"Greg Brockman works 60 to 100 hours per week, and spends around 80% of the time coding. Former colleagues have described him as the hardest-working person at OpenAI."
I am either skeptical or envious of such claims. Someone coding so much would quickly be launched into meetings to communicate one's results and to coordinate with others.
It would be my life's dream to spend 80 hours per week coding without having to communicate with others... but no one is an island...
It's possible, but harder than almost any other role. There are people at Google/Meta like this. Usually E7/E8 levels, "coding machines". It's much easier to go into a pseudo PM/TL/Director role though to hit those levels and income, so it's uncommon.
You really have to have a passion for coding to put in the hours and be very good at it. Incredibly rare, believe it or not. Lots of people think they are good coders but this is another level. Proof is in your commit/code review count/async comms being 10x-100x of everyone else in your org, and it's clear you're single-handedly enabling delivery of major projects earlier than anyone else could. Think of the pressure of doing this continuously.
It's not about being rockstar or 10x. He was the chairman of the board (and President of the LLC). Practically speaking, he can work however he wishes within the company. Seeing that he went from CTO role to President role, it's fairly obvious that he got the opportunity to structure the role and the work to best fit him (and probably the company, too).
There’s always a hoarde of people second guessing the 10x engineer. Of course it looks impossible to regular folks. I have seen a few people like this. They’re real. Sometimes it’s even worth the dysfunction they cause to see this in action.
Not commenting about the ppl who are subject of this thread but talking in general.
I have been lucky enough to have seen some of these 10x engineers but what is much more common is a 1x engineer feeling and treated like a 10x engineer because they are surrounded by 0.1x engineers.
Same, I've seen it in practice and the numbers didn't lie, week on week on week. But you know, some people are very uncomfortable with someone else being called smart. Worse yet what if they're called smarter than what they actually are? Like an injustice in the universe, but comes from defensiveness I think.
I don't know this guy in particular so I have no clue though.
I am not second guessing the 10x engineer, that topic is not the one under discussion.
The topic at hand is “how did a high level engineer got to focus on programming”. And I am saying that the reason has to do more with his influence and role within the organization, rather than other reason.
>There’s always a hoarde of people second guessing the 10x engineer.
Because most 10x engineers recognized by management as such are characterized chiefly by building out shoddy software extremely quickly that only they can understand.
In a similar dynamic, Doctors that are scored highly by patients often have pretty bad medical outcomes.
In my experience I have encountered two 10x engineers:
1) Moves fast, flexes their authority to sweep small stuff under the rug until it is out of scope and can be "fixed real quick" later. Often leverages many subject matter experts through effective and persistent communication and learns quick enough to get PRs through the door (that sometimes need "quick" fixes later). Enjoys selecting items that benefit their career the most, at the expense of others on their team. Mentors only enough to onboard and increase his team's yield, not to aid their careers. Fueled by the recognition and validation of peers through PR/project completion.
2) Gets shit done, is the SMI themself. Solo code cannon, but PRs go in clean, beautiful to look at. May not get along well with some but not necessarily abrasive to work with especially being part of their direct team. Can be a great altruistic mentor if they spare 5% of their time. Enjoys what they do, and the technologies they work with. Fueled by personal satisfaction in their achievements, and in uplifting their team.
Typically when you see the type 2 engineer, they are also an architect. It is very rare that they don't seem to have knowledge of nearly the entire system and all its interactions.
> and it's clear you're single-handedly enabling delivery of major projects earlier than anyone else could.
You have to watch out with that.. I've seen whole projects pushed through by management where no one else was involved enough to review normally, but everyone had an interaction that implied they had only seen the top of the iceberg of problems with it.
This is a well debunked myth. You can commit a lot of code and commit better quality code, but there is an upper bound on productivity. If you don't get enough rest the quality diminishes.
Management and leadership of a team has a way bigger impact than any single individual contributor could ever have. Humans are generally limited not by intelligence but by motivation and vision. Directing people to achieve what you want is what allows the scaling of innovation.
Hero worship is a very human thing, but unscientific.
I'm not discounting management or leadership. These are also very critical roles that can make or break organisations. But I'd challenge your assertion that management has a "way bigger impact" than a single IC can have. Both are critical at companies doing internet scale products.
Maybe Google and Meta are different than my company, or maybe I am not in the league of such star coder, but in my experience as soon as a demo of my code is delivered I am immediately launched into managerial mode coordinating other devs working on my code. I came to just accept it.
It could be also a sign of dependency hoarding and making you the bottleneck of the whole project. Bad architectural decisions, narcissistic need of importance or both. With those hours your partner starts to date with your friend. With experience I can assure you that position is not worth it. Not for you and not for the project. You end up draining your imagination. Over fitting is emerging in programming like it is emerging in the machine learning.
OpenAI is an absolute unicorn, and not in the bullshit-1-mrd-vc-money-dollar sense but in being truly outstanding. Since all they do is software, that is solely because of the people involved, being able to do things and doing things that other people won't and achieving things that other people don't.
When it comes to sports it's fairly obvious what outliers look like and well accepted that they exist. I don't see a single reason to believe, that the same would not be true in every other walk of life or thinking that OpenAI just got lucky (considering how many people are trying to get lucky right now with less success in this space).
There are extraordinarily effective people in this world, and they are sparse and it's probably not you or me (but that's completely fine with me, I am happy to stretch myself to the best of my abilities).
For a certain definition of "software": when only doing one training run costs an 8 digits sum (requiring hardware one order of magnitude more expensive than that to run) I kinda dispute the "all they do is software".
It's definitely not "all software": a big part of their advantage compared to actually free and open models is the insane hardware they have access to.
The free and open LLMs are doing very well compared to OpenAI once you take into account that the cost to train them is 1/100th to 1/1000th what it costs to train the OpenAI models.
This can be seen with StableDiffusion: once the money is poured in training the models and then the model made free, suddenly the edge of proprietary solutions is tiny (if it even exists at all).
I'd like to see the actually open and free models trained on the hardware used to train OpenAI: then we'd see how much of a "software edge" OpenAI has.
And my guess is it'd be way less impressive than you make it out to be.
They are using hardware, yes, but they are not creating (which is what I mean by "doing") the hardware. Anyone else with funding could have access to the same hardware for running their software, and other people did do that, and do do that (now, of course, in a drastically tighter supply/demand situation).
I do not wanna be flippant here: Obviously having easy access to money and a good standing with the right people is making things A LOT simpler, but other people could have reasonably convinced someone to give them money to built the same software. That's what VCs do, after all.
Regarding the rest: Feels very much like a different topic. I'll pass.
> I'd like to see the actually open and free models trained on the hardware used to train OpenAI: then we'd see how much of a "software edge" OpenAI has.
It would seem like you're talking about what "software edge" OpenAI has in the future, when others have caught up, while parent is talking about the existing "software edge" OpenAI has today, which you seem to implicitly agree with, as you're talking about OpenAI maybe not having any edge in the future.
I can imagine this type of person to abide to their normal obligations during business hours, and code full time the rest of their wake-up time.
In my company, 80% coding for a senior SWE is rare. But if they deliver, management will give them some slack on the other evaluation axis. I have colleagues who work almost by themselves on new high impact projects. This has many benefits. No need to argue about designs, code reviews (people just approve blindly their code). The downside is that you need to deliver.
What also happens is regular developers (like me) want the same treatment as if they could end-to-end deliver "if they only let me", but many times can't, and actually need the structure and processes of a team. I've seen this freedom not working at all.
Indeed so ... the "structure" (call it bureaucracy of you like) is all of:
- an equalizer (entire team treated the same)
- a confidence booster (approval of others gives feeling of having done well)
- a way of distributing information (everyone is aware of all other team work)
You can run a team as a form of "competitive sport", and race everyone against each other; who churns out most "wins", and helpfulness, non-code-work, cross-team work are "distractors" to that objective hence undesirable and definitely not rewarded.
If the personalities in your team are "right" then this can work and by striving to best each other, all achieve highly. Have a single non-competitive person in there though... and it'll grate. Forcing a collaborative element into the work (whether by approval/review procedures, or by things like mentoring/coaching, or even just to force briefings to the team on project completion) creates a balance between the "lone crusaders" and the "power of the masses". Make the loners aware of, and contribute to, the concept of "team success", and give the "masses" insight into contributing factors of high individual performance.
yes there must be strong accountability for this to work (e.g. a self financed open source project or bootstrapped startup), not only do mid devs overestimate their appetite, motivation to grind and delivery, but also face the Curse of Development wrt communicating to the money people their value. Why should the rockstar grind away 50x harder than their coasting peers for 30% more salary? What happens when the bean counters reorg you or a manager labels you not a team player? Equity is the right form of comp to motivate this level of delivery and at that point it’s not about 50x skills but about sales and overcoming the communication gaps to establish a nonzero price for your equity. Which is why so many amazing niche projects languish and starve and the founder-engineer eventually breaks and goes and ships react apps for whatever empty startup has startup-investor fit that year
For the most part you would run out of things to code surely? Unless you really are a one man-band with a full understanding of the commercials, user feedback, support etc.
There's probably people whose main job was to read the code and then communicate it more broadly. This is also cutting edge ML where a ton of code is basically thrown away due to not panning out so possibly the amount that needs to be communicated is fairly small.
I think Woz got the absolute best deal but that's coming from a tinkerer's POV. People underestimate how much it sucks to be under scrutiny 100% of the time as a face of the company (i.e. Steve #2)
My attitude about money is pretty much the same as Woz's. There's a lot of us out there, but the worldview is so alien to the modern computer industry that it just doesn't register.
This is like a supervillain origin story, Greg and Sam are 100 % going to start something new now, even if it's just out of spite with how much both seem to have liked their work at OpenAI
If they were popular at OpenAI, I would say they have a good chance of succeeding too. They could offer excellent equity packages to all the best engineers and researchers and due to the non-profit nature of OpenAI (and hence no equity), these people might be very tempted to leave.
OpenAI is supposedly “capped profit” so employees do get equity with limited upside.
But yeah, since Sam and Greg were apparently pushed out because they were building too good of a business any OpenAI employees that were aligned with them are likely to jump ship and join them, and OpenAI will revert to the non-profit research lab it started out as.
Would they even be able to compete with OpenAI at this point? Even without Greg and Sam they have Ilya, the models they've trained so far, institutional knowledge, datasets and billions from Microsoft. Could OpenAI be at escape velocity anyway to AGI just continuing on the track it's been on?
Microsoft got the models. And their compute infrastructure. They’re powerful enough to bleed openai out if it’s in their interest. I’m not sure if there is much trust between the new leadership and microsoft.
I don't think its possible, at least for the foreseable future, they were heavily over indexed on Azure offering them discounted compute, not like they're gonna buy that amount of GPU elsewhere
They should be. The slight improvements in messaging autocomplete in iOS 17 have made a noticeable difference in my texting. To have an iPhone that understands me, and a Siri that doesn’t say, “Here’s what I found on the web” is extremely valuable.
Idk. It looks like Apple is happy to sell you the hardware to do the image recognition etc on your own device and receive the result. They can claim privacy and save on computation.
The problem is that a significant amount of the already-made GPUs are in use. Even if they can afford to throw money at it, where is that money going to go?
The best they can do is out-bid their competitors, for the competitors hardware. I'm sure apple doesn't want to pay Google for GCP resource to train an AI. Again, there may not be enough companies renting out GPUs at all.
Aldi and Lidl are each other's biggest competitors. Aldi Süd and Nord don't really clash because there is only two markets where both are present: Germany, where they aren't competing though (split in North and South) and the US (Aldi vs. Trader Joe's). Every other country only has one of the two Aldis. Lidl on the other hand is present in most large markets alongside one of the Aldis.
I'm trying to read and reread this over and over again to make sense of this but to me it sounds like in the comments people speak as if Greg brockman resigned while in the article he is not amongst the three names who resigned. What am I missing here?
He was fired from being Chair of the Board, but the rest of the board left him in his position as an engineer (?) in the company. Then an hour or two later he resigned as an engineer.
What Brockman tweets is from technical standpoint the most mundane, boring, and obvious stuff I’ve read from a programmer. My reads of this guy have been he’s not working on any problems that are technically difficult (or interesting). It’s much easier to work long hours on easy problems. He also has a managerial vibe in all communications which supports my feeling.
Most programming work in any project and company is mundane, so I do agree someone taking care of all that without whining is actually extremely valuable. I couldn’t do it.
Still doesn’t really make sense to put him on such a pedestal like many in this thread. It seems like a cultural thing in the US to overvalue individuals, and downplay the importance of good teams.
Personally, I find it much easier to get lost in time and focused when
I am working on something challenging.
Time just flies by.
If I have to work on something boring / routine / repetitive I
find it much hard to focus and time goes by so slowly.
Then my brain decides to look for ways to automate what I am doing.
Perhaps a DSL or .. or .. o .. No work, remember work, but I could
hmm if I write a Perl script i, No work you need to work, but it woud
be work if i cold only
I would rather have one of you than ten people who dig the ditch in front of them.
You will see the distance to be travelled and say let's build a airplane.
but incentives in most companies demand "progess" hence most projects start by piling the car high and driving off. it's when they are attaching floats to the car and paddling across the atlantic shouting progess reports back to shore that the value of automation comes to mind
don't worry about the ADHD - embrace it. (my hint - of the boring has to be done, make it the only thing, have nothing else).
It's definitely a Silicon Valley thing at least to overvalue individuals and downplay good teams. Keep in mind, there are a lot of young people in this site. It's pretty fun, you get boom-bust cycles like what happened with Musk and plenty of grifters trying to take advantage of this mindset.
By that definition Elizer should be working on really hardcore stuff, right? And yet his explanations about actual technical stuff come across as a guy that barely understands how matmul works.
I think the point was more than a lot of programming is not actually programming. Working in the industry, most somewhat complex systems require mostly work on paper, planning, research, reading documentation etc. and in the end some writing of code.
Too often though, that is dismissed because it's "less agile" and a few years down the road the technical debt is huge.
There's no point building a hypothetical system. You have no idea if it works until you try it. And lol, documentation? For a system that doesn't exist?
Coding for 10/12hs daily isn’t healthy, is not sustainable and is not the way to live. I love coding and I being in front of a computer all my life, since I was 8. All the meaningful life moments in retrospective weren’t at the screen. Life occurs outside the screen.
I understand that sometimes is worth it, to create a great product, solve something important or just for fun. But beware
Realistically the odds of gdb being a terrible programmer are very very slim. He has been in the field for at least a decade, published papers, given talks, was the CTO of stripe ( a company generally respected for having sick technical infrastructure). If he works an inordinate amount, then it's probably cause he loves it. I would guess he is much more likely to be world class than terrible
Occasionally you meet people who shock you with how talented they are. I watched a couple of his presentations and he immediately reminded me of some of those people I’ve met before.
You really think they'd let him anywhere near any of those two roles if he was pumping out tire fire code into production and constantly spewing erratic BS at strategy meetings the last eight years? Please.
Might as well add LOC as a metric. Both can mean the person is extremely inefficient, over-engineering everything, and their eyes are begging for a break.
However! The best engineers I've been around do work a lot and they like it.
I’m not sure why it’s seen as ok to work 100 hours per week, or even glorified.
If instead of work it was something else it would be seen as a problem. 100 hours per week doesn’t leave room for anything else other than basic human needs.
“They like it”, well all addicts like what they’re addicted to, it doesn’t mean it’s healthy.
Agreed. "I like it" might also just mean "I can't bear being alone with my thoughts" or "I can't deal with life and need the distraction". Not that that's always the case, it's probably more often than not in these situations and should be seen as a hint that there might be more going on.
I think a lot of addicts despise their addiction. Exceptions are the few highly acceptable addictions in society such as coffee. Nonetheless, doing anything in excess can be detrimental to one's health and livelihood and should be kept in checked, monitored.
OK now back to my 12 hour day. Not burnt out yet so I'm going to keep going. And yes, I LIKE IT!
When you are a founder and working in a company doing bleeding edge it’s easy to work lots of hours. Maybe it’s not the kind of environment for you but others thrive in it. Lots of high demand type roles out unrelated to engineering that also have large hour workloads and compensate exceptionally well.
Yes we understood your idea the first time around. And you still miss the point. It might not be for you but many individuals genuinely love their work. Either because they founded it, like the area of work, the people, or some combination.
It’s ok to not enjoy it yourself. Different strokes for different folks.
I don’t think it should be culturally championed but I don’t see it as an immediate red flag especially in the case of a bleeding edge company like OpenAI.
And I think you might be the one missing the point, because you keep saying it’s ok for them because they love it.
Surely all addicts love the thing they’re addicted to, but that doesn’t make it ok, even in the case where their addiction doesn’t ruin their lives short or mid term.
Coding for 50 to 80 hours a week? Well, I call bullshit on that. Never seen anyone do that consistently and with high quality and quantity output.
Let's first define 'coding' before we jump into the details: 'coding' for me is sitting at your computer doing the work. It's not getting a coffee, chatting with a colleague, going to toilet or reading hacker news. So if you're reading this and claiming to do 100 hours per week of productive time, I call bullshit on that.
Being at the office for 60 to 100 hours, sure, I believe that.
When I was studying for exams at University, I did more than half of the work before noon. The rest was spread out over the afternoon and evening. At 20:00 my brain was dead. I could read a sentence, and nothing would stick. Read it again, impossible to process it.
So I always wondered how these other students could study until 2am in the morning. Well, turned out they didn't do shit in the morning. That's how they studied "all the way into the night".
Now back to my programming career: At my best I do 4 to 6 hours of concentrated coding per day. At my best, nobody seriously outperformed me. So if you claim to do more than x2 the work that I'm doing, I would love to see the output of that.
People like Cal Newport basically confirm what I've seen over the years. So do habits of the most famous authors.
Now, I can be convinced that it's actually possible. Take a look at Carmack, who claims to do 12 hours a day. He doesn't seem to be a bullshitter to me. So either he's counting time that I wouldn't count, like dungeon mastering a D&D game, or playtesting, or whatever. Or he's actually a super human work machine. Now he worked with Abrash, who seemed to do more sane hours. And in the end Carmack had high respect for the output of Abrash.
So yeah, if you know people who can actually do 14 hours of high concentrated coding 7 days out of 7, I would love to hear it and get some kind of confirmation that they're not browsing reddit and HN 50% of that time. And if you're reading this and claim to do 14 hours a day of concentrated work, I call bullshit on that you HN addict!
While I'm sure 100 hours a week is impossible, my dad did 6x11 work days which were dominated by coding pre-internet. You wouldn't know him, he burned out. I have personally witnessed him do more than 60 hours in a week coding. That said, his coding work isn't necessarilly creative. He can do a 12 hour stint of step through debugging stopping only to microwave frozen food. Or 12 hours of data analytic work. Since it is said this man is into optimization I'd say it is possible he's like my dad, he gets into this numb zombie state "change something, run again, look at profiler output line by line." Some people doom scroll HN or tiktok 14 hours a day, other's doom scroll a flame graph.
I also notice that the more complex a task is, the less hours of it I can do.
If I know what to write, and I just have to crunch out pretty straightforward code, I can do more hours (nowhere near 12 hours though, maybe 8 at best).
I can imagine the work your dad did, didn't include juggling a big complex system in his head, which seems to require a lot of mental energy.
That's basically also what Carmack states, that you can reach 12 hours if you plan your work to include some easier tasks for that day. But then again, I was never able to really apply that strategy.
I think it mostly takes mental energy to addapt to change. I think you can focus on a large complex mature codebase and make small improvements so long as you're not radically chaging everything. Maybe it comes down to synapses firing versus synapses rewiring but that's just a laymans guess.
I dunno man. I feel like reading this was definitely work. It surely wasn’t leisure. Have you ever examined code output by gpt where it looks impressive at first glance? That’s what reading this was like. If you’re reading this, I’m just kidding. If you’re not reading this, I’m not kidding.
https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman...