4 ms·

While the guy is brilliant, I doubt he could fit the role of senior/staff/principal engineer in any one-level-below faang kind of company. Typically, these role

• haunter 10mo ago
  He is the co-founder and CTO of Amarisoft built on thechnology he developed https://www.amarisoft.com/ https://www.amarisoft.com/ https://www.amarisoft.com/company/about-us https://www.amarisoft.com/company/about-us https://bellard.org/lte/ https://bellard.org/lte/
• adamors 10mo ago
  Who cares about being a staff at FAANG lmao when he gets to do what he does currently?
  • encom 10mo ago
    Employing Bellard at FAANG would be a tragic waste!
    • zelphirkalt 10mo ago
      I have a hunch he wouldn't accept such an ethically questionable role.
• questionableans 10mo ago
  In technically deep domains like Bellard works in, Staff+ roles bias more towards technical expertise, and managers also tend to be more technical and able to more completely address technical coordination tasks. Sometimes we like to assume that if someone is good at one thing, they’ll be bad at something more mundane (to make ourselves feel better), but I sincerely doubt he would have any trouble in such a role.
• anonymous908213 10mo ago
  Is it insecurity about yourself that leads you to baselessly speculate that an accomplished figure is unemployable?
  • dang 10mo ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. It only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  • beautiful_zhixu 10mo ago
    To be fair, I looked at his achievements and I don't know if I want his life... Also[index-finger-emoji], I believe everybody is looking at achievements wrong. The hierarchy of achievement in my opinion is roughly... 1) Chief Keef 2) Staff Software Engineer 3) President of the United States 4) Fabrice Bellard 5) Everybody else My opinion is well-grounded in logic, and can be considered a pinnacle truth. It can be considered because can doesn't need evidence to define. Evidence because dog. Dog because dog. Dog because dog. Dog because dog. I believe I have argued and justified myself enough. So my belief is justified and true. Therefore it is knowledge.
  • bpt3 10mo ago
    What do you mean? You don't think that every software developer on earth secretly aspires to spend their days making tiny improvements to an advertising machine?
• dllu 10mo ago
  The fact that so many people use FFmpeg and QEMU suggest that he is quite good at documenting, collaborating, and at least making his code remarkably clean and easy to follow. This already puts him way ahead of the average silicon valley senior software engineer that I've worked with. However, he does value independence so I don't think he would have been happy working at a faang-type company for long.
  • averne_ 10mo ago
    Not really. https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2022/12/ffhistory-fabrice-bellard/ https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2022/12/ffhistory-fabrice-bella... >Fabrice won International Obfuscated C Code Contest three times and you need a certain mindset to create code like that—which creeps into your other work. So despite his implementation of FFmpeg was fast-working, it was not very nice to debug or refactor, especially if you’re not Fabrice
• kaffekaka 10mo ago
  Yeah and can he do it on a cold rainy night in stoke?
• FpUser 10mo ago
  >"In that regard, it would be a very bad fit. " He might as well be but why would he give a flying fuck about it? He gets to do what he wants and is financially independent for doing just that. Most can only dream about it. Myself - I do not come within a million miles to his professional level, but I still have managed to do just that - I develop what I want, how I want and get paid for it. I am 64 and still design and develop actively for my own company and for clients. Gives me happiness, motivation to stay alert and more than enough time to still do my hobbies (mostly various outdoor activities).
• rdtsc 10mo ago
  > While the guy is brilliant, I doubt he could fit the role of senior/staff/principal engineer in any one-level-below faang kind of company. Maybe but what’s the point? Hell, I might guess he is terrible at jiggling and basket weaving, too. Complete failure as wrestler, even. But that is kind of neither here or there. Or is it you think staff title at faangs is some kind of pinnacle position every engineer should strive for? It actually always strikes me as a funny title. In college when they didn’t have a specific professor to teach or just going to use a grad student they put “staff” in the name box so in my mind it’s associated with a random lower rung student who couldn’t get away doing just research.
  • eichin 10mo ago
    Yeah, staff engineer is a pinnacle "still doing engineering and maybe leadership but not management" position in engineering firms. The academic "staff" is just a "not really one of us" gatekeeping-the-servants title.
• inopinatus 10mo ago
  At M.Bellard’s level one would could hardly even call such an outcome a character flaw, but my occasional privilege of managing - one should rather say, enabling - high performance teams, taught that the Venn intersection of “competent with imagination” and “collegiate manner” is far from empty, even in the tech sector. “‘We're delighted to have you here,’ he said, ‘but a word of advice. Don't try to be clever. We're all clever here. Only try to be kind, a little kind.’ Like most university stories, this one is variously attributed and it probably never even happened but, as the Italians say, se non e vero, e ben trovato - even if it isn't true, it's well founded.” ⸺ Stephen Fry.
• kergonath 10mo ago
  > I doubt he could fit the role of senior/staff/principal engineer in any one-level-below faang kind of company. Why would he want to do that, though?
• petermcd 10mo ago
  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.
  • rvnx 10mo ago
    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.
    • petermcd 10mo ago
      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.
      • rvnx 10mo ago
        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.
    • lomase 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      • 10mo ago
• tommy92 10mo ago
  Lots of negative stereotypical assumption there. If you have some source backing all this, share your claims otherwise personal attacks without any serious base isn't a good reflection.
  • checker659 10mo ago
    The amusing part is the implication that communication skills can't be learned, even by someone who's worked alone their whole career, if it came to that (*especially* by someone of Fabrice Bellard's calibre). Gatekeeping much?
• rramadass 10mo ago
  > I doubt he could fit the role of senior/staff/principal engineer in any one-level-below faang kind of company. Why would you even think that these sort of exceptional people would even be interested in mere jobs? These are people who are solo auteurs; something in them feels a need to express themselves in full creativity without restraint in any domain they choose to focus on. That is what makes them unique because they are the few who can change Science into Art and make it seem effortless. The common man calls them "Geniuses" but it is actually a way of living, thinking and training. Much of Society's institutions, companies, jobs etc. is designed to get the most out of the average person which does not work for creative individuals. To measure the latter using the yardstick for average is foolish in the extreme. This is why true Scientists/Researchers/Artists etc. need to be treated very differently from the "common" man. For all the hoopla about Corporations/Companies/Groups/Teams etc. in the modern world, all our civilizational breakthroughs have emerged from a single individual or a small group of individuals.
• zero0529 10mo ago
  A Fox one day spied a beautiful bunch of ripe grapes hanging from a vine trained along the branches of a tree. The grapes seemed ready to burst with juice, and the Fox's mouth watered as he gazed longingly at them. The bunch hung from a high branch, and the Fox had to jump for it. The first time he jumped he missed it by a long way. So he walked off a short distance and took a running leap at it, only to fall short once more. Again and again he tried, but in vain. Now he sat down and looked at the grapes in disgust. "What a fool I am," he said. "Here I am wearing myself out to get a bunch of sour grapes that are not worth gaping for." And off he walked very, very scornfully. - https://read.gov/aesop/005.html https://read.gov/aesop/005.html