
Miscellaneous unsolicited (and possibly biased) career advice - heroHACK17
https://erikbern.com/2019/09/12/misc-unsolicited-career-advice.html
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chimi
In summary:

    
    
      network a *lot*
      Choose fast growing organizations
      Choose people you can learn from
      Enter a market with few smart people
      Use your smart connections to dominate that market
    

The key will be entering a market without a lot of smart folks in it, while
also choosing the group _in_ that market that _is_ smart.

The problem is if most folks in a market aren't smart, then those who are
really changing that market look _dumb_ to those already in it, so are the
pioneering minds there smart or re-inventing failed wheels.

~~~
phnofive
Networking is the only staging step on the list, which supports the titular
concern about bias. Every other condensing step requires good judgement and
luck, which isn’t helpful as generic advice.

~~~
algaeontoast
Joining a fast growing org early in your career is a bad idea, doing it as an
intern is indispensable.

Also, networking is vital, however mostly to develop a filter for BS and BS
slingers (money slingers or "rich" people are deceptively good at BS
slinging). I had a friend who would go to meetups and befriend everyone, in my
experience this is not really productive and will lead to being taken
advantage of.

~~~
r00fus
> Joining a fast growing org early in your career is a bad idea, doing it as
> an intern is indispensable.

Isn't being an intern "early in your career"? I don't understand the logic
above.

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goatinaboat
No, being an intern is prior to your career beginning.

If you are a junior engineer in a fast growing org you will work your ass off,
being forced to cut corners to ship quickly, then rather than promote you the
org will simply hire people above you. And you will find that what you learned
was not a solid foundation to move onwards.

~~~
throwthrowthro
> then rather than promote you the org will simply hire people above you. And
> you will find that what you learned was not a solid foundation to move
> onwards.

Anecdata: junior engineer going through this process right now. Hard to move
to a new company due to the specificity of the skills I developed and can't
move up as they just bring in new people.

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ropiwqefjnpoa
This one I think is valuable for all ages: "When you’re young, care more about
building human quickly and not so much about financial capital. The human
capital will pay much larger dividends over your lifetime."

I've worked from home quite a bit over the past few years and I've begun to
notice it affecting my personal/communication skills. I'm actually trying to
get back into the office more often.

~~~
algaeontoast
Having worked remotely for a startup and within a really nice office for a
corporate hell hole, I'm now convinced that the best balance for productivity
/ sanity for me is in-office 4 days a week with a handful of remote days.

When I was fully remote, after a few weeks I joined a really unique co-working
space that was really more of a social club (Hall Boston - now defunct for any
curious). It was a really special place, but in hindsight I didn't get much
work done when I was focusing there. However, gives me hope for a resurgence
of community driven social clubs for city dwellers and entrepreneurial types.

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SamuelAdams
> Statistics. Seriously, I really wish I had studied more of it in school.
> Basically goes for anyone in the STEM field, IMO.

I really wish more people invested in statistics and data analysis classes.
People take you more seriously in a business setting when you can say "Email A
resulted in a response rate of 80%". I usually hear "We think Email A is
better because we feel it in our gut".

Ok, not those words exactly, but that's the point. Looking at data,
understanding it, and directly applying it to your job is a hugely underrated
skill.

~~~
cosmie
I went to school for statistics, and work in "analytics" (a catch all term for
anything from basic reporting to analytics infrastructure to conversion rate
optimization experiments).

You're absolutely right in that people tend to take you more seriously if you
come with numbers. But it's such a kangaroo court[1] that it drives me nuts.
The instrumentation and implementation to support that sort of data-driven
approach is usually far too lacking to give it the amount of merit it
receives. Once you take do a first principle's sanity check of things, you
learn that no one on the business side has a solid understanding of what
"response rate" is actually referring to. Then when you look at the technical
implementation, you realize that there's little reconciliation between what
it's _actually_ representative of and what anyone on the business side think
it's representative of.

Never underestimate someone's gut feeling, especially so if it's from an
individual in the trenches. More often than not, dissonance between gut
feelings and data point to an issue with the data. Not necessarily that the
data is wrong, just that it isn't fully representative of the context it's
being collected in and should be trusted accordingly.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_court](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_court)

~~~
commandlinefan
Any recommendations for somebody who ignored stats more than he should have as
an undergraduate and wants to try to catch up? I've gone through and worked
all of the exercises in my old calculus textbook so I have a good (fresh)
handle on calculus now. Where's the best place to go next?

~~~
roel_v
For years I thought I had to do it the way the big boys do, studying
university text books and referencing papers in the field and putting a bunch
of mathematical notation in my designs and emails. While also knowing all the
foundations underneath. Unsurprisingly, that didn't really go anywhere, except
hours lost fiddling with Word's equation editor (or worse, Latex).

What _did_ help me was reading a few (really a few - just 2 or 3) simple,
applied books; a 'statistics for dummies' (literally, the 'for dummies' book),
a textbook used in undergrad business courses ('<something something> business
analytics' I think?) and a book that applied all the stats to the field I was
working on at the time (transportation modeling). Just being able to apply a
linear regression (as in, actually being able to estimate the parameter on a
single regressor in a simple data set) got me much further than all the times
I thought 'whoops, getting into optimization now, better put this aside and
first get a graduate level understanding of linear algebra'. And in a week
instead of 2 years, too - quite important to keep your motivation up when
you're not a full time student any more.

So while the above is not 'advice', it is my personal experience that when
learning applied maths at a later age, it was better for me to focus on
application and taking shortcuts even if that meant not fully knowing or
understanding what was happening underneath - as intellectually unsatisfying
and 'dirty' that felt at the time.

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bjornsing
I think this fear is based on a huge overestimation of the marginal utility of
raw intelligence in the political/power field. When there’s a coup somewhere
it’s usually not the math department that rolls triumphantly through town.
Oppenheimer was a superintelligence compared to his rivals in the military
industrial complex, and we know how that turned out. I could go on, but you
get the point.

I think what we should be more worried about is the power dynamics/balance
between groups of people in society. The relatively morally bankrupt “power
people” within the military still needed the cooperation of people like
Oppenheimer to get their hands on the bomb. That constraint could soon be
gone...

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peter_l_downs
I would highly recommend subscribing to Erik's rss feed or email drip or
whatever, his blog posts are always high quality and have been very useful to
me when it comes to "career thinking." And fun fact, he wrote Annoy, which is
damn good software.

[https://github.com/spotify/annoy](https://github.com/spotify/annoy)

[https://erikbern.com/2018/02/15/new-benchmarks-for-
approxima...](https://erikbern.com/2018/02/15/new-benchmarks-for-approximate-
nearest-neighbors.html)

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silentsea90
What are fast growing orgs/industries of today?

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joshuaellinger
upvote for learning stats. very valuable.

