First world demons
peternixey.com
peternixey.com
> I don't like this expression "First World problems." It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn't disappear just because you're black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here's a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.
> One event that illustrated the gap between the Africa of conjecture and the real Africa was the BlackBerry outage of a few weeks ago. Who would have thought Research In Motion's technical issues would cause so much annoyance and inconvenience in a place like Lagos? But of course it did, because people don't wake up with "poor African" pasted on their foreheads. They live as citizens of the modern world. None of this is to deny the existence of social stratification and elite structures here. There are lifestyles of the rich and famous, sure. But the interesting thing about modern technology is how socially mobile it is--quite literally. Everyone in Lagos has a phone.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/11/whats-...
I wish entrepreneurs would stop working on First World Problems. I think a planet that raises its best and brightest to dream of building the next Instagram is on its way to doom.
Thereby your psychological hypothesis is shown, by this clear counterexample, to be factually false as a generalization about a necessary cause of worrying about "First World Solutions"; or to put it another way, someone already working on an important problem would arrive at the same worry for much the same reason that others say they are worried.
With that out of the way, I remark that it furthermore constitutes a fallacy of ad hominem / poisoning the well.
Let me try to reframe his point in a way you might find more palatable. When you feel anger, it's an opportunity to learn something about yourself--an opportunity that most people ignore. You'll always feel like you have a good immediate reason to be angry because that's how emotion works, but those explanations are often retroactive and superficial; they don't point toward a change in the world that would make your anger go away. Projection one such failure mode, and a very common; so common, in fact, that many people would do well to check themselves for it every single time they feel anger. The author illustrates his point with a concrete example.
Perhaps none of this is useful to you personally. That's fine. But you aren't representative.
Hold on. It's late where I am, I'm tired, and this might be me performing some kind of logically fallacy but: are you saying that if I hate Paris Hilton I'm actually internally scared of being an airhead who gets far more publicity than she deserves?
I think saying "what you're doing is stupid because X" is pointless, navel-focused and unproductive, though not necessarily even remotely wrong.
Here's what I'd like: I'd like instead for a discussion to take place on exactly what areas we can write code in that changes the world in a useful and laudable way.
The medical imaging example is sort of interesting, because I've worked on hospital software before and the biggest challenge has nothing to do with writing code, it has to do with politics and money. I've occasionally thought of apps that you could build and run in a hospital (watch HL7 traffic and send alerts when probable bad things happen, e.g. patients get prescribed too much drugs / odd medications), but again: writing the code is not the hard part, getting it into hospitals is.
I'd like to know what problems I can help solve now, where the main problem is actually writing code.
However, if you value intelligence, meritocratic success and substance over style then the fact that Paris apparently represents the opposite of those things is bound to be unpleasant. Is it really her that's so distasteful though or the fact that people seem to like her for it. If it's the latter then she's bound to be unpleasant by association.
On a different note I think idea that Paris is an airhead is probably misguided. Being a billionaire heiress will only fly for so long before the press lose interest and like Kim K she's been an extraordinarily savvy girl in keeping the ball rolling.
Obviously HL7 is trivial... but I don't think that's what the guy was talking about. He was talking about the hard stuff.
I sort of dislike murdering paedophiles.. I guess that means.. uhm..
It's especially interesting as you didn't mention her wealth at all, just her publicity.
Disclaimer: Pure speculation.
If you want to create the next big photo app, that's great. I'll support you, use it and enjoy it. But be modest and don't always insist that you're changing the world on a grand scale.....because when you get paired up with, say, oncologists and Red Cross volunteers, you'll seem kind of silly.
There is nothing wrong with trying to address "third world problems" if you have the skills and background knowledge to actually do something, but if you grew up in a middle class suburb then stick to working on what you know. A lot of the innovations in the first world eventually end up being used and applied to bigger problems anyway.
I'm just advocating for a little more humility in the tech industry. We should put our contributions in perspective before asserting (as many tech entrepreneurs do) that we're changing the world and people's lives.
I'd met with someone last year and built a quick prototype for his idea. Was thinking of doing an actual partnership with him - I'd initially been impressed with his hustle (which turned out not to be as great as I'd initially thought). I'd indicated that I liked the idea, but it was also essentially a feature than foursquare or yelp could add in an afternoon - I'd prototyped the thing in a couple days - what was needed was sales execution on the street to make it happen. With that in mind, I'd asked him what he'd do if, for example, yelp offered a small buyout (say, $2m).
"Oh no, I wouldn't sell - this will change the world - this will replace Facebook in the next 5 years - I wouldn't sell for $50m".
With that, we parted ways. Even if his idea is right - and honestly, I think it will likely come to pass - he/we aren't in a position to take down Facebook, and a small cashout deal would put him in a much better situation to tackle his other ideas. The idea will happen, I'm pretty sure, but not in the way he sees it happening.
Like - drop in replacement system for the flywheel of a car consisting of electrical engine with recuperation braking system backed by supercapacitors (batteries are expensive) you could turn any car in de facto hybrid for a fraction of the cost and it could be used on the current fleet that will be in commission for a long time to come.
Heat pump that cools tank of water at night to 4 degrees and pumps up the cold back into the build which would make air conditioning at summer much less straining on the grid and cheaper to operate.
There a lot of inefficiencies in out energy production and consumption system that could be eliminated by some engineering ingenuity and sufficiently smart software.
Can the alternator run in reverse though and provide energy to the engine/drive train?
"Hybrid automobiles replace the separate alternator and starter motor with one or more combined motor/generator(s) (M/Gs) that start the internal combustion engine, provide some or all of the mechanical power to the wheels, and charge a large storage battery. When more than one M/G is present, as in the Hybrid Synergy Drive used in the Toyota Prius and others, one may operate as a generator and feed the other as a motor, providing an electromechanical path for some of the engine power to flow to the wheels. These motor/generators have considerably more powerful electronic devices for their control than the automotive alternator described above."
But the goal - make the existing fleet of vehicles better while cleaning the air as a bonus is a worthy one and smog is a first world problem.
Edit: honda have something similar
The problem isn't that people individually are making photosharing sites. That's way cooler than 90% what people do. But so is being an advertising exec like Don Draper in Mad Men. Very cool job that many people would love to have. But Don Draper doesn't tell himself every morning that he's changing the world. This is of course something you see on Wall Street too. "I'm changing the world by securitizing these income streams." And how do tech folks react to that?
Also, people love to complain, about everything. Try writing a new GUI toolkit and prepare yourself for the barage of complaints from people asking why you didn't just contribute to GTK.
That depends. Is it accompanied by a statement saying "Look at our cool photo app!" or is it accompanied by a statement saying "Look at us, with this photo sharing app we're going to change the world!"
'cos that latter one gets annoying...
And there is an other argument for doing it anyway, even though it looks much less important than curing illnesses or stuff like that: We live our lifes in a specific way. The way we live it, we generate expertise. I know nothing about illnesses or development work, I would have to start at zero. But I know how to build a computer together with the parts on the market, and I think I know how to select the best ones, so I can build a hardware recommender. Same thing for other people with foto sharing apps and so on.
Working there where we have a clue is not arrogant and mindless, often times it is smart.
It's not as though the entrepreneurs are on their own in this, anyway. There is always far more money and attention for things that are not important in comparison to those that are. Playing games versus medical research, for example. Political campaign funding versus medical research. Pretty much anything in the mainstream of culture versus medical research.
In general we are the species that fritters away our opportunities for significance, with odd exceptions here and there. Entrepreneurs are just like everyone else in this respect.
Agreed. Anytime you bring out something shiny, new, awkward, and full of a mix of excitement & doubt - the arm-chair-quarterbacks will miraculously emerge from the ether. It is their role. HN is still the best place to get feedback on products, and it comes with the pendulum of 'that is the best thing ever" to that is a toy and no one will buy or invest.
Know your market. Get the feedback you need and utilize what's valuable.
How does he reconcile this with people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, whom most people venerate. Did they not work exceptionally hard and face hardship that most of us couldn't bear? If the impetus for our dislike was really a fear of the toils of entrepreneurship, we wouldn't venerate any hard-working entrepreneurs like Elon and Steve. If anything, we'd dislike them more because they have faced more adversity than the photo-sharing apps.
No one dislikes these companies because they fear work. They dislike these companies because they are trivial, and there are too many exigent problems in the world to make another Pinterest clone.
For instance, world hunger. We seem to produce more food per unit land area each year yet people still go hungry. I'm sure the explanations given are all valid, but more importantly solving them requires near-global consensus for which no incentives seem to exist.
Example 1 -- food market speculation. How many in the West care if millions go hungry when there's money to be made?
Example 2 -- continued breeding by the poor. Many in the West are opposed to any form of birth control except "God's will."
Having tilted at a few windmills in my day, I can see why people would give up trying to solve "moon shot" level problems in favor of something achievable (and with any luck, sinfully profitable) in their lifetime.
I still admit that that psychological effect is real. I'm sure it's true for many circumstances. I just don't think it's applicable to this case.
When the money for building this another photo service comes from the people, through money printing by central bankers, then , yes it could be offensive.
In USA, Japan and Europe money for banks and big institutions like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or Apple is free, as they could get money at near 0% interest with real inflation way over 3%.
No problem with "yet another whatever" that really makes profit by itself, and is necessary, but a real problem with a new multi billionaire acqui-hire that never returns what it extracts from society and when the show is over makes everyone to pay for it, creating misery for all in the process.
No, the problem is money. Good ideas are not that rare. "Worthy" ideas are not that rare. The money to implement them is almost impossible to come by, whether you're in a corporation or raising on the outside.
Free-floating capital is not actually that rare. Talent is not that rare, "talent shortage" whinging aside. The problem is a bilateral and cataclysmic distrust between both sides. Money doesn't trust Talent not to steal so it injects a bunch of useless management that makes Talent impossible to unlock. Talent doesn't trust Money not to be stupid and develops a deep, smoldering cynicism that the rest of the world misperceives as obnoxious entitlement.
The problem is that any idiot can raise money for something any idiot can do. On the other hand, if you try to convince someone to pay you, even at the level of mere salary money to do something worthwhile, you get a lot of questions because not everyone can do those useful things. You get: why you? Which is actually a valid question, even if mildly insulting, because things that are worthwhile are hard.
We end up all working for the smooth-talkers selling trivial ideas because they've been overriding the "why you?" objections since college, when it involved booze and women with low self-esteem and, by age 30, they're very practiced at overcoming, for example, "last minute resistance" (LMR). So when they see LMR in investors, they know what to do, and we don't.
If you don't have any money (and let's face it, most of us don't), you can still start a startup. You can work on your project in evenings and nights. Or you save money and quit your job for 8 months or so. Or you can work part time on your startup and do part-time contracting work on the side.
Starting a software startup is so much easier than opening a bar or a restaurant or a jeans shop it's not even funny. People put their life savings in ordinary businesses like these every day, and more often than not they get utterly crushed by reality. A restaurant without customers can't afford to keep the doors open for long. Buying a 30k kitchen and hiring 5 people before the first customer has walked through the door is scary. We programmers in contrast can just pivot until we find something people are willing to pay for. We can build half a product and use server analytics to figure out which direction is best. We have unique insights in our users and customers and the press loves to write about anything that involves startups. There are so many things subtly working in our favor!
Doing a startup isn't easy. But nobody is entitled to an easy road to guaranteed riches. But doing a startup is possible even if you're broke, don't have any connections and are only a mediocre programmer or business person.
Of course the VC money game is rigged to an extent. So what. If you have traction you have leverage and if you have leverage you'll still get a good deal. And if you have paying customers you may not even need VC money. These are, in the big scheme of things, not things to get terribly upset about.
However, what happens when your bootstrapped startup fails is an unholy cocktail of the following:
a. Your savings is depleted.
b. You learn a lot, which overqualifies you for junior-level work.
c. People try to take advantage of (a) and offer you low-level positions.
It's the career problems that make this game an unholy mess: the fact that most so-called "tech" jobs are career-killing, subordinate wastes of talent that slowly turn you into an unemployable idiot. It's the risk that you'll be 37 and taking orders from a 25-year-old "tech lead" who only knows half a programming language and won't listen to your ideas. Worst of all, at that age you probably have a spouse and kids, so suicide isn't an ethically defensible option. At that point, you just have to suffer for 40 years and die of natural causes.
There are so many things in life that can go horribly horribly wrong that the risk of career setback is completely acceptable in pursuit of a dream. Every kid who decides to major in ancient languages, philosophy or creative arts takes a way bigger risk and nobody bats an eye.
You don't have to take a low-level job. You don't have to stay at a low-level job. I have noticed people are willing to pay you much more for interesting work than they are for boring work. Just price yourself high enough and the interesting work will start coming.
Or just kill yourself now, and save us all the whining.
I don't know you personally, so I am hesitant to put words in your mouth or infer what you are feeling. So I'll just talk about myself.
What made the difference for me was attitude. It sounds trite but it's true. Some people are too motivated to let themselves be beaten down by a bad job or a bad boss. They continue to struggle through until they change things for the better. I used to be that kind of person, but I gave up hope. I had to find a way to convince myself that I was smart enough, could work hard enough, and could be persistent enough to force positive change in my life. That I would carve a good path through life with my bare hands if I had to. The other alternative was for that negative view of career option to become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
I have three children myself, the oldest of which is 4 years old. For their sake I cannot kill myself no matter how bad I feel about my prospects. But also for their sake I cannot let myself get beaten back into a hopeless corner where I come home depressed every day about my life. If I come home every day dead already, what hope do they have of seeing the wonder and beauty of life that makes it worth living? Even without the responsibility of kids I have seen too much good in life to ever be convinced that death is preferable.
I'm also almost 30, and am one of the younger people here. Maybe half of the people who were here (on the same team as me) when I started in 2007 are still here, but not all on the same team any more. A couple have been here thru several acquisitions, and long enough to have stories about losing the office we had in the World Trade Center. My direct supervisor has been with the company in various roles (not all IT) longer than I've been alive.
It's the career problems that make this game an unholy mess: the fact that most so-called "tech" jobs are career-killing, subordinate wastes of talent that slowly turn you into an unemployable idiot.
So don't accept that. My job was supposed to be translating "this field goes here" into Informatica (etl tool) mappings; ie code-monkey on a shitty non-textual turing-incomplete proprietary "language". Instead, after learning Informatica and SQL and PL/SQL all while on the job, I started writing things to automate the more repetitive parts. Now most of my time is spent maintaining and improving a set of tools for the rest of the team, which I (re-)wrote in C#, PL/SQL, Java, and the occasional bit of C, Perl, or Unix shell script.
It's the risk that you'll be 37 and taking orders from a 25-year-old "tech lead" who only knows half a programming language and won't listen to your ideas.
That seems a bit exaggerated, but I suppose it could happen if management was all technically clueless and you never bothered to learn anything resembling people-skills.
Worst of all, at that age you probably have a spouse and kids, so suicide isn't an ethically defensible option.
Um... go talk to a psychiatrist? Please?
If you feel like suicide is something that enters the equation for anyone in your profession, I'd like to urge you to talk to a psychiatrist.
It's not really any of my business, but on the off chance that you haven't talked to a professional about that possibility, I think you might consider doing that. You sound deeply unhappy.
(I am older than you by a little bit.) This is what you do:
D. Take a contract with a fortune 1000, spend a year digging yourself out of a hole, and move on.
Does it mean that somewhere early along your path, you need to pick up some Java or .Net or Oracle? Sure. But you have decades of productive coding ahead of you; a few years is not going to kill your dreams.
Look: not every portion of your life is going to be glamorous, save for the very lucky. It is possible to learn something from everybody, even a "25-year-old who only knows half a programming language."
I think what I learned most from spending some time in the developed world is not to be so self-righteous about bullshit like this. You could be parking your ass in front of a subway line telling people, "God Bless you, please buy a packet of Kleenex."
"So one must find out how to become happy oneself. Wanting to transform the world without discovering one's true self is like trying to cover the whole world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes."
- Ramana Maharshi
In Eliot's time, people didn't have access to a full time series of your professional social status. I'm sure that it sucked for him to work in a bank basement for 8 years, but he never worried that someone would find that out on LinkedIn and he'd be in the basement permanently.
There was a time in which it was much more OK to do low-level work, if only because you could pull a Don Draper and reinvent yourself with a different history.
Very much in contrast what you have said in this post and in other posts that you have offered here, I find the demand for seasoned programmers, developers, architects at an all-time high. I have recently had to turn down two very lucrative engagements due to my apparent unclonability.
I have had low spots careerwise--a period of self-unemployment, but I was determined to not get into the negative thinking, as I am sensing in your posts.
My wife bought me a fiction book by Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain. One of the phrases in the book was "Your car goes where your eyes are." If your eyes are on the wall next to the race track, that is where the car will go.
To put it in non-racing terms, you are likely to fulfill your expectations.
Am I changing the world, blowing everyone's mind? No. I'm doing work that's pretty fun, working with people I like, and hanging with my family on the weekend.
Happiness is a process not a result. If you want to focus on some perceived injustice in your past, that is of course your right, but let's not pretend it's a universal human condition.
I mean, let's take your worst-case scenario. Broadly speaking, most jobs in the world are substantially worse than a low-level computer programming job.
Repeating reality is (is lost..) that programming has a real life cost equally important to every type of pain. Whether counting greater, technical, systemic, organizational and or proprietary pains, sometimes our lives are counted by asking people to pay with pain.
Framed negative and or positive, equally real, paying programming and paying with programming et al, still has real life opportunity cost and real life opportunity lost.
No offense intended to michaelochurch; but a Greasemonkey script or something that auto-hides or flags comments from selected users (that you pick / configure), would come in really handy.[1]
It would make a HN much more happier and cheerful place.
[1] EDIT: An afterthought: a database where people could share their "flagged users" would be a useful addition. One could then easily figure out who the "most flagged users" were (for negativity, rashness/harshness/pick-your-gripe), and then add an option were you could also hide comments by the "top flagged" users in this database.
Fantastic.
My problem is that I am forced at a neurological level to be ethical and honest. In a world full of (and run by) liars, it really sucks.
This is a very interesting take on the issue, and not one I see discussed often on HN. The reality is that evolutionary psychology is the ultimate motive force in all human societies. The power imbalances in the work world that you have so thoroughly elucidated in your writings is but a mere symptom of the most basic evolutionary impulse: extract dominance from all.
Why do pointy haired bosses exist? Why do smooth-talkers like Steve Jobs always get the glory over technocrats like Steve Wozniak? Why do people so willingly submit to injustice? Weakness. People submit to those who they fear are powerful enough to harm them. Most often, even a weak bluff vaguely threatening future harm is enough to extract complete submission. The root of this is based on the evolutionary psychology of mammal behavior. Mammals exert dominance by challenging their peers: submit to me or pay the price. In the context of artisans (Technocrats), we can go back to the Feudal era, where artisans and farmers owed their lives to the Feudal lords, and could lose it any instant by not submitting some or all of their surplus value created when commanded to do so. Although the artisans created all the value in society, the lords were free to help themselves to it at will, because they were the ones who were willing to use force if their demands were not met. Although this strategy comes with risk, the rewards are disproportionately high, which is why history follows the story of one conqueror after another.
The only way artisans can gain control of their lives is if they beat the Feudal lords at their own game, ruthlessly and without mercy. This means playing as dirty as necessary to win, but still keeping your ideals intact. That is the true challenge of the Technocrat: defeat the Psychopaths using their own tools without becoming one of them. But make no mistake, they won’t go down easy. Look at Julian Assange, Noam Chomsky, and countless others who know this and have tried, in vain, to change the status quo. The choice is simple: submit to the psychopaths and live in their world, or risk everything and attempt to change the dynamic to your favor.
P.S. You made references to psychopaths and their success with females. This is well documented, and I would recommend reading about the Dark Triad personality traits.
That's bullshit. Let's take the late Steve Jobs. While his psychopathic tendencies have probably evoked fear within Apple, it does not explain his influence on the general public outside of Apple.
Various answers have been proposed by different philosophy - from a worker revolution which michaelochurch seems to support (correct me if I'm wrong), ala Marx, to just refusing to submit and do your own thing aside, ala Atlas Shrugged.
I for one would prefer this last option, but that's just my opinion. Ayn Randt wrote nothing new - she just wrote it better than La Boetie did in 1553 - almost 500 years ago: :
To him, the great mystery of politics was obedience to rulers. Why in the world do people agree to be looted and otherwise oppressed by government overlords? It is not just fear, Boetie explains in “The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude,” for our consent is required. And that consent can be non-violently withdrawn.
The most important is to have at least a bit of stoicism, because behind weakness is fear - the fear to lose something.
Weakness is the reason, but fear is the cause.
Give up your fears, accept the possibility of loss in advance, every morning, and weakness will vanish.