Bellard is actually a genius, right? What's his secret? The project list at bellard.org is impressive.
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.
Good managers increase the output of their team, bad ones try to make themselves look the best.
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.
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.
(QuickJS seems tres cool; hat tip to the author)
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.
And I would argue the difference between a mediocre manager and a good manager is more than that.
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.
But yeah you're right a bad one will turn a team comatose.
> leadership is nature's way of removing morons from the productive flow
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.
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.
Young ones take SO much time. I don’t regret kids at all but I regret not doing even more with my time previously!
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