Ask HN: What are the smartest people you know working on?
Four years out of college: Some combination of working at Google, Facebook, $BIGBANK, or going to law/med school.
The smartest all jumped on career ladders because of the head start from their degrees and grades. The non-technical went to banks because what other profession pays $100k a year for a liberal arts degree? The technical went to the most recognizable companies that would take them and pay them a lot of money.
The entrepreneurs are a much more interesting bunch; most are technical, some never had a corporate job, some did YC, some left their corporate job and are mindlessly trying to be entrepreneurs, lots have raised funding, and a very select few have exited or hit Series C.
> some left their corporate job and are mindlessly trying to be entrepreneurs
"mindlessly"?
What are they missing? I'm curious, because this is a path that has always appealed to me, but that I didn't take in my twenties or early thirties. I hope to be in a position to be able to do it in my late thirties, but am not committed to the idea.
To be clear, I don’t mean to apply that sentiment to every ex-BigCo entrepreneur. Of course many are successful.
However, in my experience the skillset that makes a good $BigCo employee is often distinct from, or even mutually incompatible with, the skillset that makes a good entrepreneur.
Since ex-BigCo employees are likely to get funding even with very little traction (because VCs like to invest in ex-BigCo teams), those entrepreneurs are more likely to found a business that is well-funded but fundamentally doomed to fail. The founders want to feel like they’re running a business, and they go through the motions of it, despite little substance or strategy behind the product. I believe Paul Graham calls it “playing house.”
This resonated with me because I was a corporate drone that left to "mindlessly" become an entrepreneur. More charitably, I believe it's being in love with the idea of being an entrepreneur but pursuing that path based on pop-culture information (think Entrepreneur magazine articles) and less on direct experience.
Nonetheless, even though my business ultimately failed, I thank my lucky stars I'm not working in the cube farm anymore. On to business #2!
>Nonetheless, even though my business ultimately failed, I thank my lucky stars I'm not working in the cube farm anymore. On to business #2!
Mind sharing the story of your first business and what you're working on now?
Getting people to click on advertisements.
>Getting people to click on advertisements.
Came here to post the same, as I take a break from getting people to click on advertisements, at a job that pays way too much money to even consider anything else.
It's pretty damn depressing that the brightest minds of our generation have been sucked up by these companies that really do nothing but further meaningless consumerism. When people ask what I do, I say I work at a button factory.
> at a job that pays way too much money to even consider anything else.
I've seen this sentiment expressed elsewhere, and I don't understand it. While I can't speak for others, there are many jobs I probably wouldn't take regardless of how much they paid. These jobs often harm society or are bad for other reasons (lack of autonomy, burnout, etc.).
Most jobs I'm qualified for pay me enough that I'm happy. Once I reach that point, I'm optimizing other axes.
I think everyone has a price. Offer me enough and I'll reluctantly optimize advertising click through working with a 20 year old code base written in PHP with no tests and the only comments being the sarcastic rants of the anguished souls crushed before me.
yep and the problem with this is its a lot harder to move from 100k down to 50k a year than what people think.
I regularly accept lower pay to ensure I only ever work on things I care about. No complaints.
I think it depends on what you’re promoting. I run an ad agency and we do mostly Facebook ads, but we only take clients that do something positive with their work. If you’re promoting people or causes that you believe in, it’s rewarding work. I know people though that just push random products on users and they hate it. For me, it’s all a matter of perspective and purpose.
I don't have a big problem with ads on broadcast television or billboards or in magazines. But I don't see how you can feel good about what you do if it requires harnessing the surveillance apparatus of Facebook. Even if you are promoting something positive, doing so on the back of a company like Facebook just feels wrong.
To be fair. I can't explain it either but when you have the traffic people also click those ads.
Edit:// no idea why I got down voted. I lived of adsense half of 2015 and full 2016. Still don't know why people actually clicked, or why they didn't have a adblock to begin with
I also do this. Although I actually believe that my clients are doing something positive with their business (and I don’t take clients who aren’t) so I actually enjoy doing this.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
— Jeff Hammerbacher
High frequency trading. Built enough of a nest egg (probably < 5MM) at age of 30 and will go off to pursue his own goals. Before you think that "talent was wasted on a zero-sum game", keep in mind that the rest of my peers in the same age group are likely to be working even more inconsequential desk jobs while paying off mortgages for the rest of their lives.
Working for himself or for a fund? Just curious if there's really room in that space for 1-5mm with all the big fish in the water. Feel free to ping me offline if up for it.
Ruining their lives with substances.
From anecdotal experience it seems to me that high intelligence has a strong correlation with emotional instability, which in turn often manifests in the form of substance abuse.
I've suffered from it myself. Extremely rough period of depression followed by me being kicked from school (which was a major contributor to my depression due to abuse of my nature,) leaving my apartment, moving back in with my parents, and abusing anything I could get my hands on that wasn't a street drug.
Glad to say I've overcome it, but I still take Methylphenidate as it helps with my severe depression.
From my own experience, outlying intelligence and interests > social maladaptation > death wish. I’m fine now, but I won’t kid myself that it isn’t tenuous.
How so?
Examples without names, personal friends of mine:
1. Alcoholism, watched this man crawl from prodigal son to non-productive leech.
2. Weed. I have no problems with recreational weed on some occasions, and have enjoyed it myself, this person has their mind constantly fried. Kid went from a 16 year old CS stunner to a 22 year old, reaction shot, deep-fried potato. Maybe not the 'smartest,' but he had major future in his field.
3. Xanax. Friend of mine, beautiful content producer, amazing aspirations. While being majorly depressed he moved from SSRIs which weren't helping him, to taking Xanax he'd buy illegally. Slowly got out of hand while abandoning his aspirations, classes, and more. He's no longer working. He committed suicide a few weeks ago.
4. Xanax, again. Dear friend of mine. Closest person I've ever known. Instead of long-term medications to deal with her issues, she turns to Xanax as a short-term fix. The immense pain caused by whatever is bothering her at the time turns her to Xanax, which in turn normally ends in her becoming unproductive for the rest of the day and sleeping for 12-16 hours. She's never been able to find anything else that helps, and in turn without Xanax she cannot handle problems well. Breakdowns, endless crying, hyper-focuses on topics. I fear things will not change for the better, although I still try.
Mental illness / mental differences are other slow disasters that my friends have much experience with. Many of us have one of many things, most commonly autism or ASPD.
There are others, too many to name that I feel have been lost for a reason or another. Sad shit.
Smartest person I know works on smarter-than-human artificial intelligence at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute [0]. Previously at Microsoft and Google, he decided to get involved in smarter-than-human AI and is now the Executive Director at MIRI. Definitely inspiring!
Video game mods and hacks?
I mean, I know plenty of people working in web development and app development, but I still think the people writing assembly for a system that's not been in development for a decade or two are doing pretty damn well at it. Doing anything particularly complicated with ASM is both tricky and tedious as all hell.
As I'm thinking about this question, I just realized while pondering it that.. I can't identify a single person, or few people, I know as "the smartest".
Different people:
• Low-level infrastructural/optimisation stuff, such as large-scale data analysis systems, language runtimes, and operating systems. Work is hard but even small wins have high impact.
• Developer tools, including using machine learning to help tools help developers better. Improving the state of programming is always welcome.
• Online advertising—such are the times.
• Avoiding the tech industry for a while to relieve burnout and work on personal projects—this person inspired me to do the same.
Retiring young, to enjoy the rest of their life on their own terms.
Amen to this!
Perhaps it would be best to avoid the more popular answers to this question in one's own career, depending on your goals.
My own strategy is to intentionally target areas that have been neglected for no good reason. While there are plenty of smart people in my field (fluid dynamics), I feel that if the field had a wider reputation, even more smart people would join, and the number of opportunities I have would shrink. Marketing folks seem to call this the "blue ocean strategy".
So what can you learn from how smart people behave? It would be better to try to distill rational principles from their behavior rather than saying choice X is optimal. For example, ask why choice X is optimal rather than just believing choice X is optimal.
ETH and bitcoin market speculation and smart contracts.
Some currently spend a lot of their time on servicing and properly orchestrating Docker and related infrastructure (the actual product they're working on, mark you, isn't Docker-related ...).
On a much more positive note though a particularly smart person I know works on speech recognition software that uses linguistic features in order to assess communication skills and to some extent psychological properties (in an anonymous, privacy-compliant fashion) such as current predisposition for depression (which can manifest in features like pitch, voice melody and prosody).
I always wondered the definition of "smart" in context of these questions. Am I considered a smart person if I work hard on a subject and succeed at it, or if I am a naturally talented prodigy, and excel on that same topic?
Terry Davis (who did http://www.templeos.org/) is the smartest programmer I know but he doesn't work.
He is currently homeless and needs your help: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?token=51kJATJUJxik3DjLLxQB6dw...
Biochemistry research, investigative journalism, crisis PR, surgery, solar power finance, and one is operating a brewery.
Banking, unfortunately.
10 gigabit ethernet to the home over singlemode fiber, with the extreme challenge that it needs to have a reasonable ROI for the ISP, fast build process, and reasonable per unit passed costs. And five nines uptime goal over 1 year of statistical measurement.
If I was douchie enough - I am working on p2p internetless cryptocurrency transfers and distributed ID. Otherwise it would be antiphishing, improved open source debuggers, and RISCV implementations.
I am interested in your idea on offline cryptocurrency, how would that work?
Also the distributed ID.
Where can I read your thoughts?
Not much, because their life is a mess.
Vehicle navigation and automation.
Definitely the right time to be in that field ($$$$) but it isn't without its moral hazards. I find the area interesting, but the high level maths is beyond me.
Studying comparative literature
Their sun-tan, their golf swing, and their fly-casting.
Nothing.
He's living amongst the forests, homeschooling his children, after indulging and destroying himself with consumerism, alcohol and drugs.
Computer vision and robotics (with Agricultural Science applications), RF communications, and one person who works in games development because it affords him his work on a C++ committee sub-group. Outside of technology, an economist for the DoJ and a lawyer who works in non-profits (not sure where she is right now / what sort of work).
From school? Playing poker online.
People I've learned to know recently? Writing web applications.
I see responses here with a certain tone of derision. That's sad and may be unproductive. Maybe shouldn't the question be what should "we", not just the smartest people working on and how ?
GPU architecture, CPU architecture and high performance computing.
Natural language processing and how it can be used to research health/well-being
Getting people to click on ads
Biochemistry MD/PhDs
Geologist for a lithium mining company
R&D of applying cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to real world problems.
Teaching high school history.
trying to figure out what they want to work on and what to do with their life
Well, this morning I hacked some Python to generate advertising performance metrics....
;-)
Going to Mars and trying to build a better patent system.
quant finance :/
HFT microwave network architecture and engineering
He's working on some sort of startup for radar.
Disclaimer: My perspective is obviously shaped by the places I've worked; I don't know the people I don't know. Here's my LinkedIn profile in you want that context(note - I'm not looking for a job): https://www.linkedin.com/in/lyndsysimon/
Healthcare. There were lots of changes brought about by Obamacare, and while of course many of the political aspects have either been changed or are at risk of being changed with little or no notice, the implementation also created great changes in the industry that aren't going away regardless of the political climate. There are all kinds of niches where something not much more complicated than a simple CRUD app on an iPad can significantly reduce costs and/or improve outcomes. The industry has realized this, and it's going to be a hot place to work for the foreseeable future - and one that can make a real difference in people's lives.
Government. The last I looked was ~2016, but 18F was doing some great things at the time. They had far more latitude in hiring and compensation than is typical for the public sector, but I'm not sure if this is still the case.
Dev community outreach. In my experience, there are at least two kinds of "developer evangelists" - those that are skilled socially (and have to gain the respect of developers) and those that are skilled technically (and may have to learn how to do the social side). Those who are technically-skilled and have proven themselves before taking on the role tend to be both very effective and well compensated. There are a couple of people I know in those roles, but they are people I very much respect.
Devops. Especially at a junior level, I've encountered far more people I would consider to be exceptionally talented on the ops side of things than purely development. I don't know where their careers will end up taking them from there, but I've seen those people rise quickly through the junior > mid-level > senior progression. If a team has someone who is exceptionally smart, motivated, and productive, devops is easily the role I'd want them to be in. Their work there can make the entire team substantially more productive. I think (good) managers see this as well, which is why devops seems to have a higher proportion of very talented people.
Finally, there is something of a revolution happening in academic publishing. It's yet to be seen if the lessons learned by the F/OSS software world can compete and win the cultural war between established academic publishers (e.g. Elsevier), but the people I know who are working in that space definitely qualify as the smartest people I know.
Former 18Fer here. Still doing great things. Still have latitude in compensation and hiring.
Awesome!
From what I've seen, 18F serves a very valid purpose, has a lot of room to do great things, and would be a rewarding job. I never really looked into it myself because my ideology wouldn't allow me work for a government entity, but otherwise it would be near the top of my list.
Fact-oriented Domain-Driven Design modeling tools.
Dubious startups
Creating proteins for biological research.
Quantum annealing using the D-Wave.
Extremely complex video game tech.
Trying to implement "DevOps" and centralized logging at one of the largest companies in the USA.
Art
developing internal tools for a large ecommerce corporation
Alcohol dependency.
Working at $BIGBANK
serving food ...
Data Science
Ethereum