> To improve the quality of your idea conversations be picky about who you discuss ideas with.
I’ve now mostly figured out the right balance for me to do this in real life. Where I struggle is with conversations online. I think one reason HN has such a high quality of conversations, compared with other forums, is most people here are motivated by finding the truth behind ideas. Twitter, for example, is at the opposite end. It feels like a firehose of conflicting motives coming at me at once. The only solution I’ve found there is to stay logged out most of the time.
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To improve the quality of your idea conversations be picky about who you discuss ideas with.
I’ve now mostly figured out the right balance for me to do this in real life. Where I struggle is with conversations online. I think one reason HN has such a high quality of conversations, compared with other forums, is most people here are motivated by finding the truth behind ideas. Twitter, for example, is at the opposite end. It feels like a firehose of conflicting motives coming at me at once. The only solution I’ve found there is to stay logged out most of the time.
In what ways does it seems the motivations and goals have changed? I’m particularly interested in this as I just rejoined YC as a partner after running a startup for five years. I first joined as a partner 10 years ago.
For starters, back in the day, YC was mostly seen as a place anyone could get funding and build a great company whether or not they had a great network. Nowadays, it seems more and more like having that network is the primary thing that gets you in YC.
(Not a criticism, and I can see the merits of that choice. But, when I talk to my friends about YC that usually comes up.)
I'm not sure where that belief would come from. YC only takes online applications, rather than getting introductions to founders like most investors do. When we're reading an application, we wouldn't even know if the founders have a big network or not.
> YC was mostly seen as a place anyone could get funding and build a great company whether or not they had a great network.
that's likely because before the success, there was no way anyone with the network would come to YC as a first port of call. And with technical partners able to judge the incoming seed company on the merits the founders themselves, YC managed to pick the successful ones (mostly - obviously there are failures).
When the success of YC's model became so prominent that it is a culture all on its own, the technical partners no longer work the same way as the old way. I don't think it's possible. So network, and human capital is used as a filter, rather than deal with the massive amounts of no-name people.
> Nowadays, it seems more and more like having that network is the primary thing that gets you in YC.
They can’t really afford that model, that’s why funding is being slashed: insiders successful in the 2010s are not better poised to be successful in the 2020s than outsiders, even if network and critical mass help them raise and burn money to have a more structured shot.
I've been founding and investing in startups for over a decade now, so I know that founder transitions are inevitable as a company grows. This is one of the instances where having "startup experience" helped me a lot with thinking through the different options and picking the right one. I'd be happy to talk with anyone who is thinking through their role as a founder.
Marissa described possibly the most thorough and analytical job search process I've heard from anyone, when she was talking about how she joined Google. I really liked her reflection on this in hindsight on how being overly analytical is dangerous and it's something I try to remind myself of when I'm in danger of overthinking a decision:
"I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up with. They look at things as if there’s a right answer and a wrong answer when, the truth is, there’s often just good choices, and maybe a great choice in there."
Too much focus on utility functions, not enough focus on novelty functions, even though it's been proven that utility functions decline in usefulness as a search space expands. Given an infinite search space, a utility function can only find local optima, there is no global optima. In such situations, a novelty function that finds a path from one happy local optima to another happy local optima is a better bet than using a utility function.
The above paragraph is rational, and yet people who consider themselves hyper rational often ignore the truth of this. And the irony is that some of them do this for an emotional reason: they want the security that comes from believing that there is an absolute right answer. They are irrationally rational.
Here's a simple counterexample to what I understand your theorem to say: consider an infinite search space: 𝕽∞ and a utility function: 1-|x|. There's a single global optimum at (0, ...), and the gradient of the utility function would find it quickly.
Counter example: R^1 with a random function. There is no algorithm that can find a global maximum other than checking every point in R^1, of which there is an uncountable number.
Not all cost surfaces are equally likely to occur in real problems...
Also depends on the constraints, linear assignment (i.e. one job to one worker with a big matrix of cost for job to worker and you minimize the sum) has a polynomial complexity solution.
We are not talking about real problems here. Reality is so far from linear, so path dependent, so temporally dependent that by the time you gather 10 data points to try and match some function to the function is already outdated and error prone.
This is infinitely truer for when you try and find absolute maxima and minima and not just local ones.
Sure, some functions have no global maximum. But the comment I replied to claimed a theorem that every utility function on infinite search space has no global maximum, which isn't true.
All models are wrong, some are useful. GP presents an interesting way of framing real life decision making processes. That it happens to not be 100% accurate in all aspects is mostly trivia.
I understand the point you're making, but these gross assumptions aren't how the world works. Reminds me of econ models with ridiculous assumptions that don't pan out when reality is a constraint.
Doesn't matter. A 50 dimensional search space with 1000 possible values in each dimension has ~10^1700 possible states. That's a number you can't search exhaustively in the age of the universe even if you turned the whole thing into one computer. And this is not a large problem, you run into similar ones in the average gear wheel design.
As someone who feels they're from the outside looking in (left college to work, still ended up in the technology but without a traditional college education) one of the most frustrating things is watch folks who I perceive as traditionally trained CS and similar folks ... is their desire to go hyper analytical ... and then REALLY commit to the result as the best choice above all others because of whatever analysis they made.
Now granted there are time to hunker down and commit but sometimes all that data doesn't really tell you anything and you're still facing an unknown no matter how much work you do, and it might be worth thinking about it after taking a few steps down that road / experience. It's not uncommon to come across a variable(s) that plays a far stronger role than any other, only AFTER you tried doing something.
For hyper analytical folks the data on hand is the hammer for every nail it seems sometimes.
Even without unknowns people elevating rationality to something that would in consequence just be horrible for everyone. Shouldn't be too hard to see if you follow through with the consideration.
Hard data also suggest how often the allegedly rational result suddenly became wrong. The rational conclusion here should be to decrease hubris then, shouldn't it? Nope...
I wonder if they recognize that luck plays a significant role. Right place, right time sometimes matters more than anything you can predict or control.
> "I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up with. They look at things as if there’s a right answer and a wrong answer when, the truth is, there’s often just good choices, and maybe a great choice in there."
This absolutely drives me crazy in design/engineering decisions. Very commonly there are a lot of good solutions and one great one, and the good ones are good enough. Yet all the brilliant intellectuals want to find the VERY BEST METHOD EVER instead of just getting stuff done.
> Yet all the brilliant intellectuals want to find the VERY BEST METHOD EVER instead of just getting stuff done.
For many mathematical, CS problems, it _does_ help to think very hard to find the very best solution to the problem, sometimes irrationally hard. I do agree that we operate in a real world, and the facts of running a business mean that you can't be spending all your time trying to figure out the best.
However, it was only by thinking very, very deeply about these problems have many of the technological improvements been possible. MapReduce, AI, ML, Cloud Computing... all started as ideas in companies where people dedicate quite a bit of thought into how to solve some basic problems.
I'll be honest: I am glad that I can reap the fruits of the labor of all these smart people, that they have enabled me to change the way computing is done, to make it easier for anyone to get started and to generate value very quickly, using the building blocks which they created after thinking about and working about this for so long.
Do an anesthesiology residency. I love how, when residents with engineering backgrounds as undergrads run up against the immutable fact of 5 minutes of hypoxia = brain death, they quickly abandon their old way of thinking in which finding the optimal solution is paramount in favor of whatever works, however kludgy.
This used to drive me nuts too. Now I just look at it as an opportunity to outmaneuver folks who are too wedded to making their solution ‘perfect.’ (Whatever that means.)
Sheryl Sandberg described a similarly thorough weighing of her decision to join Google.
Mayer: "I had a long analytical evening with a friend of mine where we looked at all the job offers I had received. We created a giant matrix with one row per job offer and one column per value. We compared everything from the basics like cash and stock to where I'd be living, happiness factor, and trajectory factor—all of these different elements. And so we went to work analyzing this problem."
Sandberg: "After a while I had a few offers and I had to make a decision, so what did I do? I am MBA trained, so I made a spreadsheet. I listed my jobs in the columns and my criteria in the rows, and compared the companies and the missions and the roles."
It's a fun bit of trivia that Sandberg put the criteria in the rows, which enables sorting the criteria - a nice way to see the upsides and downsides of each choice.
I'm referring to comparing your existing job to a new one. Everyone does this and it can't be rare.
You have to look at quality of work, work life balance, the area, commute time, cost of living, salary, 401k match, benefits, chance of advancement, company culture, job safety, bonus amount, job security...etc. For a lot of people the choice is a no-brainer, but there are comparable and even worse jobs out there.
I apologise for the seemingly privledged attitude, but I'm assuming most on HN are Software Developers, Engineers, Mathematicians, and Scientists which generally have options and change jobs on occasion. Every single person who changed has done a pro/con comparison. Even if it was a no-brainier, the comparison would've taken place subconsciously.
You shouldn’t apologise for a personal attack, whether on the internet or in person. Anyone who says you’re privileged is your enemy, at worst, and completely indifferent to your welfare at best.
The issue is that almost all the factors you mentioned- quality of work, work-life balance, chance of advancement, company culture... - are all aspects you can only have the vaguest of ideas about before you start in a new company. And a mistaken evaluation of even a single one of them can change completely the score of the offer.
Not 100% true. It depends on the industry, but I have a pretty good idea of the good and bad of many of our competitors. You're right that some of those factors are fuzzy.
I guess that’s more a factor of graduating from Stanford at that location at that point in time than it is of their personal ability to receive multiple offers (not completely unrelated of course).
"I had a long analytical evening with a friend of mine where we looked at all the job offers I had received. We created a giant matrix with one row per job offer and one column per value"
I think this is a luxury problem. How many people have competing job offers that are even close to each other in attractiveness?
Agreed. I think for most people here the risk is the indecision rather than the wrong decision. For a lot of people there's a deathly fear of ending up under a bridge, and while that's undoubtably true for many people unfortunately, I'd wager most people here have a lot more runway than they'd think even.
It's funny, this is the nugget of wisdom that stood out to me as well. I waste so much time in my daily life trying to make the "perfect" decision, when choosing something good and moving on would be a much better use of my time.
A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week. - George S. Patton
I think about this quote a lot. It's so easy to get trapped in analysis paralysis which is really just procrastinating a decision. Like most things, there is a balance. Notice he says 'good' plan, not any plan.
The trick is training yourself to separate out the shit plans from the good plans. Otherwise, you’re violently crossing the Isonzo river for the 9th time and violently dying.
So, don’t be McClellan, but don’t be Cadorna either.
But that's an entirely analytical way of thinking about it! You're looking at the decision process and asking if the marginal return on investing another unit of time in it, in terms of the improvement of the goodness of the selected outcome, is greater than the return on using that unit of time in some other way.
The very term "overthinking" implies that there's a right amount of thinking for any decision, so your real problem is working out how much thinking to do.
I've said something similar when mentoring engineering managers about how to let go of certain decision making. 90% of the decisions a team makes will have very little impact on the success of the project, but the other 10% do. You only learn from experience which decisions are the 90% and which decisions are the 10%.
It's how leaders need to operate to survive if they want to avoid micromanaging, honestly.
I'm going to reveal myself as entirely too geeky here, but my primary complaint about this approach is that it relies on a linear scale for evaluating utility, when much research suggests that utility curves are frequently logarithmic. (Example: Going from earning $20k to $100k per year is a huge difference with substantial implications for financial security, but $1m to $1.08m has a substantially lower impact.)
One could argue this article looks at a restricted range where the log behaves more lineary, but if we're going to apply mathematical modeling to our life choices, ... :-)
Yes, I agree - it was nice to hear her iterate that. I have learnt the exact same thing in my two decades as an adult: it doesn't matter really in the end what decision you make, it's how you make it work (and you do have to work at it).
Seem like one of those in group type biases. Where the more similar something is the more we obsesses over the differences. Presumably because we can relate to a lot more of the information.
Somewhat ironically being irrational can actually be a good way to make unknown, but largely equal, decisions. Because at least you picked something with conviction, rather than having analyzed the situation incorrectly.
Of course for a lot of us good choices aren't the problem so much as the downside. I remember someone made a calculator online for how many time one would most likely see their parents before they died.
Rather than treating predicting startup success as an intractable problem, I think anyone considering joining a startup should act like a startup investor making a bet on how much the value of equity in that startup will grow over time. Startup investors do this for a living and that's essentially what you are too. You're investing your time and they are investing money.
Hrm, the parallel feels really forced to me. You can invest money in multiple startups at the same time, to hedge your bets. You can't do that with your time if you plan on working full-time.
Its not even about hedging but about diversification. If you are in a position where you can't diversify fully, you should require a higher return on investment in order to take on the risk.
For example. If you could bet on a coin flip 100k times at $1 a bet, you might be willing to accept getting paid $1.01 per win. But if you had to bet $100k on a single coin flip, you would likely need the payout to be much greater before you were willing to take the bet.
Both are viable strategies. You diversify when you spend time working for startups across different sectors in the hope that some might succeed in their own area. You hedge when you work for several competitors in the same area in the hope that one of them will win in the end.
Considering how long you would have to stay to get anything from an equity event (4-8 yrs?) you realistically can't work for 10 startups. If you luck out and work for one that does have some success, you will probably find that, unlike a VC, you don't have "2X preferences" or an anti-dilution arrangement so you get nothing or next to nothing.
In the meantime you may have traded your youth for magic beans - putting off things like getting a house, a girlfriend, etc because you are working long hours for sub-market pay. That is the real tragedy.
If you look at total comp as a function of preferred investment price - exercise price, startup employees are underpaid left relative to big company / deck orb employees (or in other words, are overpaying for shares relative to investors). This is of course not considering any risk premium that employees would have due to inability to diversify.
Do you believe prospective employees, often with little experience in the startup world, can do a better job of picking winners than VCs can?
Actually, what startup investors do for a living is convince rich people that they can accurately bet on the growth of the equity value. This is different from actually accurately betting on the growth of the equity value. VC firm profits can come from fees -- they don't necessarily reflect the performance of the underlying investment.
Working with Paul is one of the things I miss most about working at YC. Besides being interesting to talk to about pretty much any topic, I remember analyzing the data on how accurate YC partners were at reviewing applications to YC and Paul being top despite spending the least amount of time reading each one.
In addition to already seeing an increasing number of engineers from both Seattle and Los Angeles applying to Triplebyte, two other trends drove our decision to open up in these two locations.
First we've seen a continual drop in the number of Seattle based engineers who are willing to relocate to the Bay Area. It's dropped by over half since the start of the year and it's the first sustained drop we've seen since starting Triplebyte in 2015.
Second, we've seen an increasing number of Bay Area engineers interested in moving to Los Angeles even as the average software engineer salaries in the Bay Area continue to grow.
As someone who moved halfway across the world and left family/friends to move to the Bay Area, it makes me sad to see how it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to move here. I believe this is the biggest threat to Silicon Valley's dominance as the center of the technology industry.
Why sad? I think it's great. It's awesome that folks can stay where their families are, where they want to live, and participate in this awesome industry. It's going to bring so much more wealth to other parts of the world. We should celebrate that.
Congrats on expanding, looking forward to when you come to the midwest!
> Why sad? I think it's great. It's awesome that folks can stay where their families are, where they want to live, and participate in this awesome industry.
In my case, the problem is needing to move away from where my friends & family are, because the bay area has gotten too expensive due mostly to the lack of housing. Given a choice, I'd rather be here.
It's sad because the cost of living is eliminating choice. It's great if you want to stay wherever you are and have a fulfilling life there. But it's still sad if someone else wants to move to the Bay Area and can't because prices have gotten out of control.
> As someone who moved halfway across the world and left family/friends to move to the Bay Area, it makes me sad to see how it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to move here. I believe this is the biggest thread to Silicon Valley's dominance as the center of the technology industry.
Yes, 100% this. The Bay Area's loss is rest-of-world's gain, so I suppose it's fine in that sense. But it's still really sad to see such completely and utter failure of leadership from our local politicians on housing, and our federal politicians on immigration.
As a person in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle-Vancouver area) it would require a truly ridiculous amount of money to convince me to live in the SF Bay/South Bay area, and physically commute to an office 5 days a week.
Considering the cost of California income taxes, housing costs, etc.
Vancouver has an insane housing market but it is still possible to buy a nice 2BD condo in a concrete high-rise building for a relatively reasonable price, that a couple with two professional level salaries can afford.
>> Vancouver has an insane housing market but it is still possible to buy a nice 2BD condo in a concrete high-rise building for a relatively reasonable price, that a couple with two professional level salaries can afford.
Yes, but is this the pinnacle we should aspire to reach?
2 professional salaries to eventually own a 2br condo somewhere in the lower mainland?
Vancouver and Toronto have a comparable ratio of salary to home costs as many of the hottest US locales right now. I don't see how it's a sustainable way to grow a city...
No, it's not ideal, but for my personal lifestyle choices I have no desire to deal with yard maintenance and tasks related to owning a regular single family home, whether in the city limits of Vancouver/Burnaby or in a suburb. I like being very close to the center of downtown and being able to walk most places, or take the Skytrain.
Vancouver is a much more pedestrian and transit friendly city than Seattle or anywhere else in the US outside of Manhattan.
When I compare what $700,000 (USD) buys in the south bay vs what $700,000 converted into Canadian at an exchange rate of 1.29 can buy, Vancouver still comes out way ahead.
Vancouver technology industry salaries are, sadly, significantly lower than Seattle or Bay area, or other large cities in the US (Chicago, Dallas, NY). There's a reason why so many Canadians leave to work in the US.
Yeah, moving out of Bay Area sounds more and more reasonable now. I wonder if salaries in Vancouver would match that in Seattle. Both of them are very interesting cities to move to
This is accurate. The tech industry is really anemic in Vancouver, to the extent that people consider HootSuite a "big deal" and it's mentioned in the local media as an example of a big, successful company. The total number of employers with >15 staff doing something IT/Networking/Software Development/Internet related is a lot lower in Vancouver.
I always wonder why the Stripes (and similar) of the world don't build engineering outposts in LA. It seems like it would get them access to large pools of devs in the same time zone and just a short flight from the main office in SF.
The FAANG of the world do it, but any idea why it's not more common with midsize or large startups.
Harj, I'm curious, what's involved in "launching a city" for Triplebyte? Why not accept candidates from anywhere? From an employer's perspective, I would love your service in Toronto.
Many of my friends from the Bay Area have been moving down to Los Angeles. Better weather, larger city, and booming tech opportunities - although CoL is still somewhat high compared to Seattle/etc
I moved to Seattle from the Bay Area 4 years ago. Uprooting my family aside, it would take a phenomenal opportunity to get me to move back, even though I loved it there and still miss it.
Hopefully you get over to Boston soon. It looks like you've got an actually decent recruiting process, but the Bay Area, LA and NYC are not places I would ever go live, for love or money, and while Seattle is charming, it's way the heck across the other side of the world.
> it makes me sad to see how it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to move here. I believe this is the biggest threat to Silicon Valley's dominance as the center of the technology industry
Absolutely. Highest income tax in the nation, couple with some of the highest cost of living in the world.
SV is in big trouble once more non-SV companies start paying comp that is competitive with SV.
This is already happening and I know several great engineers who preferred offers for the same or slightly lower comp outside of SV.
The trend will be strongest among senior and veteran engineers, since buying a decent house and raising a family is virtually non-affordable in SV.
Especially since SV was never great about paying extra for senior and experienced engineers. They're going to have a serious problem when the only people willing to relocate to SV are fresh grads willing to live with roommates.
California has benefited immensely from SV growing in its backyard, but now that this fortunate growth needs some tending, California is just shrugging its shoulders, and in some cases making it worse (e.g. NIMBY laws in SF preventing new construction).
I agree hearing what sounds like a pre-prepared, generic spiel about the company isn't very effective. That's why I suggest hiring managers/recruiters ask the candidate what they're looking for first and then talk about how the company fits into that (or not).
Being able to tailor the pitch on the fly like that is what we've seen be the difference between average and great recruiters.
I used to write rejection emails for companies at the end of YC interview days. It always sucked, especially when it was borderline decision (which it often was) but PG made doing these well an important part of internal YC culture. We couldn't leave until they were finished and each one was reviewed by another partner before sending.
In hindsight I'm glad we did this. In the years since I've had multiple people tell me the rejection was a positive turning point and the only honest feedback they'd received.
I’ve now mostly figured out the right balance for me to do this in real life. Where I struggle is with conversations online. I think one reason HN has such a high quality of conversations, compared with other forums, is most people here are motivated by finding the truth behind ideas. Twitter, for example, is at the opposite end. It feels like a firehose of conflicting motives coming at me at once. The only solution I’ve found there is to stay logged out most of the time. reply