It might come off as trite, but I genuinely am sorry that things didn't pan out for you
Very early in my career I used to believe that I or anyone else could be a CEO.
It wasn't until working with tiny teams where the CEO/founders devoted everything in their life to the business -- often at the expense of hobbies, romantic relationships, and any shred of free time -- that I realized true CEOs are a rare breed.
When are you ask things like "what happens if the product fails?" the answer would always be "It won't."
They both relentlessly believe in, and put every ounce of energy toward, their vision because anything less would not suffice
Again as trite as it sounds, I empathize with these people in that to them losing their vision felt like losing something dearest to them
There’s a fallacy that successful companies are only successful because their CEO was a “rare breed” and that failed companies fail because their CEO didn’t have some innate quality.
This isn’t true. It’s easily shown to be not true by looking at all of the CEOs who had success with one endeavor and then failed all of their following startups, or the other way around.
A lot goes into founding a successful company. Not all of it is in anyone’s control. Not everything can be overcome by a CEO with powerful motivation.
Some times the market moves in ways nobody could have expected. I even worked at one startup that was destabilized and ultimately failed due to a natural disaster.
Looking back at the startups in my past, some of the worst CEOs were the ones who paraded around their ideals about failure not being an option or who pretended that they could get the company through anything through sheer force of their will and the power of their dream. One CEO who was all about “never give up, never surrender!” thinking ran the company into the ground because he refused to let us pivot after the initial idea didn’t get traction in the market but some other features were getting a lot of interest.
Some times knowing when to call it, move on to the next thing, and stop stringing your employees, investors, and customers along is an important CEO skill.
I know one who spends the days seemingly not doing antthing. He spends like a month with his own thoughts and comes up with truly bizare things that work.
In one instance he raised the price of something by 1000 times without adding anything extra. His explaination was that it would build the right community. In his opinion people were to negative/sceptical and talked to much about what things cost.
Cost him 90% of the customers innitially then grew by 100ish%. As if some high end comedy the 90% said it was to expensive and that it would never work. The other 10% really needed to see what would happen.
what do you mean a true "CEO"? Obviously there is a big difference between what someone like Satya Nadella does and what a CEO of a 10-person firm does.
In smaller startups, everyone is directly involved and has to punch above their weight to pull through, not just the CEO.
Also devoting everything in your life to one thing is not a mark of intelligence or skill. It is a mark of dedication but by itself means little.
And yeah, not everyone can be a CEO because most business fail very quickly. There is always an element of luck in those that survive.
But the idea that you devote 24x7 of your life hence you must be a good leader is not accurate. In fact, if you press this culture downstream, you'll tire your workers and the rest of the team.
True CEO. An actual leader who takes responsibility.
I.e. Not the majority of celebrity CEOs with golden parachutes and underpaid employees. Only in the position thanks to "my dad knows his dad and we went to the same school" nods and winks. It is the objective truth for most executives.
There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born.
For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late...
Could I perform the functions of a live performer? Yes, though no matter how much I "tried" the mismatch between the job and my natural tendencies is a recipe for failure.
> not everyone can be a CEO because most business fail very quickly
Not everyone can be a CEO because not everyone is cut out for it. If you think you could step into those shoes, you're either built different or delusional.
> For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late...
These are not examples of in-born traits. While I agree that not everyone has the motivation to become a CEO, I would disagree that a person cannot learn and adapt.
> > There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born.
> The problem with your point of view is that "Love of cocaine" is one of them, it's near the top, and you'll never acknowledge the fact.
I don't get why one can't easily acknowledge the slightly weaker statement that traits that are inherent to successful CEOs might be positively correlated to being prone to a love for cocaine (which says nothing about any causality).
CEOs will often have unfavorable characteristics. From startups to billion dollar corporations I've experienced far fewer "genuine" CEOs than narcissistic assholes. The latter are so prevalent because they take the valuation of the company as one of their primary drivers. This means that, for them, removing any obstacle (customers included) is the path they will traverse.
I think the problems with "successful" CEOs don't paint the complete picture. Many CEOs come in after the hard work has been done and "final phase" CEOs enshittify the product and treat their partners and customers vastly differently than they did during their build phase. I experienced this first hand at Palo Alto Networks. At the time their second CEO (Mark McLaughlin) had just come into the org. Mark was one of those few genuine CEOs I experienced, probably one of the least narcissistic I've seen at that point in a young company's trajectory. However Nikesh Arora (Mark's successor) is a complete narcissistic asshole. I still talk to many in leadership there on the regular and the consistent theme is he's surely the reason PAN support and product quality has taken a dive compared to the engineering focus on product and customers back in the early 2010s.
There are a lot of papers surrounding CEOs and many look at the narcissistic angle [0][1][2]. The reality is a lot of these companies could operate just fine without a CEO. I find it hard to believe CEOs are even remotely worth their compensation packages given most of them have zero clue about the product or customs they serve anymore. This all flows back to the "shareholder value" bullshit the US economy is built on. If corporations had more restrictions in financial engineering maybe, just maybe, they'd actually try to better compete within their product/service space.
The bigger deal about this is that KRAS was considered an "undruggable" target.
Recent advancements have allowed us to design biologics to do things we previously thought impossible, which broadens the horizons for other treatments in the future.
The Johns Hopkins Children's' Center is looking at trialing it for rhabdomyosarcoma, a particularly deadly form of cancer that primary targets children. If successful, this would represent a HUGE leap forward in its treatment.
> "Suppose you want to write a database. You'd probably start by implementing relational algebra operators — projection, filter, join, etc. The easy way is to implement them as functions that take in tables and return tables, and assemble them into a larger expression. That was how Prela worked in its first incarnation. The code was clean, but it was hella slow! Which was not surprising, because every operator materialized every intermediate result. "
This is one of the LAST things you do when writing a database.
DB development starts with the storage engine, file manager, buffer pool (page cache), and page access methods (heaps/indices) which are binary buffer views. Then, you add the transaction manager, the WAL/recovery bits.
The actual implementation of relational algebra and a SQL language + parsing are little icing layers on top of a transactional storage engine.
> There's no mandated organizational standard for what exact tools to some, various teams have different levels of adoption and stacks
> No org-wide/team-wide conventions for Claude Code
Just for context, this pattern (different teams using different tools in different ways) is extremely normal within Amazon, and is intentional. These shouldn't necessarily be seen as a failure. Amazon likes to have multiple competing options they use for everything, and they constantly evaluate which option is best performing, like an A/B test. After a couple years they will pare away whatever performs worst, replacing it with a new option. This strategy definitely has it's disadvantages, but it is an intentional chosen pattern throughout the company.
Source: I worked there for 5 years, and painfully/tearfully remember the transitions chime -> slack -> teams and workdocs -> quip -> confluence :')
Some dipshit with too much power and not enough brain cells nor incentive to care about making good choices. That's also an intentionally chosen pattern throughout the company. :)
I am more curious about how much token budget they have. Here I have to beg my boss for more as if he is paying from his pocket or I am using it for my hobby projects (I am not). I guess time to go back to copy/pasting to chat and doing things by hand like a caveman.
I don't understand this token budget shit. Why would anyone, in their right mind, not be using Claude Max? All of the engineers at our org are using 6.25x and several heavy non-developers are as well. The rest of the company with licenses are using 1.25x.
I have hit my 6.25x limit exactly once in the last quarter.
---
I realize that we will all eventually be forced to pay more for this and I have raised it as a real possibility to the org for budgeting scenario planning; however, for now, why would you pay by token when it's subsidized?!
> I realize that we will all eventually be forced to pay more for this and I have raised it as a real possibility to the org for budgeting scenario planning; however, for now, why would you pay by token when it's subsidized?!
Anthropic (and maybe OpenAI?) have gated all the important enterprise features behind API plus pricing in the last quarter or two.
For the code I generate and the limited way I am using it, Claude Sonnet is reliable and good.
I hope that I can someday run something very much like it locally.
The moment that happens, the AI industry is essentially useless to me. I don't need some ultra expensive "Totally better" model that does the exact same thing.
assuming it hasnt changed, agent spaces is just a developer desktop running on actual aws rather than on internal hosts, and they figured out how to put vscode on it in a security approved way, including your employee credentials.
one of the things that allows is for adding mcps, skills, and various harnesses that are preconfigured to work out of the box.
i doubt its gotten out of the employee needing to sign in every couple hours
It's the worst harness i ever used. And they are selling it like crazy to all their enterprise customers who don't know any better. A true money printer at this point.
the problem is scale. there's a tension between an individual developing technical skills (transfer cost is high, slow, expensive) and developing agent skills (transfer cost is low, instant, free).
so, just like a manager manages employees, or you consult a contractor, agents are a way of getting leverage over a system.
that said, if you want to learn to play saxophone, you're free to do so. just note your personal endeavors may begin to look more like hobbies than marketable skills.
When the cost for this leverage is more than an employee the math stops mathing.
Additionally, for tech work. There is a tension about doing work and not knowing that output is correct or not. I have seen ai spit out thousands of lines of opencv code for a simple color lut. The person doing this had no idea what was going on. If they continued, the token cost and time waiting for agents spinning only goes up.
Yes, agents get smarter and cheaper but the above example replays over and over again even on crud apps. You still need to dev the skills and transfer costs for it to be effective.
> I haven't had a single friend in my life
> I can barely imagine the possibility of being able to ask a favor from someone and even receive something
> My life has been a series of rejections
It's true, I had a lot of help, and that's not universal.
I'm going to say this, and I mean it genuinely, so please do not find this insensitive:
What if you went to lunch with someone, and the first things they said to you were those 3 quotes at the top?
You'd probably much rather hear something like:
> I haven't had much luck making friends, YET
> In the past, I've not been very good at asking others for help, and sometimes I get afraid if I did, they might not give it
> I've been through a lot of hardships, SO FAR
Even if we don't say things out loud, our mental states and attitudes are clear as day to others around us. You can tell when someone is upset, or having a bad day, without ever speaking to them.
One of the most impactful things a mentor once told me is:
> "We are the stories we tell ourselves."
Look at the story you tell yourself today, in those quotes above.
I want to genuinely ask you, to give "telling yourself a different story" a try. You might be surprised at how well you can "fake it 'til you make it!"
Sorry to hear that life has been a struggle for you and that you've not had a good support system to aid you.
But it doesn't have to stay that way -- every day you live & breathe is an opportunity to start the first chapter of a very different story...
You don't have to apologize! Your feelings are yours, and if it's not hateful, no shame in expressing them
I really do think if you put your mind to shifting the framing/perspective of your feelings though, that you can have a much different future than past
Hoping things start to go your way, mate
(And yeah, definitely don't dump personal issues on new friends. I find that making friends is much easier if you ask thoughtful questions after listening to them and letting other people do most of the talking at first.)
He would tell you that he's sorry he let you and everyone else around him down. That he didn't get to fix the bridges he burned, and mend the people he hurt.
That every time he came down from his high and was lying in bed unable to sleep, the guilt was like an ocean devouring him. That tonight would be the last time he would ever touch anything.
That he wanted to stop, knew he should stop, but when you wake up sweating & shaking all logic leaves your mind and the only thing you can think of is where to get more.
That it's not your (or anyone else's) fault, you did nothing wrong, and quite probably everything right. Some of us are just born with demons on our shoulder that won't stop whispering in our ear.
He would tell you of all the the plans he had come up with over the years, to make up the lost time with you and the rest of his loved ones. Doing things that YOU want to do, just to make you happy, because he had been selfish enough and you were owed at least that much.
That when things were their darkest, and he felt his lowest, one of the few saving graces and safe havens in his mind were the times he spent with you, before he fell into this pit of darkness.
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I am, genuinely, sorry to hear that. Not in a "my condolences way", but in a grief-ridden and deeply personal way.
I lost my father and several of my closest friends to fentanyl. I know your grief. I know the feeling of anger that also gives you guilt, that they should have robbed the people that loved them most of the opportunity to experience them, and robbed themselves of the bright future they were capable of having.
Nothing I, or anyone else says, can make it any better.
I shed tears while writing this. Nico mourns for you as much as you mourn for him.
Very early in my career I used to believe that I or anyone else could be a CEO.
It wasn't until working with tiny teams where the CEO/founders devoted everything in their life to the business -- often at the expense of hobbies, romantic relationships, and any shred of free time -- that I realized true CEOs are a rare breed.
When are you ask things like "what happens if the product fails?" the answer would always be "It won't."
They both relentlessly believe in, and put every ounce of energy toward, their vision because anything less would not suffice
Again as trite as it sounds, I empathize with these people in that to them losing their vision felt like losing something dearest to them
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