"I'm also proud that I had a small part to play in ... Remote Agent, the first AI program ever to control a spacecraft. I didn't specify or write any of the software myself..."
He did fix a bug in it, though -- in a way. :-) That is, back then I noticed a mistake in the unification code which he'd previously pointed out as a common one: http://norvig.com/unify-bug.pdf
(That particular bit of the code was by HN user 'lisper', incidentally.)
"I'm very pragmatic and try to measure the impact I've had by multiplying the number of people I've done something for by the average impact on them."
I think, deep down, this is why any of us get up and go to work every day. He's truly lucky to be able to help hundreds of millions of people- this is much more rewarding than any paycheck he gets from Google.
This reminded me of the following comment from Steve Jobs:
"You know, I've been thinking about it. How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day."
"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
"People get out of balance when they see their value as being able to respond quickly. If I see myself as a machine for answering email, then my work life would never stop because my email never stops. If instead I see my value as separating the important from the unimportant and making good decisions on the important..."
I was a bit disappointed by the interview. It's very short, shallow and the selection of questions is very predictable. There is a much better interview with Peter Norvig in Coders at Work. http://www.codersatwork.com/peter-norvig.html
I checked the reviews and the TOC at Amazon. It looks like the book could be a career changer for some people (depending on how you read it and what you get out of it).
I probably won't buy it since I've already decided what matters for me in the long run. But for some who's still looking for guidance or clarification, could be worth it.
Making it Big in Software is a career guide for geeks - and a damn good one. If you've been in the business for less than 15 years it's a great read, and can really change your professional life for the better.
The Norvig interview was just one of 17 interviews with major personalities. These interviews are only about 1/3 of the book. The chapter content (the other 2/3rd of the book) provides great insights on everything from technical skills, to people and project management, how to get faster promotions, successful project proposals, and even how to launch a successful startup.
Lots of good stories, cold hard metrics and practical advice. Clearly some serious time went into writing this. Have a look at the Amazon.com reviews.
Here's the list of people interviewed in the book. A nice mix of CEOs/techies, young/old, men/women, free software versus commercial software leaders, academics/entrepreneurs. Really big names.
1. Steve Wozniak, Inventor, Apple computer
2. John Schwarz, CEO, Business Objects
3. James Gosling, Inventor, Java programming language
4. Marissa Mayer, Google VP, Search Products and User Experience
5. Jon Bentley, Author, Programming Pearls
6. Marc Benioff, CEO and founder, Salesforce.com
7. Grady Booch, IBM Fellow and co-founder Rational Software
8. Bjarne Stroustrup, Inventor, C++ programming language
9. David Vaskevitch, Microsoft CTO
10. Linus Torvalds, Creator, Linux operating system kernel
11. Richard Stallman, Founder, Free software movement
12. Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research
13. Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Fellow and Windows Architect
14. Tom Malloy, Adobe Chief Software Architect
15. Diane Greene, Co-founder and past CEO of VMware
16. Robert Kahn, Co-inventor, the Internet
17. Ray Tomlinson, Inventor, email
Also some nice quotes from James Hamilton Distinguised Engineer and VP at Amazon.com, and Alan Kay, coinventor of SmallTalk, OOP, and a major contributor to modern GUIs and dynamic interpretted languages.
Norvig's pet peeve: 'Programmers and product managers who can't think about their product from the user's point of view. As Alan Cooper puts it, "The inmates are running the asylum."'
I doubt that Norvig would endorse Cooper's even more insane idea for fixing the problem, though, which is to create a ruling class of "designers" to stand between programmers and users.
He did fix a bug in it, though -- in a way. :-) That is, back then I noticed a mistake in the unification code which he'd previously pointed out as a common one: http://norvig.com/unify-bug.pdf
(That particular bit of the code was by HN user 'lisper', incidentally.)