Ask Me Anything

A series of very hard (but fascinating) questions, in a domain I love to talk about. But first, the caveats:

• I'm (obviously) not a financial advisor.

• Even if I was, the error bars on any recommendation here will be huge. If you take the advice, you need to be emotionally resilient to massive swings that are possible, any which way, and not roil your emotions with hindsight bias.

trying to buy a home with cash because I never know when there might be a RIF

There will definitely be a RIF at some point. Whether you're included is a different question; but yes, you should prepare for uncertainty. Especially given how quickly the industry is changing.

That said, it's unclear to me whether you should buy with cash. It's smart not to be "cash-poor" after moving into a house with a huge mortgage, so it's good you're saving up, but there are other tradeoffs (e.g. the nicety of being able to customize your living space when you own vs. rent, etc). Buying in cash is definitely the most fiscally conservative approach though; then again, Warren Buffett said his biggest mistake was buying his home instead of renting for life. Some people would argue that buying, at all, is a mistake (relative to investing your money wisely), given the average US home value growth over the past 70+ years is something like 4% a year. In the end, I think you shouldn't think of a home as an investment; you should either buy one because you enjoy owning one (and view it as an expense), or rent for life because you don't want to put the majority of your assets into one real estate gamble.

What do you recommend investing in and should I automate it like my retirement? So far I have been slowly buying and holding Vanguard ETFs

I'm fiscally conservative and don't chase returns... so I'm completely behind index ETFs and manual rebalancing periodically. When you say "automate it," I'm not positive what you mean, but if you mean "follow a principled formula and don't change the approach based on emotion," I'm a big fan.

when there seems to be a dip

This sounds a little bit like trying to time the market... which doesn't work. It also sounds like the opposite of what you might have meant by "automate it," so you can guess which side of this argument I'd fall on. 🤣 I'm all for dollar-cost-averaging yourself across a principled asset allocation, and letting time-in-market do all the work.

Do you think the US stock market will crash?

Yes, always does, because it's cyclical. Might be pretty bad this time because of the US debt problem, which feels unresolvable via normal politics until something disastrous happens.

Should I focus on ETFs invested in international companies?

Unclear. I have something like 15% in international ETFs, just as a matter of principle. But it's not clear to me that you should increase your international exposure simply because you anticipate a US crash, because sometimes when the US crashes, the rest of the world does even worse. There's also a funny way in which buying US large-cap is a good deal of international exposure anyway, because so many of those companies make a huge slice of their revenue internationally. My vote is just to be principled about the amount you'll want to put into international ETFs and to stick to that, resisting the temptation to adjust the portfolio based on your prognosis of world situations (i.e. get out of the business of being an oracle).

Your approach is exactly right. As someone just starting in industry, how are you supposed to gain experience if you never look at code? It's fine and good for experienced engineers to not look at code output because they've already developed a sense for what things go wrong/etc, but how are you supposed to learn those things without ever seeing the code?

You're also right that this will make you slower in the short term than someone who ignores the code from day one straight out of college. But in several years, you will be the one who's gained deeper experience and can go farther.

The answer becomes much clearer if you look at how many non-coders get the vibecoding bug and than give up once the project is 85% done -- because inevitably, without a coding background, you'll often hit a wall at some point and be fundamentally unable to solve the issue because you lack some basic understanding. You are building yourself into the opposite of that person.

I think this is a false dichotomy. Those choices aren't mutually exclusive opposites. In #2, for instance, some people switch companies and actually grow more quickly.

If you're choosing amongst those companies, you're in the very fortunate situation of being spoiled for choice. It's a wonderful position you've found yourself in.

Some related thoughts:

• Choice of company, when each one is so stellar, is often not as important as choice of team or role. Or, for that matter, even matching yourself with a great manager.

• The fates of OpenAI and Anthropic are going to be higher variance than Meta (or Microsoft or Google). This doesn't mean they're bad choices -- it just means that predicting their futures comes with bigger error bars.

• The fact that you describe OpenAI and Anthropic as "more exciting" is probably a hint you should at least strongly consider joining one of them simply because your interests point in that direction. There's a lot to be said about being excited about something.

• When a choice is too close to call, don't overthink it. You could be aiming for false precision. In cases where it's simply impossible to know which path is best, you're going to have to choose based on available information, resting assured you could not have made a better choice at the time given what was knowable.

Wishing you the best in your decision.

I'm so sorry to hear about your difficulties in getting a callback. For what it's worth, I think all of hiring has gotten a lot tougher and a lot more competitive in the past year and a half. This is probably a combination of the job market tightening (not in the literal number of jobs, but in the much smaller number of firms that people want to work for). There is also a lot of general movement as people try to rush to the shores of companies and teams that have a foundation in AI, in hopes of not being left behind.

I can't speak for your situation specifically, but by the way you describe it, I do suspect that the years of experience may well be affecting things in a market where many senior people are simultaneously looking for jobs. For instance, at least three friends of mine at the director level have been looking unsuccessfully for jobs for over nine months. This current environment is very stark.

If the years of experience are indeed a potential problem, would you be willing to step back into a smaller scope role? Oftentimes, it's easier to get a foot in the door first, and then get promoted back into a scope you're fully capable of, than it is to land fresh with that scope already.

In this environment, you'll need a lot of shots at goal before something lands. I've had students in my UW class apply to over 200 places before they got an interview. You can do this; you'll just need to find the right fit, and persist long enough to find your next place. Your ability to have reached the director level means you definitely have it in you to be very valuable to the right company.