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.
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.
"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.
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
The thing is, being an excellent programmer has nothing to do with leetcode and sysdesign (which is actually a back-end CRUD systems) questionnaire.
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.
> 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.
"top-of-France" not "too-of-France"
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.
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Wow?!
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.
There is also no need to talk about a person with schizophrenia in a post about Fabrice Bellard.
What kind of point are you making?
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.
He did work on Ticketmaster for some years on their own VAX operating system.
Then he had the dissease and could not keep working.