okabat

5 yıl öncediscuss

If you stick with it, I would recommend you spend a lot more time talking to customers, thinking about distribution channels, and getting creative with narrowing your target audience. And build after, not before, you do those things

okabat

5 yıl öncediscuss

Formatting is hard to read, and too many details on specific technologies. Focus more on impact (results) and leadership. “Pushed to AWS weekly” and “wrote unit tests” lines in particular aren’t helping you look like a senior candidate. Did you iterate on the overall process for deploys? Teach others how to do it? Help set standards and norms around testing and quality? Reach for those stories if you have

okabat

6 yıl öncediscuss

How are roles/employees mapped to the seniority level which corresponds to the 45/95 percentile bounds? Is this a sliding scale or a binary distinction?

okabat

6 yıl öncediscuss

Growth rate is an output metric. I would recommend de-emphasizing the output by revisiting infrequently and stopping comparisons with others, in favor of concentrating on the inputs. The poster you respond to has a very good set of things to look for. What’s holding you back from making progress on one of those? How fast are you building trust with individuals you work with and how can you accelerate that (think about specific relationships to make it less abstract)?

okabat

6 yıl öncediscuss

Cool concept, matches how I want to play Mindsweeper (though others are pointing out some interesting parts of the game that this approach removes).

Played through it once and was confused by why a bomb exploded. Can somebody help me interpret? I'm especially having trouble figuring out what the dashes are in this end-of-game explainer text. Take the space diagonally top-right from the one flagged bomb (the asterix). This had a visible "1" on the board, but is marked as a dash here.

Made a mine because the user clicked it when there was a safe space at 6, 2. Can't be a mine because

  011--1?????????
  12*101?????????
  ??2211?????????
  ???????????????
  [6 rows clipped]
  + 29 mines left to find becomes

  011--1-????????
  12*101-????????
  ??2211*????????
  ????---????????
  [6 rows clipped]
  + 28 mines left to find)

okabat

6 yıl öncediscuss

Training as a separate activity from normal work activities is not my mental model, and I expect many others. Rather, training should be interwoven in all of the daily activities that allow people with more or differentiated experience to share what they know with the others around them.

Code review is training. Do you consider training one of the primary purposes of code review? In my experience, different teams are highly variable on this. But avoiding bike shedding, explaining context and knowledge without dictating direction, and asking good questions shares knowledge and makes everyone improve.

Postmortems are training. Learning what went wrong and what could be done better next time is close to the definition of training.

Performance / peer reviews (when done well - a rarity) are training - they are a time to step back and think at a higher level about where there's room for improvement and what to concentrate on. Andy Grove explicitly talks about performance reviews as training: "giving reviews is the single most important form of task-relevant feedback"

If your definition of training only includes classrooms, learning budgets, conferences, etc than I encourage you to broaden your view as to what constitutes training. If these venues help you learn, then I hope your organization supports you access them. But don't mistake their absence or their low prominence for a lack of training with an organization

okabat

6 yıl öncediscuss

As a SAML service provider, what's the easiest way to tell if my implementation has this problem?

I'm guessing I should: 1) Go into my Okta dev account, create a 2nd "okta app" (SP instance) pointing at my hosted application, which should create a new entity ID 2) Start an IDP-initiated login attempt from this 2nd okta app, and verify I get an audience mismatch error

okabat

7 yıl öncediscuss

Slack is great at managing "read/unread" state across my 4 devices even in messy mobile networking situations. Good threading tools allow conversations to remain sandboxed and not gum up entire channels. Do these improvements justify the valuation? Maybe not, especially given how many other comms apps have a similar feature set. But for the vast majority of realtime modern workplace communication use-cases, IRC or a bulletin board will not cut it

okabat

9 yıl öncediscuss

The fastest way to make progress on these business questions is often to build hacky MVPs that look like they're doing something smart, but behind the scenes are powered by humans or dead-simple algorithms, and get them in front of customers ASAP.

I recently joined a seed-stage startup solving a business problem via audio analysis in the manner I described above. I'm not spending much time doing ML yet, but I'm banking on my belief that we're solving a valuable problem (customers want to buy our hacky MVP) and that ML can and will be needed to scale our solution. By deeply understanding the customer as a first step, I think the ML systems we build will be business critical and enduring. Time will tell

okabat

9 yıl öncediscuss

I think their point is that when changing engine output is labor-intensive, it made perfect sense to have an officer giving orders and somebody else implementing them. Why the command structure hasn't shifted to accommodate modern technology is an interesting question

okabat

9 yıl öncediscuss

You pay the operational burden of keeping your computer networked 24/7, and likely receive cents in exchange.

okabat

9 yıl öncediscuss

Slate star codex on the science behind gender representation: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...

Makes the very clever comparison to medicine and other fields that used to be 100% male.

"Nobody has any real policy disagreements. Everyone can just agree that men and women are equal, that they both have the same rights, that nobody should face harassment or discrimination. We can relax the Permanent State Of Emergency around too few women in tech, and admit that women have the right to go into whatever field they want, and that if they want to go off and be 80% of veterinarians and 74% of forensic scientists, those careers seem good too. We can appreciate the contributions of existing women in tech, make sure the door is open for any new ones who want to join, and start treating each other as human beings again."

okabat

9 yıl öncediscuss

I see nothing of the sort in his original document. Could you add some quotes to back up your claim?

okabat

9 yıl öncediscuss

I don't agree with what Coinbase did, but that's because not all forks are equivalent. Hashing power (necessary for transactions to clear) and trading price are not fuzzy and make a fork legitimate. It's only because BCC has both (at least so far) that I'd argue Coinbase has an obligation to disburse BCC to holders of BTC at the time of the fork.

okabat

9 yıl öncediscuss

I'm in to prediction markets, but both Augur and Gnosis look like vaporware. Almost no volume on Augur and many poorly defined events to wager on (cost of having user generated content). Gnosis just looks like a fancy landing page and attempt to fundraise via ICO.

I have long-term hopes that decentralized currencies let us build some interesting products, but there's massive volatility against fiat when holding crypto, which makes it hard most people to want to use these auxiliary services

okabat

9 yıl öncediscuss

I work in product management and have been an interviewer in hiring cycles for a number of functions: product management, engineering, design, data science, legal, QA, marketing.

Candidates for product management, more than any of the other functions, are often strong but a wrong fit. PMs at B2B companies do very different tasks than PMs at consumer web companies. There are a lot of skills that go into product management, and different companies have very different opinions of their relative value. Look at the component skills: customer empathy, process refinement / project management, technical understanding, data manipulation skills, strategy/business, lateral/upwards management, and vision setting. For leaders, there's also org design and hiring. Almost nobody is super strong at all of these. Where are you strong and where are you weaker? What do the companies you're hiring for actually need?

I'd recommend getting tighter on your criteria for your next job. If you ruthlessly self evaluate, you'll probably realize there are only a few companies out there that can perfectly leverage your experience, so think about what you want to learn and consider lowering your "level" expectations (if you're looking at director positions, look at first-level manager or senior IC instead) to broaden your experience. 15 phone interviews to 7 onsites is solid, but 50 applications to 15 phone screens is low. Most companies are going to be very cautious when hiring external senior PM managers, so consider a stronger emphasis on networking to evaluate fit and the company's needs, so you can tailor your interview to demonstrate the right skills.

You said the feedback is often "interview for a different role". Did you interview for those other roles? What's different about those roles from the one you want?

okabat

10 yıl öncediscuss

Yeah, I don't see the evidence, unfortunately. Weird article. The lede - NSA released a bunch of documents yesterday - is buried in the final paragraph.

Think there's strong evidence their whistleblower protections are lacking. Think it's clear the NSA is trying desperately to damage control the situation. While it's possible Snowden attempted to go through the proper channels (and I'd love to see evidence of this), the documents linked in this article only show him testing the waters.

The fact Snowden doesn't want to respond is a pretty good sign this isn't a slam dunk for the anti-spying contingent.

"[Snowden] believes the NSA is still playing games with selective releases, and [he] therefore chooses not to participate in this effort," Wizner said. "He doesn't trust that the intelligence community will operate in good faith."

okabat

10 yıl öncediscuss

Being aware of risk angles and protecting yourself is not the same thing as condoning exploitative behavior.

I'd want my cofounder to think through how somebody with legal leverage over our company would act. You should want that too.

okabat

11 yıl öncediscuss

As an engineer turned PM who might start a company some day, I've always seen financial literacy as one of my weaknesses. Companies are ultimately judged for their finances. Ignoring this subject is dangerous for a company's prospects, and illegal if it causes you to make misleading statements to investors.

If anybody is looking for further reading on this subject, I enjoyed "Financial Statements" earlier this year(http://www.amazon.com/Financial-Statements-Step---Step-Under...). Quick and straightforward, it starts with the vocabulary and explains the major financial statements (Income, Cash Flow, Balance). The majority of the book follows a company from inception to dividend disbursement, explaining how various business activities (e.g. signing a lease) hit the financial statements.

okabat

12 yıl öncediscuss

I walked away from Somm convinced that wine tasting is a load of crap. The organization that puts on the "Master Sommelier" exam doesn't share results or a scoring rubric, which is a huge red flag that the test isn't merit based. It screams of manufactured exclusivity.

The best trained wine tasters can use deductive reasoning to narrow down the wine's identity, but a significant portion seems to be visual. Arguably, they are only effective at this because wine taxonomy is defined by visual characteristics. In a double blind taste test, I highly doubt it's possible to precisely identify the wine.

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