Amber Cheetah asked
answered 4h ago
Hi Philip,
I wanted to ask you three things:
Deciding when to step away: What factors went into your decision to stop working in the industry? Was it reaching a financial milestone, achieving a certain career level, or simply feeling ready? I’ve been working for 15+ years, and due to visa constraints, taking a sabbatical isn’t really an option. I’m curious what helped you decide when to hang up the boots.
Managing intensity: Earlier in your career, you mentioned working 12+ hour days with little sleep. How did you manage your emotions and avoid being cranky with coworkers and family while maintaining that pace?
One major part of your advice seems to be internalizing feedback and acting on it to improve it. However, there're situations where people find faults or provide feedback without much substance. How do you decide if a feedback is worth acting upon or not. Or do you propose to act on all the feedback given to you by everyone .
Would love to hear your perspective. I am grateful for you to share your wisdom and experience. I've learnt quite a bit from listening from you and reading your answers. Really appreciate it.
Thanks.
Philip's answer
Deciding when to step away
In some ways the decision to step away from OpenAI a year and a half ago was very easy: my mom had advanced liver cancer, and I moved my parents into my house so I could take care of her full time. That was a great decision, and very easy to make because I knew it was the right choice. Zero regrets on that.
The thing I struggle with more is how and whether to get back into industry. I still love building things and am working full time on a variety of side projects. But it's not the same as having coworkers. I'm a bit unsure if joining a traditionally structured company is the best thing for me right now, since AI enables us to work in much smaller teams. Part of me wonders whether the best work environment for me might be a team of 3-5 people.
A little part of me wonders whether I should also try a completely different profession, the way I've been teaching at the University of Washington part-time for the past 8 years.
Managing intensity
I think I did an ok job at this during the period of my life when I worked a lot longer hours. But some things made it easier:
In the period of work where I had a sleeping bag in the office, I was married without kids. So I had far less responsibilities.
I was a lot younger in many of those crunch periods, which made daily energy less of a problem.
I think I was objectively less effective on a per-hour basis during those sprints where I worked very long hours in the office. More effective in totality, but less effective per unit time.
I'm not convinced all that intensity was positive. I suspect I could have reached similar career goals without pushing quite as intensely had I chosen better how to spend my time (e.g. oftentimes during my early 20's, my extra hours were spent doing things that weren't that important).
Internalizing feedback
You're right that not all feedback is good or wise. The difficulty is in differentiating the two. I think that if you only ever implement feedback you already agree with, you arguably might not need the feedback at all. We should at least occasionally try to implement some feedback we didn't at first agree with, just to witness the empiric results. But ultimately, not all feedback is good, and some feedback might be downright harmful.
I don't have any wisdom around this other than to say it helps to triangulate amongst a few people. For instance, I've recently gotten feedback from two different sources, one professional and one social, that I jump too quickly into the next topic of conversation without letting emotionally heavy things have some quiet space to sit. The fact that this came unsolicited from two different sources is a strong indicator that the feedback is consistent and accurate. I'm going to try to change this.