I love Arcosanti. That's where I go when I need to get away for a coding breakthrough. I wish I could live there and help build it, but my family would never agree to move there with me.
58 karma · joined December 29, 2012
All currencies live and die on market pressures which require societal trust. An exchange of one currency for another is an exchange in preference of trust. Stock is the exact same thing, with the value a measure of trust in the given corporation and the viability of it to survive in a given economic, industrial, or political environment. To equate that they are different is to speciate an argument for why one set of matter and social construct is eternal in nature and the rest are mortal in nature: it is a highly opinionated point which one must make which in itself proves that the argument is false.
The truth is though is that wore me down. I ended up earning myself a chronic illness which severely slowed me down from the startup pace. I also have a family and as my kids grew, so did the time demands. I thought that my partners would understand, given I've put my life into everything I worked on, but that never materialized.
In the end, startup after startup, I've found that there's little room for sickness and especially a family. Sure, when you're young it's ok, but as you get older, or as your family ages, there is this idea of your family just has to understand that you have to do this to make all their dreams come true: founders say that family and health comes first, then try to persuade you that those really come second.
I really do understand where they are coming from. It's all a high pressure game with very little likelihood of succeeding. First to market matters more than not. Notice how many founders are either single or have marriage issues. Survival comes first for them.
I had to ask myself if that's really what I wanted. It turns out, all I really want to do is be good at what I'm working on, support my family, and have coworkers that I can enjoy being around because they value the same things. I found that in larger corporations that weren't about survival anymore. That's what informed my search most of all: the values of the peers I would be working with.
I blame this on the egos and the expectations of early adopters and contributors. They came from a point of senior systems programmers. As the language grew in popularity, they were unprepared psychologically for dealing with new or junior programmers: the level of questions put forth were things the original crew had learned early in their careers and took for granted.
It is often this way in early languages. We need to always make room for those who are just learning, or are not experienced as those who initially created the language or space. I have seen this improving in the Golang community. The more new people come in, the more it will improve.