Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
I work for the Internet and am an advisor to @stripe. These are my personal opinions unless otherwise noted.
Chicago, IL
Joined: 2/14/2009
Archived: 12/3/2024
62.1K Tweets
173.5K Followers
796 Following
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@patio11
I work for the Internet and am an advisor to @stripe. These are my personal opinions unless otherwise noted.
Chicago, IL
Joined: 2/14/2009
Archived: 12/3/2024
62.1K Tweets
173.5K Followers
796 Following
0 Likes
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Interpreting jokes in real time is murderously difficult. Here’s a classic Japan story and then one from me: https://t.co/ifyz5KVpve
I miss Japan. Anyhow, as someone who was a professional translator for a few years, if I had written this card it would have been among the best work of my career. It is a work of art two sentences in length. https://t.co/kjmm8aHQq2
This sounds like a trivial observation and it isn’t: No organization which makes its people pay for coffee wants to win.
Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before. In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.
It occurs to me that my hobby in writing letters about the Fair Credit Reporting Act is suddenly topical! So some quick opinionated advice:
In honor of someone’s bad bug today, I will retell a story of my worst bug: Once upon a time I was the CEO and entire engineering team of a company which sent appointment reminders. Each reminder was sent by a cron job draining a queue. That queue was filled by another cron job
I like this anecdote of a CEO directing a particular “If you’re making this phone call we’ve already lost a shed load of money and the priority is not to lose more” decision, recounted by Matt Levine today. https://t.co/NA93lNmRuF
Tokyo has positive population growth of about 100,000 people a year, and rents and home prices are roughly stable for last decade. How? Outconstructing NYC. And LA. And SF. And Boston. And Houston. Combined. Every year. https://t.co/qD2oMWK9qH
It’s a bit uplifting, and terrifying, to think “What other graphs do we have which are one (1) competent executive from hockey sticking?” https://t.co/VWeuqXYRSb
Me: “Well, it is the principle of the thing.” Bank: “Of course sir.” Me: “Oh and please check the box to remember their information for future transfers.” Bank: “Of course sir. Can I help you with anything else?” Me: “Yes I would like to make a *second* time transfer to…”
“How is Tokyo addressing its housing crisis?” “We don’t have one. We build homes.” “Do you discourage techies from moving into town?” “Techies live in homes so we build homes.” “How do you deal with Chinese speculators?” “Build homes.” “But earthquakes and ocean!” “Build homes.”
It is useful to understand when you are dealing with a person who can be persuaded and when you are dealing with a state machine which has formal transitions for some things you could say and literally no emotional response per policy. https://t.co/kbmi5iT2Fp
In the “Japan does a better job at hotels” and “Japan does a better job at taking children seriously”, for ~$12 our hotel had a 20 minute cooking class for children where they got dressed up as patisserie chefs and, under the instruction of a staffer, made themselves dessert.
I am reminded of the absolutely enormous detection of embezzlement as restaurants switched to cash registers, a switch which was not motivated by concerns of embezzlement. https://t.co/Jbl3RnoJSd
Japanese bank: And how can we help you today? Me: I will need to send a domestic transfer to complete a startup investment. “Absolutely Mr. McKenzie. Will this be to someone you have made a transfer to before?” “No.” “And the amount?” “$AMOUNT.” “Oh sorry. You will need to…”
This is one of the reasons why "Can you describe what I'd need to do to buy a $50 book?" is a deceptively good question to ask during job interviews (or earlier) for getting a read on how a company treats engineers, what their tolerance for process-for-sake-of-process is, etc. https://t.co/TZ5EUmWm8B
Apparently Walgreens is testing, in Chicago, a “new” concept: almost all goods (save two aisles of “essentials”) behind a barrier, passed over it to the customer in response to an order entered on a kiosk. This is almost a return to the retail experience of the late 1800s.
Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true.
This is sort of a niche financial product but I’ll explain mechanics since plausible a few readers will eventually be able to use it: Banks want you to have ~20% equity in your house to protect them against default risk. (Lower down-payments are subsidized by USFG through GSEs.) https://t.co/iinLuFJoQL
Ruriko: So when do we register with Chicago? Me: We don’t. R: So how does Chicago know everyone who lives in Chicago? Me: It doesn’t. R: … Does America have a government? How do you even do population statistics?! Me: Count every ten years. R: You ARE TROLLING ME.
This is the paradigmatic example of why we have securities laws: https://t.co/6dVKINsBeT
Wife: "Hold hands when crossing the street." *2 year old grabs own hands* "OK Mommy." Me: "Oh you're going to be so good at programming."
I love Amazon’s “Can we bribe you with a $3 Kindle credit to delay a shipment by a day for cost-control reasons?” option.
Me: Has anyone seen my ring? Lillian, 9: Yes. It is in my pocket. Me: Why is my ring in your pocket? Lillian: Because I put it there when I found it in the bathroom, one of many places you leave your ring. I figured when you missed it you would ask, and then I would say pocket.
Periodic observation for the benefit of junior developers: You do not have to be embarrassed about not knowing a particular bit of syntax or API. Googling things efficiently is a core job skill. ~15 years in I'll still look up "append to array javascript."
Meta comment: this is going to be one of the longest and most heavily cited research results in the software industry. https://t.co/47gmC99RBD
Insurance: Oh and another thing while I have you on the phone about your new policy: you don't have life insurance with us. Me: I am surprised by that statement. Ins: So I have a refund check for the policy that we didn't issue. Me: Delivering me a policy via hardcopy is in...
A lot of what people presume is fixed about airline tickets is a social fiction that the airline empowers tens of thousands of people to waive if you ask nicely. (And there are other social fictional elements, like “a ticket means you definitely have a seat on the named plane.”) https://t.co/6rGuz6f34H
I learned a bit about fracking today and even relative to my prior expectation holy cow does it sound like sorcery. As one example of many, how do you think they get information from bottom of the well to top of the well while drilling?
A memorable moment in new employee training for me was when the trainer said that most people working professionally in our field could not whiteboard out funds and data flow between all entities in a credit card transaction. She asked why I could, given no experience in industry https://t.co/K5kDmpNTAG
If you’ll forgive me for getting on a frequent hobbyhorse, beyond the point about mission-driven enterprises, this is important due to the dignity of labor. Everyone is doing something meaningful or they wouldn’t be there; they should believe that. https://t.co/KbGUzXz90D
I do not want to break into the strategic popcorn reserve prematurely but the SEC’s legal writing is sometimes hilarious and devastating. https://t.co/oUJUC5JUkr
No UI choice I have ever seen is as user-hostile as this interaction. https://t.co/ozANf6abt4
Lillian (9) math homework: *picture of a leaf* What is the best estimate of the mass of this leaf? Lillian: That cannot POSSIBLY be enough information to answer this question.
The Equifax ex-CEO throwing an unnamed technician under the bus for the Equifax breach is positively maddening. Some thoughts:
Lillian, doing homework: I hurried to get on time to school. Me: Word order. Lillian: Why? Me: It’s just a thing in English; there’s only 1 order that works. Lillian: And I’m just supposed to memorize thousands of combinations. Me: Yes. Lillian: Who designed this broken language.
Crypto, as an ecosystem, is going to be in a much worse state Monday than it is popularly believed to be today.
Banker: What brings you in today? Me: Wire transfer for a house closing. Customer #2: Congratulations we are also closing! Customer #3: So are we! Hey can I maybe ask you to be a witness on a document we need? Me: Oh I am always happy to witness banking procedure. Banker: …
You’d be surprised of how much of management, consulting, teaching, senior ICing, etc is: “I want to X.” “Have you written down a plausible plan to get to X with steps listed in order?” “No.” “Alright let’s sketch it. OK step one: are you going to do it?” “Why would I do that?” https://t.co/EnPmugz8Zk
Scaled crime is a result of a business process and it’s a very useful lens to understand how that business functions for the purpose of interdicting it. https://t.co/V6kjpNEzXd
Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.
b285b048c5f1d12785b50c79e3ba30943f9a26f5968434ac65bd1a3e6fba77de255b5483b903253398f6f2775b34e1066bce13e17cba751b44e5f6ad02f30a04
Imagine you’re talking to a time traveler back in 2000: “Oh some good news: America does have end-to-end supply chain for high-value electronics.” “Really?” “Receivers for worldwide geosynchronous satellite-based ISP. Also ours.” “Holy cow.” “Private space industry, naturally.” https://t.co/7a0cWvL0m1
TSA at O’Hare: Does anyone speak Spanish? crowd: *no takers* TSA: Really? Come on folks, need help. Me: I studied it for a few years but depending on the question it might be difficult for me to… Colombian gentleman: Bro do you know where ATM is for a *brand* debit card?
An innovation in Japan which I think will arrive everywhere: double-blinded shipping, where neither the sender nor receiver know each other's address. This was negotiated by a large marketplace (Mercari), which didn't want to have to walk so many users over the privacy hump.
I suppose I'll get in on the fun: 1 like = 1 opinionated thought about the intersection of technology and finance, up to a cap of 100.
This demo is not perfect but outperforms probably four nines of all non-heritage Japanese majors in the U.S. Yiiiiiiiiikes that was not on my bingo card for this year. https://t.co/JliMwyWFRY
FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?” Me: Write a million words. Follow up: “Hah but seriously.” Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million. Follow up: “No seriously.” Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.
Stripe is doubling down on remote engineering. We’ll hire 100+ remote engineers this year. https://t.co/Ag9UJ5luQw
Bank: Can you get us account statements of all of your bank accounts to underwrite the mortgage? Me: *sigh* And this is why collecting checking accounts is eventually a painful hobby. Bank: What. Me: What. Bank: How many are we talking about? Me: I have cut down recently. Only 40
An extended anecdote to demonstrate the power of a Dangerous Professional incantation: “What are my options?”
This is one of the best UX innovations I have ever seen. https://t.co/Rt71GLekUx
I fixed the idempotency issue and added MANY safeguards. We never unintentionally duplicated a call again for the life of the company. Nobody remembers this now except me, and engineers who I tell it to, when they think that they’ve just made the worst mistake of their career.
Me: *cash* Tradesman: Wait how did you get that with the banks down? Me: *explains* Tradesman: Oh that’s creative. Me: Nah. Next plan was creative. Tradesman: What was that? Me: Going to the church and buying all cash on hand with a check. Tradesman: What. Me: I don’t drink.
It doesn't matter what a PM at Google tells you; they'll rotate outwards after next perf cycle and it will be a new PM who will be utterly powerless to stop Google's mismanagement from shutting down the project you rely on. You have to treat all non-core products as ephemeral.
Two weeks ago my buddy @fulligin pulled me aside and said "I have something to show you." That something was the Daylight Computer, which I was previously unaware of. I've since bought one and am using it fairly extensively for reading. Vincent recorded some impressions: https://t.co/xwKKo5FckH
Engagement is a toxic metric. Products which optimize for it become worse. People who optimize for it become less happy. It also seems to generate runaway feedback loops where most engagable people have a) worst individual experiences and then b) end up driving the product bus.
Show of hands: how interested would people be in an essay about software private equity?
If I had a dollar and could sell it for $1.03, and that required warehousing the dollar for a year, I’d want to shut down this process when the Treasury rate was above 3%. If OTOH I could do that every day, I’d want to do it every day. https://t.co/oJq9HJm91H
A mindset I learned the last few years which I'm getting a lot of use out of recently: "What is the much more ambitious version of that?"
Have you ever wondered if perhaps we did not understand the sense of humor of the ancients as they would have expressed through Tiktok had they had Tiktok? Because this is *definitely* getting categorized as “religious site” by future archeologists. https://t.co/m8ZhF190rk
Some people find air travel unpleasant, but every time I visit an airport, I feel like I’m witnessing an intricate worldwide logistical ballet which somehow functions absurdly well despite all the challenges of the world. Also beating gravity, as sort of a dessert.
Proud papa moment: Liam (7) doing math. “Some elephants are at a river. 2 leave. 13 are left. How many were there at the start? Write an equation and solve.” Liam: “I don’t know what ‘some’ is here so I’m putting a ? for that.”
Credit cards are a legacy system. They are extremely important to commerce worldwide, but exhibit path dependence. Much of their functioning under-the-hood derives from decisions made more than 50 years ago. Stripe is working on upgrading this critical system, for everyone.
Culture is a real thing in the world, and in a healthy engineering culture, someone not involved in immediate firefighting would take that engineer aside within minutes and say “You are probably worried for your job right now. Don’t be. Let me explain incident postmortems.” https://t.co/oDVcTjNkUK
There is no hidden reserve of smart people who know what they're doing, anywhere. Not in government, not in science, not in tech, not at AppAmaGooBookSoft, nowhere. The world exists in the same glorious imperfection that it presents with.
I cannot possibly underline this paragraph enough. https://t.co/qL1oiRgvxO
Level of ticked off I am at the moment: Very little, because I am not dead. But if I had hypothetically died in the last six months, I would have haunted their fax machines for seven generations if they had briefly tried to cite these shenanigans to my heirs.
This concludes, for the moment, an off-the-cuff list of things which would otherwise be too obvious to bring up in conversation. Meta thought: you radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it.
I think many people would be surprised at the difficulties billionaires have in converting money into smart people and/or their outputs. https://t.co/u7pes0vlFp
Ruriko: Why do you keep using that handyman? Me: He’s honest and competent. Ruriko: He forgets half of the time he has promised to come over. Me: In America, this is a classic “pick two” situation. Ruriko: So there are no honest, competent, reliable handymen? Me: “Promoted” out.
This is, FWIW, a fairly complicated area where the IRS’s position is “We won’t make trouble for small business owners unless you really go out of your way to turn your credit card into a business into itself.” https://t.co/55VshGfa4f
Some years ago I did a speech in Tokyo at a simultaneously interpeted Japanese/English. Simultaneous means attendees get an earpiece connected to an interpreter who is doing very-close-to real time interpretation.
Wow, props to Vanguard. (They made a decision to not support buying the Bitcoin ETFs as they judged this was against the interests of their users. They will certainly lose business over this and know that to be true.) https://t.co/l4uVQLN7No
The good news: we got much better at running The Sort. The bad news: we got much better at running The Sort. https://t.co/oDwEqQl71f
One of many, many instances of “Wow competent execution on basic operations management from the 1950s feels like absolute magic. I wonder why nobody thought of that.” https://t.co/NF8B6W3lJ3
I have many thoughts on this thread, but it also stands on its own. https://t.co/bKOvfPP15x
Government software contracting has many binders full of rules designed to minimize opportunities for graft and waste, which results in the following: https://t.co/QvY6LLieCp
Some emotional swings from investing: Saw Chipotle stock quoted at ~$62 today. Gadzooks, I thought. That's only a hair above my entry point in 2004. What the heck went wrong?! Read chart closer: 50:1 stock split earlier this week.
People often ask me why I live in Japan. A part: is that it is a place where I could take my daughter to lost-and-found to ask about an acorn, knowing that someone would return an acorn, knowing that someone would clearly expect a lost acorn to be returned and therefore ask. https://t.co/SeWRUI527P
I got about ~40% faster solving sudoku after casually watching an hour of YouTube (turns out sudoku YouTube is a thing) and now I’m wondering how many other things in life are shaped like this.
Without taking more than a beat she drops from the usual-level-of-difficulty E-to-J simultaneous interpretation and switches to J-to-E, with an accent maximizing for comedic effect.
If you don’t allow enough X to be produced then it isn’t the market which excludes people from having X; the market/prices just deliver the bad news to the marginal people you decided didn’t really need an X available.
The OSS community has yet to come to grips with “Companies with $50 million in the bank send an incredible volume of support requests to people who are worried about making their $600 rent, and the community and culture in OSS makes this feel normal.” https://t.co/ZSxXkTiRQz
In which an HN commenter offers me writing advice but fails to understand the implication of second sentence: https://t.co/qWZ4sDUR3n
A random thing that will probably help someone out eventually: Should you ever have the occasion to e.g. sell a company or have your startup equity become liquid, call your bank (or chat up a new bank) *in advance*, and ask "If I were to bring in new money, what's your offer?"
I am reminded of the Joker quote: “Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying!” We have legitimating institutions which are so entrapped in ritual and so removed from winning that they cannot describe what winning would even look like. https://t.co/7enCKOeqLX
Flipping between my favorite news media and the prediction markets is an interesting contrast between an institution which keenly wants to not be wrong and an institution which wants to be right.
I feel like the video game industry has not really evolved with the consumer group, still pitching "100+ hours of gameplay!" when what many of us really want is "An engaging play session wrapped up in 30 minutes while the baby is sleeping."
I have very complicated feelings about Factorio: Space Exploration, like “That might be the best game I ever played” and “The primary thing I have to show for work-like activities in the past year is this screenshot.” https://t.co/xUB5kOimBx
Me: When I was your age computers were *gestures* big and too heavy to lift. Lillian (9): And you walked up hill both ways! Me: No that is a joke but computers really were that big. Lillian: Wat. How did you take it between classes?! Me: We didn’t have them for classes.
I followed up on this tweetstorm with a longer version here: https://t.co/0cL8wiD5z3
Was curious when traveling and… are you kidding me. (I checked; GPT is right.) https://t.co/czrfUZGoeg
In-flight screen: Could we interest you in a movie? Me: Not that interested in superheroes. “How about a slice-of-life story for a Japanese salaryman?” Me: You have my attention. “He works in a bank.” Oh they made this for me. “It’s a melodrama about financial fraud.”
Worth noting, apropos of the occasional discourses about getting customer service via Twitter, that the entire U.S. government has a blessed side channel. It is calling your Congressman’s office.
The answers to all of these questions, happily provided by people old enough to remember them, are a good demonstration that the fairly recent past was actually radically worse than the present. https://t.co/AEDNNtMMvr
This is probably the second most impressive thing I’ve ever personally seen an interpreter do while being able to appreciate what makes it impressive. The most was years prior, at a E-to-J interpretation of a sales pitch for a database product. I was in audience repping a buyer.
If you were curious what it takes to get Google Cloud to issue an apology designed to insulate purchasing decisionmakers from career risk: https://t.co/MnIJHNWGQB
Me: “On an entirely different note, I find myself needing to make a transfer of 1,000 yen ($8) to reimburse my friend’s company for the coffee they so generously bought me.” Bank: “Are you sure? The fee for that transaction would be an absurd portion of the price of a coffee.”
Ruriko: You are sick. Go to the doctor. Me: I’ll call them. Ruriko: Just go. Me: That is unlikely to be successful in this country. … Ruriko: Did you call them? Me: Yes. It was a bit of rigamarole. Ruriko: How? This seems very straightforward. You are sick. He is a doctor.