341–350 of 596 posts
Politics is a helpful lens. Either you compromise and muddy the purity of the result, or you take the high risk path of being uncompromising and greatly reduce the odds of achieving any result at all.
When facing this, many individuals optimize for lower-risk self-fulfillment over great ambition.
There are talented people everywhere, the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small. Anyone pegging their self-worth on that goal is setting themselves up for a lot of mental health struggles. My levels of ambition and relentlessness absolutely shifted after having kids, I used to be absolutely furious about being the best. Now I am very much "fuck you pay me" and my prior…
When I first had children, my pendulum swung way over to disinterest in seeking anything in my work beyond financial support for my family and time to spend with them (while still supporting and not breaking trust with my professional colleagues).
But my kids are growing and becoming more independent all the time, and I'm currently in a phase where my mental cycles and energy are on an upward trajectory over time, and now I'm back to being excited to use those cycles to do impactful work. But critically, I think, with significantly more wisdom about how to strike a healthy and happy balance for me and my family. I mean, I'm not naive, I don't think it will be easy to strike a good balance, I think it require be constant work and effort at it. But as I've emerged from the baby-brained haze, I have renewed clarity that neither focusing my energy entirely on family or entirely on work is the right path for me.
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> There are talented people everywhere, the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small. No there aren’t. For every Jonathan Blow, Salvatore Sanfilippo (redis) or Mike Pall (LuaJIT) there are probably thousands of run of the mill developers working at feature factories. You don’t build amazing software by being lucky. Your boss at GenericCo will never go out of their way to…
> No there aren’t. You underestimate the odds of talent in a population of 8 billion humans. > If you think you’re all that, don’t blame your company for “not getting the opportunity”. Please. You already have all the tools you need to code. Make something cool! There are neurosurgery robots operating with my code running in the background for several years now. I am now working on ophthalmic surgery software for sub…
(whilst double-checking my memory of where that came from, I found the obligatory LinkedIn post using it as an advert for consultancy services: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/einstein-cotton-fields-sweats...)
I'm cool with that. I keep doing work valuable enough to pay well for, and the rest is semantics.
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I don’t think anyone working with low-level C++ for HFT can face similar fate. Most of skills gained at such job seem very transferable. The article seems to be more about jobs where 95% of work consists in implementing CRUD in accordance with very specific business logic of the company. The only reason to change such job I can imagine is to sit out your non-compete package. But I am not in this industry so maybe I’m…
It's not that you won't have the skills, it's somehow demonstrating them. I also worked at an HFT C++ shop that used no STL. Every data structure has a weird name and API that you get used to. The whole architecture has its own idioms, and hasn't needed much upgrading in terms of language features. Imagine you learn the grammar of English. You learn how to pluralise nouns, when to put an s at the end of a verb, how t…
Getting rid of weird data structures that now have STL analogs then is a productive exercise - existing devs get to learn more STL and new devs have more familiar ground. You get to delete code too.
This is like the programmer equivalent of WH Auden’s poem, The Unknown Citizen [0]. When I first read this poem I thought it was sad and about a person who wasted their life on mundane, average things. But now I think it’s a positive for a person who lived an average life on the outside but likely had a rich internal life that they didn’t share with the world and that we shouldn’t expect people to have metrics that w…
It seems obvious this guy was in fact happy, despite the last lines of the poem, or else he would have acted out at work, become an alcoholic, divorced, or whatever. That or a supreme stoic.
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I recently put a little modal on my phone that just says "Compete against yourself" every 30 minutes, and I'm finding it remarkably helpful at focusing my efforts back to what I want to see in the world. I like the mindset of trying to be just a little better than you were, every day. It feels... correctly scaled, somehow.
You willingly turned on a notification every 30 minutes that tells you to compete against yourself? I cannot tell if this is parody or just Peak HN
Everyone has their quirks. I've got my computer speaking the time every 15 minutes and everyone I know would be driven absolutely insane by that. It helps me keep track of time.
Some people put a postit on their mirror or laptop screen.
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I recently put a little modal on my phone that just says "Compete against yourself" every 30 minutes, and I'm finding it remarkably helpful at focusing my efforts back to what I want to see in the world. I like the mindset of trying to be just a little better than you were, every day. It feels... correctly scaled, somehow.
What does it mean in this context to compete against yourself? Anything at immediately at hand or on the todo list? Or is it just a reminder to get something done you thought of doing but normally wouldn't otherwise?