tibbetts

Sounds like a law school exam question about when it stops being parody and starts being deliberately confusing to consumers. Like if I sell Jock Doniels whiskey that’s only 10% alcohol, is that really a parody? Or the South Butt clothing brand.

I don’t know about pretending a correlation, but a common challenge for engineering and product ICs who are trying to become more senior or have a bigger impact is understanding how their work relates to the big picture. I often ask engineers why they are (to use your example) rewriting the login system, and is there is any way to quantify the results. This helps to avoid engineers polishing an already-round ball, and to have some kind of accountability for outcomes. If you are rewriting login to cut down on tech support calls or to make it work with third party auth or work with legacy enterprise garbage, all those reasons are tangible and possible to quantify.

If you thought “A Modest Proposal” sounded pretty fantastic, you must have read a different essay by that title than I did. And saying that communism sounds good in theory is also a pretty superficial reading of Marx and others.

There is a version of DB2 for mainframe, but it’s a totally different codebase as I understand it. The operating system on a mainframe provides a lot of what modern app developers get from their database and caching systems, generally with better fault tolerance and availability. So if you have an app built for mainframe, it often will not have an external database dependency. Doing transactions can just look like writing to memory or files.

I’m not an OSX expert, but it seems like you should be able to make a compiled binary to do this and then give it setuid permissions, avoiding the need for a password. At least that is how I would do it on other unixes.

It often seems like shutting down potential acquisitions has the biggest impact, but it’s hard to get credit for saying “no” to something.

To quote: “...because we’ve got the bomb. Two words. Nuclear fucking weapons....”

Yes please LinkedIn.

I’ve hired engineers in their 40s and 50s at a startup where I was the 25 year old CTO founder. Now I’m turning 40 and my most recent title was CEO. Some of the best ICs I’ve worked with were later in their career. And not only are they good engineers, you can expect them to talk to customers, to prioritize what matters for the business, and to be circumspect about technology choices.

There is definitely ageism in tech.

One thing that I think drives it is that it takes a while to figure out if a programmer is really capable. There are a lot of not very good programmers. When I interview someone with 2 years professional experience I need to be looking for potential. When I interview someone. When I interview someone with 25 years professional experience, I can be looking at results and experiences. I’ve hired one engineer who was leaving after 15+ years at IBM. He was great and had done a lot of things. I’ve hired another senior engineer who was bailing after 2-3 years at IBM, and he complained that everyone keeps their heads down and it was too easy to hide. And I’ve interviewed several former IBM lifers who I decided not to hire because they were the ones keeping their heads down and hiding, having had minimal impact and with limited experience making real technical decisions. Even if you are “age” blind, experience gives you a lot more to judge, and often to judge harshly.

It’s not just IBM. I can say the same about Cisco, HP, and the Mathworks. Probably any large engineering organization. And I am starting to see it in candidates leaving Amazon.

There are career trajectories available to developers which can seem safe, but lead to dead ends. Working on safe boring things in a large organization is one. Being a reluctant middle manager is another.

At that age my doctor said the things that were likely to kill people like me were motorcycle accidents, extreme sports, and drug addiction. So if your hobbies are software and photography, that mostly leaves drug addiction.

Some of my mechanical engineering friends think of working at LEGO the way others think of working at Space X or NASA. I’m pretty sure all of those models have run through finite element analysis.

Sure, but most business decision making is based on hand wavy made up math. Like, how do you decide to build a feature or switch programming systems? Does it not relate to customers or revenue?

Also, yes, don’t have the numbers be BS or fail to include other useful narrative in your resume. But I so often see none of this, and leaving it all out is a sign someone hasn’t had to justify their decisions at that level.

Learn to talk about your accomplishments like an entrepreneur or executive would: impact with quantified customer and company value. Not “I switched our development from Java to Go” but “improved time to deliver new customer functionality from 8 weeks to 4 weeks through new platform choice. Improvements in agility yielded $8 million in revenue growth.”

Another thing I don’t see enough in this thread is emphasizing software you managed to avoid writing. That’s the real secret of being a 10x engineer: telling your organization when building something expensive is not necessary, either because you don’t really need it, can use something simpler, or can adopt something that already exists.

The I think “maybe I should rent one on vacation sometime.” And after three days with a BMW Z4 convertible, I get that out of my system for well under $1k. I also resolved my interest in Jeep Wranglers this way.

Don’t stress as much about investor capital as about your own time. Investors probably like what you are doing and they probably have (more or less) plenty of capital or they wouldn’t have given to you. They mostly won’t want their money back pro-rated if there is an option for your team to keep trying hard.

You have finite time on this earth. If this startup is no longer the right thing to be spending your time on, if you don’t think this or anything like it will work, then it is reasonable to quit and do something else. But I would second other people’s suggestion that you take a week or two to recover from what seems like burnout and seriously consider what the right next thing to do is and whether this corporate vehicle and these investors are part of the answer.

You can and should show meaningful numbers while searching. And you should probably do some of your 24 months and numbers before you quit your day job and ask for money.

“We talked to 15 friendly CIOs at mid sized banks, and they all said that pen theft was a top three problem for them in 2018, they plan to budget up to $30k to solve it in 2019. We are pretty sure we can build RFID pen tracking systems for under $100 per pen, but we haven’t figured out how to price it for our market. I do know two bank branch managers who are willing to run beta tests.”

I mean, that’s still a dumb idea, but you can get started putting numbers around something without running down the whole 24 month clock. And usually most of the risk is in the product market fit, not in your tech team’s ability to create pen trackers.

Edit to add: now, if you integrate blockchain into your pen trackers, and have an ICO for pencoin, then this is totally fundable. Mid sized retail banks are definitely looking for a way to spend money on blockchain.

If you have access to an oracle that protects you from making these kind of mistakes, I encourage you to start a venture fund. Or start an international charity. Or ask your oracle what the best thing to do is and then do that. The answer is probably not harshing on people asking for advice.

Donating it to charity wasn’t on offer. It’s not like OP stole the money.

Heck, I raised some of my seed capital from a venture fund that is mostly backed by an international charity, and apparently that charity thinks that a little bit of venture capitalism is a good use of their money. I actually get an annual letter from their LPs about the charitable work we are supporting, and share it with my employees.

Not everything people try works out, and the world appears to overall be a better place for the trying.

No, but for the right people in the right place at the right time raising seed capital is about as difficult as applying for a job. It’s just that you have to invent and pitch the job.

In that context you could think of the post as “I got this job by saying I was going to help the company do X. Six months in I’m pretty sure that’s not going to work. I think I should just quit, but some of my coworkers think I should keep trying, or consider doing X’, since there are a lot of things at the company which could be better. What should I do?”

Venture capital is a hits business, and if you want to invest in an entrepreneur there is benefit towards getting them the first time. Marc Benioff has 13 years of Oracle experience when he started Salesforce, and he already had plenty of access to capital and expertise.

Well they were only off by one or two.

Or moderator successful younger founders. Using the first startup as a launching point is even easier when you clear a few million than when you “fail”.

Weapon design is all about government contracts, which generally require experience. Even Iron Man was using his dad’s existing corporate vehicle.

Advanced AI usually depends on finding a business model, which requires experience. And places like Deep Mind were started by researchers who had been at it a few decades.

Pay their taxes without whining or trying to take over the government. Don’t try to discredit science to protect your wealth. Consider the social costs of their investments. Engage in substantial philanthropy.

It turns out that some problems are solvable by a massively parallelized optimization process based on independent decision making, advertising, pricing, and money.

Success stories include food production, household goods, and many kinds of media.

Failures include addictive drugs, gambling, global warming, and healthcare.

As a civilization we’re crushing it on problems solvable by capitalism. The solution to other problems is not new ways of measuring things to make them fungible (sounds like Wuffie). The solution is other forms of collective action and decision making, like functional governments and NGOs.

This is true. The feeling of entitlement, that their wealth was earned, and the lack of obligation to give back to the greater good, is the biggest problem with wealth growth since the 1980s. The 19th century British aristocracy might have been horrible, but at least they thought they were supposed to be building a better world, not just feathering their own nest.

_How Much is Enough_ is a very conservative British book about this, and the idea that modern Capitalism has forgotten what the point of life might be.

It matters, and it might be ok if the wealthy were being nice about it. Unfortunately a very active subset seems to be bringing back feudalism. In the 20s-70s rich people were conveniently afraid of communist revolution and thus inclined to distributed gains. Without another credible threat of global revolution I don’t know how this gets fixed. Of course, communism did have downsides for the people who actually lived under it.

The law against perpetuity means you can’t have an open ended bequest like that. Someone living has to get it, and in bounded time. You can mess around a bit, like leaving money in trust to your youngest living descendent, to pay out on their 65th birthday, unless someone revives you. Which also starts to sound like a movie plot.

DARPA and friends should go long. But it would be nice if journalists didn’t act like problems were completely solved the first time they see a prototype. That kind of hype is how you get AI winter.

An assumption can be widely held even if most informed people would dispute it. For example the widely held belief that housing prices will only go up, despite historical and theoretical arguments to the contrary.