[randallsquared]

Guys like Knuth and Torvalds are not primarily concerned with gaining employment, because their resumes are already pretty much at peak impressiveness. There are not many people in their class. The alternative to spending all your time on the project that you're famous for (if, for example, you are not famous...) is to spend time doing some of these things.

[nostrademons]

I've got a follow-on question related to this though:

If you do have all the skills he listed, how do you make the leap into doing real top-level creative work?

For example, one of the top links on Hacker News now is a profile of Brad Fitzpatrick, and it's pretty much accepted that he's done some industry-changing work (LiveJournal, memcached, Mogile, OpenID, Pubsubhubbub, etc.) But if you were familiar with his work c. 2002, it wasn't all that impressive. Yeah, he was a good programmer, but he just ran a website with some modest success. Several of us have done the same.

I've heard the same applies to other leading programmer luminaries, eg. John Carmack.

Somewhere along the line, some programmers start really distinguishing themselves while others remain merely "good". And I don't think it has to do with ploughing all your efforts into one project. People like Brad Fitzpatrick, Jamie Zawinski, Paul Buchheit, or Rob Pike are known for multiple contributions. Is it just the cumulative effects of time, or is there something specific they do with their time that propels them from good to great?

[randallsquared]

I don't know how to be successful on that level, but I've a hunch that paying more than the slightest attention to things like "job", "resume", etc severely lowers your chances. Also, one thing I noticed while reading Coders at Work recently: while some people are brilliant, some seem like they're merely good, and happened to make the right decisions. Those decisions always seemed to be the risky ones, but we don't see what similar decisions they went the other way on, nor the hordes of similar programmers who were cautious or unlucky.

And maybe there aren't such hordes. I dunno.

[danut]

I think people like Knuth, Torvalds, Carmack, etc. are the models for career development. Why would you assume that a strategy that didn't work for any of the biggest guys around would be better for you than theirs?

[gnaritas]

Because in all likelihood, most people don't have what they have. Those guys are outliers, not the norm.

[nostrademons]

I think that answer's a cop-out. Knuth, maybe. But Carmack and Torvalds had pretty unremarkable starts as programmers.