/Career Advice

The 100 Best Bits Of Advice From 10 Years Of First Round Review

tl;dr: "End every meeting or conversation with the feeling and optimism you’d like to have at the start of your next conversation with the person. If you envision running into this person again and how you want that to go, it’ll undoubtedly influence how you navigate a present conversation — usually for the better. Chris Fralic on how to become insanely well-connected."

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A Guide To Public Speaking For Software Engineers

- Jordan Cutler tl;dr: Jordan discusses: (1) How to improve your body language, wording, and tonality. (2) How to create a presentation structure that keeps people listening to you. These concepts can be applied to in-person & remote tech talks, demos, technical direction presentations, leading meetings and interviews. 

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Productivity

- Sam Altman tl;dr: "I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place." Sam discusses what to work on, how to prioritize tasks, physical factors (eating, sleeping, drinking, etc...) and more. 

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7 Types Of Difficult Coworkers And How To Deal With Them

- Jordan Cutler tl;dr: Jordan interviews Raviraj Achar - who has been a tech lead at Meta for 5 years - about how he manages difficult co-workers. The following are the first 3 archetypes discussed: (1) Risk-Averse: The Habitual Defender: They want to avoid risk at all costs and don’t want the system to break. (2) Risk-Taker: The Trailblazer. The opposite of the prior archetype. This person often feels the risk is justified or they will propose ideas without scoping out the risk. (3) The Stealthy Critic: They will have opinions but save them for the last minute before something is ready to ship. Or they will comment on your design doc and leave things in an ambiguous state. 

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Advice To A Novice Programmer

- Mark Dominus tl;dr: Mark wrote a memo to his daughter, who’s studying data structures, to memorialize the important process issues surrounding writing software: (1) It's important to remove as much friction as possible from your basic process. (2) It's tempting to cut corners when writing code e.g. "you need to optimize for quick and easy reading, at the cost of slower and more careful writing." (3) Debugging is methodical: always have clear in your mind what question you are trying to answer, and what your plan is for investigating that question. (4) After you fix something significant, or add significant new functionality, make a checkpoint copy of the entire source code.

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Positioning Yourself Near The Opportunity

- Matt Rickard tl;dr: From Jensen Huang, the co-founder of NVIDIA: "You want to position yourself near opportunities. You don’t have to be that perfect. You want to position yourself near the tree. Even if you don’t catch the apple before it hits the ground, so long as you’re the first one to pick it up. You want to position yourself close to the opportunities." Matt argues that this is true on a personal level. 

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How Do I Progress To The Next Level In My Career?

- James Stanier tl;dr: James helps us: (1) Explore what careers may look like and what motivates us. These topics are well worth revisiting when you feel like you are getting frustrated or stuck, or are wondering what the future may hold for you. (2) Think about some practical ways in which you begin to take your progression into your own hands. Once you know what you’re after, how do you get there? James discusses his insights to both of these prompts.

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Random Thoughts 15 years Into Software Engineering

- Ryan O'Neill tl;dr: A total of 10 random thoughts, the first 3 of which are: (1) Debuggability is highly underrated: When writing code, you have to think about how it will execute. Leave yourself audit trails, store data in human readable formats, and invest in admin tooling. (2) Projects are late, a lot. This is not unique to software. The reality is that time is constantly moving against us, and when unexpected things happen they can take an order of magnitude longer than we planned. (3) Aggressively manage scope: related to the above, protect your project’s scope. You don’t have to push back if you don’t want, but be transparent about how it will affect the project delivery and communicate it widely.

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The Strength Of Being Misunderstood

- Sam Altman tl;dr: A founder asked Sam how to stop caring what other people think. After reflecting on the question more, he thinks it's the wrong question… “The most impressive people I know care a lot about what people think, even people whose opinions they really shouldn’t value. But what makes them unusual is that they generally care about other people’s opinions on a very long time horizon — as long as the history books get it right, they take some pride in letting the newspapers get it wrong.” Many people are not willing to function on this time horizon.

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Ask Vs Guess Culture

- Jean Hsu tl;dr: Jean discusses the contrasting dynamics of "ask culture" and "guess culture." While "ask culture" promotes direct requests and clear communication, "guess culture" relies on subtle hints and indirect cues,  often gauging the likelihood of a positive response before making a request. Jean provides examples to illustrate these, emphasizing the potential for misunderstandings and frustrations. She offers advice for guess-culture individuals: (1) Seek help when feeling stuck, without fearing inconvenience to others. (2) Express interest in opportunities e.g publishing on the company blog. (3) Cultivate comfort with receiving "no" as an answer. If people aren't occasionally declining, one might still be operating within guess culture. (4) Use the thought exercise "If I could have my way..." to bypass others' needs and focus on personal desires, which can then be turned into requests.

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