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The kind of technical person who bores me, even if very talented and skilled, is the kind who is so respectful of boundaries they develop no intuitions outside their own area. They'll hold forth on say power subsystem design, but be boringly predictable/uninsightful beyond that.
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They might end up as say technical fellows or senior principal engineers at best, if they work hard in their silos, but will likely never end up CTO/VPE and though I might enjoy talking to them if their speciality is interesting to me, I have no expectations of gigs from them.
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But I think if I'm going to take a shot at identifying and betting on the 5% now is the time to do it... just need some good ideas on how to find them, and what to actually offer them
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Oh, yeah... fell for that a couple of times early on. Complete time-waster people. An extra occupational hazard for me given that my main source of leadgen is still the gervais principle series, which is basically management satire :D
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Replying to @theshteves and @vgr
technical types that scoff at “management stuff” are the false positives here
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An interesting but neither necessary nor sufficient indicator is signs of slightly crackpot tastes/inclinations, but well managed. You need a streak of that, but you can't really succeed if you let your freak flag fly too early in your career. You have to earn the right.
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Another is anyone with strong Andy DuFresne in Shawshank Redemption vibes. Still waters run deep affect. There's probably a handful of "types" here but I don't want to fall into a pattern recognition trap. This is more of a system 2 filter problem, not system 1.
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The patterns matter, but there's far too many banal objective criteria. Like knowing their technical shit instead of just thinking they know it, being in a field with technical complexity looming and room for a technocrat star career... mental-health issues under control...
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But to bring it back around, why dabble in maker shit? Well, mainly because I'm in the mood for other reasons, but also because it's the crucible where tastes of good technocrat leaders are shaped, and the tech stack has changed so much in 20y, my own tech tastes are out of tune.
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By contrast, charismatic types etc. tend to have their tastes shaped by more... social stuff. Like biographies and things.
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One model I'm thinking through is something like "clinics" -- topic-specific learning/growth support in a handful of areas where I've noticed early-stage tech people generally have gaps. Not obvious ones like "marketing" but kinda oblique. Kinda like installing missing libraries.
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But the big thing you sadly can't provide from outside is the primary criterion of "scalable tastes." If your paper plane opinions really don't scale to Mars helicopter opinions, you're not going anywhere very interesting and nobody can do anything about that.