Comment by dzink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dzink | Hacker News Reader

He is not wrong.

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same” - R. Kipling

Media riles up those who have been limited or deprived by circumstances. It waves flags and triggers emotions and creates envy and conjures social ladders to political influence, or financial gains, or popularity and public attention, or peaks of history. The reality though is that those apply to the people who don’t know better - the new grads, the hungry and ambitious, the midlife-crisis sufferers, the naive who haven’t encountered bad people or circumstances. If you’ve seen a lot or you know evil, you don’t need a public life where you may attract it. When you know what you have and value it, a quiet life is the best way to protect it. People value privacy when they have something to lose. If you know what you want to do and can do it without attention, you are much better off doing than dealing with collateral damage from unpredictable attention.

The media today is becoming incredibly propaganda filled and charged. This is a highly combustible environment. Big geopolitical risks are coming and publicity risks making you a target.

When low interest rates paid for VC-subsidized press the world was filled with startup success stories and drums up for startups and their potential gains. That meant many promising entrepreneurs took money at unsustainable expected ROI and lost years of their life working for a promise. Another word for that is lottery. When the dust settled having a quiet business and chugging along profitably proved to be like the little mice who survived underground after the asteroid hit.

If you are a cat who just caught a mouse, would you go to a hill to advertise to all local predators that you are about to enjoy fresh meat?

> If you know what you want to do and can do it without attention, you are much better off doing than dealing with collateral damage from unpredictable attention.

To achieve this state where one can operative effectively without external validation often requires them to initially engage with the public sphere. This exposure is important to getting opportunities, especially when starting out with no resources. The purpose of working is to be able to transcend this phase and do more autonomous and focused work...

> If you’ve seen a lot or you know evil, you don’t need a public life where you may attract it. When you know what you have and value it, a quiet life is the best way to protect it. People value privacy when they have something to lose.

That's a wonderful way of framing it. No one is intent on violating my privacy to give me anything, only to take.

This comes down to perspective. For example, the state would argue they're violating your privacy to give you safety.

The counterpoint to this is that having “internet status” begets a number of benefits.

For example, when you email support at $bigco you’re more likely to be taken seriously. When you contact a random founder for a meeting, they’re more likely to meet you. You forget to take out the trash from your Airbnb and nobody complains, etc. Basically everything in your life gets a bit easier, because people are more scared to piss off someone with a lot of twitter followers.

> Basically everything in your life gets a bit easier, because people are more scared to piss off someone with a lot of twitter followers

This is terrifying. Status online shouldn't bleed on all those other domains. Using your influence online to get things (or else I will tweet about you and the sky will fall on your head) is petty, and one more bad thing that social media has brought to our lives. Now we have to aim to please those who have amassed followers?

I don’t know, try to explain your point of view to people like Trump or Musk.

It'd be easier to explain Shakespeare to a fish. Sociopaths aren't generally much for outside counsel.

But what for?

People like them are not a point of reference to relate everything, you know

Maybe the world would have been a better and friendlier place if the two people you mentioned, and others like them, had an attitude a bit more muted and humble.

If their attitude had been either, they would not have become what they have become. Humble men do not, by and large, take the throne or become captains of industry.

This suggests what they’ve become is desirable - it’s not.

Are you saying that achieving what these two men have achieved is not desirable? Becoming the most powerful or the richest person in the world? I’d say that’s very much desirable, to most people.

In the same way accomplishing what Scrooge McDuck or Dr Evil would be desirable.

Maybe in abstract. I doubt the majority of people have considered those positions in more detail than "wouldn't it be nice if no one could tell me what to do?", or "wouldn't it be nice to never worry about money ever again?".

Close proximity to a bunch of tech executives very quickly cured me of any illusion that I wanted to belong to that in-group. Most already with more money than they knew how to spend, and still pulling 100-hour work weeks in service of the grind... shudders

Well, you write code for a living, right? I’m guessing the vast majority of humans would shudder at the thought of doing that 40 hours a week. It would be a similar attitude to what you expressed towards executives. Executives are sexier than coders, at least for general population. And it’s not clear which one would become more attractive to an average Joe after personally experiencing both professions.

I’ve read the piece. It’s well written. But, no, that’s not how I would like to live my life, and that’s not the life I want for my kids. Too simple, too boring, not for me. But, to each its own, right?

I go home at the end of my 40 hours (at least now I'm the far side of 30), which I think makes my deal qualatatively better than the exec who barely sees his wife and kids in the first place, and then calls into every SEV from family vacation.

Like... I don't know how evident it is to folks who haven't been on the receiving end of the round-the-clock exec communiques, but those people just don't have an off switch. It's like working with a coked-up energizer bunny

It's not evident. I've had a fairly long career in tech (both as an IC and as a manager) and many execs I worked with didn't do much of really impactful work. Sure, they attended a lot of meetings, created spreadsheets and slides (while they were attending the meetings). They left work at 6pm, with the rest of us, and came back to office at 9am the following morning with the rest of us. I don't remember ever feeling the pressure to respond to an email or Slack message sent after 6pm, and the overall number of times I received those was not large. Typically founders worked more than the rest, but that's not surprising. I'm talking about execs below C level.

Execs probably have a higher ratio of BS artists, and SWEs have a higher ratio of slackers, but overall the fraction of workaholics is about the same.

> Well, you write code for a living, right? I’m guessing the vast majority of humans would shudder at the thought of doing that 40 hours a week.

Yeah, right. The vast number of subsistence farmers in the Third World, and the (tens of?) millions of single parents holding down three jobs (at least one of which full-time) and eking out a subsistence based on constantly increasing their debts to pay-day loansharks in the USA, they all "shudder at the thought" of doing a mere 40 hours a week of a plush sit-down job like tapping code into a computer.

You need to seriously recalibrate your perspective.

> Humble men do not, by and large, take the throne or become captains of industry.

Citation needed. Other than Musk and Trump, how many throne-sitters and captains-of-industry do you know that blow their own propaganda trumpets as hard as those two? (Something which, incidentally, they both only started doing after they had money anyway, not as a means to obtain it, as far as I know.)

The world has many more people like them than you think. The reason for that is the media’s propensity to raise people on pedestal over the smallest things and crash and burn that made-up image. Some people find new tools in that kind of experience. Some people have learned how to raise anyone by crafting a narrative for them with money. And some people become addicted to it and the attention they never got as a child.

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