I can't tell you what will work for you, but I've decided for me that real change happens in small sections in myself and in people. It looks small and incremental, and the world seems large but sometimes that's enough... well, it is for me and that's one of the changes I've made to me... most of the time. It doesn't seem to be working as well, lately with all of the chaos in the world. I'm working on it, though =)
Human default is pretty biased towards cooperation, what with our speech and long childhoods and social organization, but of course, as the great success of science these past few hundred years shows, sometimes you need the loners pushing towards a hard to find insight.
Of course, if you don’t care about solving problems or making things more pleasant and interesting and just want to optimize the number of dollars in your banks database, then maybe you wouldn’t care about the most efficient way to solve problems. In which case, good luck, but there are reports from people that have pursued that path that it doesn’t hold a candle to contributing to a Great Common Task.
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This isn't true in the industry at large. To the degree it's true among the HN demographic it's true early in careers. People don't do that forever. If you have a family, you like the stability of a place and don't want to have to spend all of your nights and weekends grinding Leetcode and networking. Once you're in a senior position, it takes time to build the connections and reputation inside a company to be effective, and constantly moving is a disadvantage. Even if you're done being promoted, many people reach a point where they're earning enough to support their lifestyle and have other priorities. I have plenty of friends at companies like Microsoft, Google, and smaller boring companies HN doesn't care about that absolutely could switch jobs for another 20-40% in comp but would have to work twice as many hours a week to do so, and that's a bad trade.
Too bad there is not normally the structure in place to better reward co-operation rather than competition.
I’m not sure how to reorient myself. It’s extremely disturbing to look back and think that all the good stuff was a side effect of spending enormous energy trying to outcompete others for opportunity. I don’t want to keep doing things this way, but I also don’t know how to change.