He's in his 50s keep in mind. Most people of his productivity get shoved into management long before his age. He's very good but it's not like he did ffmpeg last week and QuickJS this week.
Some people are just born to be able to work all day all week, if you are one of those people please don't throw it away (I am not one of them). I think I have the knowledge to do most of his projects e.g. I have the mathematics, and RF engineering to do (say) the LTE stuff but there is absolutely no way in hell I could ever sit down and write it (I've done my own RF projects but I burn out so quickly).
Problem is that management pays so much better than a contributor of code. Society has collectively decided that management is worth more economically, than individual contributors.
It doesn't have to be that way, and indeed many orgs are moving away from that. Where I work, individual contributors who are talented and want to put in the work can attain a level comparable to a Director or Senior Director, and often even make quite a bit more money than their level-peers on the management track.
There's still a cap, of course; you can't remain an IC and have the level equivalent of a VP or C-level. The theory there is that the higher you climb the IC ladder, the more difficult it is to have increasing levels of impact without leading groups of people larger than just yourself. (And indeed, our higher-level IC positions often involve some amount of non-management leadership outside of heads-down coding all day.)
I'm not 100% sure I agree with the reasoning behind the IC ceiling, but things can be awesome for you outside of management, with plenty of career and salary growth opportunities, if you find a company that understands and values individual contribution. I wouldn't say this is a lot of companies, likely not even a majority, but it's a number that seems to be growing, at least in technical fields.
Yes, where I am at we also have a similar career track just introduced a year back or so. For the most part it’s a welcome change and recognition that an IC can be just as if not more valuable than a manager.
However, for extremely large organizations, despite my personal desires to see an equivalent to a VP/exec level for an IC, I just don’t see anyone being interested in that.
The rationale I’ll probably hear for why it will never happen is something like “execs are responsible for so many staff’s eventual success or failure, that there is no way an IC can compare to that level of impact”.
If I don my tinfoil hat though, the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that these sorts of changes to an IC’s career path are ultimately made possible by execs themselves, and that they would not be able to compete with someone of equal stature who has spent 99% of their time thinking about hard engineering problems. A certain fear of appearing mediocre or protecting your rank perhaps.
I’d also say that my assumptions above are probably meaningless in a startup or company less than 100; I’ve seen plenty of postings looking for a magical “co-founder/CTO/principle engineer” hybrid. Which I take to mean a really good engineer who is also responsible for some part of executive leadership. It’s not an exact comparison /shrug.
Managers are everything.. by manager I mean leaders not paperwork/monitors.
I firmly believe that 10 geniuses will go nowhere without direction 8 times out of 10. And non geniuses it will be 9.99/10. Managers were the people that turned human potential into outcomes.
I would agree with you except for the legions of god-awful managers I have encountered. A good manager is a huge asset for a team, but a bad (or even mediocre) manager is often worse than having none at all.
That's what I meant too, a good enough manager is an immense value, the others are nothing and are probably only there because somehow humans/societies recognized how crucial and applied 'put a manager' everywhere without care.
But yeah you're right a bad one will turn a team comatose.
It's not just the output of their team; compared to people like Bellard (and John Carmack, Jeff Dean, Peter Norvig, ...), 99.99% of people are mediocre. Increasing the output of 100 mediocre people by 20%-30% is worth more than contributing one person's output, even if it's 10x or 20x.
And I would argue the difference between a mediocre manager and a good manager is more than that.
You seem to be assuming that there is an equivalence between good programmers and good managers?
I wish I lived in this alternative reality you describe. My career has been littered where non technical managers--essentially clerks--get paid more than I do to sit around with a others and talk about what should be done while I (and colleagues) do all the doing. I end up doing a LOT of "managing" from behind the lines in all these cases.
Frankly, the reality distortion field where "a good manager has increased the output of their team" has been such a small observed sample, that I wouldn't be able to claim there was even a correlation between the two, much less causality; I'd just chalk it up to something like "the water" or "the lighting" if I saw it happening with any regularity.
> Because good managers are hard to come by so you have to give some sort of incentive to attract and retain the good ones.
That's a nice economics just-so story. But do people think that the median manager is effective? I'd say less than half of my managers have been effective. Some of them even got promoted.
Exactly, in my experience of open source so far, the biggest difference from a good project to a great project is management - even as simple as just keeping track of PRs.
If you make a PR and it gets left to die after a few days, who cares? If someone keeps an eye on it and tells you what they're looking for with a smile, you're going to try and get it done.
Actually it worked out pretty good here. It keeps my head free of crap so I can concentrate on making cool stuff in my own time with my own choice of tools.
I would have thought it was an asshole comment for implying that having kids makes you less productive. But having kids DOES make you less productive (at least when they are young) or at the very least removes great swaths of time that you would have had available otherwise, if you involve yourself with their lives at all.
Having kids or not is intensely personal and everyone has to make that decision themselves, not having them is extremely valid
