Ask Me Anything

Great questions! Some answers below...

1) How do I effectively market myself? One of my previous mentors (who > happened to work at Meta also) said that it's important to be verbal about > the stuff that I'm working on. My case here is that my IM (Intern Manager) > happens to be an E7, and I'm not sure how I can engage in meaningful > conversations. >

I'm not a good person to ask about this because I'm cynical of people who encourage it. I understand that some very appearance-focused people can get further in career by talking about themselves; I just don't like that sort of person, and I try not to become one. People who think like that are a key reason why some workplaces feel political.

That said, a common mistake some people make is to under-represent what they're doing, or to talk poorly of it. For instance, in the East Asian culture, it's expected that you talk badly about your work (i.e. that you criticize yourself). This isn't a good way to approach American workplaces either.

IMO, it's impossible not to be recognized if you're consistently doing great work. People who focus a lot on appearances are spending their energy in the wrong place. Plus, in the long run, short-term appearances don't keep up with real skills anyway.

> 2) From a technical standpoint, how do I improve on code quality? Without > a doubt, I think that work in the industry vs school is drastically > different, and as a result, adapting to industry lifestyle during an > internship is super crucial. With that being said, code quality differs a > lot as they've very different settings, and that was my biggest feedback > coming out of Uber, but I'm not sure how to improve. At school we're > essentially taught to just make everything pass the autograder... >

It's great that you got that feedback, since it's something actionable. A few thoughts:

- One key way to improve is to at least not repeat past mistakes. I often find myself making the same types of comments in multiple code reviews of the same developer's code; don't be that developer.

- A lot of code quality improvement comes from coding more yourself, and reading others' code. There are many times when I read others' code where I learn new (and better) ways of doing things.

- To that point, have you tried Advent of Code? I'd encourage trying it. The coding problems are themselves a good way to improve, but the real value is in the big Reddit solution threads that each puzzle comes with. I even learn a lot reading through others' solutions there.

> 3) You can only ship code so fast given code reviews and such. Do you > think it's worth forming a small network of people that can actively review > my code? At Uber, my mentor took quite some time to review my code (I > assume because he was a sr. engineer and had other responsibilities) and as > a result, I felt like I was sitting idle and felt very useless. I was > planning on trying to find other mentors at Meta that will be able to help > me, but also my thinking is that it's not their role to mentor me, so I > wouldn't want to bother them. >

In most larger teams, it helps to work on several things at once, so that while one thing is being code reviewed, you're actively working on another. A different approach is to get familiar with one of several ways to do "stacked diffs" (i.e. changes you can layer on top of the code that's being reviewed, which you can land separately). One final thing, which I'm not sure if you've had a chance to do, is to give feedback to your mentor/manager if code reviews become a rate-limiting thing for you. There usually are ways to work around it (e.g. by working on other things at the same time), but if not, it often helps to make that blockage explicit by discussing it.

So sorry to hear about the hardships over the past year.

TBH, I haven't truly bounced back... for instance, I took a day off work yesterday because I was feeling so low. Therapy has been hard (but helpful); not sure if you're seeing a therapist at the moment, but that has been by far the most helpful thing for me. The second most helpful was medication, which I resisted for many years but now wish I had started years earlier.

After my Amazon experience, I began to understand that, at least for me, having a regular thing to work on, with outside-enforced schedules/deadlines, was most helpful. Amazon was a great example of this. But I eventually rented myself a WeWork, and set myself to launching an iOS app within a year. With that goal, I started going in to the WeWork 5 days a week, at least 40 hours per week, which helped stabilize my life a bit.

At the moment, do you have steady employment? For me, at least, the current job has provided a set of near term goals/deadlines that are helpful to me; if I didn't have this job at the moment, I think it'd be harder to get up every day at a reasonable time, since I'm still sleeping badly.

The classic advice is always eat well, sleep well, and exercise. People say it's hard to go too low if you do those consistently. I find what's hard is actually getting on top of those things before you sink so low that even the activation energy to do those things feels impossible.

Thank you for reaching out. I struggled (and still struggle) with the same things.

It's hard to give accurate advice without knowing a person's situation more deeply, but I can at least speak from my own experience (which may or may not apply in your case).

First, the empiric fact is that the moment I added my Amazon warehouse job to my LinkedIn profile, recruiters stopped contacting me. And in social engagements, people get visibly uncomfortable, not knowing what to say, when I tell them I worked at an Amazon warehouse. These things made me feel a bit ashamed at times, but I forced myself to continue saying that I was, at first, unemployed, and then eventually a worker at Amazon in the warehouse. I talk more about the subtleties of all of this, along with my self doubt, in my podcast, Peak Salvation. It's hard to describe it all here, but if you're curious, please give the podcast a spin.

Second, there's the practical emotional side of stepping down. I saw former coworkers, even people who worked for me, get promoted beyond where I was in my career. I began to doubt my ability to get back into work. This doubt, by the way, got worse and worse as the months went by. When you tell people you've been "looking for the next thing" for a few months, it's no big deal. When you tell them you've been away from the industry for 18 months, people start asking what happened.

One particularly low point happened when I interviewed with Apple after being out of tech for more than a year. I tried to mumble and explain a few things about why I had left the industry, and what I hoped to do as an individual contributor on one of their small teams. At the end of the interview, the interviewer revealed that we had met previously. Apparently, when we first met, I had been the Site Director of Meta in London, reporting to the CTO; we had declined to offer this person a job because we didn't feel he qualified for an individual contributor role on the team. Now he was interviewing me as the lead of the team I wanted to join. I felt so ashamed. It's hard to describe how mortifying this was, unless you've experienced a fall of similar altitude.

If this were the classic American movie, I'd tell you that, after a period of struggle, I emerged happier than ever, glad I seized the narrative of my life and did what I wanted to, regardless of social opprobrium. That I slept well, resting in the confidence that what I had saved up to this point would last even through the types of economic circumstances that seem likely to develop in the coming months. That friends, true friends, continued to respect me and talk to me the same way.

But I don't direct this movie. It's an unscripted reality TV series, where every actor says and does what they want. I've made my choice, and I'm overall very glad I did, but I can't recommend it wholeheartedly to others without warning you that there may be some rough times ahead. Only you know what's best in your own situation.

Wishing you the very best in a tough world.

Great to hear from you! One of the EA founders, William MacAskill, has been making the rounds recently because of his new book, which posits how we should behave if future humans mattered as much as current humans do. This, coupled with the strong possibility that there will be far more future humans than current ones, leads to some very interesting moral considerations.

I've heard a lot from the EA community in the past few years, because it appeals a lot to folks in tech. I think some of the appeal is due to its attempts to quantify good (i.e. it appeals to people to whom spreadsheets also appeal). Part of it is because it's an ultra "humanist" approach (if that's even the right term) — basically a bit techno-optimist, a bit "we can do it," etc. There are many things about EA that appeal to me. For instance, their encouragement that people "work to give" (if that's even the right term); their community of "80,000 hours" is a great example of this. I think they also support GiveWell or one of the other charity-rating organizations.

One other thing that appeal to me about EA is their attempt to rank the most important things to give to. This, however, is also my main difficulty with EA: which is that the error bars on those ratings are huge. For instance, while it's true that searching for Earth-ending asteroids may well be the most important thing we could be doing, it's very difficult to estimate how much effort should be spent on that vs, say, clean drinking water. I guess these difficulties are fundamental to anyone's giving, so in a sense I'm not saying anything new; I guess I see some of the dangers in my attraction to EA, that it'll help me somehow be sure that what I'm giving to is absolutely the most important causes for the world.

Ultimately, though, I'm a fan of all the energy they've drawn into the philanthropy space, and their disciplined approach to it. I think their encouragement of people to continue working in their areas of talent in order to give is great. In a way, I think many of their teachings replace some of the things I lost when I went from being a Christian to being atheist — this idea that we should dedicate ourselves to others, and that in the end, it pays to do good.

What do you think of EA? You might enjoy some of MacAskill's interviews recently. I remember one episode of the Sam Harris show which interviewed him, for example. And Sam Harris tends to be a deep thinker, so the conversation is good.

I used to interview college candidates for Microsoft quite often, but haven't done that in a while, so my advice might be dated. But here's what I remember: there's an emphasis on "intellectual horsepower," or the ability to solve problems dynamically. And of course on coding. Here's what I'd advise:

- Speak your thoughts out loud as you reason through problems. Don't just spend 5 silent minutes staring at the whiteboard writing random things. Even when you're writing code, describe what you're thinking.

- Get code correct before you start optimizing to get it fast. And let the interviewer know that it's what you're doing.

- Test your own code first before declaring yourself done. It is far better to find your own bugs than to have the interviewer find one.

Best wishes! Let me know how it goes!