I used to work with a very senior engineer who is now retired who had a job which involved VERY LITTLE OR NO WORK.
This may or may not be your situation. He was one of the happiest people I have ever met.
I think you are feeling the default urge to look and feel productive all the time. I know exactly the feeling. It often looks bad and feels bad not to be hyper coding all the time.
The reality is that you may be, many many times, running some system which is mostly complete and your job is more of an insurance policy against the ultra bad things that happen if that system goes down.
And hyper coding is simply not required. And dealing with the psychological and social effects of knowing you are running at 10% capacity is overwhelming and hard to deal with.
It may be the case that this system may realistically involve very little work. Bug fixes and code enhancements. And that is actually fine as far as everyone around you is concerned, they may not even care. At all. As long as that system runs and you seem to be working.
So back to my friend who is now retired.
He had this down to a science. He focused on organizing discussions. So he would ask you to come to a meeting and ask you about some small detail of whatever he is doing. Then he would go: “wow, I hadn’t thought of that. That’s really something. Really great, let me think about that more.”
He would make everyone feel like a genius. Or host a group discussion with similar theme.
Then he would find some way to give you credit for your idea or suggestion. Everyone loved him.
After watching him operate for awhile it made me realize how much most engineers overvalue “genius intelligence” and being hyper industrious versus … seemingly very simple human to human interactions and the reality of how people think and work.
The reality is that the true performance criteria for you in the majority of environments is how much everyone around you likes you and thinks you are great. I realized that’s what this guy was doing after having +30 years of experience on me. And I assumed he knew something I didn’t about doing “deep career time.”
So if seeming more busy is your root problem, just realize that people:
1. Probably don’t care about what you are doing
2. Want to feel smart and consulted for their genius opinions
3. Given credit for something you are doing
If you do those three things, with the right people, your report is kind of irrelevant.
Does anyone care about this system? How does this system result in other people getting a promotion? If you figure that out, everyone will love you.
Your reports will read like; “had a discussion about best approach to unit tests with James and he suggested some important optimizations which I have made.”
You have scoped your problem as an “engineering” problem when it is realistically
More of a “peer psychology management” problem.
As long as you are likeable, that’s what really matters imo. If I understand the situation correctly.
Elon musk would probably hate this answer. He probably realistically has a ton of people doing exactly this working for him. And they are his favorite people because they want to hear his genius ideas.
Probably because there is no worthwhile business model. Selling single chips doesn’t work. And they tried bundling with cloud services to get it and that probably didn’t work. And by “work” I mean: Generate the levels of business required for Google cloud to care.
They probably have a layoff coming which is closer to 50% than to 10%. Does he want to be the one who does it? Probably not. Does Intuit need another CEO floating around? Probably not. He pretty clearly feels not much meaningful work is happening if everyone is focused on politics.
Does a mail platform need that many people? Look at the economy. It is related to this email sure, specifically it is related to his opinion on how engaged and productive staff are being.
I was working at a similar company the last two years. I was completely bored and not learning anything. Now I feel like I am learning more in a daily basis than I learned in an average month in Big Co. at a startup.
Working at the big companies is a bit like choosing a local maximum. Yeah you maxed out comp for whatever your role is in the industry. But now you flattened your growth and learning curve.
There are extreme greater heights you can reach…out there in the jungle. But that is unsafe and risky to do.
To go up, you end up having to go down, first. That means letting go of the false local
Minimum you have achieved (which feels like a maximum).
That means less money in something more risky and nascent to get way more money and promotions and experience … later.
Startups are a completely different “skill tree.” I realized I would rather make less money and work harder if I was learning more and meeting a lot more people.
Easier to do when you are younger. Much, much harder to do when you are older.
You need to write a coherent plan if you are going to take a risk.
1. What is your plan A,B,C and D if A fails? Seriously. Write it down. If I quit and the startup fails or whatever, then what? Write it out.
2. You better be choosing something very high growth and exciting if you are walking away from big money. I left to join Web3 because I believe Web3 is a $100 trillion (all money on earth) market and don’t see any indication that the incentives for it to grow are going to slow down.
There are only a few markets right now that fit this bill. Climate Tech looks really good.
If you quit and join some low growth market, what’s the point. You should quit to get a very rare combination of hard to get skills.
FAANG sucks because it is a race to see who can sit there and tolerate FAANG the longest. If you are creative, you won’t last. Ideal FAANG employee is more patient.
So do you have something better to do with your time? If you are just bored, but don’t have a goal, that is insufficient.
The model that makes sense to me is what DYDX is doing with their decentralized platform.
They use the blockchain to settle and track finalized transactions and offload computations to the validator nodes (which are effectively servers dedicated towards supporting the security of the chain).
Regardless of how it is implemented, I don’t see the computations happening on chain. It makes the most sense to use the blockchain to buy and sell an open network of machines.
Akash Network are doing similar. OTOY RenderCoin are another. Flux are doing “proof of useful work” aka “the work does something valuable other than solving crypto puzzles.”
I think about this a lot because I was at NVIDIA : Intel : Arm looking at ecosystem and how web3 would impact silicon markets.
I feel this article misses a lot of the historical context when RoboCop was created, it's themes and why it fit this time. I don't see how you can talk about RoboCop without mentioning the cultural climate at the time.
Rewinding to the 1980s.
Reagan was president for two terms, Giuliani was cleaning up the mob using RICO during these time periods. The War on Drugs was raging. Communism was still enemy #1 (See: Rocky IV). It was truly a very right-wing time. For whatever, themes around individuals taking power into their own hands to "Reform" corrupt systems (cities). Like Frank Miller's Sin City, these are absolutely right-wing themes. "Cleaning Corruption" is one of the most conservative motivations from a psychological standpoint.
Others here have mentioned the slate of 80's action movies but it felt like 100% of the culture was heading this direction. Frank Miller's Batman approaches at the time, for example, were strongly echoing similar themes: Vigilante justice in the backdrop of political deterioration. Rambo, Predator, Commando, Total Recall, Scarface.
I think it all started with movies like Dirty Harry and Serpico and then just got more and more extreme leading into the 1980s.
You also cannot leave out Judge Dredd comics. There are similarities between Judge Dredd and RoboCop, I have a hard time believing there was no influence. Judge Dredd also had this magic gun that could do different tricks like shoot through walls etc, lived in a corrupt mega city of the future.
I feel in some ways RoboCop was almost like "Serpico + Dirty Harry if you turn everything up to 1,000." Serpico also had this theme of the good cop who is nearly killed and sent to the hospital due to corrupt system etc.
I once was in a discussion between two former <FAANG> VPs. They were mentioning someone who had been at their prior <FAANG> co for 20 years.
VP 1: “Jason? He is still there? How?”
VP 2: “He never managed anyone.”
I thought about that a lot. What is it about being middle management that is so lethal? Its exactly as you said: Liabilities from from above, below and sideways.
The good news is there is nearly unlimited demand for programming work. However, you have to filter it very carefully, learn how to market yourself and become very selective and specific about what you want to do.
Pick a very specific niche which is specifically designed to be highly profitable, low custom work and doesn’t involve whole cloth creative agency work (trust me; you don’t want it).
Strongly recommend finding a simple, repeatable system or workflow that allows you to constantly come into contact (in a valuable, engaging way) with your target audience (people who are going to pay you to do stuff).
This can be a podcast, community, dinner series, workshop, roadshow, summit you organize. The objective is to make it valuable for you to be constantly reaching out and getting in touch about something OTHER than selling that person your services.
I also recommend designing or developing your own IP. Create your own stack or best practices, turn that into a brand and go promote it. Try to only get work applying that exact stack. You don't want a disconnected stream of random work with no narrative. You want to anchor your consulting work or business in some fixed constraints so it becomes repeatable.
Furthermore, you should be very specific about what work you want. You probably don't want to be doing end-to-end full stack "from zero" development. You would be better off applying some repeating system, taking over maintainance of running systems or selling your own IP.
Find a community or start one where your target market hangs out and make yourself useful, visible and valuable. Learn how to select clients and stack retainer revenues. Quality over quantity.
This article is likely focusing on non-developer platform projects. There are plenty of scenarios in Web3 which don't target developer end users so this article is probably perfectly valid for all those use cases. Neat article.
For a lot of other Web3 platforms (the one's i'm interested in looking at):
Web3 is a developer lead revolution. Over the last 25 years, developers have gone from being "nice to have" to being the center of the entire universe. One app can make or break a Web3 platform. Expecting the battle to get developers in the door to reach levels never seen in history. Like WWWIII for developer experience.
Even now, there are only a handful of Solidity developers listed on LinkedIn versus the total market demand: Moving 100% of the existing financial system over to a new technology stack (opportunity: 100% of all money, forever) is going to require vast armies of devs.
Current state of the market: Many, many "prior era" developers are not on board with this web3 revolution. Their skills will be badly needed.
The idea that developer experience is not the centerpiece of all platform product management in web3 blows my mind. In seeing the conversations online and talking to people in web3 industry, the current conception of developer relations, as a field, sounds like "we want to hire a junior engineer who sort of sits in discord and writes an article here and there."
This is NOT what developer relations looks like at world class levels, at enterprise scale.
I have seen this play out several times. The last iteration: Twilio and Stripe wiped the floor with everyone because they built developer first. That means emphasizing developer experience in the design of their products.
It has been long enough that a lot of new generation don't remember how that happened and why.
I think it is a result of market immaturity, expecting, as competition increases, that more and more enterprise grade DevRel is going to make or break the success of Web3 platforms.
Could be another 6-12 months, but I feel the change is going to happen fast and people who don't catch on (but are able to raise significant funds in this hyper "easy money" environment) might get away with coasting for a bit.
Will be driven by competitive forces, could be wrong But feels like will need to change.
My current belief is that the "Era" of Product Management lead innovation is probably over. Google and Facebook Product Managers were the "go to" people of last wave in tech.
In this wave, why wouldn't DevRel be the new PMs? Lets see if my theory is correct. I could be wrong!
This is probably meant to be, partially, in comparison to Warren Buffet, who famously claims to invest based on reading of financial statements (and other documents) in search of “good businesses.” https://www.amazon.com/Warren-Buffett-Interpretation-Financi...
Suspect that both Buffet and Paul’s real methods rely heavily on instinct, context, relationship networks, combination potentials, personality and pattern matching which can’t be fully documented or quantified or imparted.
I remember having a conversation with my brother once about a protein powder being recommended by some bodybuilder or another. His response: “Yes, he says that he looks that way because of this powder, but what does he actually do?” Answer: Steroids.
Suspect the same is true of many great success stories in business.
The problem with incoming recessions is if everyone expects them, then everyone knows they are coming, so they price it in, then they go “well, we priced that in, so now we can go back to business as usual.”
It’s a reflexive system.
Honestly- unless something has demonstrably “broken,” such as Lehman or AIG collapsing, then nothing systemically has actually changed.
There is so much nonsense and speculative Austrian economic discourse every time the market hits a speed bump that you can’t actually rely on anything anyone says.
Here is the real test for you: “have you seen any major institutions fail, implode or go under?”
If not, we aren’t in trouble yet. The stock market and economy have incredible ability to make adjustments, rebalance and repair themselves when provided information and time.
Yes the federal reserve will raise interest rates.
But that doesn’t mean the entire economy will implode. It might just mean that resources are allocated from some sectors to others.
This information is almost entirely priced in now. Unless more surprises occur (unexpected rate hikes or rate hikes happening too fast, or more rate hikes announced or institutions randomly imploding because debt burdens too high, or Russia invades Ukraine) we are probably ok.
And then again; the federal reserve is not a passive actor. They might announce a rate increase, watch what happens, then change their minds if things correct too far.
Suddenly your Peter Schiff scenario changes under your feet as the federal reserve unleashes the flood gates after allowing a calculated cooling off in speculation.
So that’s it: Has anything failed yet? Any imploding banks? Did Russia invade? If not, we aren’t in crisis mode yet so just chill out and watch.
If you are worried about a crisis; watch for institutional failure as your signal that real crisis has arrived. Everything else is just hot air.
This is actually very good advice from personal experience.
The best career results (promotions) I have seen came from people who built a prototype of some sort then evangelized it, even if it wasn’t necessarily a complete product, often just a good prototype.
First example: This guy took the Intel Edison and built a pretty cool project and brought it to our maker faire events. He ended up in conversation with the CEO of some company and ended up landing a $500K exec job. Just from building a skateboard hack and trying to tell people about it.
Second: I knew a guy who built this neat prototype of a compute service and then did a keynote talk at a Meetup. It didn’t really work as a product but the website was convincing. It was enough to “get bought” by a major tech co and land him a CTO job.
Another time I saw a guy leave a FAANG and build a compelling IoT type project in three months. Again, he ended up with a CTO level job after a few months.
My take away is if you want an executive job, build something somewhat cool, even as a prototype, and go try to sell it for real. Even if you don’t raise any money or make it work as a business it is often way better than submitting resumes.
There is something much more powerful about creating something that generates a lot of engagement and conversation, even if it is only half baked but looks decent and your storytelling is compelling.
imo there are often several components to burn out...
- going at it too hard, for too long
- letting your health and body deteriorate
- having your goals change without noticing
- bureaucracy taking too much % of your time
- creativity going out of the work
- too much stress for too long
My past experience with burn out is that it is a health issue first and foremost. You can't run your brain & energy systems flat out forever. Stuff starts to break down. Effect gets worse when you get older. When you are young, you can probably get away with it for a lot longer.
The stress you putting on yourself to "deliver results for others" means you walk around filled with anxiety and tension at all times.
In programming roles with regular stand-ups and tickets, the feeling of being monitored constantly for productivity (by management and peers) means you are carrying anxiety 24/7. In my opinion, some of the "well intentioned" group productivity methods such as regular meetings to check on deliverables tend to escalate stress levels.
Starts to feel like micro-management.
This rapidly can turn into feeling like "weekly / daily public humiliation" exercises if you are not able to maintain the cadence of results. The anxiety you might be feeling is actually a looming sense of dread of being micromanaged to deliverables in a public setting.
IF your projects have no program management, rational control of deliverables...pretty soon you just feel bad all the time. More anxiety, less motivation, more burn out. The daily stand-ups devolve into: "Lets see how much you have failed everyone today." That is a punishment, not a reward.
Once your work becomes a regular habitual exercise in punishment, then of course you are going to back off and not want to do it anymore. It is one of the same reasons why it is so important to keep a healthy mental frame around exercise and diet (reward, not punishment). Humans are animals. Animals like rewards and hate / avoid punishments.
So suspect your job has been turned into ritual humiliation / punishment and that is the root cause. Other factors might be at play, but that is my guess. Need to find a way to restructure work so that it is rewarding and not flagellating. That might mean systematically dropping some deliverables, pushing things out and renegotiating deliverables.
Having been a developer who also got stuck with project management - nothing is more stressful than having to both do the work and do the "client facing / management facing" negotiation.
You may find you don't want to be management and would prefer to be a pure specialist.
Smartest guy I ever met once told me: "The first thing I do when taking a new job is tell them I never want to be promoted. If you want to be promoted, they can make you do things." :)
The bad news is it sounds like you have absolutely nothing.
The good news is it sounds like you have absolutely nothing.
How I would love to move to Taiwan or Vietnam for six months making my current salary and work remote right now.
Or even one month.
Wouldn’t it be fun to go to Europe, take a train across the continent and work on a laptop.
Or an Airbnb in Barbados.
Who convinced you that you have to stay in this little box at a time when developer jobs are in unlimited supply?
Where did you learn that you have to constrain your options to your local environment only?
And I will tell you: The city and location do matter. You may not be crazy to conclude that only other people like yourself settle for a work / life balance like this in that city.
A small local demographic problem turns into a major existential problem for you. No one young and fun wants to live in a boring ass city, suburb or financial center bereft of culture.
Go to Nashville. Go to Colorado.
I have been very surprised visiting Chicago, for example, at how vibrant and different and friendly people were.
And visiting Austin. Wow, you can go to live music all night for $15 and walk around between bars and there is culture to experience.
Or in Taipei. Woah, people hang out in cafes reading books at 2am at all night bookstores.
If you feel like your life sucks and your environment sucks, it probably does.
Lot of people I know literally just book a ticket and stay in hostels around Japan or Asia or Europe. Cheap, meet people, work remote.
Biggest challenge is going to be your unwillingness to take even the smallest risk. That is on you.
This article came up on twitter last month. I remember finding it very interesting and taking the time to systematically untangle it. I will try to do a good job of explaining all the problems here.
This article is interesting to analyze regardless.
First; the author is correct across several dimensions. The Ethereum virtual machine is non optimal as a computer (currently). Blockchain is also not a great way to store data (currently). Let’s agree with the author on these points.
However, no one is saying anywhere that Ethereum is meant to replace AWS or that it’s primary purpose is to replace AWS S3. The nomenclature of “world computer” is not currently meant to be understood in the sense of “AWS killer.”
Ethereum was not designed to be a super fast computer to calculate things. It was designed to decentralized money and enable smart contracts.
Right now, Ethereum and crypto primarily replacing money, first and foremost. There are numerous people working on subsequent innovations called “Decentralized Web Services” which WILL have the intent to compete with AWS. So this angle of attack on Ethereum is unjustified.
It makes sense to me that all compute resources are ultimately listed on an open marketplace where people can bid for them. That structure might compete with AWS. I don’t think that is the first thing Ethereum is designed to do, but Ethereum and technologies like it will enable that use case later.
Author goes in to leap to a conclusion which can’t be justified Aka Web3 is all a scam. Wrong. Every problem he identifies is well understood by leading folks and in the process of being solved across multiple dimensions. Just read Vitalik’s blog. Vitalik has talked about solutions for years.
Author just points out a couple known problems in Ethereum that are being solved actively and goes “see, it’s all a scam,” not a good angle.
So intent of author feels disingenuous. Or lazy?
Author also points out that Web3 relies extensively on existing internet infrastructure and then makes the conclusion that “it’s not decentralized and has gatekeepers.”
He calls reliance on DNS, browsers, mobile phones and AWS as being “gatekeepers.” The reality is that those things are truly only “gates” if you can’t transition away from them or substitute them immediately.
Aka: Even if you have some aspects of your infrastructure which rely on “web2,” if you can substitute them for alternatives s then one could point out that there is no fundamental blocker to building decentralized systems on top of that.
My view is that crypto / Web3 are internet phenomena and internet technologies. Not replacements for the internet. So obviously they need to use internet stuff like DNS.
I have heard people talking about building private internets before, but I don’t think anyone in Web3 / crypto are claiming that they are going to replace the internet anytime soon. There are also many discussions around how to decentralize databases via IPFS, and replace DNS with something else.
Compute marketplaces such as GridCoin, Akash Network, etc are under development.
So those “gatekeepers” are getting eroded in real time, but browser and phone likely to remain.
The virtual machine is also under “improvement.” Folks are actively innovating new approaches to application specific VMs which will speed things up for specific use cases.
Furthermore, sovereign blockchains and subnets will allow much higher performance use cases for Web3 at the edge. Put all this together and most of the criticisms fall away.
My personal opinion is that we are going to see all tech stacks rebased around wallets as the core construct and this is going to force a rewrite of nearly everything.
OP does make interesting point. Why didn’t the capitalists (if they are so powerful) bring America into the war sooner?
This is a very valid point. Maybe worded badly but a perfectly valid thing to point out.
There is a clear contradiction here: In Democracies, public opinion does matter. It isn’t 100% capitalism. The capitalists might be able to get away with some excursions here and there, but when it comes to invading Europe and Japan, public opinion still mattered. The lack of public support was a major factor in why USA did not engage sooner, Pearl Harbor put it over the top definitively.
I didn’t read anything into his speech about being against going to war under all situations.
The Nazi war machine was identical to the group of gangsters outlined in this talk: Integrated capitalist warfare by way of industrialists. His point applies perfectly well to that situation. It’s exactly what happened.
Once one side begins the process, there wasn’t much that could be done, have to respond in kind.
Sounds like you have a lot of leverage to tell them “this isn’t what I signed up for. I’m going to start looking for new jobs now, I’ll keep getting paid etc but I’ll be doing the minimum here until I leave.”
Heads you win, tails you don’t lose.
If they change it, you win. If they don’t change it, you win because you quit. And you get less pressure while you look.
This may or may not be your situation. He was one of the happiest people I have ever met.
I think you are feeling the default urge to look and feel productive all the time. I know exactly the feeling. It often looks bad and feels bad not to be hyper coding all the time.
The reality is that you may be, many many times, running some system which is mostly complete and your job is more of an insurance policy against the ultra bad things that happen if that system goes down.
And hyper coding is simply not required. And dealing with the psychological and social effects of knowing you are running at 10% capacity is overwhelming and hard to deal with.
It may be the case that this system may realistically involve very little work. Bug fixes and code enhancements. And that is actually fine as far as everyone around you is concerned, they may not even care. At all. As long as that system runs and you seem to be working.
So back to my friend who is now retired.
He had this down to a science. He focused on organizing discussions. So he would ask you to come to a meeting and ask you about some small detail of whatever he is doing. Then he would go: “wow, I hadn’t thought of that. That’s really something. Really great, let me think about that more.”
He would make everyone feel like a genius. Or host a group discussion with similar theme.
Then he would find some way to give you credit for your idea or suggestion. Everyone loved him.
After watching him operate for awhile it made me realize how much most engineers overvalue “genius intelligence” and being hyper industrious versus … seemingly very simple human to human interactions and the reality of how people think and work.
The reality is that the true performance criteria for you in the majority of environments is how much everyone around you likes you and thinks you are great. I realized that’s what this guy was doing after having +30 years of experience on me. And I assumed he knew something I didn’t about doing “deep career time.”
So if seeming more busy is your root problem, just realize that people:
1. Probably don’t care about what you are doing 2. Want to feel smart and consulted for their genius opinions 3. Given credit for something you are doing
If you do those three things, with the right people, your report is kind of irrelevant.
Does anyone care about this system? How does this system result in other people getting a promotion? If you figure that out, everyone will love you.
Your reports will read like; “had a discussion about best approach to unit tests with James and he suggested some important optimizations which I have made.”
You have scoped your problem as an “engineering” problem when it is realistically More of a “peer psychology management” problem.
As long as you are likeable, that’s what really matters imo. If I understand the situation correctly.
Elon musk would probably hate this answer. He probably realistically has a ton of people doing exactly this working for him. And they are his favorite people because they want to hear his genius ideas.