Reading up on career-growth

jumping on the trend of folks finishing folios finally https://mikes.cv

@mjbarton_

I f***ing finished it

@lennysan

Never stop talking about your new projects until everyone finds out!

@levelsio

We tell young people in our society that end of the rainbow is retirement at 65. We ought to tell them that "there is going to be this short but beautiful golden window from roughly age 3 to roughly age 12 where your kids are not only easy (comparatively to bottles & diapers), but are going to be these beautiful little creatures and it will pain your heart to be away from them for too long. So, prepare in your 20's, financially and career wise, to build that flexibility into that chapter of your life". You don't get another shot at living the "golden window". And, for me, leaning hard into that golden window has made everything else in my life feel fairly insignificant in comparison. I have made plenty of mistakes as a father, but what I won't have is the regret of having been distracted and absent from these formative years. In some cases, that has required financial sacrifices (declining a particular career opportunity that would have required relocation), but I personally have zero regrets. I also hear from some ambitious & successful people with a 4 year old that say "I've lost my ambition, I am so immersed in fatherhood". At least for me, and a number of my friends, it comes back. You can't keep an ambitious person down and if you have the fire, hanging at a playground on too many Tuesday afternoons is going to feel like torture after too long. My three boys are approaching 13, 11 & 9, and it's much different than 7, 5 & 3. This summer, for example, they slept until 11am and I hard an unencumbered 6am-12pm to work (being on PT helps), then got another great window 7-11pm, but was able to be present in the heart of the day, then weeks when they were at basketball camp, etc. It gets easier, your time frees up again (there's a sadness to that too), but I'm back to working as intensely as I did pre-kids just because my day to day presence requires fewer hours than it did before (also, my wife is just superbly wonderful). And that is the beautiful gift of entrepreneurship (or at least my sort of business), the ability to deliver still a high level of output but work that around your life rather than the opposite. TLDR, grind before, and grind after. Prepare for the golden window.

@FundamentEdge

ok I’m finally getting why people quit their 300k+ Google jobs now

@tiffany_yxy

recommended reading.

@badlogicgames

If I got laid off tomorrow & had to replace my salary asap, here’s exactly what I’d do: 1. Go to Instagram and start a fresh account. Use a spare email. No one has to know.

@Alexie_Ai

If you want a proper remote job this year, you need to get on Reddit immediately. You’ll hardly be broke again once you figure out how it works. If you’re currently job hunting, here’s how to find your next client on Reddit:

@Chioma__Amadi

One of my fave apps I worked on recently is

@iannuttall

A brutal postmortem from an early Airtable employee You don’t often get this level of honesty from insiders Many said it’s still a good outcome but they didn’t invest 8 years of their lives and dreams of something bigger

@KenWattana

You are bored because you are not doing side quests. Life is not just work and lying in bed doing nothing. Here are 50 side quests every man should complete:

@MindMatter28

This year is my 10th year as an entrepreneur. 10 random facts and thoughts: - It took me 2 years to make $1 - 88% of my projects failed - You never know when it’ll work - Once it works, everything is easier - Understand momentum. Ride the waves. - Product market fit, or No - It's a lonely journey - Doing is better than thinking - Failing is better than thinking - Sleep 8 hours. Exercise for 1 hour

@marclou

This is what happens when you obsess over the details.

@hxmzaehsan

Who on your team is doing the job most differently than the before times? Like completely redefining PM, CTO, marketer, etc

@clairevo

If you work on the right thing, you only have to work one hour a week If you work on the wrong thing, you have to work 10 hours a day

@shl

working more on a post about what we learned doing this and how you can apply this to your skills and system prompts

@trq212

Earning Judgment

@addyosmani

excellent

@jack

Fable 5 is so good at web design that I genuinely don't see how web design careers make it past the end of this year. An AI that can one shot designs this good means that the web design industry as a whole is in serious trouble. If you're in web design, it's time to pivot.

@markgadala

Career advice in the age of AI

@philhchen

As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes: 1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship 2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra 3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance 4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit 5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS. A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product: - A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3 - A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5 - A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2 Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?

@bcherny

The 6 MOST valuable skills to learn in the AGENTIC era and how to learn them (clearly explained in 29 minutes)

@gregisenberg

In addition to your own @leerob, every company now needs their own @mattpocockuk. Role: someone who keeps up with every release, model drop, benchmark, loop, skills, paper and changelog. Then distills and briefs the team on Friday. I'm calling it Dev Intel. Who's hiring? :)

@shadcn

People have no idea what's coming with the next generation of kids who are AI native. My youngest teen just started an internship. On the first day he was given a "challenging" two weeks worth of work with very specific objectives, timelines, etc. By 10am the next morning he was done the entire list and asking for more work. They didn't think he could possibly be done. How? He used AI to help (with their permission). And he KNOW how to use AI (he's not using it like a google search bar). These AI native kids are gonna run laps around 25-40 year olds that are not using AI.

@shaneparrish

To All the Folks Who Are About to Be Rich

@joulee

tibo talking about the pain of an earnout is *real*. it was a huge reason i sold baremetrics for "just" $4 million. the fact that i refused to entertain any earnouts or contractual obligations after close immediately killed nearly every offer. i'd sold businesses before and knew that once i was "done" (i.e. willing to sell), that it was over. that every day i was still obligated to work on it would be torture. after spending *decades* being self-employed, working a job because i was contractually required to would kill my soul.

@Shpigford

wondering why I feel exhausted. maybe: the agents do all the easy stuff, and I have to work through the leftover hard bits, which means I'm perpetually locked in. and as the models get better, "my" work just gets harder and harder, until I'm basically underqualified to do the work (which... is better than the alternative, there's nothing left for me to do, and I'm paperclipped).

@threepointone

Spoke with many friends recently, designers and engineers, all people who've been doing it for 20 years or more and had a lot of success doing it. And they all say the same thing. The AI stuff is genuinely useful right now. It's fast and things that used to take a week take an afternoon. Things you never even attempted because there was no time, now you can just do them. It's the biggest enabler ever. But in the same breath, every single one also says that it's the least fun they've ever had in their entire career. They also mention it makes no sense to do it the old way. They're all in. It's a strange paradox which I feel myself. Everything is possible now and I've never cared less about any of it. Both things true at once. Not sure if thats just the feeling of the current moment, or if I just talked to people who're tired of the computer (since all of them been doing it for a long time).

@vanschneider

how to be good at your job - realize this one thing is actually made up of two separate things - realize instead of solving the direct problem you can solve a broader problem - instead of implementing thing, implement other thing that makes it easier to implement thing

@thdxr

Do you guys remember "Scrum Masters"? What was that all about???

@tunguz

"As the cost of writing software drops to zero, I find myself valuing ambition above all else. Unreasonable, unrelenting ambition."

@lennysan

the software rotation is happening don't miss yet another chance at generational wealth

@kevinxu

You can’t outwork the whole world. There’s always going to be someone somewhere willing to work as hard as you. Someone just as hungry. Or hungrier. Assuming you can work harder and longer than someone else is giving yourself too much credit for your effort and not enough for theirs. Putting in 1,001 hours to someone else’s 1,000 isn’t going to tip the scale in your favor. What’s worse is when management holds up certain people as having a great “work ethic” because they’re always around, always available, always working. That’s a terrible example of a work ethic and a great example of someone who’s overworked. A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with. So how do people get ahead if it’s not about outworking everyone else? People make it because they’re talented, they’re lucky, they’re in the right place at the right time, they know how to work with other people, they know how to sell an idea, they know what moves people, they can tell a story, they know which details matter and which don’t, they can see the big and small pictures in every situation, and they know how to do something with an opportunity. And for so many other reasons. So get the outwork myth out of your head. Stop equating work ethic with excessive work hours. Neither is going to get you ahead or help you find calm. [The Outwork Myth — It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work, 2018]

@dhh

I don't know anyone who quit their job to live of savings and built something that made money before their savings run out except @AndreyAzimov I always think it's the wrong way to do it I think you should build something on the side and once it makes equal or more money than your main job or freelance gigs and it's stable, quit the job and switch Being unemployed somehow makes people lazy and feel too relaxed to build something, like your day is fully free of commitments which sounds ideal but freedom isn't when stuff is built I think, you need constraints I had income from my YouTube channel Panda Mix Show in 2013 when I started, and it took over a year before I made enough money to switch Obviously I wish him well but I think better do the switch than hard quit

@levelsio

I'm a financial planner that works with the wealthiest 1% of people in their 30s and 40s I wish everyone understood these 10 critical lessons about finance:

@TKopelman

And we’re hiring across roles.

@karrisaarinen

There is a transition here for people across the workforce: the working world needs fewer measurers and more builders More revenue means there will be more activity and more building, and in the shorter term less measuring

@garrytan

In a way I think the top tech companies have just vacuumed up all the top talent worldwide for such great salaries + equity (for $500K to millions $ per year) And the top tech companies also have built such a great talent acquisition funnel that everyone else in the world who isn't working for top tech is either 1) already rich and retired, 2) a founder already or 3) just not good enough

@levelsio

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

@deedydas

recommended reading by @antirez > I worked 14 hours per day on average. My normal average is 4/6 since early Redis times, but the first few months of Redis were like that. this isnhow i work too, intense bursts followed by a healthier phase. https://antirez.com/news/165

@badlogicgames