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Comment by throwaway9980 | Hacker News Reader

Hitting my mid-40’s with a reasonably successful multi decade career in tech and I’ve recently realized that some gigantic percentage (plurality, maybe majority) of all the hard work has gone into competing against the people around me for opportunities. Not into actual value creation for others, not in service of others, purely focused on beating out other people for the chances.

I’m not sure how to reorient myself. It’s extremely disturbing to look back and think that all the good stuff was a side effect of spending enormous energy trying to outcompete others for opportunity. I don’t want to keep doing things this way, but I also don’t know how to change.

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I've worked for two companies who went public (the dream, right?) after becoming fairly successful and then were driven into the ground and sold off in pieces due to being horribly mismanaged by dispassionate, replacement management (should've sold sooner). I look back over the ~15 years of those happenings and I'm not sure that, in the long run, any valuation happens in the corporate culture. It all seems to be a game of Monopoly, set about by players with enough money to buy their way in, or lucky enough to leverage their way in on very rare occasions.

I can't tell you what will work for you, but I've decided for me that real change happens in small sections in myself and in people. It looks small and incremental, and the world seems large but sometimes that's enough... well, it is for me and that's one of the changes I've made to me... most of the time. It doesn't seem to be working as well, lately with all of the chaos in the world. I'm working on it, though =)

competition between organism is pretty fundamental to the way life works. Convincing humans (or any other lifeform) to turn that off is going to be a tall order.

It helps to classify things as coopetition - it is a matter of coordinating the group effectively. sometimes each person goes off and tries different strategies alone, and sometimes people share info and coordinate activities. The determinative factor is the problem to be solved. Some problems are bigger or big but well understood and you can cooperate pretty easily. Some are less well understood and you need to send people off to be mad geniuses in their labs.

Human default is pretty biased towards cooperation, what with our speech and long childhoods and social organization, but of course, as the great success of science these past few hundred years shows, sometimes you need the loners pushing towards a hard to find insight.

Of course, if you don’t care about solving problems or making things more pleasant and interesting and just want to optimize the number of dollars in your banks database, then maybe you wouldn’t care about the most efficient way to solve problems. In which case, good luck, but there are reports from people that have pursued that path that it doesn’t hold a candle to contributing to a Great Common Task.

It seems so strange, you’d think there’d be no shortage of problems to go around.

There's actually only one problem that businesses care about: how do I turn $1 into $2?

What exactly do you mean by this?

A lot of people who are good in a capitalistic world, you know your finance people, lawyers, software engineers (@ FAANG) are kind of like race horses, they are born with ample intellectual capacity and spend their formative years competing with their peers to try to rise to the top (starting from middle school, high school, top uni, top company, top position etc...), they rarely ask themselves if what they are doing is even worth it for humanity, themselves, or posterity, they just run as soon as they are put in a race. Taking a step back and questioning this stuff is scary, especially if you are brought up to think that if you aren't running then you are falling behind.

>Most people in tech changes jobs after 2 years

[[Citation Needed]]

This isn't true in the industry at large. To the degree it's true among the HN demographic it's true early in careers. People don't do that forever. If you have a family, you like the stability of a place and don't want to have to spend all of your nights and weekends grinding Leetcode and networking. Once you're in a senior position, it takes time to build the connections and reputation inside a company to be effective, and constantly moving is a disadvantage. Even if you're done being promoted, many people reach a point where they're earning enough to support their lifestyle and have other priorities. I have plenty of friends at companies like Microsoft, Google, and smaller boring companies HN doesn't care about that absolutely could switch jobs for another 20-40% in comp but would have to work twice as many hours a week to do so, and that's a bad trade.

If you could redirect the competitive effort normally required for nominal advancement into participatory co-operation instead, some incredible returns are unachievable any other way.

Too bad there is not normally the structure in place to better reward co-operation rather than competition.

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