The other day I scanned and posted a gift I’d gotten from some co-workers. When leafing through the folder it was in, I found a few other fun artifacts I thought I’d share:
First, a certificate I got from my fourth grade teacher. It’s an objective I still aim for:
And second, an invite I got for helping support the underlying voting platform:
I’ve tried to do a better job recently of documenting my career experiences, not just the work-related items, but the fun stuff too. This week wasn’t so bad, even if the town isn’t my favorite:
I did tons of hiring during my time at Amazon. I haven’t done as much in my new role, but that’s starting to change (any open roles I’ll put on my LinkedIn profile if you’re interested in checking them out).
There’s a lot I could say about the work of both identifying good candidates and presenting yourself well when you’re looking for a job. But I’ll keep it brief today.
And second, during interviews, my number one thing: tell me what you did, not what you would do. Unless I specifically ask for a theoretical answer, I want to hear actual stories of actual work and actual outcomes. Experience is evidence.
I’m not into pranks, giving or receiving. Maybe it’s just because my years are limited, but I don’t generally appreciate being inconvenienced in ways that waste my time for no reason other than humor. It’s a bit like an individualized corollary of the broken window fallacy.
Because of the above I get somewhat hypersensitive around April 1. I feel I’m generally good at sniffing out the BS, but I got taken pretty hard this year, cleverly enough that I have to tip my hat.
So a website I visit regularly posts periodic brain teasers. The one on April 1 sounded innocuous enough. The gist:
Start with a number. If it’s even, divide by 2. If odd, multiply by 3 and add 1. Repeat enough times, and you’ll end up with 1. Prove why that’s the case for any starting number.
I’m a sucker for that sort of mathy puzzle, and I spent a decent amount of time throughout the day noodling on it. Well, here’s the deal. Known as the Collatz conjecture, this convergence to one is famously unsolved, described on the Wikipedia page as “an extraordinarily difficult problem, completely out of reach of present day mathematics.” Lovely, so you’re saying this Ph.D. dropout is unlikely to solve it?
To be fair, I should have known. Numeric conjectures that intermingle addition and multiplication are notoriously complex, despite their apparent simplicity. I used to joke that a life goal was to solve Goldbach’s conjecture, which states that every even natural number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers. Apparently I said this enough at my first job that when I left, they gave me this fill-in-the-blank certificate as a gift:
It’s a good reminder that it’s the “easy” stuff you have to worry about most. It’s never five minutes.
