Dungeons & Developers
allenpike.com
allenpike.com
It's a 10 minute conversation, the first two times it was worth 150k and the last time was worth 500k. (Not counting the intangibles and immense benefit to later stages of the business)
Not practicing would have been a mistake.
Anticipating the types of questions we were going to be asked and prepping in a series of mock interviews with a few different YC founders who have also experienced the interview help to make the answers reflexive and such that we could steer the conversation to our strengths.
We didn't get in, but it wasn't our ability to talk about the business that did us in, based on our feedback.
Practicing for high stakes one offs helps you keep things tight and see weak spots before actually having to do the thing.
> We didn't get in
How was your interview prep worth money if you failed anyway?
But he didn't
Thank goodness it wasn't for $1million.
Poster said they they failed for reasons other than their Q&A. Maybe they should have spent less practice on window dressing and more on substance. We don't know.
You can learn a lot from failure, and from the conversations and practice runs leading to the interviews.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1014498456422854696/1...
(Midjourney prompt: You open the door and see three orcs wearing business suits. They’re seated at a fine oak board room table. The orcs look up at you, and one says “You’re late.” --ar 2:1)
They look like fairly common portrayals of orcs to me.
and ogres look like this https://www.gameogre.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Ogre-Emp...
In actuality, I was just joking about the idea that a ML art tool can get "Orc"s wrong since there's such variation in how they're conceptualized, same with ogres
Middle Earth Orcs (aka degenerate Elves) look like that. There are other popular fantasy settings. The only common thread is "strongly built usually ugly humanoid with often green or otherwise non-human skin color and perhaps pointy ears".
I think the comment about DALL-E being unsure what they look like is because the picture in the article has three creatures that don't look much like each other, and also look oddly ambiguous in just what's supposed to be portrayed.
If they’re effective, they’re expert communicators and are the primary filter through which information from the operating units passes to senior corporate leadership. They can help you prepare for these kinds of situations and interpret the needs/political landscapes of meetings accurately.
A friendly strategy leader is also a 99th percentile slide wizard and can offer vast optimization.
edit, numeracy
I was tasked with providing a demo to the new CTO and a few other execs. We had worked hard for a couple of years and really improved the app a lot. I got through the demo and.. silence, nothing. They moved on to other things. I found this to be very very odd.
I found out months later that all the revenue from the app was booked to another group, and my team was a huge drag on the org we were in. As such, our hard work was not rewarded, raises were pitiful. Most the team quit, lay offs, then I quit.
So yeah it’s good to know what’s going on.
We need large firms to be organized in more market-like ways, otherwise you get those ridiculous command-economy warts.
People in these groups are socially sterile in my viewpoint while working an active goal or problem and it has been a big eye-opener for me to realize that the plans within plans are actually not engineered from a position of malice, just strategic thinking. It's business warfare.
That's lower than 1 percentile. You meant 99th percentile or .99th quantile
Percentages are not the same as fractions. This confusion causes outages, because computers know the difference.
Eventually, the amount of knowledge is the same but I am glad I discovered I iterate over 2 stages of work: 1/ proactive, meaning I lay down a proposal based on a situation and then 2/ simulated reactive, meaning I do my best to discover what the audience will want, answer, contradict.
Once I am done iterating on that, I usually deliver my work to an intended test audience. Then after that, to the target audience.
So yes, imagining conversations that have no happened is really helpful and a skill to build. Just don't rely on that solely, because people are weird and unpredictable and you might very well be off :)
> the orcs look up at you, and one says “You’re late.”
what does this have to do with "role playing"? Except there are orcs.
> Given that, you’ll be either delighted or horrified to learn that roleplaying is a powerful tool in your career development toolbox, and you should be using it more often – just don’t call it roleplaying.
What? i didn't call it (whatever "it" is) that - you did.
> (sic) paragraphs of waffle here
> landing on the literal moon
as opposed to some other, non-literal moon?
> Although you can rehearse the monologue portions of these situations alone
what other ways are there of having a monologue?
> I’m talking about roleplaying here
far from obviously?
> Running a social simulation doesn’t need to be complicated
Sorry, we are techies - why would we be running a "social simulation"?
At this point, I just gave up on commenting because I was too cross. Worst article I have ever read linked to here, by far. Why does everything here get upvoted?
> what does this have to do with "role playing"? Except there are orcs.
It's role playing, I don't know what else to tell you here.
> What? i didn't call it (whatever "it" is) that - you did.
The sentence is not accusing you of doing so.
> as opposed to some other, non-literal moon?
It's clarifying that they're talking about the moon landings not using it as a framing device. At worst it's a redundant word you can skip over. It also emphasises the point.
> what other ways are there of having a monologue?
Monologue means one "speaker". It has nothing to do with how many people are listening. You can practice a speech in front of other people who listen, you can practice alone.
> Sorry, we are techies - why would we be running a "social simulation"?
Because this is advice around the social parts of the jobs where you need to interact with others. Your bio says you were a project manager, surely you can appreciate there's more to building software & running a business (and this advice is not limited to that) than coding alone.
Article TL;DR: if you have to perform in front of people you should rehearse beforehand.
It can be extremely useful for figuring out how other roles in an org work. Or prepping for a promotion ("OK, it's day 1 having title X: what's important? Who should I talk to? What should I say/ask? Who am I trying to impress and/or what should I be treating as my deliverables? What does my activity look like from their perspective?")
It becomes more formally part of what you do as you move up the ladder (higher-level business strategy is basically all role-playing! It's a ton like playing a game, really) but it's a really helpful tool even if you're down at the bottom, if just for trying to understand your immediate superiors better, or interviewers, perhaps—which can help you to align your behavior with what they want to see, in both cases, which will tend to be very good for your career.
Even as a solo dev, role-playing—even if it's entirely in your head—can be incredibly valuable for marketing or just deciding what to build in the first place.
"Role-playing" has multiple connotations. The author was playing off of those.
> as opposed to some other, non-literal moon?
"Literal" or "literally" is sometimes used for emphasis
> what other ways are there of having a monologue?
You can rehearse a monologue with an audience. This is obvious. You are far off the mark with pretty much all your observations of the article itself, and as a cranky old grump who wishes everyone would quit messing up my lawn with all this garbage, I want to sympathize but can't.
The Mun, from KSP. Maybe a metaphorical moon.