[sizzle]

So will you ever play the startup game again? or are you focused on climbing the ranks to your tier 1 dream job?

lastly, is it because you are 'smart as fuck', that why you are so jaded now because the value you brought to the startup would have taken you much further in a traditional job, as opposed to an average person who has much more to gain from a startup being successful?

[michaelochurch]

So will you ever play the startup game again?

Maybe, but in a different way.

or are you focused on climbing the ranks to your tier 1 dream job?

I have no taste for "climbing the ranks". I want to get better at stuff. Corporate dysfunction irritates the hell out of me. It'd be so much better if work was about work and not interpersonal manipulations.

Right now I'm looking to level up on machine learning. I'm on par with your 95th-percentile professional data scientist, but there's a lot that I still don't know.

lastly, is it because you are 'smart as fuck', that why you are so jaded now because the value you brought to the startup would have taken you much further in a traditional job

I spent almost 3 years building the backend for a graph-based, distributed database in Clojure (for a startup). We ended up not getting any clients; that was above my pay grade. (Mistake #1. In a startup, take responsibility for all parts and run from founders who try to go alone.) If we had, though, the stuff I'd built would have made it really cool.

Then I ended up on legacy maintenance at Google. In other words, that 3 years bought me fucking nothing.