Advice on jodavaho.io

Dealing with people smarter than you

hello@jodavaho.io (jodavaho) — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, at all stages of my career/education, people much more intelligent than I am. I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting people more productive, industrious, capable, and learned than I am (not always the same!).

Being a human, probably descended from social animals, I have the same first instinct of insecurity or feelings of regret. “Why can’t I be X like Bob/Alice is?”. Over the years this attitude has done more harm than good, which of course it must, but now after 20 years I have real hard-won evidence of it in opportunities lost, respect lessened, and sharp words from others.¹

However, there is a useful side effect of this jealousy, which is worth keeping. Any system of people benefits from some healthy competition, and the better the competitors, the better the competition.

So, enough ado: Here is my hard-won advice for dealing with people better (in some way) than you are:

Recognize illusions

People in any competitive environment (and most multi-person environments are competitive in some way), will provide a convenient illusion of self. They either do this intentionally or accidentally, but even portraying yourself as someone who refuses to front is itself a decision to front. There is no escaping this game.²

So, immediately, you can ask yourself a useful question: Is this person presenting a prepared illusion and does the evidence support my perceived ranking of this illusion vs my total (but imperfect) remembrance of myself?

Two things happen with this reframing:

The recognition that you experience < 1% of their reality, and it’s likely the best 1% that they can muster
The recognition that you experience most of your own reality, and it’s likely the worst stuff that comes up during comparisons.³

This is an old trick! And (2) above is even worse because of the natural tendency to find evidence to support the framing of “this person is smarter than I am”. So avoid that narrative trap, and recognize the illusion for what it is, and the false comparison it triggers.

Concrete actions: When you encounter a person immeasurably better than you, humanize them, talk with them, see if the illusion is dispelled. If not, you may just make a friend anyway.

Recognize choices

Hang on, is that person smarter than you are? Maybe during a whiteboard session they presented some intuitive solution to a hard problem that nobody considered. Intelligence would be supported if they made that connection on the spot, but was it intelligence after all?

Feynman himself, in “Surely you’re joking” had this story to tell:⁴

That book also showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign

it’s a certain operation. It turns out that’s not taught very much in the universities; they don’t emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. […] So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.

Feynman was definitely an intelligent person, but was he also borrowing a little niche experience and using that to solve problems seemingly magically?

It’s important to recognize experience, and choices in the path to success, and a person’s set of choices are probably very different than yours. And you can leverage your own unique insights all the time, probably without knowing it.

Concrete action: When someone has a unique insight, attribute it to experience, and (folding into prior) ask them for background and insights so that you can do this yourself!
Concrete action: When you have an insight into a problem, think about why you made that leap - was it prior experience? Do you deflate the value of your own experience (“I just saw that before”), while discounting the effect of experience on others’ success (“They are uniquely smart regardless of experience”).

Why reframe this way? There is immense danger (to self worth) in attributing others’ successes to immutable qualities of others,⁵ and ascribing your own inadequacy to your own immutable qualities. Once you have decided that you are inadequate / lesser, and simultaneously decided that you are supposed to be better at indicating immutable superiority (see next point), you have gone down a dark, self-limiting path.⁶

Recognize opportunity

Maybe that person isn’t immutably superior. Maybe they have tricks that help them succeed.

Now here’s the opportunity: Learn from them.

OK, I hear you recoiling. This is Machiavellian. It’s inhuman to use people this way. Surely you cannot just attach yourself to a person for the purposes of bettering yourself.

Yes, you can! You just can’t be surreptitious or Machiavellian about it. If your goal here is to prop yourself up to appear superior - you are the problem, not this advice. But if your goal is to better yourself, to pick up skills and tricks, and possibly to make a lifelong friend from a capable coworker, then nobody can fault you for that! That’s why humans come together to work side by side on hard things. It’s our way of improving the lot of life.

Concrete action: allow others to better you, and be intentional about it.

There are certainly environments like Academic research, or curve-graded courses, or limited-headcount government labs that are closer to “zero sum”.

That means that in these environments much can be gained by pulling down the best, because it is a “winner take more” environment.⁷ That’s the Machiavellian angle. It’s tempting to consider a smarter person to be in competition with you for a limited reward pool. Better grades, better pay, better glory, etc.

But …

Recognize false scarcity

Even in seemingly zero-sum environments, like those above, life is never actually zero sum. It can be falsely arranged to appear so, in individual circumstances, but it’s never the case in actuality, because life proceeds over multiple dimensions, and with strange payouts.

But let’s attack the math directly: Well, consider the classic prisoners' dilemma. In this game you have two options: Tear down your colleague, or build them up. But they make the same decision about you.

The outcomes are:

Both build up - moderate reward for both
Both tear down - moderate loss for both
One builds, other tears - best payout for the tear-downer, at the expense of the build-upper.

Play it out and you get the strategy of betrayal.⁸

But play it out again and again, where the cumulative gains /losses are the score, and a trust-based strategy dominates. In particular, you have to lead with trust to get the best outcomes.⁹ (There’s actually a stronger result here: when scarcity is introduced and the players consider each other to be ruthless logicians, the strategy flips at the end. After a long cooperation sequence, when the end of the game is announced and near, the player strategies switch to betrayal pretty quickly. But this falls down very quickly even with repeated games. The lesson here might be to carefully avoid people and environments that are predisposed to ruthless betrayal-based payoffs! I’m reminded of this story: ¹⁰ of the wife who, diagnosed with terminal cancer, decided divorce + flings was the right move. Calling this a “defection” might be a stretch, but being near the end clearly changed the calculus for her… but back to everyday reality ….)

Axelrod’s first rule for players in the winning strategy is literally “don’t be envious.” The math arrives at the same advice we’re stating right now! There’s another, more entertaining lesson about false scarcity: Pirates! ¹¹ Stateless, greedy, anarchistic pirate crews had a strong sense of collaboration in their creed.

And note again, the cold, mathematical result for pirates (most senior pirate takes 98% of all proceeds) completely contradicts reality, just like prisoner’s dilemma! Real life favors group results that are cooperative.

After 20 years, both of these cooperative examples feel more real to me, and the best benefit I’ve had long term comes from learning from (and even elevating) those people who are most capable. It’s worth it to be on a team of high achievers. There’s plenty of good to go around. This is especially true in industry - a better widget should benefit everyone, especially the people making the widget.

(note: this is only true in competitive marketplaces. read socialist manifesto for the dystopian case of non-competitive markets and imagine how the above collaborative advice might change)¹²

Recognize negativity

Despite the advice above, there will be people who are genuinely darkly competitive, adversarial, prideful, etc. They will be threatened by you, just as you are tempted to feel threatened by others.

Along the road of working on oneself, you’ll quickly start to recognize people who you just wish would walk the same path you are. You’ll recognize your past insecurities and past delusions / illusions that prevented you from reaching your happiest most productive and collaborative self. As much as it is (it will be!) a struggle to fix that in yourself, you must recognize that you can only show the way. It is nearly impossible to truly change others.

Concrete action: If a person is truly darkly narcissistic or adversarial, just avoid playing their game. They are running the scarcity mindset and that will haunt them long term.
Concrete non-action: Do not try to change others. If you simply must get some advice to them, do it by example, or worst case, a blog post.

The clinical name for the opening feeling is the impostor phenomenon: Pauline R. Clance and Suzanne A. Imes, “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women”, Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice 15(3), 1978. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome ↩︎
Erving Goffman got here in 1956: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Everyone runs a “front stage” (audience-aware performance) and a “back stage” (preparation), and the labor of impression management is invisible by design — if the audience notices the effort, the performance has failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life ↩︎
The popular form of exactly this: “we’re comparing our behind-the-scenes with everybody else’s highlight reel.” Steven Furtick, Crash the Chatterbox (Multnomah, 2014); the line circulated in sermons and on social media from at least 2013. ↩︎
Richard P. Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Norton, 1985), ch. “A Different Box of Tools”, pp. 71–72. His high school physics teacher, Mr. Bader, sent him to the back of class with Woods’s Advanced Calculus (1926), a junior/senior college text covering Fourier series, Bessel functions, elliptic functions — and differentiating parameters under the integral sign, which the standard university sequence skipped. The technique is Leibniz’s, from 1697; it is called “Feynman’s trick” only because he popularized it. Widely reproduced as quoted in Keith Conrad, “Differentiating Under the Integral Sign”, https://kconrad.math.uconn.edu/blurbs/analysis/diffunderint.pdf ↩︎
This is the fundamental attribution error: over-attributing others’ behavior to disposition rather than to situation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error ↩︎
Carol Dweck, Mindset (2006), calls this the fixed mindset ↩︎
The mechanism has a name, and it was documented in academia specifically: the Matthew effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect ↩︎
Nicky Case, The Evolution of Trust (2017), https://ncase.me/trust/ — a playable, public-domain, in-browser iterated prisoner’s dilemma. You play hands, then run tournaments and evolutionary simulations of tit-for-tat, always-cheat, always-cooperate, grudger, detective, and others. Its stated conclusion is nearly your argument verbatim: cooperation requires repeat interactions, possible win-wins, and low miscommunication. Strategy notes at https://ncase.me/trust/notes/ ↩︎
Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (Basic Books, 1984), from his 1980 computer tournaments — won both times by tit-for-tat, submitted by Anatol Rapoport and the shortest program entered. Axelrod’s four rules for players: don’t be envious; don’t be the first to defect; reciprocate both cooperation and defection; don’t be too clever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

Worth knowing that the theory and the simulations disagree here, and the simulations win. Game theory says a known, finite number of rounds unravels to mutual betrayal by backward induction, and yet Axelrod’s first tournament ran a fixed 200 rounds and tit-for-tat won it outright; he only switched to probabilistic termination (p = 0.00346 per round) in the second tournament to damp end-game effects, and tit-for-tat won that one too. The unraveling proof needs common knowledge of rationality, not merely a known endpoint. Kreps, Milgrom, Roberts and Wilson, “Rational Cooperation in the Finitely Repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma”, Journal of Economic Theory 27(2):245–252 (1982), showed that perturbing that assumption by any amount
- one player assigning nonzero probability to the other being a committed tit-for-tat type - makes cooperation rational, with defection confined to a bounded number of end rounds however long the game. Practically, this means that if you have any shred of doubt about the pervasive, persistent, ruthlessness of your opponent, cooperation is an ideal strategy. https://milgrom.people.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/1982/08/RationalCooperation.pdf
↩︎
Molly Kochan (1973–2019). Dying for Sex (Wondery, 2020), Screw Cancer: Becoming Whole, published posthumously in 2020. “The True Story Behind ‘Dying For Sex’ — What Happened To Molly Kochan?”, Forbes, 4 April 2025, https://www.forbes.com/sites/monicamercuri/2025/04/04/the-true-story-behind-dying-for-sex-what-happened-to-molly-kochan/, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Kochan. ↩︎
Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691150093/the-invisible-hook. Pirate Game backward-induction puzzle, in which the senior of five pirates keeps 98 of 100 coins by bribing two juniors with one each. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_game ↩︎
Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (Basic Books, 2019) ↩︎

So you want to move from backend code to robotics systems

hello@jodavaho.io (jodavaho) — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I got a really good question sent to me, and I’d like to archive the response here…

I mostly use Go (previously Java) and am exploring Rust for unmanned systems, particularly embedded work and autonomy like navigation and perception. Given your domain expertise, I’d love to hear your perspective:

I’m bullish on Rust long term. If you’re coming from Go/Java, then you’ve already got the “backend” covered, and a lot of robotics happens in “backend”-like code. So, rust here is more of a curiosity / lateral move for you. Great to try, not required. You could start right now by developing implementations of robotics-like things and making a backend.

Very little “solving” happens on small machines, it happens on on-system servers running in docker, usually. The small computers do little things, usually. So, you can definitely get started with pathfinding, optimization, mapping, image processing in Rust right now, and build small automous systems that mostly live in something you’d call a “backend”. Then plug a webcam in, and hit your “backend” with imagery and you’re off to the races.

If you’re more interested in “robotics systems”, then there’s really no substitute for learning ROS. While ROS is a bit dated, and most serious shops built their own version, ROS2.0 has a bunch of normal practices in it, and every custom robotics framework is defacto compared to ROS2.0 nowadays. This implies C++ and CMake, it’s really hard to get around that. Though there are Rust wrappers and ROS2.0 Rust compliant messaging libraries.

If you’re more interested in “on the metal” code, then ROS2.0 is still relevant, but we’re more into the firmware level things. C is the king here (still). Firmware generally does very little more than manage custom hardware like motors, low level sensors, etc. It often doesn’t do the “thinking”.

So if you’re looking to get into robotics, C and C++ are still the industry breadwinner.

Rust is a great language for this domain, but the libraries and industry adoption is lagging a little. There’s just no serious reason to rewrite your entire stack in Rust at this time, when robotics products are not very mature yet. I definitely have seen production Rust code that flies in warzones, so it does exist, but it’s commonly an outlier.

One huge benefit of Rust that is often overlooked is the immediate compatability of types, build systems, and dependency management across the firmware, system, and backend. This is what will eventually cause Rust to catch up to C++, but it may never replace it and doesn’t need to.

Guide to Working Weekends

hello@jodavaho.io (jodavaho) — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Coffee on a monday after a productive weekend, here’s what went well this time. Much better than usual!

Don’t work weekends

If at all possible, keep time to yourself on the weekend. Use it to read, relax, catch up on housework, do hobbies, spend time with wife or kids (or date otherwise). Etc. You need breaks, mentally, to remain sharp, and physically, to remain energetic.

So, it should be the default mode to not work on the weekends. But, sometimes that thing is broken, the deadline is looming, the competition is knocking, etc…

So how do you recharge (or at least not ruin your next week), while still being productive? Here’s what just worked for me.

Have a supportive partner

The best weekend warrior advice I can give is to have a supportive partner, which is also the best life I can give. Partner up with someone who knows and appreciates what you’re going though, preferably having been there before. My powerhouse wife has a 10x work ethic over me, and also (somewhat telling) has 10x the work boundaries that I do.

Tell people you need the time

Give time family, friends, or anyone else who is counting on you to adjust their plans. I had been telling my wife for two weeks I was going to be in a crunch and needed the time. We worked together to make that time.

Work on highest net happiness tasks

Maybe there’s a bit of work you wanted to do, but it wasn’t the highest priority for everyone. Do that now! It’s your time, and assuming you’re a decent employee, you gave it everything you had during the week. If you must give more, at least prioritize the tasks that will provide the most relief or enjoyment once they are done.

Take breaks

Code has to compile, emails might need a reply, Claude is busy having an existential crisis. Either way, go outside, to the gym, read a little, watch part of a movie, vacuum the floor, play with legos, listen to an audiobook. Hell, go have a margarita on the back porch. This time is yours, spend it how you want.

Unless your livelihood is threatened with imminent demise (and it almost never is, even if your emotions might say it is), you should not be over-exerting yourself during personal time.

Be alone

There’s something really awful about explaining to your kids that you cannot go play bubbles outside because you have to work. For me, at least, even seeing my wife go about her day pulls me away from work.

Worse, if you’re following this advice, and everyone is around to see you take a margarita break during a Claude task, you might be in for some difficult misunderstandings. “I thought you had to work!” is the seed for guilt (for you) and feelings of being taken advantage of (for them).

Send the kids, partner, etc to a spa day or trip to grandparents, maybe, but don’t add to the guilt by having them mope around the house while you burn yourself out.

Make it up to them

No doubt your spouse is pulling extra weight while you’re working. Or your friends are noticing you missed the event. I can’t emphasize enough:

Life is short, and consistently distancing yourself from those you love will have long term consequences for your happiness.

You’ll want to make it up to them. Do extra work around the house, cover your partner when it is their turn. Buy dinner for friends next time.

Have something to show

For employer, family, and friends, you want to have something good to show for the extra time. Tell your spouse you’re in a better place now, give your boss some extra results, etc. Check in Monday morning right away with something to show.

Now, there’s a risk of coming across as a performative worker. Those are the worst. Depending on your team culture, it might be best to keep the results just between you and the boss, or to somewhat downplay them. Weigh the tradeoffs, but if someone had to bend their schedule to allow you to work when you normally don’t, you better have something to show for it.

Conscientiousness is (almost) all you need

hello@jodavaho.io (jodavaho) — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Why do GPA and ACT scores matter?

Recently, there’s been some pushback against standardized tests and college entrance exams. It begs the question: What is all this testing good for? After all, well-to-do families and students can spend more time preparing for these exams, making them an unfair indicator of wealth moreso than IQ.

I propose: They are not a measure of ability but of rule-following, self-regulation, and preparadness. If this is true, the fact that you can study for these tests isn’t a bug, but a feature. If we were measuring IQ or “raw” ability for some kind of meritocratic system, we’d want a test you could not study for.

So why measure someone’s ability (and willingness) to study? Becasue then we’re measuring conscientiousness. And, it turns out conscientiousness is (almost) all you need.

Let’s rewind

Undergraduate GPA predicts lifetime earnings¹, incoming test scores and GPA are highly predictive of undergraduate GPA², advanced degrees (which increase earnings), and increased earnings within degrees ³, ⁴. I suggest these effects are because being a good student aka “eating books” is correlated with conscientiousness. They show up to lectures, prepare, and test well. And while test scores may be influenced by socioeconomic status, once that is removed, they are still an excellent predictor of grades².

And conscientiousness is very highly correlated with lifetime achievement, AND fufillment ⁵. So measuring conscientiousness, and signalling high conscientiousness is a really good idea.

IQ is great, but conscientiousness is how you get things done ⁶

Related: creation is our higher purpose

Four layers of self-improvement

hello@jodavaho.io (jodavaho) — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been tracking my OKR’s since 2014. Sometimes I accomplish what I set out for, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I accomplish what I put in OKRs but didn’t accomplish what I wanted.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

There are usually four types of OKRs, and not differentiating types makes it really hard to get what you wanted
Not only are there four, but they are roughly speaking prerequisites of each other.
Not only that, but looking at all the self-help books I’ve read, it actually seems like most the books also fit into these four categories, and just reading them out of order makes no sense.

These categories are:

Intent-building (actions that create action). Perhaps these are better known as “values”. When lost, you feel listless.
Foundational stuff (actions that everyone needs to do to be “better”). Basic self care is here. When lost, you feel unhealthy and “stuck” even if you have good intent.
Focus activities (the stuff you need to realize your specific vision of self). Family, job duties, social activities, etc are here. These “round out” an otherwise healthy person.
Specialized activities (the stuff that really defines who you are). These are the things you are proud of. Resume-level or hobby-level things like “I love boxing” or “I love making cabinets”.

So my strategy going forward is to work from the bottom up. If I find a day where I can’t get anything done, I’ll at least work on intent. Maybe it seems obvious, but just focusing on what I want and planning a better tomorrow makes tomorrow much easier. And focusing on intent allows you to remember throughout the day to work on your goals. Lately, just taking a break from work during the day to move an inch forward is a huge help. For example 10 pullups between meetings.

Anyway, I will shortly analyze 3rd quarter, but for now, this idea of layering on improvements is something I’m noodling as I redefine what success looks like.

The Sawtooth Career

hello@jodavaho.io (jodavaho) — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On the optimality of sawtooth careers

I was having lunch at JPL with their Chief Engineer, Rob Manning. Normally, you’d expect the Chief Eng. to reserve their time for more important people, but that’s not how JPL works.

I had posted in the New Researcher Support Group slack channel, asking for stories from folks who regret some part of their career. Gloomy, I know. He was curious, and so we we got lunch.

Being early career is fraught with uncertainty. What should I specialize in? How can I make an impact? etc.

He cut through it pretty quickly with his model for an optimal career: The sawtooth.

Behold, the sawtooth graph

Rob said that he had a horrible character flaw, in that when he got bored of something he’d usually leave to do something else¹. This led to him perpetually entering new fields as a beginner, asking dumb questions and holding himself accountable to learning quickly. He said this breadth of perspective allowed him to become a far better engineer over time.²

I respect that. Tying it back, it helped me see that just doing something, and doing it fully, is better than not. If you hate it, at least you did it, and now you can go dedicate yourself to something else.

For that reason I was perfectly happy not applying for management positions when I left Amazon. Even though this is kind of a step down. Or, when I was a manager, I could get over it and do small little contributions to small little projects because I could learn something.

As a meta-cognitive skill, I’d like to become better at walking into new areas as a beginner, and less reluctant to do so. Less pearl clutching, more exploration.

In the last 3 years, my saw-teeth have been:

Learning to optimize with SIMD, CUDA, and what you might call “esoteric problem reformulations”.
Beginning projects in new languages. Zig, Rust, or (since I rarely use it anymore) C.
Diving into backend development with both feet, especially on AWS and vercel.

These should be evident in projects.

And, going forward, I’d really love to do more:

High performance or low-latency computing
Image processing, especially for tracking
Work/research on parallelization for search, esp in game theory or discrete optimization

Now I just need to figure out how.

Clearly the chief eng of JPL knows how to finish projects, so I suspect he meant on the scale of years, not days. ↩︎
“May you have breadth over years, and depth over days” – maybe this will catch on? ↩︎