I moved to San Diego. I realise how important it is for the neighborhood to be walkable. Old Town is like a movie set. I wonder if people here realise how beautiful the place they live in, is.
It is important to have contact with reality. The problem with the product bro subculture in bangalore, is that fools you to believe there is something actually to be learnt. It’s all optimisation tricks masquerading as “experiments.” What do you expect? The “product” industry is couple decades old and evolved through capital pressures. There is a floor to how far you can dig in the knowledge tree. It ends quickly.
It’s the same scam as the consultants, and managers. The only thing worth learning is your specific case, your specific customer, and that is by definition non-transferrable. It’s all a shell game. The cohorts. The mentors. The learning groups. All of it.
The hard sciences are less forgiving. You make a mistake in the kalman estimator and the craft crashes. And I think that is sweet.
If your claim isn’t testable I’m not interested. It takes a certain sincerity to admit what you’re looking for and go looking for the truth of it.
I am tired of anything with the word “product” in it.
‘Til you forget who you is and you forget who you ain’t
Before you know it, you’re trapped inside that picture you paint
~ J.Cole, Quik Stop
These frameworks, methods, how-tos. Outputs of limited minds. There is no the expert. There is, at best, an expert. Someone who has felt the pressure points of one specific system, that kind of knowledge is non transferrable. I hope the product bros become math bros. If abstraction is what you want, abstract something pure. Try a formal system.
say it with me now. experts are fake, smart generalists rule the world, everything is designed by people no smarter than you, and courage is in shorter supply than genius
— roon (@tszzl) October 3, 2022
In fairness, Zepto is better than most. The team is competent and mostly sincere. It is easy to lie about what you do.
Bureaucracy is like rot. It is inevitable but you’d be surprised how far you can push it as your company grows. Or better yet, maybe don’t grow your company. Too many cooks and broth something something.
I think about this a lot. More after these machines, what is the essential nature of work? Of contribution? How do I help my neighbor?
Does your job feel unfair? Hard to work with people? Hard life? Have you tried building rockets? You’re allowed to complain only if you’re a propulsion engineer.
It is easy to complain about a thing. It is hard to make progress with the grain of what is.
You will point out the irony: this essay is itself a complaint. It’d be nice if systems that contradict themselves visibly exploded. No halting problem if there’s no machine. Right?