$300 jeans are a signal of status, not taste.
$100 jeans are a signal of taste.
51 karma · joined November 5, 2009
$100 jeans are a signal of taste.
Quit your job and make it your means of survival.
If you're a student, focus on your schoolwork instead. If this IS your schoolwork, consider switching fields.
I guess this is me. I fit this rubric, and now I deal with $100k+ sums on a quarterly basis. On an annual level it goes into the hundreds of thousands. I'm by no means wealthy (I do not own significant amounts of property, for example) but I am capable of fundamentally understanding large sums of money on a personal and professional level.
Dealing with money is definitely a skill that is taught. If you don't have parents or a business partner or someone else in your life that teaches you the old-fashioned way (through unflinching and strict discipline and what borders on verbal abuse when you fuck up), you're never going to learn. The credit card companies and banks are not this person/entity.
You know, that's basically what Microsoft tried to do with internet explorer, but they ran up against such vehement opposition I'm pretty convinced that's why the concept hasn't progressed.
Next up is Google with Chrome/OS/Android, will they be perceived as Evil also? Only time will tell.
This is the norm outside of Wall St as well, for anyone who has actual talent and/or experience and isn't a spineless pushover. For example, a truly talented sales engineer can easily make $250k/year + benefits and equity compensation.
> 60k is really seriously low
It was a 60k bonus.
That's called a Lexus IS250.
Get into computers/UNIX/Linux when you're 13. Start working at startups when you're 15 as a junior sysadmin/scripter. Continue doing contract work through college. Become an expert UNIX developer by the time you are 21.
After college, work a few years for a company doing a high-end specialty product such as enterprise search or ERP system. Work on big client accounts. You want to beef up your resume at this point.
After 4 years start your own consulting firm in this space. Earn $150/hr+ for 30 or so hours/week doing consulting work and charge $5k/month/server for managed hardware running aforementioned enterprise platforms.
At this point you'll easily be making $250k, probably closer to $350k.
Or you could learn how to program in college and spend years 21-30 writing shitty web apps for startups, hoping to strike it rich when you're not a founder (stupid). This is what most people do.
Moral of the story: either do high end enterprise work, or be a startup founder. You will surely get screwed otherwise. This is a brutal industry and those who don't choose their paths wisely become wage slaves who make significantly less than blue collar tradesman.
This is a good way of looking at it - it's a form of self-delusion, if you ask me.
I'm not trying to be cruel, I'm reminding him that his (salaried) labor is making someone else wealthy. For those of us who have well developed senses of self-esteem, this is a wholly unacceptable situation.
Never forget that someone else's ambition is what allows for your relative stability.
This is the most important line of the article, in my opinion.
First step to learning how to play this game is setting goals for yourself which will expose you to real risk if you were to try to achieve them in earnest.
In the tech world the most common place this sort of game is played out is the recruiter/engineer relationship. Spineless developers are favorite targets for sociopath recruiters. Next time one of them calls you, treat it like a game in which you are trying to dominate him or her.
This notion that "rich people aren't into cars" in northern california is absolutely laughable. Sure there are MORE nice cars in LA, but that's only because LA is a much larger metro area.
I've lived in both the bay and LA and I can tell that this game of "spot the differences" that so many people play are observations based on selection and confirmation bias. You're just looking for evidence that supports ideas you already have.
In my opinion SF and LA are pretty much the exact same culturally. People from SF just hate to admit it.
This seems like something of a false dichotomy to me. The professors at my school (UCSD) in math, econ, and engineering were all industry consultants and/or entrepreneurs and drove around in very nice cars like Porsches, Benzes, Lexus etc. (I never saw their houses but a good many of them live in La Jolla).
In fact, many of them were so busy with their 'extracurricular' activities that they sometimes attempted (unsuccessfully) to schedule exams and lectures at hours like 7am or 9pm.
The Chancellor drove a turbo porsche! I can only imagine what the faculty at a school like Stanford is like...
It always seemed to me that being a professor opened doors into industry, instead of 'locking' you down.