Saw this GaryV video where he was saying how he told a caller to 'eat shit' for the next 3 years, and he was proud of his advice to the caller.
A woman called in saying she was working three jobs where one was her main income, and she had 2 side opportunities. Her basic question was which one to pick. He told her 'eat shit' for the next couple years and take no vacations, just completely grind out her existence and nothing else.
The guy is seriously a maniac recommending this approach. He doesn't consider at all the risk of burnout, and how a real burnout can set you back so far. There's zero balance to his approach. I've also found it amusing there is no talk of what you should do when you retire or get the money you are aiming for.
> He told her 'eat shit' for the next couple years and take no vacations
I did this for three years. It sucks, and my god is it a roll of the dice with your health, wealth and happiness. But for me, at the time, the risk of breaking was worth the chance at stability and autonomy.
It’s terrible universal advice. But if wealth and power matter to you; and you diligently save, take sensible risks, and remain health- and mental-health-wise grounded, it can skip you up quickly. (Important, for me: having friends I could spend evenings with, eating macaroni and drinking cheap wine. Also, don’t do this if you haven’t found product-market fit.)
It's only ever "worth it" if it works out. It's never "worth it" if it didn't.
This is basically the survivor fallacy: you didn't win because you risked ruining yourself, you won because you got lucky. Risking to ruin yourself just meant you increased your chances of winning (while also significantly increasing your chances of losing).
Teaching people they'll be successful as long as they're willing to "eat shit" for years may create a handful of winners but it will also cause a ridiculous amount of ruined lives (not to mention families and relationships).
Imagine playing Russian roulette with only one empty chamber but afterwards everyone who survives also gets a toin coss to determine if he also wins a billion dollars on top.
Sure, if you win, it was totally worth it because you came out of it unharmed and you have a billion dollars.
If you win the roulette but lose the coin toss, hey at least you were ever so close to winning the billion dollars. Maybe you'll write an inspiring blog post about how waking up before dawn and doing push-ups helped you come that far and about your plans to win that coin toss if you get another chance in the future.
Or you are sour about losing the coin toss and traumatised from the roulette but people now just lecture you about how you held the coin wrong and you should be lucky you even made it to the coin toss because if you fumbled the coin toss you really weren't skilled enough to win the roulette or you should have played for a few more rounds after nobody else was left because then you'd have definitely performed better at tossing that coin.
But if you lose the roulette, you're probably in no state to lament to anyone how terrible of an idea it was to play in the first place.
And if you look at the really successful ones, you'll notice they actually sometimes shot themselves but their parents or family were rich enough to make sure they wore a bullet-proof helmet.
It's luck. Risking your health and social life just slightly increases the number of coin tosses while loading more bullets in the chamber. Look at how many entrepreneurs are putting themselves out there and working themselves to death, then look at how many are billionaires -- heck, look at how many are millionaires. The rest that just vanishes? At best they gave up and decided to do something else.
> Teaching people they'll be successful as long as they're willing to "eat shit" for years may create a handful of winners but it will also cause a ridiculous amount of ruined lives (not to mention families and relationships)
Totally agree. Telling people to "eat shit" is terrible universal advice.
> if you lose the roulette, you're probably in no state to lament to anyone how terrible of an idea it was to play in the first place
Agree again.
That said, just because something depends predominantly on luck doesn't mean it is never worth it. Terrible universal advice can be decent advice to specific people. If, as you said, you are fortunate enough to have downside protection from family, it can be less risky than it generally is. On the other hand, if you are sure you'd be happier having tried and lost than never tried at all (and know just how bad this flavor of losing can be), it may be the only choice.
Most people aren't like that. But some are. My point is to avoid over-correcting. Don't "eat shit" because a shithead on the Internet told you too. But if you really feel that's what you must do, don't not do it because someone on the Internet told you not to.
Side note: anecdote comes to mind. Advice is a person talking to their younger selves.
Sure, but this can be reduced to "it's worth the risk if you have a financial safety net to fall back to if you fail or burn out". In other words "the high risk discourages people who are not already well-off and the high reward primarily benefits those who are".
Or more simply: if you have a few tens or hundres of thousands of dollars you can fall back to even if everything goes wrong, it's worth the chance to become a millionaire/billionaire. If you don't have that safety net, you'll most likely ruin your life unless you're extraordinarily lucky (i.e. lucky enough to win even without the advantages nearly all the other winners already had).
Meritocracy is biased towards affluent starting positions.
> That said, just because something depends predominantly on luck doesn't mean it is never worth it.
I mean, you can do some back-of-the-napkin math and at least get a ballpark figure on the worthiness of an endeavor. 'Expected Value' is the term in stats. It's not too convoluted to run through the math here, but you can expand it as you need. Yes, things like 'freedom' and 'autonomy' are hard to quantify, but you can estimate them somewhat.
That sounds accurate that most money making strategies are based off simple logic and observations. Seems people are blindly impressed by ML and convolutional neural networks, even if they do not yield any impressive results.
I built system to determine which fundamental or technical factors have the most influence over a stock price. It required a fair amount of manual tinkering and sample runs to eliminate variance. The system itself is not that complex but it works. When I have demo'd it in a interview usually the interviewers are not that impressed... they are expecting that the system must be very complicated to have any results.
Great article. The one that hit home for me "One lone engineer on a big project silo’ed away".
Was on a project where we had multiple applications. The team had a new employee code an entire system as a prototype but then it was decided to put it into production. Nobody ever reviewed this code, and that engineer told me himself that the code was crap. He left the project to get away from this code and I inherited a mess, with nobody to ask questions from.
To make matters worse, the entire company relied on this system and there were about 20 regular users of this system. I was responsible for handling all of their feature requests and support which was often. Many bugs I fixed were extremely challenging edge cases, and there was zero appreciation for the complexity of many of these.
My manager was telling others at the company the code was solid, and it's "just python code" which can be figured out.
I notified the company I was leaving and they begged me to stay. Even offered to "release" me and hire me at a higher salary under another manager. The only issue was I would be required to support this same project.
My manager refused to give me a release date so I had to call HR and tell them I needed to leave at any cost. Pretty sure it's a disaster there since I left.
This happens a lot with non-technical founders hiring contractors or employees.
At first, the goal is “build a prototype,” then it’s “make this an MVP,” and then finally “what’s left to get this to production?”
I don’t blame founders for this; I blame the programmers, especially if they’re consultants. This is a symptom of failure to manage expectations of stakeholders.
As a developer, your job is to show the stakeholders what the tradeoffs of different decisions are, both in terms of immediate time to results, and technical debt. If you hear “make a prototype,” you better ask for a projected lifetime of the prototype, and discuss with the stakeholders the tradeoffs of quickly building a prototype, making sure they understand it could mean more work later to productionize it, in exchange for less work up front.
Also as a developer, you should realize that nothing is ever a prototype. Don’t use “it’s a prototype” as an excuse for writing unmaintanable and insecure code, because eventually someone is going to want to add some features to it. Good luck telling the stakeholders after three months of building a prototype that you need to start from scratch because the code is awful. This is especially difficult if the prototype looks like a fully functioning product (with minimal features) to the stakeholders, but you as a developer know that under the hood it’s completelty unmaintainable.
It’s better to take the time up front to put in place whatever you need to write quality code, than it is to take shortcuts and write bad code. A good developer will be able to explain this to a stakeholder, instead of caving under pressure to rush a prototype.
No, I completely and fully blame the managers/founders for this. No matter how much you try to drill into their heads that this is throwaway code, once they see something, they get excited, and say "Ship it!"
If the tradeoffs were valid and fully understood, the stakeholders would not logically come to the conclusion to “just ship it.” The only person who can explain the tradeoffs to them is the developer.
Therefore, if they say “ship it!”, they are either wrong or missing information.
If they are missing information, the developer is at fault for misinforming them of the tradeoffs necessary for decision making.
If they are wrong, then either the developer has cited irrelevant or incorrect tradeoffs, or the developer made valid points but the stakeholders understand the tradeoffs and are willing to accept them.
You're trying really hard to bring this back to always being the developer's fault, and you're ignoring that, many times, management just doesn't listen. You can explain until you're blue in the face, but if they don't want to listen, nothing will make them do so.
Everybody is an idiot about most things. As an expert in a domain, your job is to help non-experts be less of an idiot when making decisions that depend on things you know better than them. You won’t get very far with a stonewalling attitude of “well, the manager was an idiot.” You need to establish trust and a working relationship where you both listen to each other.
Making my boss less of an idiot is something outside of my control. I can tell them "don't do this" over and over again. If they do it anyway, how is that my fault?
In an ideal world, sure. But I live in the real world, where there are lots of managers that are just plain shitty, and no amount of explanation will change their mind. It just does not work at all. Blaming the developer is not a reasonable thing to do in that situation.
Unless you're paying top dollar for contractors, what you describe is way beyond the job duty of typical contractors brought in by non-technical founders who have no idea what they're doing. Even technical founders with a lot of experience make this same mistake. If you're not paying seriously high money, you might think that this is something you're paying for, but it's not. Someone at an overseas sweatshop isn't going to push back on a request for a prototype. It's not part of their job and it sure as hell is not in their own interest. People get what they pay for and most of the time, people who hire contractors without proper oversight are just burning money and have no idea what they even want to pay for, let alone what they've actually bought. Intelligence cannot be contracted for by stupid people.
Always write quality code or when bugs occur or new feature requests come up, they will call you. If you wrote something awful now you have to support it.
But you cannot blame the developer. Many app are prototypes to get them over a certain point to get funding. What happens is the technical debt is never paid and you are forced to scale the prototype while adding new features.
There are no simple hacks to get to the top. You need people to be searching for your name, find your link, and then spend time on the page. It helps a lot if you have posts that show up on Reddit, or other social networks.
Since there is no content at all on your site there's no way anybody will stay on your page.
How does Google figure out if visitors stayed on the page? Chrome telemetry (creepy)? Google Analytics (are you required to use this to get a good ranking)?
If a user clicks on a link on a search page, stays a few seconds on the new page and then press 'back', and clicks on another link on the search, that's a pretty strong signal to Google that the first link wasn't that good.
Hmmm. If true, I wonder if cmd-clicking the top N links into other tabs can be distinguished or if it's harmful for their ranking. Also, does going back cause a reload?
I'd guess that various clicks in a small time frame can be trivially detected and discarded as noise. The vast majority of the users do not use that pattern.
I don't think it causes a reload, but it can also be trivially detected using JavaScript.
Usage of Google Analytics doesn't affect your PageRank, but it is one way to find out what people that clicked through to your site searched for to find it.
Sad but true. I spent some time building a personal site mostly for fun, but also to get back into industry. Many companies view a blog as a liability... better off studying for a few months to get some extra certifications.
I think it depends. If you're blogging about technology findings it's fine. If you're blogging about how much you hate <insert politician here>, then yeah companies may see it as a liability.
I'm interested in hearing his reasoning, too. Maybe said companies don't want people posting about what they're doing at work or don't want a PR nightmare if the employee says the wrong thing
The problem is that SSN's are treated like a private key. If somebody has that private key, and some basic information about you, they can basically impersonate you electronically.
Meanwhile countries like Estonia use an electronic card reader with a PIN to verify digital identity, making it nearly impossible for somebody to impersonate you. Using this Estonian system, you can tell anybody your personal code ID.
In Italy the personal id is computed from name(s), surname, date and place of birth (state of birth if born abroad) and a check digit. Collisions are pretty rare (one every few tens of thousands of people), so it's pretty much a public piece of information.
Electronic identification is available on three levels: id+password, id+password+OTP (the most common), id+password+smart card (everybody has one, but in practice it is only used by officers nowadays). Getting a password is free and takes about 15 minutes plus a trip to the post office. It works pretty well, and underneath it's just SAML2 so everyone can use it.
People have been saying since it was valued at $1 that it was overvalued, or nobody should pay $1 for a virtual coin. Same people are still arguing the same thing 5 years later...
I find the idea of crypto currency, especially bitcoin, very interesting. I just have a very hard time seeing how it's actually useful. It can't handle very many transactions per minute. And the thing that supposed to make it so great is that no one controls it. But if bitcoin becomes really important then people will want to control a lot of the mining power. Pretty soon you end up with a group of miners (or even a single miner) having enough power to influence things leaving you pretty close to someone being in charge of the thing.
It's such a fascinating idea. But in less there was someway to limit mining so people couldn't throw additional power at it I'm not sure it's useful.
As an example, you could use a block chain to enforce a ledger between a couple of different companies but you'd have to have some sort of contract it said everyone was only allowed to use one of device X for mining. That way everyone would be equal and you could easily check it because the blocks should be minded roughly evenly.
But when miners can buy additional mining capacity, and they get rewarded for doing that with more money, how does this not end up with a winner takes all situation?
why is it useful? you can store and instantly send any arbitrary amount of money anywhere on the planet and it is the hardest (impossible?) for a government to steal it from you
I can send money around the world with it. You can too.
Will it hold up when 10 million people want to do that per day? 100 million? Half 1 billion? I know it can work at niche scales (relative to total global financial transactions) but can it actually be scaled up to be a real player?
Even if the block size was massively larger, say 100 MB, would enough transactions be able to be broadcasted around fast enough to be able to be collected in giant blocks to keep up with demand?
As to hardest/impossible for a government to steal from you: this is the mining pool problem. What if China decided to do something about all of the mining pools they have in their country and try and manipulate bitcoin? What if in addition to the pools that they could get/force to cooperate they added a bunch more miners with government computers?
What if the US government just decided to throw computer power at trying to make the dominant hashrate mining pool?
I'm guessing there are number of governments in the world it would be capable of doing that TODAY. They could certainly do it if they cooperated. Even if they can't take over they could throw enough uncertainty into the process to cause the price to crash.
If they all competed against each other we could end up in a situation where even know if theoretically no one controls bit coin realistically it's controlled by a bunch of giant governments and no one else is capable of competing. Oops, that sort of like the current banking system.
Like I said it's a fascinating idea, but I don't think it works at planet scale or if people can independently buy additional hashing capacity. It seems like it would have to have some sort of agreement to limit everyone to be roughly equal for it to work out almost anywhere.
I'd love to see history prove me wrong. I don't remember seening a solution to the problems that worry me yet. If they exist I'm not smart enough to think of them.
I think it can. People hate on the lightning network proposal, but I've read it and it seems like there's no reason it wouldn't work. BTC would then be used as a finalizing ledger, not for day to day transactions.
You're sending integers. To do anything useful you'd need to convert those integers to actual fiat money, and to do that you either go through a government-licensed conversion channel such as an exchange, or a third party willing to assume the conversion risk that usually comes wih high fees or highly unfavorable exchange rate.
I have many times. Bank transfers can take hours or days but BTC shows up instantly and is proven permanently immutable after a few blocks (20-40 minutes)
It shows up as unconfirmed usually in a few seconds, meaning it's in the mempool and ready to be added to the blockchain. If you trust the sender it's enough... but on average you are right that it's about 10 minutes to get the transaction included in the block. With Ethereum they are mining blocks about every 10 or 20 seconds.
How many money transfers do Visa or Amex handle per day? The Federal Reserve? What about Western Union?
Is bitcoin capable of doing 50% of that? 10%? 1%?
I know people have just decided to expand the block size but what's a realistic limit on how many transactions can be done per hour? Is that enough for real widespread use?
I can certainly see uses but I worry that he can never get big enough to truly matter. Or if it does that a government or large private entity could easily try to take it over through force of computing power.
The reason it's gone up so much recently is that they just scaled it to handle more transactions. As other pointed out you can send an arbitrary amount whether it's 40 cents or 40 million dollars and it transfers quickly.
There's no holidays for the blockchain like banks have so you can send 24 hours a day, every day.
It's actually less useful. You already have banks doing the exact same thing for free, while insuring your money, you don't get hit 3% for transferring it into the bank, and there's interest accrued, not wildly shifting value where you might lose half in a few hours.
> You already have banks doing the exact same thing for free, while insuring your money, you don't get hit 3% for transferring it into the bank, and there's interest accrued
So much wrong with this statement.
First, not many banks in the U.S. do "the exact same thing for free", actually almost none do. Most ACH transfers take 1-5 days, instead of ~10 minutes with Bitcoin or ~15 seconds with Ethereum. Yes, I know about Zelle, but not all banks support that, and clearXchange isn't always same day, even.
Second, some services like Coinbase[1] insure your holdings, even while in crypto.
Third, almost all services that use ACH, like GDAX (Coinbase), Gemini, etc. don't do a 3% transfer fee through ACH, it's actually free. But it's next business day, like most ACH, where as crypto would've been an hour at most.
Lastly, some countries, like oh I don't know, Japan[2], have negative interest rates, so your money shrinks by the day instead of growing.
Is 10-minute ACH a kind of problem a lot of people face?
Seems like instant liquidity confirmation has been solved with credit cards or Paypal for trivial amounts (third party willing to act as an intermediary) or wire transfers for larger amounts (banks engaging their backchannel comfirmation protocols for a measly $25 fee).
There are also debit card payments, admittedly not as widespread, but impressively fast when used through Square Cash or Facebook Messenger.
None of the existing solutions are perfect, but all seem to be "good enough".
There's no need for anyone to switch at this point. Also, an ACH from Coinbase is 4-5 days not 1 day. Japan is an edge case with a very small population. They have -0.1 interest rate. That is nothing compared to what you might lose based on the wild fluctuations Bitcoin incurs.
Funny part is, you're still wrong. There is a need obviously, as people are switching.
If I deposit to GDAX, sell to USD, and withdraw to my bank it will be there in 1 business day. It's been that way for years, for almost everyone I know. ACH pulls take longer, sure, but what I said is correct.
Also, multiple countries implemented negative interest rates[1]. Japan isn't an anomaly.
What you might lose from BTC fluctuation, you may also gain, as seen by the 400% YTD growth, this year alone[2].
You really should do more research and actually understand the topic instead of dismissing it because it doesn't fit your world-view.
Each bitcoin can be divided into 100 million atomic units called "satoshis". 1 BTC is just a particular denomination, in the same way that $20 and $100 bills are denominations in use for USD.
1 BTC is a historically common denomination that will likely receive less usage if the price continues to rise.
