[HN Gopher] What I wish someone had told me
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What I wish someone had told me
Author : staranjeet
Score : 88 points
Date : 2023-12-21 22:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.samaltman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.samaltman.com)
| throwaway0665 wrote:
| Anyone have any examples of the business equivalent of the laws
| of physics?
| andy99 wrote:
| "Good, fast, or cheap, pick two"
| swyx wrote:
| my version of this for the dev tools market
| https://www.latent.space/i/137474557/the-foundation-model-
| op...
|
| > Most experienced devtool investors know that devtool
| markets usually come in threes: three parts of a stool that
| individually make sense, but collectively start jostling for
| the limited budget (and funding) available in their larger
| category (and will eventually be guided by their market to
| build or buy each others' features in the process)
|
| > For frontend/JAMstack devs, this was a three way battle
| between startups building metaframeworks, cloud infra, and
| content management systems, and various combinations of each.
| Arguably round 1 won by Nextjs/Vercel and Contentful. In data
| engineering, a similar battle ensued between data catalogs,
| semantic layers, and business intelligence, though we are
| still in very early days of category collapse. Even in
| fintech, you see Deel/Rippling/Ramp/Brex building each
| other's features as fast as they can between the trio of
| contractor, payroll, and corporate spending products.
| malfist wrote:
| I took it to mean, don't fight beurocratic battles that you
| won't win.
|
| For example, fighting RTO at Amazon. Jassy has made it one of
| his top priorities, and no matter how much I disagree with it,
| I'm not going to shift the needle
| saulpw wrote:
| Inertia: the energy required to change direction is
| proportional to the size of the organization.
| legitster wrote:
| The Mythical Man Month comes to mind as one example.
|
| There are also lots of business plans that promise outrageous
| returns on investment... sometime down the line. But at the end
| of the day your business is never going to be more valuable
| than the amount of money your customers give you minus
| operating costs.
| bvanderveen wrote:
| Attempting to operate in a space where 100x more money than you
| can muster is willing to burn itself operating in the same
| space.
| smitty1110 wrote:
| Brook's Law - "Adding manpower to a late software project makes
| it later."
|
| This applies to all projects, not just software in my
| experience. Everyone thinks you just need to find the right
| expert who will magically just slot right into the team and
| process and hit the ground running. In practice, the people
| worth hiring take 4-6 weeks to get up to speed with the help of
| an existing project member, and the people not worth keeping
| start spewing out code that is ultimately neither helpful nor
| correct the moment they have access to your repo.
| chubot wrote:
| Innovator's dilemma. People you hire will grow the current
| business, rather than sacrifice the current business to find
| and build the next one
| karaterobot wrote:
| When I think of the laws of physics, I think of things which
| are reliable at some meaningful scale, and which can be used to
| make predictions about how things will go in the real world.
| So, to answer your question, no.
| darkteflon wrote:
| > "Scale often has surprising emergent properties"
|
| Hard to read that without smiling.
| DaveFr wrote:
| This is closer to a subtweet than meaningful writing, but I bet
| it's cathartic.
| herval wrote:
| I love when winners turn random chance into a narrative where
| they totally knew what they were doing
| whynotminot wrote:
| What about this makes you say that?
| herval wrote:
| This post is a list of common sense advice (I heard them all
| before), and there's probably no correlation between them and
| success (except for "the right connections", in the first
| item). You can follow this advice top to bottom and still
| fail spectacularly every time. But when people succeed, they
| retell the story - almost always random, like the sudden
| success of chatgpt - into an act of sheer will, where their
| intellect played a central role on beating the odds. As
| history shows us again and again, it's usually revisionism
|
| (Or maybe I'm just bitter, having shut down my startup today)
| whynotminot wrote:
| > (Or maybe I'm just bitter, having shut down my startup
| today)
|
| This was actually the exact vibe I was feeling from your
| post.
|
| And it's ok, I get it. Take a while to be upset and then
| get back out there. I wish you the best of luck in your
| next venture.
| SunghoYahng wrote:
| Then, how about creating 1000 startups and operating them
| in parallel? Since success is mostly luck, it doesn't
| matter how well each one is operated. Therefore, by
| operating 1000 startups, the probability of success can be
| increased to 1000 squared.
| herval wrote:
| That's called being an investor, and yes, your odds of
| success increase exponentially :)
| BerislavLopac wrote:
| This is literally the whole business model of Y
| Combinator.
| dougb5 wrote:
| In his defense, he's literally listing the things he says he
| didn't know.
| swyx wrote:
| obligatory https://xkcd.com/1827/
|
| (i dont agree w the implication that sama is primarily a
| lottery winner, but i just like xkcd)
| secstate wrote:
| I mean, the startup world is not literally a lottery. But any
| post by sama about what it takes to succeed most definitely
| should start with a disclaimer about survivorship bias.
| muglug wrote:
| 18. Be wary of pithy truisms. Success mostly follows from a
| combination good ideas, the right people, and lucky timing.
| impendia wrote:
| > Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get
| other people to fight it too.
|
| I am curious about others' track record doing this.
|
| My employer (a university) recently started enforcing a certain
| rule making us fill out more paperwork. I emailed the person
| responsible, and did my best to be polite, but basically asked
| "Is this really necessary?"
|
| This provoked a very negative response. All I accomplished was to
| generate ill will, to piss off everyone involved (including
| myself), and to take everyone's attention away from their jobs. I
| felt like a fool.
|
| I'm reminded of PG's quote that "rebellion is almost as stupid as
| obedience". To fight bullshit is to focus my mental energy on
| bullshit, and I wonder if it would have been better to make the
| minimum effort needed to comply, and move on. Perhaps others
| fared better?
| whynotminot wrote:
| I think maybe your problem was starting the conversation with
| the form custodian. Their job is the form. They understand the
| form. They like the form.
|
| I think you have to go up a level to have a chance of those
| conversations going anywhere. Someone with a little more
| perspective can go "oh yeah, shoot, good point that concern is
| OBE we really don't need to be using that form."
| askonomm wrote:
| I often call bullshit out when I see it with little regard to
| the consequences, because it just goes against every fiber of
| my being - but when I call it out, I try to show evidence as to
| how it's bullshit, and if possible a better way to approach a
| problem said bullshit is trying to solve. That way I don't just
| tell people I don't like something, I also present evidence as
| to why and potentially a solution. Seems like people are more
| inclined to see your POV this way and not feel attacked.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Fighting is risky, it's damaging, it's hard and you're gonna
| come out bruised.
|
| It's not a fight if someone just says yes.
|
| You might not be properly armed. In that case the correct move
| might be to build your arsenal, recruit allies, etc before
| attacking
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| Well, the rub of that quote (seen in isolation at least) is
| that it's still less stupid.
|
| I think with stuff like this, you can make an earnest attempt
| to understand why it's necessary, but it's on them to, if not
| convince you, at least convince you that they have reasons to
| believe it's necessary.
|
| Everybody has their role to play, and these people are at least
| ostensibly hired so that you don't have to waste your energy
| understanding and problem solving certain things like
| compliance, process, etc. But as someone who's worked in admin
| for some very flat organisations, i.e., organisations with
| allergies to beaurocratic procedure, I've always seen it as
| important that the people subjected to my next brainchild at
| least have a feeling that I know what I'm doing.
|
| I haven't seen the email thread, but failing to do that and
| responding negatively is a failing on their part. That said,
| admin can feel like hearding cats nost days, and sometimes a
| "polite enquiry into the necessity of a procedure" isn't just a
| polite request for clarification, but a threat to make the next
| 6 months of your work a living hell because people refuse to
| follow something you need to get your work done.
|
| So I guess the prescription in those cases is cognitive empathy
| and finding the right tone. On both sides.
| jerf wrote:
| "a university"
|
| Your problem is that you are an indeterminate number of
| iterations deep into people not fighting bureaucracy, and now
| it has completely metastasized. The number of administrators at
| universities is so ludicrously high that I have to imagine on
| some level the vast majority of them are aware of how useless
| they really are, and as such, the removal of bureaucracy is an
| existential threat to their job.
|
| Consider this an object lesson in the importance of preventing
| this systematic failure from occurring as early and as often as
| possible.
|
| In this particular case, yes, the correct choice is to bend
| like the willow and move on with life. Not only can you not
| defeat this process, the rewards for victory would be
| negligible. If the degree of fatalism that seems to entail is
| too much, consider changing jobs. Contrary to the loud people
| on the internet, there are jobs that are not just bureaucratic
| garbage, but you're not going to find them at a university.
| (They do have some jobs that are important by any measure, and
| if you value what you are doing because you have one of them,
| then by all means stay if you like, but they will pretty much
| all be encrusted with garbage as part of the price of entry.)
| impendia wrote:
| > jobs that are not just bureaucratic garbage
|
| I would say that most of my job is very much _not_
| bureaucratic garbage. (I love research and teaching.) I just
| hope it stays that way.
| jerf wrote:
| In that case, I would say this even more suggests bending
| like a willow.
|
| But I would suggest putting your finger in the air every
| year or two. The creep of bureaucratic garbage in the
| university system has been monotonic in the past several
| decades, sadly.
|
| I'm not advising anything I don't do myself; frankly I
| advise _everyone_ to have their finger in the air every
| year or two. Places change. I 've been where I am for quite
| a while, actually, I'm not a job hopper at all, but only
| because my job keeps proving itself to me, not mere
| inertia.
|
| In the meantime, enjoy it as much as you can! I may sound
| really cynical here, but I actually don't mean it that way.
| This is a long-term strategy designed to maximize my
| chances of enjoying my job on a succession of short-term
| bases. Once you have that enjoyable job by all means enjoy
| it, and _hope_ it will continue... just don 't _count_ on
| it continuing.
| adriand wrote:
| I think it's important to understand the context you're
| operating in. Universities are highly bureaucratic
| organizations. This is not an entirely bad thing; we don't
| actually want them to operate like startups (for instance we
| expect them to prioritize longevity over risk-taking: we expect
| them to preserve capital, etc). It doesn't mean you did a bad
| thing - perhaps you were correct, although it's also possible
| that what seems unnecessary to you is necessary for some other
| reason you're not aware of.
|
| What concerns me is that everyone got angry including you. I
| might suggest reflecting on that a little bit. Is there a path
| where you didn't get your way but you also didn't get upset?
| And where you didn't upset anyone else? If not, then accepting
| you work for a bureaucracy is one possibility, and if you
| dislike that, you could work for a nimble startup instead. The
| tradeoff is you won't have a pension. ;)
| impendia wrote:
| > what seems unnecessary to you is necessary for some other
| reason you're not aware of.
|
| In this case this was more-or-less true. As my counterpart in
| HR explained, there are federal government rules mandating
| this bit of bureaucracy. Of course, one can presumably get
| away with ignoring them... but, as it turns out, the rules
| weren't something she made up.
|
| > Is there a path where you didn't get your way but you also
| didn't get upset? And where you didn't upset anyone else?
|
| If her response was "Sorry, I realize this is annoying, but
| [explanation]", then certainly."
|
| Given the tone of her response, then in principle still yes,
| but it seems to require a lot of mental fortitude. Kind of
| like how a skilled boxer can take a punch in the ring and
| remain basically unfazed.
| PandaRider wrote:
| > No.6 Communicate clearly and concisely
|
| I have mixed feelings about this quote because I do not like when
| life writers write high-level statements such as this.
|
| Personally, I prefer very very specific suggestions on preventing
| very very specific problems. For example: How to prevent broken-
| telephone problem when communicating technical topics to an un-
| initiated audience?
|
| 1. Recognize ambiguous pronouns [1]
|
| 2. Distinguish active voice from passive voice
|
| 3. Create helpful lists.
|
| Maybe this is a one-off incident of lack of proof-reading? I
| noticed this SamAltman article didn't have the usual proof
| reading rigor
|
| [1]: https://developers.google.com/tech-writing/one
| mafuyu wrote:
| A list of unactionable aphorisms without context?
| swyx wrote:
| > Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction
| bets; this is easy to say but evidently hard to do. You can
| delete more stuff than you think.
|
| i struggle with this. anyone can macroexpand with tips?
| nequo wrote:
| Sell the house and buy bitcoin I guess. This advice seems to
| assume that high conviction cannot be the result of cognitive
| biases.
| JCharante wrote:
| Why is it flagged? It's a new post
| bananapub wrote:
| can someone please enumerate what so many people like and admire
| about Sam Altman?
|
| as far as I can tell, his career was:
|
| 1. get VC funding for his silly startup, which goes nowhere and
| is shut down 1. get a job at Y Combinator handing out other
| people's money 1. get sacked from Y Combinator for unclear
| reasons 1. get a job at OpenAI as the CEO, not a product or
| engineering person
|
| what particular things has he, personally, done that make him so
| popular and admired on this site?
| SunghoYahng wrote:
| Actually, even if you understand the last item literally, it is
| impressive enough to gain reputation. Why did you put it as the
| last item, thinking it was nothing special?
| mianos wrote:
| > Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be
| measured in weeks.
|
| This makes no sense in the domain they are on. Very few.
| significant things they do takes weeks. Even planning for a
| learning run takes months.
|
| There are a lot if things that can be split into just a few weeks
| for some contrite sprint plan. There are others that take longer
| before realising intermediate results.
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