Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Sep 20, 2018 4 tweets 1 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
A tip for receiving compliments, specific to American business culture:

“Thank you.”
“Thanks; that made my day.”
“Thanks; it is always great to know the work matters to people.”

are all probably better socially adjusted than deflecting compliments.

Just macro your favorite.
I grew up in a social milieu which expects self-effacing behavior and I know many other folks who are socialized similarly. This is not generally rewarded in the American professional sphere.
If someone says “Thank you. Your work was key to shipping $X.” and you say “Oh I don’t deserve that! Many people worked on $X.” you have just stapled “WAS NOT KEY CONTRIBUTOR ON $X” to their memory of your performance.
There exist cultures where “Oh, I barely worked on $X at all.” will be read as “Yeah you’d best believe the company would be ^{*{#ed right now but I stepped up.” (Ahh, salaryman chess, how I enjoy you so.)

US workplaces generally are not one of them.

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More from @patio11

Oct 6, 2018
Pathfinder: Kingmaker has a difficulty curve approaching C except the segfaults are competently optimized NPC mages who understand how crowd control, AoE, and party composition work.

Does it feel unfair at times? No. It simply *is* unfair at times.
Fetch quest at level two with four characters; had a random encounter with two greater water elementals.

“Now it has been a while since I played D&D”, said I, “But I recall those having at least 8 hit dice, and they can probably one shot every member of my party.”
My childhood memories were directionally accurate.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 3, 2018
This is a good thread. A particular subgenre of talent is folks who specialize in companies at their scaling stages: execs, middle managers, and specialized individual contributors.
Are your CS teams dying under the load? Need someone who went from 10 reps to 100 three times? SF has plausibly forty folks you could interview tomorrow.

What specialist do you need on your growth team? Drip email copywriter? Specializing in B2B SaaS? No worries, have twenty.
There are a lot of problems you can solve by just taking smart and hungry generalists and throwing it at them. In fact, I think that number is radically underestimated.

But when you want a specialist, SF has depth and liquidity in the talent markets relevant to your interests.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 1, 2018
On the general theory of: “Anything you spent more than 10 minutes researching is worth writing down”

You may have an SPG Amex and wonder if you should upgrade to SPG Luxury Amex and if so, how. The second question is: “Log into your account and Ctrl-F Luxury; takes 2 clicks.”
The first question: if you would stay at a Marriott or SPG hotel in a year for at least two days it is an absolute no-brainer.
If you want to math it out more, c.f. either your account or one of the online write ups for what this does to your annual fee, statement credit, etc, but then you’re just redoing the reading that I already did for you. ;)
Read 6 tweets
Oct 1, 2018
One of the weirdest things to me about cryptocurrencies is they appear to select for fans who are either hypercompetent at technology or totally clueless, but nobody who e.g. knows what a database is but doesn't use one professionally.
I feel compelled to ask: "Quick question: is your blockchain written in SQL?" just to disambiguate.
If you get "No, but actually kinda yes, but wait that question is too poorly formed to even be answered" you have someone who actually knows how 1+ clients work at a non-superficial level.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 30, 2018
Ethereum has been described by some to be a world computer. I describe it as an investment scam platform.

An example of suitability for being a world computer: there are some smart contracts which function as exchanges for the investment scams. Here's an interesting property:
One of the exchanges charges maker/taker fees of 0.1% / 0.2%. (This means that the party which "takes" liquidity subsidizes the party which provides liquidity, which is common in the grown-up world as well, though those fees would be ludicrously high in the real world.)
But: there is a cost to operate the world computer. You have to send "gas" along with your transactions to the exchange.

So there is a *separate* fee to pay for, essentially, computing services. Their FAQ says that, unfortunately, it is recently *more than the exchange charges.*
Read 7 tweets
Sep 29, 2018
Do you remember Baldur's Gate fondly? If so: Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It isn't D&D (although Pathfinder is about the closest thing you can get to D&D without getting sued...), but it's the worthy spiritual successor to the game.

(I'm only one hour in but it *drips* with it.)
Update from second play session: another thing it drips with is the blood, sweat, and tears of your character early on if melee combat is not your thing. I'm playing my usual (fireball-spec'ed mage) and even with party members after the magic missile fails to drop them welp ouch.
15 combat defeats in random and early story encounters later, I've made little progress in last two hours and am having fond memories of how ridiculous classic D&D was to magic users until they hit level 5, got fireball, and started to be able to burn down tribes of ogres solo.
Read 5 tweets

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