Jobs
Red Flags in Data Science Interviews
Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued
Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer
How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
9 Terms You’ll See In Your Startup Equity Offer—And What They Actually Mean
Liquidation Preference: Your Equity Could Be Worth Millions—Or Nothing
The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation
Things To Know About Engineering Levels
The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)
Data Careers
Cheesy titles on some of these but the content is good.
I don’t know as much as I’d like about woodworking, but my impression is that it is not so much a single discipline as a vast array of specific skills. None of these are particularly difficult by themselves, but knowing which tool or method to use at each stage and carrying out each one cleanly and efficiently takes years of practice. Data carpentry, which I’ve been practicing in one way or another for about 15 years (though never as my official responsibility), is likewise not a single process but a thousand little skills and techniques.
Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice
Don’t End The Week With Nothing
Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems
The prescription must be that if there’s something you want to do a lot of and get good at—like write, or fix bugs—you should try to do it faster.
I’ve done this a few times myself now; start out as an early or first infra engineering hire, build the stack, then build the team, then manage the team, then … leave and start it all over again. I get antsy, I get restless. I start to feel like I know what I’m doing (… a telltale sign something’s wrong). It’s a good cycle for people who like early stage companies, or have ADD. But I don’t see people talking about it as a career path. So I’m here to advocate for it, as an intentional and awesome way of life.
Miscellaneous unsolicited (and possibly biased) career advice
‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups
If you personally want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple months.
Ten Principles for Growth as an Engineer
Learn the Overlaps: Advice for the Aspiring Data Scientist
Breakout List: Career Planning Guide for People in the Technology Industry
How to Build a Data Science Portfolio
One Analyst’s Guide for going from Good to Great
Becoming a Level 3.0 Data Scientist
All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people
Your Career
Hamming, “You and Your Research” (June 6, 1995)
- A phenomenal talk that goes beyond academic research and serves as a guide on how to do great work.
Cargo Cult Science: Some remarks on science, pseudoscience, and learning how to not fool yourself.
- Caltech’s 1974 commencement address.
So I wish to you—I have no more time, so I have just one wish for you—the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.
There are two ways to be comfortable breaking rules: to enjoy breaking them, and to be indifferent to them. I call these two cases being aggressively and passively independent-minded.
The aggressively independent-minded are the naughty ones. Rules don’t merely fail to stop them; breaking rules gives them additional energy. For this sort of person, delight at the sheer audacity of a project sometimes supplies enough activation energy to get it started.
Elitism as the Mid-Career Growth Engine
Technical excellence begins in wonder but is honed by disgust
Strong Opinions, Weakly Held — a framework for thinking
Charlie Munger: The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (Transcript and Audio)
One of my heuristics for growth is to seek out the magicians, and find the magic.
How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)
Sam Altman: How To Be Successful
The Gervais Principle: The Office According to The Office
The Office is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore.
My Journey Towards Authentic Leadership
Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”
Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (109 Models Explained)
Life
A few favorites here…
Books
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)
I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.
Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others.
Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say.
Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck
When should you think that you may be able to do something unusually well?
So far, every time I’ve asked you why someone is acting insane, you’ve claimed that it’s secretly a sane response to someone else acting insane.
Cook free or die.
Blogs
Slate Star Codex, some favorites:
Wait But Why, some favorites:
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Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think
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Why Procrastinators Procrastinate, How to Beat Procrastination, and The Procrastination Matrix
Misc favorites:
Misc Sites
Podcasts / Videos / Talks
This is Water by David Foster Wallace