I would personally love my CEO for being open and not an NPC figurehead. Our enterprise customers? Guessing not so much hahaha
1,289 karma · joined February 18, 2011
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1551386634741895170?s=21...
I can tell the reporter has never used or operated something as integral as a ticketing system at scale. These systems are integrated everywhere to automate operations flows. They’re used to continuously enforce compliance. The list goes on. Ripping them out at an enterprise company is very painful. Then on top of all that, you have to re-train everyone on how to use a new system.
Not gonna lie, this is a pretty clever recruiting technique.
I could also be wrong here and the correction won't be this harsh, but just throwing out a different perspective I don't feel is being shared across Hacker News enough yet.
> So, the best case scenario is a very unlikely chance of a positive outcome, and even if you get that positive outcome, it’s of no direct value to you.
What if you own equity? What if you just want to leave places better than you found them and any hope this last meeting would help is enough for you?
Anchoring your entire spiel with "look I really want to preface this by saying I'm telling you this because I'm hoping enough people leaving over it will finally get the company to take it seriously. I care about <company> because I have friends here I really wish well for, and I have equity in the company and want to see it succeed" then go on to provide clear and actionable (even if uncomfortable feedback).
Examples of this kind of feedback:
* Troy has been a Product Manager of <X Team> for 8 months now and has yet to product roadmaps that fire up myself and the rest of the engineers. This is starting to impact how we think about technical foundations work and leaves engineers feeling bored on one of our most mission critical teams. <Troy's manager> should have a pulse on this by now, and I would hope would do something otherwise <Company> will continue to lose great engineers.
Obviously this is all case-by-case, but it feels like any company where the fall out was so bad you need to lie wouldn't give you positive references anyway. I don't know probably my own biases, but I automatically assume people are bad at giving feedback when I read salty articles like this. I've been in several jobs where I've been able to give cutting feedback in an exit but also maintained great relationships with folks. The underlying theme has always been to learn how to give effective feedback and give it frequently. Effective means concise, actionable, measurable.
* meaningless corporate jargon * silly and insecure * corporate kool-aid
I will gladly revise so I don't come off that way.
For the "work-a-loholics" comment, I certainly am a workaholic and you can easily find that online. I don't apologize for it, and I don't mind if others aren't but it will be a problem if that fact makes you salty. I'm doing a lot of shit, and I'm not sorry if that makes you insecure in yourself, although I do hope you work through that for your own benefit.
> have bullet points of your biggest weaknesses or eccentricities and other actionable info
The point of this document is to respond to someone who already wants to work with me and get signal through our hiring process to know if I should refer them in (ideally quickly). Highlighting my biggest weaknesses (something you can Google for - I'm very open about myself) feels off topic and doesn't seem to actually solve anyone's pain points (mine or the candidate's).
That said, I have been told that I can be long-winded in my writing, so it's valuable to get that feedback. I will take a stab at cutting as much fluff as possible - thank you!
> As for terminology, eager might be a better term than hungry. So funny, I associate eager more with "desperate". Maybe this is a US vs. EU sorta thing. I'm going to noodle on this - thank you!
This doesn't just make a sort of sense to me, it makes perfect sense.
People trade their labor at a lower rate for higher stability (less risk). The people who start companies, find capital, and distribute that capital in ways that increase the value of the company have taken on more risk (how significant varies case-by-case and usually is a natural market cap ceiling to the total value the owners can extract ahead of employees).
If the company I work at gives me shares in that company, I want the company to pay less for my labor (and everyone's) if my belief is that collectively all employees output will accelerate my own wealth creation when I sell my shares in the company. The share becomes a transitive store of value I believe my own labor alone will never be able to keep up with, and I want to make sure the value it's accumulating is not diminished because the company is paying out the full capital value of everyone's labor. Then there would be very little incentive for me to take the shares in the first place, and, honestly, very little incentive for anyone to start a company (why take on that risk if there's no payout in excess of just joining another company?).
> As for humility: you will not find it in most sub 40 year olds, they don't know what they don't know yet
This is interesting and very different from my experience. I feel like humility is actually the hardest thing to find in anyone (controlled for age and all). I haven't actually seen a clear trend line between humility and age.
> Adding 'hungry' also seems to select for people in need, giving you an advantage over them in negotiations.
Interesting I never really thought about it like this. Do you associate "hungry" with "desperate"? I've always seen them as completely distinct, but, if enough people see them as closely related, I probably should figure out how to qualify this.
https://vinay.notion.site/If-you-want-to-work-with-me-at-Loo...
The parent commenter is referencing several fields:
> Sybil attack: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/sybil-....
This is a type of peer-to-peer strategic attack. So you could postulate that this broadly falls under the category of "common p2p network attacks and vulnerabilities". Google that!
> Circuit breaker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_breaker_design_pattern
This is a type of software pattern for making sure a signal (usually bad) doesn't keep recurring and its blast radius is contained.
> Now you're basically trying to devise a heuristic of what every single attack might look like in terms of transaction volume increase. If you're wrong, the bridge will freeze right when a lot of people want to use it. Plus, you also need to build a price oracle now.
This is blockchain specific, but you can definitely deep dive into how blockchains work to get to a point where you understand the concept of a "bridge", "price oracle", etc.
All this said, some people are more breadth-first-search learners, so, if you find yourself in a situation where this is overwhelming but you still want to know, you can always start teaching yourself fundamentals that lead to these areas. I'm roughly breaking down the stack for you here:
First stack: * intro to programming (and getting deep into programming in general) * understanding the basics of an CRUD database app (client-server systems) * understanding multiple services (microservices and systems architecture) * distributed systems (consensus algos, time drift + vector clocks, etc.) * specialization in understanding the blockchain data structure * specialization in understanding p2p systems and their faults
I do agree it's highly probable that VR becomes a utility until we have another leap in technology (contact-lens form factor?). We shall see!
> Do us a favor: stay independent and stay interesting. Don't get acquired by Zuck. Maybe the MechE's in my family will use your stuff one day.
Thank you I really appreciate this compliment. :) My father is actually a MechE so this comment hits close to home. My background is in materials science as well as computer science. After this company, I think I'll go back to my roots in more physics, chemistry and biology and try to do something within bioengineering. Then again, who knows. I feel, as I get older, the only thing that's certain is that I have no idea what I'll value in 2-3 more years, and I think that's a good thing!
Hope you and your loved ones are doing well internet friend.
That said, when I try my hardest to think objectively about the future of work, I think VR is going to be everywhere.
Workers going into factories will become exceedingly rare. The cost of humans is high both from a safety and headcount perspective, and more and more of manufacturing pipelines are becoming automated end-to-end. Service repairs will likely happen remotely and only require humans to be onsite if absolutely necessary in the future. It's good for business.
There is a ton on "dark factories" to be found online. Also, there are many startups that have significant traction which are bridging these two worlds via AR:
When it comes to knowledge work, I think anywhere where you have to work with visuals will become a predominant VR stomping ground. If you need to be working with 3D models (lots of engineering + manufacturing) or flat UIs (being able to point and pan and modify is more natural with hand gestures), VR will likely win out. I also think VR will create a space for completely new ways of constructing software architecture. This could be a bridge to creating architectures visually for the first time (want to define a service that automagically becomes a kubernetes service and node on the backend? create a box here and give it some parameters!). The interactivity of this kind of build feels very natural, and it's how we actually already do things in a more limited 2d context. My guess is the killer feature here with VR is the immersiveness allowing for better synchronous collboration.
I could be totally wrong about this stuff, but I think a lot of our lives will change with VR. There are some serious hurdles we need to get over, most notably form factor, weight, and nausea. I feel like these are solvable problems, but honestly that's mostly a hunch more than anything. Would love to hear from others who know more than me!