tags
life-updatetechuncertainty
The primer for this was a conversation I had with my parents, so I’m going to frame the whole thing as if it’s a letter to them. I wanted them to take a walk inside my mind and this seemed like the shortest path. These are some thoughts that I didn’t have time to polish; in their raw format.
- The industry you’re in plays a bigger role in your success in life than how good you are in that industry.
- The problem you’re solving:
- Every job you take in tech is you joining to solve a specific problem.
- The first problem I ever worked on was through the last year of engineering; it was about enabling self-driving cars to differentiate between surrounding objects.
- Then out of college, I worked for a company in the financial technology space, digitizing money circles.
- Later on, and around 2021, during the peak of the NFT hype, I was working on a painting robot that uses computer vision to auto-paint portraits as NFTs, my first time to lead a full team.
- Then worked on a social platform enabling people to save & resurface content with ease.
- How interesting a problem is (business domain) and how suitable the job is (work conditions) are two different things.
- For example, this was the least interesting problem yet the best work conditions.
- We did some things like create a story ranking system like IG’s, and AI recommendation.
- Later, I joined a startup running compliance & analysis on crypto wallets, solving for fraud.
- Uninteresting problem + worst work conditions.
- Around early 2023, I’ve been already ~2 years into investigating the problem of knowledge management on the side – more on this later.
- When someone is paying you a lot to help them solve a problem, they’re not just paying you to stay at the company, they’re paying you to let their problem consume your life.
- As programmers, we think while we’re asleep.
- We find solutions to problems at the least expected times.
- You cannot work or think about two problems at the same time because of that reason.
- When you’re getting paid lots of money, it’s the equivalent of paying rent for real estate inside your head → as you get better at what you do, you’re raising your cost for rent.
- The type of the real estate is the business domain.
- The size of the real estate is how invested you are in the problem, which is correspondent to how good you are at what you do.
- When someone is paying you a high rent, they do that because you’re good, which means because you allocate the majority of your head real estate to their problem.
- You can’t expect to take high rent and give them less, no way out of this.
- If you think you can weasel your way around not letting a problem take a lot of your head AND be good at what you do, you’re only fooling yourself, one can’t go without the other.
- This seems to hold true in everything, the more head real estate you can allocate to a problem, the better solutions you’re going to have for it, and the higher you get paid in the process (post on that later).
- For example, when I recently reunited with some friends for dinner, a friend came to the dinner with his laptop on the table. It was there the whole time, might seem weird, but it was understandable, really, for all of us.
- Sometimes I go to the beach with my laptop and I don’t expect everyone around to understand, but at some point, it became just who I am.
- For this type of work, specifically, when you’ve found a problem worth solving, you become physically unable to work on any other problem.
- As you become better at understanding the bigger picture of building and delivering software to customers (Lego pipeline), you become worse at your main job.
- Like Lego, jobs in tech reward you the most when you know a lot about a very specific part of the pipeline.
- And less when you’re more of a generalist.
- About the knowledge management problem:
- I wanted to do it for myself, to enhance my output.
- I learned that all knowledge is connected, and the way we do our best work is by effectively managing this knowledge.
- So people who do a better job absorbing new information, turning them into knowledge, and know how to use it are often the best at what they do.
- Brains have limited power connecting and managing all that knowledge, so we look for external tools and systems.
- This means that the quality of our output (whatever work we do) is directly contingent on our knowledge management system.
- Throughout the years, I experienced this last statement firsthand.
- My main job function was a “data scientist.”
- That’s to make sense of lots of data points into human-readable insights.
- We don’t hear that term quite often nowadays since AI broke out.
- But my intrigue for data was still the same since the beginning.
- Only with time, I narrowed down what exactly is the type of data I’m interested in.
- Timed in with my interest in solving the knowledge management problem, at some point, I realized it is quite a data problem.
- I used to and probably still suffer from overthinking – so solving for knowledge management seemed key – with time, it became increasingly intolerable for me to forget anything I learned, knew, thought, wrote, or even read.
- Given the information overload we’re living through, it makes sense this is a problem for everyone.
- But for me, it made me unwell, mentally, and at some times, physically.
- If I’m not going to remember everything I know, then no point in knowing.
- I can extrapolate, go down that path, but it’s not something we’d like.
- Through this lens, I found a clear way to solve a nagging problem using what I know about the job.
- The problem creates a story you can tell.
- Most people do lots of money but never have a story, it’s not only boring, it’s the single most thing I wouldn’t like to die without.
- Most people will never have a problem that consumes their life.
- If you’ve found a problem, it seems like you’ve come a long way, because it is.
- But now you’ve got to figure out so much more stuff.
- You can celebrate “not being on the wrong path” but you’ve only taken step 1 on the right one, for that matter.
- In business, this means that you have to transform your solution to this problem into money.
- Which in tech, means that you have to learn a lot more than coding if you are from a technical background.
- Which in life, means that you have to do lots and lots of unpaid work, you have to put in lots of effort just learning new stuff and unlearning much of the old conditioning about money models.
- This could seem like a small deal for someone who hasn’t gone through it, but it’s a fair share of trouble for someone who has.
- Most people who did things worth telling (i.e. have interesting stories), their stories are almost always made possible because of one simple concept that we often underestimate: Compounding.
- Compounding can make 10 years feel like so little time.
- If you’re working on one problem for 10 years, the person who you’re becoming in the process is different from a person who has worked on 10 separate problems, one for every year.
- They say you have to constantly outgrow your company in order for it to thrive.
- After switching enough times between problems to work on, an existential take has eventually been drawn on me, as if it’s telling: “but what are you really about?”
- I want to explain why this feeling is irritating and what it has to do with existentialism.
- After I’ve worked on many projects, with fluctuating paydays, it is becoming ridiculously absurd to keep switching again & again.
- Not only because it resets compounding, or because I probably cannot point out to a specific work that I can call “a fruit of my labor,” but because the meaning behind any work is liquidified as soon as I switch to another, so suddenly the last few months or few years are not making any sense, except for the money.
- (I would’ve said, and maybe for the people, but as the nature of this specific industry is fast-paced and quick turnarounds, and because we’re mainly remote, you don’t get to connect with as much or as deep with people like you do at an office job.)
- So after I switch jobs or projects or companies, in hindsight, the previous experience instantly feels like a waste of time.
- How would I switch problems snappingly like that? Aren’t we supposed to work on a problem as long as we could in order for us to have any meaningful output?
- Now I’m supposed to be equally invested in an entirely different problem in a short timespan and still be as good? How’s that possible?
- This feeling was dreading me.
- I then found evidence that this feeling is valid after I saw that it’s perfectly normal for people to take sabbaticals from work that they’ve been doing for so long to cool off → and not surprisingly, these are people who are often the best at what they do.
- If people who are the best at what they do take prolonged time-offs after or before or between their work, then head real estate is pretty much a real thing.
- This tells that we’re supposed to live like that, like our work has meaning.
- If we want to illustrate this further, I think we can take a page from the artist’s book.
- Artists don’t just produce work, they live in it, they think about it day and night, in the smallest details, and they seek inspiration due to it → they have an anchor.
- This anchor, like a north star, helps them take next steps and go even further.
- This “anchor” concept is very important because it’s “something.”
- People can burn through entire lifetimes and never have anything of substance, this is a fucking nightmare.
- Artists think of their work so highly, they take pride in it, because they know this fact, they see that most things are empty and they’re creating change, which is “having meaning.”
- At least this way we have a small shot at saying that we are the best at what we do at some point in our lives, because we have been doing it for long enough, without context switching or cold starts.
- Which also means a small shot at having a story worth telling one day.
- Travel: success or failure?
- Most people who move out of the country are out of plans.
- 99% move out of the country seeking a better quality of life.
- They get offers at GCC or USA or Europe.
- They look like the epitome of success for other people here.
- Is this how you wanna live? Because to me it seems like not only you rented your brain for some random dude with money, but also you sacrificed time with your loved ones and much more because of it.
- In this lifetime, I’d rather be like the other 1%, who only travel when their thing grows enough that they will ultimately need to expand.
- Travel is one of those things that seems quite the thing on the outside, until you talk to the person. So you have to ask yourself, if this is a thing you want to have, do you want to have it, or do you want other people to know that you have it?
- People generally advise to start businesses from Egypt, and move later.
- Low cost, resources vs USA & Europe.
- When you’re growing, it’s vice versa.
- There are two popular opinions that could be very wrong:
- “You have to launch an MVP (a working version of your software product) as early as possible.”
- “You have to only leave your job when your thing is making comparable money.”
- This couldn’t be further from the truth of most stories that worked.
- It only holds true if your thing is a weekend project.
- Otherwise, these things take much of your days and brain to the point that there’s no way it will work if you didn’t live exactly like this.
- For some pieces to work, you have to brainstorm, write down takeaways, then pick up shortly after, find you’d have to change it entirely, then you have to keep iterating like this for some time in order to get it right. And lots of times this means that you have to live in the problem, not just visit it.
- This is again very evident in stories that turned out to be a huge success.
- So even if your thing is not going to be the biggest, just by interpolating this fact, the above opinion is not true.
- But one right thing to do is probably talk some sense to yourself before leaving a job.
- For many businesses, this can look different.
- For me, at the point of me deciding to leave the daily job, the product is not yet launched, therefore not bringing any money, but over the last 6-8 months, we were able to have:
- A stable MVP that took 3 design iterations (what caused the delay).
- A solid tech stack that took 2 iterations and lots of changes.
- A stable product dev internal process.
- A solid offering + sharp business model.
- A clear understanding of the product’s persona.
- A frictionless user auth flow + onboarding.
- A decent, but not perfect, marketing strategy.
- A killer landing.
- A Discord community, still growing, niched in around the problem.
- A Beehiiv newsletter, still cold-starting, for post-launch.
- A fully working iOS app, integrated and tested.
- Some word of mouth, which I wouldn’t call a win, until it proves so.
- People do not have to die at 80, people could die at 30 - I mean literally, not just a metaphor – we recently lost a friend to a car accident.
Some products have such a devoted user base that they have become memes on Startup Twitter. Among these are Notion, Figma, Airtable, Superhuman, and Discord. All of them are defined by an extremely high quality user experience.If these products were shipped as MVP's built by stringing together commodity libraries, the founders might have concluded they were just in a bad market, then gone on to build more MVP's forever.
But taking Notion as an example, their story couldn't be further from the norm. If I understand correctly, Notion moved their team away from Silicon Valley to Japan and spent a year obsessing over their product before launching their v1. This led them to a highly differentiated product that people are obsessed with. They can reduce a lot of spending on advertising and sales, since they naturally grow via word of mouth.
Notion isn't totally throwing out the rules. They started by getting a small group of people to love them. They shipped an MVP and iterated. But they chose a much higher quality bar for their MVP than most founders do today.
