Talking with Yonatan has been extremely helpful to me. We’ve mainly communicated by Telegram voice notes and messages. He guided me through a jobhunt period, and helped me refine my plans, partly by giving feedback, partly by letting me ramble into a voice note until I had rubber-ducked myself into progress, and partly by introducing new frames for thinking about decisions I was making. It was useful to have someone to talk to who understood my motivations quite well (EA), but was at an objective distance (3000 miles), and who had relevant expertise and good thoughts.
Some things I appreciate about Yonatan:
He asks good questions. Including tough questions.
Yonatan takes care to elicit my thoughts about things before offering thoughts of his own. This is good firstly because the exercise of advising myself turns up some good ideas and Yonatan is not omniscient, and secondly because copy-pasting other people’s viewpoints without knowing how they got there is less useful (less generalizable and less debuggable) than imparting generative mental ‘frameworks’ or ‘tools’.
One ‘frame’ that has stayed with me is the idea that in some situations, even if there is a small chance of someone being willing to grant your request, it might still be worth it to ask, because they might say yes, and if you don’t ask, they definitely won’t say yes.
Another example of a ‘frame’. Yonatan caused me to pay much more attention to how I was feeling about things (strategies, decisions), in a quasi-therapeutic way, because he believes that my feelings carry useful information, which seems true.
We have an informal dialogue more than a didactic or one-sided dynamic.
He is keen to be told how he is doing, and how his thoughts are being received, in order to incorporate the feedback. He is keen to tailor the relationship to my needs and focus on the topics that are most important, even if they are not necessarily about technology.
I felt able to be unusually honest and open about my thoughts/motivations/fears/insecurities/shortcomings.
As a result of our conversations, I feel I approached my jobhunt-related decisions in a 10x more systematic way than I otherwise would have, and I have more mental models to make future decisions with.
In summary, I highly recommend talking to Yonatan, in case he can help you.
Background about me: I am a developer with 2 years experience, now in my second job.
Talking with Yonatan has been extremely helpful to me. We’ve mainly communicated by Telegram voice notes and messages. He guided me through a jobhunt period, and helped me refine my plans, partly by giving feedback, partly by letting me ramble into a voice note until I had rubber-ducked myself into progress, and partly by introducing new frames for thinking about decisions I was making. It was useful to have someone to talk to who understood my motivations quite well (EA), but was at an objective distance (3000 miles), and who had relevant expertise and good thoughts.
Some things I appreciate about Yonatan:
He asks good questions. Including tough questions.
Yonatan takes care to elicit my thoughts about things before offering thoughts of his own. This is good firstly because the exercise of advising myself turns up some good ideas and Yonatan is not omniscient, and secondly because copy-pasting other people’s viewpoints without knowing how they got there is less useful (less generalizable and less debuggable) than imparting generative mental ‘frameworks’ or ‘tools’.
One ‘frame’ that has stayed with me is the idea that in some situations, even if there is a small chance of someone being willing to grant your request, it might still be worth it to ask, because they might say yes, and if you don’t ask, they definitely won’t say yes.
Another example of a ‘frame’. Yonatan caused me to pay much more attention to how I was feeling about things (strategies, decisions), in a quasi-therapeutic way, because he believes that my feelings carry useful information, which seems true.
We have an informal dialogue more than a didactic or one-sided dynamic.
He is keen to be told how he is doing, and how his thoughts are being received, in order to incorporate the feedback. He is keen to tailor the relationship to my needs and focus on the topics that are most important, even if they are not necessarily about technology.
I felt able to be unusually honest and open about my thoughts/motivations/fears/insecurities/shortcomings.
As a result of our conversations, I feel I approached my jobhunt-related decisions in a 10x more systematic way than I otherwise would have, and I have more mental models to make future decisions with.
In summary, I highly recommend talking to Yonatan, in case he can help you.
Background about me: I am a developer with 2 years experience, now in my second job.