> In terms of comparisons, John Carmack made some decent contributions, but you have zero insight into the costs of it. Perhaps more importantly, John Carmack

> In terms of comparisons, John Carmack made some decent contributions, but you have zero insight into the costs of it. Perhaps more importantly, John Carmack et al. are massive outliers. Maybe there's some kind of an excessive cost to the prominent achievements, contributions and expertise of some of those people, maybe not. Many of those people have long-term relationships, families and interests outside of CS or tech. Linus Torvalds does scuba diving. Carmack practised judo and Brazilian jiu-jitsu at least at some point. I have no idea how much of a long-term thing that was -- lots of people practise a martial art or something else that sounds superficially non-nerdy for a few years -- and it probably doesn't say all that much by itself, but it doesn't seem to me like all of those outlier people just spent all their time obsessed with programming alone. But to be able to have both great professional prominence in technology and a life outside of it, one would probably have to be both an outlier -- even more so than just for great success at tech alone -- and more or less lucky. For most people, trying for the former without regard for the latter would probably come at quite a cost. Other than that, spot on. edit: wording