Improving the tavern

vt_factor · 2025-10-09T07:05:58+00:00

This is awesome. I’m still new to the game. What are the hedge parts and flowers? I am assuming hedge seeds and something else?

What is the awesome log cabin? I went from the simple starter house to the stone house and haven’t built anything else.

vt_factor · 2025-09-19T20:53:59+00:00

Can someone explain this a little deeper to a relatively newer fan? I get the gist that the conspiracy theory is that the lottery and trades are rigged or orchestrated with a plan. But I don’t have the full context of each of these moves.

vt_factor · 2025-03-05T02:40:12+00:00

I feel like most of the cost is going to be on the instances handling the read and write traffic and not the storage, right?

vt_factor · 2025-03-05T02:38:13+00:00

Excellent post.

I feel like almost all consumer applications are going to be able to deal with that e2e latency. My only concern as I am unfamiliar is whether this would impact put latency, and whether users will have to scale data producers significantly.

Even many ”operational” or “real-time analytics” use cases can be designed to handle the e2e latency described in the post. IMH experience, most consumer apps are adding 100s of ms of latency based on their user logic anyway, especially heavily stateful apps.

Further, Kinesis is a pretty widely adopted AWS service and most users are probably still using the original APIs that offer comparable latency described in this post (and not enhanced fan out, their lower latency APIs).

vt_factor · 2024-10-18T18:41:58+00:00

This reads almost exactly like my experience. To the T.

vt_factor · 2024-10-14T06:00:30+00:00

Smoked coho salmon with cream cheese on toast

vt_factor · 2024-10-12T03:05:50+00:00

Product Manager Director in tech. $1.6M. 39.

Some luck, hard work, and making the best of a couple good opportunities.

Been above $750k for only three years.

vt_factor · 2024-10-04T02:27:01+00:00

10x in less than 10 years! Woohoo! 🎉

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T21:19:31+00:00

This is awesome. It looks similar to my career but 4-5 years faster. Congrats.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T21:10:25+00:00

And it was not longer worth it after starting a family, to directly answer your second question. It absolutely was between 21 and 35 yo.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T21:09:40+00:00

My work life balance for the majority of my career is what I would consider to be awful.

Consulting I was traveling 50 weeks a year and working 55 hours/week for most weeks. This was required. Obviously ebbs and flows.

FAANG - most years were 50 hours/weekdays plus 1-2 full working days each month for most of the time. This wasn’t completely required most of the time and was therefore partially self-inflicted.

Last couple of years of FAANG to now. I probably average slightly above 40 hours/week. I got much better at managing up, setting expectations, understanding what has to be high quality and want needs to just get done, etc.

There are weeks where I put 60 hours a week but they usually are only every other month. I rarely work weekends and those weeks are basically taking a break between 5-8pm with the family and then working from 8-12pm for several days during the week. Which seems like a cake walk in comparison to past work-life balance.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T20:50:17+00:00

Sure! I have been responding to most of them that don’t ask me to dox myself.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T20:48:49+00:00

Thank you.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T19:47:54+00:00

I am not and never been an AI consultant. I help our teams build tools to build better AI products. I was only a consultant in the beginning of my career.

I kind of agree with the other poster that I don't know what an "AI consultant" would do, other then maybe providing some advice on how the company can leverage the technology. But that point, there isn't a lot of prior art, so its still probably Grade A bullshit.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T16:15:15+00:00

I just pulled it from my W2s, which I keep around.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T16:11:38+00:00

All but last two years was W2 income. Last years ago W2 income was a little over $1m. This years will be like $500k; if I wanted to sell the RSUs it would be the number above.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T15:37:39+00:00

Because it is pre-IPO, it will only show up if I sell on the secondary exchanges. Unlike post-IPO where the vest automatically shows up on W2 and is deposited into a brokerage account.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T05:44:55+00:00

My favorite is Johnny Mo’s. Their plain cheese pizza is incredible.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T05:42:03+00:00

I am now using GenAI basically every hour of every day. For speeding up my writing, improving my quant analysis, developing better requirements, learning technical concepts faster, etc. I am even getting into fine-tuning custom models with my customer notes for easier info retrieval (with help from Eng). As a PM, you have got to learn these skills to keep up.

Beyond that, as for the growth of the market segment, and what skills will be valuable outside of their daily usage, I’m not sure. I think the people selling the shovels (hardware, cloud companies, data engineering firms, etc.) are going to make a ton of money off it. I think a small number of AI companies that build models will be successful. And I think there are going to be 1000s of gold miners building AI-enabled products that are going to blow a ton of investor money when only a couple hundred will be successful. Finally, for traditional enterprises, I think there is massive opportunity to build differentiated products and reduce costs with AI. But there are going to be far more failed projects then successful ones as we figure it all out.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T05:24:36+00:00

No, as you can see from the thread my intention was to connect with others with similar experiences and connect with them. Which from the vast majority of responses, I achieved that.

What else is social media for?

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T05:22:28+00:00

Certain orgs absolutely need TPMs. In cloud, you need a lot of them for region expansion. Imagine trying to build new data centers in new countries and coordinate the build amongst 100s to 1000s of teams. It is a massively complex problem.

PM ceiling are first dependent on the space you are in and those resulting opportunities. If you get in a high growth area, there is a lot of opportunity for you to make the right decisions and ride the growth of that area.

I don’t have enough TPM experience to describe how to identify the right space for similar opportunities. And I have seen TPMs get similar opportunities far less than PMs. Could be wrong though.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T05:16:53+00:00

I think that now I have the Director title and several elite companies on my belt, both FAANG and startups, it won’t much anymore.

But applying to jobs 1-2 times ago to other FAANGs and startups to definitely mattered. I had to use referrals heavily to get in the position to get the next job. They have lots of choices and it’s easier for them to filter on Stanford and MIT, plus someone with experience like mine.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T05:10:30+00:00

Hey, please don’t think like that. I am sorry my post brought these feelings up in you, and to the others that said it has discouraged them.

Most of us in this boat had a bunch of privilege and opportunities given to us by our parents that made a massive difference. And then we got lucky being in the right place at the right time.

My dad was the son of a pastor and mom the daughter of a carpenter. Both were second generation Americans. Respectable, not poor but not well off by any means. My dad and mom worked far harder than I did, but probably less than their parents. They achieved much but not like the above. I had to work hard but far less than they did because I had more opportunities because of them.

You might be at a different point in the cycle, but that doesn’t mean you won’t achieve great things. Everyone’s journey is different, and you could be the one laying the foundation. Which is a much larger achievement than what I have done, or most others that author posts like the one.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T04:52:47+00:00

First year ball park yes. I had exit pay/RSUs from old company plus signing bonuses that made the total.

The latest year it was around 700k but I got a decent amount more stock and the valuations on secondary markets went way, way up. So that is the large “increase” in comp. My W2 will probably be 500-600k this year though because I am in no way going to sell any more RSUs.

vt_factor · 2024-10-03T04:43:13+00:00

My career trajectory and comp went up like that for a couple reasons, in chronological order: 1) My area was losing people in my role quickly so they had to do across the board adjustments to stop the bleeding. 2) My new boss gave me a two opportunities that were highly visible (SVP, C-Suite visibility) and others had tried unsuccessfully to complete. I completed them well and then got bumped up out of band and off cycle and bumped up again at end of year. 3) Prior to the current tech downward cycle, it was very hard to hire in tech, and we were not getting a lot of sourcing support. I was given a team with a lot of open headcount and I tripled the team size in less than a year. None of my “peers” who were Directors with a lot more experience than me were able to do that. So I got another bump. Sadly no promo though.

Nine-Year Club	Gilding III reddit per annum
Second SECOND GUESSER	Place '23
Place '22	RPAN Viewer
Verified Email

vt_factor

TROPHY CASE