2020 in Review

The weirdest thing about 2020 is that it’s personally been an exceptionally good year, despite the fact that 2020 sucked for most people. Two major themes (the racial equality movement and COVID-19) dominated the story of this year, and yet my day-to-day didn’t feel that different. Sure, I added one more thing to my list of things to carry with me everywhere, and my calendar was far less packed than normal, but this year has largely been the same for the big-picture stuff: I traveled, I sent time with friends, I grew. I sometimes wonder if I “deserve” to have enjoyed it as much as I did. Ultimately, I think that more happiness can’t be a bad thing. Much like last year, I combed through Google Photos, Google Calendar, and my conversations lists to jog as many memories as I could about the past 12 months.

progress on 2020 goals

1. Becoming an athlete: I did run a marathon this year, though I didn’t set a Boston qualifying time (nor did I even register for the event). I don’t think Boston is nearly that important anymore, nor did I really stick to doing yoga on rest days. It turns out that I really need to sweat to mentally count a workout. I heavily abused my Peloton subscription, though: I logged 8,937 minutes of working out on Peloton, and the actual number of workout minutes is higher (since I didn’t start running on the platform until later in the year). Overall, I’m happy with the progress I made toward my physical health.

2. Monthly atomic changes: I completely neglected paying active attention to this, though I did end up cooking much more with my roommate (I keep on telling myself to post more to the food section of my website).

3. Relationships with people: I did a solid job with maintaining a social life, despite being a fifth-year student and the pandemic. I was actually still able to see many of my friends that graduated since they stayed in Austin with work-from-home. Setting up a routine of seeing a specific group of people on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays also really helped me keep in touch with people that mattered. Things have also been good on the dating front, which has honestly been the largest source of happiness throughout 2020.

4. Learning new things: The academic side of things went well this year, though I don’t really think that I fully earned the grades I received: online school is much easier to fall behind with, and professors have been much more lenient with grading these past two semesters. Still, 2020 saw some great classes (Positive Psychology and Nutritional Biochemistry especially) that I really got a lot out of. While I didn’t read as many books as I had hoped to, my girlfriend has a rare trait of being unusually curious in learning about many things, and her attitude of enjoying learning about cool things has definitely rubbed off on me.

5. Being a good person: I’m not sure if there’s anything that you could point to as evidence of how good of a person I was, but I’d like to think that I continued doing at least a decent job.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM 2020

• I did my first road trip with two friends from EE over to White Sands. We missed Carlsbad on the way back, but did mess around with snow for a bit. West Texas isn’t a particularly inviting landscape.

• I visited Deep Eddy with the seniors in Convergent, which was an absolute blast. I got absolutely blasted. I also participated in an IM co-ed dodgeball tournament with Convergent, which was fun (even if we aren’t champions). Convergent parties were also a blast.

• Me and my group partners started living it up during the weekly data science TA sessions, and I gained a new appreciation for tuna+mayo crackers and white wine.

• I ran a marathon without proper training in 3:21:01. I’m pretty proud of myself for that, though I don’t think I’ll be doing it again. 15 miles is probably a solid upper limit for me moving forward.

• I went hiking a ton, especially as the pandemic ramped up in the US, and debated a Fermi problem on the number of children conceived in the Greenbelt. Palmetto State Park and McKinney Falls are worth a visit.

• I watched The Newsroom, which I’d highly recommend. Aaron Sorkin is quite the storyteller.

• Nightly Facetimes with my then-future-girlfriend really helped to pass the time during a pandemic. A visit in May as she came to pack up her deserted apartment was a great three days after a few months of not seeing her.

• My friends graduated, and Brené Brown gave an excellent commencement address. I had a great night.

• One of my former roommates got married, and I’ve known the two since basically my first day in college. I’m super honored to have been in their wedding, and for better or worse gave a tipsy toast (that I guess went well).

• I road tripped with some friends who graduated. We hit up Taos and Wheeler Peak, Breckenridge and McCullough Gulch, Moab and Arches/Canyonlands National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, Zion National Park and The Narrows, the Grand Canyon, and White Sands (again). A really great trip.

• I semi-volunteered with ReadWorks for my internship. Looking back, I probably could have done more with them, though in the end I’m glad that I did that and I feel like they also got some mileage out of me.

• I spent a solid chunk of the summer with my roommate, which was an absolute blast of a time. Cleaning up and moving was a Herculean effort, and I’m so glad to have done it with him. Two straight days of cleaning and being kicked out at 6am will never be forgotten.

• My parents moved into a new home, which Sasha seems to be mostly enjoying.

• Did quite a few things with my then-soon-to-be-girlfriend around Austin: picnicked at Auditorium Shores, visited the Domain and tried cooking sausages, picnicked in Mueller, cooked a few meals and ate around (with varying reviews), watched the bats.

• Began cooking with my roommate: most casseroles are far too dairy-heavy, but pot roast is amazing, and Beth’s recipes are usually quite reliable. Pastalaya, the sweet potato chorizo skillet, the chimichurri rice, and the Greek turkey and rice dishes were all hits. Teriyaki chicken and rice… not as much.

• Made it official with my now-girlfriend just before she left for Thanksgiving.

• Struggled through a rough left few weeks of my final hard semester, though I made it through with the help of the Gantt chart. Our senior design project is going quite well so far and my thesis is looking interesting (though I need to write more).

• Visited Denver and Breckenridge for a family ski trip, which I enjoyed much more than I expected I would.

HOW I’LL GROW IN 2021

1. Continue being active. Crazy feats of endurance aren’t as important to me; what’s more important is the day-to-day activity that keeps me happy and healthy. Putting on some muscle would be great, though I’m more concerned about the process.

2. Continue to grow relationships with people. This means not only growing the relationships that already exist (which first requires thinking about which relationships from college I want to maintain moving forward), but only fostering new ones when I start my first full-time job in Houston.

3. Professionally, I want to start off my job on the right foot, and I want to figure out what routine works well for me after I do start. Will I be flying to visit others every other week? Once a month? How will I work best – what’s a solid daily schedule?

4. Do fun and interesting things. Perhaps it’s cooking, reading, or learning new things. In any case, my goal is to find “productive” ways to fill the new times that I’ll have. My last semester of college should be relatively easy (I’m only taking 10 hours), and time outside of work is theoretically all mine. How I spend that time will matter, and I want it to be good.

5. Once again, being a good person is still important, and so it’s still on the list.

THINGS TO PONDER

1. How will I balance maintaining friendships with making new ones? It’s been quite a while since I last started my social life from square one, and meeting new people seems to be more difficult after college. I don’t want my life in Houston to be lonely, nor do I want to never see my friends that are moving to other cities far from me.

Charities, Part II

Well over a year ago, I wrote my first blog post about charity, where I explained some of the (many) factors that I looked into when considering how to allocate my donation dollars. I promised to write two more posts on my favorite charities and explain why I liked them so much - and those posts never materialized (my two favorite, at the time, were ReadWorks [links here and here] and The Citizens Foundation [links here, here, and here]). Whoops!

This post isn’t about ReadWorks or TCF. It’s actually about the other charities; the other charitable acts that we do. In short: you suck at donating. I recently fell down the effectively altruism rabbit hole - this post isn’t about that. The EA community seems to focus on a few things that I don’t fully agree with, but the basic idea that you should give your resources (time and money) where it helps the most is one that everyone should easily be on board with. If I gave you a magic wand and said that waving one would cure cancer for 10 people and waving the other would cure cancer for 20; you’d pick the latter (or, you should wave both, and cure disease for 30 people). Everyone’s on board.

But the issue is that we routinely fail at identifying causes that are actually important and/or helpful. Availability/recency bias is largely to blame; I’m not saying I’m any better. But awareness is the first of 12 steps; perhaps I’ll discover something wonderful out of all of this.

people’s donations are influenced by what’s hot

George Floyd died on May 25, 2020. Over the course of the days and weeks that followed, people started becoming very active in supporting certain types of charities - all of them targeted at helping Black people. This is not a bad thing per se - as I’ve written about before, there exists clear examples of race effects in American society (even after accounting for wealth/income). But what was different about society for Black people on May 25th as opposed to May 24th? It’s not like America became more discriminatory over the course of those 8 minutes and 46 seconds. But all of a sudden, people were ready to donate to BLM or related causes overnight. Anecdotally, plenty of acquaintances at tech companies decided to use their company match to help double other people’s donations. LinkedIn was seemingly full of companies announcing partnerships and donations to organizations that were designed to help Black students get a job/afford college/etc. Companies were actually donating or announcing donations to organizations.

Maybe it’s the case that George Floyd’s death and the ensuing protests resulted in people legitimately rethinking how to best give their money. I’m sure that there’s a not-insignificant group of people that legitimately believe that racial justice is the most pressing issue today, that all of their excess time and money and effort should go to fighting for equity. But (at the risk of being cynical) I just don’t believe that the majority of people fall into that category. My LinkedIn feed is now back to where it was before May 2020: students and companies trying to hype themselves up (I’m so grateful for my offer! We’re looking for talented students!). I don’t hear about people working in Big Tech trying to help other people match their donations to charities supporting Black people.

The “hot” charity cause comes and goes. A few months ago, it was racial justice (it still is, to a certain extent). A few years ago, it was ALS (and people dumping buckets of ice on their heads). If a cause is hot, that doesn’t mean it’s bad - ALS and racial justice are objectively issues that demand solutions. But don’t just go chasing the shiny new cause. Availability bias (well, it’s really the recency bias that I’m discussing here) can distract you from the actually important thing.

people want to “feel a connection” to charity

The other side of availability bias is geographic closeness. I’ve often heard the sentiment that people want to be able to “feel a connection” to where there money is going; I don’t think that this is intrinsically bad. I want to be able to see photos of the organization in action or to hear stories of those who have benefitted to make sure that my money is being actually used to help people (or animals. Whatever floats your boat.) I’ve also heard (and rightly so!) that feeling a connection to the charity makes donors feel better about their decision, and makes them more likely to donate (whether in general or to that charity) in the future. I don’t have data to back that up, but it seems reasonable and intuitive enough.

I don’t like the idea of needing to feel a connection when I think of how limited geographically that connection often is. I’m lucky to have traveled to many parts of the world; I know for a fact just how much worse people in poorer nations have it (and how much further a dollar can go there). Here’s the short version of my point: if “feeling a connection” means somehow relating to the charitable cause, you’re likely to pass up organizations and efforts that are more worthy of your help that are outside your zone of familiarity. Malaria nets and energy poverty and deworming initatives are completely unknown to a vast majority of Americans; that doesn’t make them any less real.

unsexy charities need your money too

I reached out to one of the Googlers that had offered to help match donations to BLM-related causes, and I asked about whether I could get my donation to an educational nonprofit matched. At that time, he wasn’t focused on that. Another friend who works at Bloomberg also had a matching opportunity, but for a list of charities decided by the company. I asked about 8 or so different charities - none of them on the list.

There are charities out there that are “unsexy”, in the sense that they won’t be a hot trend. They aren’t remotely operating in North America, so it’s unlikely that you’ll hear of them in the first place. Organizations that fight malaria by providing nets or offering preventative medications aren’t sexy. Organizations that provide Vitamin A supplements or operate deworming initiatives aren’t sexy. But they work on problems that are just as real as racial justice and ALS, often without widespread support.

If you’re looking for unsexy charities, I’d highly recommend starting off with GiveWell’s shortlist, or using Charity Navigator to do research.

what i struggle with

While I won’t commit myself to having my very next post be about nonprofits, I can say that I’d certainly expect to return to this topic fairly often. I still don’t know how to find unsexy charities - right now, I’m just outsourcing the work to GiveWell. When I do choose to do my own research, I often find myself defaulting to supporting education in the US - because it’s a cause that resonates with me. But doesn’t that sound hypocritical?

how to: not suck at donating

Finally, a few last points.

1. You can’t just give money and call it a day. Money is helpful, but actions matter, too.

2. You can’t just donate post a black square and end racism, not will dumping solid water on your head cure ALS. Don’t follow the current when it comes to what’s popular.

3. This takes effort.

4. Don’t donate for yourself - the purpose of donating money isn’t to make you feel good about yourself. It’s to make the world a better place; to give to those who are in a worse situation than you.

Serendipity, or What You Learn Studying Liberal Arts

This is Part III to an unplanned series of posts where I talked about what I actually learned as a result of studying different things in college (you can find Part I: Engineering, here, and Part II: Business, here).

I struggled for a long time to write this, which perhaps is an interesting statement in and of itself. Did I not really get anything out of my liberal arts degree? Indeed, my engineering education had taught me how to analyze a circuit to find the current flowing through a particular branch, or how to build an XGBoost model for a classification task. My business degree had taught me that debits go on the left side and credits on the right side for a balance sheet. I learned that the NPV of a $1 perpetuity with growth rate g and discount rate r was 1/(r-g). These things were clearly more applicable, right? (They weren’t. The real, worthwhile things I learned were how to tackle hard and novel things through engineering and how to drive long-term impact through business.)

But still, it may feel strange to someone that majors in liberal arts and a more “hard” major (e.g. STEM, though there are other possibilities beyond STEM) to contemplate what they’ve learned from their liberal arts degree. For me, I’ve taken a year of world literature and a year of philosophy courses, and I honestly can’t say that I think I got anything out of them, beyond a further appreciation for SparkNotes. My liberal arts degree has forced me to take some of the most boring classes in my college career, some of which I consider a complete waste of time. I took an economics class where I realized I had either went on my phone or fell asleep at least once every class.

And yet, my liberal arts degree has forced me into discovering some of the most interesting classes in my college career. I took a couple of psychology classes that I truly feel have reshaped my approach to life; my freshman year I took a civic engagement class that exposed me to some incredibly interesting people. I’m currently taking a nutrition class that I’m finding incredibly relevant to my day-to-day life (funny enough, the course number is NTR 365).

I’ve realized that the value of my liberal arts degree isn’t the liberal arts classes as much as the liberal arts education. I don’t think I’d personally find much value in studying French literature or Philosophy or XYZ studies. I didn’t expect to find that much value in an intro psychology class either - I had merely assumed that I’d be memorizing diagrams of the brain and a litany of symptoms for any number of the terrible things listed in the DSM-5. And yet, I feel so thankful for the fact that I was forced into taking some of the most amazing classes in my college experience. Taking classes in nutrition and psychology is not an automatic thing for a business/engineering major; I’m glad I was forced into it.

We can’t control luck, at least as far as whether we get good luck or bad. What we do control, however, are the number of times we roll the dice. Sure, any particular attempt at asking someone out or applying for a job has a certain probability of a yes or a no, and those odds might not be in our favor all of the time. But the only way to end up successful in those pursuits is to put ourselves in the way of good luck. Taking classes from all over the university has resulted in some strikeouts and some home runs - at the end of the day, it’s the home runs that you’ll remember. Make your own luck!

Giving Something Up

I’m currently taking a class in positive psychology, and part of the course is to do “applied assignments”. While I could go on and on about how much I love this class, the assignments are the star of the show here: they don’t require any knowledge of psychology, and they’re quite helpful/interesting. As a result, I thought I’d share the second of these assignments, which I’m (at the time of writing) currently in the process of doing.

giving something up

Here’s the original prompt:

Start by making a list of the things that are part of your life on an almost daily basis. Usually, these are activities ranging from fairly simple ones, like watching TV or playing tennis, to fairly complex ones, like being critical or gossiping. They can include habits, like drinking or junk food eating. Sometimes, a whole range of activities is subsumed into a thing that they are used for, like a computer or a car. Those are part of this as well. Then, divide this list into things that you need to have/do and things you only enjoy having/doing.  This is not always an easy division to make. Really think about the difference between needing (I can’t manage significant aspects of my life without this) and wanting (this just makes my life more pleasant/convenient/interesting). Set aside the list of things you need and focus only on those that you want. Pick one that really matters to you and is an important part of your life. Then give it up entirely for the period of the assignment. Keep track of the effects this has on your life, practically and emotionally. At the end of that period, write an analysis of your experience.  There are many ways this analysis can go, depending on what you gave up and how it influenced you. Just be sure to be thoughtful and explain your reactions and conclusions.

I decided to do a toned-down version of a digital detox to attempt getting some time back into my schedule. I had already given up Facebook and most social media accounts (you could probably measure the amount of time I spent on those websites in minutes/week), but I realized that I had essentially just created a set of different vices – I spent basically hours a day browsing YouTube and Reddit, even past the point of having content available.

I had enabled Screen Time/Digital Wellbeing on my phone, and over the past three weeks (from September 13th through October 3rd) I had averaged 3 hours and 50 minutes of screen time per day [1]. To reduce the amount of time that I was spending on my laptop and phone, I decided to take 4 steps:

1. I switched my phone, watch, and laptop to grayscale (I actually used to do this before bed since it was less visually stimulating, but I wanted to see what would happen if I kept it like that for 2 weeks).

2. I uninstalled Snapchat (which I kept on my phone for some reason, but rarely used).

3. I stopped taking my phone to the bathroom.

4. I gave up using YouTube/Reddit except for school (which I eased into by putting in place a 10-minute daily limit a few days prior). I even blocked the domains on my phone.

reflections

after a week…

• Not taking my phone into the bathroom has been seriously incredible. Everyone knows about shower thoughts; toilet thoughts are equally high-caliber.

• Grayscale everything can be moderately annoying at times, and I’m not really sure that it’s having the effect that I had hoped for (making electronics less interesting, and therefore encouraging me to use it less).

• YouTube and Reddit were indeed time sinks during my week - I imagine that after all is said and done I’ll shift to a pattern of using them only once a week. I’ll reduce the amount of time I spent per week (since I won’t be re-reading the same threads to view new comments, or engaging with the less interesting material) and also benefit from the productivity gains associated with less context switching.

finishing up

• I didn’t actually improve much as far as using my phone less. The number of pickups per day basically didn’t change, and screen-on time for my phone declined, on average, by about 30 minutes per day. I probably spent even more time than normal on my laptop, which means that I probably didn’t change anything overall.

• I’ll continue to not use Reddit or YouTube on my phone, and I actually installed Freedom to block it on my laptop also during weekdays.

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[1] I’m actually fine with spending time on certain apps (e.g. Peloton, or FaceTime), though the 3:50 stat includes these apps. I probably should have taken them out, but Screen Time deletes usage data after a month.

Racism

For obvious reasons, comments are not going to be allowed on this post. If you’d like to send me a link, or your thoughts, feel free to email / text / call / FB Messenger / send a carrier pigeon to me.

I’m not diving into the racism debate directly. I think that doing so would be massively unwise for me, for many reasons, but primarily because at the current moment I’m procrastinating studying for my two midterms tomorrow for classes that I honestly don’t feel very comfortable in. What I will do, however, is to post a few links that I’ve found quite thought provoking, or at the very least quick reads that employ solid logic accessible to the average person that isn’t deep into the academic community of race relations and African American Studies. They are not all together on the same “side” (whatever that means) of racism, and so I’d encourage you to read them all. I’ve included a quote from every article, but please don’t assume that the quote summarizes the entire thing.

scott alexander | AGAINST MURDERISM🔗

A fantastic, thought-provoking read that talks about racism and discourse. Be prepared for multiple run-throughs. Thanks to David for sending this my way.

The article discussing the “ban the box” policy is here.

“Here I would point out that this is pretty much the demographic that elected Nikki Haley (birth name, Nimrata Randhawa; daughter of two Punjabi immigrants) as governor, and that supports her so fervently that she remains one of the most popular politicians in the country. Also the demographic that loved Ben Carson, making him the only candidate to briefly displace Trump for first place in the 2016 Republican primary polls. One plausible explanation is that the South Carolinians don’t like blacks and immigrants because they view them as having foreign values – specifically, Blue Tribe values (it may be relevant here that 90%+ of blacks usually vote Democrat). If someone like Nikki Haley or Ben Carson proves that they share Red beliefs, they become part of the tribe and will be fiercely defended. Maybe this is more like the daycare situation than it looks – people using race as a proxy for something they care about, until they get direct information.

To be clear – I am not saying that racism doesn’t exist, I’m not saying that we should ignore racism, I’m not saying that minorities should never be able to complain about racism. I’m saying that it’s very dangerous to treat “racism” as a causal explanation, that it might not tell you anything useful about the world, and that’s a crappy lever to use if you want to change behavior.”

gillian white | The Data Are Damning: How Race Influences School Funding🔗

The article was written back in 2015, and it only really talks about school district funding for Pennsylvania. That said, it’s one of the few articles that I’ve come across so far that shows graphs/data that account for poverty. Controlling for poverty, less white school districts were receiving less state funding than whiter ones. I’d love to know if that ever got fixed.

““If you color code the districts based on their racial composition you see this very stark breakdown. At any given poverty level, districts that have a higher proportion of white students get substantially higher funding than districts that have more minority students.” That means that no matter how rich or poor the district in question, funding gaps existed solely based on the racial composition of the school.”

View fullsize

District Funding, by Racial Composition and Poverty Level

Sendhil Mullainathan | Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions🔗

Also written back in 2015. Overviews a number of studies and findings where race is (with great difficulty) isolated from other variables.

“The central challenge of such research is isolating the effect of race from other factors. For example, we know African-Americans earn less income, on average, than whites. Maybe that is evidence that employers discriminate against them. But maybe not. We also know African-Americans tend to be stuck in neighborhoods with worse schools, and perhaps that — and not race directly — explains the wage gap. If so, perhaps policy should focus on place rather than race, as some argue.”

shree paradkar | Intentions in racism don’t matter. Impact does 🔗

I don’t think that Paradkar’s and Alexander’s points are incompatible. Racism by consequences, as Alexander describes it, seems more focused on broader impact, whereas Paradkar focuses more on our individual actions. Here’s a really solid quote from her:

“Sometimes, as in law, intentions outweigh impact: think murder versus manslaughter. Or in relationships, where a messily drawn card by a child can still melt our hearts.

Yet, in the context of deep and ongoing societal issues such as racism and sexism, separating intention from impact is vital. In this context, intentions don’t matter; impact does.

Put another way, what if I not only kept tripping you every time you passed by my desk, but my kids tripped up your kids, and my grandkids, yours and so on. At what point does our genuine lack of intention to hurt you become irrelevant?”

Long-term Impact, or What You Learn Studying Business

This is Part II to an unplanned series of posts where I talked about what I actually learned as a result of studying different things in college (you can find Part I: Engineering, here, and Part III: Liberal Arts, here).

I don’t remember the exact words she used, but a friend asked me why I was studying business. She was going through her own “crisis” (her words, not mine) and wondering, as one frequently does in college, what she was doing with her life and why she was studying what she was.

Here’s the thing: if I had to drop all majors but one, I’d keep business. There’s no hesitation with that decision; there’s no doubt in my mind that it’d be the right call. Business is the Madison to my Peter; engineering is Hannah Ann; liberal arts is one of the girls that got sent home the first night of the season that no one really remembers (fine, that’s an exaggeration, but the relative order is correct). I’ve already written about what I’ve learned from studying engineering, which is why I think I ought to write the “business student’s manifesto” or whatever.

My hypotheses are basically as follows:

1. Immediately after graduation, engineering and computer science majors have the “sexiest” jobs.

2. The best manager creates far, far more incremental value over an average manager than the best engineer does over an average engineer.

3. Long-term, most (though not all) jobs turn into general-management.

4. If you want to be a good manager, the top skills are all management, marketing, and finance related. That said, deep knowledge in management is rewarded more than deep knowledge in marketing or finance. It’s still unclear to me where in the hierarchy this applies.

Time to unpack that.

business students don’t win out of the gate

The simple fact of the matter is that most of the jobs that people idolize (at least, in my circles) are all in Silicon Valley. Sure, the consultants and investment bankers have prestige and long-term growth prospects, but compare them to the entry-level engineers and technologists in Silicon Valley and it’s painfully evident how bad the work-life balance is, how much comparatively less they’re paid (to be clear, everyone’s still earning a ton of money, beyond the $75,000-ish happiness saturation point), and how much less society glorifies the role. Seriously, I know several people whose signing bonuses in tech are higher than the starting salary consultants make. 12 months of my work is worth monetarily less than my friend e-signing a PDF.

I’ve personally felt some regret and FOMO for not being in CS in the past. Silicon Valley is hyped up throughout college and society; it’s where the people changing the world and reshaping society are. No one is debating whether BCG and McKinsey and Bain have too much power in the world without regulatory oversight; Steve Jobs wasn’t an investment banker and I doubt Elon is making Tesla and SpaceX what they are by making slide decks; the most valuable non-government public companies in the world are Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, and Alibaba.

My point is that if you’re picking a major solely based on what the job market is like fresh out of college, you’re probably not going to pick something in the business school. After all, CS and EE majors usually prefer to do engineering than consulting right out of college [1].

above-average managers create more value than above-average engineers

We have some smart friends, and then we have the smart friends. I’ll assume that the productive value of A (who’s 99th percentile as an engineer) is twice that of B (who’s a perfectly competent-but-average engineer). So the “incremental value” of A, in my mind, is +1, since the role at the company would have gotten filled by someone, and it’s against that baseline of performance that I want to measure against.

In contrast, however, let’s suppose that you’re two levels above the base in a hierarchical organization where everyone leads 10 people. That is, you have 10 people reporting to you, and each of those 10 people in turn manage teams of 10. You have 110 people underneath you, and the person above you has 1,110 people that depend on her. What’s the incremetal value of someone who’s such a good manager that she can get 10% more out of those underneath her? It’s +11 for her, and +111 for the person above her. Now, there are a lot of assumptions built into that. For one, such a rigid hierarchical organization isn’t likely to exact in that mathematical ideal form (and if one did, would I want to work there in the first place?). Beyond that, I doubt that it’s possible for you alone to get 10% more from everyone at every level below you. Nevertheless, I believe in the power of leadership-by-example to inspire people, and I bet that good managers are also improving the skills (management or otherwise) of those around them. In any scenario, above-average managers, in my mind, create more incremental value than above-average engineers.

As a few asides, people (I hypothesize) have a range of abilities that they can reach, and I really do believe it’s possible to turn people into better managers. I also worry about naming this section, as taking it at face value isn’t going to lead to the right conclusion.

There’s a counterargument to be made that in engineering through-and-through organizations where engineering is the value add, engineering prowess is what really matters. After all, Tesla is making cars that are far-and-away better than anything Volkswagen, Jaguar, Mercedes, etc. are putting out. Nevertheless, I’ll still assert that good managers (whether they come from engineering or business backgrounds) are crucial to letting the battery and powertrain engineers do their job well without encumbrances.

most* jobs turn into management

The head of tax for a large firm is going to stay technical. The person in charge of engineering is going to remain more on the technical side than, say, the CEO. The general counsel is going to need to maintain his legal edge.

What about everyone else? My bet is that as you move further up the organization chart, people spend more and more of their day to day on management tasks. Obviously, this isn’t something that I can say I know from personal experience - I’m 22 and have never held a full-time job before. But this was a question I asked a few people (the former CFO/CIO of Intel, the guy in charge of strategy for the Salesforce platform), and they all seem to indicate that the general sentiment was (unfortunately?) correct.

a business education teaches the skills you’ll actually use

My impression is that most of a manager’s time is spent on meetings and leadership, strategy, and making decisions (usually involving, to some extent or another, some financial consideration). To that extent, then, the most relevant skills are all management (meetings and leadership), marketing (strategy), and finance related (evaluating decisions in the context of risk/reward). All three components are crucial to performance. A manager that’s great at rallying the troops and setting strategy but constantly makes poor financial decisions isn’t likely to steer the boat in the right direction long-term.

I hypothesize that deep knowledge in management is rewarded more than deep knowledge in marketing or finance. Good leadership that brings out the best in those around you and inspires the team is probably (in my mind, at least) the most important characteristic of a manager. To the extent that a leader truly understands how to do that, I’d imagine that one could compensate for relative weaknesses in strategy-setting (by relying on other, competent people to aid in that process) and decision making (again, by doing the same). To be clear, I’m saying that someone whose skillset places him/her in the 99th/75th/75th percentile on management/marketing/finance skills is probably going to do better than someone in the 75th/75th/99th or 75th/99th/75th percentiles.

It’s still unclear to me where in the hierarchy all of this applies. Does it apply throughout the organization, all the way up to the C-suite? Where exactly does it start - is there even a clear, defined threshold for where management skills rapidly increase in value? I’m not sure, but presumably there’s a zone in the org chart where this general sentiment is most applicable.

why not just get an mba?

Going back to the original context of how this all started - two undergraduates talking about why they’re studying business - I think the best counterargument to studying business at an undergraduate level is the MBA. After all, if a manager’s impact only scales with the number of people under him or her, and you don’t start off in charge of anyone, then why bother learning things so early in the game? I think that this is totally fair. An MBA teaches you the important things just as you start to actually move into higher-level roles; it also frees up time at the undergraduate level to study other things.

The question for me, then, is why I choose to continue pursuing my undergraduate business education, instead of dropping it to focus more heavily on engineering or liberal arts or just enjoying life. I could try rationalizing it by saying that I really enjoy the classes (which is true), that I really enjoy the people I’ve met through my business major (which is also true), or that there’s value in learning now and re-learning later (which I bet is more right than wrong). The real reason probably has to do with sunk cost and ego, though.

I’m still thinking about this - if y’all have thoughts, please send them my way. I’m sure there’s stuff I’m missing or haven’t thought about.

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[1] This doesn’t really prove my point, but it does help it. The people with the option to pick between engineering and consulting, by and large, pick engineering.

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Update 1: Theory vs. Practice

“…I think good leadership comes from practicing being a leader, i.e. working on problems where you're having to be a part of a team and/or manage others… business school is one way to practice these scenarios, but IMO it's one of the less effective ways”

My friend Neil sent what’s written above to me (and a ton more, but the above part summarizes the most important part of the counterargument), and I think he’s mostly right. One doesn’t learn to code by staring at a textbook all day; at some point, you’ll have to fire up PyCharm or IntelliJ and write a HelloWorld program.

While I’ve noted that business school classes tend to incorporate more group projects (as opposed to fewer such projects in my engineering or liberal arts classes), there are certainly numerous opportunities in college for someone to join an organization and act as a leader (alternatively, startup land is always available).

The real benefit, I think, comes from the idea that combining theory with practice yields superior results. Without theory, it’s certainly possible for one to achieve solid results: it’s unlikely that one needs to study theory to become a great tennis player, I can become a pretty decent chef through trial-and-error without attending Le Cordon Bleu. But theory certainly has some value; I view it as an accelerant of learning. Without having taking a management class, I would have (hopefully) figured out, at some point or another, that my highly-extroverted personality tends to dominate the team’s thoughts, and that unless I actively seek out others’ opinions I’m reducing the quality of the discussion.

Indeed, the notion that “practice makes perfect” isn’t exactly true. Practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes habits. If I consistently do something inefficiently, I’m cementing a less-than-ideal habit into my mind: imagine using VLOOKUP() instead of INDEX(MATCH()) because you don’t know better - I don’t have to; I did it for years.

My defense of “business school isn’t the best way to learn management skills” is essentially: “sure, but it provides a useful foundation in theory that needs to be reinforced in practice”.

To be clear (and Neil made these points also), it’s easier to acquire business skills on-the-job by reading a book than it is to learn engineering concepts. There’s also a higher opportunity cost to learning business over engineering, due again to the crazy starting salaries available to CS/EE majors:

“Thus if you could only pick 1 major, it seems more logical to me to pick engineering over business. But that's not to say business is useless or anything; it's more that the bang-for-buck / opportunity cost seems to be better”

Neil and I agree: both skillsets are important. We differ on which major we’d keep if we had to give the others up - I’m glad that that’s just a hypothetical.

The Ideal Self, 2020

Having just finished Atomic Habits, I’ve decided to give this whole “identity-based habits” thing a change. Previously, I had never really set a concrete plan and written things out on how I wanted to improve; I just checked in every once in a while to see where I was on my mental framework/report card that covered social-emotional-mental-physical-religious aspects (more on that below). Clear’s hypothesis is that goals, on their own, aren’t worth much: they set up a binary yes/no outcome that doesn’t leave much room for happiness (which I don’t fully buy), the execution plan isn’t really built in (though that’s also somewhat the case for identity-based habits), and that goals aren’t really all that motivating long-term, because there isn’t always a clear path after you’ve accomplished a goal (which I do mostly agree with; especially as a runner). Clear recommends using your goals to help inform yourself about who you want to be and using that ideal-self identity guiding your habits (and since we are what we do, habits guide our identity).

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So, Step 0 in the process of James Clear’s self-improvement process is to establish the ideal-self identity. Who do I want to be - not what do I want to do, but what kind of person am I trying to become?

FINDING AN IDEAL IDENTITY

I basically used two frameworks/guides for deciding my ideal self, along with my usual long-term goal of “living a generative and connected life”.

CORE VALUES

A while back (August of 2019), a friend sent me this guide for helping me figure out my core values. That turned into this list:

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The whole process took maybe around 4 hours or so, but I consider it time well spent. I’ll probably come back to this every year or so.

MY FRAMEWORK OF SEMPR

SEMPR [1] has five parts that I think represent different aspects of growth:

1. Social - How are you growing in terms of relationships with others? This is a super broad category that includes friends (both in terms of quantity versus quality or relationships, though quality matters more), family, and romantic relationships. Are you spending time with “the right people” in “the right ways”?

2. Emotional - How are you growing as a person? This is where character development resides - are you growing to be more humble/honest/tolerant/etc.? I’d also say that this is where mental well-being comes into play - are you taking care of yourself?

3. Mental - How are you growing mentally? For me, this primarily focuses on learning new things, whether it’s in school, or via reading books/articles, or even having decent, thought-provoking conversations. In any case, how are you keeping yourself mentally active?

4. Physical - This one is pretty obvious. How are you growing what your body is capable of? Some people prioritize gaining muscle mass and upping the amount of weight they can deadlift; I prioritize getting faster on a track/bike and just generally being “in good shape”, which in turn implies things like eating well, exercising often (and doing a variety of things).

5. Religious - How are you growing in your belief system about God/some other higher powers? I think that even “growing into atheism” is a valid form of growth here, if you’re approaching things with an open mind and becoming more confident about what you believe. Some people use organized religion for this, others don’t.

I’m not sure if SEMPR covers all aspects of growth; there’s also probably a bit of overlap. If anyone has ideas on things that are missing, let me know.

In any case, I used these two activities and frameworks to help me think about the kind of person that I want to become. Without further ado…

THE IDEAL SAAGAR PATEDER, AT THE BEGINNING OF 2020

I’m not 100% sure how to structure this out, but I figure that a bulleted list of things couldn’t hurt. So, the ideal version of myself:

• Is the right amount of confident for the situation. For most aspects of my life, I’ll usually err on the side of overconfidence (though I’ve been improving over time). The exceptions seem to be romantic relationships and school projects in EE classes, where I’m clinically under-confident (I wrote a bit about that here).

• Is incredibly active in spending time with others. There’s depth and breadth components here - depth, in the sense that I’m really getting in quality time with my closest friends; breadth, in the sense that I want to make sure that I’m actually keeping in touch with the people that I want. Proximity plays a huge role in who I spend time with; the flip side of that is that a power-law-esque distribution takes hold where I spend a supermajority of my time with just a few people and very little with a supermajority of people. Breaking that requires an active effort to do so, and it’s especially important that I do this as graduation approaches for a large percentage of my friends. Six months from now, I won’t be able to walk 10 minutes to drink a beer with a large percentage of my friends.

• Is physically active and healthy. Eating healthy is a huge aspect; I want to start eating more vegetables and fruits, which the frozen section at HEB and TJ’s will probably help with. On the workouts side of things, I want to make sure that most days feature some form of workout, whether it’s running (ideally in the morning with TRC), a bike class on the Peloton app, yoga (through Peloton), or a core strength class (…also through Peloton). I also want to incorporate stretching after my cardio workouts to help avoid injury.

• Is grateful, since I think that gratitude is core to being a better person. I’ve been gratitude journaling for a few months now, and it’s apparent to me just how effective it is at boosting happiness. This is something that I want to keep up.

• Isn’t lazy. I wrote this as I’m sitting in bed and procrastinating going on my morning run (talk about irony), but the ideal me will be better at avoiding laziness. Habit stacking and environmental design will probably be useful here. I’ll probably start off by establishing a morning routine. The 2-minute rule is also going to be relevant here (the smallest, easiest version of a habit should take you under 2 minutes to do).

• Is constantly building better character. This one is pretty broad, but I don't know that writing out a laundry list of positive character traits is helpful. This is a you-know-it-when-you-see-it type of thing.

• Is constantly learning new things. Historically, this has primarily meant pushing myself to take more classes in school, but I want to be a more avid reader. I'll try to incorporate that in some way into a pre-bed routine.

• Is generous, both with time and money. On the time front, this could mean mentoring others, or volunteering. The money part is pretty straightforward - I'll give to ReadWorks (or TCF, or some other charity).

This list isn’t “complete”, in the sense that some things are left off because I don’t think I need to pay much attention to it (or, it just doesn’t matter to me). I’m not worried about achievement, since that has historically been fine and taken care of itself. On the other hand, I don’t value decorum, so the profanity will continue. This list is a work-in-progress, and one that I’m sure I’ll return to periodically.

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[1] SEMPR is in that order because I was looking for an acronym and semper means always in Latin.

2019 in Review

I got the inspiration from another blog that I came across to do a year-in-review – I figured it’d be a great way to be grateful for the past year, gauge my growth, and set plans for the next year. So, I dug through Google Photos, Google Calendar, and my contacts list to jog as many memories as I could (and yet, I’m still worried about how much recency bias is clouding this).

Highlights from 2019

• The last day before I flew back home from Uganda, I found a tick on my back. A few weeks later, a ring of bumps showed up around the site, so for a solid few hours I was entertaining the possibility that I had Lyme Disease.

• My Spring Break trip to Mexico City and Puebla with Ariel, Tom, Neil, Anish, and Misha was unforgettable, and truly a first-class experience. I’ll never forget eating tacos de canasta in the middle of CDMX, or the way-too-fancy hotel we found in Puebla for $40/person/night.

• I got the idea of Texas Personal Finance as a club. Even if I never gave it the time it needed, it spawned the personal finance section on my website.

• My summer internship with Popspots taught me to love Austin as a yuppie-local. I learned a ton about groceries, and met a few interesting people. Maybe I’ll be a tech-billionaire one day as a result?

• I had an eventful dinner at Launderette with the parents (and Neel, Madison, and Ariel).

• Edie and Max joined me to start the 2019 BBQ Bonanza. I’ve now been to Snow’s, Kreuz Market, La Barbeque, Valentina’s, Louie Mueller, and Franklin’s. The main takeaway I’ve had is that burnt ends are fantastic and to order one (and only one) pork rib everywhere I go. More broadly, I also started to spend a lot more time with folks in EE.

• I made a trip to Breckenridge with Jimmy and Daniel. We climbed a 13,000 foot mountain together (I wore nylon shorts), Daniel made a seafood paella, and we hit up an absinthe bar.

• The last night I spent with David featured, of course, a game of Jeopardy! I forgot who won, but Madison kept score (and pretty much everyone lost).

• I visited The Yard with Madison. We tried the unofficial-smores-shake, and I made the playlist to accompany it. Despite a year full of ups and downs, I grew a lot emotionally.

• Dad and I visited Ethan, Chloe, Krissy, and Dhruv in Colorado, where we ended up going fly fishing. I didn’t catch anything, but Dad eventually got something just before we left. Later, they came to Houston for a small family reunion.

• I got structured and wrote out some core values and my activities for the Fall 2019 semester. That helped me cut down on my commitments, and helped me focus on what really mattered. This is something I’ll likely do again for Semester 8.

• I went to a Texas Edge event and hooked ‘em in front of a bunch of UT alumni far more wealthy than I was. I must have grabbed eight notebooks.

• I ended recruiting season early, and Collin and I have been matching in our grey sweaters ever since.

• I turned 22 (Taylor doesn’t know it yet, but the song was about me) and had a more strenuous night than I ever had before. I did make it to Kismet Cafe, though, so not all was lost. The P18 is fantastic.

• Academically, the Fall 2019 semester was amazing. I took 20 amazing, interesting hours (including the hardest class I’ve taken to date and a class taught by a whiter, older version of me) and handled the load remarkably well.

• I started working out a lot more (I think nearly every day since the semester started featured either a run or a workout, and perhaps I did well over the summer, too!). I also discovered the T.H.E. shorts from Lululemon and the Peloton digital subscription.

• Pre-finals season, I cooked my first steak with Nate. The garlic butter that Nate made was fantastic; the meat I made a bit salty and undercooked. I’m glad it happened. Finals season went well, and I think I spent more time in the library during those two days than I had all semester long.

• I went on a trip to Japan! I tried out quasi-solo-travel for the first time, and realized the importance of having good people around you.

• I started doing a gratitude journal, which is easily the single best thing to have happened to me in 2019. Without a doubt, I’m a calmer, happier person as a result.

How I’ll grow in 2020

1. I want to become a top-notch athlete. At some point, I’d like to run a marathon, and fast - a 2:55 will allow me to qualify for Boston, and Nate and I have talked about how amazing doing Boston together would be. More broadly, I think that being active and working out on most days has seriously helped me enjoy Semester 7 more than other semesters (which shouldn’t be surprising, given the volume of research that points to how much happier working out makes you), and it’s something I ought to carry forward. The Peloton subscription well help out tremendously here. Yoga may also play into this - it’s a workout that also helps me stretch and meditate at the same time.

2. Continue making small, atomic changes to my life that push me forward one step at a time. Much to my dentist’s pleasure (just kidding, I don’t really go to the dentist), I finally started brushing my teeth twice a day. Some atomic changes I might make include being on Reddit less (becoming someone who spends time in the physical world, not the digital one), being more active in voicing my gratitude toward others (being someone who is grateful), or cooking more often (becoming an amateur chef). In any scenario, I want each month to be accompanied by a new good habit or the removal of an old bad one (and as I write this, I’m working on reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits).

3. Focus on what really matters: relationships with people. I recently wrote on my door a second phrase: “Long-term Happiness = Quality of Relationships” as a way to remind myself that the stuff that actually matters for long-term happiness is spending quality time with those you care about. This will be especially important for me when most of my friends graduate in May; I’ll need to be especially active in fostering new friendships and building existing ones for the future. On the dating side of things, it’s time to start applying some newfound confidence - how exactly that’ll shape up is unclear.

4. Continue to learn interesting, new things. Academically, this means working toward my degrees and taking a few courses on the side that I find interesting. Outside of UT, it means reading more than my currently abysmal rate (perhaps one of the atomic changes I’ll make is to incorporate reading into my pre-bed routine).

5. Be a good person. I’m not sure how exactly this will manifest, but it’s important to do, so it’s on the list.

Things to Ponder

1. Over the course of the next year, I want to better establish a system for internalizing and remembering what I learn in school. There’s a lot of material that we cover in class that I think is useful and important (especially in my management and psychology classes) that I would like to remember/internalize, but that I think is currently atrophying away. Practice makes perfect, but there aren’t many daily opportunities to practice crisis management or lead a new team – when the time comes, will I remember what I (was to supposed to have) learned in school? If I don’t, what was the point?

2. How will I balance my personal/professional lives? I’m not the only one who struggles with this, I’m sure. On one hand, I’d like to be able to work on projects/to work for companies that are improving the world; on the other, I’d like to really spend time fostering relationships with others. To the extent possible, can I win in both of these arenas? When the tradeoffs start to arise, where will I place the fulcrum? The keywords in my mind are generative and connected.

Two Kinds of Hardness, or What You Learn Studying Engineering

This is Part I to an unplanned series of posts where I talked about what I actually learned as a result of studying different things in college (you can find Part II: Business, here, and Part III: Liberal Arts, here).

During recruiting season, people would tell me at the events for engineers that while I might not directly apply my domain knowledge, I’d be able to put into practice the “problem-solving skills” that I had learned. I’d be able to (so I was told) open up the “engineer’s toolbox” and accomplish the task at hand. What the hell did that mean? What were these magical problem-solving skills that I had picked up on while learning that V=IR or that a capacitor’s voltage couldn’t change instantaneously? After thinking about it for a bit, I’ll propose that there are two dimensions of “hardness” (at least for academically-related endeavors) that engineering teaches, one of which I’m really going to need to put effort into.

I don’t want to waste time philosophizing on the definition of “hardness” - everyone already knows at some level what it means in a college context. Things are hard, usually because they (1) require the application of concepts we already know (“application-hardness”) and/or (2) require us to learn something new entirely on our own (“novelty-hardness”).

In school, application-hardness is the basis for introductory math, physics, and engineering classes - for Calculus I/II, Differential Equations, mechanics, and basic circuit theory, there’s not actually all that much to memorize. EE 302 (UT’s intro to EE class) only really covered eight concepts: P=IV, V=IR, positive sign convention, KCL, KVL, node-voltage analysis, mesh-current analysis, and superposition. Each of those could be their own 10-minute YouTube video, and yet somehow it took me a semester to learn those eight basic (in-retrospect, at least) topics. I’d suggest that EE 302 is a class with averages in the 40’s and 50’s because of application-hardness. The challenge isn’t knowing that node-voltage analysis exists, it’s applying it to the current task at hand to solve a problem that’s familiar to those we’ve seen before, yet different. I’ve cooked salmon on a pan before; cooking steak on the pan is a slightly-different problem that’s still relatively in my comfort zone of “I know, for the most part, what I’m doing here”. Pan-frying something new is application-hardness.

In contrast, novelty-hardness (the name’s a work in progress) takes you completely out of your comfort zone to doing something that you’ve never done before. At least at UT, this is more common in the later EE classes; a project for EE 422C required us to build an Android app that called the Dark Sky API to display the weather. Since I had already worked with APIs before (though not that specific one), the majority of the back-end of the app was application-hardness. However, I had never built an app or made a front-end before, and so most of the project featured novelty-hardness. The first time I tried cooking involved a comedy of errors and a ton of novelty-hardness. I think that these two concepts are related in that you need to first conquer the novelty factor of a problem before you start on the application. In other words, to do X, you first have to wrap your head around what eaxctly X is, and only then can you start worrying about how to apply some basic first-principles to solving the problem itself.

Anyways, I’ve noticed in my own life that I’m really, really bad at managing novelty. I panic and freak out in most situations where I’m thrust into doing something that I don’t know how to do - going back to the software project, I procrastinated so much on building the app (since I didn’t ever feel confident enough to know where to begin) that I started the project the day after it was due (somehow, I ended up with a 95). Outside of academics, there are tons of situations where we have to face something new - having your first kid, getting your first credit card, paying taxes, etc. As a result, I think it’s pretty important that I develop a response to these kinds of situations that’s better than the deer-in-the-headlights. The questions, then, are (1) What’s a good reaction? and (2) How do I do that?

For the first question, my advisor/mentor Stephanie recommended mentally cataloging previous experiences where I tackled something new successfully, and using that to motivate me to accomplish the task at hand. I’d also guess that telling yourself that the task is, in fact, possible and within your capability would help (surely I’m not that special to where I can’t do this one project that the previous X-hundred students have done just fine; if the other 320M people can figure out how to pay their taxes, I can too.) All of this, however, is really just talk for now - I haven’t tried doing any of this myself yet, so I can’t really comment on what works. That gets at the second question, since I think practice is necessary to build up virtually any skill. That said, I think it’s easy to create situations where you step outside of your comfort zone to doing something new and scary. For me, cooking is great since (1) I’m not (yet) Gordon Ramsay, and (2) I get to eat something at the end.

For those of us not in engineering, learn how to cook! You’ll learn more than how to pan-sear a steak.

Climb the Fig Tree

It’s been a month and a day since my advisor/mentor Stephanie introduced to this gem from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Today, for what feels like the thousandth time in college, I asked myself (because someone asked me) what I wanted to do after I graduated. I saw the fig on my current branch: consulting, traveling around the country and the world, meeting new people and learning new things. I saw figs on the other side of the tree: a role in Silicon Valley, designing and building the Next Big Thing; running a glorious 2:59:59 marathon time; a happy relationship with someone I loved. I looked up and saw more figs: moving to New Zealand; becoming a college professor; working for an organization that improved the education system or helped promote sustainability; settling down with a family. I looked back down - for the briefest moment - and saw the figs that I had already passed up: awkward first dates, failures and missed opportunities. What would I do?

The only thing I could: climb.

Career Choices, Motivated Reasoning, and Thinking by Proxy [Part 1]

Background

Last year, I seriously struggled to find an internship for the summer – as is fairly evident in the number of rejections I’ve received. There were three main categories of jobs that I was looking into – product management (PM), data science, and consulting – and the latter wasn’t an option (due to my delayed graduation date in 2021). So, data science and PM it was, and so began the odyssey that would become 99 straight rejections and ghostings. Recruiting that year influenced my views about whether I was technical/smart enough for a job in product management, if I was qualified, if I was a good fit. Thankfully, applications #100 and #101 turned into my “data science” internship at Popspots and a product management part-time gig at a friend’s technology-consulting firm.

With that, I entered this year deciding that I’d recruit for product management and consulting. I applied for about a dozen jobs on the technology side of things, and I went to the CS career fair to scope out options. That in and of itself was a pretty terrible experience – most of the companies there weren’t hiring yet for PM; those that were didn’t really seem very interested in a kid with a business degree. I received one coding challenge after all was said and done, but talked to enough companies to make out with a haul of eight shirts, two decks of playing cards, an umbrella, and a journal for writing in. On the consulting side of things, I ended up applying to the usual big three firms (BCG, McKinsey, and Bain) and Oliver Wyman – OW didn’t give me an interview, and McKinsey rejected me before things ended.

Thankfully, things went well with BCG. I got a call saying that I got the offer, and within thirty minutes of that I received a rejection from Google for a PM role (before the interview rounds). Given how things went in the past, I felt a couple of things in that 60-minute span:

1. Hell yeah, I just got an offer from BCG.

2. Man, fuck these PM jobs. I don’t want more rejections; I’m just going to sign with a consulting firm.

And that’s the story of how I signed my job offer within an hour of receiving it on paper – and something didn’t sit completely right with me about that. For one, my background is supposed to be perfect for PM. I have both the engineering and business skillsets; I have friends telling me that I’d do a great job at it and that it’s a great fit for me. The speed of my commitment to avoid further pain from rejection, combined with the discrepancy between how good I think I’d be at PM and how good companies apparently think I’d be at PM has made me think non-stop about if I made the right choice and if I need to re-assess how I make choices.

Ignorance Actually is Bliss

To be clear, if my goal was to be content, what I’m doing isn’t helping. If I purely wanted to maximize satisfaction, then I wouldn’t have thought about my career choices at all – I would have patted myself on the back for signing with a firm that is aspirational for many business undergraduates. Indeed, time spent wondering if I made the right decision is time I could spend instead thinking about how I can live a more sustainable lifestyle, or when I’ll see my family next, or how I can basically pound Natural Lights at the local bar every Tuesday as long as I don’t seriously flunk my classes.

For most decisions I make, I don’t need to revisit them, because there’s nothing that important at stake. The fact that I shop at Trader Joe’s and eat chicken fried rice about five times a week isn’t something that I deemed important. My choice of credit cards isn’t something I deemed important enough to contemplate about. Hell, I don’t even contemplate about my choice to come to UT anymore (though there’s a difference in that I could still change what I do in the future and I can’t really change where I get my undergraduate degrees from anymore).

This decision is something I’ve thought about, though, for a two main reasons:

1. I’m not locked-in to what I do when I graduate. While I’m committed to an internship, I could still theoretically choose to recruit for product management after I graduate.

2. This topic has material importance to my life; if I’m going to spend ~80 hours a week at my job, I better make 100% sure that it’s the right choice.

Avoiding Motivated Reasoning

Tim Urban, the author behind Wait But Why, made a great post on motivated reasoning (MR) and what he calls “the Thinking Ladder”. It’s super long, but super insightful, and you should read it. TL;DR, motivated reasoning is when you think like a sports fan, actively seeking out information to strengthen your existing beliefs without really trying to see what position the other side has.

My goal in thinking about if I made the right decision or not was to avoid MR – and this is especially hard to do for several reasons:

1. When you’re in the interview and the company asks you why you want to work for that company/why you want to do that role/why you want to be in that city, you’re stating, out loud, to another person what you want and some of the reasons you want it. People want to be consistent, and saying things out loud is one of the things we can do to make us want to follow through on something. So every time you tell an interviewer why you want the job, you’re only mentally strengthening this notion that this is actually the job you want (and making a potential subsequent rejection slightly more painful).

2. Once you’ve committed to signing an offer letter with a firm, there’s no going back (within an ethical framework). Any doubts you create about if you made the right decision or not are negative, especially since you’re already locked into the decision. There’s no doubt to creating regret about a decision that’s unable to be changed that you still have to live with.

3. Once you’ve told other people about your decision, you’re mostly just going to hear things along the lines of “Congratulations!” and “That’s awesome!” and “Good for you!” We surround ourselves with people who wish us the best (which, to be clear, is a good thing), but most of what we’ll hear is how we’ve worked hard to earn this, or that we deserve this, or that it’s a great fit for us, etc.

In this context, MR looks like “yeah, I definitely made the right call. I’m a much better fit for a consulting career than product management; here’s why PM is bad and here’s why consulting is good”. MR is how we operate on autopilot, which means that it’s something that you have to actively put effort into avoiding.

I think I’ll call it here for Part 1. Part 2 will address the tools I used to fight MR, along with some insight into my actual thought process.

Rejection Resume

Last updated October 11, 2024

My freshman year, I heard about the rejection resume for the first time. Later, I took a rejection immunity class, under a likely-false premise that you can learn how to stop caring about rejection. In any case, I think it’d be good to have this up publicly for more visibility. None of this matters in a sense; you just need one “yes” to put all of the “no”s behind you. But hopefully it’s a nice counterweight to the artifical narrative that we construct around ourselves where we only showcase the good and successful. With that said…

full-time roles

summer 2024 (post-bcg)

Apple, Jerry, Intuit, MixMode, Zep, Netflix, Crusoe Energy, Odd Bird VC, Rippling, Doordash, Figma, Attentive, Paraform, EarnIn, Pika Earth, Normal Computing, Carta, South Park Commons, Vial, Pure Storage, Coval, Apriora, Hang, Greycroft, Faire, Athelas, Samba TV, Sierra, NectarVet, Squint, Roame, Atticus, Robinhood, Airbnb, GiveWell, Gainsight, Aurora Energy Research, Mercury, ServiceNow, Meta, LinkedIn, First Round Capital, Google, Stripe, BlueSpace, Block, Nowadays, Headway, SpaceX, Lazarus, Handshake, Hinge Health, CharterUP, EvenUp, Anthropic, Peregrine, Verkada, Fay, Automotive Ventures, Fairmatic, Arine, Redcar, Twingate, Visa, Intapp, Lume, Uber, Lyft, Adobe, Salesforce, Applied Intuition, Mill, American Express

internships

summer 2018 (post-sophomore year)

Jane Street, Optiver, Southwest, along with ghostings from Accenture, Apollo Global Management, and Impossible Foods

summer 2019 (post-junior year)

Amazon, Brandless, Cal/Amp, CoreLogic, Costanoa Ventures, datto, Dyson, Envestnet, Epic, f5 Networks, Facebook, Fedex, Google, HomeAway, Indeed, Jane Street, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Pendo, PlayStation, Porsche, Remitly, Ribbon, Southwest, Spreetail, Toyota Connected, Walmart Labs, WillowTree, Zillow all rejected me.

I debated including firms that ghosted me, but for full transparency: aeris, Alarm.com, Aperia Technologies, Apple, Arris and Ruckus Networks, Atlassian, CB Insights, Credera, DataDog, Empros Capital, iRobot, Keurig Dr Pepper, Lumentum, Lyft, Meraki, Microsoft, Paypal, Rivian, Samsung, Smart Asset, Tesla, Two Sigma Ventures, Viasat, VIZIO, Warner Bros. Entertainment Group, Waymo, Zebra Technologies, and Zest Finance all rejected me without letting me know (one company avoided this list by informing me in July that I didn’t get the job).

summer 2020 (post-senior year)

Google, McKinsey, and Oliver Wyman

student organizations

Blazers (twice), Genesis, BHP Student Recruiters, Management Consulting Association (twice) and others that don’t immediately come to mind.

awards

I did not write a Model Thesis for Plan II, nor was I a College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Distinguished Graduate, nor a Plan II Honors Distinguished Graduate. I did not receive any of the BHP Senior Awards, or EE Awards (including for senior design). My freshman year, we didn’t make it past prelims for the ABSA/BHA Case Competition. The same goes for Texas Charity Pitch my junior year.

education (undergraduate)

Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, UPenn, MIT, Dartmouth (where I was waitlisted)

Hacking Happiness

This will be short and sweet. After taking a semester of psychology and just generally being a human, I’ve learned something super important about happiness: it’s actually not that hard. To be fair, people are genetically predisposed to certain levels of happiness, and for better or worse it’s very difficult to change that range. However, it isn’t hard to ensure you stay on the upper bound of that range, and the Pareto principle applies here - by doing a few small things, you can get big benefits.

Get some sleep.

The most basic thing to do is to fix your sleep schedule. This first means getting enough sleep, which is about 7 hours or so, give or take. Blanket recommendations don’t apply to everyone, but you’re probably not as special as you think, so don’t try convincing yourself that you’re actually just fine on 4 hours of sleep.

Of course, quality matters on top of quantity. Caffeine hinders your ability to sleep, so don’t have it right before bed. You might prefer quiet to white noise or nature sounds, but it’s worth figuring out. Avoid artificial light before bed (especially if it’s a cooler color temperature), and make the room a little colder, around 65 degrees.

Exercise daily.

Exercise is a complete magic bullet in terms of health benefits - it makes your happier, it makes your more healthy, and it makes you look better. However, it’s probably the easiest thing to ignore (I certainly have throughout college so far, and am only now more devoted to it).

If you think you don’t have time, you’re kidding yourself. I’ve personally found that I’m far more productive on days that I do work out compared to days where I don’t. Harvard Business School agrees. So does the Brookings Institution. Stop viewing exercise as a waste of time, and start viewing it as an investment in it.

If you don’t like it, you haven’t looked hard enough. Running isn’t for everyone. Hitting the gym and being surrounded by people who are Bro Science Life but without the satire isn’t thrilling. However, you can try: swimming, basketball, soccer, football, volleyball, ultimate frisbee, tennis, raquetball, or biking. If you prefer solitude, just work out in your own room (dumbbells, exercise bands, and a medicine ball will probably set you back $60 total).

If you aren’t motivated enough, I probably can’t help you yet. I don’t really understand motivation enough to be confident enough in my ability to motivate someone via a blog post.

build a social support network.

This is more for avoiding stress/unhappiness than actively being happy, but it’s important to feel like there’s someone that you could talk to about whatever’s on your mind. This could be a parent or other family member, a friend, or a mentor. This could be a counselor or a therapist. In any case, it doesn’t really matter who it is, as long as you feel like you could tell them something.

be grateful.

Finally, showing and expressing gratitude is important (and not just for being a better human). I’ve started integrating gratitude into my pre-sleep routine and despite how corny this sounds, it really works. Apparently it’s best if you write it down into a physical “gratitude journal” of sorts.

Put the phone away.

It’s not that important. They’d call otherwise. Facebook isn’t making you happier. Instrgram is so fake there’s an entire subreddit devoted to calling it out. Twitter is a cesspool. Snapchat is a poor substitute for real, authentic communication.

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That’s how I’m hacking my happiness. It doesn’t take all that much. If you’re wondering about the image, I took it in Hawaii some years back.

Good Read: This is Water

Why is it called a commencement speech if we only hear it when we finish? I’d argue that starting college is just as big a step forward as starting your life after college, especially when you consider how much college can change people. Nevertheless, David Foster Wallace’s speech, This is Water, given to Kenyon College’s graduating Class of 2005, is something worth reading (the audio recording is marred by audience laughter in the middle of some pretty serious and important points. The laugh track can’t make an already good show that much better). It’s short, sweet, not overly presumptuous, and insightful. Throughout the speech, Wallace’s primary point is simple: Don’t live your life on autopilot.

To be clear, it’s impossible to do the speech justice just by picking apart a few quotes - it’s exactly why you should read the whole thing for yourself, and why the words below have been written and re-written more times than I’d care to admit. Still, This is Water is a fantastic read, one that I hope to return to periodically as a good reminder to myself to take the wheel myself every now and then.

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And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

In class, it’s easy to go on autopilot and just (if you’re really academic) take notes without really digesting the information. It’s easier to pull out your phone and kill an hour on games/texting instead of trying to engage in conversation with the person sitting next to you. Walking around campus, it’s easy to just focus on getting from AND to BEL without really admiring the landscape and scenery that the school likely spent millions of dollars on. Eating food, it’s easy to just mindlessly chew and swallow what you need for sustenance without pausing to really try and pick up on the subtle flavors of soy and sesame in your bag of Trader Joe’s Chicken Fried Rice. These things are easy because our minds are usually fairly efficient; to the extent we can not think about things we usually don’t. Not only do you ignore swallowing, breathing, blinking, and other bodily functions 99.9% of the time, you’ve probably also been ignoring the length of time since you last reached out to call your grandparents/aunts/uncles/cousins/etc. to say hello.

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The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way…And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

I’m okay with not finding what I was looking for, I can deal with prices being higher-than-expected, and I don’t really comment on the corporate-beige feel of a Randall’s or Kroger. But long lines are absolutely frustrating and a waste of my time. Traffic is soul-destroying and proof that I need a better/closer job or home to cut down on commute time. The line at the Post Office or DMV is infuriating because of course people in front of me don’t have their stuff ready and so it takes them forever; I’m completely ready for the counter when I get there.

Perspective is what matters here - if you don’t change it, you’ll be resigned to thinking the same way, day-after-day, in your default setting. But a change in perspective - from killing time in traffic to your dedicated audiobook time, from long lines at the Post Office as time to meditate in the thankfully quiet environment, from waiting forever to checkout to people watching is often all it takes to turn a potentially angering experience into a positive one.

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The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

This is more of an aside, but if you haven’t yet read it yet, Tim Urban’s thoughts on Forgettable Wednesdays are fantastic. It’s weird to think about philosophizing about relationships and picking a life partner (I tried it and my best friend said she was going to make sure it appeared at my wedding after a “Bro are you joking“), but it’s incredibly insightful.

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The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

Don’t live your life on autopilot.

Good Read: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

It’s mid-August, school hasn’t yet started, and recruiting season is already underway - my LinkedIn feed is already full of posts from McKinsey consultants alerting everyone to coffee chats and on-campus events from Monday through Friday next week (interestingly, school starts on Wednesday). Like any aspiring management consultant, I was looking for practice cases to run with other hopefuls, and among a folder of hundreds on hundreds of mock cases, I found a PDF of this article by William Deresiewicz.

I haven’t read too many things lately of that length (it’s about nine pages) that made me think as much as that. Perhaps the “Disadvantages” of an elite education isn’t an accurate title - "The Privilege” might fit better - but then again the word privilege gets (in my opinion) so often attached to the word “white” that it lost its socio-economic core definition long ago (for me, at least).

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I’d almost recommend skipping the first three paragraphs, because I don’t think they’re all that important. I love the phrase “Ivy Retardation,” though I’d use it differently than the author or his friend would. Rather, I’d jump right to paragraph 5, which really hits home Deresiewicz’s point that “an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth”. Indeed, it makes me reflect on the insane level of narcissism and ego I carried in high school (it’s still largely there, though less so):

We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright… (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.)

Ever since I heard about them, BHP and Plan II were supposed to be top-dog programs. The first comparison I heard from the BHP Faculty Director, Dr. Robert Prentice, was to Wharton. Plan II, according to some exorbitantly-wealthy investment-banker-type I had chatted with when I was 16, was an amazing education, one that’d be valuable in the future for my then-aspirations to Wall Street. I had received the “best and brightest” message my entire life; I still do. Though I’d hope that I never descended to actively thinking about how others weren’t, I’d imagine I did so in the past. Hell, I tell people I go to school in Austin (as if UT Austin is the paragon of prestige - I still assert that it’s the best university within 1000 miles, even above Rice, but that’s for another post).

The most personally important point (in a shaping-your-character kind of way) to me is in paragraphs 5 and 6:

I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” …however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic… social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense.

This is a particularly interesting lesson that I know, but haven’t fully learned. In other words, it makes sense on paper, but I don’t really live my life having fully comprehended it. One of the people I respect the most never went to college, though I’d wager he’s wiser and more admirable than 99% of people with a degree (he certainly makes a better Cowboy Casserole). On the other hand, there are some truly narrowly-excellent (what a euphemism!) people, especially in EE. They can shock you with their ability to analyze a circuit diagram or write some clever algorithm, but are otherwise devoid of social/emotional intelligence (and I too am probably much more narrowly-excellent than I realize).

Deresiewicz closes out his argument on a false sense of self-worth as follows. I’ve added the emphasis. For some reason, this hit particularly home.

One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more.

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Deresiewicz’s next point is why I believe the article is more about the privilege, rather than the disadvantages, of an elite education.

Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

Now that it’s mentioned, I can recall the number of second-chances I’ve received - even without asking. My freshman year, I was late on some deadline for some semester-long project. The TA told us (without asking, I believe) that we could get 80% credit if we wanted. This past semester, I accidentally sent an older version of an essay to my psychology professor. She knew because she had already read over the draft, and informed me about the potential mistake I had made. I ended up with a 97 instead of what probably would have been a high C. I decided to not do my last project for my software class since I already had a guaranteed A. Somehow, during the course of office hours, the professor told me that I could get half credit if I just did it before the end of the semester.

More damning than the second chances is grade inflation. I recall my high school philosophy teacher complaining about it, and all we’d do is mock him for it. But the BHP curve is real (I believe the average GPA is roughly 3.6), as in Plan II (I got an A in my World Literature class that I didn’t deserve). I remember my Circuit Theory professor tell the class happily that he was feeling generous and would likely curve the class to a 2.7 and being dazed. I got a B+ in Organizational Behavior and felt as if some great injustice had been committed to drop my GPA by 0.02.

Indeed, the core of educational privilege is that

[t]he elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out… For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab… as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club.

This article was written in June 2008. If it were written just a few months later, perhaps we wouldn’t be talking about Ken Lay.

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Finally, I wanted to talk about something unrelated to elitism and privilege, a lack of intellectual pilgrims.

Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade… I’ve had many wonderful students... But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul.

I’d like to think that for the most part, I’ve been a pilgrim. In fact, I think I can safely say that adding engineering midway through your college career is solid evidence that I am, at least to some extent. However, I’d wager that many people aren’t. I recall going to office hours regularly for my marketing and MIS professors to just talk. Not about school, not about the next assignment - solely to pick the brains of my professors. Throughout the course of those conversations, I’d like to think I gathered an amount of respect from my professors for trying to actually learn about things, and not just focusing on the grades or the assignment all the time (it certainly did happen). Similarly, I feel that most people who enter office hours do so with transactional intent - they want to receive help and leave. I’ve always wondered what it felt like from the professor’s point of view to have that happen - to see your students walk in, probe slightly-too-bluntly to figure out their problem, and then just leave until the next assignment rolls around (I’d imagine it’s somewhat depressing).

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There are many parts of Deresiewicz’s article that I didn’t discuss. I certainly don’t love everything about it - the tone seems remarkably arrogant in parts, and some points I just didn’t want to discuss for brevity purposes (as if this article isn’t already about 1500 words). Nevertheless, I found it incredibly thought-provoking. I hope you did too.

What drives your career choices?

My freshman year, a professor named Clint Tuttle dropped by the BHP Wednesday Seminar to talk about what he called “career drivers” – aspects of jobs like pay, projects, and culture – that determine how much we do/don’t like our work. Seeing as those thirty minutes gave me the best framework I’ve seen for job evaluation and answering the question “What do I want to do when I graduate?”, a post seems fitting.

The Drivers

While Clint’s original speech (as I remember it) only had six drivers, his current list contains eight [1]. The idea is that these eight aspects of any job are what we evaluate for any given position or role. We don’t really compare working at Google vs. Facebook, Tesla vs. Volvo, or Chipotle vs. In-N-Out; we compare the prestige or work-life balance or people or pay of these companies. Clint’s own descriptions and explanations for each driver can be found here. That being said, I’ve made a few changes to Clint’s list, and the set of drivers that I consider are (in no particular order):

1. Salary and Benefits

2. Work/Life Balance

3. Organizational Prestige

4. Social Impact / Deeper Meaning

5. People and Culture

6. What you Work on

7. Learning and Growth

8. Location

9. Compatibility with Future Goals

While it’s important to evaluate and compare jobs on a driver-by-driver basis, it’s equally important to consider how important that driver is for you. You shouldn’t tank your evaluation of a job with little-to-no organizational prestige if you don’t care about that. Likewise, if you don’t care about work/life balance but like the idea of future optionality, you should probably go into management consulting.

Salary and Benefits

Work pays the bills; a job that doesn’t pay enough to make ends meet is unlikely to be satisfactory, even if everything else is perfect. Nevertheless, study after study after study shows that above some income level (around $75,000 - 105,000), day-to-day happiness isn’t affected (though people’s opinions on their life continue to improve). Furthermore, think about how much happier you’d be earning $50,000 versus $500,000 versus $5,000,000. You won’t be 10x happier earning 10x more – though you’ll certainly be able to satisfy most/all of your desires at those three income levels. Thus, I always think about compensation through a logarithmic scale – exponential increases in earnings only translate to linear increases in happiness and satisfaction – and even then, only up to a certain point.

When evaluating the compensation structure, it’s important to consider the whole picture, not just the salary. For example, suppose you’re picking between two otherwise-identical jobs: one that pays $80,000 per year and provides $20,000 in non-taxable benefits (e.g. meals at work, a 401(k) plan, healthcare, etc.) while another pays a straight $100,000 per year without any benefits. Assuming that the benefits are all things you would have bought anyways, it makes more sense to go with the first option. You’ll probably save around $5,000 in taxes alone. Likewise, equity is also an important part of compensation. For smaller companies, however, equity can present extraordinarily uncommon opportunities – I’ll cover a personal example in a bit. On the flip side, equity can represent risk in compensation, and some people dislike that.

I view compensation levels as falling into one of five “buckets” that determine the amount of financial freedom available.

• Jobs in the first bucket don’t pay enough to meet basic needs. This is the worst place to be.

• Jobs in the second bucket can make ends meet, though there isn’t much disposable income to do things with. Nevertheless, you’re getting by.

• Jobs in the third bucket enable various experiences – occasional weekend trips, eating out every now and then, doing cool stuff.

• The fourth bucket is financial freedom – where you have the ability to do virtually whatever you want (within reason – you can’t fly to Paris for lunch or own an endangered species), and not worry about money. A vacation every year is completely doable, and you don’t really worry much about it.

• The fifth bucket represents an earnings level where fully spending your earnings would necessitate waste.

So far, I’ve experienced buckets three and five. My internship at Akuna Capital placed me in the fifth bucket, and it’s not a good place to be. Money becomes irrelevant, and I started to waste it on things that didn’t matter. I spent $125 on a dinner, $200 at a nightclub (it was me and a friend, though that’s still hardly excusable), $400 on a gift for my cousins, and several hundreds on a phone. I stopped caring about prices and started rationalize them by saying “it’s only X minutes of salary”. Living life in the fifth bucket requires insane levels of discipline to avoid wasting it; it’s why lottery winners are more satisfied but not necessarily happier in the long-run.

Meanwhile, this summer’s internship is firmly in bucket three. I’m earning $15 an hour, paid 48% in cash (I need to earn the minimum wage of $7.25 for legal reasons) and 52% in equity – a rare arrangement for an internship. On the $7.25 an hour, given that my tuition and rent are functionally paid for, I can stretch out my earnings from this summer and what’s left of last summer to last me until my next internship. Nevertheless, I’m starting to see my bank balance dwindle as furnishing the apartment and other expenses take their toll.

A quick note on equity, and why I chose to receive it. My philosophy was that if the company does fail, then, at worst, I’ve just gotten paid a few thousand dollars less. Coupled with my habits of spending proportionally to the amount of money in the bank, this wasn’t a high cost. However, if the company did well (and, as an employee, I’ve seen firsthand how they’re doing), then my otherwise-insignificant pay would multiply substantially. To be fair, it’s a risky move that isn’t for everyone – taking on risk requires not only the stomach for it, but the financial stability in case things go wrong – but it’s one that I’m happy making.

Finally, a note of caution. I’ve found that because salary and benefits are so easily compared (after all, it’s just a number), I tend to overweight it over more qualitative drivers (e.g. people and culture) when it comes to decision-making time.

Update [07/22/2019]: This is a general phenomenon; people tend to focus on quantitative metrics because they’re easier to capture and compare than qualitative ones. Steven Kerr talks about this here.

Work/Life Balance

I feel like this driver includes two components. The first and most obvious one is the number of hours worked per week – it’s harder to work for 70 hours a week than it is to work 50. However, the variability and timing of those hours is equally important. Do you need to work on weekends? Do you need to start early in the morning, or work late at night? Are there days that you go home early, and days where you basically need a sleeping bag? Can you work on your own schedule, from wherever you choose, or are your hours more structured?

I’ve personally found that during school semesters, I can work most of the time, provided that I enjoy what I’m doing and that I consistently have a break – I aggressively allocate Saturdays for not-working time, and that’s usually all I need. However, during the summer, I’ve found that my motivation to do something productive after I come home from work is basically zero. As a result, more rigid schedules work better for me.

While I don’t care too more about work-life balance right now, I’d imagine that when I decide to start a family and settle down, it’ll rise much higher on my priority list.

Organizational Prestige

This one is fairly self-explanatory – it’s just how much prestige the organization’s name carries with it. Saying that you work for SpaceX or Tesla is sexy; no one really dreams about going to work for Independent Software Solutions Inc. or Unknown Austin Startup Inc. This is something that I try my best not to care about – though that can certainly require active effort at times. Much like choosing where to go to college, I find that prestige isn’t as important as fit along the other drivers.

Social Impact / Deeper Meaning

This driver asks two questions at its core:

1. How much of an impact are you having on the world?

2. How much meaning do you derive from your work?

Impact and Meaning is the reason that the non-profit sector exists – people want to do things bigger than themselves, and they want to effect change in the world around them. Certain companies do a better job here than others. SpaceX and Tesla attract talent that’s highly motivated to make humanity spacefaring and to accelerate the adoption of sustainable energy. Folks at Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are working toward a better food system. Employees at Waymo and Cruise are trying to prevent 40,000 road deaths per year. Doctors and social workers are motivated by improving people’s lives. Impact doesn’t just mean how much impact you necessarily have, it can also apply at the company level. Accountants may not directly cure cancer or build a better car, but they certainly play a crucial role on the team that does.

I’m starting to realize just how important this driver is for me. I used to watch crash test videos of Volvos and stare in shock and awe at how well-engineered their vehicles were. The safety engineers that work at Volvo are first-rate; the number of innovations they’ve created (e.g. the seat belt) have saved literally thousands of lives. This is what it means to have an impact on the world, this is what improving people’s lives means. The meaning that they must derive from their work (I’d wager) is huge.

While it’s possible to fold this into the “What you work on” category, I think it merits its own section because of how broad the category would be otherwise.

People and Culture

People and Culture is about how well you get along with those you regularly interact with. People you interact with can involve not just your coworkers, but also customers and employees of other companies. If you’re not a people person, maybe don’t go into sales – even if you love your coworkers.

A solid proxy is to ask yourself if you’d spend time with people associated with work outside of work – if the answer is a resounding no, that’s a bad sign. The other component to this driver, workplace culture, is hard to describe, but ultimately the acid test that I use is to consider whether you feel comfortable in your workplace.

While a mediocre or non-existent/weak culture can’t actively do damage, great company culture can go a long way for happiness, and actively bad culture can do the same. It’s also worth pointing out that some people (e.g. me during the summer of 2018) don’t care much about diversity until they’re in an environment without it. While I was interning at Akuna, the gender ratio among full-time traders was infinite – there were probably 60 or so full-time traders, and none of them were female. At my current internship, virtually everyone in the office is fairly introverted, though I’m not. Ultimately, I wouldn’t want to spend extra time with most of my co-workers outside of work.

[Update, Nov. 4, 2019: I think it’s also worth adding onto the people dimension something related to how smart your co-workers are. In general, the personalities and traits of your co-workers in an important factor to consider.]

What you Work on

What you work on is all about the projects and tasks that are a core part of your role. Here, it’s important to consider both the day-to-day tasks and the bigger picture. Data analytics roles can involve a fair amount of menial labor (especially during startup phase), but the work can be incredibly interesting (to some people). Options traders’ day-to-day is relatively bland in comparison to the few days and minutes a year where markets really start to move. Again, an easy proxy exists for this category: would you want to work on your job’s projects and tasks outside of work?

I put recognition into this category, as I think it fits best here and didn’t want to break it out into its own driver. The relevant questions are: Are you recognized for your contributions to the company? If so, is that recognition meaningful or just a token? Is it often, or infrequent? While I don’t think I’m motivated too much by recognition, it’s a very crucial tool for motivating some types of people.

The Japanese concept of Ikigai is highly relevant here. What you work on should be (1) profitable, (2) something you’re good at, (3) something you’re interested in, and (4) something that fulfills a need for the world.

Learning and Growth

Learning and Growth is about becoming a better person, professionally and personally. Consider your strengths – are you good at what you do? If you aren’t, does the job provide the support and time to enable you to become better at it? Does your job enable you to meet other people in the field (both at and above your pay-grade) and develop relationships? Can you build your skills to prepare yourself for whatever comes next?

Especially for internships, this category also encompasses the questions of “To what extent do you learn more about the industry?”, “To what extent do you meet new people?”, and “To what extent do you learn about your drivers?”. Internships ought to be learning opportunities; an internship where you learn nothing about the job, the industry, or yourself has an upper limit of how useful it is.

Your boss has a lot of influence here (along with “What you Work on” and “People and Culture”). Is your boss actively involved in your development?

Location

Location is more than just what city you’re in. Is the company in a nicer or worse part of that city? What’s near the office? Is travel ever necessary to meet relevant parties – how often? My experience with talking with ex-consultants is that traveling is fun and exciting in the beginning, until it loses its luster. Some things to consider here are state taxes, the weather, and distance to family and friends – along with the ease with which you can meet new people outside of work.

Compatibility with Future Goals

This is the last driver on the list, but it’s a big one for me. The core question is: How well does the current role tie into what you might want to do in the future? As an example, management consultants have the opportunity to work abroad, go to business school, get promoted, or leave for another job – there’s a high amount of optionality post-consulting. As a result, if you aren’t 100% sure what you might want to do, consulting is incredibly helpful at figuring out your future goals. If your goal is to become CFO for a company, you probably shouldn’t be a software engineer; it doesn’t further that goal.

Tieing into this, promotions are basically future job options, so this driver also encompasses the ease with which you can add to your list of rights and responsibilities.

Prioritizing Drivers

There’s no formal process for ranking the drivers. Rather, some priorities can be set with a fair amount of introspection and thought. However, it’s worth being aware of the effects of psychological biases, especially availability. We tend to overweight recent experiences over older ones, so things we did or didn’t like about our previous job will tend to rank higher to preserve/avoid those experiences.

As another resource, the official Drivers Exercise website can be found here, and a video of Clint talking through each of his eight drivers can be found here. Data on other people’s priorities can be found here. Don’t match your priorities to other people’s, though it can be interesting to see how you do/don’t align with others in your preferences.

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[1] Clint talks about travel and risk in the FAQs that immediately follow his descriptions, but ultimately decides on 8 drivers.

Dress shoes suck.

It’s 2019, and killing animals is no longer a source of enjoyment in mass-market products. We all eat meat, but no one enjoys the fact that an animal (be it a chicken, cow, pig, lamb, etc.) had to die for our diet - we just like the taste and texture of it. We prefer leather seats in cars, but no one requires that we allocate grain crops that could feed the world’s poor and hungry to raising a half-ton animal that farts out methane. Animal products are pretty nice things, but the animal cruelty, environmental impact, and ethical concerns that are associated with them aren’t part of the value-add for most people.

This is why lab-grown meat and plant-based meat substitutes (e.g. Impossible Foods) are growing so quickly. Companies realized that people didn’t need beef per se in their burger patties; they just wanted something with the taste, texture, and appearance of beef. All that was necessary was an alternative without compromise; a patty that didn’t taste like a dirty old tree branch.

Electric cars have a similar story. While the sound of a V8 is a rather beautiful one, your average commuter doesn’t really care about burning fossil fuels to get from A to B. Any method that does the job for cheap with high reliability and convenience is perfectly sufficient. Pre-Tesla EVs sacrificed convenience and aesthetics; Tesla came along and provided a superior product that compared favorably to traditional product offerings, without the normal compromises of being green.

My proposal is simple: dress shoes suck, and someone ought to do a better job here. The way I see it, the sole criterion by which dress shoes are currently designed is formality; it’s all about the aesthetics. They succeed along that dimension - but they also come with compromises that we’d never accept with other types of footwear. Dress shoes are uncomfortable, for one - I haven’t found a pair that I can withstand for longer than three hours. They’re also made from leather, which again - knowing that an animal died is not part of my footwear’s value proposition.

Here’s a pretty basic product idea that a company could execute on. Companies already make high-quality vegan leather for cars - Tesla’s seats, Mercedes’s MB-Tex, and BMW’s SensaTec are all non-leather seating materials. Companies like Allbirds already have figured out how to build comfortable shoes that are incredibly attractive to millennials and younger buyers (whom I believe this type of product would resonate more with). Build a shoe that (1) is comfortable to wear for long periods of time, (2) appears formal through the use of synthetic leather-like materials, and (3) is environmentally friendly.

If no one does this and gains traction, I will. The current formal footwear is failing.

How I look at Charities

Evaluating a charity for a donation is much like evaluating a company for an investment – you have to look at several different factors, both quantitative and qualitative. Meanwhile, you have to consider a double-bottom-line for charities: not just how sustainable the organization is financially, but also how much impact the organization has. In this post, I’ll talk about some of the factors that I look at when assessing whether to donate to a nonprofit.

Financials

Financial data has the benefit of being both (1) quantitative and (2) widely and readily available, thanks to sites such as Charity Navigator. Thus, it’s ideal for quickly filtering through charities along some objective, quantitative criteria. However, finances aren’t everything, so I use them as binary variables – either a charity checks the box, or it doesn’t. Unlike with companies, the factors that make charities stand out aren’t golden financial statements.

Important metrics include:

Expense Ratios: Where does the money go: what percentage of the expenses went to fundraising, administrative purposes, and programs? I didn’t want to give to a charity where less than 85% of the expenses were allocated to the charitable programs themselves. Furthermore, the ideal charity is able to allocate a larger percentage of program expenses over time.

Net Assets + Revenue/Expense Ratio: What did the organization’s overall financial health look like? Some charities have high levels of net assets, and others collect substantially more in donations each year than they spend on programs. For me, I preferred to target charities that were in greater financial need of a donation (as opposed to those with substantial cash reserves), which I quantified by adding the charity’s net assets to last year’s revenue, and dividing by last year’s expenses. If the number wasn’t under 2, I didn’t want to donate to it [1].

Year-over-year Growth: Ideally, a charity has a larger impact each year than the year before. A readily available proxy for this was annual program expenses, and I don’t want to support charities that are stagnant or worse, declining in activity. Filtering on this can be unforgiving to charities with rare circumstances, so I prefer to compare program expenses over several years.

Accountability and Transparency: How transparent are the charity’s financials to the public? Are there conflicts of interest, or procedures to prevent and mitigate them? While many factors play into this category, I decided to just use Charity Navigator’s Accountability and Transparency score, and I didn’t consider charities with scores under 90.

Underlying Problem

Charities exist is because Earth isn’t Utopia. Accordingly, evaluation of a charity begins with exploring the underlying problem at hand – a mismatch between food supply and demand, a problem with reading materials, government corruption that prevents proper services from being provided or distributed. How much the underlying issue that’s being tackled matters to you will vary – some people care more about education than health, taking care of veterans than the homeless, providing clean water than caring for the environment. That’s perfectly fine – you ought to decide to support a charity that you feel strongly about. Nevertheless, some relevant factors worth considering include:

Social Impact: How important is the issue? What does the “social return on investment” look like?

Issue size and severity: How large is the issue – how many people are affected by it, and how strongly does it affect them?

Equity: To what extent does the problem disproportionately affect those in underprivileged groups?

Mission & Programs

Once you understand the underlying problem, it’s time to start looking at what exactly the organization does to fight it. Again, some relevant factors include:

What they do: What programs and efforts does the charity lead in order to fight the problem? How exactly are they involved with those programs? What resources do they provide? How much traction have they received so far?

“Business” model: Do the programs work? Are they scalable? What’s limiting expansion and growth? How easy to access is their product/service?

Key members: who are the people involved in the organization? What’s their background, and why is it relevant to what the organization Is trying to accomplish?

Competition: What distinguishes the organization from similar ones trying to accomplish similar goals?

Looking through the organization’s annual report (which is almost always easily accessible online) should be an easy way to understand more about the problem that the charity is tackling, the work they do, and their financial position. In the next two posts, I’ll share more about my favorite charities.

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[1] Some people would argue the other way – that you shouldn’t donate to charities with a risk of going bankrupt. Indeed, this rule lacks universalizability, in that if all philanthropists were to follow the “target charities with financial need” rule, then all charities would constantly flip between being rich and poor.

Focus costs $350

Some people are sneakerheads. Others are car nuts, gym rats, or adrenaline junkies. At no point in my life have I been an audiophile. In middle school, I bought into the marketing hype and bought the Beats mixr, and later I bought a pair of 50cent’s headphones. After all, middle school wasn’t a time for finding new and unique products, it was for fitting in. As I started chasing value, my go-to earbuds became OnePlus’ Bullets V2 (before OEMs had courage) and the OnePlus Bullets Wireless. Spending $350 on a pair of headphones sounded insane, but I was willing to try any product that the Surface team puts their name on. So I bought the Surface Headphones.

The Good

From an aesthetics standpoint, I think the Headphones are top-notch. I’m a big fan of the grey-and-silver color combo, though looks are subjective. Again, I’m not an audiophile – but these sound great. I can’t say that I understand what the phrases “the mids are punchy” or “the highs are crisp” mean, but I doubt that any casual listener will have qualms – whether the casual listener is someone who’d pay $350 for headphones is for later discussion.

The Headphones really shine in the control scheme. Turning the earcups into touch-sensitive areas and flanking them with rotating dials is such an obvious move that I wonder why no one else has done this before. Most other headphones that I’ve seen have no function to the outside of the earcup, and so they cover it up with a logo. Sony seems to be catching on, and lets you swipe on the earcup for various tasks. But we’re already used to adjusting volume knobs (hence the phrase “turn the volume down”), and I’d hate to swipe 5 times just to adjust the volume to where I want it when one fluid motion could do the same thing.

With wireless headphones, you shouldn’t need to use your phone to skip a song or adjust the volume. If you have to use a voice assistant, it probably would have been faster to just pull out your phone in the first place. In-line controls are often difficult to find, and it’s easy to hit the wrong button since they’re sized for six-year-olds. The Headphones’ control scheme is far superior along all of these dimensions – the controls are right on your ears, so you always know where they are, and they’re large enough that you can’t fat-finger the wrong command. Using Cortana/your phone’s voice assistant is completely optional.

Even better, Microsoft copied a page straight from Apple and enable an auto-pause feature – take the headphones off, and they’ll pause your music (after a roughly two second delay); put them back on and the music is going again. Overall, the control scheme makes the Headphones feel auto-magic; it prevents them from becoming another gadget to worry about.

As smart as the control scheme is, most of the value for me personally comes from the noise cancellation. It’s wonderful – my roommate could be playing Diablo III, and I wouldn’t even know. No matter where I am, the Headphones provide a means of focus, and no other product that I’ve tried so far has been able to give me that. On the flip side, the option to amplify background noise is pretty smart. There are times when we want to listen to music and socialize, but those around me don’t want to listen to the Man of Steel soundtrack on repeat. Amplifying other people’s conversations is probably a bit intrusive, but it’s a guilty pleasure. I don’t fully understand the merits of having 13 different levels, however. I’ve never been in a situation where I wanted background noise halfway-tuned out; from my experience so far I’ve either wanted everything blocked out or amplified. Still, thanks to the ease of just twisting a dial, I can’t say that it really irks me.

Other niceties: these charge via USB-C, not a connector from years ago. In the carrying case, Microsoft includes a print-out showing exactly what a tap or a hold will do. When you turn on the headphones, they tell you (1) which devices you’re connected to, and (2) a rough estimate of your battery, in hours (as opposed to some meaningless percentage). These are all relatively minor things, but they make sure that the headphones don’t get in your way.

Needs Improvement

As a minor complaint, I find the case a bit large. The Headphones don’t fold, which makes carrying them a bit less convenient. Furthermore, the earcups swivel the wrong way – when I take off my headphones, I want to able to swivel the earcups so that the earcups are flat against my shoulders.

The Bad

If you wear glasses, I cannot recommend these. When I don’t wear glasses, the Headphones are comfortable, the noise cancellation works great, and the music sounds wonderful. When I want to actually see more than three feet away, none of that applies. Normally, the earcups can provide a seal between your ears and the outside world so that all you can hear is coming from the speakers; glasses interfere with the formation of that seal, which means that background noise gets in and the music gets noticeably distorted. Worse, the earcups continue pushing against your ears and glasses, so my glasses are pushed away from their normal position and my head starts to hurt after just half an hour.

I think there’s a relatively easy solution: shape the earcup differently. I think that cutting out a small slit where most people have their glasses would reduce the pressure that the headphones exert on the frame, and thus alleviate the fit and comfort issues that pop up. Alternatively, make the foam much softer around where glasses would sit. Regardless of the solution chosen, earcups would be ideally swappable so that you could pop out the normal earcups and put in the glasses-compatible ones when you need to wear glasses. If anyone can pull this off, it’s definitely Microsoft – they’ve found a way to remove the entire bottom half of a laptop, so I can’t imagine removing an earcup would be all that difficult.

Competition and Value

As a quick caveat, since I haven’t really spent much of my time or effort looking into the competition or using it, I’m going to skip over how the Headphones compare to similar products in terms of function. Nevertheless, form is certainly a strong point with these, and as biased as I am, I think the Headphones look better than the competition.

As to what exactly the competition is, I think the Headphones’ price bracket makes it clear that Microsoft wants to go against both products from more mainstream brands (e.g. Beats Studio 3) and the more enthusiast-focused ones (e.g. Bose’s QuietComfort 35 II, or Sony’s WH-1000XM3) in the over-ear-headphones-with-noise-cancellation space. Given that almost all of the competition is priced at $350, Microsoft went with the logical pricetag, one that invites comparisons between products.

On the flip side, from the point of view of a casual listener, $350 seems incomprehensible to spend on headphones. I was chatting with a friend about how amazing the Headphones were, and he was with me up until the price. For $350, he noted that he could get a nice keyboard ($100), a mouse ($50), speakers ($150), cables ($25), and a basic pair of earbuds ($25) – and he’s right. A $350 price point is pretty much a non-starter for casual listeners.

But I’m keeping the Surface Headphones. While I think the OnePlus Bullets Wireless sound just as great (I’m not an audiophile) for literally a fifth of the price, and I don’t feel bad about working out in those or getting them dirty, the Surface Headphones’ noise-reduction offers me the ability to focus, whenever and wherever I’d want to. My vision is good enough that I can get by without glasses. Similar products exist at a similar price point, but none offer the same combination of control, style, and performance that Microsoft offers.

Thoughts on the Surface Go

Background

Before I left for Uganda, I decided that (1) I wanted to write during my vacation and that (2) I didn’t want to bring my Surface Book. So I ran out to Best Buy three hours before we left for the airport and bought a Surface Go, along with the blue Alcantara TypeCover and blue Surface Pen. Therefore, this isn’t from the perspective of a normal user. It’s from the perspective of someone who:

1. Values portability

2. Requires a bare minimum of performance

3. Will be mostly off-the-grid

4. Just wants to read PDFs, type up some blog posts, and play Solitare

I bought the lowest-end version: 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of storage, and a barebones Pentium 4415Y fanless processor. I used Windows 10 exclusively in S mode. I didn’t bring the Surface charger either – I charged over USB-C with my Pixel charger.

The TypeCover

Seeing as most user interaction is via keyboard and mouse, it’s critical that Microsoft nails a good experience here. Despite the small footprint of the Surface Go, I found the keyboard to be reasonably sized, and typing was as much of a joy as it is on other Surface products (I’ve used the Surface Book, the Surface Pro 4 TypeCover, the Surface Laptop, the Designer Keyboard, the Surface Keyboard, and the Surface Ergonomic Keyboard. They’re all amazing to type on.) While the key travel wasn’t as deep as my Surface Book’s, I still found it pleasant (as opposed to Apple’s butterfly switches on the new MacBooks). I will admit to missing the incredibly loud thwack of my pinky hitting the Enter key, but a quieter keyboard is definitely appreciated by those around me (especially my roommates). Likewise, the trackpad is a standard Surface TypeCover-level trackpad. The glass surface is smooth, it feels nice, it tracks well, and the gestures are much appreciated. The size is perfectly fine.

Product-wise, I’m guessing that Microsoft may have designed the Surface Go by starting with the TypeCover – while there isn’t a wasted millimeter on the TypeCover, the screen on the Surface itself is surrounded by a thick bezel. I think it’s slightly overpriced, and that $99 would be more fair for this (given that I deem the TypeCover as a mandatory accessory on both the Surface Pro and the Surface Go), but the non-Alcantara version is available at that price point.

Performance and S Mode

I used the Surface Go in S Mode the entire time, which meant that I couldn’t install apps outside of the Microsoft store (e.g. Chrome, Steam). Truth be told, I didn’t miss anything. For music, I used Spotify; Microsoft Office was available for me to plan my course schedule and write; Edge handled all of my web browsing. The real annoyance I found was being forced to use Bing as the default search engine in Edge. You can change this easily in normal Windows 10, you can’t in S Mode.

For what I was doing, performance was fine. I noticed some stuttering here and there, but I didn’t expect much speed to begin with and the Surface Go completely met expectations. Pure expectation confirmation theory.

Battery Life

My usage wasn’t remotely realistic of a normal workload. I wasn’t connected to the Internet. My workflow was exclusively viewing/annotating PDFs that I downloaded and typing up Word documents. Of course I had great battery life – and being able to share a charger with my phone was really nice.

Product and Pricing: What you’re buying

The way I see it, buying the Surface Go will set you back at least $500: $400 for the tablet itself and another $100 for the basic TypeCover. Don’t buy just the tablet and expect it to replace an iPad – Windows 10 is fundamentally better as a laptop/desktop OS than a tablet one. Think of the Surface Go as a netbook – small, portable, and basic. Your $500 is buying you a really nice netbook. The processor and RAM isn’t strong. The size is intentionally small. You shouldn’t use this as your one-and-only device.

Yet I can’t help but appreciate what this is. It shouldn’t be your one-and-only device, but it could be, if it came down to it. The build quality is just as good as the rest of the Surface lineup, and the other hardware benefits (e.g. the amazing Surface kickstand, Windows Hello) are also befitting a price point that’s far higher of $500.

$500 is a great price, but you really shouldn’t buy this – if you’re reading this, then I don’t think you’re the target market. I think Microsoft’s commercial is somewhat right – this is absolutely something that I’d get for my 8 and 6-year-old cousins for their first laptop. Unfortunately, I don’t think the number of people who are willing to buy this is that high – on the cheaper table side of the market, the iPad presents some stiff competition at $330. On the other hand, start upgrading the hardware and a last-generation Surface Pro would provide much more power and comfort for a relatively incremental upcharge. 11” laptops died out for a reason – people realized that a tablet was perfectly suitable for 90% of tasks.

I hope I’m wrong. This thing is awesome.