Here are a few more.

* The (brilliant) infrastructure engineer who described his modus operandi as 'I read stuff on Reddit and then try it out.' This engineer is now worth, as a conservative estimate, in the neighborhood of $50 million. So maybe more of us should be doing that.

* Another infrastructure engineer, also very effective, who made a habit of booking an external training session (sometimes a series, weekly) for how to set up and integrate every piece of technology we used.

* An engineer (this one is quite famous, and we have only interacted professionally a few times) who simply wrote the best comments in the world. Every method was adorned with a miniature essay exploring the problem to be solved, the tradeoffs, the performance, the bits left undone. I think about those comments quite often.

As an addendum, though, I will say that the best engineers overall all shared a trait - they kept trying things until they got something working. That alone will take you pretty far.

“The most successful people have failed more times than you have tried”

Success is relative. If the goal is to never fail, never try is the best strategy.

Also the most sure path to finish in the 1% wealthiest is to start in its network.

When the game is set to make 99% of players considered as losers in its own terms, the best strategy to have fun at scale is to not care about the highlighted goal. Keep awareness of how rules actually apply, take shortcuts if it feels safe and preferable, always respect human dignity even when nasty players try to make a dirty move agaisnt you, don't let the lowering bare of hate infect one more player.

I am having trouble thinking of situations where the only good outcome is being the top 1%. There are, to be sure, often power-law benefits to being exceptionally good, but to use your own example, being in the top 5% or 10% of wealth is nothing to sneeze at. It's all a spectrum.

With that said, I think you make some good points about the perspective people should have about competitive goals. Most contests are not strict meritocracies, and you are in for a lot of frustration if you assume that only effort matters when other slide by on their structural advantages. I would prefer to reframe the goal as 'work hard on what you have control over, as long as it provides some amount of benefit, and as long as you still care about the outcome.'

This wasn't to mean that ending up in the top percentile of whatever metric is a good outcome, simply that those who advocate the game and its rules will generally tell what is supposed to be valuable and praised as part of the game framing. My point wasn't to tell that taking blindly this or that outcome as a desirable one is advisable.

For the second paragraph, we seem really aligned on the developed points.

Yes. An interesting corollary is that we should pay close attention to what games we have an inherent advantage in, and double down. Much higher chances of reaping those power-law benefits. I speak, frankly, mostly to myself here: I am naturally pretty bad at almost all human skills (although I’ve of course worked hard to build up at the competencies required to be a functioning adult and partner.) But for the one or two things I am naturally good at, it all comes so very easily, it’s effortless and free and I have built my life around them.

> always respect human dignity even when nasty players try to make a dirty move against you

What a gem of a quote. A great way to avoid becoming a bitter person.

>Success is relative. If the goal is to never fail, never try is the best strategy.

This is dangerously not true, if you never try, then you are guaranteed to fail to live up to your potential, which is one of the greatest failures of all.

Sorry if it wasn't clear and explicit enough, but this wasn't meant to be an advise to not try anything. Just an extrem example of what it might be logically concluded when starting from unsound grounds. Never fail is not a sound goal.

That said living up to our potential is not very much better per se. Or at least it seems far too vague to be aptly considered. What forces are going to define what it is to tap relevantly in our potential?

Its tacit

Yes. I like to think that all of the people above could have solved most of the same problems, albeit in wonderfully different styles, but what really guaranteed success was a commitment to just keep at it.

Edit to add: Still, the styles matter a lot! For one thing, they greatly influence which problems each person is interested in. Also, the style you solve problems with colors what your final output looks like, which is perhaps more obvious in engineering than in mathematics.

For me, it's tracing code/pipelines to figure out how a result was produced, typically in the context of that result being wrong somehow. Go To Definition is the most useful function in any editor.

I'm always surprised by how frequently colleagues don't think to do this and are left helpless.

This reminds me of my further theory that everyone needs one 'heavy' and one 'light' technique. The 'light' technique is something that often works well as a heuristic and can be an effective unit of iteration. The 'heavy' technique is something that you can fall back on in difficult cases, something that can reliably solve hard problems, even if it's slow.

Sometimes the heavy technique is: just ask someone else. ;)

> Sometimes the heavy technique is: just ask someone else. ;)

For a lot of people I know, this is the light technique!

You jest, but that's how my sister gets through life, and it's always fascinated me.

She's incredibly intelligent, but more importantly she's a phenomenal social networker. She always has someone to call to ask about any question or solve any problem that comes up in life, and she's great at connecting these people with each other when they have problems of their own - so they all want to help her with whatever she needs, just to gain access to a pool of people they themselves can talk to.

What do you do with a skillset like that? I honestly don't know - something in leadership, probably, something where finding the right people and setting them to work is the most important skill of the job.

That wasn't in jest. I worked in a place where this was a norm. Nothing was properly documented, instead everyone would just ask and answer questions on chats; somehow, this actually kept velocity high.

Found it really hard to adjust to that. I'm the kind of person that prefers to research things on my own, find hard references and understand context. But there, this was the wrong approach.

for those, llms are a godsend

I have both felt and seen this at work and I would add to this the meta-technique of binary search. Once it is added to your light and heavy technique you can solve what seems intractable at first glance faster than many people can even orient to the problem.

A related meta-technique is "starting at both ends and meeting in the middle". It's kind of like the inverse of binary search in some sense, isn't it?

For me the heavy technique is integer linear programming.

I’m not a software developer anymore.

Likewise. I don't always do this, but for problems that cost me much time or effort, I like to try to make sure that, if I wanted to reproduce a bug or problem, I'd know exactly how to write it.

Writing and understanding working correct software is, it turns out, a rather different skill from that of writing and understanding broken (or confusing) software. I'd also wager good money that the latter skill directly builds the former.

Another example: debuggers.

It's amazing that a lot of new developers don't know how to use them at all! I'm not even talking about using the command line gdb, but just the basic "Set Breakpoint" feature and attaching to processes.