> pretty hard-working but over time become less so
If people start to cruise, they may get pressured by hard-working peers and management. Of course, those who are very good may get away with it as FAANG reward impact and not work, but there are many strong engineers there, so it's very hard to stand out. And those who do are incentized to climb the ladder rather than cruise.
> it doesn't make much of a difference how hard they work
It's the opposite. Those who manage to have good evaluations are rewarded.
> seeing highly-motivated people having their potential sapped by working on contrived pillars instead of using their talents to make cool and useful stuff
There are tons of cool and useful projects in these big companies. Basically any field of CS you may be interested in is there.
My experience is that people work hard when they get the job. After one year, they realize it's hard to sustain that pace and that they barely meet the expectation with all the hard work. Some leave, some get managed out, and those who stay many years are productive individuals.
- 1-2 years: Work hard because you feel optimistic and self-assured, working on exciting problems with smartest people in the world, lots of great resources - 2-3 years: Start to realize things aren't as great as you thought (e.g., a project you felt passionately about was junked for a random political reasons, people you thought were super smart start to just be normal coworkers, more of a premium on playing the game the right way than doing great work) but the salary and lifestyle is still attractive - 3-4 years: Many people leave to do something else, a bit more experienced but a bit more jaded. Many who stick around have figured out a niche to fill and are mainly in it for the lifestyle rather than the technical challenge
Basically I wish it was more common to sustain and grow the early-days excitement and passion while developing as an engineer. I think with smaller companies there's often more self-determination for junior employees, so that when they "grow up" and start to see more problems they usually caused the problem themself, rather than having to live with someone else's problem, which makes it easier to stay excited. YMMV of course
For engineers, the more senior you get, the more communication you should be doing. In most companies, sitting in a corner and quietly writing code will not get you into director-level, however good you are.
Trading firms, various financial software companies, gig economy apps, crypto companies, and developer tools companies tend to be the things that recruit me most frequently. Not exactly companies that I feel are providing a lot of benefit to people. Just more efficient ways of being extractive or helping other companies be extractive.
A friend of mine used to work in the bizdev side of a non-profit, managing donations and tracking groups to thank and follow-up with and so on. Incidentally she started complaining about how bad the user experience of the software she was using was, which got my ears tingling. What if people in her position at other non-profits had the same experience to the extent that I could distribute the cost of developing something this group of users found value in (increased efficiency/productivity) that their organizations would be willing to switch to?
I ended up not following through for personal reasons and there are some of the normal "cost of switching" stuff one would have to get past to make this work, but little things like this wouldn't generate hockey-stick revenue but could bring value to the world. If the Thibault can make a decent living making a good free open source chess website or Tarn can make a decent living making the most in-depth fantasy world simulator the world's ever seen, surely there are other modest opportunities out there to be the change we want to see in the world (interestingly both examples here live on donations rather than selling a service/product).
But the pay is way way way way higher than what I could get by building a website for the local food bank. Instead, I can donate five or six figures annually to charitable causes and still come out ahead for my own income.
You should also keep tuned in to the organization (and those that receive grants from them) on what impact your helping create to build reinforcement.
Of course, there is another group whose attitude is more along the lines of, "fuck society, pay me more."
Money is just the common language you and I use to express what we personally value.
It is, but we do not have equal opportunity to express that value. Some people have thousands of times more money than others, and thus the things they value are over-represented by monetary value. Furthermore, due to marginal utility, the things we first spend money on tend to much more valuable to us than the things we spend extra spare money on, the money spent by the rich tend to be less representative of actual value than that spent by the poor. As that is a huge proportion of the total money spent in our current society (see for example https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/world-26-ri...), money ends up not being that great a measure of true value as defined by the things that people want and need.
I don't think it works that way, at least that's not the way I think about it/find it useful to think about it.
You have to consider each individual in a vacuum with what they can get and how they can earn money. The money that another person has is largely irrelevant to the individual (aside from the macro economic effects).
>money ends up not being that great a measure of true value as defined by the things that people want and need.
"Not that great" as compared to what? It's the only measure I know of.
Ah, but how they can earn money is to a great extent determined by those who have large amounts of wealth (more specifically those who control large amounts of wealth which includes those who own and also those who invest on behalf of others (such as hedge fund managers). Consider how many people are employed by Meta to work on metaverse products, and how much those people earn. Is that because those products have proved themselves on the open market? No, it's because they are the pet project of Mark Zuckerberg who has accrued large amounts of wealth. These kind of projects constitute a significant proportion of our economy.
> "Not that great" as compared to what? It's the only measure I know of.
Not that great compared to a hypothetical measure that was actually accurate. You said "monetary value is real value". And it isn't because it's not an accurate measure. There doesn't need to be a more accurate measure for that to be true.
What this means in practice is that one might be able to make a judgement that say a software job in a renewable energy company produces more value than software job creating a blockchain (even though that job is paid less), or that social worker produces more value than drug dealer even though that pays less. This judgement may or may not be correct, but one cannot rebut it simply by saying "it can't be more valuable, because if it was then it would be more highly paid". Lots of things are not compensated their true worth, and many things are over compensated.
> What this means in practice is that one might be able to make a judgement that say a software job in a renewable energy company produces more value than software job creating a blockchain (even though that job is paid less), or that social worker produces more value than drug dealer even though that pays less. This judgement may or may not be correct, but one cannot rebut it simply by saying "it can't be more valuable, because if it was then it would be more highly paid". Lots of things are not compensated their true worth, and many things are over compensated.
What I'm talking about is value to one person. For example, if you were the person you were talking about working for the blockchain v. renewable company. If blockhain job pays 150k and renewable job pays 120k yet you choose the 120k job instead, I can say that the extra value you get from working for a renewable energy company vs a blockchain is at least 30k dollars. I can then take that 30k dollars and use that as a proxy for anything else you can get for 30k for the basis of comparison. For example, you have to buy a home with 200 less square feet or you have to send your kids to a different and worse college. The value you place on those two homes or those two colleges is also worth 30k.
This logic works for any group of people as well. The US population as a whole spends X dollars and Amazon and X dollars on climate change
> This judgement may or may not be correct
I'd argue that this judgement can't possibly be incorrect for the individual that makes it (at the time it was made. regret is possible later) and that any other context you try and call it "correct" doesn't provide any insight that can tell you something new.
If money didn't exist as a proxy for value and you were instead compensated a brand new car every year at job 1 and a new house every 3 years at job 2, it'd be a hell of a lot harder to figure out how much you valued your children's education.
The way you're talking about value is using your moral priorities to say what's wrong or right and calling what's right valuable. There is certainly plenty of room for a discussion of good and/or right but I think it's a distinct conversation than what people actually value (as demonstrated by their actions). It's philosophy vs economics.
> You said "monetary value is real value". And it isn't because it's not an accurate measure.
In the economic sense, monetary value is a precisely accurate measure that shows how people valued things in the past.
I think you're talking about what people do with their money and it's societal value (as determined by your ethics) which is, as you say, not an accurate measure.
I think this gets to the heart of the issue. I would say that I'm making a philosophical argument that the (classic) economic definition of value is insufficient because ones actions are not sufficient to determine someone's preferences unless you hold their circumstances constant.
> What I'm talking about is value to one person. For example, if you were the person you were talking about working for the blockchain v. renewable company. If blockhain job pays 150k and renewable job pays 120k yet you choose the 120k job instead, I can say that the extra value you get from working for a renewable energy company vs a blockchain is at least 30k dollars
Your logic here makes some amount of sense. I think where it falls down is that if you measure in this way then you can't compare values across people (or groups of people) at all. $30k for one person is not measuring the same amount of value as $30k for someone else. If Person A earning $300k/yr chooses to spend $60k on their children's education and Person B earning $50k/yr chooses to spend $10k on the same then you can't even say that that Person A values their childrens' education more than Person B, let alone that they value it $50k more. The opportunities available to different people are not the same.
I actually feel like this problem is significant enough that one shouldn't use dollars to measure value in this way at all, because dollars are usually fungible (a dollar is a dollar is a dollar) but in this case the measured value is non-fungible. Thus making any analogies using this measure liable to be highly misleading or commit logical fallacies.
Clearly not in absolute X dollar terms though.