Jeremy’s Annual Review 2016

As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been using the system of objectives and key requirements (OKRs) to keep track of how I’ve been faring, looking at various metrics. I think OKRs do tell a significant part of the story, but they certainly don’t cover everything; a year is certainly long enough that things can change direction massively. There may be unexpected things that have come along for better or worse.

Why am I doing this? Reviews in general help me to reflect on the direction I’ve been taking, and allow me to consider how I should orient myself in the next period under consideration. I also find that being held publicly accountable is useful in spurring myself to perform better.

I’ll split this into three main sections: what went well, what did not go well and what major lessons were learnt. There’ll be another post to come concerning targets for the next year, though I’m sure some of the information here will feed back into that.

Things that went well:

1. Academics at Imperial. There is still certainly room for improvement, but scoring 100 percent in the project and a 94.5 average for the final year blew even my best expectations away (95 and 92, respectively). I wasn’t too happy with some of the scores for the modules I took, but I think all things considered this was a very solid finish to four arduous years.
2. Contracting at Palantir. I think working part-time as a software engineer during the term was great, though I realise the long hours (mainly because context switching became super expensive) had nontrivial costs. The main drivers behind this involved maintaining the currency of my skills as a developer as well as keeping in touch with the team at Palantir, and I think both ends were achieved here.
3. Friendships. I was expecting the worst after we moved on from Imperial, but I’ve been keeping in touch with a fair few people. It hasn’t always been the easiest thing to do and it’s certainly caused me a lot of stress (unfortunately, it might have also had that effect on said friends), but I find maintaining good communication very worthwhile and I’m happy to have friends who also (at least seem to) believe this is important.
4. Travels. I don’t mind a small amount of travel, but for various reasons was faced with a London – San Francisco – Palo Alto – Washington DC – New York – London – Singapore – London trip which ordinarily is more than I would like. Nonetheless I broke this down into small chunks and handled each leg of the journey smoothly. Besides the aforementioned trip I also had another visit to Palo Alto earlier in the year as well.
5. Writing. I think at least over the past three months or so when I started here, I’ve been a lot more disciplined with sticking to a schedule and forcing myself to express my thoughts.

Things that didn’t go so well:

1. Acquaintances. I’d have liked to keep in touch with more people from uni. I know this goes against the third point above, though that focuses more on the closest friends I had at Imperial whilst this focuses more on quantity.
2. Working hours. Subsequent to a previous post where I explained how I tracked time at Imperial, there have been spikes above 80 and approaching 90 even, which is something I need to learn to control. I think I tend to have a very strong bias towards action, plus I do know that I can be very determined; but this can lead to such situations.
3. Shifting standards / “the problem of never settling”. I find that I’m usually able to identify weaknesses and then address them (good), but there will always be more weaknesses to find, and a high quality bar very often has pretty heavy costs too. I’ll spend some time over the next two weeks to clear my head on this. As always there’s the flip side to this which probably leads to my current attitude, that settling for less-than-great performance isn’t ideal as well.
4. Investments. I’m largely a defensive investor, as Benjamin Graham would call it. I invest every month when my paycheck comes in, and diversify into a portfolio of passive and active funds (this is needed in some cases, such as for access to small-value). Yet there were many occasions this year where the markets kept me up at night or had me worried, when they really shouldn’t. I have a tendency to be very aggressive with these (I bought in after Brexit; not so much after Trump since there wasn’t really a significant drop there once the markets opened).

Key lessons I learned (largely chronological):

1. “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great”. (You might recognise this as a quote from Tom Hanks’s A League Of Their Own.) I think I’ve generally liked to put myself through my paces, but this came out of the depths of working with MCMAS-Dynamic. In a way finishing that project gave me some kind of further validation that the 90%+ grades and the strong performance reviews I had were warranted. Sure, it can be painful, but the sense of accomplishment I often get when successfully pulling off something really difficult is great. And even at the end (before the grades) I was still concerned the project was not hard enough!
2. Sometimes I need to take the first step. I’d say I learned this most clearly in what I call the post-Imperial crash period, when I started realising that a number of my friends would no longer be in London. I was somewhat concerned about how things would go from then on, and this caused me a fair bit of stress. I became considerably more proactive with many of them, and it seems things have worked out better than what I expected.
3. “If you’re made to wait, it’s for your own good”. Performing high-quality work takes time. During MCMAS-Dynamic I found that after 8 hours or so per day I had difficulty maintaining my concentration; I thus switched my strategy from firing off those 11 or 12-hour days during the term that required comparatively less abstract reasoning to an 8 hour a day 7 day a week model. I was pretty drained out by the end, still. I’d be inclined to think that the pure technical difficulty of MCMAS-Dynamic is higher than anything I’ve had to face so far at Palantir, but I’ve similarly run into seeming brick walls with some of my work (though generally have not been implementing the 7 day a week thing). The quote above was introduced to me by a teammate who was concerned by the hours I’d been working; I think it was intended to be in an outgoing direction (that is, I might be making others wait for their own good), but it could also apply to some extent in the other way (that is, doubling down on effort in an attempt to rush something out is not always a good idea; being forced to slow down might be better).