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Comment by obstinate | Hacker News Reader

This stuff is very impressive, but why is there nothing in here about revenue? I would be really worried if I spent five years on something(s) that didn't significantly improve my financial security. I'm sure not everyone shares my priorities, but I'd guess this one is fairly common. Maybe this individual is already set on that front and I'm simply not aware of the context, but his concerns about the stability of the gaming market suggest that this is not the case.

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>I would be really worried if I spent five years on something(s) that didn't significantly improve my financial security.

Fortunately, not everybody feels like that.

money can be exchanged for goods and services

Goods and services are not all there is in life.

Money can't be exchanged for lost time (e.g. due to making money), strained relationships (e.g. due to making money), dreams not followed (e.g. due to making money), etc.

So one has to strike a balance, and doing stuff as a hobby, without making anything money-wise, is a totally acceptable balance if you have your basic expenses (rent, food, etc) covered.

OP wrote "financial security," not "enormous sums of money."

Yes, but OP also wondered why a random person will spend time studying and reporting stuff on his blog, if they don't make money out of it.

I didn't worry that he spent time studying. That is awesome! I worried that there was nothing about revenue. And I acknowledged that there may be more context (ex. the author is already independently wealthy, or the blog covers only non-commercial work).

I'd count contributing to a retirement account a basic expense. The more money you make, the more you can contribute to your retirement account. Together with market returns it kind of makes sense to work a lot now to work very little in the future.

Again, it's a tradeoff against your dreams - if you work a lot now to work very little in the future, you may find yourself too old and weak in the future to finally do the things you always wanted to do.

Amit was a very very early employee at Google.

Well, that answers that question.

Do you have any sources for this?

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/

There's no mention of Google at all there. While the seventh employee at Google was indeed someone named Amit Patel, I'm having a very hard time linking the identities together.

Update: I wasn't able to associate any online identity information with the Amit Patel that was Google employee #7. Best I could find was references to a venture a few years back called Sunfire. Pretty sure he isn't the Amit Patel of Red Blob Games and Stanford fame. The latter probably threw off a lot of people, since Stanford CS and Google often go hand-in-hand.

There's even another Amit Patel that currently works at Google, but he's a supply chain guy.

As another thread confirms, it must be a quite common name:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13319232

Can I email you instead of posting publicly?

At the very least, it is an amazing thing to have on his resume.

One can get amazing things on one's resume and make money at the same time. :)

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