perhaps an opportune moment to mention my personal biggest learning from Patio11's oeuvre (even bigger than the negotiations essay, which is more tactical and gets less relevant the more context specific your career becomes). https://swyx.io/friendcatchers i think this is the thing that makes patio11 popular - even the negotiations essay is a friendcatcher. Patrick just has like 200 of them lying around at all times which makes for a massive luck surface area
> In the words of Patrick’s mom: "Patrick, you should learn to cook. Don’t learn to cook because you want to eat food - learn to cook because if you learn to cook you will have an excuse for the rest of your life to bring people over to your house."
> No one who knows how to cook will ever lack for friends.
Friendcatcher is an excellent name for it. I've found some surprisingly high-powered allies in a similar way, just by writing things other people tend to find useful over time.
I'm still often surprised by the traction my `fzf` tutorial https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf gets, for example. Selects for a certain clade of excited future terminal junkies I get along fantastically with.
Edit: Seems like Threadreader won't give access so I've copied and pasted from the original thread:
1. Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.
2. Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")
Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.
3. The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.
4. Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.
5. The hardest problem in B2C is distribution. The hardest problem in B2B is sales. AppAmaGooBookSoft are AppAmaGooBookSoft primarily because they have mortal locks on distribution.
6. Everyone in Silicon Valley uses equity, and not debt, to fuel their growth because debt is not available in sufficient quantities to poorly capitalized companies without a strong history of adequate cash flows to service debt.
7. Investors in venture-back companies are purchasing a product. It is critically important to understand that that product is growth. The reason tech is favored as an asset class that it appears to be one of few sources of growth available on the market at the moment at any price.
8. The explosive growth of the tech sector keeps average age down and depresses average wages. Compared to industries which existed in materially the same form in 1970, we have a stupidly compressed experience spectrum: 5+ years rounds to "senior." This is not a joke.
9. The tech industry is fundamentally unserious about how it recruits, hires, and retains candidates. About which I have a lot more to say than could fit in a tweet, but, a good thing to know.
10. If you are attempting to hire for an engineering position, greater than 50% of people who apply for the job and whose resume you select as "facially plausible" will be entirely unable to program, at all. The search term for learning more about this is FizzBuzz.
11. Software companies in B2B which aspire to growing quickly will eventually spend more on sales and marketing than they do on engineering. You can read S-1s of successful IPOs and calculate the ratio; it is sometimes 2X++.
12. The chief products of the tech industry are (in B2C) developing new habits among consumers and (in B2B) taking a business process which exists in many places and markedly decreasing the total cost of people required to implement it.
13. There is no hidden reserve of smart people who know what they're doing, anywhere. Not in government, not in science, not in tech, not at AppAmaGooBookSoft, nowhere. The world exists in the same glorious imperfection that it presents with.
14. Significant advances shipped by the tech industry in the last 20 years include putting the majority of human knowledge in the hands of 40%++ of the world's population, available on-demand, for "coffee money" not "university money."
Very important. Transcript aren’t ideal, but still skimmable. And trivially quotable:
> The thing that's often missed about solar panels when you put them on the ground is that they are hundreds to thousands of times more energetically and economically productive than farming, which is typically how we dispose of large amounts of land in order to create energy that we can use.
I'm curious about that quote. To my mind, we don't farm because we're trying to use land to "create energy", we farm because it produces food that humans demand in order to live. Is there some way to satisfy humans' need for food using solar panels? Is there a way of synthesizing consumable food using only electricity and ambient air, maybe add a bit of water, etc?
It just feels a bit silly to imply that the point of farming is to produce energy, in a general sense.
Yeah, the comparison feels a little off, but you could make a direct comparison to producing ethanol from corn or sugar cane.
And historically, it is true that agriculture was the source of most wealth, including both food and energy. Consider growing hay -> feeding pack animals -> transportation. Also, using firewood to generate heat, large amounts of which were needed to for expensive processes like iron smelting. (Not to mention human labor.)
Nowadays it's the other way around, agriculture requires energy inputs for things like fertilizer.
Patrick has been blowing up lately, anyone that isn't subscribed to his Bits about Money email list should sign up. I've been following his writings off and on since his business was making bingo cards for teachers, but the insider info from his work at Square and other banks has been very interesting and explains why some things don't work how you'd expect.
This is an idiom to prove you had a particular text file at a particular timestamp. I am socially constrained from publishing this text file.
One month from today, one of two things will have happened:
1) I am materially wrong about the most consequential thing I've had to have a view on in 15 years. You should probably degrade your estimate of my ability to think through complex problems.
2) We need a data point to coun[t]er 'Nobody could possibly have seen this coming.'"
In the fullness of time, his analysis and conclusions were proven to be clearly, obviously and completely wrong about the most consequential thing he had a view on in 15 years, an imminent Covid apocalypse in Japan.
As a result, I significantly degraded my estimate of his ability to think through complex problems.
So wordy. I still don't know what it is he had a view on.
> Three days prior to that, on March 22nd, I was sufficiently convinced that there was an unacknowledged geographically distributed coronavirus outbreak to pre-register that conclusion.
Is.... is it possible he's being intentionally nebulous to distract from his failing? Or do I just lack the reading comprehension abilities?
That's why reasonable, intelligent, well read people who have a strong understanding of complex systems have a healthy respect for how difficult it is to predict the future with accuracy measurably better than throwing darts.
So when Patrick is so confident in his own skills at interpreting and predicting complex systems that he stakes his reputation on getting the prediction right, that reputation should be diminished for his audience and for himself when it turns out he got it all exactly backward.
Instead, he now runs a popular podcast to tutor the rest of us who already know better than to make confident predictions about complex systems that we don't understand.
While it's not great, making accurate predictions isn't really why I like reading his articles, so I'm not going to stop reading due to one blown prediction.
The main issue I have with patio11 is that everything he posts reads like this. There’s just something really pretentious about it, almost everything he says could be worded in a less show-off-y way.
18 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 40.3 ms ] thread> In the words of Patrick’s mom: "Patrick, you should learn to cook. Don’t learn to cook because you want to eat food - learn to cook because if you learn to cook you will have an excuse for the rest of your life to bring people over to your house."
> No one who knows how to cook will ever lack for friends.
I'm still often surprised by the traction my `fzf` tutorial https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf gets, for example. Selects for a certain clade of excited future terminal junkies I get along fantastically with.
https://csp.fm is available for just $70.
I wonder why he didn't go for the (radically) shorter/simpler domain name.
If, like me, you have read it many times, read it again every now and then to ponder on a few items of interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15826445.
Edit: Seems like Threadreader won't give access so I've copied and pasted from the original thread:
1. Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.
2. Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")
Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.
3. The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.
4. Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.
5. The hardest problem in B2C is distribution. The hardest problem in B2B is sales. AppAmaGooBookSoft are AppAmaGooBookSoft primarily because they have mortal locks on distribution.
6. Everyone in Silicon Valley uses equity, and not debt, to fuel their growth because debt is not available in sufficient quantities to poorly capitalized companies without a strong history of adequate cash flows to service debt.
7. Investors in venture-back companies are purchasing a product. It is critically important to understand that that product is growth. The reason tech is favored as an asset class that it appears to be one of few sources of growth available on the market at the moment at any price.
8. The explosive growth of the tech sector keeps average age down and depresses average wages. Compared to industries which existed in materially the same form in 1970, we have a stupidly compressed experience spectrum: 5+ years rounds to "senior." This is not a joke.
9. The tech industry is fundamentally unserious about how it recruits, hires, and retains candidates. About which I have a lot more to say than could fit in a tweet, but, a good thing to know.
10. If you are attempting to hire for an engineering position, greater than 50% of people who apply for the job and whose resume you select as "facially plausible" will be entirely unable to program, at all. The search term for learning more about this is FizzBuzz.
11. Software companies in B2B which aspire to growing quickly will eventually spend more on sales and marketing than they do on engineering. You can read S-1s of successful IPOs and calculate the ratio; it is sometimes 2X++.
12. The chief products of the tech industry are (in B2C) developing new habits among consumers and (in B2B) taking a business process which exists in many places and markedly decreasing the total cost of people required to implement it.
13. There is no hidden reserve of smart people who know what they're doing, anywhere. Not in government, not in science, not in tech, not at AppAmaGooBookSoft, nowhere. The world exists in the same glorious imperfection that it presents with.
14. Significant advances shipped by the tech industry in the last 20 years include putting the majority of human knowledge in the hands of 40%++ of the world's population, available on-demand, for "coffee money" not "university money."
15. Weak-form e...
Very important. Transcript aren’t ideal, but still skimmable. And trivially quotable:
> The thing that's often missed about solar panels when you put them on the ground is that they are hundreds to thousands of times more energetically and economically productive than farming, which is typically how we dispose of large amounts of land in order to create energy that we can use.
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/solar-economi...
It just feels a bit silly to imply that the point of farming is to produce energy, in a general sense.
And historically, it is true that agriculture was the source of most wealth, including both food and energy. Consider growing hay -> feeding pack animals -> transportation. Also, using firewood to generate heat, large amounts of which were needed to for expensive processes like iron smelting. (Not to mention human labor.)
Nowadays it's the other way around, agriculture requires energy inputs for things like fertilizer.
"b285b048c5f1d12785b50c79e3ba30943f9a26f5968434ac65bd1a3e6fba77de255b5483b903253398f6f2775b34e1066bce13e17cba751b44e5f6ad02f30a04
This is an idiom to prove you had a particular text file at a particular timestamp. I am socially constrained from publishing this text file.
One month from today, one of two things will have happened:
1) I am materially wrong about the most consequential thing I've had to have a view on in 15 years. You should probably degrade your estimate of my ability to think through complex problems.
2) We need a data point to coun[t]er 'Nobody could possibly have seen this coming.'"
Source: https://xcancel.com/patio11/status/1241551327743770624
In the fullness of time, his analysis and conclusions were proven to be clearly, obviously and completely wrong about the most consequential thing he had a view on in 15 years, an imminent Covid apocalypse in Japan.
As a result, I significantly degraded my estimate of his ability to think through complex problems.
> Three days prior to that, on March 22nd, I was sufficiently convinced that there was an unacknowledged geographically distributed coronavirus outbreak to pre-register that conclusion.
Is.... is it possible he's being intentionally nebulous to distract from his failing? Or do I just lack the reading comprehension abilities?
Predicting the future is hard!
So when Patrick is so confident in his own skills at interpreting and predicting complex systems that he stakes his reputation on getting the prediction right, that reputation should be diminished for his audience and for himself when it turns out he got it all exactly backward.
Instead, he now runs a popular podcast to tutor the rest of us who already know better than to make confident predictions about complex systems that we don't understand.
You do need to discount for overconfidence a bit.