[petermcd]

Staff SWE at a FAANG here.

Fabrice Bellard is not a 10x engineer, he is a 100x engineer. You could attach him to a good people manager and either build a team around him or allow him to work independently on a project that he finds exciting that also aligns with company goals.

[zerr]

I don't think he would pass FANG interviews or enjoy their day-to-day grind. The whole point of such prolific programmers is to code whenever you feel like, not by some arbitrary deadlines. Not to mention the tolerance of office politics in those orgs.

[dustbunny]

"wouldn't pass fang interviews"

Bellard wouldn't apply and be interviewed like some Stanford grad. He would be head hunted and told he can do whatever he wants and receive a massive amount of compensation.

I'm not sure why you woulf assert he wouldn't pass the interview that seems totally outrageous.

[retinaros]

yeah lol. the interview is braindump on leetcode and sysdesign. two ways to pass it. do a lot of exercise/ learn the patterns or be an excellent programmer. there is 0 doubt he would have a full HIRE loop

[zerr]

The thing is, being an excellent programmer has nothing to do with leetcode and sysdesign (which is actually a back-end CRUD systems) questionnaire.

[retinaros]

it has something to do. an excellent programmer knows how to solve leetcode. maybe he never seen the problem but with he would ask a few questions that would help him get to the solution. and sys design is not a back end crud system questionnaire. it depends on the role but could be much more challenging.

[lekanal]

> I don't think he would pass FANG interviews

Given his alma mater and the way the French education system works, he performed too-of-France at “solve math problems on a blackboard in front of someone” after two years of grinding math problems including extensive practice for the aforementioned “solve math problems on a blackboard in front of someone”. I think he could manage. FAANG interview is basically a CS khôlle.

[lekanal]

"top-of-France" not "too-of-France"

[rvnx]

I think you are mixing up art, technical skills and productivity.

Put Terry Davis (again him) as senior manager at Apple, and see the result.

From my point of view, Terry has the same level and approaches as Fabrice.

It does not guarantee at all that he is going to be more productive than 100 engineers as you directly claim.

It makes them good in what they like to do (writing obfuscated or low-level code, or implementing from scratch from specifications) as art or creativity.

[petermcd]

Thank you for introducing me to Terry Davis. I'm going to read more about him.

I am definitely not talking about art.

When I refer to 100x engineer, I'm referring to the impact that QEMU and FFmpeg have had on the world. I would be surprised if anyone who is familiar with these two projects would disagree that they have been highly impactful.

[rvnx]

Absolutely agreeing with you. I rather meant that scaling teams and being a great dev are not always going together (the same way that startup folks are often not the same type of people as managers in large companies), but in terms of technical impact I totally agree.

EDIT: Fair enough, I think he would be very productive due to useful contributions, at the end I agree with you.