Work - nolanhergert/notes GitHub Wiki

Career

https://nolanhergert.github.io/notes_old/work.html

I want to do stuff that matters. That a number of people will use. No first world problems, although sometimes it's just "fun" hobby stuff.

I'm leaning towards revolutionary changes and not incremental changes. Although I realize I might not like it after all (stressful like robotics, except all the time)

Do I need to invent the algorithms? No, although I'm not above/below doing it either.

Questions for 3D Printing innovation guy

Am I going to enjoy the startup-y innovation kind of life? It probably won't pay the bills!

  • I probably would get satisfaction from more directly impacting the lives of people through an invention and lots of hard work and learning.
  • It's not for the money!

Go to product inventing conference? $150 is cheap. Crowd Supply.

Areas

No

https://inteon.co/, Justin Gottschlich and Machine Programming and Intel. Three Pillars of Machine Programming is one paper, but he has a good YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDN47rjzNMRTkGY3182ApaQ

Salary

Where do you (my boss) see me? What are the areas that I lack, I need opportunities to grow in these areas.

  • Don't reveal what you think you are performing at.
  • Ask manager for his opinion of where I am performing at.
  • What do you want me to do? What does it take? This role will give the opportunity to take things far.

Principal Engineer

Pillars of PE process

  1. Talks and expert
  2. Making a critical change that improves Intel's bottom line. Strategic value
  3. Mentoring others
  4. Recommendations

Startups

Be careful that you are not diluted out of your shares at the next funding rounds.

Then a year after I got fired the series A investor led the next round of funding and decided to value the company at $0, so I got diluted by 99.99%. Sounds illegal, right? Well, it probably was, but what am I going to do about it? They have billions of dollars and I had no money.

How does one go about learning about these things.

A very good question that I don't have a good answer to. Management likes that there's a steady stream of new people who don't know that there's a bunch of tricks that get used and so everyone learns them the hard way.

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29320078

OOO

2023

Worked sufficiently for WW2. No time off needed 7 weeks of robotics so far, leaving at 3:15 or so 4 days per week. So 7 days so far as of Feb 28.

18 days total as of May 3. That's 3.5 weeks, probably up to 4 weeks by the end of school year?! No vacation? However, was I ever blocking my work by leaving early? Yes and no.

Two wellness days total, not used.

2022

4 weeks total vacation (wellness days plus 3.5 weeks). 20 days. So...right about the limit for this year, about what I was expecting.

5.5 + .6 + 1 + .3 + 11.5 = 19 days.

Fall/winter robotics: 45 hours total. 5.5 days.

.3 + .3 EXTRA WORKING HOURS

.3 + .3 + .4 = 1 day off total for beach trip. 1.5 days off for San Francisco trip

Lunch at Fogo, 3 hours.

Robotics and everything else on this list total: 6.5 (robotics) + 5 = 11.5 days so far. (May 15)

Lauren's wedding on Thursday, APril 21

Tuesday and Thursday left at 3pm for robotics.

1.65 days off for robotics in WW5-6. Additional 2 days, 1 hour off for robotics in WW10 and WW11.

Estimate 2021

6 days remaining, assuming 9 more weeks of 3 hours a week of robotics.

2 extra hours off WW43.1 for helping Jae get a house.

3 hours off WW41 for robotics.

3 hours off WW40 for robotics

3 hours off WW39 for robotics.

Taking 4 work days off. Friday through Wednesday Aug 20 - 25

Only 6.5 hours used?!

  • 3 days for health and wellness days.

    • 5 hour break July 29
    • 5 hour break June 18 (Tree to Tree)
    • 4 hour break morning of June 16 (try out tesla, repair car)
    • 1.5 hour break June 10. Didn't get great sleep last night (up until 1), so needed to nap.
    • 2 hour break Mar 23. Picked up new laptop!
    • .5 day afternoon for break on Feb 2
    • 2 hour break on Feb 17
    • 1 hour break on Mar 10
    • Left early at 3:30pm Mar 30 for robotics. 1 hour?
    • Left 1 hour early for robotics Apr 5.
    • Biked to yearly checkup Apr 13, 3 hours?
    • Biked to lawyer for signing Apr 15. 1 hour

Openwater

  • What has working at Openwater been like for you? Pace, environment. What is a typical day or week like?
    • While I think I would tolerate some degree of intensity and risk, I don't really want to deal with politics or pressure. I have savings, I can leave easily.
  • Single, would be interested in moving to San Francisco and working onsite, but also interested in having bits of traveling / working remotely while I am still young and unmarried.

Nice bay area map of rent per sq foot: https://renthub.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/San%20Francisco-Oakland-Fremont,%20CA

Other questions

  • What will happen if the overall stock market takes a two year dive? Will funding dry up?
  • Interview, visit San Francisco, meet the team, ensure no red flags before starting? See a demo? :)
  • Why are contractors not hired? Do they not want to be hired?
  • Why San Francisco? Mary Lou likes the place? Easy to find talented employees?
  • Maybe the Staff Software Engineer is a more appropriate position? Not sure. I have a non-trivial amount of experience with imaging pipelines in OpenCV, although I am a little weak on intense SoC development. Could be possible to ramp quickly though! https://www.openwater.cc/jobs/staff-software-engineer
  • What is likelihood of success? What is success considered for Openwater?
  • Why did Brad or _______ join Openwater?
  • Is the job kind of a dumping ground of work to do?
  • Would I prefer doing OpenVX "development" work vs. "validation" work? Do they value validation engineers? It seems there is a ceiling perhaps, compared to the "cool" work of algorithm development.
    • Maybe I want to be familiar with the whole system! From algorithm to customer. Lots of benefit with that. It's frustrating needing to ramp on annoying details 3-4 levels removed from this flow though (quirks of python or c, reorganizing code, etc)

Schedule/Negotiation

  • Number of vacation days?
  • Need to take a week and a few days off in mid-August for family reunion and wedding in Oregon. Can work remotely for a few days in there, but would ideally not want to "commute" back to SF and back to Portland. Don't have any other vacations planned at this time.
  • Get agreement in writing. Maybe negotiate in writing too
  • Most, if not all of my work is software. While it's hard to find wages for "Senior Instrumentation Engineer", isn't Software Engineer similar?
    • Why make it so specific on the job req? When in practice it will likely be a number of roles.
  • I like the novocure job posting:
    • Support system-level integrations
    • Optimize, refactor, test, and integrate algorithms and 3rd party code into our software products.
    • Maintain, update and upgrade algorithms integrated into the product’s software
    • Collaborate with the software, physics, and algorithm teams as well as with contractors providing code.
  • "However, the IRA or Roth could acquire pre-IPO stock by buying it from the company or an unrelated person."

Tech

  • Are they pulling from Novocure tech on low frequency irradiation of cancer tumors?
  • I understand what Kernel is doing, but it seems super low fidelity, not very scalable at all. Am I getting that right? Why would they continue down that road?
  • Why do they have a reacquire step when they have to compensate for blood flowing too? Slightly Non contact handheld scanning possible, at least in theory?
  • How does inversion step work? (to get the laser to come back out the other side? It's not free space we are talking about here...and are not imaging the muscle technically).
    • And the laser pulse is fast enough to freeze moving blood? Or maybe that is just noise because they are so small...
  • Nice nature article on ultrasound for the brain: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-05479-7. What sort of challenges are remaining, or are you pretty confident it will work at the right price point and sell and we're just putting a box around it? :-)
  • Did he say they were dropping ultrasound for imaging? (getting through the skull / bone?)
    • How do they know they hit the voxel properly?
  • Are they constantly looking for more applications, basically? Makes sense to me. Why not apply cardiac output estimation for more people if you can do it cheaply.
  • What happened to Craig Newswanger? I remember Mary Lou talking about him a while back.

Later

  • What did they like about me? How many other people applied to the positions? How long have they been open?
  • What sort of pills does Mary Lou take? What was the experimentation process like? Is she superhuman now? :)

Novocure

  • Don't start in a high pressure position. Hopefully will have some degree of mentor there already, although unlikely at 1000 person company.
  • I enjoy developing and optimizing algorithms
    • Enjoyed
    • Developed a

Fun

Hobby

  • Make a LED flash brighter than normal for POV effects
  • Individually addressable RBG led strip controller + diffusion

I can't explain why it's fun for me. They aren't that useful.

Not fun

  • Oculus, gaming 3d VR thing. Cool engineering, but don't care about the application.
  • Trying to get links working on a doxygen pdf output that no one will read
  • For a one-line change: "Also, once CCB is approved on Wed, please also submit your dev ticket w the proposed change for gatekeeper approval as usual and we will need to submit for IFWI TF approval by ww53.2 at the latest"
  • OS and firmware stuff. It's useful and I'm glad people enjoy doing it, but for me it's a means to an end. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410/doc/minimal_boot.pdf

Retirement is for later...

Feeling bummed not doing academically difficult things

Remember, several people have told you the ML part is the fancy but minimal amount of work. The hard work is gathering all the data, etc.

Other people leaving

Why am I getting all huffy when certain <very good, more knowledge than me> coworkers leave Intel?

  • It doesn't make sense in my head why some talented people stay and others go. What do they know that I don't?
  • I do wonder a bit why Intel only pays median. But money or fame doesn't come to mind immediately.
  • Threshold for hiring is fairly low for software, maybe HW too?

For the near future:

  • I really want to practice developing and thinking about practical unit tests. Getting paid is a nice bonus!
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