orzig

I worked at a big company which did a full agile transformation, including full-time, agile coaches. I imagine everyone hired afterwords hated agile for the very real swirl the process caused, but those of us who’d been there before know it was FAR better than that chaos.

I also worked at a funded start up that implemented agile from the beginning, worked pretty great.

it doesn't give a complete answer, but we might as well start by referencing pg's words himself: https://genius.com/Paul-graham-sam-altman-for-president-anno...

There must be a good enough programmer at your work, try to get as many pole requests reviewed by them as possible, and make clear that you are eager to learn. Unless they are totally burned out, I bet they will be thrilled to pass on their wisdom(even if it is only relative). Even the same information that you could find in a book will feel much more compelling to act on if you hear it from a person.

Obviously, you should write down all of their generalized advice, and make sure that every poll request in the future incorporates it. Within six months you will probably be getting very few comments as you have 80/20 internalized their experience

About to hit the 5 year anniversary of being told I need an urgent root canal.

Fortunately, buying a softer toothbrush fixed the issue - I would have paid them $1,000 to get that recommendation a few weeks earlier!

A keyboard tray, that attached to my desk, I never realized how many of my frustrations were just the slightly awkward ergonomics of my keyboard being a few inches too high

The only reason they offered you the job is to generate cash for their own company!

It only feels like a gray area If you plan on leaving in less than two years, many people would even say less than one.

To exercise, I got a personal coach (virtually, it was the height of the pandemic). She was actually pretty terrible at her job, and the reason I am telling you this is that it still helped tremendously.

Part of the reason I had procrastinated (despite being objectively unable to exercise myself) was the worry I would choose someone I had no chemistry with. Well, the “worst case scenario“ happened, and it was still totally worth it. I just moved on after a few weeks.

If you are not exercising right now, get a personal coach!

Here's a detailed example that can probably be done on your own machine: https://www.kaggle.com/code/maksimeren/covid-19-literature-c...

For an API, I should definitely mention HuggingFace too! https://huggingface.co/docs/api-inference/index

Time for a longer reply:

> Are there any recommended resources (Books/blogs/courses/etc.) I should look into? Million dollar consultant is a ridiculous book, but shocked me out of being too far on the other end of the spectrum about some issues. You will walk away thinking "if someone like the author can make it big (maybe with a bit of luck), I can certainly make it small, at least" A more reasonable version of the ideas is probably https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/, but for contracts Nolo books can give you some basics on the contracting stuff. I wrote my own contracts, haven't had to test them in court but I guess they work. At least one book on negotiating, I've used https://gettingmore.com/the-book/ but haven't done a wide survey.

> Do I focus on work closely related to my specialty or take a broad spectrum approach? I have no strong personal preference here. My experience has been that I'm hired because an organization has a time sensitive need, and I'm plausibly qualified but (more important) highly trusted to flex into whatever they need. As an example, I mostly do ML in Python, but have been hired to do ML in R and Data Engineering in Python. But then, after you prove yourself, you get tapped to do all sorts of other things and you're pretty much a generalist.

> Should I prefer depth (fewer, more hours) assignments or breadth (multiple, fewer hours, perhaps get a wider perspective)? I suspect you won't have much of a choice. My client's needs have always taken all of my time. If their budget were limited, I guess I would have tried to go parallel. But my preferences had nothing to do with it.

> What are some ways I can look for clients I can provide the greatest value to, other than engaging my network, especially for the specialist work? That I don't know, I've only ever had two and they both reached out to me. I've had about 2 others make serious outreach in that time, roughly all people I'd worked with when I was full time.

> How do I price the work? Do I charge by time/sub-project tasks/whole projects? How would I determine the rates to charge? The most important thing is to not beat yourself up for getting the pricing 'wrong'. There's no optimal answer that you will find if you just do a bit more research. It's almost always higher than feels normal, but you have to factor in the time you won't be working between gigs, etc. I also guarantee that some clients' expectations will be heavily non-overlapping: What is too high for some is almost laughably low for others. Obviously, it correlates to how much budget they have, but also just their random life experience. And how you frame it - your "hourly" will feel nuts but you're paid for solutions not hours. And you will probably leave when you pass the peak of your ability to provide solutions, unlike an employee who has to be supported while an optimal new role is found for them.

> If I have about two months until I can start working on this business, what are the most impactful preparations I can make? Talk to old contacs (see my other comment). Do your personal finances to figure out your floor, but don't let that tie you down. Read the negotiation book and do whatever you can to internalize it - your first rate negotiation might happen faster in the process than you expect, and you're locking in many thousands of dollars in expected earnings.

Good luck!

I guarantee that whatever challenges you are facing, they are not because of your lack of credentials. I strongly suspect they are also not because of a lack of intelligence. I again GUARANTEE you are not mentally defective in an IQ sense.

I suspect that you have other struggles, which I have neither the information or credentials to diagnose, but I urge you to drop the college distraction and take that possibility seriously.

It’s a shot in the dark but if you can’t think of any other first step towards success, trust me enough to listen to this: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/depression-anxiety-i...

You seem to be making a more general point about Noah Smith. I’ve never been a follower per se but generally nodded my head when coming across his takes.

I’m game to update my priors on that, can you share some evidence?

Once you have made it text, TF/IDF for themes. Depending on your AWS familiarity, you can use some out of the box pre-trained algorithms for a pretty low price

I have 1 million thoughts but not a lot of time right now, the one thing I would say with confidence is that you will find in your early engagements through existing professional contacts (people in control of a budget; managers or owners), so talking to them will probably give you the most accurate picture relative to even high-quality generalized advice.

As a general rule, you will get more accurate information out of people if you ask for concrete historical examples, instead of “what would happen if“. But if they have not hired a contractor before you might have to settle for the second.

I haven’t filtered through all the jobs here, but it seems perfect for continuing your search: https://www.climatetechlist.com/

More generally: https://www.probablygood.org/

I am with you on this, though I am in a minority at work. An underappreciated benefit is that you are signaling to the reader, when they first see the variable, that it will only be used briefly. That helps them ration their attention.

The strongest counter argument is that developers cannot be trusted to avoid building a house of cards if you let them use, even a single shortcut. And there is plenty of evidence, including my own experience, to back that up. But if you can prove you will re-factor when the time is right, it becomes a lot easier to make your case for brevity.

People tend to think about monopolies in terms of single companies, but they're more commonly a systemic thing.

Housing: Most voters are homeowners, with the shared incentive to increase the price of housing in their town through restrictive policies. This ignores the interesting conversation about whether NIMBY actually increases property values, but most people believe they do. They don't even have to be explicit about it, nor get 100% cooperation, but the emergent property is clear and shockingly consistent across US

Healthcare: There are many systems at play here, as an example: The AMA restricts the number of doctors who can enter the profession: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/does-the-a...

Education: Prestige de-facto limits the number of 'desirable' schools in the marketplace, and the high-prestige schools haven't grown nearly as much as overall enrollment.

There's no single top hat wearing, cigar chomping fat cat. Or even a smoke filled back room. But a variety of cultural and regulatory norms keep the dynamics entrenched. Which isn't to say that they can't be changed! But it won't be just the subtle nudge of Adam Smith's invisible hand.

I don’t know if it’s enough, but the first thing I do when joining a new organization is aggressively cut down on notifications, both using the N app, preferences, and the operating system preferences. The next thing I do is set expectations with coworkers, the same tool can be used very differently across different organizations.

I think it’s a command, for HN to ask something.

Does anyone have HN’s number?

I have never used it, and only spent five minutes at a time in virtual reality, so I’m truly on the fence here. But zoom calls have a huge advantage that you do not need to spend 15 to 60 minutes to see a person, and I could imagine virtual reality evolving to be more immersive than zoom.

Given how many friends I have who have moved outside of even driving range, anything virtual is much better than my current immersive options.

As a technical expert, it would not be unreasonable for you to counter propose a more narrow definition of the technology that would qualify. Either you come to an agreement about something that would not overly constrain you in the future, or maybe they realize that they are being ridiculous and it is not worth spending more time on iterating some paragraph that some lawyer threw in there because they were feeling feisty when they wrote the first draft of the standard contract

One thing I learned when consulting across companies is that there are multiple versions of confluence. I’m not sure how many, nor what the distinguishing factor is in terms of search, but one has a search functionality which is hardly inspiring, but not notably terrible

Companies are complex systems, operating in a complex economy. It’s something of a tautology to say that a broken hiring system would be bad for the company. If the company has rapid turnover, I could imagine it single-handedly spelling doom (a summer ice cream shack as an extreme example). on the other end of the spectrum, I know somebody who is a deep, technical expert in a small but lucrative niche who has failed to find a “suitable“ junior developer for his firm over about 10 years. I imagine something about his hiring process is broken, But his company is doing just fine and can expect to for 20 more years until he retires.

Evidence for the claim?

Here’s some counter-evidence: I just did an HN search and found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33838556

Seems like it got plenty of attention. If you think a different take on the issue deserves attention, try submitting it. Plenty of stories randomly fail to get traction (there are several analyses of this) so you would really need to show a significant sample size of these stories getting zero traction before you could imply they are being purposefully buried.

That is a great point. It’s also worth remembering that most stated beliefs have negligible impact on actions (e.g. my personal opinions about foreign policy). So it’s pretty rational for most people to just take the easy way out of echoing their tribe, and reserve their “weirdness points“[1] for a small percentage of situations that actually matter.

[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MH9suFZbxXCYsr5Z5/...

https://ooh.directory/?

Whether or not, it is what you were thinking of, I have found it super fun in general

I have heard great things about the “scratch” programming, language, though it was 10 years ago.

I haven't done a whole survey, but Carbon Collective sounds like a fit: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/CCSO:NASDAQ?window=5Y

https://www.carboncollective.co/

Meta idea: who do you know that does not interact with very many other tech people, and what is their domain expertise?

Talk to them about their needs, and throw together at least 10 prototypes, preferably while you’re talking. Trying some thing is just so cheap, and I bet you’ll be surprised about what works well, and what does not. by the time you are done, I bet you will have a unique insight on how it can provide value to some niche

I used a SaaS app called You Need a Budget (often abbreviated YNAB). It did not make sense for my situation, but seems perfect for yours. The two primary ideas it is organized around our:

1) Try to only spend money that is “more than 30 days old“ which is a little bit artificial, since money is fungible, but the Age of Money metric makes more sense than monthly net income if you are inflows are lumpy.

2) Easy divide money into dozens of little “accounts“ each of which you can track against a goal. It is pretty easy to keep in a rhythm of filling up the needC–to–have accounts before the nice– to–have accounts.

Go to the closest library, get as many completely different books as catch your interest. Go home and spend at least 10 minutes with each book, of course going longer if you are enjoying it.

Take a break every once in a while for a light exercise.

Spend as little time with technology as possible.

Repeat daily.

That’s it.