
Climbing the wrong hill (2009) - 666_howitzer
http://cdixon.org/2009/09/19/climbing-the-wrong-hill/
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jacknews
Indeed, talented, and fully energetic young people should throw themselves
immediately into the startup arena, before they've developed any real skills
and particularly life skills, bargaining savvy, etc.

That way the financial system in the form of VCs can extract maximum benefit
for minimum expenditure.

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wyclif
_How can smart, ambitious people stay working in an area where they have no
long term ambitions?_

The answer, of course, is money.

But Dixon prefers to camp out on algorithms and behavioural science rather
than providing the simple answer, and if you read between the lines (and
you're familiar with the startup scene, VC, and suppressed developer wages by
collusion + H-1B visas + "talent shortage") it's not hard to figure out why.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
Yes, its not as clear cut because being in finance vs. joining or launching a
startup has a very different risk profile.

If you stay in finance for some time, you have probably made a lot of money by
the time you get out. The plan is to work yourself to death as an investment
banker and hope you made enough to retire (or become a VC, like him) at 35.

Work years for a startup, and you might not have made anything beyond living
expenses. The upside is that the working culture will probably suck less and
winning the startup lottery will make even more money. Also, scamming people
and being a sociopath is optional (but see Uber).

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7Figures2Commas
> Over the years, I’ve run into many prospective employees in similar
> situations. When I ask them a very obvious question: “What do you want to be
> doing in 10 years?” The answer is invariably “working at or founding a tech
> startup”...

It's great to ask _what_ questions, but they should almost always be followed
by _why_ questions. _Why_ do you want to work at or found a tech startup?

Startups have been glamorized by the media for well over a decade, and the
hype today is at a fever pitch, so it's really no surprise that startups are
so appealing. That doesn't mean that most people have a realistic
understanding of what it's like working at or starting one.

Frankly, "I want to do a tech startup" is as much a red flag as "I want to
make a lot of money." It's so non-specific as to be effectively meaningless. A
startup is just a vehicle, and if you don't have an interest in driving
somewhere specific, you're driving for the sake of driving.

> There is a natural human tendency to make the next step an upward one.

There's also a natural human tendency to believe that the grass is always
greener somewhere else.

The prototypical Silicon Valley startup can be as demanding as an investment
bank, and a good number are chaotic and dysfunctional to boot. And you don't
have folks like Sam Altman talking about "founder depression" because running
a startup is the next best thing to heaven.

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vinceguidry
There's a good reason near-term rewards are overvalued relative to long-term
ones. Long term rewards might never happen.

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dustintran
This is not a good analogy. Money is the obvious reason one stays at the
"lower hill". Thus it is not a question of whether the person can stoop down
from the "lower hill" and get to the "higher" one. It's a question of which
hill is really higher (by that person's standards).

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K2h
That is difficult to have the resources banked sufficient to leap off the
little hill and find yourself in the desert of despair, to then randomly leap
back to the base of what turns out to be the big mountain, but not have the
clout to climb it. I appreciate the comparison to an optimization search
algorithm, but life is really complicated for most to have the stomach for
that level of risk.

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chiachun
There is an important difference between the algorithm and personal career:
climbing the other hill has nothing to do with climbing the highest hill, but
that's not the case regarding career development. Startups are creating new
things and jobs, so how do you know that current jobs would not provide
valuable assets in the future?

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deepGem
Speaking from experience this process does have demerits. For example - how
long before you decide that the hill you just climbed is not the highest. It's
easier to figure out that a banking career is not for you but it's not that
easy to figure out that a startup job is not for you.

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ojbyrne
It makes me wonder - is there a good hill-climbing algorithm that takes
account of uncertainty - where the hills can go up and down over time as
you're climbing them? I suspect the naive algo might perform better in those
conditions - maxima that are closer to you would be favored.

~~~
placebo
Simulated annealing was already mentioned. Also parallel tempering is very
effective at finding the highest (or lowest) areas even faster.

I actually liked the analogy but applying algorithm analogies to one's life of
course only goes so far. First, even if one decides to look at life as an
optimisation problem, it is much more difficult than the hardest multiple
objective optimisation problems. One of the reasons is that I'd equate the
optimisation landscape not with static hills, but more similar to waves or
sand dunes that keep shifting with time in a way that can at most give you
short term predictions. We don't have the life span or processing power to use
a computer algorithm to optimise a static "life" landscape, let alone a
dynamic one.

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frozenport
Don't forget to count the number of steps! Reaching the top of a small hill
might take 2 steps, and algorithms like simulated annealing (unlike actual
annealing) keep track of the entropy change.

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Vladipoteur
there is probably a change of hills with the time. > Hills are dynamic > Hills
are interconnected > Hills climber is not constant over time

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bra-ket
tldr: Premature optimization is the root of all evil

