career advice

5 steps from So Good They Can’t Ignore You:

Decide what capital market you’re in, either winner-takes-all or auction
- CS is auction
- Middle East studies/academia is…winner takes all? Maybe?
  - writing is winner takes all
Identify capital type, which skill dominates?
- in CS I care about distributed systems skills and navigating large code bases
  - read “working with legacy systems”?
- with MES my skill is writing and analysis? Possibly arabic?
  - Work on arabic
  - Practice writing
Define ‘good’
- Distributed systems:
  - understanding papers, writing more distributed systems, understanding apis
  - Kafka, zookeeper, batching, etc
- Arabic: obvious
- Writing: less obvious, but ‘good’ is defined as getting published?
Stretch and destroy: push to activate discomfort
Be patient

build a career moat
- either out of obscurity/difficulty
  - make it difficult to get where you are
  - choose a path that is unclear how to climb
- predictive
  - predict valuable skills before they get recgonized
- skills that are unattractive but valuable
  - cobol? (ehhhhhhhhhh)
  - engineering management
autonomy is based around leverage
perform rigorous trial and error <- duh
- two ways of problem solving
  - trial and error
  - theory and insight
taking bets
- stay in the game
- double down on what works
- bet in porportional to your edge
epistemic vs instrumental reality
- epistemic - how do you know if your beliefs are true?
- instrumental - how do you make better decisions to achieve your goals?
- aaron schwartz wrote about this in 2012: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9SE67uz98kh6x2CxR/what-are-the-optimal-biases-to-overcome
be realistic about what you’re selling
- is your job a commodity?
- there is always a move if you are selling a unique product or have capital freedom, aka money is time
  - what is your individual free cash flow? that is, how much money can you take out to maintain and grow your current lifestyle?