[Cyph0n]

The professor himself very likely did none of it. My guess is that someone like Dr. Su probably wouldn't even have enough time to work on fuzzing LLVM, and would likely be more concerned with writing up the next proposal to fund his lab :P

From what I've seen in academia, the supervisor typically generates ideas, and the grad students and postdocs test them out and see if they have potential. The discussion goes back and forth until a decision is made on whether or not to pursue an idea.

This differs from group to group of course, and is not the case in smaller groups, but it's generally how things work.

[mehrdada]

I think this can vary across people/projects and perhaps true in a large number of cases (this could also be said for the management in business, and it is debatable whether spending time on the ground doing the actual thing would always be the most leveraged thing one can do). Irrespective of that debate, at least for this particular instance, I can confirm that the professor in question himself [who happens to have been my doctoral advisor :)] went through a whole lot of trouble personally, down to reducing many many individual bugs and you can just look at the bug tracker activity under his name to independently verify. (I have long graduated so this is not a "paid Glassdoor review" either and ran into this as a frequent HN lurker!)

[helloqirun]

I happened to come across here... For this specific case mentioned in your first paragraph, it is not true.

[Cyph0n]

Thanks for letting us know! That's quite impressive honestly :)

[PhaseLockk]

I can anecdotally confirm this to be true in my experience as well.