yes-the-day

As a non-tech hub guy, I think your last point probably isn't true. Where I work, the best devs are not on par with the Stanford/MIT etc. people, but we can hold our own quite well with the next tier down from New York, San Francisco, etc. (A lot of the devs here are from India originally but some are locals and the point stands regardless.) I've worked with a few of those people from big tech hubs on joint projects (one or two even went to prestigious technical colleges), and we had a high level of mutual respect and trust in one another's abilities. Whether my salary will trend towards yours or vice versa I don't know, but I definitely think I could have gotten a pretty big bump had I moved to San Fran. I don't because of many types of friction (laziness, family/friend/other relation ties, age, so on). If that friction goes away I assume we'll become more direct competitors.

This reminds me of the psychologist Daniel Nettle's assertion that there are 3 levels of happiness. The most basic is the immediate feeling of pleasure, like what you get from having sex or watching a sunset. I think you're right that some people naively think work should be like that day to day and their own intellectual stimulation is a primary concern for anyone else.

But there are also other forms of happiness. One is a generalized sense of well-being. Another is a sense of growth or flourishing and fulfilling one's potential. I think it's sort of natural that people associate these things with their careers (especially the latter). And I understand why it's disheartening to feel that at the end of the day you're a cog in a machine, that your work may actually be damaging to your well-being and distracting or sucking away time and energy from things that would allow you to flourish. Worst of all for many people in tech, you may feel that the work you do is actually net harmful to not just yourself but to your coworkers and your users.

I think you're right to call out people to take responsibility for themselves and to realize the world doesn't owe them anything, but I also think it's a more nuanced issue and there are some easy traps to fall into out there.

This was the advice I gave my sister: one major for passion, one for future employment. I graduated during 2010 with a humanities degree, and while I loved the things I learned and did really well academically, I was auto-rejected from a lot of interesting job opportunities during a really shitty economy because I simply didn't have a resume that distinguished me from anyone else and said "this guy could be valuable." My sister studied something she loved but also tried accounting, realized she hated it, and switched to something else practical, which got her a great job right out of school and put her way ahead of me financially and career-wise. I would give the same advice to any young person. You may not love every single class you take, but the investment will pay off immensely in terms of overall lifetime happiness, financial security, and career growth. You might also discover some passion in an unexpected place. On the flip side, don't study only for practicality. College is one of the few times in life you will have total intellectual freedom to follow your curiosity without restriction. Don't squander it only learning a trade. Find some subject that piques your curiosity, practicality be damned.

I'm convinced this is one of the main sources of inefficiency in modern management, whether using AI or not. Managers are incentivized to be action prone so as to demonstrate their value continuously, and they are also expected to put in processes. Often these processes are on way too tight of a cadence and what ends up happening is that managers spend their entire time evaluating and chasing noise.

Is it really that surprising though? Reciprocal altruism is a part of human nature. We give other individuals stuff they want so they will give us stuff we want. At the end of the day the economy and financial system are just a big layer of indirection in the process. Now whether you call your bosses "customers" or "managers" or "the board," at the end of the day it doesn't surprise me that much that everyone answers to someone.

This is going to sound a little touchy-feely, but I'm going to write it anyway.

There are a lot of games in the world, and what the author describes here is one of them. And you can play this game if you want to, and you might even win at it. But it's worth remembering that you have one existence, one set of time and energy to spend in this life. If you decide to look at the world this way, and operate with this mindset, then that's how you're choosing to spend it. You will not "make it" some day and suddenly reverse course.

More and more these days I think that people who are unhappy in the modern world live in prisons of their own making. Yes, a lot of people think this way and work this way. I think it's good to know the game is out there, and that you'll encounter people with this mindset. But you do not have to play the same game. Yes, you probably need a job. Yes, your material rewards might be lesser if you don't engage in this kind of stuff. But you can still live a perfectly good life—perhaps even a better life—by building it around other principles.

I don't mean this to be a lecture, or condescending, or anything other than a reminder that just because you have to work, it doesn't mean you're stuck playing the games other people are playing.