My total comp for creating GitHub Copilot
twitter.com
twitter.com
> The trick to effective min-maxing in social contexts is to make sure people can't tell you're min-maxing.
It means that, while in interview situations there is an expectation that you say "I did this", in social situations you might get more benefit from seeming to be more humble and appear to withhold your accomplishments, perhaps doing it in a way where someone else fills the gaps for you, or it entices the other parties into doing a bit of digging on their own and perhaps find some well-placed bios online that look like they weren't written by you / at your behest which do your bragging for you.
This avoids the situation where someone will say: "I work on Copilot now, and I can say this guy is totally full of himself." as other people respond "huh. yeah. that makes sense."
- From 2010 to 2019: 40 occurrences in HN's comments
- Compare that to over 70 for just the past two years.
Basically, it's as if you said “Woke” wasn't a contemporary word, because it used to exist in a niche for a long time.
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
What a funny world we live in! :)
Getting back to reality, ideas and prototypes are easy. Execution and delivery is hard.
I think "creator" is entirely appropriate in this case based on the features that he contributed.
The risk from zero to prototype is an order of magnitude more than the risk from prototype to product.
This dude is more than justified in being disappointed. The value added by de-risking a product of this size is massive.
The older I get, and the more I work on aspects of trying to build businesses, products, and services, the more I lament the loss of a kind of service-oriented ethos that truly makes societies great and that seems to only be "refreshed" (in America, in particular) by the darkest of times*. Here, I think of the people who went through the first half of the 20th century in comparison to the MBAs and similarly naively "optimizing" agents elsewhere in important / controlling positions in current society.
Game theory 'says' that anyone can choose D(efect)-heavy strategies, and in many environments, profit heavily, personally (aka, "The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do..."). But, a society with too many such players is not long for this world.
* Much as was said by a certain Founder about the "tree of liberty" - many of the Founders, including even TJ, who could be quite self-interested, understood that liberty requires responsibility and sacrifice ...
Dude, it might take a few weeks to work out if a big project is even viable in a large company.
Prototyping a full product is not the easiest part of the big project by a long shot. Prototyping is when you find and create the constraints, reduce the chaos and make the project legible so other people can work on it.
If you do it right, it should make it easier for other people to work on the project not harder.
Thanks for the reality check, and Occam's Razor suggests this is (unfortunately) the most likely explanation for what we're reading.
Sure, employees get taken advantage of, and screwed over by politics all the time. But something about going online and openly (and quit caustically) negging your employer while still on their payroll suggests that there's something seriously off about this guy.
And that in any case, his synopsis of the situation is not to be taken at face value.
Edit: Actually we don't have information about his current status with them. My mistake. Thanks to the commenter below for pointing that out.
I believe that he turned 100% conspiracy theorist in recent years. He famously blames Alan Turing for his own judicial punishment and suicide.
What reality check? One online commenter you don't know contradicts another online commenter you don't know.
And you're basing the truthfulness of his statement on what, exactly? That it corroborates with how you want to feel about the original poster? Hardly a "reality check."
Pretty telling
I call everyone who builds the first thing the creator(s). This isn't uncommon or weird in my mind at all.
He may be totally fully of himself, but I don't see any realistic argument that he isn't one of the creators.
I was one of the first to touch the OAI code model. Me and Albert developed the in-the-wild testing harness still in use today. We pulled all nighters to get GitHub approved for participation in the MSFT-OpenAI deal using those test results.
Existing Microsoft AI teams worked to halt our work, pushing their own small, worse models instead of OpenAI's.
I protoyped and lobbied for creation of the VScode extension. I invented and hacked the ghost text prototype into VScode, I invented the block based termination and implemented all the tree-sitter based logic needed to do it. Then I had to lobby up to Satya to get VScode to implement proper support in less than 6 months.
I named it Copilot.
I implemented GH auth, made the waitlist and onboarding. Helped design the e2e http/2 go server, after designing the fast.ly based precursor. Coordinated moving from OpenAI datacenter to Azure to improve Asia experience, and oversaw the cutover.
I was Chief Architect. It was my baby. Sad if this is how they are spinning the story internally at GitHub today.
I am specifically referring to the features he lists in his comment above. E.g. ghost text, block completion, and OpenAI integration.
To add to his credit Copilot in VS proper still sucks, so I'd estimate original VS Code hack to have better skills than the whole (e.g. the sum of) VS proper Copilot extension team.
Edit: I’m not saying that MS / GitHub is obligated to do anything more than it already has. From a PR perspective, it’s just far cheaper to give a fatter bonus and promotion to early contributors to a big product and publicize it. It will also encourage other employees to push instead of just cruising. Otherwise, now you have someone making a logical case for not working very hard for either GitHub or MS
He leveraged massive resources to do it and was allowed to tap people with multi-decades of experience (even implicitly - you think he build the execution engine where his "test harness" ran?). Not to mention that he essentially wrote a wrapper around an API..
If he put his total comp this pity party would shrink to one.
No matter the accomplishment, I doubt they would have been able to create copilot outside Microsoft and thus without Microsoft’s resources (computing infrastructure, engineering talent and software ecosystem).
And the “join a startup” is a dumb piece of advice as you’d be still making some one else profit.
Create your own company, and face the likelihood of bankruptcy.
That said, Alex's title appears to be principal engineer at GitHub, which is roughly equivalent to principal at Amazon in both expectations and comp. I worked at AWS for just shy of six years, and I can tell you that the person who created Firecracker -- which underpins huge portions of AWS's technology -- was at the same level, and while they were promoted shortly thereafter, they didn't receive a bonus (because comp packages at that level don't include bonuses at all). So, yeah, Alex is justified in sharing these details publicly, but this is just how it works in tech. (And, frankly, all the underpinning infrastructure that supported him wasn't his work -- he might have come up with Copilot, but would he have been able to without the work of thousands of others?)
I mean sure, technically this is correct. But it also fundamentally takes away from independent contributors and visionaries. Sure, "software is all about teams," but Linus Torvalds is definitely the guy behind Linux, and Palmer Luckey is the guy behind Oculus. It's unfair to take their achievements away because nowadays millions of people people contribute to Linux and Oculus was acquired by Meta.
I don't know OP, but I've seen this play out dozens of times in the cutthroat of corporate day-to-day, so it wouldn't surprise me for Microsoft to have a revisionist interpretation of how Copilot got started.
That's why the "I created" self-description rings hollow in my book -- as it does in essentially every other corporate / large-org case I've heard of (whether done as self-promotion, or the puff stories we're told about people we're supposed to hire or have run our teams or otherwise).
And which is why even people like Steve Jobs, who of course "was" the products he was famously associated with -- never went around saying "I created this." Not because he lacked for ego, or because his contributions were not monumental. But because he was smart enough to understand that once things get to a certain scale -- this kind of attribution is both absurd, and entirely beside the point.
I don't see this reading in the comment above. He is just sharing the passion and sense of ownership he put to create a great product. BTW He mentioned that it was a team effort in the thread, so I don't see any problem issue here.
Microsoft may be bad but it's not the most evil company in history, not even by a long shot.
Exxon and Texaco (now Chevron) would also be high on the list.
I want to be clear: I am absolutely not giving Microsoft a pass here. They've done quite a lot of bad. But they're a relatively new kid on the block vis-a-vis other companies out there.
PS. Within tech, I would also say that Oracle might top the list of 'evil companies' - but in their case, they really seem to actively embrace it (not that that's a good thing).
John Carmack would agree with you.
And it's funny because while Carmack was that single person which was pretty much the best dev in the whole company, Romero was a better fit of your description.
I know I do :D
I can't stand working with people like you, classic main character syndrome.
Even though I don't use it personally, Copilot is a great tool and the bonus is laughable when you put it next to the impact it had on how people write code. For me lesson learned was that in order to spend your career in a good place and to save yourself months or years of time is to voice your concerns early and move on if all you hear are promises without any follow up.
It is you who is full of oneself, your attempt to belittle his contributions shows the kind of human you are. Stop hiding behind the keyboard and tell that to his face.
Downvote at will.
Now, I have no idea if that's true and to what extent it's true - it's common for ICs to be unaware of the work others have done behind the scenes to convince the right folks and unblock their work (not saying that this is what happened, just that it's not inconsistent with Alex's perception that he drove this himself) - but I'm not sure how anything you're saying disproves his version of the story. You could say that about just about every startup founder.
There was the ads policy team that made sure our ads weren't offensive. There was the Cider team that gave us an efficient IDE for doing our work. There were the SREs that made sure we wouldn't break everything when we ran releases. There were internal tooling teams that made our tests reliable, our builds fast, and our development easy. There were the creators of the frameworks we used on the frontends/backends/infra. There was the creator of Memegen that kept me sane. There were dozens of folks telling me what to do as a new grad that made my job easy. There was the experiments/AB testing folks who helped us tune our models.
At the end of the day, I was converting protobufs from one format to another, making a UI here or there, parsing some logs, making minor model adjustments, etc. It was work, pretty similar to what I've done at other companies, it was just that the scale was different.
I always wonder when I see stories like this if these folks really were as critical as they claim to be or if they were just in the right place at the right time to get a bunch of visibility. Especially when in that Twitter thread there is this conversation:
> What do you mean by created? Did you code it from scratch yourself?
> Alex: Yes, me and 1-6 others.
> Scientist at OpenAI: hey
> Alex: correction: + much of OpenAI eng, plus years of their bleeding edge research
I wonder if Alex maybe had more help than he's claiming in other places as well.
Larry and Sergey also stood on the shoulders of those giants, but they made a lot more money off it than you did.
As an aside, his wording is very confusing to me. He says "total comp", so he is either saying that he worked for free, or the phrase "total comp" doesn't include your salary, which both sound crazy. And wouldn't a "title bump" come with a salary bump? If it didn't, surely he would say that, right?
And this ignores the fact that his engineering team had at least a dozen other people and Microsoft paid billions to OpenAI for any of his work to even be possible. What did he expect exactly, founder equity?
My guy. Are you being held hostage by your employer? Blink twice for yes.
I had most of those things with a bachelors straight out of college, working for a dinky startup. A six figure salary is basically minimum wage for software engineers in the Bay.
If you're making less than six figures, your employer is exploiting you. I hope you find a better job.
Line up another offer and watch them throw huge bonuses to retain you (if you’re really worth what you think you are). I know from my and others experience they are happy to exceed even pretty crazy external offers if you bring them to the table, they just won’t increase your pay a dime if they don’t have to.
They're both extremely high costs of living. You aren't saving that much moving to Seattle. There is a noticeable salary difference/adjustment down if moving from SF to Seattle too.
Can anyone think of some other pathway, other than trying to negotiate for more compensation, after proof of concept is delivered?
I realize that HN in 2023 is a far different place than it was in the beginning, but has the percentage of users in rural states and developing nations skyrocketed recently or something?
If you really want to do innovation and you don't need the resources of a huge company to do so, and you're risk adverse then... gosh I don't know what to say.
Practically anything at the cutting edge of research is incredibly capital intensive. So you're either loaded to start with or you have to spend most of your time collecting money rather than doing research.
If you're a researcher who cares primarily about their work, the freedom you have by working for a large company or a government institution is immense. Personally I will take a generous paycheck and resources provided for me so I can do actual work over trying to add zeroes to my own bank account. Many scientists make this trade consciously.
Also, depending on their level, “creating GitHub Copilot” might actually be part of their baseline role expectations.
"The VP who worked most against Copilot’s creation, would later tell me I didn’t deserve the promo.
That person is now in charge of GitHub Copilot."
If you are a Dev with skills you will see this all the time in big corp.
Microsoft is excellent as using young, passionate folks, especially ones that don't have experience in advocating for themselves, and pretty terrible at promoting or rewarding individual contributors doing their best to push things forward. Oh and my total comp was garbage. I joined a startup and got a 40% bump without even asking.
This person is also trying to hire startup roles, so not exactly an unbiased viewpoint, either.
I can confidently say no it is not a part of the baseline expectation of any role.
The net result was, predictably, staff engineers went out of their way to leave feedback on PRs (typically worthless, often self-contradictory within short time spans) to keep their name visible, and any pain point raised and effort to resolve it by senior level developers was shot down because some staff engineer "was working on it".
Ok.
> I’m not upset! Making copilot was an absolute joy. Just putting corpo internals in perspective for others.
I believe those big bad companies and bosses DO bring quite a lot to the table, a stable income, resources, a life free of personal risks, maybe even just credibility and many other things... It's childish to gloss over this.
Yes someone is going to bring up an edge case where someone lucked out by being born into the right family. But in most cases it’s just the hard work over time, with a mix of risk taking.
As something who’s spent years trying to build those relationships, I truly appreciate it.
> The VP who worked most against Copilot’s creation, would later tell me I didn’t deserve the promo. That person is now in charge of GitHub Copilot.
It's a tale as old as time at Microsoft where a VP (who usually has a fake job if we're being real) tries to actively block things they have no actual understanding of, it goes out and is a massive success, and then they take credit and build an empire around it.
Copilot will end up a worse product as a result of this dynamic. All you have to do is look at the anemic release of Copilot Chat, a preview of a product that people working on it should feel embarrassed about, to see how the shift has already happened. It's a shame, but it's how things work there.
There are some high-level execs at Microsoft who are great, and it's a true joy when you work with them. But in my experience, many are completely lost on what their product area is even about anymore, or so actively steeped in org-level politics that they've lost their sense of how to actually Get Shit Done.
Corporate jobs aren't a slot machine, they're a place to pay the bills without stressing about it every month.
When my friends started working at MS 15 years ago they were getting stock awards at a 20-40 dollar per share price... now those shares have gone up substantially in value (~10x in that time). It's not quit your job and never work again money, but it's definitely enough to afford a big down payment on a home.
I’d ask Alex: for your new startup, how will you quantify bonuses for salaried employees who do outstanding work or create services that are exceptionally valuable to avoid disappointment like your own?
A few other factors to consider: The people doing the low level coding are usually not the top compensated people for a project. Its the higher level architects that determine the overall plan for the product and set the direction for mid and low level engineers.
I've gotten a very similar bonus to this for putting in a few long nights and accelerating a client delivery by a month. And sometimes much less for much more effort.
I think it depends on how much of a slush fund a project has, which might not be at all tied to the impact of the project.
Technology-wise, I have a Deep TabNine beta invitation email dated August 2019 and Wikipedia tells me that Copilot announced June 2021.
Business-wise, Codata bought TabNine in December 2019.
Gorilla-wise, TabNine was initially one lone undergraduate at Waterloo.
As opposed to what? What would the author consider to be sufficient compensation? 50K? 100k? 200k? More?
How much should I be compensated on top of my regular package for doing my job extra well this year?
> Join a startup.
Want to have a better connection between the value of your work and your compensation - build a startup, don't join one as an employee.
Author's ego is too big to be a cog (extremely well compensated and risk-free cog) within a corporation, so we should all wish him the best of luck in creating his own AI startup and destroying the moat that Google itself admitted they don't have.
Good luck, author.
lets face it, companies will pay a lot to keep those magicians. so something doesn't add up. why lose such a professional for a little sum of money? so, there is another side to the story.
Always makes me chuckle when folks blather on about risk-reward premiums while relying on public infrastructure -- postal service, education, military, internet, rail system, roads, power grids, democracy, freeways, bridges, etc. Start or run your business in war torn Afghanistan and I'm happy to talk about 400:1 pay ratios between leadership and lowest paid employees. No? Alright then. Sit down, shut up, and just be happy folks aren't pulling out the pitchforks... yet.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-com...