General-Purpose Questions Thread

One thing I do sometimes is search for the name of 2 different supplements on Amazon and see if I can find a commercial stack where they appear together, then check for 1 star reviews of the stack that describe a negative interaction. (This works best for stacking supplements that have similar purposes, e.g. if you're taking 2 sleep aid supplements at once, it's plausible that they both appear in a commercial stack that someone put together.)

There are software programs that have databases of drug and supplement interactions. Also, pharmacists tend to know more about these things than doctors. So, you could find a database and search it, and/or ask a pharmacist. There isn't as much information available on supplements as there is about drugs, so it's hard to answer the question with a lot of certainty.

I don't know about "worried", but it would be a good idea to be aware of interactions between things you're taking (and eating). Some are synergetic, some are antagonists.

I don't know if this is what you meant, but here goes:

This is less a single piece of advice from someone than an attitude I've tried to adopt from places like LessWrong and CollegeInfoGeek.

• Everything in your life is optimizable.
• Doing better is less a matter of changing yourself than it is of implementing systems to help yourself overcome your failings.

Advice from people that are not exactly friendly toward me. People who openly speak their mind how they perceive me. Even if it hurts I learned the most of their advice (or criticism).

If by graphics, you mean graphical user interfaces, then shoes is a pretty easy way to get started. If by graphics, you mean drawing shapes and designing your own games, Gosu might be a good fit. Here is a book for learning programming by creating games with Ruby and Gosu.

You should certainly get good at wage negotiations. For about 5-10 minutes of what some people feel is the most uncomfortable conversation of their industry you can increase your earnings by $5-20k or more. As well as bonuses etc. out of a good negotiation.

Top boring advice: live close to work.

Should I take a job in a topic that I don't see myself in long-term?

No. Go directly towards the field you want to be in, even if it means taking less money. Life is short and careers are even shorter.

Very hard to generalize. Depending on your abilities, your credentials (what school, what impressive outside projects), and your priorities (give your life to make a small improvement to huge products vs build new interesting stuff vs make enough to live on with time to enjoy hobbies vs. many other dimensions), you should either:

• not worry too much about it - interview at 3-5 places and take the one that sounds like you'll have most fun or learn the most.
• aggressively pursue your passion. If you're into gaming, prove yourself to one of the studios (possibly by working elsewhere and building a portfolio). If you're into deep learning, all the big tech companies and a number of startups are good choices. Same for almost any other topic.
• Follow the money. Move to a big city and find the places with good stock plans. Live as cheap as possible and you can likely save 50% or more of your income.

The vast majority of software engineers change jobs every 3-5 years. At larger companies, that can be an internal transfer, but if money is an object, you're likely to get raises/promotions faster if you change companies. This means that your first few companies don't determine your life, and you shouldn't overindex on making the perfect choice. However, it also means that you're going to be continuously making this choice and asking these questions, rather than asking it here once and being done.

Max out your 401k contributions and get disability insurance through work.

Try 80,000 Hours' guide, especially here.

The city you live in may have more impact on you than which particular company you start at.

Banks and consulting companies may pay you more than a company focused on a software product, but the work is generally unsatisfying for software developers. Avoid those, unless high pay is more important to you than happiness. Though if you are choosing between them, banks are better than consulting companies. If you can find a company that has some understanding of how to treat software developers well so that they can do good work, and that makes money by research and developing their software, rather than by something else (eg. mergers and acquisitions to acquire customers) then you'll likely be happier.

As to topic it depends what you mean by topic. If you mean is it ok to make software that you're not particularly interested in using yourself, then I'd say the answer is yes. If you mean, you don't enjoy using the languages and technologies involved in the job, then I'd say the answer is no. For example, if you want to make software for chicken farmers, even though you may not be making software for chicken farmers the rest of your life, using the software language that you like working with, in a company that treats you well, I think that's ok. The next company you work for may not care how much you know about chicken farming, but may care that you have 3 years of experience using C++ (or whatever language.)

Getting involved in an open source project, or doing side projects, is another way to build up your reputation.

Before taking a job at a company talk to some people who have worked there. If you have connections on Linked In, for example, use them to find someone to talk to. Get a sense of what they like about working there. It's harder to ask about what they don't like, since people have to be careful how they answer such questions, although some will be forthcoming.

There are various ethical issues involved in creating software. It is good to be aware of them, and to think about them when considering whether to take a job. Many people around you will not think about them, so it's up to you to think it through and bring your ethics to your work.

Creating complex software is mostly about people. It's probably more important to like the people you are working with than to like the project you are working on, though that matters too. There are some work environments that can be toxic...avoid those and/or work to make them less toxic.

In fact, you may want to treat the job search as looking for a person to work with, more than looking for a particular company or task.

Regarding negotiating for a salary, these blog posts made me think.

Patrick McKenzie, a person who runs a software company in Japan, has written about salary negotiations in this blog post. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Mark Suster who has been both an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist, has written several posts abount negotiation. There's a list of them here. http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/negotiations/

The one that stuck in my mind the most was the post titled "Never negotiate piecemeal" http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/03/10/never-negotiate-piecemeal-heres-why/

Also, regarding job interviews, if you're not used to them you might think that the questions that they ask you are the ones that they want an answer to. Not so! Most job interview questions have some sort of hidden purpose to them. If you take them literally, you might miss the point.

For example, "Why should you get the job, instead of another candidate?" means something more like "Tell me something that I can tell my boss to cover my ass about why I gave you the job." "Tell me how you see yourself in 5 years" has multiple purposes. Read up on interview questions and why people ask them and what they are actually asking.

You might know this already, but iterative design is better than the waterfall method of software development, since it allows people to catch problems early in the design stages. Nevertheless, many companies still use the waterfall method, or pay lip service to "agile" but don't actually do it well.

Writing software for nuclear reactors or medical devices is qualitatively different than writing software for lower stakes purposes that can have more bugs in the software.

I probably have more advice, if you have more specific questions. It's hard to know what to tell you, since I don't know much about what your concerns are, or where you're starting from.

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