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Comment by burgessaccount | Hacker News Reader

This will sound moralistic, and I don't mean it that way, but I think this relates to our general lack of clear values as a society. With religion absent in many people's lives, not much has stepped in to take up the slack and say "what really matters is being a good person" or "what really matters is wisdom" or "what really matters is family". So we're left with the messages we ARE getting, which are from a combination of advertising (what really matters is having a lot of money/nice things), Hollywood (what really matters is being good at shit) and the news cycle (which focuses on careers and especially major careers). "Mom gets home from work and has a fun late afternoon with her kids, spending no money and getting nothing much done" isn't a story we ever see upheld as a great, positive way to spend our time. So we pursue the things we do see people praising and talking about - promotions, money, milestones, important-ness.

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Nah, it's that folks who get their values from other folks are the only ones who bother to tell other folks how well they're doing at achieving their externally-gifted values. If your goal is to make a lot of money but you decided that was just your goal, why bother to tell anyone you've achieved it? (Indeed, it can be very counterproductive to tell other people.) If your goal is to be a good husband & father, then what does it matter what anyone besides your wife & kids think of you?

As a result, external discourse is filled with people crowing about how well they achieved this or that milestone, all of which is desirable only because other people think it's desirable. But then, the only people who care are the ones looking to others for their values.

There are plenty of people whose values are plenty clear, arrived at through some deep reflection about what they personally want. But then, since it's what they personally want, why would anyone else care?

Interesting thoughts. To me, it has always seemed like, if I had something figured out, that had made me happy, i would WANT to share it, if it could help others. When people find a diet or an exercise regimen that works for them, they love to talk about it. I don't think it purely comes down to boasting. I agree that people with deeper wisdom will often be less eager to boast or force their values on others. But I also think there are some people who, in the spirit of helpfulness, are sharing positive values - they just don't have the megaphone that movies, ads, and pundits have.

That works great until you realize that other people often have different value systems. What you're super proud of may be deeply offensive to another person. Just think about how saying "I'm a Googler, and proud of the work I do" might go over for a CS student vs. how it goes ever for the journalist who's struggling to make a living because Google has commoditized the news business.

In practice, what usually happens is people end up self-organizing into small communities of like-minded people. Within the community, values are very homogenous, and people can feel safe that they have a good pulse on what will be offensive vs. what won't be. But when one community meets another, they're often shocked at how barbaric the rest of humanity can be. (Just look at the Trump vs. Sanders melee that played out in Chicago last night.)

And the more differentiated and more nuanced someone's views are, the less they fit into any one community. There are plenty of people whose personal relationships are entirely personal because they're at the point where no one group is going to give them that feeling of belonging.

I think it's interesting you're describing values systems in terms of particular jobs. Like, I work as a writer, and I do value the work that I do, but I don't think of that as my values - my values are: sound, well-researched information; kindness; humor; creativity; taking care of important resources; starting good conversations... It is difficult to believe that any of those values are "deeply offensive"to anyone - and if a person finds them offensive, I do want to change that person's mind. I agree that values are often associated with a community, but i think the work of speaking across community lines to find common values is deeply important - particularly in a far-flung democracy. In your Sanders vs. Trump example, I think actually a lot of the underlying values are the same - dignity for workers, safety for families... if we were all better at speaking about our underlying values, we would have an easier time understanding each other.

Devil is always in the details. At a high level, we're all human, and we all want life, liberty, connection, meaning, and the pursuit of happiness. It's just that means very different things for different people, and as folks get older, they tend to define meaning for themselves in ever more specific terms. The more specific you get, the more likely your definition will come into conflict with anothers'.

I don't much socialize with the people I work with. The people I do socialize with are not from within my industry.

This. I keep bugging my friends and relatives to learn programming - I make way more than the local average, and I work from home, whenever I want. I don't tell them about it because I want to brag; I do it because, to quote Miles Vorkosigan, "if I can do it, you can do it". I want them to do better, they're my friends.

The point is that they're definition of "doing better" isn't necessarily the same as yours. Maybe their idea of a good job isn't one that pays well and allows a flexible schedule, it's one that's low stress: they show up, go through the straightforward motions that they do every day, and go home. If they're interested in something intellectually stimulating, they prefer to do it on their own time, without the risk of your entire income relying on it. That's just one example.

It's natural to want your loved ones to be successful, and it's human to assume that your notion of success is universal, but it's wise to realize that it's not.

That said, it wouldn't be at all surprising if your friends would be better off if they got a job more like yours. The goals of high income and flexible schedule are quite popular.

Yeah... it's not that they like their current job (the people I talk to mostly don't). It's that they seem to have this fixation with "it's too difficult"... my brother helps drug addict teenagers and he thinks programming is too difficult! It's driving me nuts.

The mystique of "impossible" difficulty is a curious phenomenon of human thought.

I am a programmer and I love to code. I definitely think creating Stock Market trading algorithms is difficult. In the absence of conscious exertion of the will to have faith in myself, I can easily slip down the slope of believing it to be impossible. Perhaps, "it's impossible" is used as a shorthand by people to state "it's impossible for me to expend the energy learning to do that".

Perhaps what your brother is really trying to say is: "I think programming is going to take too much of my time and energy spent in acquiring the skill to do competently and professionally. This time and energy is better spent in analysing and helping heal the emotional landscapes of troubled young humans - because that is what appeals to my value system stronger. I wish you luck."

I believe this is actually more benign and respectable than the people who think they are rockstar coders but commit toxic-waste laden mud into git repositories sometimes :-) Much respect to your brother and everyone else who follows their passion instead of what popular opinion or the media tells them is the "best thing" to do.

It's a little confusing view about bugging them to learn programming and you mention making more. Lately on HN, the general view of our community seems to programming is a fairly low rent blue collar position and all the salaries will be driven down to the third; it's weird fore to see that and also the "everybodyish should learn to program" view. In a way, it kind of speaks to this glorification of work in this article .... what's really the point engrossing one's self, in very unhealthy way by looks of the sons of these comments, a "professional" and complex field when it is barreling toward a "blue collar" status ? If that's even the case, I dunno.

Programming is not by any means a "fairly low rent blue-collar position".

It has a very odd wage curve, though, where the vast majority of your salary increases will come in the first 5 years of your career, and the technologies that you became an expert in will be obsolete within 5-10 years. If you don't retrain, you'll be very much obsolete. That's behind most of the complaints on Hacker News; these were people who tasted glory once, and then fell off the technology curve into irrelevance and don't want to hop back on it.

Any profession where you can make $300-400K/year as an employee with ~5 years of experience, or over half a million as a consultant, would be considered fantastically lucrative by most of the world.

These $300k+ salaries you speak of are no more common than any other field where maybe 1/1000 makes this. HN is quite heavy with Silicon Valley coders at Google, Facebook, etc.

The 99.9% of the rest of developers are making $90k in the Midwest up to $150k in high cost areas on the coasts.

Yes this is certainly better than most other jobs, but considering a developer will hit the inflation rate raises by about 30, while other professions like doctors and lawyers tend to continue seeing large raises, I really don't feel software is a great gig, all things considered.

Mid thirties and I'm already seeing my first decades's go-to languages and frameworks becoming obsolete (Java, MVC, single RDMS, etc). Taking the massive amount of time to learn the new ones will not increase my pay one bit, but just give me another few years of employment.

It was great at 28 making $90k while most my peers were still in grad school and / or making $40k in crappy positions. But now a lot them are getting into mgmt, making partner, have a good book of customers, and have caught up. Even a few Fed and state workers I know with liberal arts degrees are hitting six figures with the gov't, along with job stability, pensions, and guaranteed raises. Meanwhile we get more H1Bs and offshoring.

Not everybody is an American :)

There are two issues here:

1. The average salary in my area is $300 a month, after taxes. The only reason I'm not making $10K is because I'm lazy, and I prefer to play games. $2K after taxes (again, working from home) is something that's so easy I honestly feel I hadn't been working at all at the end of the month. $4K is almost as easy. I've done $8K but I didn't watch TV or play games.

2. Maybe even more importantly, I do not fear the future. I recently rejected a $8K / month job because I didn't like the project. I remember being afraid of losing my job as recently as three years ago, but it's like in a story about someone else. I have clients who send me emails every month about this or that issue - it takes me a day or two to solve it, and I charge them $300 to $500. Again - this is the average here; in fact, it's what my sister makes - and she works 8 hours a day, standing up, talking to customers, using a computer with Windows 95 on it. THIS is why I keep bugging everybody.

Well I don't think that's what the complaints have been about. I'm not sure if the complaints are even true but is definitely a more common view on HN these days. It's less what you say and I think more "people in X will do all this for an annual salary of about $1,000" so that's the end of the game now.

As far as the "pace of technology change;" I don't really see that. I don't count the rather comedic constant wheel reinvention in the JavaScript community really counts as really "technology change" or even think the Web mvc framework du jour rises to that level. So, ok let's look at general cs, what I see is fairly incremental changes in distributed systems, file systems, and so on. Ok let's consider the machine learning craze, but this has been a utilization of 50 year old methods in a much more distributed fashion -- the people who wrote the Statistical Learning textbook in the 70s probably don't think of this is as mega technological change, maybe more like "well, this is finally popular." So I dunno.

Because there's a bit of a feedback loop with success. If others see you as being successful or impressive (on whatever axis they care about), this attracts them to you, and having a more admirers increases your social power and influence, which gives you more opportunities and better chances of success in your future efforts.

This also explains patio11's formula for career success, which is basically:

10 Make something awesome

20 Tell people about it

30 GOTO 10

Dude, this doesn't sound like fun at all. "Social power and influence" to what end? With whom are you getting this power and influence? Are these relationships even genuine?

> "this attracts them to you, and having a more admirers increases your social power and influence, which gives you more opportunities and better chances of success in your future efforts."

Reminds me of those "social climber" jokes about kids in high school. I guess if you've taken measure of yourself and found it matches up with the company you keep, there's nothing for anyone else to say.

Perhaps my explanation didn't adequately convey the subtlety of this phenomenon.

I am not saying that successful people are all social climbers. I am just saying that successful people naturally attract the support of people who want to learn from and take part in their success, and this greater popularity in turn increases their chances for future success. It's what you might call a virtuous cycle, or a snowball effect.

If you are successful at something, it is perfectly rational to want others to know it.

This isn't a secret, most people are aware of people whose "friends" are simply those who have skills or knowledge they want. In the context of what's important in life though, this drive for status and financial success might require examination. Especially when the people around you will disappear when there is nothing left to gain. If those are the majority of relationships in your life, it would be easy to lose sight of all the other awesome things in life aside from status and money. More importantly, you might realize the age-old problems with solely pursuing those things.

"You can't get everyone to genuinely like you, unless you're a snake, but then it's just an illusion. If you're lucky, (in this day and age) those you don't get along with will be polite.

Having all the money in the world is pointless if no one else has anything left to trade.

That's true but only matters if you have a value system that includes social power and influence among its values.

Someone whose core values are "I was there for my family whenever they needed me" is not going to care how many admirers they have. Someone whose core values are "I will respect and learn from other peoples' differences and not try to convert them to my way of thinking" is actively failing if they end up recruiting disciples.

patio11's value system is not the one nostrademons was talking about...

> As a result, external discourse is filled with people crowing about how well they achieved this or that milestone, all of which is desirable only because other people think it's desirable.

That's spot on and I wouldn't mind it if that was related to acts of creation.

> If your goal is to be a good husband & father, then what does it matter what anyone besides your wife & kids think of you?

Well, other people can still interfere with your goal. For example, they might throw you in jail.

> What our modern society needs are some new myths, legends, stories and rituals that we can all identify with in our more cosmopolitan world. Without such identification we could end up like a rudderless ship in the ocean, not knowing who we are, or where we are going. Isn’t that something that our leaders, whether in business or politics, should be concerned with?

Bill Moyers on Joseph Campbell (http://blog.iese.edu/leggett/2012/02/27/the-power-of-myth-by...)

The problem is that the myths that sell aren't the ones we should identify with.

Maybe what our modern society needs is to orient its moral compass around reality rather than myths.

> With religion absent in many people's lives, not much has stepped in to take up the slack

Given the obsession with hard (in fact over-) work in the English-speaking world and European north tends to be commonly treated as an artifact of the "Protestant work ethic" this seems pretty off-base.

Islam's view on work is balanced. Simply it's a mean to live financially independent, not a life purpose. This idea can be seen in the commitment to the five must-be-on-time prayers during the day. No work should cause the prayers to be postponed.

Ironically, through the last century, there is a "modern" Islamic speech that preaches "hard work ethics" (the western way) among other western values. It will be funny if the west starts to morally rethink their life style, while the Islamic world is about to complete the low-morale modernization process.

That "balance" doesn't seem to be contributing much to the economies of Muslim-majority countries, and their living standards, though, does it?

Except for those nations sitting on abundant oil reserves, the Muslim world is chaotic, unproductive and has terrible human rights / freedom of expression.

You have to be very careful to tease out correlation from causation here. In the Middle Ages the Islamic world was significantly ahead of the West in these regards. For a bunch of historical reasons (ineffectiveness of Ottoman Empire for several hundred years, World War I) most of the Islamic world is indeed behind first-world countries.

But that's also like blaming Christianity for the problems in Central America or Central Africa. Religion is only a small factor.

That is probably one of the reason but not conciously for most in north EU. So religion is absent in their lives just some of the habits instilled by centuries of teachings die hard.

I see that sort of message a great deal in the "Lifestyle design" communities.

A lot of the nomad-entrepreneur / lifestyle-design / ISV / four-hour-work-week culture values time with family, for example, very highly, and is actively working toward prioritising that over work.

It's one of the reasons I like that culture. It's also one of the reasons I like HN, because there's a significant minority of those folk here.

Interestingly, this ties into your comment further down the thread:

"To me, it has always seemed like, if I had something figured out, that had made me happy, i would WANT to share it, if it could help others."

A lot of people in the above communities do exactly that - but they tend to subsequently get decried as con artists, snake oil salesmen, or whatever, by people who believe they're selling an impossible dream.

Of course, there are also some genuine snake-oil salesmen out there. But I've generally found the population is lower than is commonly assumed.

Doesn't sound moralistic at all. It sounds like an appeal to analysis of sources of information. I don't see how you can go wrong.

We went from Eisenhower to Kennedy in a few years.

I think this, and the fact that people move too much are largely the whole story. See also Peter Whybrow for more on this.

>>>the fact that people move to much

???

I'm really curious about what you mean by this. Would you please elaborate?

I don't want to speak for ArkyBeagle but I think, when young adults move, they often move for work - so you show up in a city where what you're there to do is work, the people you know are through work, you don't have the balanced social structure of family, friends, and work, so you don't end up spending healthy time relaxing with family and friends, you just... work. That's my guess.

That is better than I could have summarized it. I would say that for children, it may be even harder.

Then again, I moved a child from what seemed a very good but isolated (for her) situation and she developed much more of a network after the move.

I am echoing Peter Whybrow from the BookTV presentation of his book "The Well-Tuned Brain".

Moving disrupts your (organic, on the ground) social network.

OTOH the US has been driven by the Protestant work ethic for centuries. Many religions praise hard work and not just savoring the fruits of life, so an inverse correlation between faith and devotion to labor seems unlikely.

it doesn't sound moralistic. I think you make great points and they're entirely plausible for many people.

>This will sound moralistic, and I don't mean it that way

It's truly sad that the culture of people in computing reading this forum, which reflects the nation and west as a whole, is so disconnected from God that you feel the need to disclaim the profession of morality or religion.

> It's truly sad

No, actually it's one of the few truly hopeful and uplifting things. Why would that be sad?

No, what's truly sad is that I'm too old to have any shot at being a god. So it goes.

On the contrary, I find it uplifting to witness people so disconnected from God.

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