On answering ~150 DMs on x.com in 48hrs
Context
Tbh, this all started with a miscommunication. I tweeted the following here:
Now, what I meant is that I had been consistently answering every random DM every time I would get to them since I started posting on X a few months ago and have no intentions of ever stopping. But because I'm an idiot, the tweet made it sound like I had just opened my DMs and was fielding questions. This led to me receiving hundreds and hundreds of DMs in the span of a few hours and grinding out discussions till 6am, followed by ~8hrs over the WE trying to get to everyone I had to energy for.
Because x.com's API is basically non-existent and I'm waiting on an archive of my x data for a real (anonymized) analysis, this is mostly vibes-based reflections.
I'll say it here in case people don't reach the bottom of this post: this was immensely humbling. First off, just the fact that tons of people reached out, and how many kind things they had to say. It was overwhelming and left me on a high for days. Then, the amount of people who told me I somehow helped -- it was hard to wrap my head around.
It's hard to get a sense on how random thoughts I post could be helping or inspiring anyone and it feels silly to even write this down. But yeah, I'm thankful that anyone ever felt I helped at all!
Categories of discussions
Now, on what I got messaged about -- I have broken them down into top and sub categories:
- CS
- Career
- Job market
- Crackedness
- Motivation
- ML
- How to get started
- How to pivot to it from a CS career
- Life choices and advices
- job reconversions
- university
- job opportunities
- family/childhood/overall life issues
There were many other themes, like robotics, hardware, aerospace engineering... none of them I am truly qualified to answer. I made sure to specify that for anything outside of the very narrow domain I can give meaningful advice for, or just redirected to smarter people.
In each top and sub-categories, there were recurring questions
- How do I get cracked at X? (lowbie skills/just starting out/feels overwhelmed)
- I'm learning too many things at once, is it OK?
- How do I get to the job market as fast as possible?
- I'm on the job market, but it's hard to get a job. What can I do to increase my odds?
- I'm here, what's my next steps if I want to get there?
- usually there was more money, a dream position or reaching a place where they get to live how they want to live
Because I wrote down an answer from scratch to every single person and I am still waiting on my X personal data dump, I'll have to wait before feeding the DMs to an LLM and publish a much nicer curated FAQ later on. For now, here's the broad category of answers I gave:
- always mix a bottom-up and top-down approach of heavy theory/fundamentals paired with top-down building
- accept blackboxing concepts when in top-down build mode
- it's not too late, you're not too old
- understand that no matter what you do, there are no tricks and it will take years and years and years: expand your time horizon enough so you feel comfortable with the ups and downs, the countless tangents, etc
- hard work is hard work -- reading and studying is not enough, doing is required
Some reflections
One thing that stuck out to me is I was more comfortable helping people who were already a bit on their way vs people who were completely new. Same with people who had a very high interest vs people who don't really like X/Y/Z but want the $.
Partly because the answer for people who were just starting or completely new to X/Y/Z was mostly: "here are some resources, don't overthink what's the best resource, come back to me in 3-6 weeks" or "you have to try really hard for 10 years, here's the domain and its fundamentals, go and do things in it"
Some people were already so brilliant, there wasn't much I could do but to wish them along -- there was no help I could meaningfully give outside of reassurance and vague pointers.
Some categories of people who stood out:
- peeps with tons of side projects and/or technical writings, who did things that most people don't attempt
- peeps with objectives that are imposed on them by life: no money, bad families or other issues --> maybe I was projecting but I feel like that tends to last for longer than burst of motivations
- people who came in with very pointed questions with lots of context given from the get-go
- people working at top, top companies already and who were looking to further their growth or to pivot in another domain
A lot of people also came in with minimal context and very vague questions "how do I land a high-paying job", "should I drop out of X to do Y". Every time that happened, I just asked for a context-dump large enough to be able to answer.
Loose conclusion
Overall, I'd say:
- nearly everyone (if not everyone?) answered back
- around 50% of the convos stopped after the initial topic was discussed
- around 50% came back to me a few more times with different topics
- around ~25% of them came back to me after a few days to showcase their progress, or let me know what worked/didn't
- around 5% I still chat with every now and then!
One big thing that surprised me is how many people absolutely poured their heart out to me, writing at length and giving me as much context as possible. It was surprising at first, because I wondered: why would anyon ask me anything? How could I even help them, like, what do I even know? But I tried to honor their ask, preface when I wasn't qualified to give meaningful advice and overall just tried to give some of my time by dumping my honest thoughts. I left it up to people to decide if they were helpful or not.
Would I do this again with the same format? No, not especially. X DMs are awful, I had to make lists to keep track of people, there were no "pre-requisites" to contact me (which led to me asking for more context countless times) etc...
Would I do it in a different format, maybe by mail and over a narrow set of domains? Absolutely!
Anyway, here's a random collage of like the last 15 DMs I just put together:
