Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer on the need to not only accumulate information but also to reflect and digest it:
You may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.
I just ended my 2-months employment with Amazon as SDE to get back and become a founder again. I learned a lot from their engineered culture. Amazon culture is unique, highlighted by customer obsession, a simplified term of microeconomics mixed with emotional connection, world class internal tools that centralize and simplifies developer experience and one of the strongest writing culture I’ve ever worked at.
You can mock frugality all you want, but it’s what saves big corporations from making bad decisions and disregarding innovation. Frugality is exactly what made my onboarding enjoyable. My onboarding was one of the craziest experiences I’ll probably never forget, it’s hard to imagine where it could be replicated but it starts with 3 intense weeks focused on learning the culture. Immediately after, things become technical and your instincts will naturally start bringing up vision and results, to see other smiles slowly fading away and find yourself suddenly under the spotlight of raising the bar.
The bar raiser is real, you can see it, feel it, with every code review, with every document and with every escalation. Everyone gets assigned more and expectations rise to be cleaner and to deliver faster.
AI and Working From Office
Two narratives that revolve around AI and WFO, some engineers are fighting against AI calling it a “bubble” similar to blockchain or web3. While those who are more business leaning are thinking of it as a way to get the job done, faster.
AI is a way to scale tasks where quantity and repetition are expected, cheaply. Still not mature, but almost any existing software must be rebuilt with AI where it’s used as a first-class citizen feature, not an afterthought.
Working from office is a bit more interesting these days, it’s not that working remotely doesn’t work. But being at the office gives the ability for managers to control their team’s narratives, exactly the way to influence groups to go to a “war” to drive adrenaline out of people towards one goal.
That’s when you see Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg (early days of Facebook) give wide company speeches against their competitors.
In order to feed narratives into others’ psychology, you’ll need to repeat stories, sometimes without explanation. Which makes me relate to how some LLMs are good at giving the perception of correctness without clear explanations.
I still think working remotely isn’t a good option for a startup, but a good option for cooperations, when there are tons of people, and things get messy quickly.
Back On Duty!
Returning as a founder, doing the things that spark my imagination, enjoying being a generalist and working backward from the users and iterating, right after seeing how modern tech giants operate. Operational Excellence and LLMs began to seem worthwhile if they meet. A lot is happening in Embedded Systems. Fresh energy is always dominant!
