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andrewstuart

Alternatively, don't sell your youth to Google, facebook, Microsoft or Netflix.

Travel the world. Party with friends, within safe limits do sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Get a job at a company you like, learn stuff, educate yourself, better yourself, become an awesome software developer.

Buy a car that's too expensive, crash it, be stuck with the loan for six years.

Try to start your own startup, fail, go back to zero.

Have 20 girlfriends/boyfriends.

Have fun, live life, and at 35 don't sit around regretting that you gave the only youth you'll ever have to online advertising and increasing the ridiculous wealth of Larry and Sergey.

If you do that, you'll have an empty heart where your soul was meant to have been forged.

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This is a popular narrative, that you make money or live, but you can’t do both. That is complete BS - it is equally dumb to be on either extreme, but it is very possible to do both. I have several friends who took the ‘live’ route, only to wake up in their 30s realizing they have an equally empty soul as the guys who worked too hard, and feel boxed out of the future they want with not much nest egg to start a family, or the experiences to have the career they want.

Here is to taking the reasonable middle road, the one no one writes songs about, but (I think) the one that most often leads to happiness for the average person.

Yeah, as the old saying goes: There's nothing wrong with a simple life of peace and prosperity.

I frittered away large swaths of my 20s, and now, as I try to make up the lost time in my 30s, I often think of an entirely different quote though:

  Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.
  - Neal Stephenson

You can also work for Microsoft in a different country like China, do that for 9 years, in exchange for the lower pay check (but really still quite generous salary), you can have the time of your life, and vacation in Thailand/Bali on holidays. Then afterwards, you come back to the states because you are expecting a kid, and the air pollution is a bit too much in Beijing, and then you get the job at Google because, why not?

Try not to crash your car on the public roads. The injuries might prevent you from having fun for the rest of your life after that. And I know a couple of people who were involved in crashes when they were young adults who are obviously mentally scarred (bring it up all the time) by seeing their friends die or feeling responsible for strangers dying, and they were not even driving.

You have only one body, why crash a car with it? Why give it the boat load of stress from being stuck with loans? Who is paying the world travel?

I read a blog on world traveling here once. A person did that for years and then realized that she was now a bartender with no valuable skills. She only had "experiences".

But you can do almost all that while working at Google. And imo, the stability makes it even easier to do so.

It's been my experience that Google is a super chill place to work, especially when you take advantage of the fact that you're just one cog among many.

You get 5 weeks pto plus 4 weeks work from anywhere. This year alone I'm going to the Arctic, Antarctica, and the Carribean. Including a 40 day stretch without internet. I couldn't imagine doing the latter in a startup.

And all the while getting paid and having the comfort to make plans knowing that I'll (probably) continue to do so in the future.

I never understood religious people who confessed that they use to “live a horrible life of sin”. If it was horrible, they weren’t doing something right.

Or just do both? I’m currently 25 and doing all of the above whilst making more than my peers in FAANG. There is no reason having more fun means getting paid less. Work hard play hard.

Poe's law is strong with this one.

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