career advice [581a343f]
Tags: personal
5 steps from So Good They Can't Ignore You:
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Decide what capital market you're in, either winner-takes-all or auction
- CS is auction
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Middle East studies/academia is…winner takes all? Maybe?
- writing is winner takes all
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Identify capital type, which skill dominates?
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in CS I care about distributed systems skills and navigating large code bases
- read "working with legacy systems"?
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with MES my skill is writing and analysis? Possibly arabic?
- Work on arabic
- Practice writing
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Define 'good'
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Distributed systems:
- understanding papers, writing more distributed systems, understanding apis
- Kafka, zookeeper, batching, etc
- Arabic: obvious
- Writing: less obvious, but 'good' is defined as getting published?
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- Stretch and destroy: push to activate discomfort
- Be patient
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build a career moat
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either out of obscurity/difficulty
- make it difficult to get where you are
- choose a path that is unclear how to climb
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predictive
- predict valuable skills before they get recgonized
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skills that are unattractive but valuable
- cobol? (ehhhhhhhhhh)
- engineering management
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- autonomy is based around leverage
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perform rigorous trial and error <- duh
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two ways of problem solving
- trial and error
- theory and insight
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taking bets
- stay in the game
- double down on what works
- bet in porportional to your edge
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epistemic vs instrumental reality
- epistemic - how do you know if your beliefs are true?
- instrumental - how do you make better decisions to achieve your goals?
- aaron schwartz wrote about this in 2012: www.lesswrong.com/posts/9SE67uz98kh6x2CxR/what-are-the-optimal-biases-to-overcome
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be realistic about what you're selling
- is your job a commodity?
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there is always a move if you are selling a unique product or have capital freedom, aka money is time
- what is your individual free cash flow? that is, how much money can you take out to maintain and grow your current lifestyle?