It's hard to compete with FAANG, Finance, and Consulting. Unfortunately, that's where a lot of people end up.
I recently realized that this void is because I am not living by my ideals/purpose. I know what I want to do in life, I know how I want to contribute to the story of humanity, and yet I am letting my greed overrule me and force me into a different path. Essentially, I am betraying myself, and this causes that feeling of unfulfillment/void.
I suspect I am not the only FAANG/unicorn/quant engineer that feels this way. Don't get me wrong, I greatly enjoy the day to day technical work I do. But my day job does not help me work towards what I have defined as my existential purpose.
Recently I decided I will change this, whether through volunteering or a new job (even if it might pay less.) I'm more excited than I have been in months. I will die happy if I can positively impact humanity towards the direction I hope for it to go towards.
"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind".
And even finding quality volunteering opportinities has been difficult. There's all kind of parasitic behaviour when free money or labor is on offer.
For whatever reason (personality, genes, whatever), I do not seem to be one who gets caught up in the envy of greener grass.
https://writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary/grass-is-alway...
I've spent a large part of my life as a high end specialist, consulting, and thus, have had incredibly encompassing exposure to a huge variety of companies.
Whether non-profits, government departments, or corps, it's humans which cause the often ineffectual result, of our loving attempts to being order, and stability to our labourious output.
People are the same everywhere, and thus, so your endeavours will be.
The grass is not greener on the other side.
So what I would say is:
* if you strike out on your own, you can at least move on past things which bore you
* you need true financial independence to achieve this, to become a relaxed garage tinkerer of tech
* right now, we are at a moment of golden opportunity. The markets are down. This is where you buy in. The returns are buying in these times, not in time of feast.
So... maybe this is a good time to reassess. Invest. And plan to retire once you profit?
Then I got kicked out of my home and had to work back-breaking jobs, commute 2-4 hours either walking or biking, and at the end of the day barely earn enough money to make any progress (I was lucky that a family member let me sleep in their house, otherwise I would've been living paycheck to paycheck).
During that time I felt like my mind forced me to "withdraw inside myself," so my spirit wouldn't be completely broken. It had seemed that all of my thoughts, feelings, and emotions had been stripped away from me, and the only things left were those needed to "survive."
A little bit later I was lucky enough to get my first software job, making a very good salary, and lift myself out of poverty (and start "financially progressing"); but even though my life had been the best it ever was, I never regained the feelings that I lost.
I think what I lost was my naive worldview: one that was modeled by two decades worth of living upper middle class; where I survived by virtue of my birth, and not because I personally did anything -- detached from reality.
It was a very self-centered existence. I was only concerned about my own pleasure, and escaping from any displeasure ("fat FIRE" was an escape from the perceived displeasure of having to work, and not being able to partake in idle leisure). Other than this, I had no values, nor real "ideals" (but I did have an "ideal" life I wanted to build).
I think that's where my early "dreams" came from: a self-centered pursuit of personal gain and maximization of pleasure. I didn't really care about anything or anyone, nor was my existence driven by deeply-ingrained values that could serve as a bottomless well of direction and energy. I was simply living an animalistic life.
Being thrust into the "real world" destroyed all these notions; or rather, living in reality forced me to restrain myself: my emotions had no structure, and so I was fluttering about to wherever they took me. Having to "box" them in to do something useful and purposeful finally wrangled them in, and "molded" my personality to something other than "do the things I like, and get away from the things I don't like."
I would later have to rebuild my worldview and wrestle with the void in my soul that could no longer be filled with material distractions (a life-long process).
During this process, I realized putting financial considerations as my number one priority would not lead me to anywhere fulfilled (neither would idle retirement). The only thought that rang "true" at the time was that I needed to cultivate values, and those would dictate my purpose.
It's a never-ending process. And it always keeps me busy, but unlike focusing on material things, the fulfillment and sense of goodness I feel is not transient -- it lasts, and has built up through the years.
This is how I went from trying to live an ideal life, to one where I live by ideals.
Care to expand on this process of cultivating values, the wrestling with the void, where the sense of goodness comes from..
For the last 15 years I have worked on things that I felt needed doing. Others agreed. Even though our teams achieve something worthwhile it can often feel deeply frustrating. The challenges of financing something new, that doesn’t fit the box of how it is normally done, at some useful scale, is hard. I don’t want to do anything else, but sometimes it is very frustrating.
In the end, I think there is so much one can work on that really makes a difference in “the story of humanity” as you call it, that there really is no need to take a job that goes against ideals you may hold. Healthcare, energy systems, data for better governance, food tech, Ed tech, the list goes on. There will be something interesting to work on I am certain.
This is also covered in the Book of Eccliastes [1]. IMHO it's a good meditation on the issue regardless of one's views on Abrahamic religions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Your window to return to bonkers tech money is wide so you can afford to go away from it a while. But after you do, you probably won't want to return. That's fine! Just sock away enough that you don't feel you have to, otherwise it'll feel like reinserting yourself in the matrix and it SUCKS.
If governments really wanted to prioritise innovation, they should consider giving a banker's salary to a research scientist.
They also fund startups which may be used for national interests and so on.
Much of the time, they contact you, not the other way around.
Lived and worked in D.C. and have a TS/SCI, sat for FSP…. The IC doesn’t pay even close to big tech rates. There is also no mystery around someone contacting you, just apply to the NSA / CIA / etc. if those paths pique your interest.
Startups working on IC-relevant tech getting funding via non-traditional means is absolutely true but not guaranteed.
That was 30 years ago, though. Could be completely different now.
As the person senior leadership communicates with this person is seen as more important than they are. Senior leadership wants to maintain a leveling system to separate groups of people. It's a hedge a flat organization which makes senior leadership less important.
You could swap out this person with another without losing speed but it doesn't work as well with an engineer.
It's not that management is dumb, it's that every layer of management is self-interested. Every hierarchy has to contend with principal agent problems. Organizations can do a better or worse job of it, but the incentives are always there and they lead to predictable inefficiencies which are frequently observed. Everyone knows this, but unless you know how to get someone to manage without self-interest, you aren't in a position to solve the problem. Nobody is. That's why it lingers.
You can play semantic games about whether or not it should be called inefficiency -- I don't really care what you call it -- but the RfR / Dilbert dynamic is very real and very prevalent.
Middle management becomes necessary.
But the question is around pay. Should they always make more because they sit higher in the org chart?
I would suggest they make more because of power structures not utility or because they are not as easy to replace.
Because of first class shares, senior leadership shares percentages shareholders with a vote are often the people in power. Common shareholders don't hold much power.
Let's not forget that companies aren't real sentient beings, do not really take decisions and do not really have their own interest. They are legal fictions. Trying to understand the behavior of a company based on its self interest can therefore be misleading.
Why do bureaucracies develop? Why is Google launching yet another chat app? Why are so many companies disrupted by new techs instead of adapting? All this is against their interest after all.
Companies are ultimately led and controlled by many individuals, in pursuit of their own individual interest (mostly). Some groups of individuals within a company have more control than others, and will consequently bend the company toward what's in their own interest.
I'm not versed into sociology of organisations, but from a cursory look at some big corp internals it seems to me that this easily explains the frequent growth in numbers and importance of the coterie with the more agency over hiring, regardless of whether it's good or bad for the company as a whole, ie the growth of middle management cancer.
Naturally, reality is a bit of both, but people on top push LVC hard while they never mention RfR. A good leader earns their salary multiples over, but many poor leaders rake in the dough just from RfR.
Of course some random idiot nagging the engineers won't be worth much, they need to be experts at the specific business and domain to bring value in this situation. Which also makes them harder to replace.
Certainly, companies with engineers who are capable and independet problem-solvers, and who are experts at the company's needs and the domain it operates in, are the most valuable. These are not uncommon either. But a fast-growing company in a fast-growing industry has zero chance of solely hiring such people. They need to widen their net to people that require managing.
Intra-firm compensation is not nearly as "rational" as you are making it out to be.
Google's net profit was $40B in 2020. Apple's was $94.6B in 2021. (all according to wikipedia).
Edit: The above is net income, so AFTER paying all the exorbitant salaries.
Apple alone makes enough money that it could fund pretty much all current publicly-funded science happening in the US at the current rate. That is a ridiculous amount of money, and publicly-funded science just cannot compete at that level.
(Currently on publicly-funded grants. Underpaid relative to what I could make elsewhere, but happy to be contributing to the greater good rather than helping some advertising company).
I realize this may be a pipe-dream but it feels like a better long-term strategy than "pay researchers more than FAANG".
[1] https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/89407/How-much-salar...
Otherwise, you'll end up with potential Einsteins playing with spreadsheets in investment banks rather than discovering relativity, simply because they wanted a bit of disposable income.
Stupid, yes, but that's the situation we're in.
Anybody can compete, but apparently most of us choose not to. Who forces a young talent to settle for a job instead of taking the risk to innovate ? Maybe risk-taking for innovation is what could be the encouraged through taxation.
That's what some EU members think. Ask us how that's going :)
That's why most of the big and wealthy companies hare are around 100 years old or more, vs about 30 years old in the US.
Here in Austria you can get various government and EU grants for your startup and tax waivers on social security, and if by some miracle, you don't crash and burn like 95% of startups and manage to produce a semi-profitable company in the end, then you have to pay to the government retroactively all the social security contributions and taxes that have been previously waived over the past years, which is the final nail in the coffin for most companies here never growing or scaling beyond a couple of guys from uni in an apartment kind of company.
Therefore most of the innovation happens nearly exclusively within academia, as "outside" it's a pretty hostile tax environment that mostly favors those 100 year old companies that already have solid revenue streams.
But I don't think we are evolved enough to deal yet. We'd just end up in a communist prison life or something as people selfishly try to get more for themselves. Roddenberry thought an event like finding extraterrestrial life would be the push humans need, but I'm not so sure anymore.
but dont quote me.
its also a plot device to let them talk about economics.
I think that taxing large companies more than small ones might. The bedrock of capitalism is competition, and that is significantly stifled if big players with large amounts of capital can simply buy out anything innovative.
A better way to promote innovation might be through cultivating a spirit of entrepreneurship in young people, supporting startup accelerators, and handing out grants to promising candidates like the one in the article.
I thought it was an interesting story as I heard it repeated among the students at the tournament. Many of the teams have sponsors who donate $1000s so the schools/clubs can buy parts, etc. They are trying to encourage interest in STEM. But if the story is true, one company could spend $1000000 and inspire 1000s of students, generating lottery psychology. Of course, one person could just make up such a story for $0 and achieve the same thing. But it amuses me to think of some altruistic billionaire having a little fun and doing such a thing.
Taxing large corporations seems like it would be an excellent way in which to fund such grants.
Also, big companies are needed because there are technologies that cannot be produced by small companies. I do not understand recent tendency to make them look bad. Big companies are good for country and economy. Punishing companies for success is harmful for the progress.
I think letting market decide is better choice. Overregulation leads to decrease in competition and production.
Also, what is bad in it of big companies need to compete for talents? This competition leads for better opportunities and bigger salaries. I think it is good that person has a freedom of choice were to go.
Of course a lot of processes also scale with size. With a decent welfare system this greater efficiency could also be tapped to achieve widespread prosperity.
I don't see what makes cars more "democratic" or anti-trust as firmly on the "yeoman" side of things.
Not intrinsically, obviously, as anti-trust clearly shows. I am not anti-big intrinsically, for many of the reasons identified.
But I do think there are obvious downsides to be guarded against. If anything, as technology improves, technological barriers to entry should decrease and less big companies will be needed to work on certain advanced technologies.
The 2-20%. Especially those who are W2 employees and have limited options for offsetting their taxable income.
And we know they’ve engaged in anticompetitive behavior among themselves when it comes to recruiting. I would be unsurprised to find out it still takes place.
But I think the point was monopoly power from their core products is the real issue, and that enables the astronomical salaries.
The fact that they pay the highest prices for people means they sure suck at it.
If someone can run a profitable business when money is hard to come by as a non-public company, it makes sense for a public company to buy them because they can get money much more easily and expand the smaller company's operations and make an even bigger profit. They can even run the company poorly and still make money because their money is cheaper.
Essentially, it's an information and regulation problem.
The best thing yet invented, taxwise, to counteract this advantage that big businesses have in attracting money is Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS)[1]. It' a great tax incentive program because it massively rewards people for investing in startups. It is highly targeted to encourage that and not be a general loophole.
[1]https://www.sba.gov/blog/qualified-small-business-stock-what...
Who knows what this person wants? He probably doesn’t either.