Deepanker

| Here to learn | 1.01^365=37.8

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

Observed this in my time as an EM especially for engineers who have spent a lot of time at a single company. Lots of success at big tech is disconnected from actual outcomes and thus leads to engineers not willing to adapt/change

[Karthik Hariharan @hkarthik]

I've watched "perks culture" start to infect engineering teams in Big Tech over the last decade and accelerate even further in the last 5 years since Covid.

It's unfortunately made a lot of engineers un-hireable due to their entitlement, inability to operate with any real agency, and major deficiencies in professional norms.

The new grads that I've hired in the past few years exhibit far less of these issues and are much more receptive to coaching.

It's unfortunate that there's this big "missing middle" in tech teams right now and it's not a problem you can fix with AI.

[Gappy (Giuseppe Paleologo) @__paleologo]

@RoKhanna @BernieSanders And you compare stock (net worth,i.e., $) and flow quantities (GDP, i.e., $/yr). Numerically illiteracy is the cognitive failure of our time.

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

@nikillinit Congratulations! Very happy for you

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

@gerstenzang Congratulations!

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

@vikhyatk @sasuke___420 @NameNamish @ShcChy @GergelyOrosz Exceeds only staff for me lol

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

@pitdesi @hardeep_gambhir Punjabi aa gaye oye!

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

@pitdesi @aleximm @saltandstraw Time to try and write my first LP check lol

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

Their own advice

[Mike Brown @mbrown_co]

My daughter savaged me with a riddle that I’ve been laughing about all morning:

Most people need it, often ask for it, love to give it, but rarely take it.

What is it?

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

@pmarca Ironically Abundance is actually the same exact idea as American dynamism, but from a policy angle.

America wins by building more, faster. Housing, energy, transit, factories, chips, labs, schools, companies.

We need to stop blocking the future

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

@VicVijayakumar @BoujeeFinances Vic here outworking all of us

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

Game over, Anthropic wins

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

Beautiful post, reference really matters.

[Blueprintsmb @blueprintsmb22]

Long post but the TLDR is choose your reference points carefully.

I grew up comfortable in Kansas with a father who owned a small business pulling $40k a year. I felt rich until I went to Brown. Then I felt like the poor. There were students that had BMWs parked on different parts of campus so they wouldn't have to walk far to get access to a car.

I needed to make money to pay back my parents for college so I went to Wall Street. After Morgan Stanley, I worked for a single manager hedge fund managing $1.5Bn (alot of money back in the day) in SF that had just received an anchor investment from Yale University.

My boss was making more money than ever and was spending it. He would vacation with Lance Armstrong and Cindy Crawford. He became close with Wes Edens at Fortress. We made investments in Fortress portfolio companies. My boss took board seats on some of these investments. My boss spent alot of time frustrated he was not on the same level as Edens.

My boss was also close with Charles Schwab and we also invested in SCHW. Charles would let my boss and the firm stay at Stock Farm in Montana to host events for our LPs and management of some of our portfolio companies. It was the first time I ever flew private. I met Don Valentine of Sequoia who was an LP in our fund. We ran into Huey Lewis in the men's locker room before playing some golf. It was a world I never knew really existed growing up in Kansas.

We were also investors in Herbalife and would complain to the CEO at the time Michael Johnson (ex Disney) that he was massively overpaid and that the compensation structure of the company needed better alignment for shareholders (based on hitting key KPIs, etc). He would say he impressions mattered in his industry and living in LA was expensive.

When 2008-9 happened, our fund got decimated as we basically were a long only. Heavy exposure to Fortress names with massive leverage was no bueno. My boss had board seats which meant we were restricted. Yale pulled their entire investment. While the world was burning down, my boss in his fancy office in the Transamerica building told me that I was lucky "to not have any money to lose" while the world was burning down lol. I get what he was saying now as we saw clients that had amassed generational wealth in tech or owning boring businesses in Louisiana lose half of their net worth in 12 months. People were scared.

I would move back to NYC and end up working for 3 billionaires at different points during my career as a journeyman buysider. I did well enough at points to have direct contact with some of them. I saw the same dynamic - always someone doing better. Always frustrated. Not that happy.

I stayed in this world just trying to stay alive with some good years and years I got paid nothing when performance was poor. I was fine staying on this never ending hamster wheel until 1) I got married 2) we had a daughter 3) my dad's cancer diagnosis got more grim and I did more self reflection on what game of life I was playing.

Ultimately I left to buy a small business which has been hard. I still have friends on the buyside and in tech that struggle with comparison. But the reference points I was around constantly in my W2 are no longer loud. I wake up early and turn on machines. Most of my team members never graduated high school. My customers are mostly salt of the earth sales people working for small distributors sprinkled with some big publicly traded companies. $4 gas is a huge problem to everybody I interact with during my day - my customers complain daily about it in their daily lives. I sometimes lend money to my team members when they need help. I have to fix problems every day as the business isn't big enough to support hiring a general manager right now. But I'm home for dinner every night. This works better for me and my family.

My life is simple now => bring in business to make sure the 10 team members can feed their families. Last year when tariffs and a big customer shutting down hurt business badly for 3 months, my accountant told me to start firing employees as my competitors were either shutting down or firing 25-33% of their entire staffs. Entire shifts were shut down. I fired no one. It didn't feel right. I just stopped paying myself.

This year things have turned around. Team members are making 25-33% more due to overtime. I have more purpose now as my life is simplified as I'm just focused on making sure my team can eat, we make good product for our customers and the business can continue to pay down debt.

This is a hard path. I wouldn't recommend it for many, but it works better for me at this point in my life. My mental health has never been better. My wife reminds me how big of an asshole I used to be in finance as I was always stressed about my exposure / frustrated I wasn't doing better. What changed? My reference points changed. I no longer live in NYC. I live in this myopic world where I spend my weeks talking to team members, customers and vendors. 4am until 4pm is spent living in this world. 4pm-8pm is spent with my family before I go to bed ahead of a 330am wake up.

I have no doubt if I stayed in finance and was living in the Upper West Side in NYC, I'd still be playing my own version of "why aren't I doing better."

It took having a child and thinking more about my Dad's mortality (he passed this October from cancer) to re-evaluate things. I wish I had been brave/smart enough to consider a pivot earlier in life.

https://t.co/kenM7z2Feh

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

Pretty much the same, as someone in his early thirties and moved to US 5 yrs ago, I did okay. I wonder what life would look like if 1-2 of wins would have been home run. Read somewhere keep hitting singles and your home run comes, if it doesn’t singles compound

[Karthik Hariharan @hkarthik]

This happened to me twice. Coworkers who joined the same companies 6-12 months ahead of me are chilling today while I am still working. I have made my peace with it, as I still made enough to live a nice life and raise a family in the Bay Area.

Meanwhile my coworkers today who only worked at mature tech companies or never saw an exit think that I am a lottery winner.

Perspective matters and keeps you grounded.

[Mohnish Pabrai @MohnishPabrai]

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in india have the most objective selection process of any undergraduate engineering program worldwide. There are no essays or legacy priorities. One just has to do exceedingly well on two ultra tough tests. The IITs admit just 1.1% of applicants! It is 3-4x easier to get admitted to @mit, @Stanford, @Harvard and @Princeton!
I am excited to share that this year one of our @dakshanaindia Scholars, Godavarthi Harshit Visweswar, got a rank of 39 (out of over 1.5 million applicants!) in the first IIT selection test. He is a sure shot to be admitted and get the campus and major he prefers.
His friends call him GHV and I’ll do the same. GHV grew up in the remote hinterlands of Prakasam District in the State of Andhra Pradesh in India. His father is a farmer and the family somehow survives on $5/day.
When GHV was in 8th grade, a @dakshanaindia alum, Keshava Chandra, who used to be in the same school as GHV delivered Dakshana’s Inspire session at the school. Each year our alums visit hundreds of schools to inspire the next generation of students to aspire to be @dakshanaindia Scholars. GHV was impressed that Keshava was a student at @iitkgp and understood that if he wanted to go to IIT, he needed to be accepted as a @dakshanaindia Scholar after 10th grade.
If there was no @dakshanaindia, the closest location for GHV to get coached for the IIT entrance exam is over 150 miles from his home and the costs of $4000+ would have been completely out of reach. Sometimes all we need is a gentle nudge in the right direction. I received a similar nudge in 8th grade and it totally changed my life trajectory.
GHV was the only kid from his school accepted by @dakshanaindia in 2024. We relocated him to Dakshana’s Center of Excellence in Bengaluru and he was coached for two years at The Charles T. Munger Hall. Charlie would be proud! Congratulations to GHV, his family and his teachers. The future for GHV and his descendants looks very bright. This is @dakshanaindia at its very best!

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

@gauri__gupta @OpenAI @AnthropicAI @GoogleDeepMind @theworldlabs Thank you for sharing!

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

Been in tech long enough that I fully agree with this. Lean shipping machine is all you need.

[Dale Vaz @dale_vaz]

We just wrapped our annual performance review at Sahi.
Nobody got promoted. And we love it.

@Sahi_HQ is 2.5 years old, and we've consciously avoided internal job levels and fancy designations. Every engineer is a "Software Engineer." Every PM is a "Product Manager." That holds across the company.

Having built and led 1000+ people organizations at @amazon and @Swiggy , I carry painful memories of what traditional org structures — levels, titles, ladders — actually do to a company. I've been guilty of it myself. At Swiggy, we created titles and new levels because we had to, as tools to attract and retain talent. It's a slippery slope. Once you anchor people to levels and titles, they start to optimize for them.

I call this the "resume-driven development" phase: careers are built around what it takes to get promoted, not what the company actually needs. The machinery around promotions — peer feedback, promo templates, calibration cycles — only deepens it. Employees and managers spend weeks "aligning feedback providers" and "gathering data points." Before long, the promotion process becomes the single most important conversation between a manager and their report.

All of this to climb a ladder that was invented to give people a sense of personal growth.

After 20+ years of watching it up close, I can say it plainly: promotion culture is broken. It's the opposite of what great companies need to win.

Great companies hire missionary talent, trust them with the freedom and opportunity to do meaningful work, and share the rewards through wealth creation.

At Sahi, we're holding on to this. Every team conversation is about impact and outcomes, with zero time lost to promotion politics and the Day 2 culture rot it leaves behind.

In the age of the AI-native company, the old hierarchies are dead.

**Performance Culture >> Promotion Culture**

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

Spot on.

[Arjun Jain | Fast Code AI @Arjunjain]

The best ML engineers I know started as software engineers. I can’t think of one who went the other way.
That’s shaped how we hire.

Most ML engineers we meet can train a model. Far fewer can ship one. The fundamentals - clean code, testing, scalable architecture, debugging real systems - take years to build, and they’re genuinely hard to teach on the job.

ML is different. You can pick it up by being in the right room.

Our engineers absorb it through osmosis. They work on production systems for clients like Mercedes and Bosch. They go through our AI Masterclass. They sit next to people building cutting-edge ML every day. If the curiosity is there, the skills follow.

So if you’re a strong software engineer who wants to grow into a world-class ML engineer, this one’s for you: 👇🏽

[Deepanker @_deepanker]

Feeling seen

[Julia Turc @juliarturc]

Why so many of us feel career-homeless in tech:
>Startups full of fraud, grifters and short-term thinking
>FAANG full of politics and slightly behind
>Frontier labs in a race with no morals
>Academia full of title collectors
>Content creation ridden by AI fakes and sensationalism

Who is starting the renaissance and how do I get in touch with them?

[Alex Imas @alexolegimas]

Ever since Coursera courses became very good, only to have basically no impact on higher ed, I've come to the belief that the biggest role of formal ed is to act as a commitment device for students to actually consume the information. AI will be transformative, but AI w/o that commitment element will likely lead folks like you and I to learn more efficiently (but we were going to do the learning anyway), and have little impact otherwise.

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

90% of the bloat in midcap tech companies is the result of weak, ineffective leaders who are unable to stand up their their good VPs and fire their bad ones

They let their good VPs build redundant and bloated fiefdoms.

They promote them to CXO titles to retain them, which slows down the organization as everyone else becomes confused on who calls the shots

Then, instead of firing their ineffective VPs, they build defensive and redundant scaffolding around them. This protects the organization from catastrophic failure but adds more bloat

This all works (well enough, at least) when revenue is growing quickly and profits don’t matter. And it is catastrophic when revenue slows and profits matter

At almost all of these companies the problem is the CEO. It is war time now. If you are going to bet on a company that is down 50-70% already, you had better be betting on the right jockey.

If they are guilty of these sins, and many of them are, do you believe they have seen the light? Are they willing to do what needs to be done to fix it? I think the safe and correct assumption is that many are not up to task. It should have happened in 2022. Ask yourself: Why will it be different this time?