antipattern

You are either into writing programs (aka coding) or not. There is something totally amazing about creating something from nothing, and doing it with just your brain, and some time on your hands.

When you get hooked on coding, it will totally take over and change your life in ways you never suspect. If you get hooked when you are very young, it could result in you having spent thousands of hours in front of a screen even before entering the job market. And in that case, you have a massive advantage in comparison to other software engineers. You simply are better at it than most of your peers. There is nothing strange about it, it is just simply what happens when you practice a lot.

The coding prodigy however faces problems that other coders often don't even reach. They are on a track to something else, and they are not even aware of it.

Geek evolution is related to the dopamine hit you get when you've completed a project. In the beginning it is quite simple stuff, like just getting the computer to do something. Then it matures to finishing up bigger projects. Every time you complete a project, you just feel good, sometimes really great.

But unfortunately the dopamine high after a project quickly fades.

Now you are on to creating bigger and more complicated projects. At some point the projects come so big, you need a team to complete them. So now you have to deal with computers and people.

Most coders don't even get to this phase – they somehow can't make the jump to dealing with people.

If you have both coding and people in your career, you're title is probably director or software architect, or something like that. The cool thing is that now you can build even bigger projects.

What happens next? I don't want to spoil the ending, but it is a very slippery slope from here onward.

At some point, even with a team of people helping, and you churning out cool projects, the dopamine hits become less intense and far in between.

You start wondering if there is something wrong with the projects themselves. Maybe they are just too boring, you decide.

So you jump to a different company that does some cooler stuff. Or course you can perform this jump many times, chasing that high.

The next major hurdle that you might face is that you can't find projects that interest you any more.

Woe if you got this far! Now what?

At this point, you really have no choice but to invent your own projects to work on. This is the first phase of being a technical entrepreneur.

The technical entrepreneur, coming from a coding background, literally invents new things to chase that high. The perspective is that of a coder looking for something cool to do, and that is the reason why his/her startup exists.

However, most of what you do ends in pretty much failure at this stage of geek evolution. It is quite depressing. There is no easy shortcut any more to your dopamine high.

Next step is that you realize that you have to get into the minds of other people, to see what makes them tick, so you can understand what they want. In this way your projects achieve a purpose, and can be even more successful.

Now you've turned into a psychologist of some sort, I am afraid. What you do every day is going further and further way from what you love, the coding that you started with. You are now trying to figure out how to get people addicted to the stuff you churn out.

Product managers call this engagement, and it is probably the worst thing that has happened to software. Not a day goes by where you don't see a news article about the effects of this addiction, so I won't spend much time on it.

Now suddenly you are dealing with your own dopamine addiction, and that of others – essentially stealing away their time, getting them addicted to your products.

And you are typically stealing attention from people that have more time than money, since those two things seem to be inversely related most of the time (who has both time and money, you should ask?).

Of course, when stealing time from a person who does not have much money, you have to think of other creative ways to monetize your products.

This is causes a lot of further cycles of addiction on addiction.

There are others that would be very happy to advertise to your highly engaged users, of course to help satisfy their shopping addiction.

There is the venture capitalist who, in trying to satisfy his own addiction to money and returns, is willing to finance your multiple levels of addiction. Of course, the vulture capitalist is really driven by the stock market, which is driven by your own addiction to investment returns. It is a full cycle.

It is all inter-related.

And it is all about addiction.

Your pleasure in creating something from nothing now made you part of a world of people all addicted to something. Most of it not good for them.

And now, you coder, have reached the final stage of your evolution.

Philosopher.

You have to live under a rock not to have noticed that a lot of US companies are snapped up by Chinese companies. At least this was the case last year, with $3 billion in Chinese tech investment in the US. The invasion has however been slowed to a trickle with new administration policies. A lot of Chinese investment deals fell apart in 2019 because of this.

Some companies are not that lucky. Being bought by a Chinese company is an an interesting experience, to put it mildly.

The first thing to know is that your now-Chinese company also automatically gets a new employee called Confucius. No joke, this new employee is really the famous philosopher that often speaks his wisdom from fortune cookies when you go out for Chinese food.

Yes, THE Confucius has joined your company!

The result is that you often don't know how things work anymore. Confucius brings lots of new ways of doing things that you were never even aware of. Distilling thousands of years of traditions from this dude into the brain of an average startup dude in Silicon Valley takes a lot of effort.

Basically things get weird very quickly.

You might not know how decisions are made any more. They just land on your lap, with no warning. Nobody thought it was a good idea to you talk about it first. The business ideas don't make sense, but you have to make it work anyway.

Speaking your mind often causes trouble. You can't just say no to something. You realize it afterwards when the dynamics in the room just goes bonkers. Or the conversation just stops.

You might ask questions and never get an answer. You don't know if your Chinese boss is just busy, passive aggressive, not paying attention, or planning to fire you. You don't understand him. The instructions are vague and sometimes conflicting or not making sense.

There are a lot of meetings. And I mean a lot. You can't figure out why, because no decisions are being made. You can't understand a word of your Chinese co-workers when on a conference call.

Lots of travel. You try to understand the situation at the Chinese head quarters, but you give up. You ask questions, and people start whispering and not responding. It is just so weird.

Business decisions go into some other alternate universe where everything is a quantum superposition. Your business strategy might literally change 180 degrees from one week to another, and then back again. You look again and something changed.

The notion of focusing on one thing flies out of the window. Suddenly several businesses ideas pop up, and it becomes hard to explain how the fit together. It is like ideas multiply and everything is tried in some weird stir fry wok of a business.

You think you are doing well, but then find out, no you were completely wrong. Some good people get fired, and nobody can figure out why. Others just run for the hills, and they tell you they are so happy to be out of here.

Suddenly all sorts of privacy issues pop up. Huh, they want us to send the data to China? Can the Chinese government see all our data now? Should we tell our users? Explaining what privacy means becomes a problem – you try but it does not really sink in.

Security says: Don't take your laptop when you go to China, you will get hacked. Don't log into production systems from China. You can't basically work when there, since you can't log into most of the systems you need.

You suddenly have to deal with spy employees. Nepotism suddenly rears it head.

There are spectacular displays of wealth and really excessive parties. Crazy large business deals involving Chinese money start happening.

Where is all the money coming from?

WTF is going on?

I am having a chat with a startup CEO, and he casually mentions that he works 80 hours a week. He is a moderately famous person, wealthy, and made his money at the Google rocket ship like many others. He could have stayed at Google forever, but started wondering about the outside world, and now made the jump into the startup world.

I am not sure what to say about his amazing work ethic. I just nod my head as you are supposed to do. This is what everyone knows it takes to make it in Silicon Valley. The conversation goes on to other things.

There has been periods that I really worked a lot too. I've always been a bit afraid to add up how much I work. Just like commuting in the Bay Area, you best should not add up how much you drive, since the numbers are likely to be very depressing.

After the meeting, I start thinking maybe I should talk to the CEO about cutting down on his hours. I am not sure and I think he would probably take it badly.

I want to say to him, even if you could work 1000 hours a week, your startup is still most likely to fail. You will just burn yourself out, as I have done. You end up with no startup, no life, and bad health.

Maybe consider working 10 hours a week instead of 80. Yeah, really do that, just don't tell your investors who will likely fire your ass in five minutes.

The reason is quite simple.

You cannot do everything as a CEO. If you do the same thing 3 times, you have to get someone else to do it for you. It is not worth your time doing the same thing over and over again. So you really have to think hard how to keep on doing different things.

You only need to pack a few different things into a week as a CEO to be quite successful. If you can find 80 hours of different things to do every week, you probably live in some alternate universe.

I want to be a CEO that works 10 hours a week. A lazy but very successful bum.

Honestly, I have not though much about diversity in Silicon Valley until recently. I guess I did not get out as much, just doing my thing at a startup.

Recently, however, I am talking to a lot of companies and startups. And I am starting to make diversity observations.

I hope this won't get me into trouble.

For example, at one startup I visited, I was totally struck how tall everyone was. I was like an ant among giraffes. I said something to that effect, and everyone just laughed, and we moved on to other things. But I spoke up and it was no problem.

Once an investor friend asked me talk to a company he just bankrolled. They were all still working from a corner conference room at some random VC firm in Palo Alto. There were like 10 engineers sitting around the conference table, hacking away on their Macbooks.

All Indian. All male. The investor is Indian too. I think they all came from Google one time or another.

Now I've been a friend of this investor for a long time, and probably could have asked if they only hire Indian engineers, or things just happened to work out this way. Maybe he knows female Indian engineers to mix things up a bit?

I decided not to ask and moved on with the meeting.

More recently, another Indian friend of mine, asks to speak to his team of engineers and product managers. It is a very well-known and successful company, and they have lots of employees, tens of thousands, I believe.

Anyways, we first have lunch, and my friend tells me he would like to bring a different DNA into his team of a few dozen people. In particular, he is looking for some more innovation and thinking about new products and revenue streams.

After lunch I start talking to his team. I probably had half a dozen folks to get to know, and actually really had a fun time talking to everyone one at a time.

As you probably suspect, they are all Indian again. I am the only white guy.

The diversity DNA.

I have more examples, but they are just more of the same.

I now see startup after startup like this. Everyone white. Everyone from China/Asia. Again everyone Indian. Whole management team Indian. No women in management. Everyone from Europe.

Its just weird.

This is my favorite question of all time. I seem to be getting it all the time during interviews. The younger the startup, the more common the question.

But I am a bit at a loss of words to answer this question.

Now you see, I've been around in Silicon Valley for a long time. Yes, that means I am an older dude that worked on a lot of projects.

Nothing to be ashamed of, right?

I am just wondering what is going on in the mind of the person who asks me this? Does he really know what he is asking?

But can you code?

OK, just suppose I can't. Lets work this through.

This means I've been working at all these software companies for a really long time, and somehow did ... nothing?? Nobody discovered that I am an imposter software engineer. Somehow I got paid a lot of money, had fancy engineering titles, and my Linkedin got longer and longer. I must be really talented to have done this for decades without being able to code.

This is logical, right? According to any sane reasoning, I must be able to code to exist in Silicon Valley. The guys that can't code tend not to stay such a long time here.

Before you go, can we do some coding on the whiteboard?

WTF?

Did we not go over the all of this already?

Finding a new job in Silicon Valley is getting weird. I must say, I never really thought much about the process because I never really had to. I always floated between startups via word-of-mouth or while shopping. I once ran into an old co-worker at a supermarket, and he told me they were looking for someone – next week I had a new job. No joke.

I can't remember names and dates that well, so I mainly use Linkedin to keep track of those type of things, thinking someone might ask me one day and it would be really embarrassing if I can't remember the companies I worked for before. Like, “what did you do in 2001” and I totally blank out.

So, all that preparation payed off, and at least I could point the recruiter to my Linkedin page recently. And there is a neat button to turn it into a PDF resume, very convenient.

I believed I was all set, and not much more to do. But the recruiter started acting a bit weird when I said there is only my Linkedin profile to share with others.

That is the whole point of me having having Linkedin, no?

Supposedly it does not show enough effort, I am told. You have to COPY all of that stuff onto something that can be printed too, and it should look different and more stylish than your Linkedin profile. This gets you more points with companies where you apply. OK, so whatever if a bit weird, I do all of that and the recruiter is much happier.

I now actually think the recruiter is right, because I also had this weird experience where I contacted a rather well-known VC connection of mine on Linkedin chat, and he really got pissed off. It seems he hated Linkedin, “it was not working for him”, and he wanted me to send him a PDF resume via email.

So two demerits for Linkedin there.

Anyways next, I get a bunch of links to cool stealth startups from the much-happier recruiter. I can pick and choose what I like and give feedback on startups via a nice web-based portal. Things definitely have improved from the word-of-mouth days!

Some of the startups talk about their culture, very interesting and all.

And good heavens, among one of the startups, I discover one that says “bloviated resumes are crap” and they simply ignore them.

To join this startup, you must have participated in all sorts of hackathons and coding competitions, be able to solve all sorts of puzzle on demand, and also submit your rankings to prove that you are worthy of working there.

Post-resume, post-Linkedin startup guys, it seems. I am wondering how that is going for them.

WTF?

Have you heard of Google dust? Its like fairy dust but only much better. Sprinkle this stuff on a startup and you have a guaranteed success your hands.

OK, this is really what your favorite venture capitalist is thinking:

Those guys who just pitched me all worked for Google, and boy Google made a lot of money! I will just give them a huge amount and we will all be rich! They will hire all their other Google friends who are getting bored from all those free lunches. And the Google guys know everything because they are all so really clever, you know with all those clever interview questions and all. Like how many beanie babies fit into a manhole, or something like that. And they are all so young, got their Google jobs straight out of school. So clever.

OK, so I am really not kidding.

I ran into a Google dust startup recently, and wanted to know how they are going to make money, and actually what their go to market strategy is. It was a bit of a hard and awkward conversation. There was not much there there, and I though best not to push onward with my line of questioning. After a while, they realized something was off themselves, and retreated to discuss this among themselves. The CEO sent me an email later explaining that they really have thought about it, and tried to explain a little more. It did not really compute and I felt bad for them.

I suspect they thought since they were just going to make a lot of money because they came from Google. Somehow, I think it is going to be a bit of a humbling experience when they discover they are not strapped to the rocket ship that is Google any more.

For that one you just had to hang on and not fall off.

Maybe a decade ago, when you finally raised your seed round, it was not that much money. Maybe a few hundred thousand or maybe if you were lucky a million bucks. And we were super careful how to spend that money. Lots of small teams, just figuring things out together.

Looking around today, I noticed things have changed. A lot.

Now it seems that a seed round of $5M is a common occurrence. For a stealth startup that is still supposed to figure stuff out. With no proven business model at all yet.

OK, if you have so much money, what is your absolute first though? Let me think about that for 2 seconds ...

Hell yeah, lets vacuum up as many engineers as we can find! Lets get a recruiter and go bananas!

So now I keep on running into startups that nobody has heard of at all, and they have these huge teams. And honestly I cannot figure it out. Do they really need all those engineers already? They are not making any money, are they?

If things don't work out on the business side, as they tend to do 95% of the time, and your investors don't return your calls any more (don't tell me that does not happen), what do you think is going to happen with your team of 30 or more engineers? Its like you are running at maximum velocity towards a wall. Its going to be a spectacular event.

There used to be a rule of thumb called no-premature-scaling. What happened?

I am just a guy living in Silicon Valley. I've been around the block too many times to count, and have seen all sorts of sh*t. Sometimes you need to write amount the stuff you experience.

This is it.