• Did the DXA scan – body fat, visceral, bone density, regional distribution. Was cool.
• 2 and 20. Seed and profit percentage fees. RenTech got up to 5 and 44.

• Deleted the blogger importer plugin on wordpress, was a one-time operation.
• Added LinkedIn links to the sidebar image and name.
• Sqlalchemy supports the 4 main rdbms: postgres, mysql, oracle, sqlite.
• There are document-object mappers (similar to ORMs) for nosql dbs like mongo. Collections = tables. Documents = rows. Get all, query by key value, all the expected.
• UFC last night. Also watched the first season of Billions.
• Went to the Genesis Open at Riviera to see Tiger play all day.

A reflection on the last year. Pros, cons, and general introspection about leaving my old job to pursue a few of my own projects, then re-integrating with the corporate world once complete.

Exiting

• Productivity. Output is an all-time high when you don’t have distractions. No meetings, no commute, no chatrooms, no lunch breaks. Pure efficiency. You’re 5 feet from a personal kitchen, 5 feet from a personal bathroom, and 5 feet from your area of rest. The 80hrs/wk at home feels shorter and easier than the 80/wk I was used to in the office. You may walk to the ocean when you want. You may grind until 5am when you want. You may take exercise breaks and interface with the rest of the world’s 9-5 businesses when you want. No alarm clocks, pure output.
• Perspective. It does not matter how sharp you are – to assume that anyone’s knowledge base is a subset of yours is foolish. Everybody knows one thing you don’t. Simply having a window into another brain is valuable. In a corporate environment, you get 100 windows a day. This diversity in perspective is worth a lot. You don’t get it at home.
• Peers. Maybe surprisingly, most people didn’t understand the process. It was called unemployment, sabbatical, vacation, time off – none accurate. I think most folks naturally understand a work hiatus for an MBA, a graduate degree, pursuit of a startup idea, or another professional development course. If the schedule is not imposed by an institution, but rather by the individual, its perceived credibility is much less to most. It’s curious. These sorts of conversations do little more than make it clear which folks don’t have a similar drive to comprehend the autonomy.
• Liberty. You may work on whatever projects you want. That cool new frontend framework is pulling at your attention? Build an app with it. You don’t need approval from your boss. Another tech stack seems beneficial but your schedule is too tight so you reuse your old template? Nope. Learn that new environment. Your timeline is your own.
• Verdict. Was the last year a good choice, now that hindsight is 20/20? I specifically left SpaceX for a number of reasons. You may start to stagnate in the middle-career rate of learning, you may be in a department that re-orgs every couple months, or you may feel cornered and myopic in your skillset. I felt all 3, and most can probably empathize because no work environment is perfect. Try to ignore the negatives of the status quo and focus instead on the positives of the alternative. Can you achieve what you want for your life from the platform of your current position? If not, leave. Simple as that. You could be in a great spot, you could be in a terrible spot; if your aim is higher than your footing, start walking toward your target. This past year of self-investment has paid off wondrously, along all educational, financial, culinary, physical, and purposeful dimensions. I’m 3x the software engineer I was 1yr ago. I’m 5x the human. Vocation is a part of your life, which is easy to forget when you have a profession you love.

Entering

• Offers. I conducted onsites at 4 companies: Amazon, Citadel, Disney, and Netflix. All extended offers.
• Timeline. Depending on the company, it was 2-8 weeks from start to finish. 2 months to finish all concurrently. Conducting these processes in parallel was stressful and you could likely target a single position in a shorter timeframe, although I would admit the multiple-option approach has great benefits. Better comparisons, different lenses, stronger negotiation, fresh practice.
• Preparation. I studied for ~6 weeks. Although my academic focuses were largely soft (control theory, optimization, machine learning), I matriculated in Mechanical Engineering at Berkeley for undergrad and Aeronautics/Astronautics at Stanford for grad school. Having done software professionally for many years, I had the behavioral and systems/scalability side in grip, but I wanted to ensure the other CS fundamentals were fresh. I needed to focus on data structures and algorithms. This manifested as ~200 practice problems (leetcode, hackerrank, geeksforgeeks), including some whiteboard and oratory rehearsal.
• Communication. Performance stress is unavoidable. If you aren’t worried about something, it’s likely because you don’t care about the outcome. I prepared on the technical side, but I found general confidence preparation to be very useful as well. Saunas were my friend. Getting a good night’s sleep was crucial, to retain information in memory as well as to improve clarity for the interviews themselves. Mindfulness practice helped, even for just 10min a day. Anxiety is an emotion coddled by people who are always thinking about the future. Employees who are always thinking about the future are usually good employees.
• Comparison. This one was a surprise. Of every big company that reached out to me, Google was the only one that left a weird taste in my mouth. There were two negative domains: direct interaction, and career prospect. I would classify most of my conversations with other companies as a discussion of what how why who when where, in comparison to the dialogues with Google being what. It was simply more shallow. Some places sat me down to build a scalable microservice topology for the FBI in assessment of problem solving. Google asks you to parse strings. Overall, it seemed as though talent acquisition was a surgical operation at every company I spoke with. At Google, it was a physical. Maybe for efficiency’s sake, maybe for naught, maybe for both, but notable in any case. The second domain was career prospect. Engineers there self-admitted, and formers/third-parties corroborated, that the culture there is posh. If you’re looking for a bustling environment, or a more startup-ish feel, or some innovative daily expectation, likely seek that elsewhere. If you’re looking to cruise in a comfortable community of scholars, Google is a good fit. It is a subjective choice, but surprised me nonetheless.
• Perspective. It’s natural to regard the offer as the finish line. It makes sense. It’s a convenience for our internal monologue to schedule accordingly. I found that some of my success was a result of the shift from this passive perspective into one that viewed the destination as success after offer. The offer itself was the starting line. This perspective requires you to actively maintain it, and is subtle, but it is a much more reliable lens. It encourages precision in questions to employers, it requires more accurate introspection of your actual wants/needs, and it authenticates confidence.
• Verdict. Similar to the above section, I’m plainly struck with gratitude for the process. I’m very excited for the next steps. Changing phase can be uncomfortable, but that’s exactly why you do it. The discomfort is because you’re no longer an expert, you’re becoming an expert in something new. You’re growing. Chase that.

• Finished Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt.
  • Solution: build an exchange (IEX) with a deliberate delay (few hundred microseconds) so that HFTs can’t frontrun other investors.
  • This was one of the first instances where wall street intimately utilized technologists, for both HFT opportunism and rectification. They were valued like traders on the floor, for the first time.
  • Scale: although frequencies of ~microseconds were GOLD to traders, that’s not all that fast in engineering terms. Coming from other disciplines, those speeds and concurrency regimes are relatively simple infrastructures.
  • Brad Katsuyama (RBC->IEX).
  • Allen Zhang (IEX->Citadel).
• Biggest stock exchanges in the world by market cap 2019: 1 NYSE, 2 Nasdaq, 3 japan, 4 china, 5 hong kong, 6 eurozone, 7 london.
• Tesla, with its current market cap of ~140b, issued 2b worth of new stock. Market value dropped briefly but recovered quickly.
• Trump allegedly doesn’t like Amazon because Bezos owns The Washington Post. Could be a lurking variable in the JEDI/Microsoft contract.
• Watched the big short. Similar to the book, I’m struck by how much comes out of the simple obscurity of the market. Exchanges, brokers, loans, banks, everything. The system is divided enough to be confusing, which allows loopholes to be taken advantage of. Everyone is an expert in their piece, but no one comprehends the whole thing; even the SEC.
• Started another show: Billions on showtime. Lots of finance media lately!
• Settled phone bills since last, looks like 6/8.
• Started settling all apartment fees, divisions, bills.
• Talked with a friend’s father about personal finance, wealth management, pivoting from engineering, more.

• JEDI = joint enterprise defense infrastructure, a 10b contract for various cloud services that microsoft won a few months ago. Related to azure. Surprising, considering aws, hadoop, gcs. Anyway, Amazon filed a suit for unfair process, political interference, more.
• An invisible keyboard: uses the camera on your phone to analyze your fingers as you type in thin air. For faster messaging on the go. https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-selfie-type-demo-video-1071955/.
• Started Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt. Read about half today. Very interesting, relevant, and told well; almost like fiction. Michael Lewis is the same guy who did Moneyball and The Big Short.
  • HFT, fiber between exchanges, jumping the gun on bids after they’re placed because you can get there first, dark pools (private brokers basically).
  • Cool to see the impact of other non-software disciplines affecting this industry: optics, signals, comms.
  • Scary to think about information that exchanges, brokers, HFTs, etc have that the average trader does not. You’re going against very big players. Not knowing the trading algorithms behind execution timing, bids/offers, spreads, so much can bite you.
• The state comptroller manages many assets that are often forgotten: uncashed checks, benefits, returns, deposit box contents, etc. https://sco.ca.gov/upd_download_property_records.html.
  • Over 2GB of pure CSV is a lot of data. Searched for Mahlstedt. Maybe 100 items, but nothing to claim for anyone I know.
• Went to the original pancake house.
• Scheduled an engineering->finance consultation with Rob for tomorrow.
  • Calendly is a cool tool. Was seamless from a user standpoint.

• Fixed-income security = debt instrument, where the investor gets paid known interest, like a treasury bond.
• https://www.citadel.com/investment-strategies/. Equities (further split into global equities, surveyor capital, and ashler capital), fixed income and macro, credit, and quant.
• Went through and pruned a lot of social media. Removed a bunch of followers on ig (500->200), haven’t had fb for a while, deleted snap, have a twitter but never use it. The only one I really check anymore is ig for comedy accounts.
• Few more tagups.
• Watched the chess documentary Magnus.
• Ordered, received, mealprepped amazon fresh.

• Slack jumped a huge 18% yesterday, 350k IBM users wow.
• 3 realms: Buy (hedge funds) Sell (banks) Vendor (fintech).
• Something graphics-card-related crashed during my webex with citadel converts today. Couldn’t connect, and then later notices that media wouldn’t play; not even youtube. Restart fixed.
• Bonds obviously don’t imply ownership, it’s more like a loan. Little return, low risk, low volatility. Someone who has bought bonds from a company or an org or a treasury is usually considered a creditor, not an investor.
• Convertibles.
  • Convertible bonds. Allow you to convert bonds into shares.
  • Convertible preferred shares. Get a fixed income (usually dividends) with no risk of share price rise/fall, and then at a later date you have the opportunity to convert as much as you want into common shares. Good for early investors, low risk and then convert when the startup becomes reliable.
• Bought a new pillow. Gonna experiment with a few things.
• 2 team-matching calls. Extensive notes in private drive.