hkarthik

When I was a VPE at a mid stage startup, I tended to ignore 99.9% of these pitches.

Except for one. It came through a trusted contact, and he specifically wanted to intro me to a founder who had built a data security solution that he truly believed in. Out of respect for him, I took the video chat with the founder, and included my head of security on the call.

The founder's pitch was amazing, and I knew I wanted to use her product. She identified a problem that we definitely had, had built an elegant solution for it, and could demonstrate value very quickly in a 30 minute video call.

So if you want to get a VPE's attention, build something great but leverage someone in their network to warm up the intro for you. It works wonders.

We purchased her product within a month and implemented it within 2 weeks. It's now a core part of how we secured data internally.

There are three big challenges he has to overcome.

1. Make it work. This sounds easy with open source tech, but really hard if it includes effective content moderation from day one. That's a tough product problem to solve which only the largest consumer companies have addressed with their own proprietary technology.

2. Make it scale. This is hard, especially given the potential large userbase and the fact that none of the major public clouds like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft will likely host him without very strict content moderation policies. He's going to have to find some esoteric hosting providers that are willing to look the other way and potentially lose every other customer over it.

3. Make it cheap. Related to previous option, there are few viable hosts so he will have to pay a lot due to having little to no leverage on pricing. It could turn into a money pit very quickly without a rich corporate benefactor (that also has the tech) willing to take it on. Even friends like Peter Thiel at Palantir may not be able to do it with the potential risk it would pose to their other contracts.

The only way to avoid conflict is to constantly expand and adapt for (or adapt to) new environments, otherwise competition increases.

Mobility also needs to increase to avoid conflicts which lead to physical harm.

At L6+ you also need experience and war stories during the interview process. And a significant number of wins with broad impact that can only happen if you have the soft skills to make large change happen.

Yes, I believe extra terrestrial life exists but there are significant known barriers that prevent our contact with interstellar species currently. I believe with enough time, we can get past these barriers through technological means.

However, given the age of the universe, there is strong reason to believe that other species somewhere else have likely crossed these barriers but run into another set of constraints which we simply can’t comprehend yet. These could be physical, philosophical, or even metaphysical barriers which prevent contact.

I hoped that in my lifetime we would have made more progress but it may take a few more human lifetimes before we get there, barring a breakthrough which helps leap frog our current understanding.

The best thing the Cyberpunk team could have done to ensure success where they could avoid a myriad of technical issues is to have limited how many platforms they supported when they launched the game. Trying to simultaneously support high end PCs, and lower end last-gen consoles (PS4 and Xbox One) with a 2020 release was just foolish.

I think it would have been a fantastic game if it was a console exclusive, or a launch title for PS5 and Xbox One along with PC (since many CDPR fans are PC players). Yes this would have limited how many copies sold, but it would have set them up for building a long term franchise too.

Half measures to support their last gen console support was ultimately what killed their PR for the game.

It’s the economics of it all. Industrial design costs a lot of money. Money requires margins. There is little margin to be had in building PCs after Intel/AMD, Nvidia, Realtek, etc all take their cut. And let’s not forget Microsoft getting their pound of flesh for Windows. The modern PC is simply packaging.

The flashy gaming PCs with cheap LED lights and backlit keyboards have allowed the manufacturers to increase their margin enough to stay in business, but not enough to fund the kind of industrial design that Apple puts forward.

Just turned 40, and this year I have picked up Japanese sword martial art called Shinkendo, through a local dojo a few miles away. I have no previous martial arts experience.

I have also started learning Unity and I am making my first 2D game. No previous game development experience.

Having a lot of fun learning both.

Yes, I started with a massive Windows 8 Media center PC in 2003 which evolved to an Xbox1 with XBMC, followed by a couple of all in one PCs which could load standalone XBMC Linux based kernels by 2010.

Around 2015, I switched to having a Synology NAS hold the content with small streaming devices around the house with Plex running on both ends.

But these days 99% of the content we want is on Netflix, HBO Max, or Disney+. We occasionally rent movies via AppleTV. I can get all the content I want more conveniently through these services. And I am rarely debugging the setup during a family movie night while my wife and daughters groan about how my stuff never works.

I am a big fan of Educative.io as I have realized I don’t learn concepts well through video, but I still need my hands on the keyboard while I am working through material to stay focused. The small quizzes also force me to pay close attention to key details and absorb better.

I find that video tutorials are better for learning ways to be efficient with tooling so random Youtube or conference videos work fine for me. Or even better, a remote pairing session with someone really strong in some particular tech!

Something no one explained to me that I had to figure out on my own. There are three basic levels of engineering management.

Team level - Supporting individual engineers working collectively to solve a relatively narrow set of business and technical problems. Lots of short term focus.

Org level - Supporting multiple teams of engineers solve bigger, hairier problems and learn to both identify and solve their own problems. More long term focus.

Exec level - Represent the needs and capabilities of the every engineer at the company, and be a strong advocate for them. Support the needs of the larger business and strategy. Super long term focus.

Depending on the company, there are some half steps in between each level, and you may have responsibilities that span multiple levels.

The most important thing to evaluate (and constantly re-evaluate) is at what level you are currently working at and what level you need to be working at for the good of the company. Hire accordingly.

If you find yourself working at all three levels, it won’t be sustainable and the payoff simply won’t be worth it in the end.

I read this as Chinese nationalistic policies are now being exported to other countries like the US.

The pivotal moment here is that it may put the rest of the world on a path of being less connected to each other through trade and exchange of ideas.

In the short term, it will probably help give local economies a boost. But in the long term, it will create an imbalance of resources, technology, and people. Which sets the stage for conflicts 10-20 years down the line.

Find an internal mentor at Google who has been there at least 3 years and came in at the same level as you (or maybe one level above). They will give you a wealth of tips and tricks to navigate it. It's usually easy to find an altruistic soul who is willing to make sure others don't repeat their own mistakes.

Make sure they are not part of your org chain, and that there is a clear understanding of trust so you can talk openly about everything without any fear of retribution. It should be a safe place and a good mentor always respects that.

Companies started in the last 10-15 years that started and ended on a mostly Java-based stack.

The business should also be super stable, slow growth, but high revenue/margins. That's probably the most important thing you should look for.

I'm 16 years into using gmail, so the thought of converting to a new email address feels harder than trying to change my social security number right now.

Anyone done this successfully?

If you don’t like how Apple does business, stop using their products.

If you don’t like how Google does business, stop using their products.

If you don’t like how either one does business, stop using technology all together.

I am being facetious, but mainly to illustrate the point that we now have a series of entrenched monopolies in the tech world so “stop using X” isn’t a realistic solution.

This is the stack to run a startup with several engineers, not an MVP.

Likely so.

Also once there is a coronavirus vaccine, it will likely be considered discriminatory to require vaccination as a condition of employment in order to enter a company office.

Just write engineering management and highlight it was a manager role. Most hiring managers and recruiters are aware that titles are often meaningless.

Netflix is known for being speedy with hiring because they are also speedy with firing under performers.

So they see hiring as a relatively low risk proposition and will make decisions faster since the long term effects are greatly lessened.

I can give you an ex-insiders view on this.

Uber made an early strategic decision to invest in on-premise infrastructure due to fears that either Amazon or Google would enter the on-demand market as competitors and bring their cloud infrastructure to bear and potentially squeeze us for costs. Azure wasn’t much of an option during this time. This decision limited our adoption of cloud native solutions like SpannerDB and DynamoDB. We ended up doing a lot of sharded MySQL in our own data centers instead.

This on-prem decision led to a lot challenges internally where we would adopt OSS and then have difficulty scaling it to our needs. For some tech like Kafka it worked out, and we hired Kafka contributors who helped us scale it. For other tech like Cassandra it was a pretty epic failure. I am sure more of these war stories exist that I wasn’t privy to myself.

Coupled with the fact that we were early adopters into Golang which had its own OSS ecosystem, we found that writing a lot of our own infrastructure solutions was the only viable option at our scale.

What you are seeing now is a lot of that home grown infrastructure being open sourced in big way as people who have left Uber continue to see value in investing in the tech that they worked so hard to build. There is probably a nontrivial amount of work to scale the Uber OSS down for smaller use cases but some startups are emerging to make that happen.

Source: I worked at Uber from 2015-2019 on product and platform teams and had several close colleagues in infra.

the problem is the tech industry is run by tech execs with high priced Bay Area property. They have no incentive to be pro growth as long as cities like Austin, Seattle accept their “satellite offices” with open arms.

These are both very different roles, so I'd take a step back and think about three things:

1. What excites you (Desire)

2. What you're good at (Talent)

3. What roles are available (Opportunity)

The right approach is target two out of the three, and if your goal is to climb the career ladder to a VP, it's best to focus on #2 and #3.

But you may find that once you are on this path (or even achieve it), your lack of desire can be a pretty limiting factor. So for many people, they are happiest if they focus on #1 and #3. It will be a longer, harder road before you achieve what most people would call a successful career. But you may end up more satisfied in the long run.

Layoffs become a trend and there is a cascading effect. One company does it because they have to and others start doing it because they think they should too. The public companies start doing it to cull their ranks because they want to.

A big part of the stigma around teen sex is rooted in thousands of years of religious taboo associated with it among the world’s major religions. This is likely because those belief systems were the original dominant form of birth control.

This is likely a case where the evolution of human culture hasn’t caught up with the available medical technology.

Less unwanted pregnancies which result in less abortions, single mothers relying on taxpayer social safety nets, or extra state money spent on kids falling through the cracks of the foster care system.

Similar experience for me and we are the same age. I don’t feel cheated per say but I agree we had less opportunity available to us and less ability to affect change.

The thing to remember is that we are a small generation sandwiched between two big ones (baby boomers and millenials). We never got to move the needle as much culturally as these two generations did.

The boomers set the rules, which we begrudgingly followed. And the millenials are breaking the rules and we have to roll with that too.

Sometimes it feels like we are caught between both worlds, and forced to choose a side where we only agree with them 50% of the time.

I benefited greatly from my EM mentor, who was a senior manager at my last company. Our meeting was arranged as part of an internal mentor match up, and then we just continued it over nearly 4 years of working there. I think we were the longest running mentor/mentee arrangement from that first match up!

I attribute my success largely to his support. He leaned into the mentorship by meeting with me weekly initially, and then bi-weekly as our schedules got tighter (we both got promoted to manage larger and larger teams). He was always extremely generous with his time, and always helped me sort out sticky situations and gave me direct feedback.

The way to progress as a manager is to develop the vision to grow the scope of your team, justify additional headcount, and groom some of your tech leads to become managers under you.

If done well, the optics are that you have a strong upwards trajectory as a leader and are well respected by your teams and executive leadership. From here, it's fairly easy to continue to move upwards toward an upper management role.

If done poorly, the optics are that you are an empire builder and not capable of actually moving the company forward, or supporting your people effectively. You will be not be respected and many people, including your own reports, will talk behind your back end eventually you will be pushed out.

Another path up requires a patron or sponsor. This might be your direct boss who moves up and takes you with them.

The last option is waiting for your boss to quit and be given the opportunity to take their job by your boss's boss. The best bosses will groom you for this.

Custom fields on a key entity that can be added without additional code or refactoring.