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02.01.2018 at 12:00 am
Cuttings

Genuinely Technical Modesty

Humility in the face of proven expertise.

... Richard Hipp: Yeah, and plus I wouldn't know how to do that. One of the reasons people really like working with this is we are a 100% engineering shop. There's no sales talk. When you talk to somebody at our company, you're getting direct no-nonsense talk with an engineer; you're not talking to sales people. And that's different. And that's not to knock the sales aspect of things. I understand that, and you have to do that in a lot of occasions, and those people work really hard, but we're just doing it a little bit differently.

You mentioned, maybe it was during the break, you quoted something from the article about how people tell me I could have made a lot of money on this if I had any business sense. And I believe them, I probably could have. By hiring some sales people, I could probably make a lot of money, get rich. But you know what, we make enough. It's not a lot. I'm driving a 10-year-old Civic, but that's fine. That's all I need.

You know, everybody - I'm getting off-topic - has this threshold where they get enough money. When you have nothing, you wanna make money, everybody wants that. But at some point you get enough money, so "Okay, now I have enough money, now other things become more important. Family, free time, working in the community, charities... Whatever." And that threshold is different for different people. Some people, they don't reach that threshold until they get into the billions, other people reach it at a few tens of thousands. Me and the people that are on the team, our thresholds are kind of low, so we're okay.

For all his technical knowledge/abilities, Richard Hipp sure is humble.

Source: Richard Hipp, _The Changelog interview_
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