They just get in the way. It’s nice to have them, for a few months if you are struggling to get anything done, but after that let’s just abandon them. If it takes 5 minutes to write down what to do, and 15 minutes to do it – don’t even write it down, just do it. The habit should be to do, not to manage/schedule.
Good-Bye, Google
How I am planning on controlling the products and services I use more strictly.
Relatively I’ve gotten a new phone, a moto x4, and since I’m on Project Fi (by Google), this phone ended up being a Google phone, too. I only really got it for one reason: it has a dual rear camera, allowing me to take nicer pics. I can use that, for my Instagram. However! After 3 or so months of using it, I have to say I’m ready to give it up, and finally switch to an iPhone.
Now, why? The short answer is that I really really don’t like the Google assistant. It tells me when I get home, it tells me when my credit card is due, it knows everything about me. My photos are backed up (poorly) on Google cloud – so I can neither get them back easily, nor have any reasonable privacy. And I use google way too much. It has all my data and when I type in a search query in Chrome, it auto-completes it for me, so very often instead of searching for what I want I search for something else – the nearest-popular autocompleted sentence. I don’t feel comfortable with that at all.
Now, Google will still have my data, and true privacy is impossible to achieve. But I should make a conscious choice to at least attempt to mitigate the risk and the problem of privacy. Just look at how much trouble Google+ has been, or how much trouble Facebook has been! Oh, I quit Facebook quite a while ago, I have an account but I don’t rely on it for communication or any part of my social life. However, real tools like the email, calendar, and the physical sellphone are harder to own as private.
Another reason for me to dislike google is that they charged me $1800 according to some 5-year-old contract, because someone used some API keys that were under my name. I’m still recovering these monies, actually. Obviously nobody reads the contracts they sign, but also – let’s sign fewer contracts, and let’s actually avoid unnecessarily giving away control.
In general, I don’t feel comfortable how pervasive Google’s services are. I want to use it less, not more. So I’m in the slow, gradual process of abandoning google services. I feel that email may be the hardest to abandon.
5 ways of finding a career match
To correct what I’ve said yesterday, the 5 ways of finding a career match are:
* live fit (career choices, location, compensation, company size)
* technology fit (candidate’s skills align and candidate has the necessary skills)
* cultural fit (candidate’s acceptance of the company’s management style, situational judgement test, personality test)
* personal fit (do I want to work with him? does he want to work in this team?)
* other factors (a blanket category for red flags and whatever you cannot disclose)
Interviewing
selfie – huge file!
Tools: Water
It took me a whole going into adulthood business to realize just how important water is, and I suspect that as I get older, water will become even more important for me.
It’s not just that it’s critical to survival. It’s quite critical to health in the following ways:
* A guard against hangovers. If you drink enough water while going out, your hangover will be minimal. The suggestion is to chug a 8-12oz water glass with every drink, and that’s what I do. Say at a bar, I order a beer, and also water, chug the water, then sip the beer. Do it between 9pm-3am, not have a terrible hangover in the morning. Without water tho, your hangover will be so much worse.
* Better sleep and shorter sleep requirement! I just kind of discovered it recently, and still subject to validation. If you go to sleep well-hydrated, you need to sleep less to recover your energy. It’s a time saver! Continue reading “Tools: Water”
On One-way pre-recorded Video Interviews
It’s a good idea when you use it very specifically.
A while ago I was applying for some job and one of the requirements was for me to record a video answering questions for them, and upload it. Very quickly: my comment on this is that it may work for some blue-collar jobs where you have large churn, and need to interview 1000’s of candidates. It would not work for white-collar jobs, for example I usually require my time to be matched one-for-one during the interviews (e.g. if I spend 30 minutes on something, someone has to sit there for 30 minutes and watch me do it). This makes the process more fair, in my view, and less of a DoS (denial of service) on the interviewee.
To further clarify, I say an interview can be a DoS because everything takes time, and since the interviewee usually doesn’t delegate interview tasks, it may take him (or her) prohibitively large amount of time to do low-reward interview tasks. For example, if one of the interview steps is filling out an online form for 15 minutes, before any opportunity to talk to a human, the interviewee may end up spending days doing such manual tasks, whereas on the receiving end is an automated process that spends only milliseconds accepting results of these tasks. The interviewee may find himself spending prohibitive lengths of time on these, with no actual progress being made – that’s what I mean by a denial of service, because that’s effectively what it is.
Having a recording of yourself on an interview is also concerning, due to privacy reasons, but in my mind, less so that the amount of time it takes to record (without that same time being matched by an interviewer). I actually agree that looking at something through a third eye so to speak, through the lens of a recording device, allows for some additional clarity and for catching details not visible if the process was to take place live. Just re-reading a text, or re-watching a recording, it likely to give the viewer insight that wasn’t easily accessible upon first viewing.
Another time I was asked to record a video interview when I applied for a startup accelerator. That use case sounds reasonable to me.
When I interview, I actually prefer to give candidates tasks and not match my time 1-for-1 with them. A lot of candidates, in fact the majority, are taken out of the race on the first step. As an interviewer, I definitely prefer the first step of the process to be automated.
How to prepare for Facebook Interview
aka the Facebook University
“What makes you interested in applying for this position?”
This is a toxic question, but a one that comes up frequently and you have to be prepared to give an answer.
Continue reading ““What makes you interested in applying for this position?””
Fitness: Jiu Jitsu
This is actually a requirement for me now, every day or at least 4 days a week. I love it and I can’t stop. Although, a friend of mine said he’s actually burned out from jiu jitsu: that he has been doing it for, like, 5 years, and he doesn’t really want to do it anymore. For me, I physically cannot stop, it causes inefficiency in everything else I do. So, it’s curious. But the bottom line on physical fitness is, you have to do it, consistently, forever. This way, you can also start being good or great at everything else you do.