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I Wasn’t Prepared to Work

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420 pointsreikonomusha285 comments

This is a big part of the reason I support the idea of a "basic income" system.

I believe there are lots of people out there not wired for dealing with the politics or immediate-results stress of the VC system but who are self-directed, interested and motivated enough to work on big problems, but whose energy is destroyed by having to deal with the immense bullshit inherent in modern office-style software development to make money to pay the bills. As a society I believe we would be better off if these people were free to go live in some cheap cost of living area while just doing their thing and contributing to the commons in the form of open source or taking what they eventually create and marketing it (if it is marketable when complete) in order to generate wealth on top of their basic income.

I believe the same would hold for non-software creative jobs as well.

But, of course, I'm not holding my breath for this to happen.

I have always liked Friedman's negative income tax proposal for exactly this reason.

Just going to add a bit about some potentially fertile intellectual grounds for bipartisan support for some form of universal minium income.

From the right: F.A. Hayek, another right-leaning Nobel-winning economist, also supported a universal minimum income (not a negative income tax, but similar, of course. He also added a caveat that he thought it should be implemented IFF it was implemented everywhere).

I like the idea because it doesn't involve eliminating market economies. It's kind of like food stamps, but for a broader array of things: You can competitively purchase basic goods and services, which generally drives down costs and drives up quality.

From the left: One big concern with cash transfers is that some goods are complicated for consumers to understand (healthcare, for example). So, if you are left-leaning, maybe you can support a universal minimum income because the government could have a big role to play in, say, acting as a neutral agent and creating web portals and apps that efficiently disseminate excellent and easy-to-understand information about the types of healthcare plans available for purchase.

I like it because it presumes that people are capable, when left to their own devices, to make decisions on their own.

> From the left: One big concern with cash transfers is that some goods are complicated for consumers to understand (healthcare, for example).

Not really. The problem with health care is that it works if it's socialized, and it doesn't if it's private, as shown by about all the entire developed world. And Saudi Arabia. No way to patch it to make it palatable to the right wing, but that shouldn't be a problem. There wasn't any way to make the USSR being a failure palatable to the left, either.

To clarify, health care is not a consumer product, it's a particular kind of insurance. It doesn't make sense to bring consumer choice into it. [1]

> if you are left-leaning, maybe you can support a universal minimum income

What are you talking about? Universal minimum income is a socialist proposal. It has been for a fairly long time. I suppose they'll be glad to see the libertarians also agree that it could work, but it's not like Hayek alone invented it.

[1] http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/2/PHCBP.pdf

You won't see many leftists pressing for competitive purchasing of goods and services on an open market, i.e., where the payers are individuals and not governments - that's the context in which I was writing about a universal minimum income. You do see a bit of this, but it's mostly a big push for monopsony.

Also, health care doesn't have to be insurance. With proper regulation, it could be competitively delivered (e.g. LASIK). However, as many leftists note, the consumer-knowledge problem comes into play at this point. That's what I was referring to.

> What are you talking about? Universal minimum income is a socialist proposal. It has been for a fairly long time. I suppose they'll be glad to see the libertarians also agree that it could work, but it's not like Hayek alone invented it.

Only in some watered down sense of the word socialist. Neither "from each according to his ability to each according to his need" nor "to each according to his contribution" are compatible with a basically capitalist society with private ownership of the means of production that happens to have a minor redistributive element layered on top of it. In fact, I suspect a Marxist analysis of such a programme would conclude that it was simply a mechanism for the capitalist class to stifle the development of class consciousness among the proletariat.

That's exactly what we Marxists do conclude, but personally, if it means people can actually live happier, more fulfilling lives, who gives a damn?

True. It's a little like http://xkcd.com/810/: "Mission fucking accomplished".

I think the only argument against basic income/negative income tax is some form of "fairness", that taking away the need to work somehow makes people weaker or less moral.

I don't really believe that, but I can't think of any other good arguments against it.

The other argument is that all taxation is theft, and everyone fully earned whatever money he earns in the free economy independent of everything else.

Even if you believed this, basic income seems to be closer to this ideal than the current welfare/subsidy system. I'd be happier paying slightly more in taxes for things which don't create perverse incentives for anyone, but in reality, I think basic income (and a sane defense budget) would be a tax cut, at least after a transition period.

Surprised to see you support basic income, I had always assumed you were a super Randian rugged individualist :)

I also support basic income FWIW.

People have been conditioned to equate wage labor with morality; anything that can be cast as weakening this is immediately politically suspect. From a policy standpoint, as opposed to a political one, I've never heard a rational objection to a basic income.

I'm not a believer in the Marxist doctrine of a false consciousness, so when I say "conditioned" I don't mean "by the faceless cabal"; as the child of an anthropologist, I've long understood that culture is entirely sufficient as an explanation.

How would you avoid the free rider problem (freeloader effect)?

You don't. You accept a certain level of free-riding as a better alternative to the suffering caused by poverty.

Who cares?

I've argued this before. People usually tell me I'm living in a bubble and that the general public is too lazy for this to work.

It's not aimed at the general public though, only those who would create IP, businesses, etc. but otherwise than through established economic engines (businesses and companies).

But how do you choose who would create IP, businesses, etc? Seems like the selection process would become just as politicized as the processes which it has been set up to avoid. Not to mention, we already have this scheme (tenure) and it's slowly going out of fashion.

Well, I'm not versed in the minimum-income ideas GP was describing, but one way to think about it might be as an expansion of the Small-Business Administration.

People usually tell me I'm living in a bubble and that the general public is too lazy for this to work.

Right now, we have a problem with parasitic moochers who ruin society-- a parasitic set of nonproducers who have destroyed our values and bankrupted us. They're at the top of it.

If the worst thing that happens out of BI is that there's a class of parasites at the bottom, that I can deal with it. It improves the leverage of the productive middle against the parasitic, progress-averse top of society, and that's a really good thing.

> It improves the leverage of the productive middle against the parasitic, progress-averse top of society, and that's a really good thing.

I'm certainly inclined to agree with you. However, many of the people I've discussed this with think the middle wouldn't be so productive if their livelihood didn't depend on it. I usually argue that with automation we don't need as many people working. Imagine a machine is invented that is capable of replacing every facet of human labor. While this is obviously a great invention in our current system it would condemn the majority to insurmountable poverty. This machine is already being invented slowly. With private ownership of the means of production basic income will become a social necessity.

I'm certainly inclined to agree with you. However, many of the people I've discussed this with think the middle wouldn't be so productive if their livelihood didn't depend on it.

Most people are stuck in a mindset appropriate to a world where the most productive people are 1.25-1.50x more productive than average ones and reducing variance (bringing everyone to the middle) has expectancy.

Now, it's 10x. Everything a company does to detect and punish slackers takes several times more productivity off the best people-- who might drop from 10x to mere 4x-- than it induces gain. To quote Gus Fring, "I don't find fear to be an effective motivator".

> However, many of the people I've discussed this with think the middle wouldn't be so productive if their livelihood didn't depend on it. I usually argue that with automation we don't need as many people working.

I essentially agree. Why do we need people to be productive? Why do we need people working? We do need this, but do we really understand why? What is the moral argument derived from, that we say people must work because otherwise they're lazy?

I tried to write out an answer to these, since I have it somewhat in my head, but it's too incoherent to come out as sentences right now, so I'll just leave them here unanswered.

(Your points so coherently resonate I am nearly in disbelief.)

The economists' argument is that the rest of society is better of with the "too lazy too work" part of general public receiving a negative income tax. Several reasons for this:

1) A person that only does the bare minimum amount of work needed to avoid being fired exerts a cost on the economy, e.g., work place accidents due to negligence, "work shirking", taking credit for others' work through bullying and politics, etc...

2) To an extent these individuals are already using other welfare programs, e.g., social security disability payments ( see http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/09/how_to_be_mean_to_you... ) to this end, despite these programs not being designed with this goal in mind.

Of course this is complete a red herring in the first place: like most behavioural traits, industriousness is distributed along a normal distribution. In other words "too lazy to do any kind of work" people exist, as do people working 18 hour days, but the average individual falls somewhere in between.

Finally it's also easy to design a work around for this: even the name negative income tax hints at this -- these individuals would still receive these payments if they're working (either full time but below a living wage, or underemployed/consulting) so there's still incentive to earn more (much like a progressive income tax means there's still an incentive to earn more even once you've exceeded a certain tax bucket).

We could even make a requirement that individuals remain in the work force (even if they can't find an employer willing to hire them at this time): they would provide proof that they've applied to jobs, were seeking further education, or the like.

The fact that both liberal and Friedman/Hayek libertarian economists support this idea means there's probably something to it. In any case, the comparison is not with an ideal system, but with what with have now: on the net, a negative income tax would actually mean a smaller government and greater negative liberty (less welfare administration agencies, more individual choice and less compulsory-participation programs like an insurance mandate or social security) and it would mean those worse off in society would fare better than they do today (i.e., greater "social justice").

>greater negative liberty What does this mean?

>We could even make a requirement that individuals remain in the work force (even if they can't find an employer willing to hire them at this time): they would provide proof that they've applied to jobs, were seeking further education, or the like.

I've long been a supporter of a negative income tax (actually, until recently it was a basic income), and this is one idea I've been trying to develop. I have some concerns about how well the idea you layed out could be implemented. It seems like it is doomed to fail due to the nessasary bueracracy. Either the process of proving you were looking for work becomes so streamline that you do not need to actually exert meaningfull effort (and possibly waste employers time to get the needed paperwork), or proving that you are seeking work would become a significant burden.

The solution I've been thinking of is some sort of work on demand program, where, while your unemployed and reiciving your guaranteed income, you can be asked to do short term work for the government (and/or private companies). Obviously this would need regulation to prevent it from being exploitative, but it would allow the governent to make more infastructure investments without needing nearly as much money. It might even save more money than we are paying people through the program as we would effectivly be getting labor at below market wages. An important part of this system is that there be no long term commitment, so if you find a job, want to move, etc, you will not be prevented from doing so. This may also require an additional investment in training the unemployed to do the specific job we need them to (but training the workforce is a good idea anyway).

Apart from the obvious regulatory issues, which seem solvable, what I can't quite figure out is how to make this fit in with a negative income tax. Effectivly the work on demand model makes the government an employer of last resort, and what would be negative income tax simply becomes a paycheck. The best solution I can come up with is abandon the negative income tax idea and embrace the government as an employer of last resort model. This sidesteps the problem of a lazy unemployed by requiring them to work to receive the income. If the 'normal' workforce gets to small employers could 'rent' these workers from the government, again at sub-market wages.

This however, risks employers not hiring 'normal' workers, but rather work on demand`ers. If this is the case, then many people would be unable to get a normal job, and effectivly be forced to work for sub-market wages, potentially leading to a situation like the industrial revolution where much of the workforce is trapped in low paying jobs because they are the only ones available.

However, because the government controls the minimum income, they control the wages of these workers, so they can increase said wages as this starts to become the case. But, as this happens we move even more into the government become the sole employer. Once this happens we begin to loose the free market, causing us to be in an effectivly socialist state. However, when a specific region of this economy becomes inneficient, an entrapanuer would have the oppurtunity to make above minimum wages by competing with the existing provider. If quality of life is good enough for everyone that no one wants to do this, then we win. If quality of life is bad enough then someone will do this. Hopefully this will allow the free market to create and maintain the proper equilibrium point between socialism and free-market.

> The solution I've been thinking of is some sort of work on demand program, where, while your unemployed and reiciving your guaranteed income, you can be asked to do short term work for the government (and/or private companies).

Corvée labour is actually the oldest form of taxation. It's stunningly inefficient compared to just taking money, for all the reasons that barter is inefficient plus the resentment people have towards working for nothing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corv%C3%A9e

The idea isn't that people work without being paid. Effectively, the government is paying (via the Basic Income) for your work (or willingness to do work when none is available). If you refuse to work, then your right to a basic income is revoked (or reduced).

This effectivly makes the government the employer of last resort, in the same way that it becomes the buyer of last resort to escape depressions.

Well, that's different. Workfare or Mutual Obligation. In Australia we call it "Work for the Dole" [1].

It's not a substitute to normal employment, though it is certainly better than plain "sit down money". But a lot of the problems of welfare still persist anyway.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_the_Dole

This sounds more like a huge public jobs program than negative income.

I know I'd love nothing more than to get basic income and work on open source revolutions in 3d printing, AI, computer vision, biometrics, etc. Too bad that doesn't feed me, so I have to drudge through asp.net development job ads that expect 80 hours a week from me.

Unless there's something unique to your situation, CV, biometrics, 3d printing, etc. all have a fair number of jobs, too. Some using open source.

> > greater negative liberty

> What does this mean?

A negative liberty is a term used to distinguish it from a positive liberty. A positive liberty sounds like this: "The right to free speech." A negative liberty sounds like this: "The right to not be discriminated against based on X, Y, or Z." Differently, a positive liberty is "freedom to do" whereas a negative liberty is "freedom not to have done".

So, what GP is saying is that people under such a program would make for fewer impositions on individuals by the government.

That's not quite right.

A negative right is a restriction on government that prevents it from interfearing with or punishing certain behavior. So free speech means that the government can't punish you for critizing the government. That's a negative right. So is the right to bear arms, the right to choose, the right to free exercise of religion, and the right against self incrimination.

A positive right, on the other hand, purports to create an obligation for the government. For example, the South Africa constitution guarantees its citizens basic health care. That's conceptualized as a right, they are said to have the right to health care.

Some things are tricky to place. Take the right to counsel in criminal cases. Is it a positive obligation for the government to provide an attorney or is it a restriction on what the government can do to you unless it chooses to provide you an attorney?

Descrimination is likewise tricky. Saying one has a right to be black is kind of nonsensical, allowed or not that's how people are born.

Yes, this is what I meant.

Libertarianism is defined by a focus purely on negative liberty, classical liberalism (e.g., liberal parties in Non-US Anglophone countries) has a more broad focus, and social democracy/left-liberalism (generally called just liberalism in the US, but best expounded through John Rawl's excellent work) also adds the idea of social justice.

Discrimination is indeed a challenging matter: obviously law against govenrment discrimination counts as negative liberty, but you could (and I personally would) also argue that restrictions on certain type of discrimination by individuals and businesses (in employment, housing, contracts, e.g., prohibitions on restrictive covenants for future home sales) might technically infringe on negative liberty of one group, but greatly increases positive liberty of everyone else.

There are no simple answers here and I not having a true political science, law, or economics background I would not be qualified to offer one. That's why I tried to make my appeal for NNI as broad as possible: it is clearly a policy that -- compared with what we have today and other politically viable options -- is more just no matter which one of the common political philosophies you subscribe to.

Ah. I wasn't aware of these government-centric definitions. I got mine from here, which presumes that the agent is a person rather than a government: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/

If you expect actual useful output from acting as the employer of last resort you run into all sorts of problems of management, supervision, quality control, etc.

A more achievable goal is solving the idle hand problem ("idle hands do the devil's work") and preventing people from cheating the negative income tax by working off the books.

That's been tried ("workfare") and in some case had worse effect: typical example, requiring someone to commute hours to a minimal wage job. It overrides the natural disincentive for the worker not to take this job (there net utility to them is zero) and has unintended circumstances (while I'm not a fan of Michael Moore's demagoguery, he gives a particularly strong example in Bowling for Columbine -- where a mother was left unable to participate in her son's life).

The big assumption there is that employment is intrinsically valuable, which I don't think is the case. Workforce participation is, but they two are not the same. The desire to deal with political externalities and catch "cheaters" is a very understandable one, but I think it's over-stated here. I tend to think of it in almost a reverse way: instead of trying to get beneficiaries of NNI to work by making NNI dependent on employment of some kind (even if it's just "make work" employment or rent-seeking by corportations, which this sounds like), make it such that being employed still allows one to receive NNI on top of their salary (e.g., turning a potentially below minimum wage job to a minimum wage one, turning a minimum wage job into a living wage one, turning a living wage job into a job that allows one to save).

One option might be to require reserve service in exchange for basic income.

If a citizen does ~2-4 weeks a year of reserve service (in the military or in other public-good roles), and is potentially available in emergencies (either long-term defense callups, or just public training in EMS and available as a first responder if nearby), give ~12k/yr equivalent in basic income/negative taxation.

The disabled or really useless would be another problem, but I think that's a smaller population than is currently on public or private disability.

You still aren't listening to the point about low value work. Do you want to be in a military with armed people behind you who have no interest in being there, doing a good job or your welfare? Conscription is a horrible failure of a policy and there is no logical point trying to bring it back for any reason. Bringing it back to force people who don't want to be in paid, productive work to work for free is a terrible, terrible idea.

The main advantage of a basic income/negative tax system is that you just pay people and send them one their way, you don't administer it or waste effort on bureaucracy you just accept that there is some slack in the system.

Training the entire populace in basic civil defense or "pre military" skills is a win because they use those skills in daily life. You wouldn't actively call them up except in a draft situation, and at that point you evaluate, train, and direct them. But basic stuff like "if you are on fire, stop drop and roll" or whatever is useful to have widely disseminated.

The other advantage of paying people for being trained and theoretically available is it gets around the "moral" objection to basic income unfairly paying people to do nothing.

Yes, the general public is lazy. But they are more greedy than than they are lazy. You can probably already work 3 months a year doing some kind of seasonal work, and lay around the rest of the time but you won't be able to afford anything nice. Guess what - most people want nice things.

Question (and this is motivated out of my ignorance, not any political leaning) --

If everyone gets a Basic Income, wouldn't prices merely rise to compensate for it, leaving us in the same state we're in now? In other words, when it comes to prices, isn't everything "relative," since prices are determined by supply and demand?

I feel like it'd be affine, so the floor buying power of each individual wouldn't be zero, but some offset of zero that nonetheless has buying power (even if that marginal amount is less than in the original system).

The income must be cash or cash-equivalent (as opposed to a monopsony, where a single payer buys tries to negotiate lower rates with, say, farms and landlords) so that purchasing occurs competitively. Government's role would be to break up monopolies on basic goods and services.

Economics is one of those subjects where simple questions have complicated answers. At a basic level, we have more than ample resources to give everyone ample food, shelter, etc. However, because of the way money is distributed, it is more profitable for producers to create less nessasary items for those with a lot of money. With a Basic Income, producers would have a reason to create more of the basic goods now that more people have money to give for it.

Of course, the fact that these people are now spending more money does have a significant positive effect on the economy, as it is essential the definition of not a depression.

the fact that these people are now spending more money does have a significant positive effect on the economy

This sounds like a house of cards. Does Zimbabwe have a significantly positive economy because of just how many Zimbabwean dollars are being spent?

Zimbabwe had hyperinflation resulting from printing money.

The classical cause of depressions is that once people are unemployed, they no longer spend money so other people can no longer make money from them. The logic behind stimulus programs is to get people spending again to bootstrap the economy.

Just FYI, no Zimbabwean dollars are being spent: the only trade involving Zim dollars these days is selling notes to tourists as souvenirs -- for US dollars (in which the government has denominated its accounts since 2009), South African rand, Botswana pula, etc.

For prices to rise, the nominal amount of money flowing through the economy must increase somewhere along the line.

However, what occurs in basic income is a straight-up "redistribution of wealth" from richer to poorer, which means that the nominal amount of money in the system should be no different from the laissez-faire situation.

This in turn means that prices aren't going to change as a direct result, as in inflation(where there is an overt increase in money supply). But they are likely to change when consumer demand changes, which could happen if, for example, people receiving basic income start to upgrade their lifestyle away from abject poverty.

Some prices may actually drop as a result; for example, if more people can afford health insurance and get preventative care, the economies of scale for health insurance coverage improve. On the other hand, luxury goods with limited supply are likely to be pushed upwards to remain out of reach of the masses.

You're assuming that the basic income dollars would actually be transferred and not just printed.

Indeed. That's consistent with most proposals(including negative income tax) and the few real world implementations such as the Alaskan benefit.

The government can always opt to print for its expenditures - there is nothing stopping them from doing so, and it's a typical last resort of desperate leaders, but economic prescriptions avoid it since it lowers confidence, which has destabilizing effects beyond inflation.

Why government printing money for its expenditures is considered bad?

I know that it's tempting for government to print money uncontrollably. But what if printing money was proprly offset by increasing reserve requirement so that banks would create less money with credit at the same time?

This is a good question, and it's one of the more challenging aspects of neoclassical macroeconomics(as taught in most U.S. schools). It's also heavily contested, and one of the reasons why I started to dislike my study of economics, because the theory has to make some big assumptions to get any result.

The rationale given to not do this is that any policy change from the government is going to affect expectations of the future - if (on balance) most economic actors are rational and know that there will be inflation in the future, they will take steps _now_ to protect themselves from the side effects. If you change policy on both ends, expectations about the economy become uncertain - more so than if there's no change - which means that the market will start to move its investment towards other countries with more predictable economies.

Here's a Wikipedia article describing the original proposition that this theory was built on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Ineffectiveness_Proposit...

I think that any potential incentive for the investments to leave could be properly offset by lowering or abolishing taxes.

In the short run yes, money would be redistributed within the economy towards things poor folk like to buy, causing prices to rise. In the longer term price increases signal profitability and other providers enter the market or existing players compete to drive prices back towards the cost of production.

Have a look at some places where the social safety net (unemployment benefits and so on) is pretty strong. The answer is no, and typically the minimun income is tied to a cost of living index. Prices are a little higher compared to a neighbour country with no such net though.

As clarified below, not necessarily: it has nothing to do with the quantity of money being created.

However, I would also like to point out that some inflation is desirable in order to prevent hording of cash and that the informational value of money is improved by giving everyone a floor on income. Basically, when the optimization function of our economy only takes into account the preferences of the rich and the government, we create many inefficiencies in the production and distribution of goods and services. When we instead redistribute money such that everyone has at least some, the economy is more efficient and production changes to match. If more people want to buy simple clothing and the price rises more people will make simple clothing and the price will fall again.

This is the hypothesis I have heard for why raising the minimum wage doesn't lower employment (the experimental result which perhaps most clearly demonstrates the flaws in modern macroeconomic models.) People who receive minimum wage spend it on other goods that are produced employing more people who earn minimum wage.

I do not agree this essay is a reason and I have two specific reasons for it from the essay:

"I was approaching my 20s and I had to get a job. Living at home off of my parents was not sustainable, and wasn’t conducive to a better future."

I do not think that a life on basic income would have been appealing to the author based on this remark.

"I began doing non-consulting, full-time work several of years ago. During the span of those years, I have made moves between the plains, the mountains, and the coast. I have learned a good deal (though I don’t claim expertise) about different facets of the tech industry from different perspectives. But I also took a great hit. I got stupid."

I do not believe the author presented with a life on basic income would have wanted to have foregone the prospect of this experience despite the prospect of the cost of it.

I lament that I haven't read 200 books a year since my teens and I hope nobody would mistake that to mean that I want to be paid by the government to read 200 books a year.

> "I was approaching my 20s and I had to get a job. Living at home off of my parents was not sustainable, and wasn’t conducive to a better future."

Maybe a basic income would have encouraged him to go the academic track which seems to suit him so well.

If he was attracted to the idea of going to grad school for free, I think he would have gotten a grad assistant scholarship/stipend. He would certainly qualify.

However, I don't see any indication that academia would have addressed the needs expressed in what I quoted from the essay. Academia has its own grinds and banalities and does not have an easy exit.

I do not think that a life on basic income would have been appealing to the author

Basic income isn't supposed to be your only source of income. Rather, it's income you can take for granted and that therefore gives you some financial security to do riskier or financially less rewarding (e.g. social) work.

It seems there are two definitions. The person to which I responded said:

"free to go live in some cheap cost of living area while just doing their thing and contributing to the commons in the form of open source or taking what they eventually create and marketing it (if it is marketable when complete) in order to generate wealth on top of their basic income."

To me that sounds as though basic income would be all of the income with only a possibility of income from the work eventually.

If basic income is only supposed to supplement a person's income, then EITC already does this in the United States and might only need an adjustment to be based on contractor and royalty income, not just earned income. Your definition is so close to EITC that it makes sense for the more ambitious definition to be the one with its own name and political movement.

If the start of this post put you off because it sounds arrogant, please keep reading. It is an intentional setup to highlight the core point, which I think is in this paragraph:

But the environment matters a lot less than the fact that when I get home from work—which is a two hour commute each way (sorry, I can’t afford to live in downtown San Francisco)—I just feel like being mentally incapacitated. Occasionally I have a little spark of brilliance (relative, not absolute) that motivates me to write a short bit of code, but the code is never more than one or two hundred lines. It usually consists of some little trick.

That is: you cannot fight your day-to-day work — long-term — by working on your own stuff, when you get home after already spending 6-7 hours working and thinking in a particular way. The author tagged it "sad" for a reason.

Agreed. What if we could have a world where work was the pursuit of intellectual growth rather than the pursuit of money? What would it be like?

I'll play the part of the economist and say that this world would primarily be hungry and cold.

It would also be a world of half finished projects. Most people who do things just for the sheer joy of learning, challenge, art etc would lose interest in a task when the challenge is conquered.

>"What if we could have a world where work was the pursuit of intellectual growth rather than the pursuit of money? What would it be like?" Non-existent, because people are greedy and will always want more than their fellow man. Even if /you/ don't personally, most of the people around you probably do.

This is the #1 reason I get depressed about this life.

If such a world wouldn't be a zero-sum game, then the greedy could have their wealth, and others could pursue other things, and those two goals wouldn't conflict.

Isn't that kind of how it is right now?

It mostly is, which is why, unlike OP, I don't see the reason for it to stop.

> you cannot fight your day-to-day work — long-term — by working on your own stuff, when you get home after already spending 6-7 hours working and thinking in a particular way. The author tagged it "sad" for a reason.

That's precisely why this post resonated with me. Even short of literally switching mind sets, I find it tricky to get motivated to code after spending ~8 hours at work (coding). As it stands, I even find myself stressing out over weekends due to not being "productive" enough on side projects.

Of slightly more relevance to the author, having done the 2-hour commute in SV (granted, from SF to Menlo because socially I couldn't stand the latter), I strongly recommend against it. Housing accommodations can be found in SF for a developer's wage, and I would strongly urge anyone and everyone to avoid spending 4 hours of their life each day in transit. It makes a difference.

I think of a 4 hour commute as (at least) a 33% pay cut. Unless you're getting paid to commute.

I wonder if it is possible to construct a sensible tax that punishes commuters.

Not because I think they deserve it or anything, more because people tend to be highly adaptable and commuting (speaking in generalities) stinks.

Edit: I guess various congestion taxes are exactly what I suggest.

It would also likely be an extremely regressive tax so I'm not sure it would ever be sensible. People live in the suburbs because they can afford something that doesn't suck. The ultra poor and the ultra rich live in the city, the rest of us commute. And that's only slightly hyperbolic.

I recommend this book as relevant to your interests: http://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/dp...

Speck is kinda acerbic, but if you can get past this, his points are very good.

Are you serious? Your solution to fix commuting is to punish people who may depend on a job that's not in close proximity? Really... I have a job I depend heavily on and to make my life even more burdensome just seems inhumane. Please never get elected to office.

Edit: To be fair, I work 2 days from home, but the idea of taxing people who may have no other option disgusts me. You probably can't even begin to identify with them.

I was quietly thinking out loud. So yes, I was perfectly serious.

If some method of taxation was narrowly burdensome, I probably wouldn't think it was sensible.

But, for instance, maybe there is a way to (relatively objectively) identify businesses that employ lots of people but are less location sensitive. Some mild tax on such a business should not have an enormous impact on the employees (I immediately see an objection to this idea, the cost of maintaining a location already provides similar pressure).

Punitive measures for folks who are already being punished because they ostensibly ALLOWED themselves to be punished??

I would say you are over-analyzing my word choice.

As I noted, congestion taxes have a similar goal (reducing traffic), but less questionable motivations (they generally directly address externalities rather than behavior).

I was coming at it from the perspective of thinking about mechanisms that might be useful to try to shift aggregate group behavior towards something that is better for everybody. I certainly wasn't insisting that it was sensible.

Felt the same way. Is this a perfect example of the sociopath Hugh Macleod apex personality or what?!

If I was pursuing the thought in a way that had negative consequences for other people I could see room to question my motivations and empathy.

As it is, you are basically just shouting at me because you didn't like what crossed my mind.

and here I am dealing with a 6hr commute for what is essentially pocket change (if the recent SF income poll is anything to go by)...

more reason to start looking for a new gig sooner rather than later I guess.

About to start a daily commute from Berkeley to Menlo Park. Am optimistic about 880-South in the morning, and driving seems far faster and more peaceful than the BART -> Shuttle method. But I do mourn the loss of productive time on a daily basis, but can't imagine a better place to live. Even on a wonderful developer salary, I cannot possibly afford a nice apartment for me and my partner in San Francisco or on the peninsula. Especially compared to East Bay's prices...

> Even on a wonderful developer salary, I cannot possibly afford a nice apartment for me and my partner in San Francisco or on the peninsula. Especially compared to East Bay's prices

Ah, yeah. I was unfortunately speaking from the POV of 1-person dwellings with, ahem, somewhat lax standards. I totally empathize with not finding something suitable for 2.

A carpool might be worth looking into, but that said they're not really my cup of tea either (and, less productive than any single BART / train ride). Congrats on the new gig though, hopefully the work will be stimulating enough to offset any other inconvenience :)

I don’t quite follow the logic of driving being “faster”. In my experience, public transportation can be highly productive time for certain activities like reading, while driving is very limited in the activities you can safely do (though I used to have a tape in my car to help me practice singing scales, so there are some safe options).

I've just timed it out for about 45 minutes in the car, and an hour and fifteen for the BART/shuttle combo. I also quite like podcasts, so am all right with having just my ears free while driving.

Berkeley to Menlo Park is only 45 minutes if you leave at the correct time (before 6-7 and after 10am, and 1-3pm or >9pm), and there are no accidents or other delays.

To get there with 95% odds, you often need to allow 70-80 minutes. I guess it depends on how bad being late is.

Timing it to arrive at 0930 is actually really hard; I end up leaving around 0730 to be 99% certain of arriving on time. Sometimes it's an hour early, but sometimes only 15 minutes early.

You've just broken my heart. My timing's basically based on two 9 AM drives that hit traffic/construction, but took no more than 45 minutes.

I start tomorrow.

80 (i.e. along the shore in Berkeley) is really bad quite often, but you could possibly skip most of that. If you can avoid that, it's not too bad, although the 880 parts in Oakland (due to port/construction traffic) can be bad.

Actually live in Oakland near Emeryville. Not sure why I wrote Berkeley, except for misguided attempt at identity obfuscation. But used to live up in Contra Costa county, and the mornings I'd drive into SF-- boy howdy, 580/80 along the coast near University was an absolute disaster.

I wonder if, as "Oakland becomes the new Mission", if we'll see more of the tech giants sending shuttles up to East Bay. I know Google has at least one going to West Oakland, but Facebook does not yet.

Yeah, I have a friend who worked at google who lives at the cannery lofts, and used the west Oakland Bart google shuttle a lot. I still would want my car in case I wanted to work late, or go somewhere other tha directly home.

Another annoying thing about 880 is the trucks and general narrowness. It is technically 45mph but people do 70-80. I hadn't had an accident there, but it kind of sucks vs the rest of 880.

You are aware that a lot of the Oakland/emeryville areas near 30th and such are pretty gangster, right? My friend had a loft there and I kept showing up at her buyer while the cops had the block shut down to serve a high risk warrant.

Yes, a friend's motorcycle was severely damaged last week from someone trying to steal it. He was upstairs in our apartment eating dinner. Nine more months on the lease!

If you're starting at the same Menlo Park company that I work at, for the long term, you may want to consider taking BART down to Fremont and then arranging a ride in a carpool/van-pool over the Dumbarton bridge: there are tons of folks who live in Fremont/Newark/Union City and who wouldn't mind a +1 for carpool lane. Many of them also have kids so they tend to come a bit earlier than others (most folks come in between 9:45 and 10:45).

Also, I've yet to have had a semi-recurring meeting schedule before 11 am (occasionally there are interviews earlier in the morning, however).

That said, irrespective of where in Bay Area you live, Ryan is 100% right: the problem isn't the average commute time (which is very easy to keep under 45 minutes -- this is not LA!), it's the outliers. It's a lot like the JVM: good performance on average but then a Concurrent Mark and Sweep failure happens...

Also, congratulations! I'm on the data/systems infrastructure as opposed to machine learning side (but folks move around quite a bit and a lot of teams do both ML and systems programming), but let me know if you've any questions.

I tried this a few times during a conference--it was stop-and-go hell during rush hour, hope your experience is better.

Does anyone know of advanced software development courses that are practical on a small mobile device screen? I love coursera but it only really works on a laptop or tablet and that's not always convenient when commuting.

BTW, in case you hadn't done the math, you are wasting 12% of your life commuting. At least get audible.com for when you're stuck in the car.

I second this request.

It boggles my mind, just how much productivity and potential the form-factor of a phone sacrifices for portability and comfort. I learned to code by tapping away on my TI-83 in class when I was bored; I can't believe that doing work on a phone is so impossibly inconvenient.

I started getting up earlier and giving a couple of my very productive hours every morning to myself.

I focus on myself first thing in the morning. Gym then Code then Work.

I found it calmed me down and since things always run late and never early its mostly working out.

Any push back I got I told them they would need to pay for my non-existent crossfit class that was pre-paid for and they quickly move on. If that failed I told them I would get a note from my doctor and they had their choice to pay for a lifetime of cholesterol medication or have their oh so important meeting. I think the uncomfortable nature of medical issues stops most people.

Exercise before work does seem to be very beneficial. I've occasionally gone to the gym before work and now commute by bicycle and it does seem to give noticeable boost of energy to the work day.

You never get the time commuting back. If you want a better work-life balance, move closer to work, or work closer to where you want to live. Switching jobs is not as hard as people make it out to be, esp. if you're good at "the game".

This. Also consider working remotely if you are into that. I had a job where I at first had to spend little over 2 hours per day commuting. The job became much more pleasurable after I got to do it from home (barring the occasional meeting of course).

Side projects are a fun idea, but I've found far more pleasure in dedicating myself to one focus: my day job.

If your day job isn't something you can get passionate about and that fulfills whatever needs your side project is doing for you, then you might want to consider switching jobs. It's not that difficult, and the upsides can be exponential.

In either case, I find my day job becomes my side and only project (as far as interest and passion and fulfillment) when I dedicate myself to it. This makes me happy and it makes my employer happy also.

So what you are saying is that work becomes your life, and your employer is happy because they 'own' you 24/7 and get many more hours of your-brain-output than they'd normally get for your salary?

I've had far more pleasure writing very little code outside work and dedicating myself to my wife, friends and being outdoors. I don't want to look back when I die with regret for only pursuing my coding ideas, which are ephemeral. Each to their own though!

No, that's absolutely not what I'm saying. Ideally it should be a relationship of mutual benefit. Dedicating yourself to your job doesn't mean you give up your work/life balance (definitely NOT what I mean), it means you're focused on your actual work while you're AT work, not distracted by side-projects, startup ideas, and anti-productive pursuits.

I'm dedicated to work at work, but I leave at 6 and I leave it behind. I don't distract myself with side-projects at home, either. When I'm at home, I'm dedicated to everything you speak of.

All I was saying is that side projects and startup ideas shouldn't be your focus while you're employed and at work. In my experience with having side-projects, I've been miserable by not being able to dedicate enough time to the side project, while my actual work suffered for distraction and time wasted. I prefer to have one pursuit in my work, and a life in my own time, and not mix them.

Thanks for your clarification, I really appreciate it.

I've been surrounded by bright starry-eyed graduates recently who take the view I was outlining. I was one once, and don't want others to lose a decade of their life :)

I completely understand—it's so hard to tell at a glance on HN whether someone is a junior in college with a summer internship who suddenly thinks they're an expert on life, versus a 10-year veteran of the startup world...

I sadly wish someone told me the same thing earlier as well. But life is good now, and you live and learn. Cheers.

I did some side work that applied to work. Something that interested me, but on my own free time.

I've moved on to other hobby projects, but now those side projects have become a big deal at work. Now I'm getting assigned my usual work plus the task of bringing up this side project. I refuse to give them my personal time so there are never enough hours to get anything beyond my regular work (and what are considered the highest priority) done.

It's definitely having a drain on me and I have to keep reminding myself its their problem how they prioritize things. I won't hand them more of my personal time. Occasionally I get to point this out as I'm pulled into meetings where the update is no update, which amuses me.

It is sad. This part stood out for me " I wasn’t demanded of much: maybe to keep my room clean and to help out around the house occasionally."

Sometimes I wonder if there isn't a niche for someone to teach people like this how to live a little better. Like really basic things people used to take for granted such as cooking, being outside, and eating meals with friends and family.

It took spending some time on a family farm to make my realize that while I had "success" I had a very low quality of life, one that just wasn't worth it in the long run. It makes me sad to see posts about things like "Soylent." It's like how much of humanity can we prune off in the pursuit of coding as much as possible?

I quit my Manhattan job with the long commute and moved to a cheaper, though still vibrant city. I sleep eight hours a night, I cook meals from scratch, I have friends I see almost every day, I walk to work, and in general my quality of life is very very high. My job is fairly "boring", but I have the energy to work on my own side projects.

Don't forget that you are not a robot. That very simple things can make a human being's life better, like sleep and friends and good food.

Well said. It is damn tough (if not impossible) to keep the same sort of intellectual stimulation going when you have to "work" at a dull, boring job (or maybe any job, other than doing pure research).

I definitely miss having time just explore, play and do interesting stuff, now that I have both a $DAYJOB and a startup. However, the goal is to get the startup to a point where I can either:

A. IPO or sell the company, and walk way with enough cash to be financially independent for life, giving me all time I want to do "fun" stuff.

B. Get the startup to a point where it makes sense to hire somebody else to be CEO, appoint myself some nonsense title like "Chief Scientist", collect a reasonable salary, and spend all my time researching and playing with neat stuff.

It makes me sad though, every time I look around my apartment and see all these math books, or philosophy books, or history books or whatever, that reflect some interest I've been wanting to explore forever, but don't have time for. :-(

I know exactly how you feel about seeing the books you never have time to read... http://sdrv.ms/10HTsYs

積ん読 (Tsundoku) - piling books bought, but not read .. https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=積ん読&client=safari&...

If you have difficulty reading AI book, I highly recommend taking this course:

https://www.edx.org/course/uc-berkeley/cs188-1x/artificial-i...

Just read the chapters that are being covered in the course and you will have read one third of it! Second part will start early next year with further chapters covered.

I have actually read the majority the AI book, it was the course textbook for the AI paper I did at university. The reason it is there is because I want to re-read parts for a project that I have never started.

Isn't the idea to be happy during the journey? I'm following about the same path and can't find balance.

If ever there were an economic problem in need of solving, it would be the friction between how people spend their time (i.e., slaving away on a particular type of task) and how they could be spending it (becoming enlightened and happy, maybe because the ability to live is not tied to slaving away on a task).

My situation is so much like yours that I think we should get in touch. (Damned, we are not nearby. :-)

May I add #C to your list -- MOOCs for the rest of the life together with the day job unless A or B works out.

May I add #C to your list -- MOOCs for the rest of the life together with the day job unless A or B works out.

Good point. For me, I chafe at authority pretty strongly, so a $DAYJOB for life sounds like Hell on Earth to me. I've "worked for" somebody for too large a portion of my life already. For me, doing a startup is as much about being in more of a position to call my own shots, and have a little more freedom and flexibility while working as it is about making enough money to retire and spend my life doing math or whatever. I just fucking hate having a "boss" in the traditional sense, even when I like my boss (as is the case with my current $DAYJOB boss). The fact is, I'm a horrible employee. I don't play stupid political games, I am terrible at biting my tongue, I'm insubordinate when I think my manager(s) is/are full of shit, and if I'm not given a fair amount of autonomy I get really annoyed, bored, and disengaged.

So for me, option C isn't that appealing. But I can see how it would be for some people.

I empathize with this a ton. Reminds me of a David Foster Wallace commencement speech in which the takeaway point was something to the effect of 'you graduates don't yet know what day in, day out really means.' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFt7EzpsZQo)

Come on folks, let's think up a better primary waking activity for the average person than "attach yourself to someone else's dreams, and help build their wealth, at the expense of your own intellectual freedom and sanity." It's a first world problem, but I think privileged first world people should put some effort into thinking up something better for everyone. Effort meaning an intentional foray into some creative economics.

The economic world is something that can be shaped. The problems, of course, are where to start, and how to do it :-)

>Come on folks, let's think up a better primary waking activity for the average person than "attach yourself to someone else's dreams, and help build their wealth, at the expense of your own intellectual freedom and sanity."

Part of the reason that efforts to do this have cooled down some is that the previous attempts didn't go so well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale

Socialism is about attaching yourself to the community (or usually the Politburo's) 5-year dream for production. Doesn't have anything to do with individual freedom.

In the 21st century, there is little valid reason to coordinate production centrally - it's inefficient and causing industries to bumble along, generally. The direction now is to automate production and have universal minimum income that can be used for competitive purchasing of goods and services. Sounds like a market economy to me.

>Doesn't have anything to do with individual freedom.

Generally 20th century enterprises employed millions of factory workers as machines in a giant productive machine, with the benefits going to the founders/owners/etc. Socialist movements were an attempt to capture this value for the people creating it. Which would presumably mean you didn't have to work as much.

As a casual reading of history will tell you, it didn't work.

>In the 21st century, you there is little valid reason to coordinate production centrally

I wholly doubt that decentralized manufacturing solutions benefit from economies of scale as well as their centralized kin. (Assuming you're talking about 3D Printing/etc/all.)

>Sounds like a market economy to me.

I would hope so. Command economies are generally a bad idea.

The economic concept of centrally-coordinated production has nothing to do with 3D printing (?) or "centralized" / "decentralized" in the computing or distributed systems sense.

It has everything to do with economic planning (the Argentinian government at one point literally had a room where they president and staff would sit in command chairs and plan out production across the economy, although I don't think it was ever used).

Sure, socialism was designed to let the employees capture value. But intellectual freedom is different from who gets to capture the value. Even in America today, there are employee-owned companies. If capturing the value is what you care most about, you don't need socialism - just work for an employee-owned company.

just work for an employee-owned company.

How is this different than, "attaching yourself to a community," which you denigrated above?

Two ways: It's voluntary, and you might get some of the profits if the company goes in the green.

In a state socialist economy, you have to go work on the pig farm or whatever. In a market-ish economy, the attachment to a particular community is more voluntary. You can, more often that not, choose which one you want to join.

>The economic concept of centrally-coordinated production has nothing to do with 3D printing (?) or "centralized" / "decentralized" in the computing or distributed systems sense.

Great, that's cleared up. It was ambiguous to me whether you meant in the systems sense or the one you've outlined here.

>Sure, socialism was designed to let the employees capture value. But intellectual freedom is different from who gets to capture the value. Even in America today, there are employee-owned companies. If capturing the value is what you care most about, you don't need socialism - just work for an employee-owned company.

I think that this is where the authoritarianism of most far left and right movements comes from. (Like Communism in the Soviet sense or Fascism in the Italian sense.)

In a free market economy, the score is kept with money. This necessarily means that everything which makes you make less money is bad. So you have an incentive to use less resources when making a product, and thus creates incentives for certain kinds of R&D. Consumers will obviously pay the same for better, so you also want to have the best product in your price range. Which is your incentive to keep improving your product. Both of these effects will improve products and make them cheaper.

It also means that when a finite resource is considered a public commons or otherwise not given its "proper market value", that it will be ruthlessly used up by money maximizing organizations. It also means that a profitable practice that produces some negative social ill will not be factored into the free market optimization process.

Generally, these are called externalized costs. And one of the Big Problems (TM) of the 21st century will be figuring out how to deal with them. Global warming is largely an externalized cost, to the extent that it exists. (I can't give a knowledgeable opinion on that topic one way or the other.) Another externalized cost is worker happiness, a money maximizer that can get more money by driving its workers harder will. And in a free market economy it will also prevail against more ethical organizations. This means that you have a few options:

Find a model where working workers less is beneficial to money maximizing.

Find a model where you can simply force money maximizers to be more ethical.

(At least, those are the two I can think of.)

Without commenting on the possibility of the first, which of the two seems easier? To me at least, it seems much easier for Vladimir Lenin or Benito Mussolini to decree that factories dumping waste into rivers will stop and start sending the waste to a designated disposal facility, on pain of death or imprisonment. Or in the context of a representative democracy, face huge fines.

This is why those ideologies which speak of a bourgeois (Before becoming a Fascist, Benito Mussolini was a Socialist, and took inspiration from left ideologies.[0]) usually employ the most authoritarian states. They exist by the following reasoning.

A dictatorship of the proletariat exists to counter act the free market forces which cause the exploitation of the proletariat in the first place. Therefore it must have control of the economy. Of course, an organization that controls the economy controls everything.

"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws." - Attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, but I don't have a reliable source.

Moreover, the "exploitation of the proletariat" is a moral issue. If the state is allowed to dictate on this moral issue, then surely it can dictate on all of them. (Partly a constitution in the American sense exists so as to say "You can't dictate on these moral issues.". One of the consequences of this is that some of the most thorny political problems involve changes to the constitution.)

As Paul Graham points out in 'Inequality and Risk', a lot of innovation comes out of people trying to make money. And if you're not on top of the innovation heap you may as well be on the bottom.

"Ok, so we get slower growth. Is that so bad? Well, one reason it's bad in practice is that other countries might not agree to slow down with us. If you're content to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest of the world, what happens is that you don't invent anything at all. Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. Once you sink that low, other countries can do whatever they like with you: install puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women as prostitutes, dump their toxic waste on your territory-- all the things we do to poor countries now. The only defense is to isolate yourself, as communist countries did in the twentieth century. But the problem then is, you have to become a police state to enforce it." - Paul Graham, 'Inequality and Risk'

Free market forces aren't a result of any conscious design, they're what you get when you predicate your society on making money. (Which, assuming that in your country making money is correlated positively with making wealth, countries that have free markets will probably have a decent amount of wealth.) To counter act free market forces you must either instill a near universal belief in an ideology which gets people to act against them, or have so much power that you can stop them from arising. Usually both.

The problem is that even if you can wield enough power to suspend the free market over a large geographic area, unless you control the world you'll have serious trouble competing in the free market forces on the nation state scale. Which leads to this quote by Mussolini which I currently use as my Litmus test for Fascism, which itself is something of a meta-ideology in its attitude.

"From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable." [1]

So for Authoritarian regimes on the left or right, the only option to enforce their ideology is world domination. By force or by revolution. Again, usually both.

[0]:

“Therefore I became the public crier of this basic, partisan, warlike conception. The time had come to shake the souls of men and firet their minds to thinking and acting. It was not long before I was proclaimed the mouthpiece of the intransigent revolutionary socialist faction. I was only twenty-nine years old when at Reggio Emilia at the Congress in 1912, two years before the world war began, I was nominated as director of the Avanti. It was the only daily of the socialist cause and was published in Milan.” - Mussolini, My Autobiography

[1]: One of the ironies of this idea is that in a world where it was universally employed, Mussolini himself would not be able to have done what he did.

Were you by any chance referring to Project Cybersyn[1] started by the Chilean government under Allende? It was meant to be a strictly centrally-coordinating body than a "top-down command and control" system.

The room that you mentioned in this case is the "Opsroom[2]", where the officials can see the relevant economic data from different industries across Chile and advise accordingly.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn [2]http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/cybersyn/opsroom.html#

Labor unions worked exceptionally well in the US: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/05/lab...

Socialism is not the same as Marxism, and has at this point been widely adopted throughout most of the world.

Marxism has a lot to do with freedom. Unfourtunatly the only form of socialism that was ever tried was Leninism, which is a specific form of state socialism. And Leninism is easily corruptable. ( Or perhaps was designed to be easily corruptable.)

And your decentrelized economy sounds to me a lot like socialized ownership of capital, the very definition of socialism.

A classic No True Scotsman fallacy.

If you really want to dig into this, I recommend Andrzej Walicki's 'Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom'.

It's really not. yk is not saying: "it's not 'real' Marxism that has failed, but Leninism as 'fake' Marxism, therefore Marxism hasn't 'really' been tested." That would be a No True Scotsman fallacy.

yk said that a type of Marxism called Leninism failed, but other types of Marxism may succeed. Declaring statements like that equivalent to NTS is fallacious.

Saying: "although a type of Marxism called Leninism didn't work, other types of Marxism might" is about as fallacious as saying "Frisky the horse didn't win the Kentucky Derby this year, but next year Trigger, who was trained by the same trainer, might."

Actually I fail to see, why this is a No True Scotsman fallacy, since I specifically acknowledge state socialism as one form of socialism. However, if you are concerned that I am shifting goal posts, see for example Libertarian Marxism [1] as a Marxist school of thought that opposes state socialism and predates Leninism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Marxism

It's a No True Scotsman fallacy because Marxism has been tried in wildly different cultures under wildly different circumstances using wildly different methodologies, and in each and every case you've lumped them under a single type of 'non-free' Marxism called Leninism, which then allows you to claim that 'Marxism has a lot to do with freedom' - despite a large body of contrary evidence collected, like I said, under wildly different circumstances.

Yes, it's true that in each and every case, no matter what the initial circumstances, things wound up devolving into totalitarian dystopias, but it's not because they all started off as Leninism. The more obvious conclusion is that since Marxism, despite the intentions and backgrounds of its adherents, always seems to lead to a not-so-good, not-so-free outcome, there is something about Marxism itself that is not compatible with freedom.

This is nothing unusual - ideas often have unintended consequences that differ from the motivations of their holders. But it should make you pause before making statements like 'Marxism has a lot to do with freedom'.

Marxism is a political theory, or if you prefer ideology. Therefore the statement: 'Marxism has a lot to do with freedom.' is a theoretical one. And the reason of it is, that the basic idea is to free the workers not only from government oppression, but also ( as much as possible ) from oppression created by the economic system.

However, to answer your criticism, there are similarities between the already tried forms of socialism, namely that they were tried by states that were part of the eastern block and as such under the influence of the Soviet Union. And I think that the problem is specific to these similarities, not to Marxism. To convince me otherwise, you would need to show that other forms of socialized ownership of capital, for example employee owned companies, produce also disastrous consequences.

About your last point, I actually agree. Marxism proved to be a rather dangerous ideology. But I think that it is at the moment more dangerous to forget Marxism, than that a second coming of the Soviet Union is imminent.

You misunderstand the No True Scotsman fallacy. This is, in fact, a classic example of such confusion. I have seen it often on the Internet.

It is usually better to set aside these named fallacies and just follow reasoning from lower principles. Leninism is different enough from many other forms of socialist or communist thought that its failure says nothing about these.

Guaranteed income is the simplest way forward to this future in the age of wide-spread automation. Originally a conservative idea, it's unfortunately been dismissed as "conservative" has come to mean "member of the current elite".

I want to agree with you - I really would like to find out what that activity is.

But, if people aren't willing to "attach themselves to other people's dreams and help build their wealth", how are people going to work together enough to build bigger things than they can build on their own?

It seems like a catch-22 - perhaps the the balance is working with people who care about your intellectual freedom and sanity?

Yeah, wealth-building activities that are truly valuable to society probably should remain incentivized by the possibility of great wealth. It's not the only incentive but it's one that works well.

What about most economic activities, though? Trinket selling, farming, programming CRUD apps, fishing, working at grocery counters, the duller parts of research, etc. Technology is already automating many of these things away and replacing them with more fulfilling work, or maybe not replacing them in the sense that new jobs are there but the workers have to be retrained. How badly do we need a human incentive structure for tasks that can and will be automated?

Also, where can I work with people who care about my intellectual freedom and sanity? (Not a rhetorical question; if you know of any, please do tell!)

I think you are right in that, if people who care about intellectual freedom can achieve it en masse, we will have found a great balance.

"..where can I work with people who care about my intellectual freedom and sanity?"

I love that question, and it is one I am going to really ponder further. The answer to that question sounds appealing to me, even if I don't know what it is!

What follows are some not necessarily connected brainstorming thoughts about said place to work:

- No, I don't know a specific place we can work where people truly care about that (and I wish I did too) - I think that's because survival driven needs (and financial ones) generally tend to overpower the needs/wants of intellectual freedom/sanity for both organizations and individuals.

- The place to work where you can achieve that is probably relative to each individual - I mean, one person might achieve that stability/freedom through farming and another might through writing code. However, for a moment let's suspend that idea and pretend there was one answer that would work for everyone to achieve intellectual freedom and sanity.

- True story - I met someone once who told me that their goal was to pay employees whatever they wanted, with a wide open vacation policy, super flexible working hours, with the best benefits money can buy. The reason for this was that the person wanted to hire people who would devote themselves completely to the problems the organization wanted to solve, and wanted people to reach the point of self-actualization so they could do their very best work - as in fulfilling all of Maslow's hierarchy of needs (plus a reasonable number of "wants"). Unfortunately, I wasn't able to work with this person but I have always been intrigued by the idea/theory - one only made possible by access to considerable financial resources.

What are some elements of such a place to work? It makes me wonder if we can use project management's cost/scope/schedule to define them. In other words, freedom from fear of cost, freedom from scope (free to explore any direction), and freedom from schedule?

More thoughts:

- it feels good to know your presence is appreciated (i.e. people want to have you around) but not required - you have a place to "belong" virtually or in person.

- freedom from schedule (free to come and go as you please, no project schedule requirements, completely flexible and unlimited vacation time).

- freedom to work on any type of project, invention, idea, in any area at all.

- freedom from having to worry about paying/taking care of yourself/family? guaranteed stable income at a level commensurate with the expenses relative to the local area?

- what you do has to produce something, eventually, otherwise how does it fund itself?

Umm, how about some sort of combination of a hackerspace with a community-run or collective based organization/business - people come together in a shared workspace whenever they want, they build ANY kind of projects and ideas together without limit - if those are able to generate revenue, a portion of the revenue goes back into the collective/organization and the rest to the individuals who were the source of the revenue? Also, very little restrictions on who can join - technical, non-technical, it doesn't matter - all that is needed are people who want to work on ideas together, a place for them to work with resources for them to work with/share, and time. Kind of like a wide open incubator I guess.

I have always wondered what people could generate working together in a truly open way with complete freedom to explore any and all ideas and freedom from any related fears (i.e. a basic code of conduct).

Though not living in the first world, I feel it the same way.

I recently quit my job due to having an eerily similar feeling. I saved enough money to take a break for even a year or two if I want. It is difficult to express how much more fulfilled I feel following my own academic pursuits rather than someone else's business plan.

So far my plan for the future is:

  1. Enjoy as much time off as my heart desires, until I start feeling monetary pressure.
  2. Suck it up and get a job that is boring and pays an inordinate amount of money.
  3. Do that for 1-2 years, living frugally, fattening my savings.
  4. Repeat.

Better suggestions welcome.

Thats exactly what Ive been doing. Every day isnt a party but I worry that the culture of software shops has changed in ways that I will never be happy in a software job again. And I hate pretending Im OK with stuff Im not OK with.

Its gotten to the point where no matter how much I lower my expectations, they are never low enough.

I'm going about it a different way: work hard while I'm young and save (i.e. invest) as much as I can so that I can retire early. My current retirement age goal is 45.

The way I see it, the advantage of your approach is that you'll get a lot more interest on your money. The disadvantage is that you might take longer than you expect, and if you take too long you might be too old to fully enjoy your retirement.

What if you die at age 44? And what if there is hyper-inflation?

You bet the farm and lost. Shit happens sometimes...

I've been working and getting paid well, then not trying to save a ton since I could die any day. My generation probably won't get to retire, and so I'm trying to live now while I'm young. I usually try to do crazy stuff on the weekends that other 20somethings wouldn't be able to do, and I'll bring my friends along if I can.

Move to a developing country, if possible.

After living outside India for 12 years since my undergraduate period, I didn't think I would adjust well after moving back, but I did (despite the power-cuts, etc.). Leisure truly is the greatest luxury you can have, provided your basic needs (which include a decent internet connection) are met.

I currently am in a cushy job that doesn't excite me, and intend to move back again, this time hopefully for good.

I got confused. Are you intending to move back again out from India or to India?

I am once again working outside India - intend to move back to India again!

> I Wasn't Prepared for Work

Some people just aren't cut out for the business world. Centuries ago they might have become monks or clergy.

These days they exit academia with a master's degree or Ph.D., try unsuccessfully to fit into the business world, then retreat back to academia and eventually become associate professors or professors.

It's very easy to spot these types of people in interviews. I generally pass on them because it's been my experience that in the business world they are rudderless. They are very smart, but they often don't understand why companies pass on them.

On the other hand, in this case, it may just be the four-hour commute. No job is worth traveling four hours in a car each day, unless it's the only one you can find and you're supporting a family. If that's not the case, find something closer, or move. San Francisco isn't the only place that creates software.

Among the HN crowd, and especially those who dislike working for others, I'm surprised there isn't more of a focus on early retirement. If you make an upper-middle class salary, it's not difficult to become financially independent in a decade, even if you don't "strike it big".

Here's a great article by a programmer-turned-blogger about how savings rate affects time-to-retirement:

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

Wait, ya'll, let me know what you think about this idea as a way to enable more people to work on math, CS and other formalized things and get paid. More generally, this is a potential way to solve the friction between what workers are doing and what they are capable of doing.

I have this notion that there should be an online community that formalizes the search for solutions to open problems. Each open problem has directions and attempts. Proof software validates attempts, and senior community members discard fruitless directions.

Let's say you want to tackle a hard unsolved math problem. Import all of the research directions to date, and log the attempts. Recursively log directions and attempts, and build up a tree of research into the problem.

Generous organizations and governments set up very large prizes for successful solutions, and when a solution is discovered and verified, contributors are rewarded according to merit. The person who provides the proof gets the largest prize, and the folks higher up in the tree for that problem who defined new directions get some money, too.

Research will accelerate, so it's worth the money. It doesn't solve the problem of tedious work in general - it only solves it for the specific case of workers who, due to friction and the incentive structure in the economy today, are producing at less than their potential.

Productivity is antithetical to intellectual exploration. Software is a craft pursuit, essentially blue-collar work. The OP does not wish to be a craftsman. He wishes to be an intellectual, an explorer, an inventor, all of which are pursuits of luxury, enabled by the efforts of those people who actually make things and do the labor of the world. I find it unfortunate that in stating his preferences he finds the need to dismiss the value and joy of crafting.

It used to be that those luxury pursuits were the realm of the upperclass or the genius, though more recently they were subsidized by the labor union-enabled middle class support of public universities. Such accessibility, though, is a historical anomaly and has fallen apart with the fall in funding for higher education.

I enjoy making things, even out of parts, because those choices are valuable. The application of design patterns is joyful, even if it involves creating nothing from whole cloth, because of the rapid creation of a product in which I take pride. I recommend to the OP that if he genuinely does not enjoy what he is doing, he seek out some other field, part time work or simply long-term employment where his employer will appreciate algorithmic innovations (I find computer vision to be an excellent field for this).

This is why I freelance remotely. I set my own hours, charge by day of work (or by week), and don't really need to commute (drove less than 200 miles in 6 months(grocery shopping)). I know I'm lucky.

Why not use that 2 hour commute to learn a new language? Pop in some audio of sentences, grammar, and vocab words. I'm sure you can find plenty of audio resources for new languages online, and start learning!

Everyone is so set on coding for their personal projects. Why not explore other areas like learning a new language, and expand your skills.

Easier said than done - your advice sounds a bit like http://www.theonion.com/articles/find-the-thing-youre-most-p....

I can't imagine how exhausting four hours of commuting per day must be.

I do three hours a day (1.5 hours each way) from a Chicago suburb to downtown, 5 days a week. It's exhausting.

I've tried this. It's OK in the morning, but in the evening it lulls me to sleep -- suboptimal when driving.

Is academia an excuse to "hide out" for a while and continue being an autodidact? Also, the 2 hour commute, as I'm sure you suspect, is no small part of the intellectual killer.

Only if you want to be slowly edged out. Academia actively kills off people too interested in taking classes and insufficiently interested in doing work for whatever preset research effort can pay their rent.

I'm an autodidact and I found "higher ed" limiting and throttled to an artificially low rate of learning.

If anything, dropping out of college was in many ways a god-send though it does make it more difficult dealing with the professional population for whom the old college experience was more "meaningful."

Some tips I learned from my commute from south bay <--> SF for two years.

- Take caltrain for normal days. Drive for days with evening events. Trains are far slower in off peak hours.

- Use a bike for station to home/office. Bart or VTA are shit.

- Get up early, use bullet train (last one leaves Mt View ~8am)

- Use a data plan on train to catch up on emails, code reviews, etc. Or type up some code that you can finish up compiling debugging when in office.

I probably would prefer this commute over 30minute drive within south bay.

This post resonates with me a lot. I have often considered writing something similar called "How I became a 9-5 programmer." I got my current job straight out of university, about 2.5 years ago. Since I started working, I have noticed that I feel both more, and less capable. What I mean by this is that while I am certainly more skilled at writing software than when I started working, I feel much less optimistic and able to tackle hard problems.

This just sounds like a case of reality setting in. When people know a little about something, they often think they are at a far higher level than they really are. There is a word for this, but it's evading me ATM.

Oh man, this really hit me hard.

I'm halfway through an MA in mathematics and thinking about going on to a Ph.D. I've done very well at my current institution and think I'll have a decent chance of getting into a good program. But I'm not totally convinced I'll make it in the long run. I've seen some friends of mine go through the academic job search this year, and it's absolute hell. I don't imagine it'll improve when I hit the market. If I go the academic track, I might not get a job. Or worse, I get caught in postdoc limbo or am denied tenure. Then I'll essentially be where I am now, minus 5-15 years of my life (I'm studying pure mathematics. I'm not likely to pick up any directly-marketable skills in further graduate studies).

Meanwhile, essentially my entire social infrastructure is moving to the Bay Area. The appeal of going up there, getting a job (establishing financial security next year instead of next decade), and being around people who I know I want to have in my life, is becoming hard to ignore.

I'm frighted by my eventual prospects in the academic job market, but I already knew that was scary. But down the other path might be something at least as bad.

Fuck.

I saw a statistic claiming there are about 5 graduate students for every professor in the American graduate schools. Unless you want to really pursue the academic path, maybe a phd is not worth it.

> But the environment matters a lot less than the fact that when I get home from work—which is a two hour commute each way (sorry, I can’t afford to live in downtown San Francisco)—I just feel like being mentally incapacitated.

Although this seems like a minor point in the article, and to some extent it is, I think this is still fairly significant. Four hours of commuting every day is a hell of a lot. I'd eventually come to hate almost any job if I had to commute that much.

I'm also quite confused on why this person didn't go to graduate school. By his own admission, he's not making enough to even live inside San Francisco (you can certainly share an apartment downtown on a modest income if you're frugal), so he's not really getting the main advantage that a career offers over graduate school: money. If he's not going to make much money doing something he dislikes, why not instead make little money doing something he loves?

Exactly my thoughts. He comes across as the ideal candidate for further study. No doubt, if he's as capable as he makes out, he'd be able to get a PhD scholarship, and spend all day doing what he wants do to. Granted, there is still a lot of "politicking" in grad school, but you can avoid most of it.

re: commuting. I spent 10 years commuting 1 hour each way (2 hour daily commute) to and from first high school, then university. The biggest quality of life improvement I've ever experienced was moving closer to wherever I had to be day-in-day-out. Every single relocation decision has been chosen explicitly to lower my commute time.

This is exactly why I'm in graduate school. It has its own problems, the premier of which is: you spend a lot of time meeting others' expectations before you can start even looking at "your own" research.

Turns out the real world exists in grad-school too. Still better than a cubicle, for me!

Thanks for making me feel fortunate for working where I work, doing what I'm doing, with the team I'm a part of, HN.

"I find myself abstaining from studying advanced topics in programming and computer science, and instead sticking to this comfort zone of what I know."

that pretty much sums up why you may not enjoy work anymore. i've been doing the exact same thing for the last 8 years, research on google, find an example that gets me close, manipulate it to my desire to get the results im looking for. this is not a bad thing, and is also an art.

i find one can get a rush through learning, it seems you get the same when you delve into certain subjects. i usually get bored with working at a company after a couple of years. mostly due to the repetition that ensues when one is comfortable with their environment. i've worked in 5 different industries using 13 different languages in the last 8 years.

you always have a choice on how to solve the problem. implement it the easy way you know how, or do extra research and find a more optimal solution. i code in a manner that excites me. this usually leads to better code as well as learning new techniques in the process. i do a lot of language research and slowly work my way to the most advanced techniques a language has to offer. i learned about pythons named tuples the other day, iterator tool's groupby and chain. i use these new constructs when i can.

if you make learning part of the job, it stays enjoyable longer. i also make an effort to learn other things outside of tech at home. learn to skate, play the guitar, learn a new language.

don't get burned out on coding.

I'll say this: it sounds like the author went through a great deal of stress (interviewing, moving to another state, taking a new job, taking on a huge commute, living in an unfamiliar area) and stress does make one feel like they're less intellectually capable.

I found best way to deal with this is to connect with like-minded folks: look for people who do interesting things (whether at work or elsewhere) and who live or work next to you; at the least grab dinner or drinks with them occasionally, attend meetups/conferences that they attend, etc.. To your surprise, you may find that many people with what you see as enviable careers went through same challenges as you have (everyone had to face self-doubt, stress, and exhaustion at some point or another).

Others talked about commute, but I'll suggest some actionable choices: commuting from Oakland/Berkeley/Emeryville is 20-25 minutes door-to-door (granted these places are no longer inexpensive, but still much better than downtown SF -- if by downtown SF you mean somewhere close to a Bart Station). If you're willing to commute for 30-60 minutes (still less than two hours), Pleasanton/Dublin (a 40-45 minute Bart ride) is an option, as is Daly City/Colma (30-40 minutes), or Sunset (40-45 minute commute by Muni Metro).

Education is also a great alternatives: if your high school grades are too poor to be admitted to a university, California has a great community college system (e.g., Foothill or De Anza). While the days of "guaranteed transfer to UC Berkeley or UCLA" are over due to budget cuts, you still have a high chance of getting into a good school (including Berkeley MA CS program, even if perhaps not EECS).

What you've probably realized right now is that you've got the rest of your life to work: it's one thing to drop out if your side projects becomes a wild success, it's another thing to forego college altogether in favour of work. Furthermore (and I am not defending this as necessarily just or right, it's more of "the way things are" right now) coming in as an intern can generally be a gateway into more rewarding jobs as opposed to trying to find a full time job without any experience in areas that compose the set intersection of "interesting" and "in-demand". I've known folks who went back to academia after 10 years in the industry (most in order to attend graduate school, but a few returned for undergrad) and it is really never too late.

To your surprise, you may find that many went through same challenges as you have.

That's why I post things I "should never say" under my real name. Ten years from now when I succeed in spite of it, I want people to realize that this painful shit is part of the path, rather than suffering in silence and being ashamed of their (actually very common) setbacks. We live in a phenomenally stupid world where a lot of horrendous, incapable people have power, and if there is anything good about you, you will suffer for it; but people overcome that anyway. It's not as common as it should be, but it happens.

I can't stand this world where people pretend to be happier than they are in order to project status, and thus create a world of full-out dishonesty that almost no one has the courage to challenge. I'd much rather bring out the truth so we can start fixing things and solving problems. I'm young, but I won't always be; so let's get this shit over with, be completely honest with ourselves as a society, tear down whatever powers deserve it, and build something better.

Erm, I understand you have some strong opinions on this, but I actually meant something slightly different: people go through tough periods but generally bounce back and are actually happy (even during their tough periods).

It isn't evidence that you need to "tear down whatever powers ": how confident are you that whatever you'll build will actually be better?

I'll say one last thing: if your system design goal is having a high uptime guarantee, it's easier to do so by building systems that have a low mean time to recovery (MTTR) as opposed to infinitely high mean time between failure (MTBF). Applying this analogy to other topics is left as exercise to reader.

people go through tough periods but generally bounce back and are actually happy (even during their tough periods).

I believe that, too.

I'm not an unhappy person. I'm angry often, but if you recognize anger and put it in its proper place, it need not be overwhelming. There's nothing wrong with having anger. The problem is letting it control you; that's when you're losing.

Happiness and anger are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it's hard to be happy if you don't experience negative emotions (anger, fear, disgust) in proper, limited, and appropriate ways.

It isn't evidence that you need to "tear down whatever powers ": how confident are you that whatever you'll build will actually be better?

Extremely so. The world (at least, the business world; I don't think public-sector "politicians" are that bad, the worst are rarely worse than the constituents who elect them) is run by some of the worst people imaginable.

The world (at least, the business world; I don't think public-sector "politicians" are that bad, the worst are rarely worse than the constituents who elect them) is run by some of the worst people imaginable.

Most of your comments don't seem particularly anti-business, but this seems fairly out there. What's your basis for this particular claim?

He had a manager he didn't like once at google and has built his worldview around it.

It is not just that. I think going through bad startups too.

Not all jobs require producing a solution in a short time to a trivial problem, some jobs involve a lot of abstract thought (academia, some software companies) which the OP seems to enjoy, though very few combine high salary, thinking freely on topics which interest you, no workplace politics, and convenient location, however if you are not in a job and environment which satisfies you, you clearly have the abilities and resources to change that situation.

To the OP I'd say:

    Ditch the commute - either move closer to work or find other work - I don't know how you can stand a 4 hour commute, that alone would knock me out.
    Long term, ditch the job - it's clearly not a good fit for you, there are plenty of jobs out there suited to  your particular interests. They won't all be well paid but they won't require a 2 hour commute and work you find tedious either. 
    Accept compromise on some areas (i.e. lower pay or living with others) in order to gain on others (short commute).
    Don't succumb to bitterness or blame others for your predicament, it doesn't help.

RE: "When I was 16 or 17, I was exploring the relation x ....After all of that, I came up with, through experimental ways, methods for approximating x to1/x using rational functions, very reminiscent of Padé approximations."

At 16 or 17 your brain filled with a hot-rush golden glowing light as you knew you moved the whole ball of wax.

You want that.

We also. Therefore please:

Show HN: (Padé) Rational Approximations of y = x to 1/x?

Just a bit of a shock at the end here -- "my decision to rush off to stuff my bank account."

Not everyone gets to decide and not everyone stuffs their bank account. Far from it. It seems that the OP is very self-aware and aware of his own benefits, but the luxury for work to be a decision is one you should never take for granted.

Fascinating. I have the same symptoms as described by the author, but they're due to a major depression. I stay in my comfort zone, and am lacking the brilliance I had earlier, if I may be so unhumble. I can't write code anymore.

I'm sad for the author, but it's interesting to recognize myself in a completely different setting.

Is a two-hour commute really necessary? I found rooms on Craigslist for $650 a month in South SF. Personally though, I'd shoot for one of the $850/month pads I saw in downtown. As long as you're making at least $60K that should be doable. Shaving 20 mins off a daily commute is worth 200 bucks at least.

An amazing article which resonates well with what is happening to me. I find myself just copy pasting lot of code from stackoverflow(website), leaning to google for every answer and not able to come up with good solution for even moderate tough problems. Earlier I used to be able to convey my thoughts well in writing at least - now even that has degenerated I think. Thinking about something deeply is now a chore for me. I get distracted, irritated very easily and this increases mental tension...this is a vicious circle. I stopped TV for the fear of it dumbing me down. Now I am abusing stackoverflow, google and getting into the same situation. Fear of job security and having to learn just enough to get the job done is not helping either.

I feel for the author, but it seems like (whether he realizes it or not) he's not complaining about the modern working world so much as he's just complaining about fundamental facts of life- at some point you've got to move away from home and start supporting yourself, and it may take a while to find a way to do that in a way that doesn't drive you crazy.

At the end he says this:

"Had I known the burden that an average (or above average) job would put forth, I might have re-evaluated my decision to rush off to stuff my bank account."

The phrasing, "to stuff my bank account" makes it sound like he feels like he made some Faustian bargain to give up his soul for the filthy lucre. But that's not why he rushed off. He rushed off because of this:

"I was approaching my 20s and I had to get a job. Living at home off of my parents was not sustainable, and wasn’t conducive to a better future."

Is he saying, he wished he never left home, and continued living off of his parents? Because I hope he realizes that that's not an option, or at least not one that's going to be good for him or anyone else in the long term.

Or, is he saying that he had achieved some reasonable way of supporting himself back at home, but he kept moving around and chasing higher-paying jobs, until some financial version of the Peter Principle kicked in and he attained some high-paying position that he hated? It doesn't sound like it, since he still complains about not being able to afford a decent place near work and spending 4 hours commuting every day.

I'm not sure he's saying anything other than verbalizing why he feels unhappy right now, and for that I feel bad for him. This is the thing though- he's clearly approaching a fork in the road where he's going to have to make some tough decisions in order to get back to a reasonable level of happiness. The fork is whether he blames the world for his problems, or uses it as an opportunity to grow and find new ways to be happy and satisfied. If he blames the world for his problems, then presumably he quits his job, moves back in with his parents, and goes back to being addicted to his inner world all day long for as long as that lasts. He doesn't change, nothing changes, he just figures out some way to prolong his adolescence for a while longer.

The much better alternative is to just realize that a life well-lived continually pushes you outside your comfort zone, and the best skill you can acquire is to figure out how to roll with the punches and figure out new ways to be happy when the old ones aren't practical anymore. People in your life come and go, jobs come and go, where you live will change all the time, and your amount of free time and what you can do with it will change continuously over the years. More than anything else, YOU will change, the things you need will change, and the things that make you happy will change. You'll miss the people and things and places that are gone, but all of the pressure is on you to adapt and find new ways to be happy. It completely and totally sucks balls, but everybody has to go through it and it hits some people a lot harder than others.

There's things you can change and things you can't change. You can't change having to support yourself, or being responsible for your own health and happiness. But you can change just about everything else. Is a 4 hour commute making you miserable? Get a new job that's much closer to home. Or move closer to work. If you can't stand the commute, then one of those two things has to change, period. Also, it sounds like his passion for the more abstract, academic side of things would make him a perfect fit for grad school or a PhD. Maybe your parents have to help you with that for a while, or you can get a scholarship and/or student loans. Every problem you can verbalize like this is just a question that you need to come up with an answer for. Actually, based on what he wrote, it kind of blows my mind that he didn't want to at least stick around for an MS. Finally, he does sound like he may have some depression issues, and he should at least meet with a therapist or psychiatrist a few times to talk this stuff out. Nothing wrong with that, it happens to people all the time. Good luck, you won't need it though.

Great comment. At many stages of my life things suddenly just got harder. Bit by bit I've learned to cope with them. I'm sure there are many more such occasions on the horizon.

Find a job you can do remotely, therefore no commute. Move to another country. You'll be rich there so you'll have nice place to live in. At some point you might want to ditch US citizenship to make IRS stop draining your income. Accumulate enough money to retire for few years than do it. During this few years have fun with your own stuff. You'll create some passive income inevitably, just don't sweat about it. It might be even enough to live in his country without ever taking a job again. find a wife, have an awesome kid. Die happily.

If you are white I suggest moving to Poland. Locals won't be able to tell whether you are foreigner unless you speak. And in Poland we don't speak much with the other people, apart from friends.

The lead-up describes somebody who definitely seems destined for research work, PhD, think-tank analyst, that kind of thing. It's not surprising that a run-of-the-mill code-slinging J.O.B is a terrible fit and I feel bad about it - but it's never too late to change paths. Why not make an effort to steer out of the situation into a career that is a better fit? You smashed a multivariable calculus course in less than a week and here you are working next to people who barely scraped through a general arts degree. It's painful to even hear about.

The problem is more complex than that I believe. I can say that my experience with mathematics has been very similar up until a certain point during my undergraduate years when money became really tough for me. All the stress and uncertainty ate me up and I ended up feeling a lot like his later self much earlier than at a run-of-the-mill job. There simply aren't enough spots in academia and during graduate school a big portion of people like us don't get paid enough to get by. I'd say most of us burn up before they get to the end.

I think the point is another: it seems that only if you do maths you are smart. And whey all the formulas at the beginning, to make sure the reader think you are smart? You might have lost some abilities in that field but you gained others, to me more valuable than doing demonstrations.

If you like math do something with that, to me it seems that academia is more suitable for what you want from your life.

> I have no room for a chalkboard or whiteboard, unless I wanted to cover up half of my mirrored closet.

You have a mirrored closet? Problem solved. You have a fancy dry-erase board, no modifications necessary.

This is a random offshoot of the actual point, but I think it's useful to know that you can use any window or mirror as a dry-erase board.

From the article - "shortest distance between a point and a line".

Distance between a point and a line is the length of the line segment that joins the point and the line, and is perpendicular to it. It's nonsense to speak of "shortest distance". It tends to imply that there are many distances between...one of them is shortest.

I found this blog entry interesting not so much for the point being made, but as an insight into the intellectual pursuits of an extremely intelligent teenager.

At that age, I was mostly playing Goldeneye 007.

blasted simple neural network behavior equations :P

Maybe you're learning now that the skills you learned and valued so much weren't really that valuable at all?

The author's point is that "valuable" isn't the same as "valued by others who are willing to pay you", and that the latter can interfere with the former.

I just read like all of this guys blog posts, they are great!

OP deserves a lot of credit for having the courage to write this.

1. Software was supposed to be trans-industrial. If you knew how to write code, you could work anywhere in the industrial economy. This meant it would have all the same benefits (stability, industry-agnosticism) of management without the negatives (subjectivity, politics). Unfortunately, that didn't last. Managers took that from us and created a culture of oblique/inappropriate specialization because it's easier to do that than to admit that they don't understand what we do.

2. Our industry has become extremely anti-intellectual. There's a sharp phase change between what your professors groom you for (out of a legacy leftist hope, never realized, that if a leadership education is delivered down into society's middle; then the scorned middle classes will revolt against the elite) and the world of Work, which hasn't evolved in most places. Adam Smith called Britain "a nation of shopkeepers". Corporate America is a nation of social climbers. It's fucking revolting. The good news is that, after a few years, you get used to it and develop the social skills necessary to survive it.

3. I don't think the future is in the Bay Area or Manhattan. Those are great places to build your career and gain some credibility/savings/experience while society figures out where the future will be. However, if you want to build the future, California's not the place for that anymore. Forty years ago, Northern CA was where people went to escape the Mad Men nonsense. Now, houses in Palo Alto-- a suburb; we're not talking San Francisco-- are more expensive than many places in Manhattan. The future's going to come out of a location that's free from the high-rent nonsense that creates a work culture of subordination. The years that made Silicon Valley cheap were those in which few feared the boss because one could make living money doing odd jobs, the cost of living being so low. That's over now. The Valley is Manhattan (again, Mad Men) minus winter and with worse architecture.

4. Through all this, you gotta play the long game. Sure, you're not going to be able to do hard experimental mathematics. You may have to let that dream go. Just keep current/sharp enough to be eligible for interesting work when it comes up. That is doable. Things are terrible right now for cognitive 1-percenters who want meaningful, interesting work (i.e. an upper middle class salary isn't enough, and it's never "stable" for top-0.x-percent intellects because of the job security risks that level of talent implies) but they won't always be like this.

5. Relatedly, if you watch the social climbers, they don't do a lot of real work. If you get even passably good at their game, you can get by with a couple hours of focused effort and that leaves 5-6 for self-directed learning. (Don't write code that you'll use later on work time-- you don't own that-- but feel free to explore and just rewrite the code from scratch at home.) Don't feel wrong about doing this; it's a crooked game and that makes criminals of everyone. Work is (for 95+ percent of people) just about advancing your career; the other shit is stuff people say to distract the naive and clueless. That idealistic shit is a luxury of the extremely privileged, and you need to pretend it as a status signal, but don't believe your own lie. Proles have to take what they can. Just be smart about it. Stealing office supplies == stupid. It's illegal and wrong and dumb and you'll get fired. Making decisions that help your career but aren't optimal for others (who don't give a shit about you either) == smart, if you don't get caught. If you steal, make sure to take intangibles.

6. If you can, start getting up at 5:00 in the morning. Get some productive hours banged out before you go to work. If you can't go to bed early, then compensate by taking mid-afternoon naps in a place where your co-workers won't find you (almost no one gets anything done during those hours anyway). Relatedly, it's worth a lot of money to kill your commute. If you can't afford to live near work, then consider a different city.

7. There are jobs that aren't like the corporate hell being describe above. They exist, but they're not common, and they're probably extremely selective in the Bay Area. When you get one, hold on to it for as long as it's good and learn as much as you can.

Also, on this: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/we-should-pay...

michaelochurch's comments are as valuable as the article. In particular, "3. I don't think the future is in the Bay Area or Manhattan..." rings very true. Earlier today there was the regular 1st of the month "Who's Hiring?" post. Scanning through (and trying to not overgeneralize) it struck me how rather uninteresting most of the Bay Area startups' pitches seemed (to me). Retail, ads, IT cloud services, etc. All relevant and worthy of respect -- but not _inventing_ anything really new.

Absolutely agree. The Bay Area is a horrible cancerous wart on the tech industry. It is a huge mistake that my employer is supposedly going to build a new HQ on old HP superfund land in Cupertino. There's a reason the people who need engineers claim they can't get enough in the Bay Area domestically, but they rarely will mention (because they are near dishonest) that Americans largely refuse to move there, for financial reasons at least, and huge cultural depravity (worship of money). Michaelochurch hit many serious issues dead on accurately. I've never read a more honest remark on reddit or ycombinator since either began. (And I knew what a y combinator was decades ago, so was saddened to see it moved to the west coast.)

> Retail, ads, IT cloud services, etc. All relevant and worthy of respect -- but not _inventing_ anything really new.

Those are the types business that make money fairly easily and therefore have capital to spend on hiring. They're also not great places to work, and so they don't have talented people banging down their doors to work there. If you want to work somewhere that is doing something really cool, it's unlikely you'll see them posting it on a job board

Actually the cloud's not much in SV. Rackspace is in Texas and Amazon's AWS leaders are in Seattle and their biggest datacenter is in Virginia.

The whole point of the cloud is that it doesn't matter where the servers are physically located. The programming jobs aren't located where the servers are anymore. The servers are in places with cheap real estate and power.

Relatedly, if you watch the social climbers, they don't do a lot of real work. If you get even passably good at their game, you can get by with a couple hours of focused effort and that leaves 5-6 for self-directed learning. (Don't write code that you'll use later on work time-- you don't own that-- but feel free to explore and just rewrite the code from scratch at home.) Don't feel wrong about doing this; it's a crooked game and that makes criminals of everyone. Work is (for 95+ percent of people) just about advancing your career; the other shit is stuff people say to distract the naive and clueless.

This reads a lot like @vgr's description of the career trajectory of the so-called "Sociopath". More specifically, the transition from Loser to Sociopath.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

And a far richer and more thorough expose on the subject is @michaelochurch's Gervais-Macleod series. To whom you responded.

Nice - I must check it out then!

edit: in case others are interested, that link is - https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais-prin...

The future's going to come out of a location that's free from the high-rent nonsense that creates a work culture of subordination.

I've been toying with the idea of a rural technologist. Sure, if the startup I'm part of goes big, my equity might get me (most of) a house near the city. Or, I can take my skills and my money to the country. How might society change if rural areas had an influx of people who care about applying modern tech outside of city life? I feel like I (and maybe OP) would flourish with lower living costs, time to think and experiment, large tracts of land and grassroots farming & manufacturing industry.

It may not be as crazy as it sounds at first. Per documentaries, that was why the Silicon Valley came to be. Land was cheap, so Shockley (specifically avoiding the old centers of industry) set up shop there, and the rest is history.

That's skipping the substantial part where Terman establishes Stanford's engineering department, brings in massive government funding, and encourages students to commercialize the research.

Yes, certainly not to say Shockley was all alone in establishing in the Bay Area- but without him, would it be called the Silicon Valley? :)

perhaps shockley would have actually preferred if it were called 'germanium valley' :)

Yes I have been interested in this as an idea. The industrial revolution in the UK started in the countryside (in the beautiful Peak District) due to availability of water power, and Cambridge University started in a rural setting too (to escape from Oxford).

There have been some versions, like this http://www.colletta.it/

I think you need some sort of coworking facility, the monastery model rather than the hermit model to get the most out of it. Otherwise you are giving up too much of the community aspect that makes cities so stimulating now.

X-posted on FS: http://firespotting.com/item?id=1087

This sound like an amazing premise for a reboot of Green Acres.

This would seem to assume modern tech isn't cared for outside of cities, which is pretty funny. Now don't quote the Amish to disprove me, I'm talking about regular rank and file rural people.

Some fun things to google for are "high tech redneck" and the scene in Huntsville AL in the 90s (and probably now).

This sounds like the future. A lot of people are still in the "i'm city person" mindset, without ever knowing how it is to live in a less populated area where living costs are lower and your peace of mind is almost guaranteed.

I was trying to figure out why it was that I disagreed with so much of what Michael O Church raised here.

Not only is Michael O Church clearly smart and well spoken, but it is simply statistically unlikely to be so often anti-affirmative by accident; not merely disagreeing, but holding a position that is the opposite of (what I believe to be) correct.

I came to the conclusion that I probably am seeing a very very different Bay Area than Michael O Church, and filtering the part that I see in a very very different way.

I think the reality is that perhaps mass culture is negative in the direction, but not magnitude, described here.

But what I see here, in the bay area, is a small tribe, embedded in city of San Francisco, energetically, beneficently, earnestly, relentlessly working and helping each other out, putting their considerable time, capital, and intellect towards building the future and solving our biggest problems. Nowhere else in the world are people really trying to solve these problems. And maybe it's not nearly enough of the bay area, but damn it, people really are trying. Not everyone believes and lives what they say.

But I think that, just enough of them, do. Enough to change the world for the better. And it feels, genuinely, like it is happening here, more than elsewhere. It would be a shame if that signal is lost to the noise.

Solve our biggest problems? I'm neutral here, but are you sure that's what is happening in the Bay Area and no where else in the world?

I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I think natural resource constraints and tribalism / nationalism are the greatest chronic threats we face.

Energy tech and communications tech try to solve these, respectively; most funding, research and commercialization appears to happen here (although most deployment happens globally).

I've been studying where things are happening from my admittedly skewed vantage point for quite a long time. It does still seem that the vast majority (>60%) of activity is happening in the bay area.

Thats a very SV response of course.

I don't think SV is at the forefront of energy tech, don't have any figures to hand, but I would put Germany way ahead of SV.

Communications tech, yeah maybe, but it is very well dispersed now. Social change created by this? Less so, the US is trying to reinforce the existing consumer society through better advertising. Much of the rest of the world is experimenting with using new technology to help change society, from the Arab Spring to M5S and the Pirate Party and so on.

This is one of those occasions where it's worth checking the poster's profile. Danielle Fong is "cofounder, chief scientist, lightsailenergy.com" and probably does know a lot of people in SV working on energy tech.

Silicon Valley certainly outperforms Germany in new energy tech. It's not even comparable. Germany just spends more on deployment.

There is little need for better energy tech at this point, it's all a question of deployment.

Edit: That is to say wind and solar can both be cheaper than coal right now depending on location and how you calculate the cost of money etc. Which means we are over the tipping point and it's just a question of how much and how quickly to invest not the need for some great breakthrough.

It's not possible to economically power the world with non-fossil fuel based sources based on current prices. We are between a factor of 2 off, optimistically, and more likely a factor of 5 off (floored by extraction and processing costs.)

I don't know where you got your data or how you're doing your analysis, but you're incorrect on this one.

If by power you mean electricity then your simply wrong. According to a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) between El Paso Electric Company and First Solar, electricity will be sold from First Solar’s thin-film solar panels to El Paso Electric Company for 5.8 cents per kWh http://cleantechnica.com/2013/02/03/thin-film-solar-power-to... Let's compare that with http://www.heco.com/portal/site/heco/menuitem.508576f78baa14...; and say there is no way to run an economy on renewable energy.

That said, scaling things up quickly is a hard problem but slow things down and many problems go away. Realistically, rather than transporting electricity to industry a lot of industry is going to move to where there is cheap power. Also, transportation is a separate issue boats and airplanes are not going to be 'green' any time soon.

Let me try again. Maybe it will enlighten some other readers.

You're cherry picking some of the outermost outliers of both of their ranges, ignoring the cost of storage and transmission and distribution infrastructure, and ignoring the fact that the price of fossil fuel could just decline to the cost of extraction processing and transport as we produce replacements. The cost of coal + extraction nears 2 cents per kwh.

That's a vary different argument from It's not possible to economically power the world with non-fossil fuel based sources based on current prices. However, my point has little to do with today, where not going to replace most power plants in the next 10 years so you need to consider the longer term.

First off transportation and processing are huge factors in the price of fossil fuels, finding and pumping oil are a small slice of the price of gas. At it's simplest cost of fossil fuels = (natural resource value) + (cost to locate) + (cost to extract) + (cost to refine) + (cost to transport) + (environmental cost). [even this ignores subsides etc]

What's important to consider is a proven reserve may or may not be worth extracting based on the market value when your done due to extraction, transportation, and refining costs. Many coal mines in west Virginia have been closed and reopened based on such factors. Now where do renewable energy come in? Shutting down existing coal power plants is a question of maintenance and fuel costs, but new power plants need to consider construction as well. Add to that all existing power plants have a finite lifetime so long term it's only the replacement costs you need to consider. So while building solar in new England is not worth it now, there are plenty of places where it is worth it and that's not going to change.

We have crossed the Rubicon to the point where economics are pushing adoption. Which means there is going to be a lot of grid connected wind and solar power in the future in places like Arizona which means grid operators have no choice but to adapt. The grid can and will slow adoption, but again existing infrastructure has a lifetime and the replacement is going to be designed around matching production with utilization.

The future of the energy market is a huge multidimensional optimization problem. But, investments follow expected profits and there are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of profitable alternative energy investments to be made over the next 30 years. Governments may help or hinder the process but unlike 10 years ago they don't actually need to be involved and it's still going to happen.

What makes America unique and strong is that few other places attract the amount of international talent that SF, and the US in general have. To my knowledge there is no other city in the world that attracts the amount of international talent that SF or NYC can. That with some of the best universities in the world, with many of them in California, put California, and SF, in a good position for many years to come.

Having said that, the world is changing. And we will see other inovation hotspots emerge, but I truly believe without diversity in people, it is harder to have diversity in thought , which can inspire innovation.

Given the level of attraction of SV, the number of talented people from outside the US would be much greater if it wasn't for the way the US government treats foreigners. If the government doesn't become more receptive to foreigners it is quite clear that SV will never grow to its full potential.

London has been a global city for its entire history, and would be in that group. As would Tel Aviv and Singapore.

I think there's quite a strong divide between the creators and the consumers of (low level) technology, even in San Francisco (even though I've never been there). From what I can tell, there is a shift going on in the sense that the number of consumers will grow relative to the number of creators.

This all is the (natural) consequence of the successes of SV. These days, enough kids aspire to be the next Zuckerberg, rather than the next great sports player. These kids will move to SV and consume existing technologies, in the sense that they will follow a couple of a rails tutorials and build the "next great webservice" by combining a couple of the patterns they've learned and create a twitter-bootstrap website that goes along with it. They may create some trivial extensions and post it to Github, but that's about as far as their direct contribution to technology goes.

This isn't necessarily bad, some of the world's problems will be solved by this new generation of entrepreneurs. The presence of more high level developers may also make SV even more attractive to the developers that can actually create cutting edge technologies, which would make SV an even 'richer' place in the sense of talent. However, the number of times I hear people say "I've wasted 4 years at university, and wish I dropped out after the first month" makes me think that they have not understood what university is all about, and makes me wonder if they will be among the ones pushing forward the frontier of technology.

I think the fault in your last paragraph falls to universities. I have a liberal arts degree and have never once questioned the value of my education or its applicability to my work. I learned how to learn, how to understand the ideas of others and developed a broad base from which to understand modern society, whereas the CS graduates I know learned many concrete facts that are useless in their day-to-day lives.

I think that there's a significant number of people who didn't do the learning you apparently did, and instead tried a let's call it "vocational" approach. Funnily enough, such approach is at the core of the jokes about a so-called "humanist" studies leading to a job at McDonald's - the difference being that you can usually get by enough to start in STEM fields.

The other group of people complaining about university, to whom I sometimes belong, is grumpy due to how easy it is to be self taught, even if you might miss some of the more theoretical stuff that you won't use unless you work on a harder problem than most software in the world. Sometimes it's not even about education as much as it is about finances - I quite often found myself looking at job ads and thinking "I could do the job right now if I dropped uni, and I would have no more problems with money".

You are misrepresenting CS degrees. There are very few classes based on memorizing facts. It looks like your degree has taught you how to create strawman arguments pretty well though...

Let me show you how it looks from the other side. I got two technical degrees (one of which is CS). I learned how to learn, how to understand the ideas of others, how to model complex problems via abstractions, and how to apply logic and mathematics to those abstractions to solve the underlying problems. I have very few concrete facts memorized because I know where/how to find them. However, the liberal arts students just sit around and have pseudo-intellectual conversations about art/music/whatever, but never gain the discipline required to discover an 'actually correct' solution to a complex problem. This is why they can't get jobs.

I wanted to stay out of the whole Michael Church discussion: it is unfair, because I read the original article as a cry for help or expression of sadness by the original author, not part of anything more systematized.

However, I'll say this: for a theory to be useful it has to be internally logically consistent, but internal consistency is insufficient. The theory is usually applied to a mix of tautologies (independent of experience /perception) and observations (dependent on experience/perception)

In Michael's case his theory is logically consistent within itself, but 1) his axioms (about what ones' goals should be, what to seek in life, what constitutes fulfillment in work, etc...) seem wildly different from mine 2) what he has experience seems to trend towards the negative side and while not unheard of is, is definitely atypical in terms of the chain of events (hence our gut response which is to say "is he really talking about the same Bay Area/same Google/same software industry?") 3) even so, his perceptions of events seem to be very different from how I might perceive the same events.

I think that's why many people see Michael as while hyper-graphic (a common trend amongst many other Internet posters), clearly intelligent, insightful on technical topics (I'm a bit biased in this case, being a caml fan as well), but find his conclusions in discussions of the industry, management, and of entrepreneurship to be a bit bizarre.

(Donning a flame retardant suit, I am a bit reminded of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science -- or other theories of a "computational universe": it is interesting and there are no internal contradictions, but I'm at at loss at how it could be broadly applicable or how it supersedes existing scientific and mathematical theories).

This is the standard red pill/blue pill paradox, which one do you want to take? Reality can be very subjective. I sometime see what Michael sees, but I can understand why others don't.

Are you claiming that it's the true reality? If you want, you can trek down to specific parts of Kabul, or the Tenderloin, or South Bronx, or San Quentin, and see horror upon horror that bespeaks the devils within our phenotype.

But you can see far more greatness, goodness, and humanity if you so choose. Which shall it be?

The key distinction here is that travelling to those places as a successful entrepreneur is worlds apart from being born there, without any genetic or environmental advantages to help one escape such a fate.

Michael is speaking from a broad base of experience, one that is not just a hero's epic of one success after another with a token failure before the ultimate victory. From the heroic perspective (PG, Zuck, Gates, etc.), every setback is but a small dip before eventual triumph. These people sincerely believe that anyone can do what they have, and as a result their worldviews are extremely limited and naive. In a way, they cannot know the other side of the story, because they have never experienced any other outcome.

The cold truth is that the situation Michael describes is reality for the vast majority of the working world. The darling VC-fund kids are a tiny minority, selling hopes and dreams to the masses in exchange for their servitude as employees who will never join their ranks.

It is very hard to see the system as a whole when one is so deeply immersed in one side of it. VC startups will not save the common man. If anything, they will put him out of work and ask him to "retrain", putting him in massive debt for an entry level position making far less than his previous job.

All this being said, I am extremely optimistic for the future, but I understand that the US requires significant structural reform if everyone is to benefit from technology. Not everyone can be a successful startup founder or programmer, and as soon as we accept that, we can move onto an earnest conversation about what needs to be done to make a better future for all, elite and commoner alike.

I'm very confused by this. Who is "selling hopes and dreams to the masses in exchange for their servitude as employees who will never join their ranks."

The dream we sell to our employees is one version of an idyllic California life. Awesome weather, awesome people, awesome food, and the best work that they've ever done. That what we strive towards. We don't say whether they'll join our ranks; it is simply not an issue. Nobody asks. And if they do have an interest in founding their own thing, we'll help them. They are usually capable.

Again, I just do not see the reality that you're talking about.

> the best work that they've ever done

Whatever you say, Marie Antoinette. You're the exception to the rule and can perhaps create a new kind of corporate culture (though I sincerely doubt it.. if you do, you'll owe it to society to write a management textbook. Or - you will act like most people do - and hoard the information for personal benefit, until one of your underlings reverse engineers it and publicizes because you're just not paying her what she's worth. Case in point: Michael O Church). Most great work is stymied by politics, because the great creative thinkers and engineers haven't been groomed and trained in politics/management. So due to their social flaws, their projects fail, and they're stymied.

Michael O Church is crowdsourcing political support, and he believes the crowd will throw out the hegemony. Well, Michael O Church just might be on to something.

A downvote without a reply is a form of impotence. It says: I don't like what you said, but I don't have the verbal dexterity to articulate my position in a cogent & cohesive way.

For whatever it's worth, that's not me down voting you.

I will say two constructive things, and leave it as that:

- Startups cannot possibly afford to pay people what they are worth in cash salaries, because the value that they create is realized in the future. In order for startups to be fair, employees actually have to recognize some of the potential value of stock.

If employees were in a position to realize it, they could earn far more in equity. But people reasonably need some cash to live, so that is the tradeoff.

- The best experiences are worth more than equity or money combined. This is, to my mind, not sophistry. It's the only way to live. Money ultimately just gives more options for experience. You have to actually live life, and enjoy it.

Living life and enjoying it; a.k.a. "presence"; is not available to everyone. Most people, including workers in Silicon Valley such as engineers, literally get used and farmed. You happen to be of rockstar talent level and your ride will be more pleasant than most. Don't feel guilty - but don't get upset either when we mock you.

Startups cannot possibly afford to pay people what they are worth in cash salaries, because the value that they create is realized in the future. In order for startups to be fair, employees actually have to recognize some of the potential value of stock.

Of course, that is true and so I agree with what you're saying. The problem with startup equity/options is that it's often so pathetic. 0.03% of a 50-person company for Engineer #20? That's ridiculous, especially when useless nontechnical VPs are still getting 1%.

Software engineers, in most companies, get next to nothing in equity. What they get is a token, a lottery ticket. Only founders and those horrible executive implants pushed by investors get a real slice.

Here's a fairer way of doing that (profit sharing): http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macle...

The best experiences are worth more than equity or money combined. This is, to my mind, not sophistry. It's the only way to live.

Few people have the luxury of not paying attention to compensation. There are STEM PhDs out there who end up working retail because they have no safety net and when they fall into the working class, they can't get back out (often, they can't even afford interview expenses to get out of whereever they are).

This is a great post.

My story's not over yet. I plan on being successful. I'm too old (30 this month) to be a VC darling, but I know I'll do something cool, and probably in the next 10 years. But the world needs to see that the misery is real and that, no, not everyone gets out of it. Most people don't start talking about their lives until the bad stuff is all years ago and they end up putting forth an "all's well that ends well" rosy view. I want the whole story to get out. If I have a break-out success in five years, then after 5 more on that, I will already have lost some touch with how the world really is.

VC startups will not save the common man. If anything, they will put him out of work and ask him to "retrain", putting him in massive debt for an entry level position making far less than his previous job.

Right. I don't think that's the intention. I think many VCs are good people trying to help the world. However, most of the established players in Corporate America would rather cut costs than improve yield. The first increases centralization of power (fear) while the second is destabilizing to those in power, even if economically beneficial to all (including them).

VC-funded startups can't change the world because they are an even more short-sighted (by necessity) strain of the Corporate America they're theoretically supposed to be attacking.

All this being said, I am extremely optimistic for the future, but I understand that the US requires significant structural reform if everyone is to benefit from technology.

Very well said.

You can see horror upon horror just treking in the states. Whether you choose to, or more importantly, whether that is USEFUL to you is key.

Societies and cultures are complex systems. There are a lot of historical biases (e.g. castes even in the states) that are fairly easy to identify if you are looking. But for most people, I think, it is not worth stressing over aspects of the world that they have little ability to change. Why be unhappy?

> But you can see far more greatness, goodness, and humanity if you so choose. Which shall it be?

Unhappy critical people like some of us will see more because it is there to see. Many choose not to see it, because that is how cognitive dissonance makes people happier. Whatever world view works for you is the best one to have, I guess.

This whole comment comes off as a sociopathic and mildly paranoid screed. The idea that software is an extremely anti-intellectual industry is remarkably out of touch. The numbers you throw around (95+ percent of all people, "cognitive 1-percenters") are pure hokum and your prescriptive advice is comical ("take mid-afternoon naps in a place your co-workers won't find you" -- what'd you have in mind, the broom closet?)

I'm surprised to see this comment at the top, it's hardly related to the article and reads like a tangential rant from a self-aggrandizing loner.

I think his assessment about the software industry being anti-intellectual is not out of touch, unless you have had the privilege of working with people who like to learn things beyond new programming patterns in their favorite language.

Often, to even suggest an alternate way to look at things—perhaps functionally—or to advocate a new method be learned is often met with disdain.

  * "We don't have time for that."

  * "What we have works. If it ain't broke don't fix it."

  * "Get those monads out of here. I don't understand them."

I think the stagnation in the development and popularity of many mainstream languages underscores this point.

As a small anecdote, there has been an interview from which I was rejected simply because in a programming puzzle, I employed high-order functions to solve the problem, without:

  * loops,

  * off-by-1 errors,

  * null pointer dereferences, or

  * type unsafety.

The sad thing is that this kind of behavior wasn't local to this particular company. It runs rampant.

An industry which is focused on results generally occludes importance in the path to achieve the results. And it is often the path that can be optimized by some metric by use of intelligence.

>>> Get those monads out of here. I don't understand them

This is actually may be a valid reason, unless the specific code can be supported by one person and this person doesn't mind being chained to a desk. If the company has code that only one person can understand, the company has a big problem. Of course, this can be solved by hiring more people that understand this, but it may not be always easy/practical/affordable/feasible.

>>> I think the stagnation in the development and popularity of many mainstream languages underscores this point.

Slow development of mainstream language is a good thing. Mainstream should be stable. Exciting things should happen in the cutting edge and then be slowly brought into the mainstream.

Yes, Exciting things are foreign and alien. We must protect ourselves from that frightening strangeness.

A lot of engineering (as opposed to computer science) is about eliminating strangeness and minimizing risk.

Probably because those areas of engineering are about making things that work.

Bosses understandably want to commoditize programmers.

Speaking of "strange tools", Rich Hickey mentioned the phenomenon of helping commoditize yourself by shying away from the unfamiliar (in Simple Made Easy).

Everybody wants to commoditize programmers. Commoditizing is how you build mass production, mass production is how you get cheap accessible goods, cheap accessible good is how you keep 7 bln people fed and reasonable comfortable. I get it that for a professional programmer the threat to his priesthood status is unpleasant, but it's where it is going, and it is inevitable.

The problem is not fear, the problem is unfamiliarity and cost. If US company decided that all company communications from now on would be in Mandarin, it would be a mistake - not because Mandarin is particularly bad or frightening, but because most people in US would not know how to speak Mandarin and thus would not be able to participate in communication without very substantial effort.

Code is a form of communication too, and it must be done in a way that is understandable to fellow developers, otherwise costs of development raise immensely and the whole project comes under threat.

I wish HN would let you block users, so I wouldn't have to read the same micheleochurch tripe in every article.

Taking a lead from another current thread [0]: on what basis is this tripe? I find micheleochurch's comments always thought-provoking; not always grounded in the world I see, but that's not what I look for in a good comment. I want to be provoked to think.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5807770

To be honest, I actually find value in clearly written content that I consistently disagree with. It allows me to pause and consider different angles of perception especially when it comes to SV, in this case.

I think the alternative, being surrounded by a bubble of things that I agree with, is far more dangerous (though understandably more pleasurable of an experience).

I wouldn't dismiss the advice so quickly! I've known several promising young computer scientists (one now at an illustrious and wealthy tech company, one hopefully entering a graduate program at a famous university, etc) who would hide in their companies' offices and take naps.

> The idea that software is an extremely anti-intellectual industry is remarkably out of touch.

Have you ever worked at a web development shop? Your bio says you're a biology guy caught up in programming, so I would guess you've found a more intellectual strain of the industry - if so congratulations. Enjoy it, because you're one of the lucky few. I slowly die of boredom in the web development field...

On an unrelated note (completely unrelated to the original article, but highly related to the place that Michael's post is coming from), when things in your life don't go the way you want them to, and you find yourself in a position where you're upset that everyone isn't recognizing your genius, there's two things you can do.

(1) You can take a long hard look at yourself and the people around you and your assumptions about everything, and realize that maybe you screwed up and/or maybe they screwed up and/or maybe the system can be a little messed up sometimes. And, forgive yourself and forgive other people and accept that life is full of bumps and misunderstandings and confusing situations and downright unknowable things, and soldier on a little bit older and wiser and less certain of your own infallibility.

- or -

(2) You can construct an elaborately detailed worldview in which you are still a flawless genius and everyone else is wrong, and devote the rest of your life to trying to convince everyone else of this worldview. If people push back or don't believe you, that still works because your whole worldview is that you're a flawless genius and they're all idiotic corporate drones, so of course they don't want to buy what you're selling. It's a narcissistic tautology, and it's a black hole that sadly many otherwise intelligent people get sucked into.

what a load of bullshit. nerds were supposed to rule the world, but jocks, err...managers, took that away from you.

OP and you seem to share this feeling of greatness, this deep conviction that you're special and all the fucking mouthbreathing plebs around you should understand that. turns out the world doesn't work that way, tough shit.

the sissyfication of modern life is getting amazing. don't like workng for someone else? then don't, found something and go go go you brilliant mind, stop complaining in your wall of texts that you don't. have. time. guess what, if you are on HN or have blog, are writing a book (see OP) - then you have time.

haha, a harsh dose of reality. repped.

Silicon valley didn't become what it was because of cheap housing. The entire west coast was built up for high tech electronics and aircraft because of proximity to japan in WWII and later to russia/china in the cold war.

About point 1, if it were true, what would stop "rogue" managers from braking ranks?

There would surely be a lot of marketplace advantage in being the only one hiring trans-industrially if the industry-specific experience had little or no real value.

Much of what you write here is perceptive, until:

"Things are terrible right now for cognitive 1-percenters who want meaningful, interesting work (i.e. an upper middle class salary isn't enough, and it's never "stable" for top-0.x-percent intellects because of the job security risks that level of talent implies)"

You write as if you need the monetary and security advantage of the climbers while at the same time needing the artistic/intellectual liberty of the "cognitive 1-percenter". We don't need that. Basically all the brilliant intellectuals that I've been blessed to be surrounded by is happy and productive without the money and social recognition -- as long as there is room for learning and creativity. Of course, heaps of money and recognition are welcome. But not needed. And certainly their absence is not the ground for recrimination (again, as long as there is learning, freedom and creativity -- with some basic food on the table).

Ah, yes, the Gervais Principle. More people here should be familiar with that.

Also, why isn't there a startup in SV trying to truly disrupt the housing market there? Can it even be done?

Foster City was probably the closest thing to "disrupting the housing market" SFBA has seen in a while; a relatively high density community built on formerly unused land.

There are some other areas which could get redeveloped the same way (I think the Belle Haven part of Menlo Park and just north of there would be the easiest).

Just build 2-4 story apartment/condo buildings. Some parts of Mountain View seem to be doing this now, too.

I like Intermittent Fasting of the Martin Berkhan flavor - you don't eat breakfast or lunch. You free up your lunch hour and you don't get sluggish in the afternoon (AND it's easier to lose weight, of course).

> Corporate America is a nation of social climbers

Well, yes, but you can only climb up to a certain point on the social ladder. In fact, adapting to corporate culture guarantees that you will never be a member of the highest class. You may reach the upper middle class, but you will never become a member of the upper class because the upper class not only does not work (they don't need to), but they look disdainfully upon people who have to work, especially people who sell things, because they consider selling things for a living to be vulgar. People who come from the corporate world will almost always, even if they aren't conscious of it, have middle class tastes, and middle class speech mannerisms. For example, Corporate America loves modern design (because it is boring, and thus cannot be offensive) and uses lots of euphemisms. Members of the upper class hate euphemisms, and consider saying "Fudge!" to be much worse than saying "Fuck!". This goes against everything a Corporate America drone has been taught. Social norms in the upper class are much different than social norms in the upper middle, and other classes. The obfuscatory circumlocutions known as "HR speak" or "BS" are reviled, and so are foolish compliments. If you are at an upper's house and praise their furniture, you could be ejected from the premises. Why? Because it is a given that an upper will have good furniture, and compliments about it suggest that this may not be the case, which is offensive.

Because the things we do, say, and the values we have are often subconscious, it takes a concerted effort to change them and it is almost impossible to do so. The things that determine your class cannot all be written down into a book. Even if you do pretend to be an upper, at some point you will commit a faux paus that gives you away.

Strong post. I agree.

Here's a blog post I wrote to explain the terminology I'm going use next: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/the-3-ladder-... .

The E3's are the ones who end up running corporations, except in ceremonial sinecures and extremely high positions with no accountability, where E2's and E1's will sometimes go. E3 is as high as you can go via work.

E2 is the declining national elite ("WASP establishment") that, as you said, is the true upper class and does not value (but disdains) hard work.

E1 is an emerging and outright nasty global elite. E1 is more willing to play the corporate game than E2, but an E1 will never attach himself to one corporation. CEOing is a highly-paid E3 job that can ruin your reputation if it goes badly. E1s buy and sell corporate positions, social access, assets and resources; they're too savvy to attach themselves to one company, however.

You're not a mismatch for E1 on values if you're a corporate striver, but you'll still never cross that divide. You can't enter E2 or E1 as anyone's subordinate. E2 is inaccessible by wealth (and probably closing up and inaccessible in general at this point) and E1 requires so much wealth to enter it that it will never happen, even on a CEO's salary.

I strongly recommend that you read Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell. Although it was written in 1983, it is still the best description of the American class system that I have ever read. It's less than 200 pages, so you can read it within a day. It primarily deals with the social factors of class,which makes me think that it makes it a good choice for you because it will complement your existing knowledge of corporate culture.

http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/d...

I've read it. It's insightful and accurate. It misses E1 because the global elite that we have now wasn't a problem yet. Upper Class and Top-out-of-sight are E2. Upper-Middle Class is a mix of E3 and G1-2.

Nijk, you've been hellbanned, but you're question is valid so I'll respond to it (I can't respond directly to a hellbanned user).

Brin and Zuckerberg are members of the (upper) middle class. Class is a broad term; the people who think that there is "a growing division between the classes" are usually using income as the sole indicator for determining class. The definition of class that I'm using takes into account social factors as well.

The members of the upper class like archaic customs, dress, and design. They have little use for technology, because they have servants to perform the tasks that members of the middle class use technology to do.

Privacy is also very important to uppers, because they hate when middle class people attempt to pry into their business. That's why they have half mile long driveways and tall shrubbery around their houses to keep prying eyes away. Zuckerberg and Brin give themselves away as members of the upper middle class because they sell (selling is vulgar to the upper class) services that do not respect the user's privacy.

> If you are at an upper's house and praise their furniture, you could be ejected from the premises.

Have you performed any experiments to verify this claim?

Most screeds I see against the Bay Area seems to ignore one of the most important things about it: It's in California, which has had laws against overly-restrictive employer non-compete agreements since the 1800s.

You don't just need a critical mass of technologists in an area, you also need them to be able to do new and interesting work on their own schedule, either by switching jobs or by starting companies. The Bay Area meets both criteria.

> Things are terrible right now for cognitive 1-percenters who want meaningful, interesting work (i.e. an upper middle class salary isn't enough, and it's never "stable" for top-0.x-percent intellects because of the job security risks that level of talent implies

You seem to be implying that less intelligent or educated people have LESS job security risks to worry about than the "cognitive one percenters"?

You can't be serious. Are you confusing "risk" with "choice"? Going down that scale, it's "choice in finding a job" that gets reduced, not "risk of having to find a new job".

Or maybe you're confusing the "job security risk" of losing that really nice intellectually challenging job and having to pick a possibly less interesting one from a number of companies that are jumping up and down because intellectual talent like that is never on the job market for long, with the ACTUAL job security risk of losing your job, period. And the subsequent worries about where next month's rent will have to come from.

And the "right now" part has me scratching my head as well. From what I'm seeing, if there's one sector that seem to be coasting along just fine in this turmoil of economic crises, it's the tech sector and in particular the highly intelligent top of it.

My friend for instance, is a brilliant programmer with a sharp analytical mind, only just about to finish his Physics PhD, already found a job, had to look for, oh, about a week or so. He had at least 3 options (he indeed picked the most intellectually challenging one), the reason it was "only" three was because he doesn't really want to move (this university town is a bit of an "island", most people have to move to other regions "where all the jobs are"), he limited his options by choice.

Now compare with his girlfriend. Equally smart, but no background in programming and her PhD is in Bio/Med. She's already had to move to be able to take a temp research position and has been looking for more stable employment for months, without much luck.

... and one other, unrelated thing, the following can be pretty dangerous advice:

> Don't write code that you'll use later on work time-- you don't own that-- but feel free to explore and just rewrite the code from scratch at home.

I can't speak for how it works where OP lives, but this won't fly in the Netherlands. Regardless of whether you rewrite it from scratch, code that you could conceivably have written as part of your normal work description (yes this is pretty broad), you don't own that. Doesn't matter one bit when or where you write it, at home or at the office, whether you made money from this hobby project or volunteered to write a simple database app for your local sports club (that last example is literally a casus we learned about in class).

It's a snag, usually won't give you trouble because a boss doesn't need to enforce it, esp if he wants to keep his programmers. But what you're suggesting is deliberately placing yourself in an adversarial position, it depends on how you do it, but the tone you described it, can easily push someone to become very difficult, very quickly.

The ability to google and copy-paste the answer is as common as the ability to drive a car - it is absolutely nothing special and absolutely must have. And of course it isn't enough to secure a job, let alone to make something people will appreciate.

And, pardon me, but having a chalkboard in one's room is a sign of narcissism.) Get a Ph.D from Princeton first.)

Welcome to the real world :)

Thank you for perfectly describing my thoughts.

Welcome to the world most people live in, would be more accurate.

Staring at traffic for 4 hours a day is no way to treat oneself.

He should treat a 4 hour commute as a life-threatening emergency. That is insane. Drop what you are doing and find somewhere closer to live or get a closer job.

Not even just "treat" it like that; it _IS_ a life-threatening emergency. I was forced into that exact situation for 1 month. Even paying $4 bridge-toll. It wasn't even a question if I was going to quit that job, the situation fell apart on its own. I just couldn't sustain it. That daily 4hr commute eclipses any other issue he has, IMHO. Whatever physical or mental energy you didn't burn up in the office is destroyed in 4hrs of traffic. Nobody should live like that.

I suspect that part of the problem is that many people working on programming projects no longer feel like they are making the world a better place. Many of the world-changing ideas have been implemented. For many people, what is left but to continually optimize what already exists?

> Many of the world-changing ideas have been implemented. For many people, what is left but to continually optimize what already exists?

This sounds unimaginative to the point of absurdity.

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