mi100hael

Agreed on the tabs. Not sure what I'm supposed to do when I have more than 1-2 channels I want to view.

When I went to Defcon a few years back, one of the speakers started his talk by saying:

"When I first started coming to Defcon, it was full of hackers and we played spot-the-fed. Now you're all feds and we play spot-the-hacker."

What's your goal with the project?

I built a web app that looked very similar a few years back: friends & family collaboration on a trip plan, itinerary with map view, packing list, notes/journaling, favoriting, private or public with commenting, that sort of thing.

My thesis was that the current common method of trip planning in a shared doc was messy, and a more structured, guided approach would make the process easier for users. And being able to share/show trip plans with others who aren't on the trip would be something people would want to do.

My goal was to scale it and get actual broad adoption, make it a social experience, but even getting a handful of users was an uphill battle.

I found that my thesis was likely wrong for a couple of reasons:

1. The messy shared doc approach had the benefit of being very low-friction. It's easier to just type a bulleted list than to click "add item" and fill out some form fields.

2. Browser usage was (I think) a limiting factor. I'm not sure if it would have worked as a native mobile app, but it definitely wasn't going to work as a web app.

3. When people want to show off their trip or look for travel inspiration, they turn to apps like Instagram and Tiktok. They want visuals with photos/videos, not a list with a map. It's very difficult to create a new purpose-built social network.

I ended up winding it down and moving on.

I don't mean this to be a Dropbox "why are you building this" comment, but more hopefully pointing out a few challenges that exist in the space that you'll likely need to think about if you want to scale.

Likely a bit lower if you're looking like-for-like, but there are trade-offs that make it worthwhile.

Major consulting companies hire everywhere and have offices everywhere. Excepting the last couple of years, which are looking like an anomaly at this point, FAANG requires one to relocate to NYC/SF/Seattle. There are a lot of bright people who can't make that move, so consulting ends up being a good alternative. In non-HCOL markets, consulting pay is usually some of the best.

Unless you make partner, comp is going to be just base + bonus without equity. Even outside of HCOL, base can end up being higher than base at FAANG, which means when FAANG equity is down big like it is right now, the gap narrows.

Partner at a Big-4 or McKinsey/BCG/Bain will reliably pull $1m TC after a year or two. IMO making partner is easier than making FAANG director. PWC and EY both have 3-4,000 partners, for example. McKinsey has 2,700 partners and only 38,000 employees (a good chunk of which are back-office non-billable). Contrast that with the number of L8+ at FAANG which is usually 5-10x fewer, from what I can gather.

Ultimately if you imagine a 28 year old consultant making $170k in Kansas City working remotely with a FAANG team of 24 year olds making $200k in Mountain View, it's quite possible that the consultant is banking more than the FAANG team, and with a different potential trajectory comp-wise.

+2, and National which is owned by Enterprise and allows you to just walk into the garage, get in a car, and drive out. It's the most painless process in the industry.

Ok great. Now I spend all day wishing I was playing chess instead of working.

Your experience at Amazon probably isn't due to the incompetence of others, but due to a difference in alignment.

In the business world, the time of highly motivated, talented engineers is extremely valuable. It doesn't make sense to dedicate any more of their time than necessary for the average internal webapp. Adding automated builds/tests is usually time that's not being spent on more impactful initiatives for the business.

I've noticed that the #1 positive thing I learned from chess is rarely mentioned by others, and I'm not sure why that is. For me it was:

Pattern recognition.

I many cases (at least at the intermediate level), winning/losing games doesn't come down to who can "think three moves ahead," it comes down to whether someone can recognize that a pattern of three moves will result in a particular outcome. It may be a nuance, but it's actually an important one because it eliminates the notion that someone has to be of above-average intelligence and discover new moves on the fly to succeed.

In actuality, that skill of pattern recognition can be practiced, honed, and applied in numerous areas of life. Playing chess is such a pure form of the skill that it opened my eyes to how many other activities can benefit from a similar approach.

Intriguing design and it looks like they've sold enough to see some real-world success, but I can't help but think the headset must be under extreme torque with a 150+ lb person sitting on essentially a large lever.

That and the small wheels don't inspire confidence dealing with the typical curbs & potholes that one is likely to encounter in an urban environment.

What's the use-case for folding bikes like this? Is there a pervasive lack of bike racks in certain places that would necessitate stowing a bike in such small quarters?

You know you can make your window narrower than 4000px, right?

I think people have forgotten how easy it is to set up a traditional server-rendered site with Spring Boot or Django or whatever framework. These days I see people adding a SPA as the default starting approach, which adds an entirely separate additional tech stack & deployable to the mix when it's not usually clear why.