When it inevitably, eventually implodes, nothing of lasting value will be lost.
That about sums it up. If people suddenly became rich through farming, you'd see people flocking to the mid-west. A lot of people claim a higher calling or passion for tech, but it's mostly just dollar signs in their eyes.
So what do you do when you are a capable programmer who isn't rich enough to work on something challenging/interesting/meaningful like electric cars or rockets? Maximize expected value. That's not immoral. That's the shitty reality of being a person of average means.
The list of meaningful things a capable programmer is way longer than that! You dont have to quit yiur dayjob to work on them and get some fulfillment/validation.
I'll add: Rockets and electric cars are just at a certain point in their hype-cycles, and you're just drinking the koolaid. I'm 100% certain you'd have your passion for tech beaten out in those industries too, if you worked for the wrong company.
Why do you have to be rich to work on electric cars or rockets? Many companies are hiring specifically for these technologies.
I mean neither to backhanded compliment the abilities of the HN crowd, nor to - as seems increasingly common when I find myself in the change - state interfaces of society, silently denigrate you by implicit reference to privilege I may not have. If you can take my statement literally, that would be superb!
I mean, I think the word average when it comes to ability or performance or self assessment is poorly used. Too frequently it is meant as self denigrating before a audience (which, as with above, I did not infer nor deliberately infer from your comment) and when it is used plainly, as in "I'm an average kinda guy" I find it too often misleads one into imagining one's interlocutor is saying they are a unremarkable character personally. It's a safety pitch in a chat up line, for one example of use subset my last classification of "average" use.
I take your statement literally in a socio - economic and intellectual sense, but with a skew that probably does put you quite a bit above the census bureau averages in most ways.
But what does frustrate me, when self description of "average" is used, is that perfectly "average" people perform quite wondrous feats or succeed with way above the deviation accomplishment, because one is able to trade in life.
I have just remembered this, prompted by your comment: when in my early twenties, despite I had received a privileged education, imagined what I could do by trading futures in myself. Take my thirties away and give that time to me now. Forget my personal growth (that was a biggie I left too late, beware!) because now I want to design things 24/7/365. And so on and so forth. I estimated not my ability or relative ability, but looked about at how long (by mere guesstimate) things I admired took to do, when I imagined most on that job were going home normal hours to wives and children, and having weekends and social lives, and the odd sick day or holiday, and maybe only reading two or three work related books a year, max, and certainly not consuming a subset of citeseer in unbroken mind-high caffeinated sessions which cared little to distinguish weeks, let alone days.
Quite apart form the fact you are either a engineer or have some capacity in that regard, the bounds of possible optimisation achievable from "a person of average means" I think must be very excellent indeed. How indeed, did mankind excel, when there was just a few of us in any social group hanging about with no tools or fire or built shelter and so on? Someone hit it right out the park, not merely once, but probably a while lot of times in a row, to get us through some earlier developing stages, just as we have some now, particularly in systematising and understanding what all this software lark is really about and how to make all of us good at it, instead of - one wonders - mere self defined _potential_ outlier points around some average.
I'm also quite sure, that when you are in your metier, when you are at a fundamental level aware you are where you want to be, you will find relevant skills or muscles or abilities notably at a higher functional level than you ever imagined they could be. Because there is something reflexive, compounding, about the human existence at least I have known, just as equally there can be compounding, confounding negative spirals. I believe there must be a art I have not learned in my 40 some years, of neatly skipping sideways from the spirals and letting one's instincts guide us to where some factor or energy or whatever phenomenon it may be is compounding and positive. If we could so dance with our own entropy, what a dance it would be. But meanwhile, I think "average" is most definitely not always average.
AFAICT, tech was full of passionate people (at the very least about building something, if not changing the world), way back before it had the cultural cachet that it now does. As it became increasingly clear that there was a lot of money in tech, what I call (generically) "the finance crowd"[1] flooded in. By which I mean, the masses of more-or-less competent people across the country/world who really don't care too much what they study/work in, as long as it's profitable.
The beef I have with thinking like yours is that there are plenty of us still around who were here before working in tech went from being nerdy to (relatively) "cool", and we'll be here if and when it stops being the industry du jour. It kinda sucks when people like you make the leap from "most people these days are chasing dollars and paying lip service to passion" to "anyone who claims they love/believe in what they do is just chasing $$". To this day I know plenty of people who would be here even if it didn't happen to be the currently-booming industry.
To be fair, the oblivious author is far guiltier of this than you; he's a perfect example of what he's whining about hating, and if he bothered learning anything about the history of tech in the area, he wouldn't be so quick to assume that those who claim an affinity for it are completely hollow.
Though I have to say, getting here years before the rush provides the nice consolation of not having to compete in the ludicrous housing market that the boom + lack of construction has spawned.
[1] I may be guilty of making the same over-generalizing mistake about finance, but I know quite a few people who work in finance and have been legitimately passionate about finance as a concept and the technical challenges involved therein since they were pretty young. Every single one of them has had that passion beaten out of them by the industry itself and the people they're surrounded by. By contrast, I still know tons of people in tech turning down big paychecks to just work on stuff that they like working on (I quit my job last year and am taking about a 50% paycut for similar reasons).
Yes and no. As is often bandied about, the expected value of a career in startups is lower than in many other fields, and yet people do stay after seeing through the myth.
A large part of it, at least that I've observed, is the energy, speed of execution, rapid change, the excitement and adventure of the startup world. You willingly give up expected value in exchange for a more interesting life. The stress is part of the fun, the person it moulds you into is something that becomes part of your identity. If the personal risk wasn't real, it wouldn't be fun. The man in the arena etc.
Hence, "Lottery".
If you are lucky and became incredible reach you should give back to the world. And not just the 0.1% to have media coverage (like facebook did when their cheating got out)...
Apple once were the biggest company, yet i dont know anything that would shine any good light on that company... Their last notable act was that their blackmailed the EU..
Thats why i hope no company will overgrow the countries...
I have no idea what this refers to. Care to elaborate?
Most simplistically, we have traversed a social arc between almost hard - wired numerical limits to groups, by tribe or family or township, or travelling together, through dissociation of conurbations and suburbia and the popularism of the "atomic family" which mae feel-good about a life within a picket fence and a statutory numberof offspring, all separated from relations, co-workers and even neighbors by white-picket and loosely connecting these nodes via tin chariot (well, steel, but tin chariot scans more to my liking), through synchronous but limited (by cost of area code) node to node networks (POTS) until today one only has to sign up for Facebook and one is inundated not only with "friends" * but the immediacy of multifaceted interaction in many time-division multiplexes of attention, which is in comparison with our earlier means to communicate, infinitely closer to the real thing of mingling among people we know or vaguely know.
Meanwhile, for a litany of reasons, from specialisation in study to the economic drive that demands ever greater input from students to adjuncts and in similar fashion in business demand for narrow "verticals", silos of expertise, the straining naturally not automatically robust interdisciplinary lines of correspondence, even to the distraction of once innocently the snake game, but our phones themselves...
It feels to me as if we have been corralled, and I do not say this has been to any grand plan, but it feels to me as if our lives are inverted. Or at least I felt that I experienced a inversion: My work was a primary social interaction, and home a "refuge" or rather a seclusion at best, a isolation at worst, and it could feel so even when not alone, if I was in my wife's bad books. But now instantaneously I can obtain the adrenaline, serotonin, the chemistry caused by high value, high consequence socialising, whilst individually I cannot communicate silently my mood with a gesture or sigh, whilst individually I can be picked off for especial treatment to pump my brain chemistry in the right way to receive a advertisement, without someone guffawing what a load of tripe the product is or telling me I won't like a violent scene in a movie or..
I may not be doing so well at this, but I am trying to describe how I believe Facebook and imitators can co-opt the physical self that is keyed to complex social interaction, [edit to add next few words] and in a larger social context high value things such a reputation and acceptance carry heavy processing burdens as well, which potentially may impair other critical thought. [end edit]
Along with the chemical and thence psychological rewards, comes very possibly "being happy" or "a happy user", yet because we are alone, a sole observer, I see risks. Even in company we have created our unique context. I recently described the difficulty of discussing code between two on even the same part of a project, to being able to tell from what they say how, by reading what articles or using what sites, your love on the sofa with you has arrived at a particular remark, without them explaining it. I said just keep adding bells on that one." Because social interaction at a wider mark is high value and high risk, and because we process so much of this intuitively or subconsciously, any extension of the framework that omits balances and checks, which are provided in face to face society where communication is necessarily open, I believe there is significant potential for undesirable system wide side effects on a individual.
So I do not think that users are in of themselves happy _because of a product like Facebook, but Facebook has created for them a simulacrum. I believe like any simulation which is necessarily crude, inherently non - deterministic, and isolating whilst increasing sensory or other input, such a system is not inherently not dangerous.
*That experience was made even fresher to me, not very long ago, when I first time ever registered on FB, and before anything else, entered a pre-pay cell number. I was quite confused a while how many people seemed to know me, even invite me to be friends, who seemed to stretch my recollection a bit much, before I twigged the number had been allocated not long before I bought the phone. Invites to be friends were surprising - I checked and I don't share a name with anyone in this other social group...
[Edits for punctuation, minor clarity]