> Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.
This makes no sense in the domain they are on. Very few. significant things they do takes weeks. Even planning for a learning run takes months.
There are a lot if things that can be split into just a few weeks for some contrite sprint plan. There are others that take longer before realising intermediate results.
One of the key things OpenAI does is very small scale model experiments. You can iterate a lot faster if your training run takes on the order of minutes. So vet ideas there, only allow proven ideas to be part of the longer training run.
ML model training has become the new "my code's compiling" except now it takes weeks in many cases. The train then chill mindset that some ML engineers have is not they way to make rapid progress.
The last one is golden "Working with great people is one of the best parts of life".
It's unthinkable nowadays to work in the old AT&T/Bell lab environment during the invention and early works of transistor, Unix/C, fiber/laser, CCD, DSP, etc. For the glimpse of the wonderful environment working there check out Richard Hamming's book "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" since he was working there when most of the inventions happened.
> Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too.
I am curious about others' track record doing this.
My employer (a university) recently started enforcing a certain rule making us fill out more paperwork. I emailed the person responsible, and did my best to be polite, but basically asked "Is this really necessary?"
This provoked a very negative response. All I accomplished was to generate ill will, to piss off everyone involved (including myself), and to take everyone's attention away from their jobs. I felt like a fool.
I'm reminded of PG's quote that "rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience". To fight bullshit is to focus my mental energy on bullshit, and I wonder if it would have been better to make the minimum effort needed to comply, and move on. Perhaps others fared better?
Your problem is that you are an indeterminate number of iterations deep into people not fighting bureaucracy, and now it has completely metastasized. The number of administrators at universities is so ludicrously high that I have to imagine on some level the vast majority of them are aware of how useless they really are, and as such, the removal of bureaucracy is an existential threat to their job.
Consider this an object lesson in the importance of preventing this systematic failure from occurring as early and as often as possible.
In this particular case, yes, the correct choice is to bend like the willow and move on with life. Not only can you not defeat this process, the rewards for victory would be negligible. If the degree of fatalism that seems to entail is too much, consider changing jobs. Contrary to the loud people on the internet, there are jobs that are not just bureaucratic garbage, but you're not going to find them at a university. (They do have some jobs that are important by any measure, and if you value what you are doing because you have one of them, then by all means stay if you like, but they will pretty much all be encrusted with garbage as part of the price of entry.)
In that case, I would say this even more suggests bending like a willow.
But I would suggest putting your finger in the air every year or two. The creep of bureaucratic garbage in the university system has been monotonic in the past several decades, sadly.
I'm not advising anything I don't do myself; frankly I advise everyone to have their finger in the air every year or two. Places change. I've been where I am for quite a while, actually, I'm not a job hopper at all, but only because my job keeps proving itself to me, not mere inertia.
In the meantime, enjoy it as much as you can! I may sound really cynical here, but I actually don't mean it that way. This is a long-term strategy designed to maximize my chances of enjoying my job on a succession of short-term bases. Once you have that enjoyable job by all means enjoy it, and hope it will continue... just don't count on it continuing.
I think maybe your problem was starting the conversation with the form custodian. Their job is the form. They understand the form. They like the form.
I think you have to go up a level to have a chance of those conversations going anywhere. Someone with a little more perspective can go “oh yeah, shoot, good point that concern is OBE we really don’t need to be using that form.”
I think it’s important to understand the context you’re operating in. Universities are highly bureaucratic organizations. This is not an entirely bad thing; we don’t actually want them to operate like startups (for instance we expect them to prioritize longevity over risk-taking: we expect them to preserve capital, etc). It doesn’t mean you did a bad thing - perhaps you were correct, although it’s also possible that what seems unnecessary to you is necessary for some other reason you’re not aware of.
What concerns me is that everyone got angry including you. I might suggest reflecting on that a little bit. Is there a path where you didn’t get your way but you also didn’t get upset? And where you didn’t upset anyone else? If not, then accepting you work for a bureaucracy is one possibility, and if you dislike that, you could work for a nimble startup instead. The tradeoff is you won’t have a pension. ;)
> what seems unnecessary to you is necessary for some other reason you’re not aware of.
In this case this was more-or-less true. As my counterpart in HR explained, there are federal government rules mandating this bit of bureaucracy. Of course, one can presumably get away with ignoring them... but, as it turns out, the rules weren't something she made up.
> Is there a path where you didn’t get your way but you also didn’t get upset? And where you didn’t upset anyone else?
If her response was "Sorry, I realize this is annoying, but [explanation]", then certainly."
Given the tone of her response, then in principle still yes, but it seems to require a lot of mental fortitude. Kind of like how a skilled boxer can take a punch in the ring and remain basically unfazed.
"we don’t actually want them to operate like startups (for instance we expect them to prioritize longevity over risk-taking: we expect them to preserve capital, etc)".
I'm not sure you need bureaucracy to do this? It is just the easiest and laziest way to do it. Adding processes that are by design wasteful as an attempt to slow down change is perhaps the most inefficient way of getting to that goal. It would be much more efficient to just have far far far less people with far more responsibility and work to do. That combination would be equally slow at less cost.
Bureaucracy is very very difficult to fight if you are not in charge, and conversely wasteful bureaucracy is almost entirely in the domain of fault of the person in charge ( the CEO, the President, etc of a company).
If you are in charge, you can stop it. I do it all the time, and I rather enjoy when someone tells me I need to fill out a useless outdated form to do something, and I say 'So, if I don't, do I get fired?'. The answer is either 'yes, you will', or 'no... um.. I guess this might not really be needed.'
The message to eliminated wasted time and wasted process has to come from the very top, with such authority and clarity that it leaves no room for 'that is how we have always done it'.
Yeah, it's good advice if you're CEO, if you're not you better have nothing to lose and be willing to leave the job even if you think you are a good diplomat. I think your last sentence is often the only play, do just exactly what you need to do to appear to be all in and a model supporter of the "initiative" without putting any real effort in to it. But it's also a skill to know when you can, and when you can't change a course of action. Sometimes something silly is happening that no one cares about and you can just change it by speaking up and taking ownership of it.
Well, the rub of that quote (seen in isolation at least) is that it's still less stupid.
I think with stuff like this, you can make an earnest attempt to understand why it's necessary, but it's on them to, if not convince you, at least convince you that they have reasons to believe it's necessary.
Everybody has their role to play, and these people are at least ostensibly hired so that you don't have to waste your energy understanding and problem solving certain things like compliance, process, etc. But as someone who's worked in admin for some very flat organisations, i.e., organisations with allergies to beaurocratic procedure, I've always seen it as important that the people subjected to my next brainchild at least have a feeling that I know what I'm doing.
I haven't seen the email thread, but failing to do that and responding negatively is a failing on their part. That said, admin can feel like hearding cats nost days, and sometimes a "polite enquiry into the necessity of a procedure" isn't just a polite request for clarification, but a threat to make the next 6 months of your work a living hell because people refuse to follow something you need to get your work done.
So I guess the prescription in those cases is cognitive empathy and finding the right tone. On both sides.
I've personally decided to minimally comply. Sometimes I'll just skip steps and if no one calls me out on it then great. If they do... Well, I guess I have to waste more time. Easier to ask forgiveness and all that.
I often call bullshit out when I see it with little regard to the consequences, because it just goes against every fiber of my being - but when I call it out, I try to show evidence as to how it's bullshit, and if possible a better way to approach a problem said bullshit is trying to solve. That way I don't just tell people I don't like something, I also present evidence as to why and potentially a solution. Seems like people are more inclined to see your POV this way and not feel attacked.
> > Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too.
>I am curious about others' track record doing this.
I nearly lost my job fighting bullshit and bureaucracy at my current gig and have been relegated to a small corner of the business where I am unable to call out the incessant nonsense coming from the vast army of project managers and other professional meeting attenders that have infected this place. At 54 I’m past my sell-by date from new projects and customers, so my only option is to take the daily humiliation so I can keep paying the rent.
> Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction bets; this is easy to say but evidently hard to do. You can delete more stuff than you think.
i struggle with this. anyone can macroexpand with tips?
Instead of doing a lot small things, work on a few high value ones.
The definition of "high value" is context dependent of course, for instance if the ones buying a software are not the ones who will using it, the value of UX efficiency when doing bulk operations will not be the same.
Just lok at the openai: they not only provide ML models, but also a chat experience, a way to save your preious interactions, an easy way to pay, fine-tunes, and that's all from day one
I have mixed feelings about this quote because I do not like when life writers write high-level statements such as this.
Personally, I prefer very very specific suggestions on preventing very very specific problems. For example: How to prevent broken-telephone problem when communicating technical topics to an un-initiated audience?
1. Recognize ambiguous pronouns [1]
2. Distinguish active voice from passive voice
3. Create helpful lists.
Maybe this is a one-off incident of lack of proof-reading? I noticed this SamAltman article didn't have the usual proof reading rigor
> Most experienced devtool investors know that devtool markets usually come in threes: three parts of a stool that individually make sense, but collectively start jostling for the limited budget (and funding) available in their larger category (and will eventually be guided by their market to build or buy each others’ features in the process)
> For frontend/JAMstack devs, this was a three way battle between startups building metaframeworks, cloud infra, and content management systems, and various combinations of each. Arguably round 1 won by Nextjs/Vercel and Contentful. In data engineering, a similar battle ensued between data catalogs, semantic layers, and business intelligence, though we are still in very early days of category collapse. Even in fintech, you see Deel/Rippling/Ramp/Brex building each other’s features as fast as they can between the trio of contractor, payroll, and corporate spending products.
The Mythical Man Month comes to mind as one example.
There are also lots of business plans that promise outrageous returns on investment... sometime down the line. But at the end of the day your business is never going to be more valuable than the amount of money your customers give you minus operating costs.
Brook's Law - "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
This applies to all projects, not just software in my experience. Everyone thinks you just need to find the right expert who will magically just slot right into the team and process and hit the ground running. In practice, the people worth hiring take 4-6 weeks to get up to speed with the help of an existing project member, and the people not worth keeping start spewing out code that is ultimately neither helpful nor correct the moment they have access to your repo.
I took it to mean, don't fight beurocratic battles that you won't win.
For example, fighting RTO at Amazon. Jassy has made it one of his top priorities, and no matter how much I disagree with it, I'm not going to shift the needle
When I think of the laws of physics, I think of things which are reliable at some meaningful scale, and which can be used to make predictions about how things will go in the real world. So, to answer your question, no.
This post is a list of common sense advice (I heard them all before), and there’s probably no correlation between them and success (except for “the right connections”, in the first item). You can follow this advice top to bottom and still fail spectacularly every time. But when people succeed, they retell the story - almost always random, like the sudden success of chatgpt - into an act of sheer will, where their intellect played a central role on beating the odds. As history shows us again and again, it’s usually revisionism
(Or maybe I’m just bitter, having shut down my startup today)
Then, how about creating 1000 startups and operating them in parallel? Since success is mostly luck, it doesn't matter how well each one is operated. Therefore, by operating 1000 startups, the probability of success can be increased to 1000 squared.
I mean, the startup world is not literally a lottery. But any post by sama about what it takes to succeed most definitely should start with a disclaimer about survivorship bias.
can someone please enumerate what so many people like and admire about Sam Altman?
as far as I can tell, his career was:
1. get VC funding for his silly startup, which goes nowhere and is shut down
1. get a job at Y Combinator handing out other people's money
1. get sacked from Y Combinator for unclear reasons
1. get a job at OpenAI as the CEO, not a product or engineering person
what particular things has he, personally, done that make him so popular and admired on this site?
Actually, even if you understand the last item literally, it is impressive enough to gain reputation. Why did you put it as the last item, thinking it was nothing special?
As far as this particular post from Sam, who cares? Judge something by that something, not by who said it. If it is advice that is good, it is good. It isn't good because it comes from someone you like. It is good because it is good. Content is what matters, not the credentials of the author. Lots of people with great credentials say stupid things... and smart things...
This makes no sense in the domain they are on. Very few. significant things they do takes weeks. Even planning for a learning run takes months.
There are a lot if things that can be split into just a few weeks for some contrite sprint plan. There are others that take longer before realising intermediate results.