Effective Engineer – Notes
&quot;Opportunity cost of working on wrong ideas can set back growth by years.&quot;<p>I feel like this is spoken by someone who hasn&#x27;t seen more than one technology cycle come and go.<p>What I&#x27;ve observed - having started my career back in the Java-will-eat-the-desktop days and then adapted through webapps, big data, mobile, and now AI - is that the people who are best positioned to capitalize on an emerging technology wave are the ones who started working on it before anyone realized it was important, just because it was interesting to them.  They&#x27;re the ones who write the papers and software that everyone else evangelizes, and then get multi-million-$ signing bonuses or stock grants (or billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency) when corporate interests catch on that this is a new technology wave.  But at the time they start working on the idea, it&#x27;s both useless and unlikely to work.<p>You can make a decent living always being on the look out for a new technology wave and jumping on it as soon as it&#x27;s clear that it&#x27;s hot.  I spent much of my 20s doing that, and made enough money doing so that I can take it a bit easier now.  But it&#x27;s exhausting, and you&#x27;ll never be the one actually driving change.<p>It&#x27;s also usually not clear what&#x27;s the &quot;wrong idea&quot; except in retrospect.  DropBox is rsync with cloud storage and some pretty slick desktop app integration, done at a time when everybody thought that desktop apps were dead and Drew&#x27;s Windows hacking skills were old news.  But it&#x27;s that familiarity with old technology that put him in a place to realize that new technology could make the old technology dramatically more useful, to the tune of a $10B company.