Danial Kalbasi

📍 Amsterdam http://danialkalbasi.com

Point of experimentation

The point of experimenting is to get it out of your system. If you are thinking of something and wonder whether it's going to work or not, try it, build it, work on it, write it; do whatever makes it real. Best case, it succeeds; worst case, it

Amazon layoffs

Amazon is laying off 16,000 people for "reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy". The problem is, I'm not sure companies that lay off employees to reduce layers are going to set up a better incentive structure to avoid this in the future. Every time

Product validation

I've been trying different methods to validate product ideas over the years. One lesson I learned is that many methods are ways to avoid launching the product. It's a scary step for many of us building products to find out if what we built is going

Bad common hiring advice

The common advice "hire for character, train for skills" is usually misleading. The idea isn't fully wrong; it's just that most people underestimate how difficult and time-consuming it is to develop certain skills. Let's look at a simple situation. If you'

Startups get more from AI than large companies

I've noticed indie hackers and startups are getting far more from AI than larger companies. Developers often point to codebase size - it's easier for an LLM to grasp 10K lines of code (LOCs) than millions. That's true to an extent, but it misses

Small freedoms in life

A few years ago, I began to realize that I view freedom mostly at the macro level: democratic elections, a more open education system, equal opportunities, and the ability to criticize the government without risking my life. This understanding partially comes from the fact that I was born in Iran,

Do nothing when there is nothing to do

What Warren Buffett said about investment is true for management too: "The trick is, when there is nothing to do, do nothing." The reality is that, sometimes, managers are intervening too much. This has a few bad effects in my experience: It reduces people's proactiveness, creates

Staff engineer

Very few industries create a job title first, then figure out what it means. Software engineering's "Staff Engineer" is one of them. Talking to people about Staff roles made me realize most companies treat it as a glorified Senior position without a clear definition. There are

AI and code ownership

One of the things I'm curious about is how AI will change the relationship between developers and their code. Most engineers love their code. If you want to put this to the test, just go and create a PR (pull request) on someone else's code and

Procrastination in teams

Procrastination isn't just an individual problem. Teams procrastinate too. It's just harder to spot. Team procrastination is when they delay decisions, intentionally or not. It feels productive because we label it differently: "building consensus," "we're aligning," "gathering more data,