This comment from Elon Musk reminded me that back in the good old MSR Asia days when Harry Shum would buy people free food at around 3 am and I tried to convince everyone in my projects to go home no later than midnight.
🙂
May 11, 2022
Burning the 3 am oil
April 7, 2022
Everybody brings their pitchforks
The reason for my NVIDIA-bye subject line is that my then manager John Danskin once sent out an email with subject everybody brings their pitchforks and content about a team member who broke the code check-in protocol of a chip we were working on, so I thought I should reciprocate with another quote.
John is also a former student of Pat Hanrahan, and one of the smartest people I have worked with.
It appears that he designed not only GPUs but also his own car and home.
March 26, 2022
Dictator meeting room
In a meeting few days ago a colleague was sitting alone in a conference room, which, due to camera angle, appeared much deeper than it really is. We joked to the colleague that he looked like a dictator sitting at the end of a long table, and he immediately moved closer to the camera.
March 24, 2022
Burnout from a thousand little tasks
A task might not seem to take much time or efforts to complete, but if we take on all of these coming our way, we will run out or bandwidth before too late.
Better judge each task as part of the whole (work-life) optimization.
December 18, 2021
Justifying compensation
I find interesting the part of this Planet Money episode no shortage of labor stories about a founder who let her employees propose and justify their compensations.
This can be a great exercise to think about what one can contribute to and receive from a job, but hard to do with companies that are sufficiently large or involve in sufficiently complex businesses.
November 7, 2021
With great power comes great hassles
With great power comes great responsibility, but the real trade-off lies in the hassles.
November 1, 2021
Patents are more like swords than shields
Patents are commonly thought as some kind of protection that can shield the inventors from lawsuits, but this is not the top reason as others can file patents for similar inventions.
Instead, patents are best used as potential weapons for counter-suits; the best defense is a good offense.
September 27, 2021
Confession time
After updating the c/cpp/m/mm files of a product code repo knowing only c++ but not object-c I finally came around to read some tutorials about the latter today! Fortunately the two differ mainly on a syntactical level so I could grasp the basics pretty quickly.
I plan to do a quick pick up of Swift at some point in the future.
September 25, 2021
Job title
Among all the aspects of a job, title has probably the largest ratio of what people care about psychologically over the practical cost/value/importance.
It cost an employer little-to-nothing to dish out prestigious-sounding job titles.