Tag: #decision-making
Writing on GPUs, LLMs, MLOps, Kubernetes — and mindset · 24 posts
The Manager Track and the IC Track — What Is Reversible and What Actually Grows
Because becoming a manager is habitually called a promotion, the two paths look like the top and bottom of one ladder. What actually differs is the kind of job, and whether an organization treats the two as equals varies
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#management#individual-contributor#career-strategy#decision-makingHow to Evaluate a Company — Signals of Growth and Signals of Stall
Most people evaluate companies in reverse order: brand, then compensation, then stack, and only afterwards the problems and people that actually build the engineer they will be in three years. This post separates the sig
2026-08-15 · 5 min read #career#job-search#interview#decision-making#company-cultureNegotiating When You Feel You Have No Leverage — What Is Actually on the Table
What stops most people from negotiating is not missing information but a self-issued verdict that they have no leverage — a verdict produced by defining leverage narrowly as one competing offer. This post locates where l
2026-08-15 · 5 min read #career#negotiation#offer#communication#decision-makingA Plan That Assumes It Is Wrong — Direction Instead of Goals, and the Questions to Ask Each Quarter
A five-year plan does not fail because it was made carelessly. It fails because there are two things to predict and both of them move: the market changes, and inside it you change too. This post explains why trying to im
2026-08-15 · 5 min read #career#planning#decision-making#career-strategy#reflectionWhen to Leave and When to Stay — The Problems a Move Solves and the Ones That Follow You
Changing jobs works well on problems caused by the environment and fails on problems whose cause travels with you. Without that distinction, you repeat the same situation with a different company name on it. This post la
2026-08-15 · 5 min read #career#job-change#decision-making#growth#retentionThe Experiment Where One Dollar Beat Twenty — Cognitive Dissonance and Sixty Years of Rebuttal
Participants were made to do a deliberately boring task, then asked to lie about it. One group was paid one dollar, the other twenty dollars. The people who later rated the task as more enjoyable were the ones who had be
2026-07-26 · 13 min read #psychology#paper-review#social-psychology#decision-making#mindsetHow to Decide Well — A Good Decision and a Good Outcome Are Not the Same Thing
When the last pass of the Super Bowl was intercepted, everyone called it the worst call in history. But grading a decision by its outcome erases almost everything there was to learn from it. Here is the idea of resulting
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #mindset#decision-making#psychology#productivity#self-improvementLosses Hurt Twice as Much as Gains — The Prospect Theory Original and the 45 Years Since
The sentence "people feel the pain of a loss twice as strongly as the pleasure of a gain" has become a fixture of negotiation textbooks and pricing memos. Open the source — the 1979 Econometrica paper by Kahneman and Tve
2026-07-26 · 13 min read #psychology#paper-review#behavioral-economics#decision-making#moneyHow to End Things Well — The Skill Nobody Taught Us
We learn how to start things countless times, but nobody ever taught us how to end them. This post looks at the structure by which the sunk cost fallacy keeps us pinned down, the one-sentence question Andy Grove asked at
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #mindset#endings#sunk-cost#decision-making#retrospectiveHow to Judge the Timing of a Job Change — The Question That Separates Running Away From Levelling Up
When you are torn about leaving, what you need is not courage but a standard. One sentence — would I stay if the problem vanished — separates the escape move from the growth move; a learning curve gone flat is a signal w
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #career#job-change#decision-making#growth#job-searchThinking Tools for Reading the World — Mental Models
Mental models are thinking frameworks that help us reason about a complex world by simplifying it. This essay walks calmly through Charlie Munger's latticework of models, first-principles thinking, high-leverage models l
2026-07-05 · 15 min read #thinking#mental-models#decision-making#first-principlesThe Psychology of Money — Why We Spend So Irrationally
We are astonishingly irrational about money. Following behavioral-economics findings like loss aversion, mental accounting, and anchoring, we look at the relationship between money and happiness and the psychology of imp
2026-06-21 · 26 min read #behavioral-economics#psychology#money#decision-making#cultureSimulation Thinking: Running It in Your Head First
Running important decisions, hard conversations, talks, and matches in your head first is a powerful tool. This essay covers the cognitive science behind mental simulation, scenario planning, imagining worst and best cas
2026-06-19 · 11 min read #mental-simulation#decision-making#scenario-planning#cognitive-rehearsal#learningHumility, Right Place and Right Time, and the Golden Mean: How to Govern Yourself
How to speak with humility yet clarity, the sense of placing work and people in the right spot, and the balance of "too much is as bad as too little" drawn from Aristotle on the mean and Plato and Mill on temperance. A p
2026-06-19 · 30 min read #self-improvement#humility#moderation#self-discipline#philosophyThe Harmony of Emotion and Reason: Think With Data, Feel As a Person
Good decisions come when cold data and warm intuition work together. From an engineer perspective, this essay covers the roles of emotion and reason, how to combine data-driven thinking with human intuition, practical to
2026-06-19 · 29 min read #self-improvement#decision-making#data-driven#emotion#rationalityLife Is a Long Game: Making Regret-Free Choices With Your Future Self
If the you of three years from now looked back at the choice you are making today, would they regret it or be grateful? Using your future self as the standard for decisions frees you from the trap of short-term focus and
2026-06-19 · 34 min read #future-self#long-game#decision-making#mindset#self-improvementThe Power of Order and Sequence — What You Do First Changes the Result
Doing the same work in a different order produces a different result. This essay covers reading dependencies and precedence, designing priority and sequencing, and building from the foundation. It also examines the trap
2026-06-19 · 35 min read #productivity#learning#prioritization#sequencing#self-growthHumble Yet Sharp — Speaking in Facts
Humility and confidence do not collide. Separate opinion from fact, speak with data, remove ambiguity, and hold strong opinions loosely. This piece covers the trap of political speech and the craft of delivering feedback
2026-06-16 · 17 min read #communication#mindset#career#decision-making#feedbackWhich Work Makes the Biggest Impact — Prioritizing by Impact
Being busy and being important are different things. The definition of impact, ICE and RICE for weighing effort against effect, the important-vs-urgent matrix, choosing what not to do, the trap of local optimization, and
2026-06-16 · 13 min read #career#productivity#prioritization#impact#mindsetTools and Trends to Avoid in 2026 — A Curated Anti-Recommendation Deep Dive
A 2026 opinion piece on developer tools and trends that have aged badly — and the better choice that fills each gap. Not pure negativity: every AVOID is paired with an INSTEAD. From CRA, Moment.js, Yarn 1, Gulp, and loda
2026-05-14 · 21 min read #anti-pattern#tools-to-avoid#developer-tools#curation#retired-tools