The Mission

Can you indulge me in a thought experiment. You seem like a reasonable human being but I think your question shows that you may have fallen into a moral trap.

Can you explain to me the point I've made that you're arguing for or against with your question. Show me how your question has any impact on that point.

If you're taking a side and saying "But did you know this person was literally Hitler" then you may have fallen prey to the manufactured outrage surrounding the issue. Take a step back and ask yourself if it matters if the list was called pc-considered-harmful, woodchipping-kittens or fluffy-bunnies? What is the impact on the list's name on the situation?

If you're associating any questioning of the situation with the other side then it's worth spending a moment to see if you might have tied your beliefs to identity. When we tie our beliefs to our identity, we associate questioning of those beliefs with attacks on our identity. This is being exploited at the cost of completely polarizing your view.

The next step would be to see how upset you are. If you're very upset or wound up, or maybe you're not but you've commented a zillion times about this elsewhere, why are you doing so about this matter and not other things? What is it about this issue that gets you so riled up and why? Why would you care about some guy you don't know getting fired more than the President's involvement with Russia, or the killing of innocent civilians in the Yemen? What is it about this…

Hard to kill because they're financially independent. We believe enough in the technology we're building (gpu-powered graph ai & visualization) and the missions we're powering (security, fraud, anti-misinfo, healthcare, etc.) that we turned down large initial funding as it would have broken us. So awhile back, being cockroaches meant running as cost-effectively as we could (and still do, in fact, just not as extreme) as we figured it out, and now that things are working, it means prioritizing sustainable growth vs financial games likely to fail.

In contrast, popular models prone to failure and largely fueled by market phenomena like low inflation rates include ad-based social media ("we'll turn on revenue in 5 years, no, really!"), blitzscaling ("we'll eventually figure it out!"), sales-driven growth ("our federal team will make our $ back in 3-5 years, no really!"), acquihires ("with enough AI talent we'll just sell our staff!").

I like venture capital, such as for deep tech and true growth, but the reality is most tech VC funding is more about financial engineering that assumes most of the portfolio fails. They push for commercial scaling too early and wipe out, which is fine for the rich VC who just needs 1-3 bets to win. Fine for them, but sucks for most founders & employees unless they job hop every 2 years. If we take VC $ again, it'd be on our terms and with a clear payback/growth return.

A great way to kill an otherwise great idea & company is putting VC $ in,…

Hey Zach, I'm in a similar boat to you, although less prolific. I read your post as saying "I'm trying to figure out what to do next", and this is some food for thought in that regard. Personally, moving forward I intend to do what you call a "project deep dive", but from a slightly different angle.

There was another highly upvoted post on HN last week titled "Things I’ve Learned from Reading IndieHackers" [0]. The article itself had a lot of interesting advice, distilled from interviews with people who had taken side projects and turned them into profitable businesses.

In the comments, soneca had some insightful additions [1]. And we are increasingly in an attention-driven economy [2]. But while attention is being widely harvested through exploiting addictive tendencies [3], that does not motivate me. Reading Hooked [4] was interesting, but also terrifying.

For me, bringing this together means my course of action is as follows: Build an audience around content which enriches the lives of people. Way easier said than done. And some may write it off as hopelessly naive.

But while Facebook and friends scour the dopamine landscape for user attention, building an audience around long-term content that challenges and enriches the lives of people seems wonderfully contrarian to me. And it's in that contrarian tenet that I find solace. Take the slow and the long road, and you can build a sustainable source of value.

In the grand scheme of things, spending a few years of my…

These articles twist words. How come teams composed entirely of women on them are called "diverse"? I do not think this word means what they think it means.

Liberals have fought for decades to make race and sex a non-issue. They won: today's conservatives are decidedly liberal when we compare them to the thinking of conservatives from the 40s and 50s. No one can dare to say in public the kind of stuff that was regularly said. Few even think it. Mixed beaches. Interracial marriages. Women go to college and graduate at greater rates than men.

But now the pendulum has swung in a direction that makes many liberals uneasy (including Bill Maher, Sam Harris, David Pakman and so on). Now, we can unironically say things like an all-women team is "diverse", that failing to mention race is racist, that it's impossible to be sexist against men or racist against whites, that ignoring the effect of race based quota policies on asians is not racist, that men should shut up in the #MeToo movement, and white people should be in the back in the BLM movement.

Things usually start far earlier in life. Little boys are funneled more towards maths and programming, little girls are not. So by the time it comes to Google hiring, trying to solve the problem with quotas is only going to make things worse. Take it from a female ex-googler who did the hiring: https://medium.com/the-mission/im-an-ex-google-woman-tech-leader-and-i-m-sick-of-our-approach-to-diversity-17008c5fe999

But beyond this,…

Nice. I could talk all day about this stuff.

I represent goal/value alignments by assigning each value a label and labeling each goal. For instance mental health might be blue, professional competency might be yellow, etc.

Tracking depends on the specific thing. Most habits I track in an iOS app called Streaks. For skills which require introspection to improve, I keep a journal right in the trello entry for that specific habit. For instance if you play a musical instrument and you get feedback from a teacher weekly, you may want to journal that.

Values & Principles were later additions (I only added principles in the last year). The distinction is that values are specific to a person while principles are broad. For instance a lot of people agree in the principle that giving back to the community leads to deep happiness in the long term. But some might choose to do it by teaching python to kids, others might make dance tutorials on youtube.

My thought is: values do change over time as we get older or re-prioritize things in life, principles should be more steady. And it's useful to ground our values to reality.

Granted it's probably impossible to write down principles objectively, but I think it's worth a shot, even if to remind us that our values are only that: things we value, not necessarily others, who are all on their own journeys.

https://medium.com/the-mission/the-difference-between-principles-and-values-789b95452422

Hey! Definitely look at the other advice here, and take mine with a grain of salt. However, I want to offer a slightly opposing view.

"I no longer have the financial means to take a step back into a less senior role at a company with a larger engineering team"

I would argue you can't afford to stay where you are. If you're not happy and feel under-qualified (true or not), you'll never get promoted again. You're dooming your career ultimately, for a short-term tradeoff.

Now, that's not to say you should go more junior! Rather, you need to find your zone of genius. It sounds a bit cheesy, but I recommend you spend some time trying to figure out what you're both good at AND enjoy:

https://medium.com/the-mission/6-ways-to-uncover-your-personal-zone-of-genius-be7fd33e3773

There are so many highly-paid/highly-rewarded roles in tech! I think you're underestimating your ability to find a job you both love and which will value you (financially and intrinsically).

To sum it up: you don't need mentorship, you just need a new job :) After 5 years, that feels insurmountable. It's not!

(My email is in my profile if you want to reach out and share more explicitly about your financials if you're willing to share numbers. I'm happy to help you figure out your options, and talk about comp! And obviously I'll keep everything confidential.)