"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."
https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309033/greg-brockman...
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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).
> 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.
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).
> Since all they do is software...
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.
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.
This is very true everywhere I've looked.
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.
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.
They’re doing groundbreaking research, there’s always something new to try.
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.
No one wants to be another woz
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)
What’s wrong with being another Woz? The money?
Why not?? Being another Woz would be amazing.
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.
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?
Greg seems to be much loved by OpenAI employees, and generally inspiring person.
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
ALDI vs. LIDL
Seems to me that most of that is spent on twitter.
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.
he resigned earlier. google it. or bing it. or chatgpt it.
This is Time Magazine...Once wrote a piece about Gates and Warren Buffett spending the weekends on Math quizzes...
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.
I know nothing about the guy but judging his work and assuming you can guess the type of problems he works on based off his tweets is ludicrous.
I disagree.
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 am diagnosed with ADHD)
he is on a pedestal because everyone who’s worked with him said he’s amazing and effective.
But it is your right to assume what he works on from reading his tweets and leap from that to how this is an American cultural thing tho.
Impressive analysis. Can’t wait for someone to tell you what kind of a programmer you are based on your HN comments.
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.
They said "senior researchers", and I would say a programmer is not a researcher if they spend all their time on programming.
How nice would be him tweeting about the real stuff that is their competitive advantage
That sounds spectacularly unhealthy
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
Meaning of life is highly subjective. Just because your personal beliefs don't value coding highly doesn't mean that is universal.
Seriously, do we honestly believe 80 hours a week coding is a good thing. What, is he this bad at coding.
What about he spends 4 hours a week coding cause he’s so good at coding.
Way more impressive.
80h a week doing stuff does not prove your level at it, it proves your work capacity.
Being good at something lies in the result and/or appreciation of your work by skilled pairs, which also seem to be there.
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.
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 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.