With every organization, once you are part of a product initiative for a few years, this question of "how transferable are my skills to a different domain or company?" is a valid one to ask oneself.
Also, it is easy to get so involved in the daily busyness, that your skills might not be transferable.
I think spending some time in being curious and learning/investing in transferable skills, and building a "brand" of helping others(either online or in person) helps significantly when it is indeed time to pursue that next opportunity.
3 critical skills that will help you through out your life:
1. Learn to workout well - crossfit, hire a trainer, etc
2. Basic financial knowledge - investing, taxes, RSUs/Options, etc
3. Presentation skills - most of your career will be determined by how effectively you communicate, influence and persuade. Invest in it.
There’s a lot of better ways to work out than crossfit. But I agree with the basic premise! Learn the skill of lifting heavy things and running farther than you’re willing to walk.
I’d add to presentation skills: negotiation skills. I’ll recommend Chris Voss’ book “Never Split the Difference” as I have been to all my relatives this Christmas.
I have done crossfit, other HIIT gyms, weights, swimming, running etc etc. However the best exercise I can recommend is one you enjoy. Try squash, Rock climbing, yoga etc till you find something you enjoy and you want to excel at.
This business of exercising for the sake of exercising for the rest of your life as if it is some sort of cross to bear is not the best technique to staying healthy! Try and enjoy it.
I'm not a crossfitter either, but I've trained at Crossfit gyms for about a year in the past. Yes, high intensity training with complex Olympic movements create a situation where injuries might more easily occur, but if one just goes there for a few months to learn the basics of movements/lifting form, it can be beneficial even if you go workout by yourself later on.
A lot of folks give CrossFit crap (and a some of it is justified). It is hip to hate on it. If you can get a box that has a good owner/coach, CrossFit is an excellent way to learn about fitness and your limits. The biggest issue I have is the lack of quality control between gyms. The community/class aspects help push you, the types of movements and workouts can be very effective at both strength, cardio, and capacity. Work on mobilizing and form and you are golden with CrossFit.
Trust me it REALLY depends on the box and the coaches...there's 2 coaches that aren't super helpful, but they're still nice and friendly, but the owner, and 2 of the other coaches are amazing.
At 515, you can't do a ton, so they walked me through modifications, they give me extra help to get better form, they slow me down when I want to push past my limit or feel I'm not progressing fast enough -- so I don't get injured.
Heck, they even call and fb chat w/ me if I miss a class.
I started 9/10 @ 515. It's 12/27 and I'm 430. Goal is be <300 by 2020 (40th birthday).
I can see CrossFit REALLY sucking if quality isn't there, and the coaches suck, I don't like going to classes AS much when the good coaches aren't coaching, so I think that's the difference..
A normal gym you just have equipment, quality doesn't matter that much, in CrossFit --it's all about the people running the place, if they aren't attentive to those who might need extra help getting up to par, then find a different box.
Thanks. Been a great year. CrossFit helped me overcome depression, and a lot of things. Probably some with focus too... Also more confidence. Can't wait to recap my progress next Year... hoping to be < 300.
I tried 3 crossfit gyms. They all played such loud music that after each session my ears would ring and it made me agitated. Ended up sending the one an email, but apparently it has something to do with motivation.
As reported in NSCA study, which court found containing “false statements”.
"It is taken as established that the NSCA had a commercial motivation for making the false statement in the Devor Study (…) that the NSCA made the false statement in the Devor Study with the intention of disparaging CrossFit and thereby driving consumers to the NSCA (…) (and) that a loss in CrossFit’s certification revenue was the natural and probable result of the false injury data in the Devor Study."
1. useless 50+ unless you enjoy pain and injury.
2. Buy something that is always worth something, take care of it and make enough $$ to enjoy life. Leave something for your family and rainy days.
3. Presentation skills? Communication skills and I'd say those are only useful when you have something to communicate. Technical and creative skills are just as important.
OP list is the young mans guide to SV future reality if I had to guess.
Do you know of a way for an amateur to get more efficient at preparing their own taxes? As an American living in London, I feel like I spend waaay to much time going down research rabbit holes to answer questions like “does HMRC consider Roth IRAs to be like pensions?” or “Does the IRS consider a help-to-buy ISA to be a PFIC?”
Maybe. Persuasion is also about finding shared success/common ground, and its almost a negotiation in that way. Look at Robert Cialdini's books on Amazon. Similarly books on negotiation by Maggie Neale or Chris Voss (Never split the difference) are really helpful.
Never Split the difference from Chris Voss is a good book. Persuasion and negotiation are also as much about effective listening. Something I've practiced hard this year is to be mindful of creating a pause before I respond. Pause for like 2 seconds.
Forget stock picking, it is generally a fool's errand.
Also - Tony Robbins did a good job with his book "Money: Master the game". Look up the "All weather strategy" from Ray Dalio referenced in that book. Diversification across non-correlated assets, compounded over time creates wealth.
My personal recommendation for learning to give better presentations is to just do it. Start your own little tech convention and do as much public speaking as possible. You get the "bystander effect" at social events when someone has to say something to a crowd but nobody wants to do it, so step up and get some practice! People don't judge you for errors nearly as much as you think.
As for written communication, Markel's Technical Communication was used in my English class in college and I remember getting a lot out of following its directions. As you might expect, it's very well written. Of course, I had the advantage of classroom instruction, but I think it would be helpful even for self-study.
+1 to this, I think Ramit Sethi's material is a great introduction to financial knowledge. This year I'm following up with Bogleheads and, if I can handle it, The Intelligent Investor
Ellie Mae | Platform Product Manager | East Bay, CA | Onsite | 2 open full-time positions
Ellie Mae (NYSE:ELLI) is a leading provider of innovative on-demand software solutions and services for the residential mortgage industry.
My name is Vikas Rao, and I'm the Vice President of Product Management for our Lending Platform at Ellie Mae, and we are looking for teammates with strong platform expertise.
Prior experience in launching developer facing platforms, working with engineering teams to create platform services like activity streams, identity management, notifications, etc is key.
I worked with them for a little while. At a fundamental level, its a brilliant model. They're basically looking for strategies that have little to no correlation to the S & P. Also, any strategies that short the S & P market successfully are welcomed. They already have enough of the trend following, or mean reversion strategies which are found everywhere in quant trading books.
Ellie Mae | Pleasanton, CA | Senior or Staff Front-end Engineers | Full Time | Onsite/remote
Ellie Mae (NYSE:ELLI) is a leading provider of enterprise on-demand solutions, including an online network, software and services for the residential mortgage industry.
Come join us and contribute to Ellie Mae’s product development team in moving our leading mortgage software solutions to the next level. We are expanding our development teams and seeking to hire new software developers to help innovate EllieMae’s next generation SaaS Platform.
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Please don't link to websites with a clear agenda against Atkins. A search of pubmed will reveal the positive effects of Atkins and similar diets on weight-loss, regulating insulin levels, energy levels, etc.
Both of those studies are too small and too short. The second article even says, "questions remain about long-term effects and mechanisms," so it doesn't address my original concerns. Short-term decreases in blood sugar, cholesterol, and triglycerides are a result of suppression of appetite, followed by semi-starvation, which are the underlying mechanisms of a ketogenic diet, and are not sustainable in the long-term.
And Lustig gets thoroughly demolished here by Alan Aragon, a guy known for very scientific approaches to stuff like this. Lustig is known for cherry-picking the stufies that support his arguments and dismissing those that don't.
I read through that and it seems far from any sort of 'demolishing'.
The one broad point is that fructose is unhealthy in a general sense and that -absorbing- lots of it had many adverse health effects. I say absorbing because there are two sides - too much fructose and not enough fiber.
1. First he says Japanese people do add fructose outside of fruit to their diets. Both sides of this generalization don't really matter in the face of the actual numbers and shades of grey and as a whole this is a small part of the overall point.
2. He talks about factors leading to a more sedentary lifestyle. Is this really a rebuttal? Is he saying that the enormous rise in obesity is causes by this? If it is a contributing factor, does it take away from the main point? Does a rise of two worker households even mean a more sedentary lifestyle (even for the children)? It seems like a lot of words used on something that at most could be pointed to to say that the effects of fructose aren't quite as extreme, but it seems to me that there is a loose correlation between what he lists, decreases physical activity, and then the health data at core of the argument.
3. Then he seems to think that citing a study using 150 grams of sugar (which is the about the equivalent of a pitcher) is not worth looking at because it is too much. Is it not common to use exaggerated doses in studies to be able to exaggerate effects? How is anything contradicted by this?
Overall I expected a lot more from your description, but that page doesn't just lack a smoking gun, it is tiny arguments over points that are almost inconsequential to the main theme.
So then that begs the question of what you would attribute to the enormous increase in obesity and what you would peg as the causation of the correlation between increased fructose consumption and obesity.
That video appears to be talking about epidemiology. That is fine if you are interested in the broader public health concerns, however it cannot possibly give actionable advice to an individual.
Can it not? Stop eating so much fructose and eat more fiber so you don't absorb as much of what you do eat. Can that guarantee the same results for every single person? I would guess not. It is a good indicator of the first thing to try to be healthier and lose weight? Seems like pretty overwhelming evidence to me and in fact mirrors my own experience with intentionally losing and gaining weight.
Most of the time this type of dismissal is more due to someone not wanting to face the idea of giving up sugar, which I can understand.
A potential acquisition of Slack and cutting number of employees to < 1000 are 2 things that come to mind. Owning slack opens up other potential streams of revenue in the enterprise space. Or allow twitter users to form groups/rooms on twitter ala Slack.
Twitter can't afford Slack. Twitter's market cap is ~12B. There is no way in hell that Slack would sell for less than 10B. They probably wouldn't even sell for that much.
Is Slack, unprofitable w/ $30MM yearly revenue[1], really worth almost as much as Twitter, unprofitable w/ almost $2BN yearly revenue? That's a lot of growth to account for.
Probably. Allowing people to create chat rooms/channels is another possibility, and allows them to enter the enterprise collaboration space. Competes easily with HipChat and Slack. Most people already have twitter accounts, so groups of people can collaborate on the fly.
Aerohive Networks - Portland, OR - www.aerohive.com
Aerohive Networks (www.aerohive.com) just opened a new engineering office in Portland and we are looking for front end developers to work on our JavaScript development toolkit which will be used for all of Aerohive’s applications.
You will also be working on data visualization for our big data applications, so the role is a great mix of feature development and building/enhancing a JavaScript library.
A little bit about our company, Aerohive Networks is competing alongside companies like Aruba networks, Cisco, etc and winning. Now we’re expanding into the big data aspect of networking, where we are innovating and taking enterprise web applications to the next level.
There are quite a few visual testing tools, for example WebdriverCSS (https://github.com/webdriverio/webdrivercss), which is an open source visual testing framework built on top of WebdriverIO.
Visual testing tools actually differ quite a bit from one another in many ways (automation framework integration, if any, baseline management, comparison engine etc).
Also, it is easy to get so involved in the daily busyness, that your skills might not be transferable.
I think spending some time in being curious and learning/investing in transferable skills, and building a "brand" of helping others(either online or in person) helps significantly when it is indeed time to pursue that next opportunity.