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The Real Silicon Valley

jfornear.co

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Re: The Real Silicon Valley

#121

Post by da02 »

oscargrouch wrote: post #36

I quit my TI job, lost my beautiful fiancee, lost my friends and came back to live with my parents, and all of this after thirty.. Im pretty sociable guy.. and had a very rich and good social life before all this.. Im living in Brazil, without access to this garden of VC funds you guys have in the Valley.. But i live in front of a beautiful beach, where i go out everyday to run, and let some stress behind me.. Im sti…

Do you have a blog or website? I would like to read more of your thoughts and commentary (tech/housing/whatever).

Re: The Real Silicon Valley

#123

Post by michaelochurch »

hazov wrote: post #96
michaelochurch wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's an unreasonable possibility, actually. What I'm describing is an R&D like environment. There's no reason autonomy has to come with the extreme and mostly random income volatility of the VC-istan ecosystem. It's not that I want zero income variance. How many people would want to live in that world? I don't. It's that I'd be willing to give up the upside over $50 million in exchange to never have to…

Academia is like that if you choose your field of research well.

Academia is not like that. You don't have much immediate job risk, because jobs have defined lengths of time (2-year postdocs, 6-year tenure race, indefinite tenure) but the career risk is intolerable. Academia has a terrible job market; it has sold out a generation and a half and I don't see it being able to unwind that.

Academia has almost no financial upside but a lot of downside.

Re: The Real Silicon Valley

#124

Post by tcgv »

arbuge wrote: post #58
rprasad wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interest rates on investments take into account estimated inflation, so the $30k already takes into account likely inflation (but would not take into account higher-than-expected inflation).

Hell no. You invest in a 1% CD, you get 1% absolute return, even if inflation is raging in the double digits. Edit: I assume you mean that over time interest bearing account rates rise with inflation. That's true in general, but as the current situation shows, there's no guarantee they're actually even above the inflation level at any point.

He means that if you keep spending all of your investment's returns, you'll end up with a fixed income of $30K (1% of $3M) that, due to inflation, will have less purchasing power as the years go by.

Re: The Real Silicon Valley

#125

Post by arethuza »

sliverstorm wrote: post #83
jseliger wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I owned a nice home, a beautiful vacation (lake) home, a big office building, 2 Mercedes Benz (wife's SUV, my car) [. . .] It all went away (except for my primary home) by the time I was 35. One lesson here might be to not buy the fancy, expensive stuff and the lifestyle that goes with it. I bet things would've been a lot smoother with fewer gee-gaws and more cash in the bank.

Yes, ideally you should earn as much money as possible, and spend as little as possible. Money only does you any good when you don't spend it.

Though, if you never do anything with your money then it's pretty pointless.

Re: The Real Silicon Valley

#126

Post by michaelochurch »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #91
dxbydt wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are looking for a rose without the thorns:) you'd be better off with a lily ( ie. straight job at big-co/small-co, no income variance )

There's plenty of in-between. The key concept is career capital. Career capital is basically how much a company values you. You can more or less trade career capital for things like money, promotions, freedom, etc. Different companies will let you trade career capital for different things. Small startups generally grant more autonomy and less cash. Investment banks will let you get plenty of cash, but all the career…

This is excellent advice. The question is: what should people do to acquire career capital fast? Work hard at their assigned stuff, or invest in self-directed labor?

I think there's something to be said for the zigzag strategy. Take finance jobs to improve comp, and more typical tech jobs to improve autonomy and technical knowledge. No tech company will match a $250,000 hedge fund salary, but most will compensate "out of kind" with a higher title and more authority. Then you do something awesome at your tech job and become qualified for a better finance job.

The other advantage of zigzagging is that you can overstate how politically successful you are, because you're moving into a context where people don't know how to evaluate your signals. If you claim you were at level X in finance when you were actually X - 2, other finance people will be able to tell based on what you actually did and how much you know about the industry. If you zigzag a bit, you have more control over your story. But I think there must be limits to the efficacy of zigzagging, because lateral movement without progress becomes damaging after a while.

Re: The Real Silicon Valley

#127

Post by majani »

michaelochurch wrote: post #69

I really wish there was a way to: (a) have the autonomy and interesting work of a startup tech founder (while a full-time technologist, not a manager) but (b) without the extreme income variance. If your job requires you to take personal loans, there's something wrong. I also think there are a lot of people who have the talent but not the ability to afford the risk. The extreme income variance is a bug, not a feature…

The closest you can get to that is a consulting business.

Re: The Real Silicon Valley

#128

Post by rgbrgb »

michaelochurch wrote: post #123
hazov wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academia is like that if you choose your field of research well.

Academia is not like that. You don't have much immediate job risk, because jobs have defined lengths of time (2-year postdocs, 6-year tenure race, indefinite tenure) but the career risk is intolerable. Academia has a terrible job market; it has sold out a generation and a half and I don't see it being able to unwind that. Academia has almost no financial upside but a lot of downside.

I've had a lot of CS professors that consult in industry for huge payouts (particularly in more applied fields like biometrics and graphics) and I know there are applied math people doing the same. It looks incredibly hard to get a tenured academic job, but I think once you're there in an applied field, your title can be very lucrative.

Re: The Real Silicon Valley

#129

Post by phatbyte »

I advice everyone on HN to view this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nif01WZ9aI

Maybe this won't change anything, but there's more in life than just getting funded with millions of dollars. I feel pretty bad for people who get depressed or worse because they didin't made it in SV...that's so superficial about life and things in general. Do we all really need millions of dollars and IPO to be happy and be considered "successful" ? What does that even mean ?

Do what you love, that's my advice. My girlfriend is a nurse and when people are in their dead bed, she said that the thing most people regret is not doing what they loved, spend time with their families, going on trip around the world. And that hospital is used mostly by high class people, with lots of money.

Re: The Real Silicon Valley

#130

Post by SatvikBeri »

michaelochurch wrote: post #126
SatvikBeri wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of in-between. The key concept is career capital. Career capital is basically how much a company values you. You can more or less trade career capital for things like money, promotions, freedom, etc. Different companies will let you trade career capital for different things. Small startups generally grant more autonomy and less cash. Investment banks will let you get plenty of cash, but all the career…

This is excellent advice. The question is: what should people do to acquire career capital fast? Work hard at their assigned stuff, or invest in self-directed labor? I think there's something to be said for the zigzag strategy. Take finance jobs to improve comp, and more typical tech jobs to improve autonomy and technical knowledge. No tech company will match a $250,000 hedge fund salary, but most will compensate "ou…

What should people do to acquire career capital fast? Work hard at their assigned stuff, or invest in self-directed labor?

Cal Newport wrote a book on this[1]. The short answer is "acquire rare and valuable skills."

If you have a track record of applying NLP to massive data sets today, that makes you extremely valuable. Combine two or more valuable, but not necessarily complementary, skills and it makes you a unicorn.

You'll almost never acquire rare & valuable skills by doing your assigned work. That's because entry level employees do commodity work. You might acquire valuable skills that way, but not rare ones.

My preferred method: survey the land. Try to figure out what skills are one notch above where you are today. Come up with a side project that's beneficial to your employer and would teach you those skills. Depending on the level of autonomy you have, you might be able to get that project approved as part of your official work. A few iterations of this should put you in a position to get a promotion or a better job.

The danger in doing something purely on the side, and not as part of the company, is that you don't have concrete results you can show at your next job. You might have mastered Hadoop/NLP/Machine Learning on your own, but all things being equal I'd hire the guy who used NLP to earn his company millions of dollars.

By the way, one of the easiest ways to get a rare and valuable skill is to aim to be 80th percentile at two things, as opposed to 95th percentile at one thing. My current aspiration is a strong understanding of user interaction/psychology + a strong understanding of Machine Learning. The combination of the two will put me in a very unique position when designing analytic software, even if I'm not the best at either individual skill.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-ebook/dp/B0076DD...

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