Lessons from working in NYC 🍎🗽
A collection of a few lessons learned while working at CTRL-labs
from friends + peers
- Family is probably great (in my idealistic and opinionated dream, see Bonnie and Tortie)
- It’s really difficult to identify when you’re not being treated right, or why you’re not happy – an outsider’s perspective is sometimes all it takes to identify this (again, see Bonnie and Tortie)
- When you finally realize you’re not treated right, it’s sometimes not worth dealing with that person and walking away. Asking for help from said outsider’s perspective is the usually the play.
- Sometimes it’s not about how smart you are, but how you ask for help from other smart people.
from mentors + managers
- Do easy things quickly and hard things methodically.
- Working hard is a requirement, and usually the opposite is not an option. That being said, sometimes you’ll work extra hard/late some nights/weekends, and sometimes you’ll get burnt out the next day/week – but don’t work til burnout as a lifestyle. It’s just not worth it.
- Just send it.
- This is in reference to asking for help from multiple people, simultaneously, via email. It’s just not possible sometimes to work extra hard in a vacuum. In particular, asking help from each person one-at-a-time will result in thrashing feedback and you might get no-where as everyone is holding their own assumptions.
- Some problems aren’t necessarily hard, just have many moving parts and you need synchrony. This is the classic situation where no additional man-month will speed-up the project.
- Finally, this is directly connected to #8.
- Human-communication is by-far, the largest bottleneck in any project. So communicate.
References
- CTRL-labs: a cool 🧠-interface company
- Bonnie and Tortie, a josephzho.ng blog
- Mythical Man Month, a book by Frederick Brooks
Perhaps, sometimes, it’s okay to be completely confident in yourself, and even then, still uncertain about things. And that’s why we ask for help in others.
It’s one thing to be told from the beginning that “soft-skills are the key” – it’s another to actually take action and see the results unfold.