cushychicken

Nobody's worth is tied to source code output.

"You put more value on every minute. You do. I mean I always thought I kind of did that. I really always enjoyed myself, but it’s more valuable now. You’re reminded to enjoy every sandwich and every minute of playing with the guys and being with the kids and everything."

I have a t shirt with a photo portrait of Warren with "Enjoy Every Sandwich" on it. I almost always get a comment from a fellow Zevon fan when I wear it.

Plenty of people would have come away from this interaction without the level of introspection the author had, and thought, “Man, that SVP is a jerk.” This can add up into frustration and, given time, turnover.

My claim wasn’t that SVP was ineffective - the point was clearly made and understood.

My claim is that it would have taken slightly more words to get that point across without any reputational downside to the SVP.

Whether that cost is worth paying is a question of culture and style.

You're inferring a lot of emotion into this writing that I simply did not read.

I do think his choice of words was a bit suboptimal. But, it got the point across.

www.onions.com

I’m not usually about hereditary succession, but this is an exception I could get behind.

YC seems to be serving its function perfectly well, if you think of it's function as: "start many venture funded SaaS businesses, with the goal of a small number achieving Unicorn or bigger exits".

Stanford, Harvard, and other elite schools seem to be filling YC's applicant pipeline really handily with smart undergraduates. In a sense, YC is kind of like biz school for startup founders.

The path I see unaddressed: what's the development track for an SMB founder?

YC has the startup/tech company development track pretty well on lock. Traditional MBA programs have the "bigco advancement" track sewn up. How do I learn how to start a small business?

I'd love to eventually start an EE / embedded business on the scale of 5-10 people, ideally selling a niche product to other technical businesses. I have no idea where to start here.

People tend to forget that the US government will pay out the wazoo to achieve things that are one-time successes.

Consider things like Operation IVY BELLS, or Project Azorian.

Now consider that same mindset applied to a long term investment. The possibilities are pretty limitless.

Facts.

Source: me - TS/SCI, several interesting SAPs, contractually bound to not say a word about the details til death.

I know cleared psychologists are a thing. I never tried to speak with one but I’m told demand is high, and the ones out there are typically very oversubscribed.

I may be a bad counter example to this article. I never had to cope with super severe depression or crisis, or conops that would bring me a ton of personal crisis.

I just see a commonality in struggling with not being able to talk about it. Work is too big a part of my life to not be able to discuss it freely. That did cost me something, personally. I’m glad it didn’t cost me anything as dear as what it cost the people in the original article.

The work I did absolutely had positive impact on the world.

People rush to criticize and write off working in the defense sector, but it can be a very rewarding place to work. There are absolutely problems in that sector - bad management and regulatory capture being primary among them. (Ultimately, those are why I left.)

It’s hard to judge accurately from the outside. That’s the nature of classified work: by definition, you can’t know what you’re getting yourself into until you’ve jumped with both feet.