Ethan's Wiki Update #21
A few long blogs, lessons and stories shared by others over the internet on entrepreneurship, career growth and adopting AI tools.
What’s New
Entrepreneurship Stories page:
Lessons Learned Shipping 500 Units of my First Hardware Product
Story of a software engineer quitting his job starting a hardware product
Self reflection on what went well, what went wrong and lessons learned
Plan in detail, over-communicate, test a lot more, validate the market, focus on customer support, etc.
The Uncomfortable Math of Working for Yourself
A small, self-employed entrepreneurship is still a job
You are your own manager, and you might be the worst manager to yourself
Survivors are loud, but statistics are quiet
Isolation in self-employment cannot be underestimated
I don’t agree the last part where the opposite of entrepreneurship is a stable job with guaranteed stability, but it might be true that the glamorous self-employed entrepreneurship stories are dominated by successful stories. Statistics are quiet.
Seniority/Manager role page:
21 Lessons From 14 years at Google
Lessons mostly focused on a software engineer, but largely applicable to other roles
Approach to work:
The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems, not using cool technology
Take action and ship, iterate and learn from real feedback
Prioritize clarity over cleverness, optimize for comprehension
Favour boring technology not novel innovations
Best code is the code never had to write, question the purpose
At scale, bugs have users, understand the cost of compatibility
Abstractions don’t remove complexity, understand the underlying
Work that enable other work is priceless yet invisible, do it when needed
Most performance wins come from removing work, not adding clever optimization
Teamwork:
Being right is cheap but getting right together is the real work
Slow teams are usually misaligned teams, clarify direction
Winning every debate probably means accumulating silent resistance
Process reduce uncertainty and failures, not to be bureaucratic
Growth and mindset:
Code doesn’t advocate for you, but people do
Focus on what you can control and ignore what not
Writing forces clarity, the fastest way to learn is to teach
When a measure becomes a target, it stops measuring
Admit what you don’t know, stay curious
Your network outlasts every job
Eventually, time worth more than money, make the trade deliberately
There are no shortcuts but learning compounds
Hire the best by noticing hidden potentials from candidates
Discover non-obvious talent to build a high-leverage team on a startup budget
11 traits listed: hunger, self-driven, humility, detach from one’s work, high EQ, etc.
Artificial Intelligence Page:
(1) Drop the chatbot: use agent because of the automatic feedback loops
(2) Reproduce your own work with AI to learn what can and cannot be done, and how to do it
(3) End-of-day agents: block out end of day time to explore what can be done to gain some efficiency
(4) Outsource the slam dunks: delegate work that AI can do, work in parallel for other work that AI can’t
(5) Engineer the harness: make sure AI don’t make the same mistakes again
(6) Always have an agent running: force yourself to improve workflow and delegate
I think this doesn’t just apply to AI, but also applies to adopting other new technologies and tools in general.
Random
Talking about the potential issues of taking the entrepreneurship route, I am (not) a Failure: Lessons Learned From Six (and a half) Failed Startup Attempts is a good read. It includes six failed attempts on startup plus more stories. Each with some lessons learned.
And talking about career growth, I like the blog On Being A Senior Engineer. Like anticipate outcomes, making tradeoffs explicit, provide suggestions rather than making empty complaints.