Technology on Sasha Katsnelson

News Diet

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today I start my news diet. Trying to keep up with the US, Spanish, New York, global, and tech news on the 25-hour-cycle has become too exhausting. Despite feeling like an ostrich burying my head in the sand, I will try to ignore the news 6-days per week and spend an hour or two over the weekend catching up on important stories. Specifically, I will endeavor:

not to scroll left on my android phone’s home screen
not to open news links that aren’t relevant to my immediate tasks
not to engage with social media that isn’t immediately and personally relevant to me
to avoid taking a stance in conversations about current events

Let’s see how it goes and if I manage to maintain my diet + cheat-day for a few weeks.

Thoughts on Product Management Interviews

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Product managers have a few different jobs depending on the organization we’re working with, but inevitably we find ourselves doing a lot of organizing and a lot of communicating. In the course of my career I’ve been through all kinds of product interviews - they almost all follow a common pattern: Introduction Call → Fit and/or Tech Interview → Homework → Fit and/or Tech Interviews (repeat) → Senior Manager conversation → Offer → Negotiation

Bitcoin for Muggles

Tue, 19 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If witches and wizards made Bitcoin - it might look something like this:

Imagine a simple leather journal with a small red gem embedded in the cover. All of the pages except the last one are full - columns of hard-to-understand runes and numbers stretch from edge to edge. You notice thirty-two entries organized in two columns on each page, each entry consisting of 2 runes and a number. On the last page every so often, another line appears - rune, rune, number - and when the page fills, the journal shimmers and a new page is added.

Abandoned and Set Adrift

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Thinking is really hard. After a long day of work and then expending energy maintaining relationships, my body, and my home - I don’t always have much left to do the research necessary to form sensible, well-informed opinions about topics that I feel are important.

Health-care, police violence, taxation, welfare, immigration, and the list goes on - I have intuitions about the effects of various policies based on what I have read in the moments of distraction between things I should be doing - but I know that those are informed by my filter bubble.

Annoying Journalism

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s how much money doctors actually make - it’s a catchy headline, but it summarizes a single article and then passes it off as research…

I don’t mean to pick on Business Insider in particular, but this is a great example of the kind of journalism that I’ve found frustrating. BI has an annual article that pretends to analyze doctor salaries - 2016, 2017. In 2017, it’s just pulling two charts from a single Medscape article and then describing them… there’s a lot of interesting content discoverable with a google search or even a look at the Medscape references. The articles miss a ton of nuance, e.g., controlling for specialty, seniority, hours worked, and some other factors black male physicians earn 35% less than their white male counterparts, a significantly larger gap than the 13% the BI article indicates - but women don’t have a disparity in pay between black and white doctors (more here).

Nebo Note Taking

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I spent quite a bit of time playing with Nebo and have enjoyed the experience. The controls aren’t quite as precise or intuitive as I’d like ideally, but it’s a huge step towards making my note-taking a purely digital experience. I think that the value I get from having my iPad as my paper and as shareable, searchable text is high enough that I’m willing to deal with the recognition errors in many cases.