I’m always painfully aware of how privileged my life is. I grew up in New England’s affluent suburbs as part of the upper middle class. I attended college at Columbia University with generous financial aid. And now I’m working in one of the few industries that’s aggressively hiring in a job position that’s seeing growth. There’s a stark contrast between my situation and those less fortunate around me. New York City’s current unemployment rate of 8% remains unchanged since a year ago. U.S. unemployment is 9.1%.

Right now there’s so much more demand for technical talent than supply of it that I wish I could wave a magic wand and turn idle construction workers, durable goods manufacturers, and fishermen into Ruby on Rails developers.

Stick this into your shell’s rc file. If you use bash, .bashrc. I use zsh, so .zshrc.

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# make ls display colors, reinforce with CLICOLOR and LSCOLORS
export CLICOLOR=1

# LSCOLORS order: DIR, SYM_LINK, SOCKET, PIPE, EXE, BLOCK_SP
# CHAR_SP, EXE_SUID, EXE_GUID, DIR_STICKY, DIR_WO_STICKY
# a = black, b = red, c = green, d = brown, e = blue,
# f = magenta g = cyan, h = light gray, x = default
# lowercase is bold
export LSCOLORS=gxex

This particular LSCOLORS configuration makes directors bold cyan and sym links dark blue. All the rest are default.

Argh. I just want to plot some charts in Python. Why does it have to be so hard?

I tried to

easy_install matplotlib

but this fails with some byzantine errors that I can’t make heads or tails with.

I’ve noticed that lots of Internet companies have a job listings page that links to JobVite.com, a third party applicant tracking system. I click on a position at company X. It links me to hire.jobvite.com/stuff. The branding is consistent with company X insofar as the logo and color scheme are at the top.

What irks me about JobVite is the fact that it’s not easy to upload a resume or cover letter. There’s a form with two textarea elements and a “insert document” link above them. So I’ve already spent hours in my word processing program writing my resumé, formatting it, bolding this, italicizing that, checking font sizes are consistent, aligning every single piece of text down to the pixel.

Yesterday morning I bet over 95% of my 401k savings into a 3x leveraged inverse ETF based on mid cap companies (UltraPro Short Mid Cap 400 – SMDD). And then I tweeted,

I Hope the Economy Tanks Because I Just Bought a 3x Leveraged Inverse ETF

The tech startup industry is more of a perfect competition than industries like airplane manufacturing or steel-making. It’s the wild, wild west of our age. Low barriers to entry. Lots of competitors. Lots of hype and perceived glory.

If someone tells you they’re quitting his/her job to found a startup, and you don’t really understand what that means, pretend you’re in the 1800s and that person has just told you they’re going West because gold was just discovered in the Klondike.

Over the last week I’ve changed up my investment portfolio allocation significantly. I’m bearish on the US economy and bought large stakes in inverse ETFs in both my regular and 401k portfolio. I bought some ProShares Short QQQ (PSQ) and ProShares Short S&P 500 (SH). They take rise when the Nasdaq Composite and S&P 500 indices fall.

This morning, in my most aggressive move, I bought a big chunk of ProShares UltraPro Short MidCap400 (SMDD). This is a 3x leveraged ETF. Yeah…

A week ago I came across this series of posts by previous Facebook engineering manager Yishan Wong.

I recommend reading all five posts if you work in an engineering or technology related field, especially if you are a manager who works in one. The fifth article argues that technical leaders need to be technical and able to write code:

All external management hires must be able to write code and show a high level of technical proficiency, up to and including the head of the technical department. If the company is a technology company, this should also include the CEO.

There is an odd misconception that this is not a necessary requirement for an executive or manager, as though programming were just a fancy form of typing. No other specialized industry seems to feel this way: banking executives are expected to be able to read a balance sheet; an automotive executive would never be hired if they didn’t know what a catalytic converter did.

This article hit home because I’ve worked at places where the technical leaders weren’t technical. I discovered that this often worked out the detriment of the company, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why until I read this post.

A “technical” organization whose leadership is non-technical fails in one or both of the following ways:

1) Leaders are unable to tell when the technical staff is not performing up to snuff, because they cannot reliably differentiate between excuses for poor technical performance and true obstacles that arise when contending with difficult technical challenges. Performance management then becomes impossible, leading to mediocre work and eventually, outright and repeated project failures.

2) Business needs cause leaders to override the suggestions or opinions of the technical staff. Today’s harsh business environment requires that business leaders push their organizations continually beyond their old boundaries, and sometimes this means that a leader has to tell their staff to “damn the torpedoes” and stretch further than they are comfortable. Unfortunately, a non-technical leader has no personal ability to gauge the actual risk profile of overriding technical suggestions (i.e. shrewdly exceeding old limits in certain special situations) and is then prone to eventually overriding technical advice which should not be overridden.

Wow. In two points, Mr. Wong has articulately explained what I felt long ago. And for that I thank him.

This is part 2 of a previous post on creative ways to say happy birthday. Since that page drives 85% of my site’s traffic, I added more.

Test to see if they’re getting old

• (On a birthday card, write in very small letters) You are not old if you can read this without using a magnifying glass or even your spectacles!

If they are getting older, tell them this sad truth. Yup, no way around reality.

• Some words of wisdom for your birthday, “Smile while you still have teeth!”
• With age comes wisdom. (You’re one of the wisest people I know!)