Thread by @benskuhn

Six (!!) years ago today was my first day at Wave! This has now surpassed elementary school to become the longest period of time I've *ever* spent at the same place. (For some value of "the same" and "place".)

To celebrate, 1 like = 1 thing I learned:

1. important problems >>> "hard problems"

I learned way more by building a simple UI around some arithmetic—that mattered bc people loved it—than out of my previous job building ML models and reading stats papers.

2. the ceiling for "trying hard" is ~2 orders of magnitude higher than you think. If you haven't spent entire years failing, you are trying medium-hard at best.

3. Having a great manager makes an *incredible* difference to your learning, growth + just how much fun your job is.

4. It's really hard to know what you're missing on 3.

5. Almost any problem becomes interesting if you stare at it hard enough and use your entire brain to solve it.

6. Or in fact, becomes a fractal of equally interesting sub-problems. (Ask me about accounting sometime.)

7. You can only be truly effective at one thing at once, which is whatever you can't stop thinking about.

8. Corollary: anything that wants to control what you think about (eg: phone notifications, Slack, this website) is extremely dangerous.

9. In low-income contexts, people often make financial decisions that seem "irrational" for what I'd interpret as game-theoretic reasons—e.g. giving their cash to a door-to-door savings collector (real job!) to avoid having it lying around for people to ask for.

10. Corollary: one of the more interesting applications of mobile money (that we've barely scratched the surface of tbh) is helping people with these more behavioral-economics-y problems.

11. Another interesting example of this is that when available, borrowers *dramatically* prefer loans with more frequent repayment schedules (and repay them more reliably).

12. It's obvious that cheaper money transfer is awesome, but less obvious that *faster* money transfer is equally awesome.

If you're trading goods and your trades settle 2x as fast, you can make 2x as many trades = 2x your income. Whoa.

13. Being able to get excited about ~anything that seems important is a (surprisingly rare!) superpower.

14. The trick to acquiring it is to care enough about your end goal that you're excited to do unexciting things that will get you there.

15. I haven't yet met anyone with a version of this superpower that lasts forever. I know a decent number who have burned out by convincing themselves that they did.

16. As a special case of "any problem becomes interesting if you think hard enough about it," designing maintainable CRUD apps is an unfairly-maligned field whose depths have not yet been plumbed.

17. If you have a problem where your best idea seems good but not great, write down all the alternatives and list their pros and cons. Then devise a new alternative with all the pros and none of the cons.

18. Altman's Law: you are not spending enough time on hiring, even after taking Altman's Law into account.

(I am currently procrastinating on some hiring.)

19. Brockman's Law: if you don't fix that harmless-seeming issue now, it's going to appear in an embarrassing place on your next postmortem.

20. Database transactions should be committed by the same function that begins them.

21. Don't make blocking network requests in the middle of a database transaction.

22. Draw boundaries between software teams that minimize the need for teams to talk to each other.

23. No, you dingbat, that doesn't mean you should discourage teams from talking to each other.

24. Choosing a software product that will be used by more than 5 people is a lot more work than feels reasonable.

25. If you try to ignore 24, it will be *even more* work than that, and an annoying amount of it will happen on panicked Zoom calls at 3am.

26. My #1 management lifehack: if you're worried that you made someone sad, ask them if you made them sad.

Once you know, you'll be much less stressed, even if the answer is yes. (And then you can help fix it!)

27. #2 management lifehack: if you (like me) suffer from over-opinionation, your new job is to be professionally *intensely curious* about everything instead.

Your opinions will gradually become more wrong (+ thus do damage). Annoying questions stay useful for much longer.

28. #3 management lifehack: if you are reluctant to give someone critical feedback, you probably haven't given them enough positive feedback.

Make it obvious, repeatedly, that you're on their side + they'll know that critical feedback comes from the right place.

29. The single biggest win you can have as a manager is to help people route themselves towards the type of work that they love doing. Enthusiasm is worth 25 IQ points.

30. Close Slack more.

31. If you have more than one message back and forth, pick up the phone.

32. Being a distributed company has many upsides, but people become much happier and more productive after meeting their coworkers in person for the first time.

33. If you're going to build one habit / ritual, make it a weekly review. Set aside time every week to think about what happened and how you could make it better.

(This is cheating, because a weekly review is the best way to tweak and improve your other habits.)

34. The solution to making habits stick is often not to "try harder," but to eliminate the trivial inconveniences that make them cost willpower points to execute.

35. If your mascot is cute enough, people will never question how it has nothing to do with your product.

(36. The penguin was actually reused from a previous startup, a mobile group video chat app also called Wave.)

37. It's pretty fun to have a product where one of the top user acquisition strategies is paying people to literally dance in the streets

https://twitter.com/benskuhn/status/1407146587386793984

38. The best Ethiopian dish is shiro wot.
39. Which it is possible to subsist on for months if you have no other vegetarian protein.

40. How to get better at programming #1: expand the types of problems that you can solve in your head instead of needing to implement.

This lets you think coherently at a higher level of abstraction.

41. How to get better at programming #2: learn, in gory detail, how a lot of stuff works.

Like the above, the fewer of the components you use are black boxes to you, the more you can do higher-level reasoning correctly.

42. How to get better at programming #3: figure out how to work faster.

This is under-discussed, probably because it pattern-matches to "work longer hours" or "work more frantically" (that's not how!) but it makes a huge difference.

43. How to get better at programming #4: read a lot of stuff on the internet.

Seriously. There's a lot of incredibly enlightening essays/books/blog posts out there. (I'm not talking about "building a todo app in language X" of course.)

44. If you have never made an important decision and, six months later, asked yourself "how could I have *possibly* thought this was a good idea?," this appears to put you in a depressingly high percentile of decisionmaking ability.

45. Corollary: you can often make decisions by argmin(premonitions of doom).

46. Corollary 2: If all of your choices have plausible doom-premonitions, you need to generate more choices.

47. The above applies to high-*downside* decisions, i.e. those where a spectacular failure is much more bad than a spectacular success is good.

For high-*upside* decisions, premonitions of doom are fine and normal.

48. How to get better at programming #5 / management lifehack #4: get enough sleep.

Corollary: that's all for now! Hope it was useful 🙂

(Seriously though—it somehow took me years to realize that 2h sleep dep ~= mild depression. Pay attention to how sleep dep affects you!)