One thing that wasn't really covered was: why did you sell?
Especially at a 2.4 multiple... It seems like you could have just let it keep running mostly on autopilot (assuming the team could keep working on improvements)?
1,391 karma · joined August 29, 2013
Especially at a 2.4 multiple... It seems like you could have just let it keep running mostly on autopilot (assuming the team could keep working on improvements)?
As someone with pretty much the upbringing you described, I don't think this was the takeaway.
For me personally, I learnt adaptability, how to adjust to new situations and people quickly.
I saw what my parents did and said "I don't want to be like that".
The downside is, it's hard to answer "where are you from?", or to know where home is, and it's especially frustrating as an adult to see your parents continue to make bad decisions, to continue to be broke etc.
I know everyone is different, but anecdotally my sister and brother also seem to be doing relatively well.
Reading about "FUBAR" makes it even worse.
Given that a lot of law enforcement doesn't even bother with the low hanging crimes, the chance of them prosecuting anyone using Tor is extremely low unless you get big enough or go far enough to warrant the attention.
Joking aside, even with AI generating code, someone has to know how to talk to it, how to understand the output, and know what to do with it.
AI is also not great for novel concepts and may not fully get what's happening when a bug occurs.
Remember, it's just a tool at the end of the day.
1) You need to be the boss with the AI being your assistant. You are now a project manager coming up with strict requirements of what you'd like done. Your developer (AI) needs context, constraints and needs to be told exactly what you'd like created without necessarily diving into the technical details.
2) Planning - you need to have a high level plan of roughly how you'd like to structure your code. Think of it like you're drawing the outline and AI is filling in the gaps.
3) Separation of concerns - use software principles to drive your code design. Break problems down into separate components, AI is good at filling in components that are well defined.
Once you change your thinking to a higher level, then you can maintain flow state. Of course the AI isn't perfect and will make mistakes - you do need to question it as you go. The more creative you become with a solution the harder time the AI will have and sometimes you'll have to break out and fix things up yourself.
For me it's a huge productivity boost.
Personally, I've voluntarily gone without employment for many short stretches, as well as a 2 year stretch, and each time I've thoroughly enjoyed it.
Trips to Thailand, Europe, working on my own projects... The only real downside has been watching my bank balance go down. Otherwise, it's great.
Back in 2012 you could upgrade the RAM yourself. Now there's no real alternative.
Small country, fairly neutral stance, little involvement in international conflict, and huge distance.
Follow that up with alliances and there's not much reason to come to NZ, other than for a holiday!
Although NZ has agreements with Aus and the US, you'll find on the ground that kiwis are actually not super fond of the US.
We won't let US nuclear ships into our waters, and we actually have quite a good relationship with China.
NZ is also quite self sufficient in many ways and so far from other countries that it's fairly sheltered from potential conflict.
The way that I see it is that it's a financial investment. Not only can you increase your chances of multiple offers (which can lead to increased salary), but performing well could be the difference of $10k+ salary per year.
If you think of raises as a percentage of salary and compound that over the years you might spend at a company, then potentially we're talking multiple 10's of thousands over the lifespan of working at a company - all for a bit of extra effort up front.
It is extra strain for sure - the smart thing to do is to start your prep a month or more before applying. Also, don't keep your prep code in the IDE. I did this (had an 'archive' folder), and Intellisense was picking up the name of an existing class I'd used during my practice (not sure if the interviewer noticed that...)!
My strategy is quite simple - when I need a job I search for and apply for jobs I like the look of.
I might apply to a handful of companies. I tailor my CV for each one. Then I treat the interviews seriously, researching intensively and preparing as best I can, doing the problems they're known to give, practicing answers to questions etc.
It's pretty straightforward but requires a lot of work and means I have a high rate of passing through and getting offers.
My last interviewing experience was a few months back and I applied for 4 jobs, and got 2 offers. I didn't get past CV stage with the other 2 companies. I've moved around a lot with at most 2 years at a company so that probably hurts my success rate. It's always me quitting, I've never been fired or layed off.
I've gotten work via a friend before (side job), as well as through recruiters. I still get emails every now and then from recruiters that have me on their list. I even got a job via hackernews - Posting in an "Open for work" thread.
If you're applying for jobs in companies, and those companies want you to have skills in tools x, y, z, then they have a need and they have problem scenarios that will be relevant to those tools.
You can read company blogs - go look at any of the big tech company engineering blogs and they'll go into a lot of depth on the problems they have and how they go about using modern tooling to solve those problems.
The information is out there, if you don't have any ideas, then talk to ChatGPT , read company blogs, buy a book, do a course, put a question into google.
There has never been an easier time to get an answer to a question - you just need to ask it in the first place.
Your job relies on you being a problem solver. Start by solving your own problem, stop with the excuses.
The real question is, given all the materials on the internet that can literally tell you why these tools are useful (I mean, surely if you just read the docs you'd find out?!), why have you not done the work?
It feels like you're in your comfort zone and rationalising why you shouldn't do the work. I mean, is finding a job and being employed not motivation enough?
Perhaps look inside yourself and be honest first. It sounds like instead of admitting that you need to do some work and learn some things you'd rather blame outside circumstances for your lack of personal progress.
I don't mean to sound harsh - sometimes we just need a reality check!
Take responsibility, get out there and DO THE WORK. A new world is waiting for you just over the hill.
You've actually just proved my point - you used a method of breaking down the problem into a different problem and then solving it rather than simply memorising.
If you give the same question to multiple people there will be numerous ways different people use to go about solving it.
As an example, I might solve this by doing
20*8 = 160 3*8 = 24 160 - 24 = 136
Or 10*8 = 80 7*8 = 56 80+56 = 136
And I might apply different tools like the one I originally mentioned within these calculations. I know that 80+20 is 100 and so "borrow" 20 from 56, so that I can easily add 100 and 36 together.
These ways of calculating happen in your mind very quickly if this is how you get used to calculating.
But you can break this into a different problem knowing that 2^3 = 8, and doing 7*2*2*2.
This isn't as fast but is in a way more useful because while 7*8 is fairly easy to remember you're not going to remember 17*8 etc but you can problem solve it fairly quick.
There are other ways of seeing the multiplication table as well. For example 9 times something can be thought of as 9*x = 10*x-x.
I never learnt these, but simply realised over time that there are different approaches to doing calculations.
Except AI is already being used by people (like myself) every day as part of their usual work flow - and it's a huge boost in productivity.
It's not IF it will make an impact - it IS currently making an impact. We're only just moving past early adopters and we're still in the early stages in terms of tooling.
I'm not saying that AI will become sentient and take over humanity, but to think that AI isn't making an impact is to really have your head in the sand at this point.
A manager should really just be another role on the team, with the possibility of firing a team member being a decision for the team, not a single managerial role.
Everyone should get a vote in who stays, otherwise you just end up with a bunch of sociopaths running the show.
I also can vividly "hear" music, not really voices, but I can put a track on in my head almost as if listening to the radio. For people that can't do this, it might sound great - and it is quite cool except for waking up many mornings with a random track stuck in your head or hearing a particular riff over and over again.
I don't tend to remember faces of people I've recently met - there are times when someone says hi, starts chatting and I think "who the hell is that?"
There are a couple issues I can see in that people may be unaware of how much the AI's hallucinate, but also there's a real probability that people will pick and choose what they like based on what sounds correct vs what is correct.
AI is a great tool, but it's also convincingly deceiving at times, so much so that many people are totally oblivious to it.
My partner recently went a bit nuts writing an article with the help of GPT4. She was very proud of how productive she'd been until I asked if she'd actually searched for the papers GPT4 had referred to.
Of course, many of the referred to papers didn't exist...
It's really catered for beginners, people that have next to no knowledge of graph databases or Neo4j and want to get up to speed in just a few hours.
I imagine some people may not even be super technical, but may want to learn just the basics of querying a DB at work to get some basic info out of it.
Apart from lessons there are also exercises for people to practice what they just learnt, and I do my best to point out gotchas and keep it mildly entertaining with a gentle progression in difficulty.
https://www.udemy.com/neo4j-foundations/
There are many people who do teach and explain topics well. Richard Feynman comes to mind.
I've found Abdul Bari on YouTube to also be an excellent teacher around technical topics.
As someone that's made a best selling technical course, I strongly disagree.
It's 100% laziness and/or disregard for the reader.
The reason examples are as bad as they are is that people rush to get something published rather than put themselves in the audience's position and make sure it's concise and makes sense.
It's not like webpage space is expensive. There's plenty of room to walk through a good example, it just requires a little effort.
`DeadlineSetter` should not be a class, and besides that the implementation makes zero sense. The whole thing should probably just be a single if statement.
Then you have direct access to the start of each chunk, so like a hash table of linked lists.
Of course reality is nuanced - a friend of mine for example is building out essentially his own apartment in his garage and having his sister pay rent for his house.
I'm still not sure how best to add a "compare buying to renting" feature for the calculator, so any ideas are most welcome!
Most people don't know what they want though, and we take it for granted because we are good at making things that others are too.
We'll just get people producing a bunch of products that all feel the same (i.e. what AI is trained on).
Yes it'll get easier to build things - but aren't many things already much easier? I mean go back in time and make a website then compare it to the tools today.
I feel like we're not giving humans credit for true creativity. The bar is being moved, barriers are being changed but don't underestimate the resilience of people.
There are and will be many opportunities, we just need to use our natural intelligence to get there.