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I've heard of the principle before and generally believed it. But this summary leaves me with the feeling that the problem is mostly about people who lack managerial skills being promoted into managerial positions.

Is that the case, or is it just coincidence that his examples all relate to people being promoted into managerial positions?

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It certainly can apply to ICs too. The scope and complexity of projects increases with seniority until they fall beyond the innate capacity of your brain.

As an extreme example, suppose the spectrum of software IC spans writing simple CRUD apps as a Junior Engineer to singlehandedly writing qemu and ffmpeg as an 10x Rockstar Ninja Principal Engineer. At some point most people (who aren’t Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack) will be promoted into a role where they simply can’t keep up intellectually.

What's the job position of Fabrice Bellard?

He appears to be co-founder and CTO of Amarisoft, which makes wireless telecom software [0].

Given that he’s posted telecom-related software to his personal website [1], I am sure that he is the sort of CTO who still also acts very much as an IC.

[0] https://www.amarisoft.com/about-us/

[1] https://bellard.org/lte/

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