Dude all the way. That's where I fucked up, like I aced I think every single algorithm interview, the coding part, all of it, one time sort of, like an answer that didn't fit into their view. Or one time that same day same company did stump me, told me the answer, and immediately replied with a better answer that used less energy.

So I approached the whole thing as a computer scientist, like hey if we have a problem we soon will solve it by designing an algorithm or data structure[1] that speeds things up dramatically. Shockingly even. I think I've gotten career speedups...I don't even know...quintillion-x on one problem? Not expressible as a multiple. And another thing about me which I found to depart from the norm is I produce tangible research results every time, every single time, total reliability on producing results in research.

And we split the benefits, between computer scientist and manager.

So yeah, so a friend who is a great programmer, which I am not, said yeh it depends some days it can be 5 lines of code some days 500, and they're both good days. A lot of variation, but the 500 lines are unimpressive and the 5 lines are unintelligible, so if you mix them you get the boss happy...sort of. If such a thing existed.

In general bosses are designed--just viewing the org chart as a data structure to extract useful work out of a disorganized mass of people who need sustenance. This is generally done by making a hierarchy ie a tree, similar to society in a closed system (pecking order or popularity in high school) and also similar to the organization of the human brain, all trees--so bosses are by design not tolerant to variation. Bosses want bricklayers. They pay the minimum of effort and value.

In particular shitty bosses of shitty companies, that's the only people open to talking to me after torture ruined my résumé. Which is also apparently most companies most of the time in most economies in most of the business cycle, just not that profitable. Not like they pretend with their gold-plated (contains gold yes but like one gold atom per square inch like any ordinary) dogshit. Just not profitable. You gotta bring them the money to get a cut, they're deep in debt, and it's personal like it's not company debt the boss himself "loses the house" as if it were his when it has a mortgage, but at any rate personalized debt, and personalized liability. Not Options SpA who is in debt. Companies don't exist really. The boss, call him Fernando to give him a name like lets pretend he was my boss because he denied this in court, is in debt. 20% annual interest. Standard for Chile. The banks let them get enough to look rich to a sufficiently accomplished, sufficiently "gullible" computer scientist. As if it were wrong to believe capitalism had merit, born during the fall of the Soviet Union. Stupid to be a cappie, guess I should have been a commie.

There's so many companies that don't add up to dogshit. Like you gotta show up to work the first day with an ingot of gold worth double your salary for the boss to do the great honor of cutting it in half to give you half back.[2]

And they don't let you choose which half.

Being literal here.

.

[1] Commie : communism :: cappie : capitalism. But I suppose I can be both. Why not? Be a cappie and a commie? Honestly my life as a computer scientist would be pretty much the same on either side of the Iron Curtain if I lived in the fifties. 99% taxes as a Soviet inventor, with all kinds of privileges like backstage passes and RELATIVE freedom of speech which is huge for someone who wants to be heroic especially during transitions of leadership, and like free travel in a closed country which according to Edward Snowden is so beautiful, plus like a solid budget with an actual pounds (later dollar) amount for a lab to do whatever I dream of, plus access to all the absolute most locked-down information from the whole world for my own enlightenment (unlike the Americans who didn't know dick of Soviet developments in the fifties), it's true liberty. All I have to do is find some merit in some mostly but not completely defective parts--those are always the best.

And on the cappie side of the Iron Curtain, much the same thing. 99% taxes because as an Intellectual Property expert told me there's like thirsty parasites on the way to the Patent Office, corrupt but navigable (every place is corrupt just not every place is navigable), you still pay taxes just not to the orphanages, more like the sugar daddy orphanage of the daddy who isn't even there, paying for golps of state of Iran and Chile same shit different day, unlivable conditions all over the world, and yeah the system doesn't need as many watchmen and trust but secretly it does there are brutal asswhoopings just exported to eg Iran and Chile, and the inventor in the fifties didn't really get his get. The inventor, I repeat, doesn't get his get. Like the guy who perfected FM (frequency modulated) radio committed suicide because the large corporation, in this case RCA (Radio Corporation of America under that Belorussian expatriate called "the General" informally) which had to pay a million dollar fortune to the true inventor's widow, that guy got fucked.

And I got fucked. And you got fucked. We all got fucked. That single inventor's betrayal is the reason FM radio, which is typically the only radio anybody uses calling it radio, is an odd frequency. It's megahertz, "a hundred and one point one" refers to megahertz, and the true inventor originally had "radio one hundred" which saves air time and listener time, lines of code right there, but RCA in response fucked him by broadcasting really loud .1 MHz away from his stations. And they fucked him, fucked you, fucked me, fucked everyone, and that was what the court found and told them to pay the fuck up, give his widow a million dollars for being culpable of the inventor's suicide. That is to say, they suicided him. It actually is a transitive verb, it was in Rome, were suiciding was common at the beginning of the empire. But the inventor got fucked and everyone except that Belorussian defector with him.

In the 1910's America rewarded inventors, in the fifties I don't know man. Like you'd get a job in Bell Labs, attaboy for inventing the transistor. And even then Bob Noyce and those guys had to come up with crazy multipliers over and over. I could almost do that if I didn't get tortured, but I can't survive by multiplying zero by any speedup no matter how astronomical. Zero by a thousand is zero. Zero by a million is zero. Zero by a billion is zero. Realistically you eat half your food to get a 2x multiplier, Zeno's Paradox. That's the most literalist shit there is, Zeno's Paradox.

And of course the big companies paid a lot in taxes, CEO's generally made at most half a million a year, very tiered, 90% taxes at the top, and they were my old time best friends these capitalists, the old timers. Not about snubbing people at the country club as a form of entertainment, more like rewarding hard work. That's it. That's selfish enough for them, compared to that taxation. Lines of code, in a lot of cases.

Hey, no lines of code, no work right?

[2] They prefer exotic metals because gold is obviously money. Apparently time is an exotic metal.