caffeine

I read this as tongue-in-cheek.

The author was amused at his younger self’s naïveté and entitlement in assuming such a raise was a given and planning it on a timeline app.

So I think you are actually in agreement.

> There are things in life more important than money.

Not only this, but I think even in purely self-interested financial terms your ethical approach is superior over the long term.

Over time, truth and honesty offer a compounding positive spiral.

You make better decisions because a) the inputs are free of lies and b) you make them carefully knowing you will own the consequences.

Reputationally you garner trust which makes possibilities available to you (collaboration, quid pro quo, and low-friction litigation-fee business relationships) that are not open to unethical people.

My advice is, watch your costs. When you leave paying work it’s easy to think the slug you’ve got in the bank will last a while.

But traction will take 2-3x longer than you think, and an unexpected stream of “one-offs” will eat your runway.

So be extremely conservative on costs from the very beginning.

To be fair, all the other interview rounds were with more junior, low-EQ CS nerds like me, so he could still be pretty confident the candidate would get a good grilling.

I’m finding this more useful as a reverse search!

“Paid, supported, professional alternative to”

This is a random place to throw this at you, but you seem like you have a) the skills and b) and the motivation.

The internet needs an “allowlist” front end for kids, especially for video platforms.

I would pay $20/month for a family subscription to a front end app for Netflix and YouTube that lets me allowlist shows and channels, and never lets Netflix or Youtube AI choose what to show my kids next.

Netflix in particular is extremely subversive. I have seen it stop a show mid-episode to suggest a new show to my 6yo - which is clearly aimed at slightly more mature audiences, and is therefore more exciting/scary for my daughter.

The AI is constantly pushing her toward more mature content even if she doesn’t choose it. And there is NO WAY to stop it other than just get rid of Netflix entirely, but they also have by far the best content for kids.

Anyway, a browser with proper kids controls, good UX for the parents, and especially the ability to filter/block the closed video platforms, would be huge.

I would think that as you grow, economies of scale will kick in and the cost per search should go way, way down.

WhatsApp is probably their best property.

At my old job in the UK, we always got better results hiring engineers from Imperial College (which is the UK attempt at an MIT/Caltech-type of school) than from Oxbridge.

We eventually figured out that the Imperial students had written thousands and thousands of lines of code by the time they graduated, in several different types of languages (Prolog, Haskell, C, Verilog, Java, Python, Javascript) and at all levels of the stack (they were writing drivers, theorem provers, machine learning code, games, web apps, etc.). The students had been using Linux as their daily driver for 4 years, the command line experience of ssh/git/grep and the rest of it was native for them.

The Oxbridge students had done a lot of hardcore mathematics and a lot of proofs of theoretical computer science concepts. Brutally difficult.

But the Imperial students would roll in, sit down, and within a few weeks (after we taught them about tests) would be pounding out large swaths of working code.

The Oxbridge students would start to get stuck once their programs hit 1000 lines, and would spend days refactoring little functions and making things pretty rather than just getting stuff done. They simply had never dealt with large, real-world code before.

It’s factual, but I think it’s there because it sounds exotic and makes the title more interesting.

> know deep down this is bad for the long term

It’s bad for your sense of self-worth, even if it’s not objectively a bad thing.

One day you might ask yourself “Where would I be if I went all-in on something exciting rather than just putting 10% effort into my work for all those years?”

Consider taking a longish holiday (like 3 weeks)? If at the end of it you don’t want to come back, quit. But that might be long enough to scratch the itch and feel refreshed.

I was a younger, inexperienced tech lead sitting in on an interview led by an engineer about 10 years older than me.

I was shocked when he spent the whole hour asking soft questions like “So describe your previous team structure. How did ideas and plans arise? Who took responsibility? How was conflict resolved? What were your impressions?”

I always went hard on technical stuff when interviewing, was always worried that an incompetent would sneak through.

I asked the senior engineer his rationale. He told me “This guy went to X school and got Y degree and worked at Z company. So I know he’s smart enough. And I can teach him to write good software. But I can never teach him not to be a prick.”