Sometimes people ask why hackathons have such amazing things that don’t show up during the normal work prioritization. And why of those hackathon projects, many great ideas still never get to prod. It’s because…coding was not the bottleneck.

Competent people either want total authority, or for other highly competent people to have total authority. Any situation where that falls apart will make them absolutely freak out.

One of the best things you can get from a new hire is perspective. I remember when we were transitioning to 24/7 oncall, some people were really freaking out. We hired someone from Amazon and they were like are you fucking kidding me? The oncall rotation here compared to Amazon is like being the sultan of Brunei. We hired someone from an AI 996 startup. People were chatting about having too much going on. The person’s jaw hit the floor. Fellas, their face said, this is picnic in Hyde park with tea and cucumber sandwiches compared to where I came from. And similarly, we’ve had people come in and say how unbelievably fucked our CI is. And they were right. Just viscerally knowing how things are elsewhere can be such an uplevel to perspective.

In the first ten years of your career you’ll meet a lot of people that are older and more senior than you who seem like idiots, and people will go “oh no you don’t understand, you’re still new in industry, you don’t get it.” And then the next ten years of your career you’ll find out that all of those people were 100% idiots.