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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no need to wish me harm because I compared two people who had the same similar tech level and approach as art, rather than pursuing productivity as a first goal.
Again sorry if that made you upset, I just wanted to share my train of thoughts:
It was to show that "tech skills" != "tech lead skills" + "tech skills" != "productivity".
In fact, sometimes great devs can be counter-productive, as they tend to write code that they are the only one who can maintain (bus factor), or optimizations that turns out to be net negative when working as a team.
Here it is a mixed bag, Fabrice is very productive at least as a solo contributor (c.f. FFmpeg or QEMU), but Terry obviously wouldn't be.
About the comparison, it may sound strange to you, but I am talking only about the tech-side to show that tech skills do not always align with human skills (or management, or team lead), and Terry seemed to me the perfect example of something completely disconnected.
In practice it is difficult to find other examples of people who wrote their own compiler, put a huge amount of energy, just for the sake of writing a compiler.
Thinking about of the most well-known projects: Bellard's "Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler" (which then became TCC), it's not that crazy to compare it to the "HolyC compiler".
Now outside, in their private life, they are very different, and nobody doubts that.
Side-note: I actually like very much what Fabrice does.
To your credit, again the two persons are NOT at all equivalent or comparable, just that the resulting works are, but for different reasons.
I just needed an example that shows that it is not because you can write a compiler that it means you would be productive in a team at a FAANG.
I edited the post above to make it more clear, that they are not comparable on the human aspect, perhaps I should have insisted more, to not give the impression.
It was clumsy from my side, just that I found it difficult to find better example of someone who is well-known good programmer, wrote their own compiler too, wrote their own image decoder too, but not productive in a corporate environment.
Needs to be said: Socially distanced does not mean meeting up with new people and staying a few metres away. In fact it means avoiding social interaction especially with individuals in a different social group.
I really like the UI design that goes into avionics - the fact that every possible scenario has to be thought out and handled, and that the end result has no flashy eyecandy or extraneous functionality; it's all function, it's all required (or it's not there); everything on the screen at any given time is significant, and (hopefully) care is taken that the amount of data (ie, significance) showing at any one moment is not information overload. A very hard balance to get right, I'm sure.
The rigor and discipline imposed over the process of software architecture and implementation in aviation (moreso than medical devices, it would seem) is both inspiring and instructive, and I definitely look up to it.
I must admit I'm genuinely interested to learn more about how the role of UI design plays into avionics construction - I've leaned toward UX for quite a while (I think I started headscratching about the subject around 13-14, although I didn't know that was what it was called at the time) and I think it's probably something I'd do pretty well at when I'm finally looking for a job. Web UX is... frustrating and demotivating, though. I don't want to kill myself doing that.
Researchers traced the phishing link back to a bitly account that wasn't password protected. When they saw the other links in the account, they were able to decode the email address each link corresponded to. This unveiled that gaining access to Podesta's emails was part of a coordinated attack against the Clinton campaign. See http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-hackers-broke-into-john...
The second question is one of attribution (i.e. "Who did it?"). That's harder. I believe it was the Russians, but that's based more on faith in the U.S. and British intelligence services getting this one right than a smoking gun linking back to the Kremlin.
I like the medium-like bar on the left to browse blocks. Checking the boxes next to the blocks you want to show is a neat way to make a view of just the functions you want to look at. Putting it in a browser, like iPython/Jupyter improves accessibility for people whose main job is not developing software (the Eve demo makes a good example of being able to pass an analytics view to a teammate in marketing).
I do find myself wondering how a literate programming system like this would scale for a large project (I expect the Eve team have thought about this more than I can imagine).
I've been to India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre for work. They do a lot with the resources they have been given.
The on-base museum exhibits show how their weather and communications satellites help India with its national development goals (agriculture, connecting the countryside, etc.).
Space is hard. India has very reliable rocket (PSLV) that gets satellites to orbit. They have also successfully sent a probe to Mars, which is a real accomplishment for any space program. I was living in China at the time, and the Chinese felt a bit shown up by what they consider to be a less developed economy.
> I was living in China at the time, and the Chinese felt a bit shown up by what they consider to be a less developed economy.
And they should. I and probably a lot others are rooting for India! It is great to see these types of accomplishments by other less resourced programs.
> The on-base museum exhibits show how their weather and communications satellites help India with its national development goals.
My question is: Can India achieve those goals with less money using a commercial satellite launching company like SpaceX? And if India does have a competitive advantage in launching satellites, should it be run by the government or as a private enterprise?
India has been launching rockets and satellites since 1960s. SpaceX wasn't there, then ;)
ISRO launch vehicles (PSLV and GSLV MkII) do have competitive advantages in launching commercial payloads (up to 2.5 tonne). They already have a commercial/marketing arm called Antrix Corporation[1]. Also, there are a few private launch brokers like Earth2Orbit[2] who can procure ISRO launches. However, ISRO doesn't yet have heavy lift (4+ tonne to GTO, 8+ tonne to LEO) launch vehicle. They are working on it, and they have a new heavy lift launcher called LVM3 (aka GSLV MkIII)[3]. First developmental flight is scheduled in Dec 2016.
Should ISRO be run as a private organisation to achieve better efficiency ?
I don't think so, because, despite being a government organisation, the bureaucracy in ISRO is next to nothing. The organisation hierarchy is relatively flat for that size. There are six or seven levels between the lowest grade scientist and the chairman. I think Scientist B to H. The chairman reports directly to the Prime Minister. Even the defence heads don't get this privilege. If you imagine any private organisation of that size, there are a lot more inefficiencies in their org structure and the general operations. I'm not able to draw specific comparisons at the moment.
ISRO has also not net produced a Falcon 9, yet. That I think is mostly because of their budget constraints and not because of organisational inefficiencies.
Now, can a new private company do better than ISRO? Specifically, can a private company build a Falcon 9 like rocket more efficiently than ISRO can? In theory, absolutely. In reality, probably no.
Per ISRO's budget estimate, you are looking at raising at least $3-4 billion for a 2 year runway. Even if you start small you are looking to raise in the $100 million range for your seed round. Unlikely that any domestic VC in India will foot this bill.
So you'll need foreign money. Given the security concerns around space programs, govt will not let foreign money fund such programs. Even if they did, it'll subject the foreign investors to so much red tape that the investors will get fed up and decide not to invest.
- Money spent counts toward GDP, even if the money comes from a bank loan that will never be repaid (Example: big real estate project in a third-tier city that will never sell for its listed price)
- China's foreign reserves can not be used to pay back debt denominated in Chinese Yuan (foreign currency reserves are the result of people/institutions giving the Chinese government foreign currency in exchange for Chinese Yuan -- you can't do the conversion twice)
- China has a shrinking workforce due to demographic shifts. Specifically, they have moved from an agrarian birthrate to an industrialized one.
You are correct that China has a huge population and workforce. Their wages are rising (which is good for China!) which makes them less competitive as the factory to the world. The Chinese are making progress at moving up the value ladder to help justify those higher wages, but they aren't quite at the top yet. And the workers are very much getting squeezed between high living costs and soon-to-be higher costs to service all that debt and pay benefits to those not in the workforce. These are some reasons why experts are suggesting that China needs a new and more sustainable growth model.
The Chinese government will not allow the Chinese banks to fail the same way the USG did for Bear Stearns. They will likely buy the bad loans from the banks at face value and put them in government-owned asset management companies who will attempt to restructure them.
The cynic in me expects it will probably go worse than Japan since the '90s.
When I lived in Beijing several years ago, I interviewed a guy for a software development position. He worked for a network equipment provider (not Huawei). When I asked him about his work, he told me that his company based their router software on the same leaked version of Cisco's router OS that Huawei had used several years prior (IIRC, there was a court case over this, and Huaiwei switched to their own software).
Based on my experience, the Chinese now have the breadth, depth, confidence, and money to develop complex software on their own, so I expect to see less of this in the future.
As per this article, the Chinese can make a fair point to the US government that so long as Huawei is barred from the US, then there's nothing to discuss about telecom infrastructure equipment.
But I hope and wish the US and other Western governments will press for more media openness in China with the goal of ultimately getting China to tear down their system of censorship and the Great Firewall. Because, ultimately, I believe it hurts modern China more than it helps.
I met a local Chinese guy in Beijing several years ago who knew the Red Flag people. Based on what he told me, it sounded like Red Flag positioned themselves as the official Linux of China, which meant they would be specified and required by Chinese government agencies and state-owned enterprises. Red Flag then told the Chinese government that to make Red Flag Linux successful, they would need government funding. With a nascent team, simple product, and this funding in hand, they they went to the big players in the PC and server ecosystems (Intel, etc.) and said that if those companies wanted their hardware sold in China, it would need Red Flag Linux, and Red Flag could provide consulting services to make sure Red Flag Linux ran well on their hardware.
According to the guy I talked to, the Red Flag management team then embezzled most all of the money from the government and US, Japanese, and European companies and left an understaffed team of developers to deliver on the contracts with the foreign companies.
Another Chinese friend said years ago that many Chinese tech entrepreneurs were "just making money off the investors." It didn't make sense to me until I heard the Red Flag story.
Embezzling from the Party would seem to be a career-limiting move, no? There must be more to it. As in, the Party or power members thereof must have been in on it.
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.