Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

My cynical explanation:

In every workplace, it's usually the few productive people who do all the work and others just dragging their asses around, mostly being a nuisance - they exist only because HR is doing a bad job on one hand, people learned how to pass interviews and then kiss asses to stay on the job very well, on the other hand, and managers want to stroke their egos by having as many people "under them" as possible.

Trick is, in the last 10-15 years those few productive people, thanks to the infinite scalability of success in the digital world, and the good stock market performance, have saved up enough money to kiss the job goodbye forever, and only those losers remain. Almost all good developers i know, quit actual development - they either sit on multimillion savings, or went into well, hardly productive sectors like crypto. No one works for hire as developers or even runs development companies (startups are too hard, many tried but no one pulled it off). And these people are barely 40. 20 years ago people like that would be those primary workhorses, now they are lost for the labor market forever.

On paper things look well, but productivity obviously suffers.

And in 20 more years, they would retire, die or become managers. And new engineers enter the field, without millions in the bank, establish themselves as workhorses and so it continues.

You make retiring in your 30's sound like it's a victory. No one does that unless they feel unwelcome and have enough money to scrape by after saying goodbye rather than being forced to tolerate an unwelcoming environment.

I don't agree, many people just don't like work. Smarter people may be less influenced by social pressures/morals so they can see it in a more unbiased way (society forces on us perception of work as a virtue), so they like it even less.

After all, i for example, have never participated in a single project that would ever go live, and only a few times, built small pieces of code that were for some time used in live products. How can i probably fool myself into believing that work is a virtue?

It depends how you define work. I have built systems that are used in large production services. But even if you're just going to dinners and meetings then that's still work in a way. Possibly a more important kind. We all need to have some reason to exist. Tech is weird historically speaking since once the work is done the code runs itself which leaves builders as the architects of their own demise, since few folks are interested in disrupting cash cows with a better mousetrap.

Why would it not be a victory? Who likes working for someone else when you don’t have to. I can think of an infinite number of things to do with free time if I didn’t have to work for money.

Smart and productive people are happiest when they are free to do whatever they feel is worthy of their time and attention. One of the key to their productivity is that they don’t need to be told what to do every step of the way. Retire at 30 does not mean being unproductive, it means working on what you want, when you want. I have even met execs in large orgs that were essentially doing the job because they liked it. They did not need the salary anymore.

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