[sasaf5]

I am either skeptical or envious of such claims. Someone coding so much would quickly be launched into meetings to communicate one's results and to coordinate with others.

It would be my life's dream to spend 80 hours per week coding without having to communicate with others... but no one is an island...

[nvarsj]

It's possible, but harder than almost any other role. There are people at Google/Meta like this. Usually E7/E8 levels, "coding machines". It's much easier to go into a pseudo PM/TL/Director role though to hit those levels and income, so it's uncommon.

You really have to have a passion for coding to put in the hours and be very good at it. Incredibly rare, believe it or not. Lots of people think they are good coders but this is another level. Proof is in your commit/code review count/async comms being 10x-100x of everyone else in your org, and it's clear you're single-handedly enabling delivery of major projects earlier than anyone else could. Think of the pressure of doing this continuously.

[NhanH]

It's not about being rockstar or 10x. He was the chairman of the board (and President of the LLC). Practically speaking, he can work however he wishes within the company. Seeing that he went from CTO role to President role, it's fairly obvious that he got the opportunity to structure the role and the work to best fit him (and probably the company, too).

[ramraj07]

There’s always a hoarde of people second guessing the 10x engineer. Of course it looks impossible to regular folks. I have seen a few people like this. They’re real. Sometimes it’s even worth the dysfunction they cause to see this in action.

[kpandit]

Not commenting about the ppl who are subject of this thread but talking in general. I have been lucky enough to have seen some of these 10x engineers but what is much more common is a 1x engineer feeling and treated like a 10x engineer because they are surrounded by 0.1x engineers.

[Xcelerate]

Haha, that reminds me a lot of this quote from an Atlantic article on Freeman Dyson:

I asked him whether as a boy he had speculated much about his gift. Had he asked himself why he had this special power? Why he was so bright?

Dyson is almost infallibly a modest and self-effacing man, but tonight his eyes were blank with fatigue, and his answer was uncharacteristic.

“That’s not how the question phrases itself,” he said. “The question is: why is everyone else so stupid?”

[wavewrangler]

That’s still 10x. If you think that’s worth mentioning, you should see the 10x engineers swoon over the 100x unicorn.

[vasco]

Same, I've seen it in practice and the numbers didn't lie, week on week on week. But you know, some people are very uncomfortable with someone else being called smart. Worse yet what if they're called smarter than what they actually are? Like an injustice in the universe, but comes from defensiveness I think.

I don't know this guy in particular so I have no clue though.

[NhanH]

I am not second guessing the 10x engineer, that topic is not the one under discussion.

The topic at hand is “how did a high level engineer got to focus on programming”. And I am saying that the reason has to do more with his influence and role within the organization, rather than other reason.

[pydry]

>There’s always a hoarde of people second guessing the 10x engineer.

Because most 10x engineers recognized by management as such are characterized chiefly by building out shoddy software extremely quickly that only they can understand.

In a similar dynamic, Doctors that are scored highly by patients often have pretty bad medical outcomes.

[blurbleblurble]

I've seen the bugs of multiple 10x engineers multiply together for 10^n x bugs

[datameta]

In my experience I have encountered two 10x engineers:

1) Moves fast, flexes their authority to sweep small stuff under the rug until it is out of scope and can be "fixed real quick" later. Often leverages many subject matter experts through effective and persistent communication and learns quick enough to get PRs through the door (that sometimes need "quick" fixes later). Enjoys selecting items that benefit their career the most, at the expense of others on their team. Mentors only enough to onboard and increase his team's yield, not to aid their careers. Fueled by the recognition and validation of peers through PR/project completion.

2) Gets shit done, is the SMI themself. Solo code cannon, but PRs go in clean, beautiful to look at. May not get along well with some but not necessarily abrasive to work with especially being part of their direct team. Can be a great altruistic mentor if they spare 5% of their time. Enjoys what they do, and the technologies they work with. Fueled by personal satisfaction in their achievements, and in uplifting their team.

[pixl97]

Typically when you see the type 2 engineer, they are also an architect. It is very rare that they don't seem to have knowledge of nearly the entire system and all its interactions.

[chucke1992]

Sorry, but what is SMI?

[potatopatch]

> and it's clear you're single-handedly enabling delivery of major projects earlier than anyone else could.

You have to watch out with that.. I've seen whole projects pushed through by management where no one else was involved enough to review normally, but everyone had an interaction that implied they had only seen the top of the iceberg of problems with it.

[throwawaaarrgh]

This is a well debunked myth. You can commit a lot of code and commit better quality code, but there is an upper bound on productivity. If you don't get enough rest the quality diminishes.

Management and leadership of a team has a way bigger impact than any single individual contributor could ever have. Humans are generally limited not by intelligence but by motivation and vision. Directing people to achieve what you want is what allows the scaling of innovation.

Hero worship is a very human thing, but unscientific.

[nvarsj]

I'm not discounting management or leadership. These are also very critical roles that can make or break organisations. But I'd challenge your assertion that management has a "way bigger impact" than a single IC can have. Both are critical at companies doing internet scale products.

[sasaf5]

Maybe Google and Meta are different than my company, or maybe I am not in the league of such star coder, but in my experience as soon as a demo of my code is delivered I am immediately launched into managerial mode coordinating other devs working on my code. I came to just accept it.

[mindesc]

It could be also a sign of dependency hoarding and making you the bottleneck of the whole project. Bad architectural decisions, narcissistic need of importance or both. With those hours your partner starts to date with your friend. With experience I can assure you that position is not worth it. Not for you and not for the project. You end up draining your imagination. Over fitting is emerging in programming like it is emerging in the machine learning.

[visarga]

> Over fitting is emerging in programming like it is emerging in the machine learning.

That's a nice insight. I have been in that place many times, I was overfitting on my own imagination.

[mindesc]

Filling up that mana bar is not easy.

[jstummbillig]

OpenAI is an absolute unicorn, and not in the bullshit-1-mrd-vc-money-dollar sense but in being truly outstanding. Since all they do is software, that is solely because of the people involved, being able to do things and doing things that other people won't and achieving things that other people don't.

When it comes to sports it's fairly obvious what outliers look like and well accepted that they exist. I don't see a single reason to believe, that the same would not be true in every other walk of life or thinking that OpenAI just got lucky (considering how many people are trying to get lucky right now with less success in this space).

There are extraordinarily effective people in this world, and they are sparse and it's probably not you or me (but that's completely fine with me, I am happy to stretch myself to the best of my abilities).

[TacticalCoder]

> Since all they do is software...

For a certain definition of "software": when only doing one training run costs an 8 digits sum (requiring hardware one order of magnitude more expensive than that to run) I kinda dispute the "all they do is software".

It's definitely not "all software": a big part of their advantage compared to actually free and open models is the insane hardware they have access to.

The free and open LLMs are doing very well compared to OpenAI once you take into account that the cost to train them is 1/100th to 1/1000th what it costs to train the OpenAI models.

This can be seen with StableDiffusion: once the money is poured in training the models and then the model made free, suddenly the edge of proprietary solutions is tiny (if it even exists at all).

I'd like to see the actually open and free models trained on the hardware used to train OpenAI: then we'd see how much of a "software edge" OpenAI has.

And my guess is it'd be way less impressive than you make it out to be.

[jstummbillig]

They are using hardware, yes, but they are not creating (which is what I mean by "doing") the hardware. Anyone else with funding could have access to the same hardware for running their software, and other people did do that, and do do that (now, of course, in a drastically tighter supply/demand situation).

I do not wanna be flippant here: Obviously having easy access to money and a good standing with the right people is making things A LOT simpler, but other people could have reasonably convinced someone to give them money to built the same software. That's what VCs do, after all.

Regarding the rest: Feels very much like a different topic. I'll pass.

[capableweb]

> I'd like to see the actually open and free models trained on the hardware used to train OpenAI: then we'd see how much of a "software edge" OpenAI has.

It would seem like you're talking about what "software edge" OpenAI has in the future, when others have caught up, while parent is talking about the existing "software edge" OpenAI has today, which you seem to implicitly agree with, as you're talking about OpenAI maybe not having any edge in the future.

[yodsanklai]

I can imagine this type of person to abide to their normal obligations during business hours, and code full time the rest of their wake-up time.

In my company, 80% coding for a senior SWE is rare. But if they deliver, management will give them some slack on the other evaluation axis. I have colleagues who work almost by themselves on new high impact projects. This has many benefits. No need to argue about designs, code reviews (people just approve blindly their code). The downside is that you need to deliver.

[vasco]

This is very true everywhere I've looked.

What also happens is regular developers (like me) want the same treatment as if they could end-to-end deliver "if they only let me", but many times can't, and actually need the structure and processes of a team. I've seen this freedom not working at all.

[fch42]

Indeed so ... the "structure" (call it bureaucracy of you like) is all of:

- an equalizer (entire team treated the same)

- a confidence booster (approval of others gives feeling of having done well)

- a way of distributing information (everyone is aware of all other team work)

You can run a team as a form of "competitive sport", and race everyone against each other; who churns out most "wins", and helpfulness, non-code-work, cross-team work are "distractors" to that objective hence undesirable and definitely not rewarded.

If the personalities in your team are "right" then this can work and by striving to best each other, all achieve highly. Have a single non-competitive person in there though... and it'll grate. Forcing a collaborative element into the work (whether by approval/review procedures, or by things like mentoring/coaching, or even just to force briefings to the team on project completion) creates a balance between the "lone crusaders" and the "power of the masses". Make the loners aware of, and contribute to, the concept of "team success", and give the "masses" insight into contributing factors of high individual performance.

[dustingetz]

yes there must be strong accountability for this to work (e.g. a self financed open source project or bootstrapped startup), not only do mid devs overestimate their appetite, motivation to grind and delivery, but also face the Curse of Development wrt communicating to the money people their value. Why should the rockstar grind away 50x harder than their coasting peers for 30% more salary? What happens when the bean counters reorg you or a manager labels you not a team player? Equity is the right form of comp to motivate this level of delivery and at that point it’s not about 50x skills but about sales and overcoming the communication gaps to establish a nonzero price for your equity. Which is why so many amazing niche projects languish and starve and the founder-engineer eventually breaks and goes and ships react apps for whatever empty startup has startup-investor fit that year

[VBprogrammer]

For the most part you would run out of things to code surely? Unless you really are a one man-band with a full understanding of the commercials, user feedback, support etc.

[throwuwu]

They’re doing groundbreaking research, there’s always something new to try.

[marcinzm]

There's probably people whose main job was to read the code and then communicate it more broadly. This is also cutting edge ML where a ton of code is basically thrown away due to not panning out so possibly the amount that needs to be communicated is fairly small.

[bozhark]

No one wants to be another woz

[autonomousErwin]

I think Woz got the absolute best deal but that's coming from a tinkerer's POV. People underestimate how much it sucks to be under scrutiny 100% of the time as a face of the company (i.e. Steve #2)

[nobodyandproud]

What’s wrong with being another Woz? The money?

[JohnFen]

Why not?? Being another Woz would be amazing.

[nobodyandproud]

I just saw this. Glad to see I’m not the only one.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/21/why-apple-co-founder-steve-w...

My take: He’s the Keanu Reeves of tech (or Keanu is the Woz of the film industry). The world can use more of this.

[JohnFen]

My attitude about money is pretty much the same as Woz's. There's a lot of us out there, but the worldview is so alien to the modern computer industry that it just doesn't register.