1,289 karma · joined February 18, 2011
You only get this kind of humility when you're working with absolute wizards on a consistent basis.
The best managers have both.
The worst have only positional and flex it constantly.
The mediocre have positional but rarely flex and rely on their teams.
Regardless, there always needs to be both types of authority so the ultimate accountability of performance to a goal can cleanly bubble up. As goals become broader, it's unfair to pin the accountability on one individual without putting them in a position of positional authority so they can then give smaller authority (and responsibility) to the individual team members.
Source: I have managed and scaled teams up to 100+ people. I've served both engineering (Head of Eng, CTO) and HR leadership (VP People) roles.
From talking to friends and younger people entering the workforce, this is almost always the bigger consideration. Most feel like starting a company is still a total shot in the dark from a success standpoint, and I feel like there is more skepticism than ever of the startup lottery.
What I totally agree with is that VCs need to be doing a much better job telling people that starting a VC-backed company is an extraordinarily bad way to make a lot of money. The odds are just insanely stacked against you. That said, most people gravitate to inspirational stories even if you're told it's at odds with what you can expect for your own journey, so, the more of these success stories there are (even if the ratio of them relative to total "tries" stays consistent), the more people will take the startup path.
If you or anyone else wants advice on founder dynamics, my email is vinay@loom.com. Happy to give advice and be a sounding board over email. I’m sorry you’re going through this.
1. Please keep at it. We need more people with experience staying in software. I don’t know your financial situation, but software is huge and something will land!
2. Based on this comment, I highly recommend likely not ever starting a company. It’s fucking hard, and it’s not glamorous. And even though it’s hard times in the macro, it’s actually way harder for many compounding reasons that are not obvious until you do it.
Again, coming from a place of love.
That said, I also feel like this, mixed with them not really shipping much new UX/device innovation, signals a distinct chapter away from Jobs. I really want to see the vision Apple has taken with the M-series chips applied to new devices. I don't know what that looks like. I don't have the vision. Maybe it's their VR headset? Maybe it's humanoid robotics? I need Apple to tell me.
Don't know if anyone else can relate to this feeling.
Or are you saying you were actually attracted to said guy and you'd be ok with it? Then your story makes sense, but it's still an odd one to pick given how extreme most people would say it is.
To be honest, I'm very confused by this comment. I love Hacker News lol.
Seems like OpenAI is exploring its own devices/OS as well, which makes sense to me, but it’s a vertical integration bet. This seems to be another big bet, but they could benefit from having their own optimized chips regardless of whether the device/OS bet wins out.
Extremely exciting times for OpenAI!
To say you never need to understand what problem the abstraction is trying to solve (or you always need to) doesn't quite strike the practicality of how teams work together in my experience.
That said, in my experience, there are a ton of leaky abstractions that really shouldn't be too.
Network effects have not been accounted for in antitrust. That’s the core of the problem. Not the fact that Amazon is tweaking algos. Every major player is doing that.
I like Jerry Chen’s piece on “The New Moats” (ahead of its time published in 2017) that calls out the progression of tech going from systems of engagement -> systems of record -> systems of intelligence. It feels like this is one (of many) consequences of that progression:
Tangible example:
We have a video transcoder queue. The state of the video model in our db can change as the video is being finalized in various ways. The transcoder generates thumbnails and assets from the video and also updates its state in the db. So we store job information in the message about what thumbnails we want to generate and the video ID but nothing else. This allows us to look up the video row, see if the same media was already transcoded from the video (and cancel the job), and, if not, run the job and update the video row.
Also (and I know you’re not saying this), but I’ve never understood the argument that keeping queues in Postgres leads to higher data integrity via transaction guarantees. The job is still running on another process outside of the db. The only time this could be true is if the job itself mostly updates state in the db, in which case it’s the small minority of queued workloads (with the majority needing to do non-db compute work).
It seems foolish. I am a big fan of “use the dumbest tool”, but sometimes engineers take it too far and you’re left with the dumbest tool with caveats that don’t seem worth it given the mainstream alternative is relatively cheap and simple.
One such algo is Chord:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(peer-to-peer)
It’s a peer-to-peer ring of nodes which have their values consistently hashed between them. The network leverages these things called “finger tables” which essentially store replication information in the form of a table. This table can have information which is incorrect or outdated and the peer you go to can tell you to go to another peer (usually the “next”/“successor”) until you find the value (or don’t).
Reason this algo can be used with no “leader” is because it can also work by just going to a node and doing a linear scan across all nodes. You don’t need a thumb table to speed up queries.