Comment by orph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by orph | Hacker News Reader

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Orilly? We had no PM, EM, or designer: I played all those roles for 1.5 years.

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.

Seems like people are eager to attack you because you've shown a bit of arrogance, but if what you wrote is true then it's completely fair to feel frustrated about it. I sympathize with you. I used to feel this way about much much smaller achievements of mine.

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.

If your title was Chief Architect then accomplishments like this are baseline expectations for an IC, and your comp would have reflected that. It would have been well into 7 figure territory.

Exactly. He did his job, and was paid handsomely for it (and whether or not it became anything).

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.

That’s the reality of being employed, really.

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.

Driving a brand new product from the ground up is not in the job description for almost all levels. Only maybe if you're one step below Distinguished Engineer.

It is (or was) explicitly in the role guideline at MSFT for principal level. There's lots of variation at that level. Some sit on their butt and only chime in when they have expertise, others prototype new ideas of their own. That's how a few things I know came to be.

I don't think "chief architect" is a title at Microsoft, and it's probably worth noting that unless you're at the partner level, your pay at Microsoft will be pretty terrible compared to the rest of the tech industry.

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?)

This is the correct take. Copilot impossible without the years of work from the brilliant people at OpenAI, VScode, Azure, and GH.

No offense but this comment sounds really egotistical and shows a total lack of self-awareness. Software is all about teams and if you have one guy who thinks he's god's gift it ultimately hurts the whole team. I'm not surprised your compensation is much less than you think it should be, I suspect Microsoft has a more accurate view of your value than you do yourself.

> Software is all about teams

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.

My own threshold for "I created X" would be "I was solo dev, until it got legs of its own and started needing serious outside help." I don't know the story behind Oculus, but objectively Linux and a host of other famous OS projects do have origin stories like this. Yet for this project -- even by his own telling, it wasn't just him, but "me and Albert". Okay. Not to mention it was all done in a bigcorp environment -- which by definition means tons of support from all kind of people (even while others may be simultaneously blocking or competing against you).

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.

> Software is all about teams and if you have one guy who thinks he's god's gift it ultimately hurts the whole team.

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.

This total lack of empathy is why our industry is a circle wank of dudes. Why do you feel so obliged to defend the most evil company in history? And why do you feel the need to make personal attacks at some dude, is it because you think you are so much better yourself?

> the most evil company in history?

Microsoft may be bad but it's not the most evil company in history, not even by a long shot.

I'm not disagreeing with you but I'm curious as to who's on your short list of most evil company's in history?

The short version are all of the "X East India Companies" that were formed in Europe that effected much of the West colonizing Asia. The list of atrocities is immense.

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).

Completely forgot about the "X East India Companies"!

It's not about defending Microsoft -- it's about defending and acknowledging the dozens if not hundreds of other people who worked on, and continue to work on, Copilot and making it a commercial success.

A better approach to doing that (for the corporate employer) might be to say 'Here's a million $ bonus for the team, please divide up amongst yourselves as you see fit.'

that's probably what happened...

> Software is all about teams and if you have one guy who thinks he's god's gift it ultimately hurts the whole team.

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.

Carmack obviously is (and was) a genius developer but I don’t recall him ever saying “Doom was my creation” or “Quake was all me.” Even though he clearly had a huge impact on the success of those games. He’s always been (in my eyes) a pretty humble and easy to work with person (this is seconded by some people I know who worked with him at Meta) which has contributed to his success.

Probably because we all know that already? People literally worship Carmack. There's a book titled "Masters of Doom".

I know I do :D

The overwhelmingly most valuable (and difficult) part of copilot is the work done by openAI. You're acting like you single handedly built it.

I can't stand working with people like you, classic main character syndrome.

Interesting that you switched to “we” and “our” pretty quickly in this comment when describing the work…

Your response basically confirms the parent commenter's assessment that you're completely full of yourself and sound awful to work with.

Btw, your message behind this is that you should work at a startup (maybe yours), is that correct? How do you plan to compensate individuals who do this type of work at your own startup?

Thank you for creating copilot. It's a great achievement. Sad that you did not get the recognition you deserve and grifters stole it.

In your mind, what would be fair compensation?

Not the op, but looking at MSFT on levels.fyi at least the last level of Principal SDE (e.g. 67) would be the minimum I'd grade Copilot with. 68 or 69 would be more appropriate.

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.

It depends on how revolutionary the product or service was. Not sure if any company still does this anymore, but the way Google rewarded and recognized the initial teams behind stuff like gmail and Google maps seems more fair. Based on the comments I’ve seen so far, i doubt that OP received much of either from GitHub / MS.

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

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