Well he picked the right problem at the time which was (and still is!) search. I was really looking forward to some progress on this and then he deleted tweets and dropped off the system. I would love to see a podcast of him talking about that & fyi @realGeorgeHotz is back on it now to promote Tiny grad/box/corp.

As someone who has spent 20+ years working in large companies you can spot developers like him a mile away i.e. the sort of behaviour you see with skilled but arrogant grads/interns.

The right approach when you're new is to quietly pick a simple problem away from the core services where you can learn the processes and polices needed to get something into Production. More so when you're in a company that is undergoing a brain drain.

Then you can progressively move to solving more demanding and critical issues.

You should write a book or a blog about how to not rock the boat at large companies. Maybe you can call it Going Nowhere Fast.

Large companies normally (unlike Twitter) have achieved strong product market fit and are all about tweaks that deliver marginal revenue. Given that they already have a big slice of the market, the multiplier on marginal revenue makes what you're doing worthwhile.

"Rocking the boat" is more likely than not to make things worse.

You don't need a book about it when it's a concept children understand.

Before you run you learn to walk.

Some people were just born to run. Their legs don’t really work right for walking.

I remember watching a live stream [1] of him going through Twitter engineering articles and trying to reverse engineer the Twitter frontend and backend, and he clearly had absolutely no clue of how anything remotely related to the web works.

He was just clicking around compulsively, jumping between stuff randomly without even reading it, while not understanding what he was looking at. I have no idea how he's successful in tech, judging from what I saw there.

[1] https://youtu.be/z6xslDMimME

> I have no idea how he's successful in tech, judging from what I saw there.

I think judging only from what you saw there is the issue. If you look somewhere like Wikipedia [0], you'll see he was the first person to jailbreak the iPhone, the first person to achieve hypervisor access to the PS3's CPU, he took first place in several notable CTFs (at least one time as a one-person team), he worked on Google's Project Zero team (and created a debugger called QIRA while he was there), creating comma.ai, and the list goes on.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz

He's good at breaking APIs. That's different skill from making APIs and things.