Guido van Rossum

What can also happen is that...

Someone is a brilliant engineer and sort of builds a great first version of a product and has no aspirations to then become a manager and grow the team from five people to 20 people to 100 people to 1,000 people and so on.

be in charge of hiring and meetings and they move on to inventing another crazy thing inside the same company or sometimes they found a startup or they moved to a different great large or small company.

There's all sorts of models.

And sometimes people sort of do have this whole trajectory from engineer buckling down, writing code, not nine to five, but more like noon till midnight, seven days a week, and coming up with a product and sort of

staying in charge.

I mean, if you take Drew Houston, Dropbox's founder, he is still the CEO.

And at least when I was there, he had not checked out or anything.

He was a good CEO, but he had started out as the technical inventor or co-inventor.

And so he was someone who

I don't know if he always aspired that.

I think when he was 16, he already started a company.

So maybe he did, but he sort of... It turned out that he did have the personal sort of skill set needed to grow and stay on top.

And other people sort of...

are brilliant engineers and horrible at management.

I count myself at least in the second category.

Find something you actually want to do with it.

If you say, I want to learn skill X, that's not enough motivation.

You need to pick something, and it can be a crazy problem you want to solve.

It can be completely unrealistic.