aiwv

Like you said, Meraki got better because the core team, including engineering and sales as well as the founders, stuck around for about two years. Things did go significantly downhill once the founders left but by that point the company was already so successful that the exodus of great people that followed their departure probably didn't even impact their bottom line that much. I will say that I personally found working for a Cisco subsidiary pretty terrible relative to working for a startup but, hey, the checks cleared.

Yeah, I was astounded by how quickly my singing improved when I started practicing with a metronome. Keeping time seems to me the easiest thing to improve if you focus on it (but that's just my subjective opinion). Once you can keep good time, the rhythm of the song imposes restrictions on you that actually help you figure out how to physically perform the movements demanded by the music and then subsequently groove them so that you can focus on all the other elements of making music.

> If you look up "Victor Wooten Music Lesson" on YouTube

I can't recommend Victor Wooten enough. His book "The Music Lesson" is also great.

> Grinding to make money in your thirties and beyond

I sort of think grinding is generally wrong at any age. If you feel like you're grinding, perhaps it's time to take stock and consider what you could be doing differently so that you don't have to keep grinding to both meet your responsibilities and enjoy life. Of course some might find themselves with enough exigencies they have almost no choice but to grind, but I doubt too many people on HN are really in that boat.

> Knowing what to want to know seems much harder.

This is truly the most important question and one that only you can answer for yourself, unfortunately.

Not only have I never heard of this kind of "handbook" (in spite of having an advanced degree), it isn't clear to me how they actually would be a reliable source of wisdom. It sounds like they are supposed to be a meta-analysis of the current state field, but to take it up a meta-level, who is analyzing the meta-analysis? How do I know the editors didn't just select their friends who have similar viewpoints? In the abstract, a handbook seems as likely to send me wildly astray as it is to send me down the right path. Almost by design, I'd naively expect handbooks to amplify the status quo and discourage more radical ideas (as most institutions are wont to do). This might be good or bad depending on the status quo but either way I'm likely only going to get out wisdom proportional to what I bring in.

> you have to CHANGE THE CODE YOU SHIPPED in order to properly debug it

If I'm at the point where I need to debug a production process with breakpoints, I'd rather just find a new job than worry about my coworker's coding style.

Many if not most "hard" science cultures (math, physics, etc.) have a strong undercurrent of competitive gamesmanship. In its worst form, it becomes about vanquishing your rivals more than it is truly about advancing the human condition. I believe this is a factor in driving many people out of the field, including many extremely talented women. The womanizing is consistent with this culture even if it doesn't always come out directly in lectures or papers.

Also, I have direct experience with this having spent time in some of the most prestigious academic institutions in the US. I can assure you that the culture I'm describing exists. As a postdoc, my supervisor was so insecure that he would go out of his way to undermine me publicly and he was one of the leading scientists in his field and in his 70s at the time. There were also good, generous people, but as the old saying goes a rotten apple can spoil the lot.

> You fault him for not knowing "there's no sex in the Champaign room"

No, I fault him for being an entitled asshole.

> I recommend that you don't look into the sex lives of famous and admirable thinkers through out history.

The greater the man, the greater the shadow. That is why I am reluctant to admire _any_ great person. You are absolutely right that the more you dig, the more you learn how flawed everyone is. My problem is that there is an uncritical deification of Feynman that seeks to whitewash the aspects of his personality that were far less than admirable.

> We take pleasure in out-smarting the our so-called superiors.

And thus mirror exactly the behavior that you don't like about them.

To me, Feynman epitomizes smart but not wise. I cannot hold a candle to him when it comes to understanding the physical laws of nature, but almost nothing I have ever heard from him actually helps me a better human, which is not true of some other great thinkers. YMMV of course.

> Other religions and subcultures didn't manage to make people afraid of speaking their mind on the Internet.

Have you ever heard of gamergate? Do you have any idea what it's like to be a woman on the internet?

Forgiveness doesn't mean that certain behavior was ok. Feynman was a very complicated figure. I find the stories he wrote about going to the strip club in Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman quite disturbing. He quite explicitly dehumanizes the women who work at the club when he realizes that buying them a few drinks isn't enough for sex. He was in his 60s when he published that book. I know that times were different then, but it was rotten when it was published and hasn't aged well. I expect better from someone with his intellectual prowess.

I also find that whenever I read Feynman or watch one of his lectures, it always seems as though the real subject is Feynman himself. In spite of his humble everyman from Brooklyn persona, he always seems intent on reminding you that he is smarter than you are. He always seems to know better than all the idiots out there. I find it very off-putting.

At the same time, I can respect his contributions to physics and his personal genius. He was also clever and quite charismatic. But I wouldn't give my children a copy of Surely you're joking...

Sure, but the lesson isn't necessarily that we should emulate this particular human, genius though he may have been.

The experience of time has as much to do with focus and your capacity to take in information at a given moment. With sports, it is quite possible to play for many years and never gain enough skill to truly play well. When I have had a time slowdown experience, it has often come after a change of approach in which some aspect of the game that previously had been hidden to me is suddenly revealed. I'll never forget the time that I saw two defenders in front of me jumping up for a rebound and I was able to simultaneously see them and the trajectory of the ball and realize that they had jumped in the wrong direction and that I could easily swoop in and claim an easy offensive rebound that I wasn't even planning to go for. It was truly like bullet time in the matrix, but it was also a completely mundane event in a random pickup game with rather mediocre players (including me).

At the absolute highest level, the game plays you as much as you play it. I have the most experience with basketball, but I am certain what I'm going to say applies to other sports, including but not limited to soccer.

With a rhythmic sport like basketball, you can gain a huge advantage over most amateur players by simply learning to play with rhythm. If you can dribble rhythmically, then you free your mind up to focus on the game situation rather than the mechanics of dribbling. It becomes like improvising music. At your rhythm, the game has a pulse. In between beats of the pulse, aka your dribbles, you can analyze the situation and adapt your approach depending on the position of your teammates and the opposition. If your opponents are not playing in rhythm, then they are stagnant and it should be easy to get by them. Even if they are playing in rhythm, if you can play at a faster pace than they are, time effectively slows down for you relative to them because you can make more changes of direction than they can in a given unit of time. When you are at your best, you are simultaneously aggressive and completely passive. You are dictating the terms of engagement, but accepting whatever the game gives you, knowing that you will always have a good option (provided you have developed sufficient skills, which does take practice). This is what I mean when I say the game plays you. There is a reason why we describe great athletes as unconscious and they report having out of body experiences.

Just because you have never experienced this doesn't mean that you never will. I played basketball for more than 20 years before I had the above time slowdown experience. It only came after I had been focusing on rhythm while learning a musical instrument.

I think people like the idea of democracy more than they like actual democracy. On some level, most people would agree that pure democracy as in one person one vote in every organization is ridiculous. Any organization of sufficient complexity cannot possibly be fully understood by all of its members. It would be absurd for example to give full voting rights on strategic direction to a new hire. What I think people actually want is the sense that their voice is heard by the decision makers. They also want the opportunity to advance to the level of decision maker in their particular domain as they gain experience.

The problem that I think most organizations face is that they eventually end up with a strategic decision making level that is impenetrable by the rank and file. The people at this level only hire their friends or promote people who have similar viewpoints to them. This is incredibly demoralizing as well as toxic to the organization because you as a person who is actually doing the work have important context that the strategic leaders don't have and won't listen to.

Solving this problem is one of the more interesting systems problems out there. I'm not aware of any large organization that has truly figured this out (including national governments).

Raises the question whether or not anyone writing this kind of software actually uses it.