Learn how the plus, minus, equals framework can be applied to hacking your way into law school
130 karma · joined May 5, 2010
I applaud your self-awareness and realization that you personally cannot drink moderately but must reject the assertion that there are such things as "regular life" and "alcoholism". Define these states of being...
... except you can't.
What you want to do is have a clear vision of what the life you want looks like and then work backward to where you are right now, then walk that path.
When you think forward incrementally with thoughts like "I should drink less" or "Do not drink beer" you are prescribing a behavior that is detached from an identity. Who is the person you will be that behaves this way because these behaviors are aligned with who you are?
Consider the difference between eating less meat versus becoming a vegan. One is a forward looking behavior, the other is a backward looking identity. If you are a vegan, you cannot consume animal products because that is who you are and to be a vegan means that you cannot consume animal products. The behaviors and identity are intertwined in a self-reinforcing system. This is strategy versus tactics.
Veganism and other extremely well defined identities are useful for making my point but it need not be so extreme. You can create a custom identity built around a set of ideals, policies, and rules that you define. I am: "a vegan" is equally valid to "a guy who has 3 beers on Wednesday nights watching the game with his boys". Define your values, describe who you want to be, then figure out the delta from where you are at right now to where you want to be. Then do it or admit that it's not what you really want and who you intend to become.
Setbacks and fuck-ups are inherent to the human condition. They do not matter. If we are still on the path we can take two steps forward, one step back and still finish the race. Black and white thinking leads to shame and guilt, which undermines and destroys everything. Life is messy and happens in the grey. Yesterday might have gotten fucked up, tomorrow might be dope, more than likely it will be aight.
I hate to tell you this but you can swear off booze or smokes or bread or sugar or bowties or whatever now and forever but it is gonna come up again. You might get involved. That is not failure. That is life. Hating yourself is counter-productive. Notice when you get yourself off the path and course correct, keep rolling.
You cannot and should not ever expect that you can execute flawlessly and white knuckle your way through this mess we call life. Do not give up your power and agency by believing that some bullshit molecule has hegemony over you.
Be who you are. Do as you wish. Become what you want. Live the dream.
Across your entire description of your situation you never once mentioned what it is you are actually working on but called out the income you hit and frameworks you are playing with. I humbly submit that your problem is that you have lost the plot.
Hate to break it to you chief but the libraries and frameworks and techniques you use to work are not the point. Creating stuff that people want to use is all that matters. Doing it with finesse and craftsmanship is how you go from good to great but if nobody gives a shit you will always feel empty.
Switching projects and doing something "harder" isn't going to fill that void.
Build something people want. I promise your drive and all the rest will follow behind once you are making them happy and get hooked on solving their problems and improving their lives.
That is what this game is all about.
Nobody gives a shit if you are a director of engineering but they may well care very much if you solve their problem.
It's all vanity and ego run wild. The reality of business is that the only two things that actually matter are building shit and selling shit. This is how to easily differentiate between cost and profit centers and who is essential vs expendable in an organization.
You should only be driven to be a manager or director if your fundamental skillset is dealing with bullshit to enable other people to do value creating work by getting it out of their face.
If you think you are moving a bunch of JIRA tickets around you should take a hard look at what a legit engineering manager deals with. And then add in trying to resolve bullshit conflicts between grown ass men acting like children, talking people into getting involved with your high risk/low reward squad, forcing people to make a decision and start moving instead of arguing endlessly, having really uncomfortable conversations on the regular, firing people who have a mortgage and kids but have undeniably become a risk to the business even if you like hanging out with them, identifying, defining, and enforcing the processes and changes to keep everything from falling apart...
Your 25 years of experience don't necessarily have any impact on dealing with all that bullshit. You have to be fundamentally organized and passionate about driving others to succeed and absorbing damage so they don't have to in order to be a really legit manager. Unfortunately titles and position in the hierarchy has become irrationally coveted and rewarded in many organizations and people who are "senior" slide into these roles and fundamentally suck at it and create misery for their direct reports and commit unforced errors that put the entire business at risk because they don't know or really care what they are doing.
Do not envy and covet joining that squad.
The only thing that really matters is creating dope shit that people want to use and making money while you are doing it. What role you are playing in the organization isn't meaningful compared to whether or not it is winning or losing.
There are plenty of lone-wolf IC's out there pulling down ungodly amounts of money because they are just destroying it and the best way for them to create value is for everybody just to get the fuck out of the way.
Only become a manager if you can be an excellent one and crush it and don't think for a second that just because your former colleague slid into a lane when you didn't that he is succeeding and you are failing. He has a whole new problem now to make a bunch of other people successful and absord all their bullshit for himself to be successful. That's the job. You can only admire and envy him if and when he has crushed it and you are certain that you could have crushed it even harder and should have taken that shot.
And if that is where you are at start interviewing for management roles, grab one, and put the ball through the basket to prove it.
You haven't made a career mistake you are just ruminating on an insecure head trip. And fuck that, you don't need, want, or deserve to live that way.
What you need my friend is a strategy. Are there features that if delivered create outsized economic returns?
You need to invert your thinking. Nobody gives a shit about you, your product, your company, your mission, open source. Money is directly derived by delivering value to another party in a way that they could not or would not be able to create themselves.
Open Source software utilizes a confluence of patent law and hippy bullshit to create a safe space for collaboration and advancement and yada yada yada.
I didn’t invent fire, but I can start a hell of a bbq.
Do shit that matters and everything will be fine.
The best thing that you can ever do is make a ton of money, hire a ton of people, pay your taxes, and be there when your are called upon.
“If we build it, they will come.” Is just a lazy fantasy that lets you stay in your comfort zone, fixing bugs, refactoring modules, and pushing features for the next release.
If Matrix is to succeed as a technology it needs a real, highly competent go to market team and strategy. And I think you have to build some very compelling user experiences to drive switching and combine that with import/invitation features and outreach (pushes, email, etc) to even have a look at the basket. Alignment across platforms is just table stakes.
I think that there is good reason to doubt that premise. Driving people around has a very different cost structure from a SaaS business that can throw off 85% margin if you get to product / market fit. Uber is a commodity and is trying to create margin by sucking all the air out of the room for competitors. A key strategy has been weaponized fund-raising. But even if you snuff out Lyft the barrier to entry for any player with a platform and scale is very low.
Then let's think about the tech. There's an implicit assumption that Uber is going to be a force in the self driving car market. Even if you set aside the Otto mess, why does anybody think that a 6 year old company that drew a car on Google Maps and did a payment integration is going to dominate the driverless car game? GM, Tesla, Volkswagen, Google have been thinking about this shit for decades. Why is Uber going to win? They can't run HR yet -- how are they going to own what happens next?
It's a monster business and they should be super happy with where they are. But I just don't see how they win in the shift that is coming. Car ownership is dying. It's becoming about transit experience
With that said, we do feel that Google came up in short in their responses to us over the course of the issue. We pay handsomely on a support contract to get off-hours responses and issue escalations. The responses we received were hand-wavy and vague, leaving us without sufficient data to make decisions. We have raised these concerns with our Google representative and will be working with them to tighten our partnership going forward.
We take full responsibility for this event and are working to cover the exposure. Building a system and business with resource constraints and complex distributed technologies is a long game of managing risk and trade-offs. We're human and we make bad calls along the way. We are very sorry and violated our commitments to our customers and their users. The entire Layer engineering team is head down right now working to make it right.
We are very sorry to all our customers for the downstream impacts their businesses. We came up short and are doing everything we can to make it right.
Last night we lost a race to evolve our architecture and deployment ahead of a zone level issue that affected our total operations. We are working on it in earnest but there is very real complexity in operating a widely distributed real-time system.
I take full responsibility for the issues here and the team is working to remediate the exposure as quickly as possible.
Layer provides a comprehensive platform for adding rich messaging experiences inside other products. You can think of our offering as similar to iMessage or Facebook Messenger as a library / platform. We provide native SDKs on iOS and Android that provide a high-level development experience for implementing messaging. The SDK abstracts away all the low level details of implementing a great messaging system on mobile such as content synchronization and managing a persistent connection while still providing the developer with full control over the user experience. We also offer an open source UI toolkit called Atlas that provides a reference UI implementation on iOS and Android.
In addition to our mobile offering, we also provide a Javascript SDK for browser clients as well as raw REST and WebSocket APIs for other platforms. There is also a rich set of integration APIs in the form of backend to backend REST APIs and Webhooks for tracking events within the system.
The platform is fully managed and offered as a service. Historically our availability has been very strong, but last night exposed an achilles heal and we are working quickly to remediate the issues exposed.
My best advice for you is to either find a unique value prop in the consumer space where you can perhaps gain a foothold and access virality or focus on finding a nice home for your engineering team and technology. I've seen a lot of advice here about how you should start consulting to create runway. This is terrible advice and you should face reality. Nobody is going to build an app and a business on top of a messaging platform that is a part time project of a handful of developers without any runway. It's just not a rational business decision and nobody who is capable of paying you real money would make that call. You are in a market with existing well funded players that are rapidly evolving their product and addressing that market through sales and marketing. You either have to build something that you can give away for free and generate traction that you can raise money against or you need to focus on selling the core assets that you do have: the people and the tech. You may want to reconsider releasing that code if you want a shot at an aquihire outcome. Best of luck.
The free tier gives you an opportunity to try out the platform very quickly for free and perhaps host an early web only scaffold of a pre-launch app. It's not meant to host any app in production (except maybe an internal copy of Hubot).
Any app with meaningful functionality is going to at least need 1 web dyno ($36 a month) and a background worker, plus a database (Crane @ $50) and likely some add-ons such as SendGrid/Redis.
Heroku is not trying to compete with Amazon EC2 -- it's built on top of it. The real value of Heroku's platform is that it greatly reduces operational overhead spend for businesses hosting their apps on the platform. Rather than paying consultants or dedicated ops personnel, your business can pay a premium for the PaaS and keep the dollars focused on value creating development activities.
Heroku's target market is also not bootstrapped tech start-ups allergic to spending <= $100 a month. These projects have a huge failure rate and very low expected lifetime value. You would be a fool to try and target this market -- it's tiny and unprofitable.
If you take a broader view of the world, there are tons of businesses with technology needs that already have profitable business models and steady growth but are not technology companies themselves. This is the huge market that Heroku is truly addressing. They know that these businesses turn to consultants or hire developers and empower them to drive the technology decisions. That's why developer mind-share is so valuable to Heroku -- it's not that they want you to host your next bootstrapped startup weekend side project on the platform, but instead they need Heroku to be top of mind when somebody with profitable technology needs hires you.
I would bet that applications starting on the free tier and seeing organic growth is a very tiny sliver of Heroku's revenue. Most applications are built from business needs, not ideas. These businesses are not scared to spend when it solves their problems or grows revenue. $100, $1000, or even $10k a month is nothing when you find yourself in such a position.
Its also very flexible, as you can do `dispatch_sync` if you need a synchronous fetch of the resource or use callback blocks to go as async as possible.
Our approach in GateGuru is to bundle the security wait time functionality with other, highly engaging and free services (such as flight tracking, itinerary management, and our amenity database) in a completely FREE app and scale our way into it.
We are deep into it and its an ongoing part of our strategy, but its not clear to me how you could generalize this and build a business around it without an amazing solution to this fundamental problem.