Herman Ng
5.9K posts
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.
Before the Play-In Game vs the Clippers… Steve Kerr had made the decision to retire. Link: espn.com/nba/story/_/id…
Sending 9 out of 195 graduating seniors to Stanford is insane Guess which Bay Area high school this is
Draymond Green believes Steve Kerr hindered his career and wonders why Kerr didn’t run any offensive plays for him during the Kevin Durant era 😳 “As much as he's done for me in basketball, a part of me think he's hindered me in my career and what I could have become. But what he's also helped me become. Like you got to take the good with the bad, man. You know, when I think of who I was offensively as a player and who I became, I think a part of that is due to him. I don't hold that against him. I'm forever grateful that he still put me in a position to be successful and that I could become Draymond Green despite my offensive role on our team. I don't sit and be like, ‘Oh man, like I f--king hate Steve because of that. No, it's one of my gripes. But if you're going to take one gripe and not be able to move past it for all the other things, then you're shallow as a person. You know, when [Kevin Durant] came from 2016 on, I have not had a play in our playbook. Not a single play that we run for me in our playbook since 2016. You think that would hinder someone as an offensive player? Of course. So at times, I go home and I think about my career and I'm happy as hell of what I've been able to build. But at times, sometimes I sit there and think, ‘What could I really have been if I stayed true to my game and what I really was?’ ” (Via nbcsportsbayarea.com/nba/golden-sta…)
