> Studies indicate that hospitals led by doctors, sports teams by star players, and universities by researchers outperform those led by non-experts
This is a bold point with only a vague reference to studies. I’m more familiar with sports teams than the other domains but star players who manage successful teams is an exception, not a rule. A few famous examples are Michael Jordan and Derek Jeter - both were legends playing their sports and have yet to participate in building successful teams at the management level.
> Hospitals led by doctors outperform those run by non-medical managers. Universities, business schools and academic departments led by good scholars outperform those that are not. The best sports teams – using data from 15,000 basketball games and 60 years of Formula 1 racing – are led by great former players or run by racing specialists.
I would argue that it depends and varies on the person. I have had non-experts in management who did not often grasp the effort and difficulty and often made bad judgements. Then there were other non-experts who appreciated what was done on technical side a trusted that the reports will do a good job.
Then I had experts in management who always poked into everything and thought they knew better or often get swayed by sweet talks from other experts(even in cases when it didn’t make sense). Then I had experts who rose among the ranks and then despite being untouchable, still supported the reports and put immense trust and acquired all resources requested and let people do their best work.
In the end, I think, expert or non-experts bring different tradeoffs, but trust and a good relation with the people in trenches always gave the best results.
Simple hack that has helped me is changing “todo” to “maybedo”. It reminds me that at some point I thought whatever task was worth doing but gives me the freedom to do something else as needed. Most weeks, I make a “maybedo” list at the beginning of the work week on my whiteboard and erase items as they get completed. Erasing is just as satisfying as crossing off and keeps me out of the hyper-evaluative state of comparing how many things I’ve done vs where I started.
I’m a Dad who grew up in the 80s and the problem is us, the parents. My parents didn’t push me to get into computing, I just found it fascinating. If we try to find things like gentle introductions, it’s likely to get more kids to a base level familiarity but all of the real learning was in reading a 256 page manual as an 8 year old so I could get StarCraft to work on my highly custom rig. Parents as the driving force simply won’t work. Ask your kids what they are interested in and let them struggle with the problem for hours (days even) and they’ll be better for it than anything you could possibly install or provide to them.
Could your parents navigate DOS? Mine sure couldn’t but it didn’t stop me from learning.
From my experience, the best approach is to get your children to try lots of different things and let them find their own interests. I tried lots of things with my son:
Some he really enjoyed. Other he lost interest in very quickly.
It can be frustrating when they quickly lose interest in some toy you have spent your hard earned cash on. But that is the way it goes. One of the things we tried was model rocketry (starting with a small Estes kit) and that was a big success. He has now won competitions, is level 1 certified and wants to study aerospace engineering at University.
I guess it is a bit like running a film studio - most of the films lose money, but the occasional blockbuster more than makes up for it.
This is a great answer. I think you already hint at this but I wanted to elaborate on it a bit: the big thing that our kids fall in love with will not necessarily be computing (at least not in the sense that we mean), and that's okay.
We grew up at various stages of a massive revolution—some are reminiscing for the 80s, I'm at the tail end reminiscing for the early web and then the Flash era. Computers were wonderful to me because I could, as a kid, produce results that looked and felt like they were in the same ballpark as what I saw professionals doing. It was the frontier, and I felt like I was helping to explore it.
In the last two decades computing has grown up, and having grown up it's no longer possible for children to participate in the frontier. From a young age they interact primarily with toys and tools that would be impossible for any one of us to make alone, much less for a child who's still learning. Sandboxes like Scratch are great, but an adventurous kid who wants to be at the frontier will very quickly recognize it as just that: a sandbox. It's not as compelling because it's artificial, created specifically for their education.
Instead, I expect that my children will find something else, a new frontier to push. My kids don't want toys curated by their parents, they want to explore the world and they want to contribute. They are going to find the fields that are still fresh, that still have mystery, that don't require years of education to get to the point where they can contribute meaningfully. And that's awesome! I'm excited to see what they find, and excited for them to show me along.
I am also a dad that grew up in the 80's and my thoughts on this issue is that back in those days there was a much smaller selection of things you could do with a computer, less stimuli and smaller need for instant gratification. At some point computers turned from being a tool you could create to a tool you use to consume other people's creations. From my experience, children today don't have enough patience to learn how to hack things around before they get bored and move on to the next thing. There amount of distractions is insane (web, social media, youtube, easily accessible video games etc). Its more likely a kid will avoid the problem than try to solve it at this point. I feel we lost something important along the way.
This has been my experience too. Not for a lack of trying either! Looking back now, it seems obvious.
I like to leave interesting things lying around where we hangout the most though. Giving them at least an opportunity to get interested (and almost inevitably lose interest!).
Computers weren’t on my radar until my grandmother surprised me with one. I came home from school and there lay 2 huge boxes. I was on my own from there.
I keep seeing that myth. Most of the people I know studies the same as their parents, inspired by them. Specially what catches in kids are hobbies.
I have lots of friend which are professional or semi professional musicians. All of them got the playing of the instrument from the parents.
My wife's siblings are all musicians because that's the direction their mom drove, but nearly all of them now wish that they'd been allowed to pursue what they were truly interested in. If given a choice, only one of six would have chosen music as the primary thing in their life.
Seeing that, my feeling isn't so much that parents as the driving force doesn't work, it's that it's cruel. Our kids are not blank slates for us to write on, they have many predispositions and interests that we have only the smallest influence over. It is far more effective and more ethical for us to help them develop those interests in ways that will benefit them over the long haul than to try to teach them the things that interest us.
> Our kids are not blank slates for us to write on
So true. Hopefully we can give them (what we consider) good basic values. But we can't (and should try to) mold every aspect of their intests and personalities. And anyone who thinks that they can is in for a rude shock.
What a fun game and awesome write up! I've been considering building my own card game variation and this encouraged me to dive in and do it. I loved your balance of engineering/product/marketing/game theory throughout the article. Given the success, have you tried to monetize it at all?
I was feeling very lonely working remote. We moved to a Memphis TN to be closer to family and I was struggling with feeling like an outsider. I grew up playing sports and tried CrossFit but hated paying so much for a gym. F3 workouts are free and I thought I was going for the fitness aspect, but the fellowship is what really stuck. Guys hung out after workouts and it was great to meet so many guys from so many different walks of life.
I've heard these quickly become alt-right incubation machines. The "fellowship" becomes "brotherhood" and then you got a cult-militia going pretty easy after that.
There's no ignoring how the pictures can look externally. For example, I never imagined myself wearing a rucksack for fitness. In my experience though, the community is filled with men from all walks of life, political views, etc. I suppose like any group, its local membership is what most defines your experience. I've personally met lots of guys that I would have never met at church, work, etc because I worked out with them at F3.
Anyone whose political ideals include exclusion or destruction of classes of people may be "scary" to those classes, and in any case I am willing to be intolerant to people who have vocally, explicitly broken the social contract we all usually abide by.
Journaling has fundamentally changed my life in almost every measurable facet. It is the single habit I can point to that helped me accomplish things like in my personal life - stop biting fingernails, run a marathon, run the Boston marathon, be a more engaged Dad. It has also helped diagnose lots of professional patterns - good bosses, bad bosses, understanding that everyone has value and has flaws.
My approach is to read journal entries written on this date from previous years. For example, this morning, I read what I wrote on 5/16/20, 5/16/21, 5/16/22.
Tilled | Remote US | Software Engineer | Tilled.com | Full-time Payment facilitation as a service
Stack: Angular Typescript NestJS Postgres
I’m looking for someone with proven Angular skills who wants to lead our front end development. This role has significant autonomy and the opportunity to work across the stack. We’ve raised capital, compensate competitively and offer stock options. We’re remote first (I’m in TN, company headquarters are CO and we are open to any US cities).
About Tilled: Tilled exists to empower software vendors, marketplaces, and SAAS companies to start generating revenue from accepting credit cards. With our suite of powerful financial tools and industry leading revenue sharing programs, Tilled will power the financial backend of the next generation of marketplaces, SAAS companies, and independent software vendors, allowing them to focus on their core product, not payment facilitation. Welcome to PayFac-as- a-Service!
Tilled | Remote US | Software Engineer | Tilled.com | Full-time
Payment facilitation as a service
Stack:
Typescript
NestJS
Postgres
Angular
About Tilled: Tilled exists to empower software vendors, marketplaces, and SAAS companies to start generating revenue from accepting credit cards. With our suite of powerful financial tools and industry leading revenue sharing programs, Tilled will power the financial backend of the next generation of marketplaces, SAAS companies, and independent software vendors, allowing them to focus on their core product, not payment facilitation. Welcome to PayFac-as- a-Service! This is an exciting time to join as the company goes live with its first customer, and to be part of the early launch team.
Essential Job Functions:
• Create, develop, deploy and maintain Tilled services
• Design and implement highly reliable, fault tolerant systems
• Collect and visualize detailed telemetry data to continuously improve systems
• Advance and adhere to high quality coding practices – unit testing, pair programming
• End-to-end responsibility – continuously monitor and improve the services you create
• Promote an engineering team culture that is always learning, motivated and
collaborative
• Work with a variety of technologies – Typescript, Angular, NodeJS
We're looking for someone with proven front-end skills and interested in working across the stack.
I’ve been working on a project to allow anyone to get paid for their time. It requires they have some knowledge that someone else is willing to pay for but it might help. Free for hosts. BuyTime.co
This is a bold point with only a vague reference to studies. I’m more familiar with sports teams than the other domains but star players who manage successful teams is an exception, not a rule. A few famous examples are Michael Jordan and Derek Jeter - both were legends playing their sports and have yet to participate in building successful teams at the management level.