kls

Nowadays law enforcement does not know your name, they suspect you from first contact and family is not as tight knit as it was. I would be very leery of asylums in present society, due to the many ways in which society has changed.

As well, there was a waves of offshoring, so again the common wisdom was do not go into computing. With that being said, I hade the fortune of working with a company that was early to mobile, and was working with Palm on mobile web apps around 2000, so when the crash came, though I lost that job due to the company closing, I knew mobile was right around the corner and went back to grinding out internal corporate software for a few years.

The offshore projects started to fail to deliver and then Steve came back and launched the iPhone. My experience is software is a boom bust economy. It's been more robust this run and everyone learned that outsourcing was not the win-win they thought it was going to be. In the meantime software ate the world so there is not enough hands to do the work that is out there and to your point, a whole generation was discouraged from entering the market. If there is any market that has a bad track record of employment forecast software dev has to be top of the heap.

I had this on Adderall, I was switched to Desoxyn and had no issue with it. On Adderall even medicine like Viagra would not improve the side effects. That was a show stopper for me, and really frustrating that it actually increased drive.

*2) The hyper focus aspects of ADHD are now basically on all the time. Medication is less a guided missile and more a laser. Instead of taking it and 'magically' getting things done, your attention is now dialed into whatever you point it at. This can be extremely productive, or not. I have less 'lost days' than I did before seeking treatment but those days now have a greater intensity.* I would agree with this description for me as well, though I can choose where the focus goes and I can choose when to disengage. To me it had been a net plus.

*3) It can be easy to get into stimulant fueled cycles of self-destruction. I need to be very disciplined about getting enough food and sleep. The drugs make it easy to shrug off a night or two of little sleep. But using drugs to ignore my body leads to much worse ADHD symptoms then if I hadn't been taking the drugs at all.*

Agreed 100%, it is easy to fall into a cycle of well I can take my second dose later and squeeze some more hours out of the night. As far as food, that is the one really bad side effect of Desoxyn, Adderall suppressed my appetite, Desoxyn completely eliminated it, I can go days without eating and never have the urge to if I do not monitor it. At first I did not care because I was about 60lbs overweight, I am now slim could loose 10 more and be fit, but I am certainly not overweight anymore. I view this as a net positive given the long term ability to manage my weight, but now I stay on top of it.

*4) There is a distinct difference in my personality on days when I take my drugs and days I do not; see Good Changes, point (1). This can be hard for other people, especially romantic partners, to deal with.*

This is the one I hear from people but, the only thing my wife has said about me, is when my first dose kicks in, my feet hit the floor and I am going. I used to take an hour to get ready in the morning, I would do one thing, sit down, do another sit down. It took an hour to feel like I was just slightly awake.

I also have no idea why anyone would want to abuse something like Adderall. The levoamphetamine targets the bodies nervous system rather than the brain. On very low therapeutic doses it cause all kinds of peripheral physicals problems for me.

It is also good to keep in mind ADD/ADHD meds have one of the highest success rates in the pharmacological field of psychiatrics care. It's one of psychiatrics success stories and there is a mountain of evidence that supports it. It is sad that it is still stigmatized as just wanting to get high. I avoided treatment for years due to that. Not accepting the proven track record of stimulant based treatment for ADD/ADHD is doing a lot of harm to a lot of people. Is it over diagnosed sure, but that does not negate that it does work for people who suffer focus disorders.

Her entire company was running on a legacy system that the vendor who was a small custom software shop, had abandoned and who was not interested in selling the source code to anyone (think Computer Associates on a small scale), The owner had done well and was just bleeding the contracts he had until they ran out. While he sailed around the world.

So she was locked into a system that had no path to add features. I had to reverse engineer this system to get to the data, get it out of the underlining datastore it was using and into a proper DBMS, as well as architect a solution to synchronize data between the two while we implemented critical features they needed in a new system, while strangling out functionality of the old system. Then hire pretty mush an entire development team from the ground up to do this (fortunately I knew a few developers that had just lost their job due to their company selling). She was looking to sell her company at top dollar and this system was costing her opportunity on that front.

So while I was doing development, I was not just a engineer I was 27 years old, I was in charge of and navigating the technical direction of a multi-million dollar company.

The reality was the other company was an exit north of $50 million dollars. I got a check for $125k and told to have a nice life. Because I did not negotiate an exit package in the event of a sale. I believed the VC's when they said this was a long haul venture, they where not looking to take it public and where not looking to exit. They where not silicon valley VC's and had more of a background in large real estate deals. So most of their ventures where long hold investments. There is a lot more to that story. 911 happened and hit the industry it was in hard and I think they changed that viewpoint at that time, but I did not shield myself from that reality.

The point is, the sale would have never happened had I not joined the company. Had I extracted my real worth I would have walked out of that exit with about 2 million dollars. Like the COO and the VP of Sales did. She saw all of that happen and she knew the reason I did not and it was because even though I was doing well, I still thought like a poor person.

The bottom line is that neither company would have sold for the sticker prices that they did, had I not entered those companies and navigated them out of their bad technical direction. There are certainly other people that could have done it, but I had a proven track record of doing it. I was a sure bet, thinking like a poor man made me price myself on the market by what my hands can do in an hour and not see myself as a product, a product that reduces risk and risk reduction has value.

To get deeper into the story, this company was involved in hotel allotments and was a central hub for them. Think of something akin to a commodities market for hotel rooms. One of the things that they really needed to be able to do was provide their allotments in real time to online vendors, something that they could not do. So they where basically packaging up an ETL every day and sending it to them. Within a month of me being with the company we had the data sync up and running and had web services on top of the new DB to provide real-time allotment. We brought Travelocity and Expedia online first and our revenues skyrocketed. When I signed on with the company she made me an offer that I could get a take of every booking that was done thru the web services we where going to build, if I could get this system up and running, but that would be my compensation. No base salary, just a take of every booking. I declined because I was risk adverse and wanted to hold on to what I had. She said this was the moment she knew that I was holding myself back.

Think of it this way, imagine that I came up with an algorithm that could predict the next lottery numbers. I was calculating my labor of how long it took to create the algorithm as it's value and not the fact that it could net millions in winnings. If I had that magical algorithm I could certainly sell it for 50% of the next purse. I was selling it for the man hours I put into making it and when she said, hey I will buy the ticket and give you a cut, I was like no, I want money now and that is how a poor person thinks.

You are right, I was making great money for my age and the era but even with all that and even though I was doing great my earning potential was being hampered by the the way I thought.

Finally I will leave you with this. I grew up not far from Palm Beach. Many places have the other side of the tracks we have the other side of the bridge. I had very rich friends in High School and I remember they would take me to dinner with their family at really nice restaurants. I remember being at those dinners and thinking one day, I swear I am going to earn enough to take my grandparents to dinners like this because it was so nice. No one having to serve, everybody just getting to sit there and talk and enjoy each others company. That was literally my only goal of wealth in life and that is how a poor person thinks. That was the good life to me, going to a restaurant. That was my measure of made it.

When that happened I was annoyed, I went and interviewed and I asked for as much as I thought I could get. I had never interviewed when I did not need a job, it was the first time I has ever interviewed without a sword over my head and I had to do that to learn the lesson that she knew she could not teach me, but was in the position to nudge me into. She was stupid rich, it did not hurt her one bit to pay me double, the key was I never asked for it, because I thought like a poor man. Money was very valuable to me, to her it was an afterthought as compared to the important things she needed accomplished.

When you are poor, money and the retention of it, is the bottom line. When you are rich it is not. It is a factor, a rich person is not going to go into a bad deal and loose money intentionally but in her case she was loosing millions in lost opportunity. Had I asked for $500k, her mind would have still been on the Millions is lost opportunity, not the $500k it will take to pursue it. It is as simple as that.

I remember one time, when I just started out in tech, I went to an interview for a group that was contracting for NASA, the interview went very well, they loved me, the team loved me. I pretty much had the job. The team liked me so much that they invited me to lunch. I declined, you could tell the temperature changed at that very moment that I did. I did not get the job, and in retrospect I should have just told them I am not in the position to pay for a meal out at this time. I had literally put my last pennies into the tank of my car to get to that interview.

Anyways, I back story that, to say this; I did well in the industry, I have exited a few companies and I have held some pretty impressive titles at some pretty big orgs but I never got rich. Some of that had to do with dragging my family out of poverty but some of it had to do with something else. I helped build a startup and we sold that startup for a good deal of money. I received a pittance because I did not know my value. It was enough to take off some of life's stresses but it was not FU money. I went to work for one of the companies that we had a B2B relationship with that was a downstream provider to the company we sold. Anyways it was here that things changed for me, and it was not because of me or my work. It was because the CEO of that company became my personal friend. Her name was Sheila and she told me something that I had never heard before and that was this.

She told me that I was what she calls institutionally poor. That I had been conditioned thru my childhood to think like a poor person and in doing so you send out unconscious signals to others. She told me this because she came up similar. She told me that it causes you to over analyze and over estimate risk and therefore you will not take the bold moves that people that don't have to worry do. That while you can change the world and everyone see it. If you hold onto the fear on needing your safety net under you, that you will never extract your true value from other. So I said, so you are going to pay me my fair value, she laughed and said no, I got you for a very good deal. 3 Days latter I walked into her office, with my resignation letter and told her I had an offer from another company. She said, now you get it, how much did they offer. I told her, and she said I will double that if you stay. That was when I learned a tangential lesson, and that is sometimes hard ass, ball busters are the best people.

Point being there is a piece of this, that the person that grew up poor has to break themselves free of and many times they don't even know what they need to free themselves of and that is thinking like a poor person.

I am a scientist, a really awesome scientist, I slayed Rand because of my awesome sciencey authority, Rand was wrong. Oh BTW rand was right about fiction being a good conveyor of morality, because it suits my narrative. So I wrote some fiction with no science in it, to slay her for being wrong. Did I mention I am a scientist so that gives authority to my fiction, being fiction it negates my need to provide the sciency bits to prove my point.

This authors hubris is at the L Ron ++ level.

As well their really is no comparison, to JD's high end fleet tractors to the ones they sell to compete with New Holland or Kubota, they are different lines with different quality controls. It gets even worse when you get down to personal lawn tractors. They are basically just rebadging commodity built hardware at that level.

A tangential question would be, if I need a piece of hardware or software what is the process from purchase procurement to it being installed on my machine? This can sniff out several red flags, from there is a lot of bureaucracy to get software on your machine, to we are the type of company that will pay a person a decent developers salary and then just let them sit there because we will not buy a $100/$500/$1000 tool to make them more productive.

Now on pointing it out, I think a lot of people don't realize they are trying to sway the discourse thru the use of projection rather than logic and reason. I think it is one of those insidious things that just creep in and people don't realize they are doing it. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and think they want to appeal to reason (at lest in life and on HN) and I think many don't see these words work in direct contrast to that, they literally appeal to the mob. I point it out not to gain net fame or quake guns (I will take a pack-o-punch'ed gun in BO Zombies though) but rather I would hope at least one reader of this thread would have the "I never really though about it that way" moments.

I am not sure what the implication of garbage economy is, but the south was fairly wealthy antebellum. So much so that they supported a large tax base for the federal government which they resented, it lead to the nullification crisis in 1832 and started the long road to the civil war. Southern universities where also considered to be some of the best in the nation pre-war.

If you where referring to an economy based on the backs of slaves then yes it could be labeled a garbage economy but if it is in reference to the poverty seen across the south in modern day, the antebellum south was a totally different economy and honestly an entirely foreign culture a culture that was decimated (the bad and good parts) in Reconstruction.