How to write stuff no one else can
thewritetoroam.com
thewritetoroam.com
> But when you look closer, you see that this person was a sophomore in college at the time, that the company was just a month old, and that actually, it wasn’t so much an executive hire as it was kids trying to get something off the ground.
Although not the main point of the article, this is much better advice for finding high-potential employees who are under the radar than the article that was on the front page a few days ago: ("How to hire low experience, high potential people" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288669 )
When the last article hit the front page I couldn't believe HN was upvoting an article that advocated for deep-diving into people's personal early life history as a hiring technique. That's like reading the tea leaves for interviewing candidates.
Instead, this article reveals the real secret: You have to be prepared to do some legwork and research, as well as look beyond the obvious. You could go hire a lot of smiling ex-FAANG people with perfectly curated LinkedIn profiles and professional headshots by throwing large salaries at them, but you're not going to get the best results that way. It's also one of the least efficient uses of your headcount budget and those people are almost guaranteed to ghost you in 18 months when someone else offers them a fancier title.
There is a lot of gold waiting to be discovered among people who aren't curating perfect LinkedIn profiles or collecting famous company names for their resume. It takes some work to find it, but it's out there.
If you have a good perf review system and don’t mind false positives it can work. Maybe it worked better before boot camps.
Or did you mean to convey that people who go to boot camps think it's a way to get rich quick? Your wording is a bit confusing toward the end there
but they do get a reasonable shot at a middle class lifestyle with potential to do really well at some point.
That's better than a lot of career paths give you nowadays.
Of course not, but that's the sales pitch, isn't it?
There’s no way I would try and hire someone with lots of experience and credentials. There’s too much risk.
Instead, I found a recent college grad who I believe is capable of doing what’s needed at this stage.
I face lots of risks and the last thing I want is to add an expensive hire to it.
You think they won’t optimize their profiles for their next job?
My LinkedIn is utterly moribund, which has come up in interviews a few times. Either they say "you don't really use LinkedIn, huh" or I explain the same. As far as I know this has cost me nothing.
Would you say “a good resume is a red flag, nobody producing value has time to tend that”.
The big irony is making things look nice, be readable, be sellable is creating value. In the case of making a LinkedIn or a resume, the value your creating is in terms of your very own capability to get a job and have a high take home pay!
And this is why: Everyone looks at it. Far more people then you would expect.
I can't tell you how many meetings I have gone into where I walk in and see that everyone at the conference table has my LinkedIn profile up on their laptops. They knew they were meeting with me, had no idea who I was, so they looked me up on LinkedIn right before. Its my introduction and sets the tone for a meeting or presentation. This experience is not only in the professional world either. I recently (in my mid-30s) decided to go back to academia to get a PhD and now I am encountering people in academics who use my LinkedIn to learn about me when I reach out for academic or research assistance. When applying for stuff, presenting at conferences, all of it uses LinkedIn as the central way to communicate your identity. Having a nice profile helps me set a positive first impression that helps me gain more responses.
Also, I can't fail to mention that recruiters use LinkedIn as a search tool. Not every recruiter is worth your time, but the right ones certainly are worth it and LinkedIn helps connect you with more of them. THey also use your LinkedIn when communicating with their clients. Almost every job interview you do, you can assume the hiring manager and interviewers have looked at your LinkedIn profile before meeting you. Most have probably looked more closely at your LinkedIn profile than your resume.
Curating a LinkedIn profile is not that much work. Maybe 30-60 mins per month is all it takes if you have a lot happening and maybe 1 hour per quarter for everyone else. Its not a huge commitment, and yet the gains in my opinion are far greater than the small amount of time spent on it.
I don't care if people want to hate on LinkedIn and say its stupid. If anything that benefits me, because it helps optimized profiles stand out. Maybe theres a few people (like the parent comment) who have an aversion to LinkedIn for some reason and will look down on someone with an optimized profile. But I truly believe it offers far more value than it detracts. The people that look down on it are usually people that are not in any position of power anyway or they are a micro-minority.
Much easier to answer questions at the right level of detail when you know the audience.
It shows immaturity to try to shoehorn a C-level job into your resume where it doesn't make sense and where 99% of people will rightfully raise an eyebrow at it. I say this as someone who had "Assistant Director" on my resume as my second job out of college, and I was assisting in the direction of a department of two people. Myself, and my boss. In my actual day-to-day I wrote bad PHP and read HN. It was a joke, and looking back I'm sure there are some jobs I applied to that tossed my resume after seeing that, and rightfully so.
So much of life these days feels like Freddy Got Fingered. Fondling someone else's horse on their farm does not make you a Farmer.
The people talking about the stuff largely arent the people doing the stuff because theyre too busy doing the stuff.
Where, in my case, in our tech circle, that is generally design and development. Of course there are outliers.
Great people who actually do great stuff need to become people who talk about it too.
Otherwise only those that master talking will get exposure.
Or maybe we shouldn't organize our society so that "exposure" is such an overwhelmingly positive thing.
It’s not great for career progression. But I actually don’t care about that. So instead of playing that game I play one I actually care about which looks very different than one where exposure matters.
If I solve the navier stokes equations or whatever, but never talk about it... Yeah. Who would know. How could they know?
Tree, woods, sound.
Some exposure is of course necessary, but when it becomes the main driving force it turns ridiculous.
> You can’t just Google these kinds of things. That’s why they’re so interesting.
So what Google did is dilute the information advantage. The more interconnected we are, the harder it becomes to maintain that advantage.
Once you can pay to get your own fine tuned version of the big LLMs maybe we can start to do real work with these.
However my point is that having the context and the ability to use it is sooooooo far out of reach for a computer it's unfathomable. In much the same way how life is unfathomable at some level. It's this self referencing infinity that is somehow collapsing into results while being uncollapseable.
Computers can't do that not without something fundamentally different
It has a massive speed advantage that lets it read the whole internet, but it's dumb enough that it also needs to, and when even that doesn't give it enough examples, it's like asking me to improvise Latin based on what I recognise of the loanwords in English.
Parent is saying the advantage is in pulling ideas from outside that encoded distribution.
Amazon selling what used to be open source projects has certainly had a chilling effect on people publishing source code under a permissive licence.
Of course attribution and linking is important.
You can ask ChatGPT how one might implement and enforce laws in a world where magic exists. Or time travel. Or whatever. Because it knows laws and it knows common fiction tropes and can reason well enough to surmise how to apply them together.
In a world where magic exists, laws and the legislative system would likely undergo significant adaptations to address the unique capabilities and risks presented by magic. Here are several ways in which these systems might be different, based on various assumptions about the nature and scope of magic:
1. *Regulation of Magical Practices*: Just as with professions and practices in our world, there would be regulations governing who can practice magic, how it can be learned, and where it can be used. Licenses or permits might be required for practicing certain types of magic, similar to medical licenses or driving licenses.
2. *Magic-Related Offenses*: New categories of crimes would exist, such as unauthorized enchantments, illegal curses, magical fraud (using illusions or mind control for deceit), and unlicensed necromancy. Laws would specify what constitutes a magical assault versus a non-magical one, with potentially different penalties.
3. *Enforcement and Jurisdiction*: Special law enforcement units trained in counter-magic or magical defense would be necessary to handle crimes involving magic. The jurisdiction might depend on the nature of the magic used; for example, cross-dimensional or time-altering magic could involve a higher authority or international magical council.
4. *Evidence and Investigation*: The collection of evidence might include magical means, such as truth spells, scrying (viewing distant or future events), or reviewing memories directly. However, there would also need to be laws protecting individuals against invasive magical investigations.
5. *Rights and Protections*: There would be laws to protect non-magical beings from discrimination or harm by magical individuals or entities. Similarly, sentient magical creatures or beings might have their own rights, leading to more complex legal considerations regarding interspecies interactions.
6. *Ethical Use of Magic*: Legislation would likely address the ethical implications of spellcasting, summoning, and other magical practices, including the use of magic on unwilling subjects or creating sentient beings. Regulations might prevent or restrict the use of magic that can alter someone's will, memories, or identity.
7. *Magical Contracts and Agreements*: The legal system would need to address the binding nature of magical contracts, which could have irrevocable consequences. Laws might specify how such contracts can be fairly negotiated and what remedies exist for breaking a magical contract.
8. *Intellectual Property*: In a world where spells, potions, and magical items are created, there would be intellectual property laws protecting the creators of magical inventions. This could include patents on spell formulas, copyright on magical texts, or trademarks on magical item designs.
9. *International Relations and Security*: On a larger scale, there might be international laws governing the use of magic, especially in conflicts or espionage. Treaties could limit the use of particularly destructive spells or ban the creation of magical weapons of mass destruction.
10. *Education and Public Safety*: Laws would govern the education and training of individuals with magical abilities, possibly requiring mandatory schooling to ensure that magic is used safely and responsibly. Public safety regulations would address the storage of magical materials and the construction of magically protected buildings.
In this magical world, the legal and legislative system would need to be flexible and innovative, capable of addressing the ever-evolving nature of magic and its impact on society. It would be a blend of traditional legal principles and new rules designed to manage the unique challenges posed by the existence of magic.
I'm sorry but how magic and the legal system interact is a subject explored in fiction. Hell, even Harry Potter touched on the subject. And that's not going to even touch authors like Jim Butcher and Piers Anthony who have entire series about "this, but with magic".
> since it knows how to correctly apply exist concepts to previously unexplored areas
and yet these systems know nothing at all. Far too many people (including the developers of such systems) have failed to understand that none of these systems can go beyond the programming that humans have incorporated into them. Yes, they appear to exhibit certain [abilities] but no more than any other essentially mechanical device and the limited capabilities that we have been able to design in them.
You can certainly pose questions and these systems (within the constraints of the programming involved in them) can retrieve and correlate data that is accessible. Bus the insights drawn will require human involvement.
Over decades, I have built tools to help in the analysis of all sorts of data sets and it has taken a human asking the [right] questions to get appropriate outcomes.
We do not understand our own intelligence let alone being able to build any artificial intelligent system that can operate on its own.
What does amaze me though is that we create natural intelligence systems all the time and they are called children. I have been avidly watching the development of my youngest grandchild and she makes an absolute mockery of any artificial system we have built anywhere.
In a very real sense, every artificial stupidity system (AI) that we have built is as complicated as a hammer or a knife.
It is what we (human beings) do with these simple tools that determine the outcomes.
> within the constraints of the programming involved in them
I think the point of machine learning is that programming isn't "incorporated into them".
These systems may not be intelligent yet, but we certainly didn't program them - the majority of their features and abilities arise from the training data they were exposed to.
I would love to see an actual example where a program does something not encoded in itself already.
1). the code within the systems
2). the data entered into the system.
Those images are the result of how the data is processed by the code. Even if you put in a random number generator, the code processes those numbers based on it internal code constraints.
Now a well designed and built code base may be able to generate every image of the same dimensions. You can certainly write code that can exhaustively generate every possible image, but the question here is whether this exhaustive generation is intelligent.
If you ask for a picture of Shakespeare dressed as Spiderman reading a McDonald's advert on the moon, no one has programmed that and the fact it knows these individual concepts is no different to the fact a human has seen them too.
The laws of physics encode every motion and interaction of every particle.
None of those fundamental laws directly says "water is wet".
> I would love to see an actual example where a program does something not encoded in itself already.
You see it every time you use a machine learning system. Even the simplest models, say a linear regression line in a spreadsheet, "learn" from the data, not from the code.
When it comes to intelligence, this is not something that we can say is actually emergent.
There are currently a number of projects that are looking into intelligence and free-will. There are researchers on the same teams who hold quite different opinions - the results for these projects are not at all conclusive.
This limitation is the only reason why all of us all have jobs, so do plan for your economic future on the assumption the AI get past this flaw with no warning — how many steps it can do before falling over isn't something I can predict, despite regular use of even the OpenAI playground before ChatGPT came out.
I have just two recent examples where I thought it would be faster to use chatgpt instead of reading the manual.
1. How to asynchronously (e.g. asyncio) record from the microphone in python. Chatgpt gave me good which looked elegant, but didn't work. Well turns out pyaudio isn't compatible with asyncio.
2. Trying to install a docker of some server (I think it was wallabag?) with an SSO using openid. Again I got a elaborate docker compose file and instructions for the server configuration. After trying to implement it for a while I realised that those configuration options don't exist. Chatgpt just invented them.
My conclusion from these is that one really shouldn't ask AI question were one already knows the answer/correct way and you just want to have something create the boilerplate. I shudder and the thought that people are proposing to use AI for medical purposes without supervision by a professional.
I have given our internal knowledgebase documents to ChatGPT and asked for summaries, and it adds in things from the general internet that are wrong to very wrong contradicting our KB (we are very far off the beaten path of conventional audio studio design testing).
Over the longer term, new releases have improvements, but the feedback loop is currently pretty slow. It will likely get faster.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38369583
One thing I've found comically underestimated is books. It's not whether the information is physical or electronic, but what actual corpus of information is available
...
So yeah I'd say 3 main repos of knowledge are: the open Internet, printed books, and Scihub, and many people today only use the first one
Though I'd also put "talking to the right people" and by extension "working at the right place" pretty high up there in getting novel information.
I think for a certain generation, Google probably diluted their ability to access other knowledge bases, and act upon that info. And for the generation currently learning how to learn, LLMs may do the same thing.
Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry for two reasons.
* Most software developers are never exposed to strong personalities and have no idea what strong leadership looks like. An excellent software developer tends to score high in agreeability, but a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance.
* Strong leaders know when to not follow trends with extreme criticality. This is highly paradoxical since so many software companies are funded by advertising which is a business of growing trends. Real leaders set new trends and take share from existing players setting their brand reputation in the process. Most people in software are deathly afraid to abandon conventions of comfort whether in business or in product/process innovation.
Maybe in the companies you’ve worked for, but I haven’t found this to be true at all
> An excellent software developer tends to score high in agreeability, but a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance
Hard disagree. “Maximum confrontation and/or defiance” has never been a goal of good leaders who are trying to build a team that works together.
Encouraging people to speak their mind is good. Encouraging “maximum confrontation” is just going to create chaos. The goal is to work together to ship, not to argue and defy all the time. I can’t think of anyone who would want to work on a team where everyone had agreeableness dialed down to 0 where leaders encouraged confrontation all the time, except maybe for people who just like to argue a lot.
> Most people in software are deathly afraid to abandon conventions of comfort whether in business or in product/process innovation.
Another strong generalization that I can’t agree with. Most people I’ve worked with in software have been so aggressive about bucking trends and trying new things that we’ve had to dial it back a notch. A lot of the debates I’ve had with teams have been about choosing boring, stable technologies over the newest cutting edge technology that’s popular on Twitter. Same goes for business strategies, where I’ve had to deal with everyone from product managers to sales people trying to do things their own creative way when the standard, boring practices are what finally got the job done.
Strong teams need a balance of transformational leadership, servant leadership, some laissez-fair management and some micromanagement (etc, etc).
I.e. situational leadership.
In my experience, given how many ANDs you need, the most successful teams have a combination of leadership styles and roles from different people at different times. Balancing leadership and responsibilities across people also allows the personal cost of such activities (whether it's emotional labour, political backlash, etc) to be distributed as well.
This, I also believe, is why co-foundership appears so often in stories of successful companies. You always end up with "the leader that is good at X despite Y", and there is always someone who can come in to provide "Y without necessarily X" in a way that makes their joint leadership work in ways that individually they would fail.
>> Hard disagree. “Maximum confrontation and/or defiance” has never been a goal of good leaders
This phrase:
> a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance
Feels like something uttered by a cocaine snorting MBA who gets high off creating hostile work environments and enjoys firing people.
I’ve been in environments where everyone is agreeable because they have to be agreeable. They are agreeable to a fault. These environments have a banal toxicity that is hard to pin down, but it shows when there is disagreement. These orgs value agreement above all else, above performance, above achieving goals. They suppress valuable insight because it is uncomfortable to them. FUD is a great rhetorical strategy that I’ve see used to squelch conversation, thinly veiled appeals to authority is another. This breeds complacency and destroys value.
We have a management class in the west that believes that management can be a mechanistic exercise of gathering metrics, assessing performance, and assigning corrective actions. That it can both be systematized and abstracted away from the work is a core assumption of western management. This is a paint by numbers approach, similar to Searle's Chinese room, and works to take the leadership out of management.
You’re right that most of the time the best choice for your business and customers is to choose the boring, stable technology that works. Avoid the rewrite, don’t use the hottest new frameworks, or languages that are in vogue.
Experience shows generally to dismiss developer desires for novelty. But sometimes you do need a novel solution and your developers are the ones who are going to tell you. You will not figure this out by following the rules taught in management school. Metrics like CPI and SPI are only going to tell you that you’ve made the wrong choice on your project when it’s too late. You need to make a decision, which means seeking out information and making the best decision based on the information you can get. This takes leadership.
The best programmers I know have strong opinions. They will tell you that you are wrong. They do this to learn both to test themselves and the people around them. If they are wrong, the withdraw, then more on. It’s the most healthy thing I’ve seen and is actually what builds success.
Disagreement is healthy and good and should be encouraged, when the goal is knowledge gathering. A leader who is turning agreement to zero is a leader who wants to be decisive.
Stop the madness. It does not matter how things feel. It matters how things are measured, which includes employee retention and delivery and product quality. Most of the comments here loudly scream none of these people have been in management.
The one big difference between a leader and a contributor is ownership. Everyone here has danced around the idea of ownership without addressing it. Unless you have owned liability in a managerial capacity it doesn’t matter how things feel, because your perspective is too narrowly construed.
Disagreement, when voiced, is a form of confrontation. It is healthy. Healthy teams are brutally honest. Most of software absolutely abhors confrontation.
To "turn that down to 0" doesn't mean operating 100% of the time in non-agreeable mode. It also doesn't mean doing that only with your team. It also doesn't mean encouraging people to do it. It's just that sometimes you gotta put your foot down.
You jumped to another extreme, but the whole point is just that both extremes are problematic. An always 100%-agreeable leader needs a lot of luck to succeed.
outside of that, it couldn't be further from my experience. many many defiant and confrontational founders/PMs, who often actively avoid the accepted "best practice" and rethink what they're doing if they find themselves in the majority
My experience as well. Big enterprise software companies reward keeping your head down and toeing the line, but "confrontational and defiant" personalities trying to reinvent the wheel are a common feature at every other type of software company.
The problem is that—as a generalization—strong personality tends to correlate inversely with competence, and software engineers esteem the latter above all else (because a machine is not swayed by charisma, after all).
Good leadership is really the combination of strong personality and competence. That combination is so rare that for most software engineers, the safest bet is to simply try to avoid employers with strong personalities entirely.
citation needed
It also kinda makes sense if you think it through. Strong personality types receive less feedback. Feedback helps us grow.
I’d say strong personalities are essential for consensus:
When it’s clear who is holding court, there’s much less talking over each other and bickering, precisely because the leader has made it clear what the expectation is — and everyone knows it will be enforced.
“Let’s quiet down for a moment, I really want to hear what @edmundsauto is saying.”
How about that?
Avoiding strong personalities purely for the sake easing hostility sounds a lot like cowardice. A better course of action is conflict resolution.
There is a class of people who believe leadership is something you can learn on its own. These are the people who join all the useless commitees for resume building purposes. Leadership only has value when paired with significant knowledge in some domain.
> Avoiding strong personalities purely for the sake easing hostility sounds a lot like cowardice.
Cowardice is when you avoid something, because of fear. GP is talking about avoiding people who will annoy you.
That sounds like autism. Avoidance for what ever imaginary reason your creative mind can conjure is still cowardice. The excuses only fool yourself. Other people will see it as they choose.
What I see most time, managers buy bright cover, very few bother to look deeper.
And it's easy to understand - as said wisdom, "No one fired due to buy IBM solution". When I agree, not many people are like IBM with near cloud-less clear reputation, but it's just simple and need less energy, to not try swim against flow.
Strong doubt on the risks part. Sure, for founders. But for executives at established companies, the more senior you are the less risk you have. Severances get larger, firing rates get lower, and you probably have more cash in the bank.
IMO finding these undiscovered gems will stand out more; a lot of content has the veil of originality but lacking.
A lot of content online feels unoriginal or uninspired. Perhaps we'll see the pendulum swing back toward original long form journalism to tell these stories.
(Unfortunately, just as I got time to move it to front burner, it was probably killed by LLM consumer popularity.)
Find a human who can bypass robots.txt/limitations of ChatGPT and find less traveled sources given the internet fails to archive itself and important information can be wiped any minute? Isn't that just called good journalism?
Not really much thought or deep reflection on my part,I just feel that they are a type of person that I don’t want to be or follow advice.
So I stopped reading.
Getting ahead of competitors isn't some abstract, arbitrary goal. It's the only way to survive in a business like this.
If your goal is just to write for the sake of writing and you don't care if anyone reads it, this article probably isn't for you.
I suspect achieving what he was aiming for is much harder now than it was when he wrote the book, as the barrier to entry to starting businesses goes down and the competition continues to rise.
But I think there is still something to be said for the goal of building a "lifestyle" business rather than trying to build a hyper-growth startup. If you are strategizing through the lens of "How can I make enough money to survive and thrive with the minimal amount of time spent?" vs "How can I grow my business to $100m" you'll come up with very different plans.
There are lots of opportunities like this. There is nothing morally or ethically questionable about this. It doesn't require you to over-inflate your prices. That is the power of software. The VC hyper-growth world is heavily focused on continuously changing your software, but that isn't a requirement (and in fact, is often not desirable to your customers).
[1] There is of course more nuance to this then expressed here.
Contrast that with the replicable software example.
Whats with spotify?
Appears to be blogspam.
My abstract strategy for making contact with the right people:
Try to imagine things from the perspective of the people you're trying to contact. What is their day-to-day, what are they sick and tired of? What will make your cold email stick out in that context? It's click-bait targeted at a specific person. Again, this is probably just one level above what the average person will do. But that already puts you ahead of most people. It gives you some chance of reaching the right person.