Is quitting your job for your own startup idea, when working in tech, really that big of a deal? Especially if you are a software engineer? You'll probably end up doing the same thing as on a corporate job but for yourself while learning a lot of new things about building software (marketing, sales, design, etc.) and about yourself (grit, character, etc.). You are still gaining experience. If shit hits the fan, with all digitalization going on everywhere, finding a new job won't really be that big of an issue.
For some it is, for others it isn't. Remember that not every potential entrepreneur is in the same boat. Some are non-technical founders. Some just graduated college and are flooded with debt. Others are risk-averse.
But they all want to do something big. The test-drive concept is to go into building your new startup with data-backed reasons for why it's the right thing to do.
It helps you justify your decision to yourself and those around you. It's not just the job, but the people involved. At the end of the day, the entrepreneur is NOT the only one affected by the decision of starting a new business.
If by "successful" you mean unethical, manipulative, and popular, yes. I happen to define success as providing actual positive value to the world because those are my aims. If your goal is to be an asshole but not get recognized as the source of the assholery, then you now know how to succeed at doing that.
Value pricing is very difficult when it comes to consulting and freelancing. Who and how does one decide the value. How does one measure it in terms of output? Scope? Feature changes and bugs? Charging by the hour makes some of these problems easier and is probably therefore more common.
From my experiences with employers in many parts of Europe, they value partial contributions to teams more than complete individual achievements. Talking to much in "I did..." sentences instead of "We did... (...and I helped with...)" can come across as self-centered, which often is considered a negative trait here.
So noted. We asked follow up questions to get to a person's contribution. It is valid to move the team forward. It is not valid to ride on the contributions of the team without putting your own contribution in.
This is exactly where biases creep in to evaluation. It's really, really hard to assess these signals objectively, and not use them to justify your snap judgements or prejudices. So maybe when the guy with a college sports background and a military-style buzz cut talks about how 'the team' did stuff, you mark it down as a sign of being a great team player and sharing credit. But when a guy with long hair does it, you assume he didn't make any individual contribution. And if a young woman talks about 'I' did stuff, you interpret it as confidence and evidence of personal contribution, but an older lady with kids does it and you dig in hard for evidence she's taking credit for others' work. Not personally accusing you of these specific biases here - just trying to show how these vague 'personality' judgement signals can be unconsciously misjudged by an interviewer, without them even knowing that's what they did.
I have an inner monologue when thinking and I hear an inner voice when reading (sometimes several if there are several characters in a text).
The voices differ. When reading something from a friend I will hear their voice, my own when reading my own, and my brain will try to create a auditory context if its by an unknown author. For example, Hacker News covers a lot of news from Silicon Valley/San Francisco so reading the comments here I mostly hear an American voice with an Californian accent, mixed together with my own voice.
My brain pairs this together with inner images. So if I read a book about exploding stars, for example, I will hear an inner voice narrating the topic while also seeing images of the things being explained. These voices and images are very weak compared to the real thing though. My inner voices lack clarity and my inner images have no color.
Obviously this is not great for my reading speed. I did a test a while ago and according to that test my reading speed was compared to that of a 5th grader, with high memory retention of general concepts and average memory retention of specific details. I read for several hours every day.
As for numbers, when doing maths in my head, I do it visually. I see the numbers as images. What is strange though, compared to other things I imagine, is that results to math problems manifest themselves as a gut feeling rather than as the logical result from a chain of continuous inner dialogues and imagery. If I try to calculate 5*5 I get a gut feeling to answer 25, often faster than I consciously understand how I arrived at the answer.
Needless to so say I have a very strong imagination, sometimes so strong that I stop paying attention to the real world for a little while.
On the off chance you haven't heard of him, you might want to check out Daniel Tammet [1]. He's a high-functioning savant who has number-related synesthesia, can do calculations by juxtaposing images as you describe, and he's cultivated these abilities to the point that he can perform incredible feats of calculation and memorization.
A micro VM on the big cloud providers is only a few dollars a month, and should you need to scale its a lot cheaper than $100/month for 10 API calls per second!
