I think you're using "indiscriminately" as if it meant "if I personally don't like it".
But you're right, my litmus test is very sloppy and it could be phrased much more precisely. I hope most people will understand the spirit of it though.
> but that piece of advice was meant for the kind of people that CAN afford a vacation after a startup failure. Is something wrong with that? If you can afford a vacation, you take it. If you can't, you don't.
If they really intended that advice for the audience of 5, they could've sent them an email (or a Clubhouse invite /s) and not put it in an interview on YT. The rest of the audience is just facepalming while listening to this.
* "Common Mistakes of New Engineering Managers" (5hrs ago, 110 points, 30 comments) -> rank 2
* this post (2hrs ago, 1000 points, 500 comments) -> rank 20
Why is this post being penalized? Too many black folks commenting and up voting? (/s)
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Amazingly well written. I'm going to say some things. You'd guess wrongly if you infer that I'm bitter - since I'm personally very lucky. Having been born in a not so privileged family (more common than not in the world), by the luck of the draw I am today very privileged because I work in tech (in itself not that common).
The actual problem that is at the core of all of this is - incredible disconnectedness from the plight of even regular people by the world's tech bubbles. On average, people of color have it (!!!) even worse (!!!), but it seems that these SV/NY/LDN/etc. tech bros are completely devoid of any conception of how difficult any average Joe has it.
To illustrate disconnectedness: there was an interview with a YC partner a few years back that went like this:
INTERVIEWER: "What would you advise to the young folks interested in startups?"
YC-PARTNER: "I would tell them to be ambitious, try their best, work hard and if it doesn't succeed - it doesn't succeed. You should take a vacation and try again." (the emphasis and the exact phrasing of the vacuous advice are mine)
How the fuck does one TAKE A VACATION after your startup fails?!
It goes without saying that the YC partner and their brother received tech stocks from their grandparents for one of their teen-birthdays.
Here's a litmus test to know whether you're likely disconnected: As a techie/doctor/engineer did you become by far the highest paid person in your wider family by your mid 20s? If the answer is "NO", then you would be disconnected by default - unless you consciously invested effort to educate yourself.
That's the correct way to look at it. You want to evaluate ideas on their own merits, but you also want to use heuristics and proxies when determining which ideas to consider in the sea of ideas on the Internet. A correct heuristic to search for good ideas is to seek the opinion of the previously successful people.
I find Sam Altman's essays completely devoid of any insight. He's trying really hard to be like PG, while he simply doesn't have the street-cred required. Case in point, when they did a series of Y Combinator interviews a few years back Sam apparently thought to himself that it would be appropriate for him to be interviewed third following Elon and PG - in what world does that make sense?