Fadi Boulos

Lebanon 🇱🇧 is known for its vibrant night life. It also has a record in software engineering outsourcing. Some reasons behind this tiny country's growing talent hub 👇🏼

This made my day!

Scott Galloway: "In the 60 minutes following its earnings release, Nvidia added the value of Ford, Ferrari, and GM to its market cap." 🤯🤯🤯

Top 3 reasons that make developers stay at their current company according to HackerRank's Developer Skills report: 1. Learning new skills 2. Team and culture 3. Career growth opportunities Happy to be giving all three top priority at Supportful.

Why do tech startups hire staff augmentation companies? 1. To accelerate their MVP journey with experienced engineers. 2. To enjoy flexibility and speed, the cherished startup traits. 3. To access cost-effective tech talent that delivers.

"Walk across the pedestrian bridge over the river - if there's water, walk slowly as it can be slippery." These were the most unconventional instructions I ever got to access a meeting venue. And it turned out totally worth it! The scenery, the host, and the discussion topics. Thanks for your hospitality (and for the tasty lemons), @Achkar!

A California-based startup founder after working with us for 2 months: "I always knew that working with Lebanese software engineers was going to be great. I just didn't know it was going to be that great." 💘

Who wants to see my FAILURE resume? I came across this concept in a thoughtful Ask Me Anything session by @ItsAJThomas with the @RunningRemote community. A failure resume includes your learnings and failures - instead of your achievements and awards - throughout your journey. It is meant to remind oneself to always be humble, to accept failure as part of the process, and to draw lessons from every experience. So, I grabbed my last resume and looked at every section of it to answer 2 questions: 1. What have I failed to do? 2. What was the main lesson learned? The result was a nice failure resume 👇🏼 Here's to our learnings... and failures.

According to @deel's State of Global Hiring Report, software engineering is again the #1 role that companies hire for remotely. I don't see this changing at least in the next few years.

My 3 tips to avoid technical debt when building your MVP: • Keep it simple: stick to what is most important and avoid using "trendy" tools for the sake of using them. • Design for scalability: your architecture should be able to scale without major rewrites. • Have the right team: work with experienced leads and engineers who can maintain a clean codebase.

Full report: atlassian.com/blog/distribut…

I read @Atlassian's report about the lessons learned from 1,000 days of distributed work. Here are the most important findings for me: 🖥️ First off, distributed work describes how work gets done, not where. It's typically online. 📈 92% of Atlassian employees say that flexibility makes them more productive. 🚄 Atlassians save 10 days per year each in commute time. ✅ The number of candidates per role is 2x higher since Atlassian became a distributed company. ⏲️ Collaborators need about 4 overlapping work hours per day to be effective. 🫱🏼‍🫲🏼 Bringing teams together 2-3 times a year is essential for bonding. 📞 Meetings should take up no more than 30% of the week. ⌛ Meeting duration can be 5 minutes or 2 hours, depending on the objective. The link to the full report is in the first comment 👇🏼

A client to me about the software engineer assigned to them: "I'm super happy, it's everything I hoped for in a software engineer: honest, fast, and great code quality." 🚀🚀🚀

Me to a 13yo kid: How much time do you spend on TikTok every day? Him: 2 hours. What about you? Me: I don't have TikTok. I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter. Him: Twitter is the streaming platform, right?

"How likely are you to recommend Supportful as a place to work?" This question was part of our annual employee satisfaction survey. We've been consistently gathering the feedback of Supportful employees about their role, the client they're working with, and the workplace. I believe in the value of this survey because our employees are "our biggest customers" (credit: Dart Lindsley from Google). The answers to "On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend Supportful as a place to work?" determines the company's employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). According to the "Academy to Innovate HR", eNPS in the 10-30 range is generally considered good. A score above 50 is excellent. The 2023 eNPS of Supportful is 56 🚀 So happy and proud!

If you're interested in getting 2 months free of LinkedIn Premium, send a DM. LinkedIn has offered me a referral link which will give you a 2-month free trial. Only 10 spots are available. First come, first served.

Software engineering path #1: college, internship, looking for a job Software engineering path #2: bootcamp, side projects, headhunted Choose your path.

I listened to Bill Gates' conversation with Sam Altman, and boy, was it so insightful! Here are some interesting facts and takes about AI: The person who built GPT-1 did it by himself, with no real deep understanding of the "science" behind it. It was an empirical discovery. Multimodality is the next milestone in LLMs: a mixture of input formats such as text, images, videos and similar output. Other mid-range objectives include improving ChatGPT's reasoning ability and reliability (getting the optimal output every time). Currently, ChatGPT spends the same amount of compute whether solving a complex math equation or coming up with a sentence. Adaptive compute is needed. AI regulation: Altman sees it done via a global agency (like IAEA) inspecting and approving very powerful models because of the huge impact they will have on the future on humanity. AI can do tasks today; in the future, it will be able to do jobs: "Create a company for me", "Discover new physics", etc. ChatGPT's best productivity gain is currently in coding. It's allowing developers to code 3x faster. AI will force society to adapt to changes at a pace never seen before with previous technological revolutions. This could prove to be problematic as society generally needs a couple of generations to absorb big changes. OpenAI tackled robotics early on, but had to put the project on hold. They needed to focus on intelligence and cognition to avoid robots making physical damage to human co-workers when things go wrong. When OpenAI started, they thought they'll make a breakthrough first in robots and blue-collar jobs, second in white-collar jobs, and last (or never) in creativity. Things eventually went in the complete opposite direction. AI poses a challenge about the human purpose in life if it's going to do most of the work for us in the future. What are we going to do then? Altman is afraid that his role at OpenAI "might be the last hard thing he ever does". AI technology is getting less expensive. OpenAI brought the cost of ChatGPT-3 down by a factor of 40 in around 3 years. AI cost reduction will beat Moore's law. The average age of employees at OpenAI is above industry average. OpenAI broke all typical rules set by startup accelerators: they started the company without any idea on how the product will be; they never talked to users; and they took 4.5 years to launch their first product. No VC would have ever wanted to invest in OpenAI because of the huge research cost spent at the beginning. Only Microsoft did. Employees at OpenAI are mostly there because "everyone wants to be in the room for the creation of AGI." Sam Altman's advice: leaving your cushy job to pursue your dream career is less risky than staying in your comfort zone. Bonus: Bill Gates' advice is to build teams with a mix of talent. His focus in the early days of Microsoft was on pure IQ, and it was a wrong approach. The episode link is in the first comment.

Cold rainy winter weekends are made for reading sprees.

When the job description literally asks for the impossible.