There is a class of problems that I noticed comes up again and again in various scenarios. Abstractly, you can formulate it like this: given a time limit, how much time should you spend increasing your production capacity, and then how much time should you use your production capacity to produce utility? Let's take a look at two version of this problem:

Version 1:

You have N days. You start with a production capacity C=0 and accumulated utility U=0. Each day you can either: 1) increase your production capacity (C=C+1) or 2) use your current production capacity to produce utility (U=U+C).

Question: On what days should you increase your production, and on what days should you produce utility to maximize total accumulated utility at the end of the N days?

It's trivial to prove that the optimal solution looks like increasing capacity for T days, and then switching to producing utility for N-T days. What is T? In this case it's really straight-forward to figure it out. We can compute final utility as U(T)=(N-T)*T. The maximum is at T=N/2. So, you should spend the first half increasing your production and the second half producing utility. Interesting...

Version 2:

You have N days. You start with a production capacity C=1 and accumulated utility U=0. Each day you can either: 1) increase your production capacity by a factor F (C=C*F), where F>1 or 2) use your current production capacity to produce utility (U=U+C).

Same question. Now the final utility is U(T)=F^T*(N-T). Doing basic calculus, we find the optimal T=max(0, N-1/ln(F)). A few interesting points you can take a way from this solution:

1) If your growth factor F is not large enough, you might have to stick with your original production capacity of 1 and never increase it. E.g. F=1.01 and N=100, where optimal T=max(0,-0.499171).

2) The bigger the N, the lower growth factor you can accept as being useful, i.e. T>0.

3) For most scenarios, you should spend 80-90% of the time increasing the production. Example. With larger F, T will approach N. This reminds me of Reducing Astronomical Waste post.

Questions for you: where have you seen these types of problems come up in your life? Is this a known class of problems?

CFAR sometimes plays a Monday / Tuesday game (invented by palladias). Copying from the URL:

On Monday, your proposition is true. On Tuesday, your proposition is false. Tell me a story about each of the days so I can see how they are different. Don't just list the differences (because you're already not doing that well). Start with "I wake up" so you start concrete and move on in that vein, naming the parts of your day that are identical as well as those that are different.

So my question is (edited on 2014/05/13):

On Monday, I make my decisions by rolling a normal die. Example: should I eat vanilla or chocolate ice-cream? I then decide that if I roll 4 or higher on a 6-sided die, I'll pick vanilla. I roll the die, get a 3, and so proceed to eat chocolate ice-cream.

On Tuesday, I use the same procedure, but use a quantum random number generator instead. (For the purpose of this discussion, let's assume that I can actually find a true/reliable generator. May be I'm shooting a photon through a half-silvered mirror.)

What's the difference? (Relevant discussion pointed out Pfft.)

I think most of us are familiar with the common semantic stopsigns like "God", "just because", and "it's a tradition." However, I've recently been noticing more interesting ones that I haven't really seen discussed on LW. (Or it's also likely that I missed those discussion.)

The first one is "humans are stupid." I notice this one very often, in particular in LW and other rationalist communities. The obvious problem here is that humans are not that stupid. Often what might seem like sheer stupidity was caused by a rather reasonable chain of actions and events. And even if a person or a group of people is being stupid, it's very interesting to chase down the cause. That's how you end up discovering biases from scratch or finding a great opportunity.

The second semantic stopsign is "should." Hat tip to Michael Vassar for bringing this one up. If you and I have a discussing about how I eat too much chocolate, and I say, "You are right, I should eat less chocolate," the conversation will basically end there. But 99 times out of a 100 nothing will actually come out of it. I try to taboo the word "should" from my vocabulary, so instead I will say something like, "You are right, I will not purchase any chocolate this month." This is a concrete actionable statement.

What other semantic stopsigns have you noticed in yourself and others?

In November of 2012 I set a goal for myself: find the most x-risk reducing role I can fill. At first I thought it would be by working directly with MIRI, but after a while it became clear that I could contribute more by simply donating. So my goal became: find the highest paying job, so I can donate lots of money to CFAR and MIRI.

A little bit of background on me. Started programming in 2000. Graduated in 2009 with Bachelor's in computer science. Worked for about a year and a half at a game company. Then did my own game startup for about a year. Then moved to the bay area and joined a game startup here, which was acquired 10 months later. Worked a bit at the new company and then left. So, just under four years of professional programming experience, but primarily in the game industry. Almost no leadership / managerial experience, aside from the startup I did where I hired freelancers.

Below is my experience of finding a software engineering job in the Silicon Valley. If you are not an engineer or not in the Silicon Valley, I think you'll still find a lot of useful information here.

Pre-game

Before sending out my resume, I spent about a month preparing. I read Intro to Algorithms, which was very good overall, but not a huge help in preparing for interviews.[1] I read Cracking the Coding Interview, which was extremely helpful. (If you read only one book to prepare, make it this one.) The book has a lot of questions that are similar to the ones you'll actually see during interviews. I also did TopCoder problems, which were pretty helpful as well.[2] Looking back, I wish I spent more time finding actual interview questions online and doing more of those (that's why CCI book was so helpful).

After several weeks of preparation, I compiled a long list of companies I was going to apply to. I checked on GlassDoor to see what kind of salary I could expect at each one. I then rated all the companies. Companies with low salaries and poor personal fit received the lowest rating.

I started by applying to companies with the lowest ratings. This way I could use them as practice for the companies I thought would actually make a competitive offer. This was the right move and worked very well. (Another friend of mine did the same approach with good results as well.) Remember, you are not just doing those interviews to practice the coding problems, you are practicing pitching yourself as well.

Interviewing with a company

Standard procedure for applying to a tech company:

1. Send them your resume.

• Proofread your resume. Let your friends proofread it.
• Make sure there are only relevant things on it. When I applied to tech companies, I removed a lot of game-specific things from my resume. When I applied to companies that did 3D graphics, I made sure I had all my 3D graphics experience listed. I ended up with two version of my resume.
• Have your resume in DOC, PDF, and TXT formats. This way you'll always have the right one when you upload / paste it.
• For a few companies, I had a friend or friend of a friend who referred me. This REALLY HELPS in two ways: 1) your resume will be processed a lot faster, 2) if your friend is a great engineer/employee, you'll be taken a lot more seriously, and the company will fight for you a lot harder.

2. You'll get an email from the recruiter and setup a time to speak, where you'll talk about yourself, what you've done, why you are interested in their company, and so on. You can and should ask them questions as well.

• When you start getting multiple calls each day, make sure you know who is calling. There is nothing worse than talking about the challenges of streaming music to a car sharing startup. (True story.)
• Read about the company on Wikipedia before the call. Know the basic stuff. Look at their website and read the About page.
• Find the thing that makes the company special and successful. Find the thing that you actually think is cool about the company. Those are your answers for why you want to work there.
• Ask non-technical questions: How is the company structured? How many teams are there? How many employees? Engineers? Think of other intelligent questions to ask.
• In my experience, it's not very beneficial to tell them you are interviewing with a dozen other companies. When they ask who else you are interviewing with, just name a few companies, especially the competitors / similar companies.
• Be SUPER NICE to your recruiter. They are your main point of contact with the company. They'll be the one fighting to get you the best offer.

3. You'll have a technical phone interview with a software engineer where you'll solve a problem or two on collabedit or some similar website. At the end, you'll get a few minutes to ask them questions too.

• All the usual interviewing tips apply here. E.g. talk out loud, your interviewer doesn't know what you are thinking.
• Most companies don't care what language you use, as long as it's mainstream. (I used C# for almost all my coding questions.)
• DO NOT start answering the question by writing code. If the questions seems vague, ask about the context. Who'll be using this solution? Definitely ask about the kind of data you are working with. If it's integers, are they random? Over some small range or over all possible integers?
• List out metrics for various approaches: brute-force solution, optimized for speed solution, optimized for memory solution. Here is a question I saw a few times: Write a data structure which can accept and store integers, and can check if there exist two integers that sum up to a given number. There are multiple solutions, and the best one depends on the ratio of addInteger to checkForSum calls.
• The previous steps should only take you a minute or two. Once you've decided what the best approach is, then you can write the solution. When you are done, check for errors, then run through several examples. Do a simple example and a slightly complicated example. When you find a bug, don't be hasty in fixing it. Understand why it happened and make sure you won't introduce new bugs by fixing it.
• If everything works, make sure you handle errors correctly. Can you handle invalid input? Input that violates your assumptions? (As a reminder, I leave “\\Check for errors” comments in appropriate spots as I code the solution.)
• When you are done, ask the interviewer questions. Ask them to tell you about what they do, if they haven't already. What have they been working on recently? What technologies/languages do they use at the company? Do they use Scrum/Agile? Pair-programming? Come up with other intelligent questions to ask.

4. You'll be invited for an on-site interview which will be 3-6 hours long, at least half of which will be coding on a white-board. (Although, a friend told me he brought his laptop with him, and most people were fine with him coding on it.)

• All the previous tips apply.
• Be on time. Take bathroom breaks when you need them. I found that drinking water during the interview keeps me refreshed. Remember your posture, body-language, and eye-contact skills.
• Learn how to talk out loud as you are writing out your solution. If you are stuck, explain what you are thinking, and what your intuition is telling you.
• Learn how to read your interviewers. If you say, "Here we should check for the null case or for empty array," and they go "Yeah, yeah, okay," they are not the type of interviewer that really cares about error conditions, so you can be somewhat more lax there. By the time I was finishing my on-site interviews, I could tell if my solution was right just by the interviewer's body language.
• When you are done, ask them questions. What are they working on? What's the thing they like most about the company? What's their least favorite thing about the company? (Another way to phrase that: What's one thing you would change if you could change anything about the company?) Do they have to work overtime? How are the people here? Can you switch between projects? Are there company wide events? In all my interviews I've never met an interviewer that didn't try to sell their company really hard. People will always tell you their company is the best place to work.
• If the person is a manager or a director, ask them higher level questions. What kind of culture are they trying to create? What are the current big challenges? Where do they want the company to be in the next 5 years? How does one advance in the company? (Usually there is a managerial and a technical track.) How often are reviews done? How are they structured?

5. You'll get a call from the recruiter congratulating you on an offer. They'll go over the offer details with you.

• Before they make you an offer, they'll check if you are actually seriously considering their company. If you told a startup you are also interviewing with Google, they might suspect that you are not seriously considering them. Unless you dissuade those fears, they might actually not even make you an offer. (Happened to me with Rdio.)
• If you didn't get an offer, try to get as much info as you can. What happened? What can you improve on? Below are the reasons why I didn't get an offer after an on-site interview:
  • Not doing well on a technical question. (Happened twice; one time because of a very obnoxious interviewer.)
  • Not interviewing for quite the right position (that on-site interview ended early).
  • Not having the necessary experience (a lot more important to startups than bigger companies).
  • Not being passionate enough about the company.
• If this is not a good timing for the offer, e.g. it's one of your first interviews, then tell them so. They will probably wait to give you the offer details until you are ready to consider it.
• The recruiter will likely ask what's important to you in an offer. How are you going to make your decision? What I've said is that compensation will be an important factor in my decision, but that the team/project/etc. are important considerations as well.

6. You have a few days (usually around 5 business days) until the offer expires to decide if you want to accept it.

• Sometimes the offer will expire before you've received offers from other companies. This is why it's important to interview in rough order of ranking, so that you can just let those offers go, knowing you'll have much better ones soon. If you want to hold on to the offer, just ask your recruiter for an extension. It'll be much easier to get an extension at big companies, especially if you are interviewing for a generic position.
• If you decline the offer, let them know.

Always be very nice, friendly, and polite. Walk the fine line between telling the truth and saying the right thing. Ideally, make sure those are the same. Even if you are interviewing with a company you have no intention of working at, make sure to find something you really like about them, something that makes them stand out to you. Always have a good answer to: "Why do you want to work here?"

Before each on-site interview make sure you research the company thoroughly. Use their product. Think of ways to improve it. It's very helpful if you can meet with someone that works there and talk to them. See if they can give you any tips on the interview process. Some companies (e.g. AirBnB) want people that are extremely passionate about their product. Some companies focus more than usual on architectural questions. Many companies expect the engineers to have some familiarity with UI/UX and the ability to think about a feature from all angles.

Managing your time

I sent my resume to 78 companies, had at least a phone conversation with a recruiter with 27 of them, had an on-site interview with 16 companies, and received 12 offers. Out of those, I've only seriously considered 3. (Companies with lower ratings had an atrocious response rate.)

My time-line ended up looking something like this:

• Week 1: Started applying to low-rated companies. About 2 phone interviews.
• Week 2: About 7 phone interviews. One on-site interview. Sending out more resumes.
• Week 3: About 3 phone interviews.
• Week 4: About 15 phone interviews. A few meetings with friends of friends, who ended up referring me. 1 on-site interview. Sent my resume to all the high-rated companies. (During this week interviewing became a full-time job.)
• Week 5: About 10 phone interviews. 4 on-site interviews.
• Week 6: 8 phone interviews. 4 on-site interviews.
• Week 7: 4 phone calls. 5 on-site interviews.
• Week 8: 12 phone calls. 2 on-site interviews.
• Week 9: About 8 calls a day for a few days, while I negotiated with my top companies.
• (These are strictly lower bounds for phone calls. On-site data is pretty accurate.)

Some companies move fast, some companies move slow. Google took 2 weeks from the on-site interview to the offer call. This is very common for them, but most other companies move faster. With Amazon, I actually interviewed with two different branches. With one branch things were going well, until they dropped the ball and never got back to me, even after I pestered them. This is unusual; although, Twitter did something similar, but then ended up responding with an on-site invitation. With the other Amazon branch, when I got home from the on-site interview, I already had an email saying they were going to make an offer. This is extremely fast. (I had a very good reference for that position.) Most companies take about a week between on-site and offer. The whole process, from first call to offer, takes about three weeks.

If your recruiter doesn't respond to you during 4 days or longer, shoot them an email. They might have forgotten to respond, or thought they did, or may be things are moving slowly, or may be they decided not to pursue. You want to be clear on where you stand with all the companies you are applying to.

The timing is pretty important here. You want your top-rated companies to give you an offer within a span of a week. This way you'll be able to leverage all those offers against each other.

If your current job position is already almost optimal for your goals, then it's possible you can do a few interviews, get a few offers and pick the best one, which will give you some marginal improvement. Or use those offers to leverage a raise at your existing company. But if you are pretty sure your current job has not been optimized for your goal, then I'd say, contrary to popular wisdom, just leave and spend a full month interviewing. (Or, even better, if you can, take a long "vacation".) You just can't do this kind of intense interviewing while holding another job. The one exception to this rule I can think of is if one of your highest-rated companies is a competitor with your current employer. Then you can leverage that!

Value of information is extremely high during this process. Talk to all the companies you can, talk to all the people you can. Once you have the final list of companies you are considering, reduce your uncertainty on everything. Validate all your assumptions. (Example: I was sure Google matched donations up to $12k, but turns out it's only up to $6k.)

How to evaluate your offer

There are 4 basic components in an offer: sign-on bonus, base salary, equity, and bonus.

Sign-on bonus. Most companies will be okay offering something like $12k sign-on bonus. Some will offer more. Most startups probably won't offer any.

Base salary. This is pretty consistent across most companies. Based on your experience, you'll be given a title (e.g. Senior Software Engineer or SE 2), and that title will determine the range of the salary you can expect. If you are good, you can demand a salary at the top of that range, but it's extremely hard to go higher.

Equity. This is the most interesting part. A good amount of value will come from this portion. With a startup, it'll be most of it. Here are two things to pay attention to:

• Is the company public or private? If it's public, you are most likely going to be given RSUs (restricted stock units), which will basically convert to normal company shares when they vest. For private companies, see the section below.
• What's the vesting schedule? For almost all companies you'll get 25% of your shares right after your first year. (This is called a 'cliff'.) After that you'll be given the appropriate fraction either monthly (e.g. at Google) or quarterly (e.g. at Facebook). Amazon is an example of a company where the vesting schedule is somewhat different: 5% after year 1, 15% after year 2, and then 20% each semester for the next two years.

Bonus. This is the bonus system the company has setup. You can't negotiate it, but it's important to take it into account.

• There will usually be a cash bonus that's based on your salary. It'll have a target percent (e.g. 15%). If you can find out how many people hit their target, that will be very helpful. However, most companies don't share or simply don't have that information.
• Some companies also have equity bonuses. Try to get as much info on those as you can. Don't assume that you'll get the maximum bonus even if you work hard. If you have friends working at that company, ask them what kind of bonuses they've been getting.
• Lots of startups don't have bonus systems in place.

Other factors.

• Donation matching: Google matches up to $6k (you donate $6k to any charity, they'll donate another $6k). Craigslist matches 3:1 up to 10% of your salary. Most companies don't have anything like that, and you can't negotiate it.
• Paid Time Off: Google offers 2 weeks, all other companies I was considering offer 3 weeks, and some even have unlimited PTO. This is not negotiable in most companies.
• Commute: how far will you have to travel to work? Are you okay moving closer to work? (Google and Facebook have shuttles that can pick you up almost anywhere, so you could work while you commute.)
• People/culture/community/team/project are all important factors as well, depending on what you want. If you are going to spend the next several years working on something, you should be building up skills that will still be valuable in the future.

Thinking about private companies

If the company is private, you might be given RSUs or you might be given stock options. With stock options, you'll have to pay the strike price to exercise your options. So the total value your options have is: (price of a share - strike price) * number of shares.

You can't do anything with your shares until the company gets acquired or goes public. Some companies have liquidation events, but those are pretty rare. Most companies don't have them, and the ones that do only extend the opportunity to people that have been with the company for a while. There are also second-hand markets, but I don't know much about those.

If you are completely risk-intolerant, then just go with a public company, and don't consider private companies. (This is actually not exactly true. Just because a company is public, doesn't mean its risk-free, and just because a company is private doesn't mean there is a lot of risk. There are other important factors like the size of the company, their market diversity, and how long they've been around.) If you are okay with some risk, then you want a company that's close to an IPO or is likely to get acquired soon. If you want to have a chance to make more than a few million dollars, either start your own company or join a very early stage startup (my top pick would be Ripple). Before doing so, check out the stats on startups to make sure you understand how likely any given startup is to fail and make sure you understand the concepts of inside/outside view.

Taxes

It's crucial to understand all the tax implications of your salary, equity, and donations. I'm not going to go into all the details, there are a lot of resources out there for this, but you should definitely read them until it's crystal clear how you will be taxed. I'll highlight a few points:

• Understand the tax rate schedule and notice the new 39.6% tax bracket. If your income is $100k, that doesn't mean you get taxed 28% on all of it. 28% applies only to the income portion above $87,850. Also note that this is only the federal tax. Your state will have additional taxes as well. Aside from those percentages, there are a few other flat taxes, but they are considerably smaller in magnitude.
• The money you donate to a nonprofit (aka. 501(c)(3)) organization can be subtracted from your taxable income. This means that you will most likely get a refund when you file your taxes. Why? Because when you fill out your W4 form, you'll basically tell your employer how much money to withhold from your paycheck for tax purposes. If you don't account for your future donations, more money will be withheld than is appropriate and the discrepancy will be paid back to you after you file your taxes. Ideally, you want to take your donations into account and fill out the W4 form such that there are no discrepancies. That means you'll get your money now rather than later. (I haven't gone through this process myself, so there is some uncertainty here.)
• You can claim tax deduction for up to 50% of your wages. That means if you make a lot of money in one year, even if you donate most of it, you'll be able to reduce your taxable income by a maximum of 50%. The rest goes over to the next year.
• When RSUs vest, their value is treated as ordinary income for tax purposes. When you sell them, the difference is taxed as a capital gain (or loss).
• Stock options have a more complicated set of tax rules, and you should understand them if you are considering a company that offers them.
• You can't have your employer donate money or stock for you to bypass the taxes. I've asked.

Calculating donations

To calculate exactly how much I could donate if I worked at a given company, I've created this spreadsheet. (This is an example with completely fictitious company offers with very low numbers, but the calculations should be correct.) Let me walk you through the spreadsheet.

Time discounting (Cell B1)

Money now is more valuable than money later. By how much? That's a very complicated question. If you invest your money now, you might be able to make something like 10% annually with some risk.[3] If you are donating to a charity, and they are growing very rapidly, then they can do a lot with your money right now, and you should account for that as well. If you expect the charity to double in size/effectiveness/output in the next year, then you might use a discount rate as high as 50%. I chose to use 20% annual discount rate based on my own estimates. Since I'm doing monthly compounding, the spreadsheet value is slightly higher (~22%). You can look at the column K to see how the future value of a dollar is being discounted. Note, for example, that a dollar in 12 months is worth 80¢ to me now. This discounting rate is especially important to keep in mind when examining startups, because almost all their compensation lies in the future. The further away it is, the more heavily you have to discount it.

Cost of living (Cell B2)

This is how much pre-tax money a year I'm not going to donate. See column L for the monthly expenses. We time-discount those dollars as well.

Offers (Cells A4-I15)

This is where you plug-in the offers you get. Bonus row is for cash bonus. Equity row is for the total equity the company offers you. I use the dollar amount, but you'll notice that for some of them I'm computing the dollar amount as: RSUs the company is giving me * current share price. For private companies, this is value I expect my equity to have when the company goes public. For Square it looks like: (percent of the company I'll own) * (my guess at valuation of the company at IPO) - (cost to exercise my options). For Twitter it looks like: (growth factor up to IPO) * (current price per share) * (RSUs I am granted). (Again, the numbers are completely made up.) In my calculations I'm not expecting public companies' share price to rise or fall. If you disagree, you should adjust for that as well.

Monthly projections (Cells A18-I66)

We are going to look at how much money we'll be making per month for the next four years. (Four years because our equity should be fully vested by that time.) If you are certain that you will stay at the company for less time than that, then you should consider a shorter timeline. This might affect companies differently. For example, most of the equity you get at Amazon comes during the last two years. If you are not going to be there, you are missing out on a big part of your offer.

For companies that I was seriously considering, I created two columns: one for cash wages and one for equity wages. This way I can do taxes on them more precisely.

Let's go through the Google's offer:

• For the first year we'll be only making our standard salary.

• After the first year, we get our cash bonus (green font). Here we are assuming it'll be 15% of our salary. We also get 25% of our RSUs vested (salmon background).

• For the remainder of the second year, we are making our normal salary. Each month we also get 1/48^th of our original equity offer.

• Google also has an equity bonus system, where each year you can get a bonus of up to 50% of your original equity offer. This bonus will be paid in RSUs, and it vests over 4 years, but with no cliff. So we count that as well, but I'm assuming I'm only going to get 15%, not the full 50%.

• In year 3 everything is basically the same, except now we got our second equity bonus, so we have two of them running simultaneously.

• In year 4, we have three of them running simultaneously.

For pre-IPO companies, I've estimated when they'll go IPO. Most have clauses in place that don't allow you to sell your shares until after half a year or so after the IPO. I'm assuming I will sell/donate all my shares then, and then continue selling/donating them as they continue vesting.

Sum (Cells A68-I71)

In row 68 we have the total sum. This is the amount of pre-tax dollars we expect to earn in the next four years (remember that this amount has been adjusted for time-discounting, so it'll seem much lower than you'd normally expect). L68 is how much money we are spending on ourselves during those four years.

In row 69 we subtract our living expenses to get the amount of money we'll be able to donate. Note that I'm subtracting it from the cash column, leaving the equity column alone (for the companies where I split the two).

In row 70 we account for taxes. Note that our living expenses already accounted for the taxes we pay up to $65k, so the rest of it will be taxed at around 28% or higher. You could sell your shares, or you could just donate your shares directly to your charity. (That's what we are doing with our Google offer.)

In row 71 we simply sum up the donations from cash and equity.

Disclaimer 1: while I tried as hard as I could to double check this spreadsheet, there might still be mistakes there, so use it with caution and triple check everything. The tax calculations as they are right now are wrong, and you'll have to redo them (basically the whole Row 70) based on your own numbers.

Disclaimer 2: this spreadsheet is not great for evaluating an offer from a startup, since it doesn't capture the associated uncertainty and risk. Furthermore, if you expect the startup to succeed after more than 4 years, to correctly compare it to other companies you'll have to compute more than 48 months and potentially start accounting for things like promotions and raises.

Picking the one

All right, so how do you actually pick the best company? It's not as simple as picking the one with the highest EV, since you have to account for risk involved with startups and even pre-IPO companies. In fact, you should be surprised if your offers from public companies have a higher EV than offers from startups. If that's the case, I'd double check your calculations.

This is where it becomes extremely crucial to narrow down your uncertainty. When is the company going to IPO? What is the likely valuation? Does the company have a lot of competitors? Does the company have the necessary talent to execute on their plan? What's the company's history? What is the employee churn rate (especially for executives)? How well is the company doing financially? Who are the investors? Etc, etc, etc... There is a ton of questions you should be asking, and you should be asking them to everyone whose opinion on this issue you can respect. Honest opinion from an informed and knowledgeable neutral party is worth a LOT here!

You should also talk to the people at the company. Your recruiter will connect you to the right people if you ask. Keep in mind that nobody there will tell you that the company is going to go bankrupt or fail. But you can still get some valuable estimates, and then potentially discount them down a bit. You can even ask for their opinion on other companies you are interviewing with. Expect them to completely throw the other company under the bus though, but even so, you could get a lot of valuable criticism and bring it up when you talk to that other company. Overall, expect a lot of conflicting messages.

Keep in mind the charities you'll be donating to. What kind of donors do they have already? Are most people donating a bit from their salary? In that case, a more risky venture might be reasonable. Can they really use some money right now, or would they be a lot more effective later on with a large capital? What's their time discount rate? If you care about your charity, you can help them diversify their donor pool.

For me, it was a hard choice between big public companies (primary candidate: Google) and close to IPO companies (primary candidates: Twitter and Square).

Negotiating

You have to negotiate your offer. You have to have to have to HAVE TO. For any given company, you'll be able to get them to up their offer at least once and potentially thrice. Example: Google upped my offer three times.

• Some companies will tell you their offer is not negotiable. That's not true.
• It's much easier to leverage similar companies against each other. Leverage big public companies against each other; leverage pre-IPO companies against each other; etc... Leveraging between those categories is a bit more difficult, because startups know they can't compete with the raw cash value you are offered at bigger companies. The only thing they can do is up their equity offer and hope that they are a much better personal fit for you than the large companies.
• Recruiters will ask you very directly what the other companies are offering you. You can choose to disclose or not to disclose. If you don't disclose, the company will come back to you with their standard offer. That offer might be higher or lower than you expected. (Example: The first offer I got from Google was significantly worse than initial offers I got from Facebook and Amazon.) If you tell them what offers you have (and you should only disclose details of your very best offers), then they'll very likely match or come in a bit stronger. Usually you don't have much to gain by disclosing your other offers upfront. You can always do so later. However, you should let your recruiters know that other companies did make an offer, or you are expecting them to. That gives you more leveraging power.
• Sign-on bonus is very easy to negotiate. You can easily convince a company to match a sign-on bonus their competitor has offered.
• Negotiating salary is much harder, but, again, usually you can convince a company to match a salary their competitor has offered or at least come closer to it. If you are interviewing with startups, their salary offer will usually be lower than at bigger companies and even harder to negotiate. ("Cash is king" is the common phrase used there.)

First negotiating phase: simply email / call back your recruiter (who is now your best friend, right?) and tell them that the offer is somewhat lower than you expected, you have other better offers from other companies, and you are wondering if they can increase their offer. If the company made you a clearly worse offer than another similar company, you should be very open about it.

Second negotiating phase: matching other companies. This is when it makes the most sense to disclose your other offers. For example, I used my Amazon and Facebook offers to convince Google to up their offer significantly. For some reason their original offer was very low, but seeing their competitors with much better offers convinced them to update pretty quickly. You can also bring up the perks one company has that the other doesn't (e.g. donation matching or unlimited PTO). The company can make up for that with salary/equity. There is some difficulty in using offers from private companies as leverage, because there is not much information you can disclose about them. You can talk about the number of shares you'll have, but it might not mean anything to the other recruiters if they are not familiar with the startup.

Third negotiating phase: once you picked the company you'll work for, go back to them and say something along the lines of "I really like the offer and the company, but there are a few things that don't make it ideal for me. One of your competitors did this, and another company has that. Right now I'm inclined to go with your competitor, but it's a tough decision, and I would rather go with you. I think if you can make me an offer with the following parameters, it'll make my decision extremely easy, and I'll sign on the spot." Include offer letters from other companies, especially the ones that have them beat or beat on some parameters. Notice the key promise at the end: you will sign with them. Your recruiter will have a lot more leverage in fighting for you if you make that promise. You are not legally obligated to follow through with your promise, but I wouldn't advise breaking it or using it just to extract more value to use as leverage against other companies. Use this tactic at the very end to extract that last bit of value from the company that's already the best. This is what I did with Google. I asked for about 3% higher salary and 12% more equity than what they were offering, and they came back with the exact numbers I requested, which means I should have asked for more. My advice would be to ask for about twice or may be even three times as much (6% and 30% respectively). Even if they come back with a compromise, it'll very likely be more than 3% and 12% increase. If not, you can try to barter one more time.

I'm sure some people will cringe at this kind of haggling, but, in all honesty, this is what recruiters expect, and they are very much used to it. Nobody even blinked an eye when I started negotiating, even on second and third rounds. However, some recruiters might try to make you feel guilty. They'll say that if you really want to work at their startup, then you shouldn't really care about your compensation. Most points they'll make will even be valid, but if you are trying to optimize for donations, then you have to make the compensation the most important factor in your decision. I've actually told most of my recruiters that I plan to donate most of my salary to charities. I don't think that got me higher offers, but it made me come off less like a greedy jerk.

At the end of the day, the company wants you, but they want to pay you as little as possible. But, given the choice of having you and paying you the most you deserve VS. not having you, all companies will pick the first option. ALL OF THEM. This is one of the best perks of being a talented software engineer in the bay area.

Once you accept the offer, don't forget to email everyone else and let them know. Thank everyone that helped you. Some recruiters will be surprised by your decision, and some will even fight really hard to get you to reconsider.

[1] None of the interviews required a data structure more complicated than a heap. All the answers had a very easy to compute complexity, either polynomial, polynomial * logarithmic, or factorial. The most weird one was probably O(√n) for computing prime numbers.

[2] Some problems I did during actual single-round match-up (SRM) competitions, which is good for training yourself how to code and think faster than you are used to. I also did a lot of old SRM problems, which have solutions and explanations posted in case I couldn't get them. I could easily do problem 1 & 2 in the easy division, and could do problem 3 most of the time. I didn't really bother with the hard division, and none of the interview questions were ever as hard as problem 3 in the easy division.

[3] According to the comments, this number is too high. Pick your own best estimate.

Recently I decided to try an intermittent fasting diet. To do so, I had to figure out how much I could eat on my off/down days. I realized I didn't have a very good idea about how much calories my meals have, and as I was thinking about it, I started to get curious about my diet overall. How many calories do I get a day? How much of it is from fat? Do I get enough vitamins? Etc, etc, etc. All very basic questions, and since my meals are very regular, there was an easy way to find out!

(Note: anytime you feel curious and are about to find something out, make some predictions. I didn't, but I really wish I did, because I was very surprised by my findings.)

It took only a couple of hours, and here is the result.

If you scroll down, you can see that my usual Breakfast+Lunch+Dinner only nets about 1000 calories and gives 30% daily value of fat. No wonder I crave cookies and chocolate so much!

There are many surprising results that I got from this. And knowing that I've been eating like this for the past few years... Wow. This is the epitome of a low hanging fruit. I can't believe I didn't do this analysis earlier!

Edit: I was not trying to say that I only get 1000 calories a day. Of course I get more than that, but the rest is from cookies and post-meal sweets. I always thought I just have a sweet tooth, but the fact that I wasn't getting enough calories from my main meals can also explain this.

http://www.muckflash.com/?p=200

Might be a nice story to point out to people who think "friendly" is easy.

I've recently learned about alleged dangers to drinking fluoridated water. Amongst them is increased rate of cancer and lowering of IQ. Interestingly enough, wiki doesn't mention this at all, but searching for it brings up a decent amount of (what look like) reasonable results. I am really curious about this, and want to learn more about this. I was wondering if anyone on LW has already conducted a research literature investigation on this topic, or if you just have tips/advice on what to pay attention to when I read the literature.

Thanks!

This is a very personal account of thoughts and events that have led me to a very interesting point in my life. Please read it as such. I present a lot of points, arguments, conclusions, etc..., but that's not what this is about.

I've started reading LW around spring of 2010. I was at the rationality minicamp last summer (2011). The night of February 10, 2012 all the rationality learning and practice finally caught up with me. Like a water that has been building up behind a damn, it finally broke through and flooded my poor brain.

"What if the Bayesian Conspiracy is real?" (By Bayesian Conspiracy I just mean a secret group that operates within and around LW and SIAI.) That is the question that set it all in motion. "Perhaps they left clues for those that are smart enough to see it. And to see those clues, you would actually have to understand and apply everything that they are trying to teach." The chain of thoughts that followed (conspiracies within conspiracies, shadow governments and Illuminati) it too ridiculous to want to repeat, but it all ended up with one simple question: How do I find out for sure? And that's when I realized that almost all the information I have has been accepted without as much as an ounce of verification. So little of my knowledge has been tested in the real world. In that moment I achieved a sort of enlightenment: I realized I don't know anything. I felt a dire urge to regress to the very basic questions: "What is real? What is true?" And then I laughed, because that's exactly where The Sequences start.

Through the turmoil of jumbled and confused thoughts came a shock of my most valuable belief propagating through my mind, breaking down final barriers, reaching its logical conclusion. FAI is the most important thing we should be doing right now! I already knew that. In fact, I knew that for a long time now, but I didn't... what? Feel it? Accept it? Visualize it? Understand the consequences? I think I didn't let that belief propagate to its natural conclusion: I should be doing something to help this cause.

I can't say: "It's the most important thing, but..." Yet, I've said it so many times inside my head. It's like hearing other people say: "Yes, X is the rational thing to do, but..." What follows is a defense that allows them to keep the path to their goal that they are comfortable with, that they are already invested in.

Interestingly enough, I've already thought about this. Right after rationality minicamp, I've asked myself the question: Should I switch to working on FAI, or should I continue to make games? I've thought about it heavily for some time, but I felt like I lacked the necessary math skills to be of much use on FAI front. Making games was the convenient answer. It's something I've been doing for a long time, it's something I am good. I decided to make games that explain various ideas that LW presents in text. This way I could help raise the sanity waterline. Seemed like a very nice, neat solution that allowed me to do what I wanted and feel a bit helpful to the FAI cause.

Looking back, I was dishonest with myself. In my mind, I already wrote the answer I wanted. I convinced myself that I didn't, but part of me certainly sabotaged the whole process. But that's okay, because I was still somewhat helpful, even though may be not in the most optimal way. Right? Right?? The correct answer is "no". So, now I have to ask myself again: What is the best path for me? And to answer that, I have to understand what my goal is.

Rationality doesn't just help you to get what you want better/faster. Increased rationality starts to change what you want. May be you wanted the air to be clean, so you bought a hybrid. Sweet. But then you realized that what you actually want is for people to be healthy. So you became a nurse. That's nice. Then you realized that if you did research, you could be making an order of magnitude more people healthier. So you went into research. Cool. Then you realized that you could pay for multiple researchers if you had enough money. So you went out, become a billionaire, and created your own research institute. Great. There was always you, and there was your goal, but everything in between was (and should be) up for grabs.

And if you follow that kind of chain long enough, at some point you realize that FAI is actually the thing right before your goal. Why wouldn't it be? It solves everything in the best possible way!

People joke that LW is a cult. Everyone kind of laughs it off. It's funny because cultists are weird and crazy, but they are so sure they are right. LWers are kind of like that. Unlike other cults, though, we are really, truly right. Right? But, honestly, I like the term, and I think it has a ring of truth to it. Cultists have a goal that's beyond them. We do too. My life isn't about my preferences (I can change those), it's about my goals. I can change those too, of course, but if I'm rational (and nice) about it, I feel that it's hard not to end up wanting to help other people.

Okay, so I need a goal. Let's start from the beginning:

What is truth?

Reality is truth. It's what happens. It's the rules that dictate what happens. It's the invisible territory. It's the thing that makes you feel surprised.

(Okay, great, I won't have to go back to reading Greek philosophy.)

How do we discover truth?

So far, the best method has been the scientific principle. It's has also proved itself over and over again by providing actual tangible results.

(Fantastic, I won't have to reinvent the thousands of years of progress.)

Soon enough humans will commit a fatal mistake.

This isn't a question, it's an observation. The technology is advancing on all fronts to the point where it can be used on a planetary (and wider) scale. Humans make mistakes. Making mistake with something that affects the whole world could result in an injury or death... for the planet (and potentially beyond).

That's bad.

To be honest, I don't have a strong visceral negative feeling associated with all humans becoming extinct. It doesn't feel that bad, but then again I know better than to trust my feelings on such a scale. However, if I had to simply push a button to make one person's life significantly better, I would do it. And I would keep pushing that button for each new person. For something like 222 years, by my rough calculations. Okay, then. Humanity injuring or killing itself would be bad, and I can probably spent a century or so to try to prevent that, while also doing something that's a lot more fun that mashing a button.

We need a smart safety net.

Not only smart enough to know that triggering an atomic bomb inside a city is bad, or that you get the grandma out of a burning building by teleporting her in one piece to a safe spot, but also smart enough to know that if I keep snoozing every day for an hour or two, I'd rather someone stepped in and stopped me, no matter how much I want to sleep JUST FIVE MORE MINUTES. It's something I might actively fight, but it's something that I'll be grateful for later.

FAI

There it is: the ultimate safety net. Let's get to it?

Having FAI will be very very good, that's clear enough. Getting FAI wrong will be very very bad. But there are different levels of bad, and, frankly, a universe tiled with paper-clips is actually not that high on the list. Having an AI that treats humans as special objects is very dangerous. An AI that doesn't care about humans will not do anything to humans specifically. It might borrow a molecule, or an arm or two from our bodies, but that's okay. An AI that treats humans as special, yet is not Friendly could be very bad. Imagine 3^^^3 different people being created and forced to live really horrible lives. It's hell on a whole another level. So, if FAI goes wrong, pure destruction of all humans is a pretty good scenario.

Should we even be working on FAI? What are the chances we'll get it right? (I remember Anna Salamon's comparison: "getting FAI right" is like "trying to make the first atomic bomb explode in a shape of an elephant" would have been a century ago.) What are the chances we'll get it horribly wrong and end up in hell? By working on FAI, how are we changing the probability distribution for various outcomes? Perhaps a better alternative is to seek a decisive advantage like brain uploading, where a few key people can take a century or so to think the problem through?

I keep thinking about FAI going horribly wrong, and I want to scream at the people who are involved with it: "Do you even know what you are doing?!" Everything is at stake! And suddenly I care. Really care. There is curiosity, yes, but it's so much more than that. At LW minicamp we compared curiosity to a cat chasing a mouse. It's a kind of fun, playful feeling. I think we got it wrong. The real curiosity feels like hunger. The cat isn't chasing the mouse to play with it; it's chasing it to eat it because it needs to survive. Me? I need to know the right answer.

I finally understand why SIAI isn't focusing very hard on the actual AI part right now, but is instead pouring most of their efforts into recruiting talent. The next 50-100 years is going to be a marathon for our lives. Many participants might not make it to the finish line. It's important that we establish a community that can continue to carry the research forward until we succeed.

I finally understand why when I was talking about making games that help people be more rational with Carl Shulman, his value metric was to see how many academics it could impact/recruit. That didn't make sense to me. I just wanted to raise the sanity waterline for people in general. I think when LWers say "raise the sanity waterline," there are two ideas being presented. One is to make everyone a little bit more sane. That's nice, but overall probably not very beneficial to FAI cause. Another is to make certain key people a bit more sane, hopefully sane enough to realize that FAI is a big deal, and sane enough to do some meaningful progress on it.

I finally realized that when people were talking about donating to SIAI during the rationality minicamp, most of us (certainly myself) were thinking of may be tens of thousands of dollars a year. I now understand that's silly. If our goal is truly to make the most money for SIAI, then the goal should be measured in billions.

I've realized a lot of things lately. A lot of things have been shaken up. It has been a very stressful couple of days. I'll have to re-answer the question I asked myself not too long ago: What should I be doing? And this time, instead of hoping for an answer, I'm afraid of the answer. I'm truly and honestly afraid. Thankfully, I can fight pushing a lot better than pulling: fear is easier to fight than passion. I can plunge into the unknown, but it breaks my heart to put aside a very interesting and dear life path.

I've never felt more afraid, more ready to fall into a deep depression, more ready to scream and run away, retreat, abandon logic, go back to the safe comfortable beliefs and goals. I've spent the past 10 years making games and getting better at it. And just recently I've realized how really really good I actually am at it. Armed with my rationality toolkit, I could probably do wonders in that field.

Yet, I've also never felt more ready to make a step of this magnitude. Maximizing utility, all the fallacies, biases, defense mechanisms, etc, etc, etc. One by one they come to mind and help me move forward. Patterns of thoughts and reasoning that I can't even remember the name of. All these tools and skills are right here with me, and using them I feel like I can do anything. I feel that I can dodge bullets. But I also know full well that I am at the starting line of a long and difficult marathon. A marathon that has no path and no guides, but that has to be run nonetheless.

May the human race win.

There are two points which I want to cover here. First is about my own game, and second is about raising the sanity waterline through games.

Point one: "Girl with a Heart of"

It's been over a year since I found LW community, and as soon as I finished the Sequences I realized I want to dedicate my life to making games that raise the sanity waterline. I've started working on a game to do just that in January 2011. The game is called "Girl with a Heart of", and it's very close to being done. In this game I wanted to present the idea of recursive self-improvement in a way that's intuitively accessible to an average person. I don't think I've succeeded, but I'll leave the discussion of reasons behind that for postmortem. Suffice to say, presenting ideas in text, even if they are part of a game, doesn't make them more intuitive. In fact, the player might as well just read the original article/post.

You can see screenshots of the game here: http://bentspoongames.imgur.com/girl_with_a_heart_of

For the most part, the game is just a choose-your-own adventure game. There is a lot of dialog. There are many various ideas, which I took from LW posts, and you'll probably recognize most of them when you play the game.

I've also started a Kickstarter project to help me finish the game: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bentspoongames/girl-with-a-heart-of

This is a nice way to preorder the game if you are interested. However, no money will be charged unless the fund goal is met. (If people object to this link, I can remove it.)

I am not asking you for donations, since most people on LW donate to causes that are a lot more important, but I will ask for support. If you have friends that like adventure games, or you have friends that like reading, then let them know about this game. Follow the game - and myself - on Facebook and Twitter. That's where I'll be posting updates about the next game I'll be working on.

Point two: Using games to raise the sanity waterline.

My first game was/will be a bust in terms of this, but the idea itself is not without merit, but I don't want to start discussing game design in this post. What I am looking for are people who are interested in making this happen, whether by doing art, programming, design, PR, or contributing resources: connections, expertise, and/or funding. For me, this will be a full time job (if I can get funding/money) and my primary goal for the near - and I hope far - future.

I'll be moving to the Bay Area in the next month, so I would love to meet up with anyone who is sincerely interested in working on this. And even if you don't live in the area, let me know either way, and we can work together remotely.

Not everyone likes reading, and not everyone can learn the ideas from the way they are presented in the Sequences. I want to take those very basic ideas, and present them in a different format, which I hope will be more accessible, fun, and, in the end, more fruitful. Think HP:MoR, but in game form. My goal is to build a community of people who are interested in building games that leave the player with tangible, useful knowledge and skills. My goal is to create lots of games that people can play for fun, while receiving measurable benefits (in my case: rationality training). These games might even be used for training basic skills in rationality camps. During this year's mini-camp a lot of people, including myself, praised poker for its lessons in rationality, but we can easily create a game that focuses a lot more on those skills.

I am very curious to hear your thoughts on this, whatever they might be.