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Comment by LeonB | Hacker News Reader

If your goal is to make a lot of money and to influence a lot of people — you are guaranteed to be unhappy. If you make a lot more money than others, you’ll still make a lot less than some. No amount can fulfil that “goal” because it’s not a goal it’s a direction, like “head west, and keep heading west” … you can’t reach “west”.

Different point of view —

If there are people that you care about and your goal is to help those people - you can be happy and you can succeed. If you only help a few, it’s still worth it, because you care about them. If you help a few more, even better.

If you’re hoping to get rich by helping people who you don’t care about, give it up, stop wasting time. Step back and think about it.

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I'm surprised that your takeaway from my venting was that I want to be rich. There are much easier ways to get rich than becoming an expert at something. Out of the four options, I've chosen the one that makes the least money (#4 arguable I suppose).

The reason I became an expert was to do useful things in the world. It does not feel like that's possible beyond a tiny hour-by-hour contribution to a single client at a time.

Even the top researchers in the world don't make an impact beyond a tiny bump on the graph of knowledge of their field unless they are also lucky enough to be founding members or on the right side of a paradigm shift.

All you can do is look for places where you can make a contribution and keep an eye out for places that could matter in the future. No one knows what will matter in a few years, but it's often apparent what won't make a difference (the well-trodden path).

Sorry for focusing on the money aspect.

I agree with a lot of your bullet points, particularly your characterisation of faang, but the overall message that a single software developer can’t make much impact is needlessly negative.

Compared to any other worker throughout history you’ve got more access to being able to duplicate your work and to reach more people. A peasant in the 1500s could help just one person at a time. But what’s actually stopping you? You can publish open source software that is not limited to helping 1 person at a time, or create educational content that helps more than 1 at a time and so on, or contribute to existing open source software to do the same. It’s such a privileged position you’re in.

Totally agree. Although if you happen to have the skillset to make lots of money you can use that to help more people. That gives a reason to tolerate bullshit jobs too.

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