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.
> 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.
Investing time early on can permanently change your trajectory.
My experience has been that "grinding" has very big returns. When you're starting out, putting in 2x more time gets you way more than 2x returns over the same period of time.
Personally I'm happy to "grind" for a few years at the start of my career to set myself up for the rest of my life.
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.
I've never seen a handbook that led anyone "wildly astray". They're put out by major academic publishers (Oxford, Routledge, etc.) who hire (publishing) editors qualified to select qualified (academic) editors to select qualified chapter contributors. It's not like they're randos self-publishing or something.
The entire point is to be a fairly neutral, comprehensive state of whatever field or subfield the handbook covers. And they generally do a pretty good job. A place like Oxford is never going to publish a handbook that's trying to push some ideological agenda and ignoring half the field.
But if you don't trust the senior editors at major academic presses, then I don't know what to tell you.
And since you've never heard of handbooks, see my peer comment with links so you can see they exist. :)
Is that advanced degree an academic oriented one or industry oriented?
People on the academic oriented degrees tend to use them a lot. But industry oriented degrees tend to stick with textbooks. (By the way, yes, textbooks are the other kind where you can find wisdom. Normally in an easier to get, more condensed form, but of an older kind.)
About who selects the books, well, who tells you if a book is any good? Some have very radical untested ideas, others stick to older but proven ones. You decide what book to get.
>People on the academic oriented degrees tend to use them a lot.
Are you from the EU? Becuase having been in US STEM graduate programs in 2 different fields I have never come across such a handbook or know anyone who has. It's certainly not common in the US.
If there are different schools within a field, every one of them might have a handbook (so you might have a handbook on linguistic typology, and on the other hand a handbook on generative grammar - although often the topics are even more narrow), so they still are useful to get a survey of the land even when there are different schools of thought. I also do not at all share your sense that all science is crazy antagonistic and political in the sense that "institutions discourage radical ideas" - maybe that's true of some fields, but definitely not all of them (for example, the idea makes no sense at all for mathematics). Even when different opinions and schools of thought exist that doesn't necessarily mean that there's nothing that people can agree on.
But more concretely, you can just look up the authors that contributed to the handbook and if you do indeed have a degree in the field, you'll probably recognise them and their affiliations and will be able to know (or at least look up) what tradition they belong to and what this implies for the handbook.
> 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.
Yes. It's what arguably started (this iteration of) this insanity. And it's very much "the wokes" GP was referring to, not "other religions and subcultures".
> Do you have any idea what it's like to be a woman on the internet?
No. I have some idea based on what I've been told by women close to me, but it's obviously a small sample limited by age and geography.
Just to echo gp, America Christians have recently overturned roe. That is much worse from an individual freedom perspective than being forced by your employer to watch a video about how all white people should feel guilty of their white privilege.
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...
> 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.
You fault him for not knowing "there's no sex in the Champaign room"
> I expect better from someone with his intellectual prowess.
I recommend that you don't look into the sex lives of famous and admirable thinkers through out history.
> He always seems to know better than all the idiots out there.
He's a working class guy as am I. This is an essential conceit and source of humor for many of us. We take pleasure in out-smarting the our so-called superiors.
> 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.
What are some instances of people en-masse trying to emulate a scientist's womanizing or similar traits? What I mean to say is, the problem we're trying to solve/avoid - does it actually exist, ever?
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.
