We had a guy who made a huge “impact” alright. He left almost three years ago and we’re still trying to unwind the mess he made.
He approached a couple members of my current team about the idea of open sourcing some infrastructure he worked on, and I think he was shocked to find that his efforts were not as appreciated as he thought. A bad copy of something better. He left shortly thereafter. I’m not sure if that was always his plan and he wanted to take some things with him, or if he was disheartened. But I know for sure that of he had left earlier he would have never heard that feedback and would have walked away feeling really good about his work.
For myself, I tend to want to know how we got here, wherever “here” is. I don’t need to have made a decision to learn from the consequences, but I do have to understand the decisions to some extent.
look up people that can accomplish a lot in short period of time, at least less than half a year or <2years, like geohot, Alyssa Rosenzweig or Mike Blumenkrantz and more
Have no idea who the others are, but I remember geohot from the various HN threads discussing their self-driving project: a safety-critical piece of software with important parts implemented in Python and running on an Android phone. When the NHTSA started asking some questions about safety standards compliance, geohot cancelled the project.
Finally it was open sourced and is currently sold with the following warranty: “[…]driver alertness is necessary, but not sufficient, for openpilot to be used safely and openpilot is provided with no warranty of fitness for any purpose.”
Another example for a 10x developer would be fabrice bellard. I've participated in this year's advent of code and usually needed dozens of minutes if not hours to solve examples. Then you see some of the videos from streamers on the leaderboard. they just quickly type out code. Sure, I hadn't practiced much and they had a lot of practice (doing AoC was my attempt of getting some), but they are definitely a two digit multiplier away from my performance. Of course, this doesn't directly translate to performance on the real job though, but there is a correlation I'd say.
