All these “we” statements should be “me” statements. So many people are ready to take what they’re given, but you can opt out. Find in-person work. Throw out your phone. Live close to your friends. Drop in on your neighbors. Become a regular at the gym. Become a regular at the bar. Talk to people on the bus. Notice which flowers bloom in what order in the spring.
If all you seek is comfort you’ll find it as you sit alone eating take out in a fully furnished apartment waiting to die. If what you want is community and to be present in the only life you have, you have to work hard to find it and maintain it.
I'm a few years out of grad school, working at a tech company, and single. I came from an academic background where talking about interesting ideas and concepts was the norm. I had a pretty uncommon career path into tech and I'm not some coder.
My experience is that when you're in my position, it's getting harder and harder (with age) to find people who are interested in talking about ideas, entertaining the curiosities in life without some agenda/getting offended by the controversial ones, talking about possibilities and concepts (rather than objects). Like having conversations on advanced mode with people who are similar.
Often times at parties, when I get bored, I think of a quote, "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events/things. Small minds discuss wine."
It's getting more and more common that I find people just wanting to talk about wine. Or the equivalent. Stuff that's completely forgettable after you leave the party. I mean that stuff is fine, and there's nothing wrong with talking about good food you've had, some articles you've read, movies seen, etc. too. And to be funny and engaging while talking about it. It just feels like... after you're done talking about that, what then?
Or if I do meet people who are intellectually interesting, how to get more connected or where to take it after a chance meeting and pleasant chat?
That said, what do I have to offer at this stage of my life either, to a stranger? I'm unmarried, so I don't have kids or the mortgage to talk about. I'm not a CEO or someone powerful. Also I'm single -- what are people supposed do with that? Don't have a lot of great reasons for anyone to want to go out of their way to spend more time with me after even an interesting 30 min conversation, without some other excuse.
We're not all living close together in shared housing to make intellectually stimulating conversations natural and prolonged. People have their lives to lead, not sit around talking about theoretical ideas. To contact the few people I've found who are interesting would be... how? "Would you like to schedule a get-together again for a conversation date?"
It's not going to get easier either. Probably in a few years I'll be the really odd guy. Eh, it's a life choice I've made, I realize that too -- to be more interested in ideas and experiences than say... people.
I figure I'd better find some interesting hobbies to make up for the lack of intellectual stimulation. But deeper, what am I working towards? For whom? So, sometimes I think of changing jobs just to see more of the world and gather experiences to be able to have more intellectually stimulating conversations. Learn about VC? Hear about more companies? Where/how?
Yeah, it's a bit of a problem sometimes to ponder.
This is one of the things which we like to say about startups, but it doesn't stand up under scrutiny.
The competing job offer is Google or another megacorp. What's their turnover for engineers in a year? 10%? 15%? The definitionally average startup has a higher turnover even if we restrict it to turnover caused by business failure, to say nothing of voluntarily or involuntarily losing one's job.
If you exit a position with Google/etc, you have a network full of people who also spent the last couple of years at Google. You can easily lateral into jobs of comparable quality. If you exit a position with a failed startup, your lateral transfer is likely into another job which pays below market. Your immediate professional peers are also people trying to avoid the failure stigma. They may also be slightly busy looking for a job to help you with your own job search.
If you work for Google for 2 years and then separate from them, your 401k increased by $30k in the interim and you probably have six figures sitting in the bank account. If your startup is shot out from under you, you may end up counting the number of ramen boxes in the pantry while hoping that the startup can make good on its final payroll check.
If you work for a megacorp and are let go, it is highly likely that you were let go for firm- or individual-specific reasons rather than industry-wide calamity. This is very much not guaranteed in startups, where e.g. ebbs and flows of the capital market can cause a daisy cutter to hit the hiring pipelines at dozens of firms at once. You could lose your job at the same time that everyone else stops hiring. Ask the wizened veterans of the dot com bust who are, what, in their late 30s?
Startups are meaningfully less secure than working at bigco. Anyone who says differently either doesn't understand them or is trying to sell you something.
I once read a HN comment that I cannot find anymore but said:
“my default loop is "First, cycle through all my developers and make sure that I have equipped them to be happy and productive in their jobs. Second, find something to do. If possible, delegate it; if not, do it. Repeat."”
My biggest productivity gain was when I realized I should measure my productivity through the productivity of my developers. By the same calculation as done by the author I can only increase my own productivity so much but when I do the same for all my developers that adds another layer of multiplication.
This means I regularly enter the office and don’t even turn on my laptop (monitors) before checking if any of my developers need my help. Helping them be productive is my first priority. When nobody needs my help I pick up a task from my todo list but only if I cannot delegate it or it is a short task. I try not to pick up any task that is critical for my developers progress because my days do not have enough focus time to work on the same topic for more than 30 minutes to an hour without interruption.
This does not mean I do not take focus time sometimes, I do, but usually this is for getting my state of mind documented so I can share it with my developers and ask for their input to improve or reshape it. This helps again to have everybody understand the bigger picture so they can be more productive without my direct help and make decisions without requesting my approval. Also, because everybody involved contributed to the vision it feels better to work on it for all of us.
The same holds for meetings. If somebody requests my attendance in a meeting I request the agenda of the meeting and if the request is valid I’ll join as helping to unblock multiple people is important. If I’m not the right person I point them to the person they need to get into that meeting.
So, in short, I devote my time to helping my devs get 10% more done everyday and 1% better each year because that scales way better than just improving my own. (Though you could say that also improves my own?)
Not everyone wants to share everything. So this could be a great personal analytics tool capture life and build a better self. Then anything you don't mind sharing could go into a more public social network. I like the idea of a private timeline.
In the Reddit AMA Kevin Rose said he thought "Quantified self (eg. fuelband, fitbit)" were the next trends. So a Quantified self timeline would make a lot of sense and bring things together quite nicely.
Good luck with this and excited to see how this progresses.
I'm using the 64drive cart from http://64drive.retroactive.be/. I've owned both generations and they're very easy to develop with. There's a USB port on the side of the N64 cart that lets you load ROMs very easily to test rapidly.
c.f. Lawdingo (YC 13), which is Uber for lawyers. No relation; never pulled the trigger on actually using it.
Incidentally, my last employment contract had a similar clause in it. After consulting with my bosses, who thought it was the usual boilerplate and didn't really expect a young engineer to have meaningful IP, we came up with a list which looked like:
1) Bingo Card Creator [the only IP I was really worried about]
2) Various contributions to the OSS projects listed in Appendix A [these days I'd literally just print a listing of all repos in Github]
3) Miscellaneous computer programs, inventions, and documents which exist on physical or electronic media as of $DATE and are impractical to list -- $COMPANY acknowledges this disclosure is adequately specific for its purposes
Every dog I've ever met is better than every person I've ever met.
If I believed in reincarnation, I would believe that if we were good enough people in this life, we could come back as dogs in the next one. But it's so hard to be a person worthy of becoming a dog.
A lot of the don'ts are kind of domain specific (and the rest are kind of "don't do the opposite of the "do" column), and the majority of the "dos" are the kind of thing you always hear everyone saying, but once you've felt the pain it really drives the point home:
* Have a testing framework in place (you don't need 100% of tests written during dev, but make sure your shit is testable and written with tests in mind)
* have a deploy plan that is one step
* have a rollback plan that is one step
* have backups running way before launch
* have one-step restores from backup running before launch
* make sure your restores make their own backup before running (yeah... that day sucked)
* write enough documentation that someone not involved in your project can setup a dev environment and make simple changes/deploys/rollbacks
* document your production system setup and make sure you can reproduce a production system from your documentation alone (this WILL bite you in the worst possible time if you need it!)
* make sure you have a plan for database migrations and it works 100% of the time (and in both directions! Have a "deploy" migration as well as a "rollback" migration for every single change!)
* Have someone that is not a developer use the app without any documentation (this is huge)
* Have a lot of logging and a way of easily viewing them (you can always turn logging down fairly easily, but adding it after the fact is a lot more work)
* build a lot of "support help" tools in from the start (things like the ability to see errors that happened from a specific user, or at a specific time, or in enterprise applications the ability to grab screenshots from the device that is being helped, or built-in remote desktop if applicable)
* Get a bug reporting system in place so users can easily send you problems and issues with as much information as they are comfortable with
* make sure you can deploy hotfixes easily and at any time even if the live version of your app is months behind master
* plan to have more developers at some point. Even if you don't now, even if you can't fathom having more than a few people, just keep it in the back of your head that there's a chance that 10+ people could be working on this code, so maybe that cute one-liner shouldn't be used here...
* stick to a style guide
* put a version number somewhere visible in your app (even if it's REALLY small) so when people send you screenshots you can instantly tell if they are behind or up-to-date or if they got yesterday's hotfix, etc...
I feel like an old fool fighting against its time, but to me all those new applicances are scary not because of privacy (have my data, I couldn't care less), but because of how they shape our world.
Most of the coolest memories I have were the product of something spontaneous, or mistakes, that become close to impossible with a computer and internet in your pocket 24/7.
Assessing what's around you, talking to strangers, actively looking for something without it instantly popping in suggestions after you've typed 4 characters, all those things have been a great source of circumstance-based, little everyday life adventures.
This is the difference between risking buying a random book, or browsing reviews and picking a 5 star one to download.
This is the difference between discovering a place you'd never thought existed while waiting for someone and poking your nose around, instead of standing there, frantically watching their dot on the map get closer to you.
This is the difference between the mesmerizing feeling of playing the first expansions of world of warcraft, versus the tiring experience of the super streamlined versions that followed. Yes, they are less frustrating, but they don't bring tear to your eyes when you thing about them, they just feel averagely satisfying.
A few minutes ago I got up to open the door for my cat, and in a few minutes she'll be back and I'll be interrupted again. I feel like those interruptions are precious. They keep you connected to reality. I could install an RFID cat door, hell I could make a voice activated one in a couple weekends, and I would not be annoyed anymore. I would also never have seen all the things I witness every time I get to that damn door.
