I know this is somewhat of a false dichotomy, but at some point I think PG's essays started to shift from being directed at startup founders to giving advice to his children that they can read when they grow older.
Ok I just looked up the phrase false dichotomy, apparently doesn't mean what I thought it meant, probably would have been better said as "the two are not mutually exclusive", still point holds.
"False dichotomy" implies more than just the fact that "the two are not mutually exclusive". It further implies that the speaker in question has implied that the two are mutually exclusive, when they are in fact not.
There probably is some tethering to whatever his perspective is at the time. At some point, YC was a relatively new idea coming to life and he was probably constantly thinking a certain way. Now, it's something that he's been up to for decades.
That said, I think there's more of a zeitgeist change than actual change in pg's content. Things sound different 10-15 years apart. A lot of things age poorly, often: idealism, stand up comedy... most anything avante garde-ish.
Clever people spoke highly of agile,for example, when it was manifestos and such circa 2005.
I feel like a lot of it is the same stuff that you get in generic self help books, but explained in contemporary techie language and cultural references.
Not that that is necessarily bad per se, there can be a lot lot of value to reminding people of things that may seem obvious. But it's annoying when people treat him like a genius for saying fairly standard platitudes in a clever way
Strange that Firefox's reader view cannot be enabled for this post. Probably because instead of using `<p>` tags or similar, the content of the post is contained within a `<font>` block inside a table, with `<br>` tags separating the paragraphs.
Not having the content inside of `<p>` blocks is a departure from Paul Graham's older content, and a confusing one at that.
EDIT: It looks like the posts with the "Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator." banner are contained within a `<p>` block, and can be read with Firefox reader view, but those without the banner are not within a `<p>` block, and cannot be read with Firefox reader view.
Being able to decide what to work on requires a certain amount of privilege, as opposed to needing to do whatever you can to pay for rent, bills, and groceries this month.
I think you're on to something here. I'm struggling to articulate that somehow this essay addresses, albeit well, the low-hanging fruit of working hard, at least in the move-the-world-forward sense than this is written (he's not talking to bricklayers, he's talking to the architects). You have options; you have family/social support, and so on. These things allow the other things to become. [As you can seem I'm still struggling.]
That's a good post. Addresses the societal imbalances that are sometimes hard to see, adds a little more context:
>If hard work and long hours could be consistently transformed into “success”, then my friends and family who are teachers, nurses, social workers and factory workers would be far more successful than I am.
Yeah, but you have access to a computer and you are speaking english. Some may consider that privilege, like "Being able to decide what to work on requires a certain amount of privilege". I can decide what to work on like all of my friends and family but I don't think me or they are privileged. In current climate, anything beyond subsistence is considered privilege and used to belittle and shame those who have means to have life not lacking in neccessities. I'm flamebaiting, because original comment is not in any way insightful, but essentially means 'Oh look, he can choose what to work on, he is "privileged"' without any further meaning.
Maybe I misinterpreted oc, but I understood that « choosing what to work on » was about choosing precisely what project you want to work on and not just doing the job you wanted but on the project of your boss.
Because that is really rare and close to impossible if you are not an entrepreneur : I have. personally never ever worked on a really interesting project, and tbh, the few times I switched jobs following my attraction to the product, it went terribly wrong.
I’m not saying that you can’t be happy and fulfilled in this situation : my current company is really nice and I’m happy to be paid correctly to do what I wanted to do, but our products are extremely boring and I would never choose to work on my current project if I had a true open choice. And I don’t think I’m the exception on this one.
The ability for hard work is a luxury. Work three jobs, save, build a better future for yourself is a very nice thing. Take it away, such as spending your life caring for a disabled or addicted family member, and you will realize how nice self-determination is.
Doesn't this sound shit though? If Bill Gates is so smart why did he have to work so much? Did he like coding and management more than days off?
If a life of hard work is needed to get you into heaven that's fine. Or if anything less would mean you and your dependants going hungry. But once your basic needs are met then it's irrational not to start spending time on all of the other things that life has to offer.
I feel like drive and energy and work-ethic are great, and you're useless without them. All the same if you have nothing else then you just become enslaved by your need to output more or increase your wealth or whatever, without connecting that to any healthy goal like health or happiness or wellbeing. It's like a cognitive defect, a disability except you're unable to not-do.
He probably didn't treat those as "work" as we laymen understand. We just work for bread and butter and most of the time workis kind of boring. But if you happen to work for yourself or enjoy your work for whatever the reason, you don't treat it as "work" and it's all about achieving the maximum happiness as you can.
I expereinced this a few times in my life and I never regretted about working hard on it. Why would I regret about playing hard and achieving what I can? But sadly due to my shortcomings these events are short and far between.
This is it. When you’re working on things you love, it’s hard, and can be lots of hours, but it doesn’t feel like work.
Speaking from my own experience of founding a startup. There are also times it was absolutely miserable. But it’s true: I wasn’t beholden to my VCs or angels. I could have quit. I just enjoyed the work so much, so deeply, that I didn’t want to quit.
The challenge was not burning out: I needed to take more vacation, because it not feeling like work didn’t mean it wasn’t, still, hard work which people need a respite from.
Yeah exactly. The trick is to not burn out early. I usually got burned out when I figured out the core (perhaps 20% of the work) and needed many days to grind out the final results, which I did not have the perserverance to complete. This is probably my worst shortcoming of life and I still can't get rid of it when I'm approaching 40.
It seems that the only way for me to finish something is to have the task coming from _someone else_, from a friend or from work.
I resonate with this completely. For me, it’s largely a result of ADHD. My solution has always been to partner with “finishers.”
I’m a spectacular starter, prototyper, and builder. But I cannot complete the damn project for the life of me. My best friend and first employee though? Thrives on that.
Rationality really only makes sense in relation to goals, as far as I can see. If your goal is to meet your basic needs, then it’s irrational to work all day. If your goal is market domination, then I’d say working all day is a very rational thing to do
I'd go a step further and it sounds woefully disconnected from the joys of culture and life. For those it works for, I imagine that this seems satisfying but for the rest who work hard and don't hit acclaim and fortune (or at least not wild acclaim and fortune), they're going to have midlife crises when they realized they itemized away their youth... I'd guess.
The thing that most people seem to be missing is PG isn’t advocating for working hard just to work hard. He’s advocating for working hard at things that you love, because then it doesn’t feel like work.
He is also glorifying anxiety, which is unfortunate, and I think this essay stands stronger without those particular points.
But "working hard at things that you love" isn't much of a challenge. Your motivation is already there, and your simply overcoming a lack of skills or knowledge.
What's difficult, and more common amongst mere mortals is twofold; trying to find motivation to overcome difficult things, and learning the skills and expertise to accomplish these things. Love for those things isn't really a factor.
Graham really is trying to simplify things a bit too much, and recycling the tropes of natural ability, practice and effort.
> It's like a cognitive defect, a disability except you're unable to not-do.
He specifically trained himself to have leisure anxiety and advises other people to do this as well:
>> The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off.
It's certainly effective, but as you say, effective to what end?
I tend to agree, but I guess it depends on what you're replacing with work, and how you feel about the work. If you're replacing idle TV watching with a form of work you enjoy, great. If it's replacing time you might be watching specific shows with your partner/kids and with get-head-of-the-pack projects that stress you out, the trade-off will be far from universal.
But as usual, he's writing for a very specific group of people - young people with a strong urge to do late nights building something.
If Bill Gates was so smart why did he have to screw so many people over? Remember how many other smart people and other companies he eat for breakfast? If Bill Gates had the right work ethic would he still be so rich?
There’s also a conflation of working hard and working really long hours. Plus some cherry picked examples. Basically if you only need to find five or six examples of success you could probably defend any lifestyle to get there. For example if I didn’t have kids or need to coordinate with the west coast of the US this mode from Haruki Murakami sounds lovely.
> When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m.
> I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.
> But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.
I read a book on authors work habits and this pattern seems very common. Work for a relatively short period in the morning (by modern work standards) then spend the rest of the day at leisure.
Yeah I think for the sort of creative work I find myself doing that I don't really have more than 5-6 hours a day of it in me. Having the afternoon to recuperate and spend time idly thinking about the thing I'm trying to make would be great.
Further, the thing about Bill Gates is that he can't not be Bill Gates. Whatever drove Bill Gates to work as hard as he did, he probably had no real choice. If you have the drive of Bill Gates, then you'll work with the drive of Bill Gates. Simple!
Because he was trying to build one of the biggest/most successful companies ever? Some things are just hard regardless of how smart you are, building a mega company is one of those.
I understand the drive to share here, as nothing fees better than hard work, but it’s a very intimidating read and feels quite navel gazey.
In my experience, there is no such thing as hard work. There’s a universal river of truth that I can tap into in flow state, and if something is blocking me from getting there, I might as well watch a show and see if the river is open later.
One thing I find important relates to other people. Some say that success comes from hard work, or that the right focus is essential to success. But that's a false dichotomy.
In truth, there are many people out there who work incredibly hard, and some of them are even good, and some of those have the right focus.
Hard work is the precondition. Even if your focus is right and you're clever, you are always competing with people who also have that but put in many hours on top.
It's a tower, and if you want to rise, you need to tackle all the layers.
> There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard.
I'd like to add that it is more than fine to not do great work. If you like to spend a lot of time with your kids and tend to your vegetable patch, by all means only try hard enough to keep the job that pays for that lifestyle.
So, no dig on the author, but there is more than maximizing for great work. Try for a while to instead maximize for life happiness and experience how that feels for you.
Agreed, but I also found that 3-ingredient formula to be one of the more insightful things he says in this essay. It's a good way to understand what it takes to be successful at anything.
Including, by the way, being a parent. Many of us aren't born with (or have a sufficiently healthy childhood) to have naturally great parenting abilities. But hard work and practice sure do go a long way.
Anecdotally, from years at the playground, the attitude of trying to maximize the quality of your parenting is however a killer impediment to being a good parent. Parenting is challenging and a lot of time, but works a lot better when you are doing it in the moment rather than to achieve some agenda.
Of course one of the great things about parenting is that mostly you get to have the same situations over and over again, and get to change your approaches (including consistency) to see what happens with different approaches. So you get practiced at each thing. And the talent needed for parenting is more intimate that for writing software - it's the talent to make your toddlers laugh, to make your 4 year old confident enough to try something they want to try. It's a set of skills for doing stuff between a particular parent/child system. My tricks might not work for you; my tricks for my first born did not work for my second born.
PG never said you should maximize for great work. The essay is about "how to work hard", not "work hard is the only purpose of your life". You are missing the point here.
In addition, you mistakenly exclude great work / achievement from happiness. Spending time with your kids is great, tending your vegetable patch is great, doing great work is also great. Life is not a single purpose process. Happiness is not a single threat process either.
Currently all the critics on the essay are terrible, but you are better at least know to keep it civil.
I don't think the person you're responding to is missing the point. Rather, they are making another, adjacent point. Our culture glorifies hard work and financial success (and excess) to what some believe is an unhealthy degree. It's worth noting almost anywhere hard work is brought up that it should be within the context of the values you hold for the other aspects of your life.
I will say that it is better to do great work than good work all other things being equal. But other things aren't necessarily equal. I would not want to have the discomfort with idleness that the author of this blog post lauds, for example. Although, if you do have that and are pleased to, then good for you!
I wonder how much of the criticism is skewed by the Western notion of “work”. I.e., we tend to view a vocation as the most legitimate definition of work.
If we take a different perspective, I think the author is much less likely to be the target of ire.
>working hard means aiming toward the center — toward the most ambitious problems.
To those in a society hyper-focused on productivity, this can certainly rub people the wrong way because so few are able to dedicate themselves to super ambitious vocations. As the saying goes, the world needs ditch diggers too.
But if your ambition is to cultivate a meaningful, verdant life I don’t see why the author's statement is incompatible with the GP comment. Maybe we just need to broaden our definition about what is worthwhile “work”. It’s certainly possible to do great work cultivating relationships if that is your goal rather than, say, creating a new field of mathematics.
I don’t think you’re wrong, that’s the same impression I got as well. But I suppose that is to be expected in a society that tends to consider one’s vocation as the height of personal ambition.
I would also suspect the author scores highly in the conscientious personality trait. So it would follow they have high levels of discipline, derive pleasure from achievement etc. Maybe the title should be changed to “How to Work Hard (and why that matters to people like me)”
My reply was based on the interpretation that the author defined work as "doing your job". That interpretation was mainly based on him mentioning Bill Gates not taking a day off from Microsoft (his company and job) in his twenties, and the writer Wodehouse spending so much effort on his livelihood, writing. So I think my interpretation is correct.
The article strongly correlates this interpretation of "working" with "being happy". Two quotes:
> When I asked Patrick Collison when he started to find idleness distasteful, he said
>> I think around age 13 or 14. I have a clear memory from around then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside, and wondering why I was wasting my summer holiday.
And
> Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful.
My point to the above is: if you feel awful when you don't work hard on a job, by all means work hard on a job.
But if you feel fine only working moderately hard, and that is enough to fund your true passions, pleasures and happiness, do not feel bad for not wanting to work hard on a job.
And the reason I felt the need to say that, is that "hustle culture" [1], which this essay is not far away from in my opinion, might make people believe (incorrectly) that only people who work hard at a job are valuable and worthy human beings.
Playing as Devil's advocate here. I think that "good work" is much wider that you are considering.
Having quality time off with your partner is "good work"
Raising your children is "good work"
In a more philosophical way. "Work" could be defined as trying to make a change in your reality. So yeah, that life discovering the arts, eating tasteful and healthy food, and spending time with your beloved ones is "good work" and requires ability, practice, and time to do it well.
This, exactly. It takes a lot of hard work to raise children and have a good relationship with your partner. I consider taking vacations to lay on the beach with my partner or children a part of that hard work. The definitions in the essay seem a bit short-sighted to me.
There's a lot of spectrum between "only try hard enough to keep the job" and PG described "great work" in many tech jobs, and indeed most tech people are somewhere in the middle.
PG essays are written for an audience of startup founders and prospective startup founders. When he says "doing your best work" he doesn't exactly have a guy pouring concrete sidewalks in mind. Theoretically, a founder who works harder can make 10,000 as much as if they slacked off. That will never be true for basically any other profession.
I really don't lije these "work hard in all your 20s" advice because I'm at nearing the end of my 20s with great results but I feel like I want to save what's left of my 20s instead of chasing more cash. I haven't personally met people who worked hard until 40s and felt like it was worth it for them. Being a successful person personally has always been way more than just having a successful career and money.
> ...because even in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless.
I loved all of my CS courses in college. They were my bread and butter. I also liked a lot of my math courses and even an English class or two. I just wish I didn't take 5 history courses (three as part of an elective set that had to be liberal arts), three unrelated sciences (bio 1+2, and astronomy - imaging science was great and applicable), and two women and gender studies courses (nothing against the major, just unrelated to my degree).
I've been told countless times that these courses help round out a student. Most of them don't. I end up bullshitting them as much as possible and getting a B so I can focus on the courses I care about. A streamlined college education where we remove some (not all) non-major course work and save two or three semesters of time would be amazing, but of course that's two or three semesters of lost cash for a university...
> Most of them don't. I end up bullshitting them as much as possible and getting a B so I can focus on the courses I care about
I hear where you're coming from on this (and have been in similar shoes), but I suppose there is more nuance to it, mostly because professors and departments play such an important role in the experience.
The argument of liberal arts electives lending themselves to a richer education experience is a well-intentioned one, and does reap benefits if executed well by the professor, the department, TA's and so on. If not, well, it is just like you mentioned, one is inclined to BS their way out of a class to focus on things more important to them.
Speaking from my anecdotal experience, I have had to take three electives as part of my undergrad: microeconomics, macroeconomics, and a philosophy class on the philosophy of the mind. I have thoroughly enjoyed macro-econ and philosophy simply because the professors put in an incredible amount of work to inspire me to work hard and care about the subject. Micro-econ, on the other hand, was one giant mess and I did not show up to more than 3 lectures over the course of the semester.
I believe in the earnest that students stand to gain so much if some university departments and professors gave a crap about the experience that they are offering.
You chose to go to this University/College though. For whatever reason, you chose to attend studies there, knowing this was how the institution operated.
If you went not knowing how the institution operated, well, that's completely your issue.
You could have chose to seek your studies at any institution that caters to the ideals you've stated in your post. Yet you didn't, and you have the audacity to complain, about how the place you chose to attend operates, while they fully and publicly disclose how they operate
He was told prior to entry that the history courses round out his education. At the time, he accepted that explanation (or did not really care). After experiencing it firsthand, he no longer accepts that explanation.
What you want exists: it's called a vocational school -- and no, as of now, many don't teach higher level academic subjects to the exclusion of all others, but they do provide a focused training for a specific line of work and nothing else. A Code bootcamp, for example.
Universities have their historical origins in educating the children of elites in the ways of the world: which by definition is a varied education consisting of many different subjects. I can only guess at the reasons why one can't commonly attend a Computer Science University in the U.S; but there are a handful of institutions in the world that are more focused (The Max Planck Institutes in Germany come to mind)
Maybe the world also needs people who are not so achievement-driven, who act as a kind of lubricant in the machine of society by making the environment around themselves lighter and more pleasant. And people who are that way should learn to value themselves and not feel guilty for not being as driven as some.
A world where everyone is a nose-to-the-grindstone overachiever seems like a pretty dreary one to live in.
And really is Viaweb that big of a deal? He got rich by selling .com in the .com bubble to another .com company. That wasn't so hard at the time. He wrote a good book on Lisp, and used his riches to invest and get richer. None of this seems particularly extraordinary. Does he somehow imagine Dropbox or Viaweb have transformed human experience? He writes a good essay, but he seems overly impressed by his own success.
>>There wasn't a single point when I learned this. Like most little kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust when I wasn't achieving anything. The one precisely dateable landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV, at age 13.
I wouldn’t dare question Paul Graham’s accomplishments, but I’ve always found it odd that some people are so proud of their abstention from television. There are time-wasting things on tv, but there are also time-wasting books, albums etc. I think not watching television and advertising that one didn’t was once an easy intellectual badge of honor. When there were only a few networks and the programming didn’t vary much, perhaps this made sense.
Every so often I still hear someone proudly say that they don’t watch television today. I usually wonder exactly what they mean, now that we are all able to choose the exact film or program we want and play it on demand. Surely it’s not a mark of excellence not to stream, say, the Criterion Channel?
For me, I stopped watching TV twenty years ago - but then transfered my neurotic novelty seeking behavior to the internet. But because I quit once, it made it easier to reign in my mindless internet consumption. And then stop any mindless book consumption. Then mindless video-games.
So for my - "No TV" is a easy way to express "I'm trying to maintain a ballance between living a vigorous life and consuming meaningful media"
It's probably due to hidden third causes (the kind of personality + circumstance + challenges that cause people to abstain from TV are the same that cause this and that positive outcome), but it's there, at least according to lots of anecdata in this very same thread.
I've wondered about the "no TV" stance too. I used to push back against it, but I believe there's something to it. Here's my current reasoning:
First of all, TV and movies have their strengths. Videos can communicate phenomena that are difficult to portray with the written text. They're also very accessible. However, all but the most low-budget shows and movies need to make money. Therefore, they need to appeal to a reasonably large audience. The economic motive limits the depth of the content.
Books can be written by individuals. Great books, and especially classics, are usually written for non-economic reasons. Often the author has a passion or a world view they want to share.
Books, as a medium, are older. Old books are filtered by time. They also let us learn about peoples who have different assumptions than we do. You can do this by reading about other cultures that exist today.
Books, as a medium, let one pause and think. You can write in the margins. It's possible, but more difficult, to do this when watching a show, listening to an audio book, or listening to a podcast. I like that I can listen to podcasts when I run or clean the dishes, but I grasp much less then when I read.
I agree that it's not enough to not watch TV. You need to discriminate regardless of the medium you're consuming, but I believe books are a better way to learn than most other mediums. Therefore, skipping television is probably a good idea if your goal is to develop a deep understanding of the world.
Typical TV has low information density. It’s not a good way to learn. This is ameliorated in the non-fiction world in the YouTube era as there are so many detailed video essays now. PG grew up before then.
As far as fiction, books have told richer stories, though, again, things are somewhat different in the “prestige TV” era.
I stopped watching broadcast TV out of sheer spite towards the TV licensing system and the slack-jawed oafs that enforce it, but that's a uniquely British reason!
> There are time-wasting things on tv, but there are also time-wasting books
Books require constant attention to progress, TV doesn't, for me that's the big difference. If you start to drift out and don't remember the last few paragraphs, you know you can pause, read them again and continue. With a TV, you usually can't go back. You may be conscious that you were not engaged, but you can't take the steps to fix this.
The true ah-ha moment comes when you finally realize how much bullshit this is.
"Hard work" is the mantra that keeps you a slave. "Success stories" are the tasty carrots that keep you toiling away your best years enriching others in pursuit of the things you're supposed to seek in life: Power, success, status. "Life hacks" are little dopamine hits to keep your eye on the carrot.
And the kicker is that those few who actually do attain these things mistakenly attribute it to their own prowess, when it's mostly luck and circumstance with a smattering of ambition and striking deals in the right networks. They then take it upon themselves to perpetuate the system that now feeds them at your expense.
So you go on toiling away, pushing that wheel around and around for years as your masters feed you stories of their success and a promise of your own one-day-someday, until eventually you hopefully realize the futility of enriching these parasites, and get off their treadmill.
The proletariat are only useful to the rich if they're toiling for them.
Edit: In case you're wondering why this tanked to the bottom of the comments despite being at 38 points after 30 minutes, it's because the admins can artificially drop a comment's priority if they don't like it, and prevent further upvotes (downvotes still work though).
Yeah this is absolute shit, and it appeals to a very specific kind of "driven" people. Nothing against them but they need to realise that most others just want to enjoy their short time on this planet. I'm happy with my really mellow stable job that leaves me plenty of free time to do the things I actually want. Life is too short.
And then there are many people like me who work a job they hate, still don't get much time to enjoy life, all just to pay the bills. Less time on the planet might actually something many of us look forward to as life is full of pain and misery.
I hope this doesn't come across as insensitive but this is something I've never understood. If life feels like this, that seems like an indicator that it's time for some massive change. Usually people give some vague abstract response about why massive change is just unrealistic, indicating some fragile house of cards, while in a simultaneous act of cognitive dissonance dreaming of the day it topples.
Perhaps we could: sell everything and move into a van to live on the road; or get a cheap house boat; or declare bankruptcy and move into a Buddhist monastery; quit jobs to transition into a more mindless one that allows more free time; find a nonprofit organization in a different country to throw oneself into; teach English in a foreign country; etc...
It's like, when we're brooding so much that we're done with life, it just seems like that's the best time to give life a chance, because at that point there's nothing left to lose.
I think the biggest thing is that life can suck in any of the alternatives. Human suffering is universal. People are reluctant to switch if there isn't a well defined value proposition. Life is about trade offs, so there isn't a perfect solution. Even living very minimally is expensive due to things we have little to no choice in like taxes, medical stuff, etc.
Sure, I could go live in a cabin in the woods. That will mean my wife divorces me, I'd still need a job to pay for taxes and medical bills, I would likely end up incarcerated for not being able to pay child support, and loose the cabin/land anyways.
To drill down on your response here, is it that you’re frustrated by not having those options?
I get being frustrated if your dream is to live in a cabin in the woods. But it’s hard to fathom being frustrated if you value the relationship with your wife more than living in said cabin. What are the underlying expectations from your life that you feel shut out from? Based on your earlier post, the only expectation seems to be “not to work in a job I hate” which seems completely attainable.
If I’m prying too much, just feel free to ignore me.
How would you define “a job you like” and how much would you have to make to pay your bills? Are there main drivers for those bills like high cost of living, medical issues, student debt?
Obligatory not GP, but fee very similar. To me, “job I like” is a very difficult category for me to explain. Normally, when browsing jobs, I see something I think would be cool to work on. Most things disinterest me, so I maybe will see one of these once every few months, always woefully unqualified. There’s not really a specific domains, industry, etc. tying them together, just me thinking it sounds cool to work on.
At this point, I don't know what job I would like. The biggest part would be a place that actually follows their own policies and doesn't violate them to the detriment of the employees. Sadly I feel that would happen anywhere.
I could work with $80k per year if the healthcare and other benefits are good. It would also be nice to have the ability to advance and make it to a tech lead at $120k.
> Perhaps we could: sell everything and move into a van to live on the road; or get a cheap house boat; or declare bankruptcy and move into a Buddhist monastery; quit jobs to transition into a more mindless one that allows more free time; find a nonprofit organization in a different country to throw oneself into; teach English in a foreign country; etc...
Name one of those things you can do when you have family members depending on you.
To ignore that element just telegraphs a complete lack of understanding of the basic premise that underpins human existence.
To ignore that element just telegraphs a complete lack of understanding of the basic premise that underpins human existence.
It's true family is extremely important and clearly I personally do not have much in the way of familial ties (though not by choice). If I'm speaking from one extreme, it seems like you are speaking from the other extreme. The premise of one person's existence isn't the same as the basic premise of all human existence in general. We all have different experiences.
> Perhaps we could: sell everything and move into a van to live on the road; or get a cheap house boat; or declare bankruptcy and move into a Buddhist monastery; quit jobs to transition into a more mindless one that allows more free time; find a nonprofit organization in a different country to throw oneself into; teach English in a foreign country; etc...
You are making the extremely generous assumption that the person is unbound and able to effectively disappear with no responsibilities to anyone other than themselves.
Among the truly miserable people I have encountered, the most common reason was bearing the burden of one or more dependents. A little sister with severe mental health problems, a sick parent unable to work, a drug-addicted and orphaned nephew. Can't exactly sell the house and move to Japan when your sister needs her SSRI and therapy to not hurt herself.
And the second most common reason was having little or no income at all, for whatever reason, in which case getting a job that they hated would _already_ have been a step up.
- Relationships: The single biggest deathbed regret is neglecting relationships (either not forming them, or squandering them).
- Finding time to live: The second greatest deathbed regret is missing out on life: Travel, arts, discovery, etc. As you get older many parts of this become a LOT harder.
- Stress free living: Stress is one of the top causes of a short lifespan.
This was my high school experience, but it was an early lesson I took to heart.
I used to work at K-Mart, one day a windy storm blew in. I was really hustling to get all the shopping carts in before they blew around the lot and damaged vehicles. I was still trying to get my other responsibilities done and noticed the patio furniture was starting to blow around too. I mean at this point I'm literally running to get to everything.
New guy, chatting up the manager. I can't remember the exact reason, but at some point on the same day the manager got upset that my stuff wasn't done. (my stuff being organizing and fronting shelves)
This guy didn't do anything. Like literally just hung out and made the manager laugh.
That's when I knew. Hard working people don't get ahead on their hard work alone. Sure, it gets recognized when you've got good leadership in charge. Honestly though, after that experience, I've seen it over and over.
Do solid work, know what you're doing and help others around you. Just don't kill yourself trying to impress your boss. The old saying goes, "If you want something done, give it to the busiest person."
You're just asking for someone to dump their load on you in some way. If you have the capacity and enjoy your work, get it done. If you don't, and there's no deadlines, why stay late?
The thing he doesn't mention is all the people burned out by 35, with the best years of their life behind them, coping with deep and lasting psychological damage that will affect them for the rest of their lives, and nothing to show for it (except, if you're lucky, a bit more money).
The fetishisation of work does seem to largely come from people with enough money that they and at least several generations of their progeny will never need to do it.
The thing he doesn't mention is all the people burned out by 35
The business model of his company is built on the backs of those people. The more of those people he can attract, the richer he becomes (to a first approximation)
Everyone around me that has wealth built it up from simply talking and connecting with people. Going out for golf and drinks where people tend to let their guard down and just enjoy themselves allows people to build trust.
This would, in my opinion, truly define their success as luck. I will outwork them, out hustle them, learn things and do things yet I am a whole Everest beneath them with wealth.
But they will strike up a conversation in a hot tub in Mexico and end up partnering up on a major project/deal over mojito's and bubbling water. Whilst I build my landing page stuffed with SEO keywords because I have 'data' to guide me.
Imagine knowing someone in 2009 who could get you in early on uber or airbnb. or in 2006 get you in on Facebook. you need to know the right people, combined with luck (choosing to invest in uber isntead of quora) and some risk taking.
All of my 'successes' (granted they are very small but hey you gotta take some wins from time to time) have come from opportunities which arose from conversation.
If hard work were correlated with success, we would probably all know a lot more successful people . Most people who bust their ass have little to nothing to show for it compared to people who are truly successful, like people with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars or critical acclaim. Look how many people aspire to be successful writers, athletes, marathon runners, singers, actors..are those who fail not working as hard?
This is bullshit. This is what people who’ve failed tell themselves to rationalize that failure.
People who’ve succeeded at achieving ambitious goals are able to look at success from both vantage points: from having yet to succeed and succeeding. You’ll hardly ever, if ever, hear them say it’s solely the consequence of having the right networks and being lucky.
Sure some luck is involved, but most of it is attitude, and this is NOT the attitude.
I say thank God for people with this faulty perspective. It makes it easier to succeed when the playing field is full of people who’ve told themselves it’s futile to even try.
The amount of luck involved in "success" is almost always underestimated. Whether it's being born into a family with money, or having a great teacher who helps you understand Calculus. To avoiding health issues and accidents. To choosing a spouse that doesn't self-destruct. The list is long.
Luck is the trump card of life. You can be smart, hardworking, all the business traits that are espoused by "successful" people, and still fail. As Lefty Gomez said "I'd rather be lucky than good."
Look at Michael Jordan. He had talent and an incredible work ethic. Yet until the Bulls drafted Scottie Pippen, he didn't have the team required to win a championship. Imagine if the Bulls missed out on drafting Pippen and had drafted Dennis Hopson instead? Would Jordan have still become the GOAT?
> People who’ve succeeded at achieving ambitious goals are able to look at success from both vantage points: from having yet to succeed and succeeding. You’ll hardly ever, if ever, hear them say it’s solely the consequence of having the right networks and being lucky.
Yes, people tend to adopt a personal narrative that maximizes their own moral status, so successful people artificially minimizes the effect of circumstance on average and unsuccessful people artificially minimize the effect of choice.
But we don't have to rely on competing personal narratives weighted by who has the resources to reach a larger audience; these are concrete fact questions, and there is plenty of evidence that (1) circumstance beyond personal traits has a very large role, (2) personal traits contribute in ways different than the popular narrative of the successful, and (3) the personal traits that contribute are themselves largely products of (mostly inherited and early childhood) circumstance, not active choice.
> Yes, people tend to adopt a personal narrative that maximizes their own moral status
Exactly, that's what I'm saying about rationalizing. The only thing those who've yet to succeed lack is the vantage point of the successful. So I'd argue the successful are operating with an information advantage.
> The only thing those who've yet to succeed lack is the vantage point of the successful.
No, that's a pre-Enlightment (or maybe postmodernist, it can be hard to tell the difference at times) attitude.
What both most who have succeeded and most who have not succeeded lack who don’t actively seek it out is the perspective of structured, broad information gathering, analysis, and hypothesis testing beyond self-justifying rationalization of personal experience.
But no one needs to lack that, because plenty of that has been done, so there is no need to rely on duelling self-justifying constructed narratives to understand the world.
> People who’ve succeeded at achieving ambitious goals are able to look at success from both vantage points: from having yet to succeed and succeeding.
You fell for the classic survivorship bias fallacy.
It seems nowadays, or maybe not only in modern age.
Being not doing anything is more painful than to be occupied and leaning toward burning out.
It kinds of reminds me of a published story on hn [0]
> "That is why we like noise and activity so much. That is why imprisonment is such a horrific punishment. That is why the pleasure of being alone is incomprehensible. That is, in fact, the main joy of the condition of kingship, because people are constantly trying to amuse kings and provide them with all sorts of distraction.—The king is surrounded by people whose only thought is to entertain him and prevent him from thinking about himself. King though he may be, he is unhappy if he thinks about it"
It seems that being in the passive mode or `flow` is a therapy itself, we can't seems to even stand non-productive ourselves to a certain extent. And modern convenient distractions only steer ourselves down this path even further.
I didn’t really interpret the essay that way. I think the essay applies as much to working hard on personal things, like becoming better at playing some instrument or painting better. Both of those take a lot of hard work, but it has nothing to do with ”toiling away your best years enriching others”.
This essay is basically yet another pamphlet for puritan work ethics. Funny that it comes at a time where "faith" in hard work as a main determinant of success is at a low point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27514188
> I had to learn what real work was before I could wholeheartedly desire to do it. That took a while, because even in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless.
The arrogance! This is one of my pet peeves at work: When someone looks at another person's work and judges its value or difficulty. "That's easy." "That's pointless."
Ugh.
Everyone else's job looks easy and/or pointless until you're the one doing it. Then it's important and challenging (hopefully).
Most people who feel their own work is pointless simply don't understand how their role fits into the bigger picture. I assure you, the profit motive is very good at weeding out truly unnecessary costs. It may lag, sometimes. But if there's a dollar being spent that doesn't need to be spent, someone is going to eventually find out and eliminate the expense.
I think this mentality comes from a deep need to feel superior to others. So when we can't understand or appreciate someone's job, it feels powerful to declare their work easy or pointless.
But that's just ignorance, arrogance, and, frankly, bullying by other means: I'll make myself feel bigger by making you feel small, and I'll do it in front of all of my friends so they can affirm how big and tough and awesome I am.
In my experience, nonprofits do accrue a bit of needless fat that is often justified by their compassionate mission. BUT, even then, only by so much. They still need to accrue enough funds to pursue their mission.
Every organization has to be cost-aware. It catches up to you eventually.
For context, in my home town of Sudbury, Ontario, our leading university (Laurentian U) kept growing and investing in new things. There's lots of debate around the merits of what they were spending on. But it caught up to them in the form of bankruptcy.
One of the few things I like about capitalism (there aren't many, but that's just me) is that it gives a laser-clear focus. Just because an organization is a non-profit doesn't change that. At some point, you either bring in more revenue than you spend, or you fail.
Governments that continuously overspend eventually have their debts catch up to them, too. (See: Every empire in history.)
That would actually explains non-profit-seeking organizations that degenerate and focus just on surviving and getting bigger and bigger. The unnecessary costs are the original intent, the necessary costs are feeding the bureaucratic machine.
The author is right. Gender studies, for example, is a pointless degree. You certainly have a point about not being quick to judge, or overly dismissive, but there are certain things in life that are genuinely pointless, even in education.
Why would a Gender Studies degree be pointless? Given the current landscape around gender and such, having more educated people in that area seems like a very good thing.
Or maybe the people that want to justify their places are the ones creating that landscape in the first place? I work in tech, and really like tech and think it's important, but I know that I'm really biased because that's what feeds me.
The level of disrespect towards the social sciences in HN is just baffling to me.
Sometimes people study stuff for intellectual fulfillment. I haven't studied gender studies, but according to HN, if I were to study sociology I'd be an ass with a pointless degree.
I think people are conflating intrinsic value with extrinsic value.
PG’s point is that those degrees have no extrinsic value, even if they provide lots of time to think, learn, and gain enjoyment. That can certainly be valuable, but it isn’t necessary or helpful in achieving success.
Nothing wrong with that, and his choice of wording wasn’t ideal, but that was my takeaway.
Anthropologic, literature, and historical research endeavors, even -- and in all likelihood especially -- when they intersect, can have a lot of value in many fields of the humanities, and beyond. They can inform our societal, political and economic prospects, and shine a light on what we usually don't even acknowledge.
It's not because it doesn't impact your field/industry, isn't marketable and profitable, or because your politics don't comingle with them, that such studies are pointless or useless.
Handwaving humanities on the premise that they are humanities is just another very stereotypical show of STEM arrogance.
I don't think that's fair at all. We are on Hacker News, the whole point of this website is intellectual curiosity. People here understand the value of what doesn't impact their field/industry, isn't marketable and profitable. Look at how much open source code is produced just for the sake of it, because people believe it's the right thing. Look at how much cool projects with detailed instructions on how to do them yourself are shared. Dismissing everyone here as "STEM arrogance" means that you missed all of that.
You talk about "STEM arrogance", but maybe you should take some time to analyze where you feelings comes from, and if you're not suffering from a huge bias against these fields yourself. If the defenders of social sciences aren't even able to apply their teachings to themselves, people have the right to be skeptic about the value of their fields.
I don't like the "STEM arrogance" bit (I wouldn't go so far as to say there is anything inherently arrogant about those in STEM), but I also don't think you can ever fairly judge the value of someone else's field.
You don't know why they went into the field -- I promise it's because they saw more value in it for themselves than other fields.
You don't why the school offers such programs, but I promise they wouldn't offer it if they didn't think there was some demand for it. (Programs that don't get students to enrol stop existing pretty quickly.)
So while I don't believe in "STEM arrogance" or "HN arrogance" (I'm here because I believe this is one of the least arrogant and most open-minded online communities I've ever encountered), I do believe it's arrogant to proclaim yourself the authority on whether someone else's field has value. Just because you don't see the value doesn't mean it's not there. It might even be more valuable than your own.
By the way, not sure if this was intentional on your part, but "maybe you should take some time to analyze where your feelings come from" is very much an idea that came from the humanities. So there's a certain amount of irony in your comments.
I'm not proclaiming that I'm an authority on whatever field has value. We're actually saying pretty much the same thing: don't judge other people too quickly. I replied to someone that talked about "STEM arrogance" and implied that we can't understand that things can have a value without being marketable or profitable. This idea is wrong, and the action of the STEM field prove it.
> By the way, not sure if this was intentional on your part, but "maybe you should take some time to analyze where your feelings come from" is very much an idea that came from the humanities. So there's a certain amount of irony in your comments.
There's no irony except the one I was highlighting: someone is saying that humanities are important and have lots of value, while not applying that really fundamental concept.
> Gender studies, for example, is a pointless degree.
I would say that, like most interdisciplinary and many other degrees, its not particularly useful as a vocational credential outside academia.
OTOH, gender studies as a component of or elective within other degree programs that are more vocationally useful outside of academia is useful, and you don't have that without gender studies professors who you don’t have without people focussing on gender studies.
You're going to get downvoted into oblivion I suspect, which may have been your intent?
Is History a _useful_ degree? Is Economics? Is Politics? Psychology or Sociology?
I actually don't want to make those determinations. I don't think I'm qualified. I have a rough view that highly specific degrees are worse overall than general ones. Eg Actuarial Mathematics vs Mathematics. Marine Biology vs Biology.
But those are personal dinner table views, and I'm not certain I'm right! I certainly don't want to define policy on it, and I'm not sure I know of anyone I think is qualified.
I don't agree with the premise that gender studies is pointless (and if I had to guess, you selected that one for the sake of controversy?).
That aside, let's say that a degree is "pointless" if it doesn't lead to good job prospects. By that definition, there's an awful lot of fields of study that are "pointless".
For example, I love philosophy. It was my favourite topic in school. But the only job that a philosophy degree seems to make available is that of teaching philosophy.
I think what we're seeing now is the market at work. There was, for a long time, a push to simply get a post-secondary education. It didn't matter which field. Just get a degree! Now we have a couple generations of heavily indebted students in fields that did not improve their job prospects, and they're telling the next generation: don't do it.
So I think we're going to keep seeing financial pressure on these fields until they shrivel up and go away. Capitalism at work, for better or worse.
But that's not the same as thinking these fields were pointless. I see tremendous social value in them. Having entire generations raised with a healthier and more accurate understanding of race, gender, class struggle, etc., is good for society. It's just not good at creating jobs.
So I guess my point (no pun intended) is that "pointless" is in the eye of the beholder. No one sets about wasting money pointlessly, and the things that you see no value in may be of great value to many others. You're not the arbitrator of what has value. Nor am I. But the market does a pretty damn good job.
Just because you think something is pointless doesn't make it so.
It would be much more truthful to say that everything in life is genuinely pointless than what you've said - and I'm saying this as a lifelong multidisciplined engineer.
Perhaps you meant to say useless instead of pointless? Yes, I would agree, that the overwhelming vast majority, if not all of gender studies degrees are useless in the world/societies we live in. But pointless? No.
It depends on how you're measuring value I suppose. Research for research's sake is rarely pointless, contributing to the sum of human knowledge is a worthy endeavour if you're okay with being in academia forever which many people are. Society's relationship with gender is a field worthy of study in my opinion, regardless of the political radicalism that apparently originates in that field.
I'd argue that the social sciences need more people involved in them, not less. For example, the way behavioural psychology has been weaponised during the pandemic by political actors (particularly the British government) has been very unethical in my opinion but as the social sciences are often seen by the general public as a bit woolly there's not been an awful lot of publicised expert criticism in the same way, say, a government denying genetics in favour of LaMarckism would put angry biologists directly into every newspaper.
Curious to hear your opinion on why gender studies is a pointless degree? Other than you thinking it's "pointless", what is it about a gender studies degree that is pointless?
Doesn't it all depend what you want out of life? And is the hard work even guaranteed to provide you what you want out of life? Hard work, desired outcomes, and goals are not in alignment.
What's the point of this essay, to convince people who don't want to work hard to work hard? Is this meant to chastise people? Motivate? Demoralize? Self-congratulate?
To identify that for people who succeed, hard work is often required, and most people aren’t born with the ability to do really hard work. That takes conscious effort and an uncanny ability to stay on task.
ADHD makes this hard, fwiw, and PG is not saying this mode is right for everyone. But I would agree with that idea: working hard isn’t natural, at least for some people, but it is a requirement for attaining success. If you’re going to work hard, it makes sense to do it on something you love. And there are people who thrive on hard work.
There are a bunch of prerequisites, some of which he explicitly states (find something you love, eg) and some implicit (sometimes you have to take the job you don’t like, because circumstances dictate that; families, eg).
"Natural ability" is a cop-out and PG should know better. It'd be fine if this came with a disclaimer, "we don't know what natural ability is and the more we learn the more complex and diverse this umbrella term becomes." But taking it at face value is fuzzy thinking. It feels like this was included to hedge his bets.
The Polgar sisters(1) serve as evidence that while "natural ability" may be a thing it's even less important than you might imagine. Instead this and work like that of Ericsson(2) on the development of expertise point to repeatable environmental factors for success.
I look forward to a day when we can eliminate this phrase and replace it with measurable phenomena and repeatable processes.
Is anyone else distressed by pg's sudden turn to these sorts of para-culture-war issues? He's gotten increasingly anti-woke over the past year or two and it's starting to leak into sloppy argumentation like this.
In decades past, he'd discuss similar issues ("how to identify a good hacker", stuff like that), but the focus was on the talent and what it meant and how it worked. Now... suddenly this kind of genetic stratification is just a given? Not a good smell.
So... I actually have a theory. He had kids. His kids are precocious and bright. And if you watch him on twitter he loves to talk about how smart they are. Which is hardly weird. But read back through his early writing: PG's school experience seems kinda traumatic. He hated it, he has an essay likening schools to prisons. So he's projecting his anxieties onto his kids.
And modern educational thought (be it "woke" or not), has very much moved away from a focus on the Best and Brightest students and onto a theory of education that prioritizes the needs of the disadvantaged. PG's kids just aren't what people are talking about. Educators tend to assume they'll do just fine given their existing advantages.
But PG didn't do fine, in his mind. He thinks society is moving in the wrong direction.
Which is ironic, because if anything modern educational environments (my kids are almost the same age) are much MORE inclusive and benign and much less likely to produce the kind of anxiety he experienced. His kids will do better than he did BECAUSE the school brings everyone else into the discussion and doesn't drive a competetive prison. He just can't see it.
Hard work can be good, but only if you own a substantial capital interest in the company/result. But if you can hire people to do it for you, then you can reap the benefits and live a life worth living. If you are just part of the labor and not the capital, then there really isn't an incentive to work harder than necessary to keep you job or earn a measly raise.
If you tell people that if they work 12+ hours a day in their 20s that they would be multi-millionaires or billionaires, then almost everyone would accept that position. The real world doesn't work that way and using statistical outliers like Gates is disingenuous to the discussion about hard work and how it applies to normal people.
> If you tell people that if they work 12+ hours a day in their 20s that they would be millionaires or billionaires
Billionaire isn’t a realistic goal, but millionaire is a common outcome for software developers who work hard through their 20s and 30s now. It doesn’t even require a FAANG job or living in a super expensive city any more, just wise job selection, a reasonable amount of financial savvy and budget adherence, and a deliberate effort to work on your career path.
You don’t need to own substantial equity in a company in your 20s to have a reason to work hard, as long as you’re doing work that builds your skill set, reputation, and network. Everything you do (or don’t do) has some impact on your persona capital over time.
Working hard in the mailroom or stocking shelves at a grocery store isn’t going to translate into a successful software career, but making an impact and helping people get things done at several companies through your 20s is the easiest way to build a strong network that opens doors in your 30s and beyond
> millionaire is a common outcome for software developers who work hard through their 20s and 30s now.
No, it's not. It's common for some FAANG engineers. It's not common at all for the industry as a whole.
Look at all these comments doubling-down on the "7%/$10k-per-year" arithmetic, as if the only thing that affects savings rates is knowledge of this basic math. For a data driven community there sure are a lot of people ignoring the data.
Anyone making high 5 or low 6 figures will be a millionaire at the start retirement if they can save a modest amount from a reasonably early start, say 30 years old.
While technically correct, this doesn't square with most people's intuitive sense of what "being a millionaire" means. It's not having a solid retirement nest egg, it is being able to jet off to your yacht in St. Tropez on a private jet.
I think this is largely due to inflation. A million dollars in the 50s or 60s would be around 10 million today, while at the turn of the 20th century when the term really became popular it would be worth 30 million today. A "millionaire" of the time is really living a different lifestyle and can likely afford a very extravagant upper class lifestyle purely on interest of their wealth.
With housing costs having risen so much faster still beyond inflation, today you can easily be "a millionaire" simply by having a bit of equity in a modest home in a costal city.
yeah well that's true about people's intuition but it hasn't been the case for a long time. to "jet off on a private jet" anywhere regularly probably requires a salary on the order of a million per year.
I think it's common when compared to other industries, though maybe not generally common. Admittedly I have no data to back up this hunch.
If I'm wrong, please correct me, but my interpretation of what the person you're replying to was trying to get at was that modest savings from a 23+ year old software engineer, to the tune of $800/month or $10,000/year (this could be 401k match and contributions) will get you pretty close to a million.
Using this calculator[1] with an assumed rate of 6.7%, $0 initial investment, $800/month, compounded semi-annually and a variance of 1 netted $891,000 within 30 years.
I think $800/month for nearly all software engineers is doable.
No doubt. People usually assume 2% inflation/year since that is what the Federal Reserve targets (and the 6.7% is a little conservative) but that amount of money also continues to grow over time, so depending on your expenses you may never touch the principal at that point with a 4% withdrawal rate.
There are a lot of variables too. $800,000 with a paid off house is different than $800,000 and still renting, for example. Depends on your country of residence too, etc.
But you can get to that point by saving, using common assumptions.
Exactly. The math is easy, but convincing people that becoming a millionaire is a matter of consistent moderate savings is still hard.
$800/month is $9.6K per year. Approximately half of the maximum 401K contribution limit, so it can be tax-advantaged as well. If you can swing the full 401K maximum, you’ll hit the millionaire status even faster. Add some taxable savings and it can be done in a decade without getting too extreme. A married couple doing this together makes it even more achievable.
Unless someone has maxed out their career options (unlikely) almost everyone in software could get a $10-20K bump in the coming year through negotiation or changing jobs. Allocate that raise entirely to tax-advantaged savings and stay consistent for a few decades and it will add up to a million dollars.
It doesn’t require FAANG compensation or extreme frugality. It just requires consistency over 20-30 years.
Aren’t 401k taxed? Can you write down the math how a police officer can do this easily (get to 1m purchasing power of today’s value in 10 years) please? I cannot figure it out how to even get a quarter of that
401ks are taxed (either a Roth or Traditional 401k) but are tax advantaged.
Please feel free to contact me directly. Happy to help. It'll be difficult to get to $1mm in purchasing power of today's value in 10 years without saving around $50,000/year or getting extremely lucky.
> The math is easy, but convincing people that becoming a millionaire is a matter of consistent moderate savings is still hard.
Consistent moderate savings on top tier income, sure.
> $800/month is $9.6K per year. Approximately half of the maximum 401K contribution limit,
Also, approximately 1/3 of national median household disposable income after taxes and transfers (NB: not essential expenses, just taxes and transfers) in the United States.
> A married couple doing this together makes it even more achievable.
Yes, you can become a half-millionaire much faster than a millionaire—brilliant observation.
> Unless someone has maxed out their career options (unlikely) almost everyone in software could get a $10-20K bump in the coming year through negotiation or changing jobs.
“Software” includes a lot of different occupations, but most of the nob-management ones have median compensation around or substantially below $100K; so you are suggesting most people are leaving upward of 10-20% on the table. That's...unlikely.
> It just requires consistency over 20-30 years.
Asserting that that is easy in software would be more convincing if we were more than 20-30 years from a major industry crash, or had some structural guarantee of it not happening again.
Not completely convincing even then, but more convincing...
> Consistent moderate savings on top tier income, sure.
Do keep in mind that the context for this thread was software engineers. The median pay makes saving $10,000/year very, very achievable.
> “Software” includes a lot of different occupations, but most of the non-management ones have median compensation around or substantially below $100K; so you are suggesting most people are leaving upward of 10-20% on the table. That's...unlikely.
Below $100k sure, but closer to $60,000 or so which again makes this amount of savings very achievable. My first job out of college was exactly this amount and I was saving about $1,000/month in a MCOL city. And if you're making that amount and living in a HCOL of city you may need to consider changing your location. You might not like it, but that's reality.
> Asserting that that is easy in software would be more convincing if we were more than 20-30 years from a major industry crash, or had some structural guarantee of it not happening again.
This is only a problem if you happen to retire right when a market collapse happens. Even then you adjust your withdrawal rate or try to put retirement off a bit. For those saving 20-30 years, those market dips are buying opportunities as the ROI of the market compounds over time. Given what we know, there's no reason to assume things won't just keep chugging along, at least for the purposes of general discussion. You can say that it won't and give great reasons for that, but I think it's fair to state those up-front.
If you want to discuss specifics I think that would make sense, but given that the person your responding to and myself were speaking generally about the software engineering profession (sure maybe there's some confusion there but for my part I was speaking about software engineers) so obviously there's some generalizations and built-in assumptions that are pretty common in the finance space.
In that time period the cost of your house went from 100k to 700k. You aren’t a millionaire anymore. You are poor. Getting to a million dollars with the same purchasing power (make sure your inflation basked is properly chosen) as of today outside of metro area (as a million in sf isn’t much)
With a $100,000 salary, $50,000 expenses, 30% tax rate, and 5% real returns you could put away $20,000 a year and have a million (2021) dollars in 26 years.
Hardly easy but not out of the realm of possibility for a persistent and highly paid software developer.
If you use his definition of working hard, by the time you are 30-year old software developer you'll have valuable skills and a valuable network in addition to a solid amount of money. You may be unable to _retire_ at 30 but you will, generally speaking, be setup for success for the rest of your life.
How did you work hard? What kind of career did you choose? What was your budget like? Did you have any bad luck re health or family? There's many possible reasons, many under your control, some not. Should I assume based on your response and the original article, by hard work you mean not just effort on the job, but also effort in finding work you align with, explored other job types, spent real effort networking, studied for job skills a bunch, and didn't have any bad luck to explain it?
Good grades, got a job I thought was good at the time, great grades in a masters program (expanded network outside the company), became an expert at my company, filled a role on the team 1-2 levels above mine. Then got denied promotions based on political games and contrary to policy, more ignored policy to my detriment, even worked a second job for a while, outsourced my team, forced to switch to even less known tech, etc etc. Got AWS and financial certs, filled a role above my grade (again), more politics, more violation of policy to my detriment, etc etc. No other good job options in this area, wife won't relocate, multiple family health issues in the past year and family commitments (ie my wife walks all over me now that we have a kid) that prevent me from throwing in extra hours, not that I feel much reason to based on past treatment when I used to do that.
Budget has always been very frugal. I make my own cheap beer/wine, make soap, grow food in a garden, almost never take vacations (honeymoon was the only expensive one), cook 99% of the time at home, etc.
You can't trust companies to keep their word. Working hard gets you no where. The greedy people at the top are the ones who get everything and will screw you over constantly. And I'm not even talking about success in terms of $200k+ salary and fancy titles like CTO etc. I'm just talking about success as making it to the natural progression of senior dev and techlead with a salary over $100k.
But I must be a loser who didn't work hard since other people made it.
But even that isn't necessarily true. I know of several managers who didn't work hard to get there. Theh were just in the right place at the right time, or in some cases the right gender.
We can abstract this a little. You don't have to work hard. You just have to appear useful to the people in power.
I worked hard in the past. I'm not working hard now - I'm really slacking now that I know I'm screwed. I'm still getting paid the same.
I’m glad you phrased it like that, because I think it explains a lot of the talking past each other that’s going on here.
The article is not titled “How to be rich af”. It’s How to do Great Work.
So Gates is the example here because he built a huge company that made software used by almost every human on earth, and because every reader will know who he is.
I guess the author could have used RMS, or John Carmack, or Bill Joy, but that would have excluded people who aren’t into free software or gaming or Unix etc.
The Millionaire Next Door concepts are still as relevant as ever, albeit the specifics are a bit dated. Millionaire status is reasonably achievable for someone whose income and cost of basics allow for modest discretionary income. This is certainly the case for the majority of software developers
> How do we factor in retirement needs and inflation?
Use inflation-adjusted calculators. Any good savings and retirement calculator will have an option for this.
Inflation is commonly misunderstood in long-term financial planning. It’s important to consider inflation for expenses and future savings amount, but many people don’t realize that inflation will also life their investments to some degree.
For example, if a common house costs $5,000,000 on your future retirement date and you’ve been saving your money in cash this whole time, you’re in a bad spot. However, if you buy a house in your 30s that meets your needs, the value of your house will also rise with inflation. Inflation is also loosely coupled to rising stock prices (except for hyper-inflation or other economic catastrophes) and asset prices. Just don’t keep your money all in cash, because that’s the only guaranteed way to lose out to inflation.
Yes, because despite being _insanely_ intelligent he was _also_ insanely hard working. Its questionable whether aiming to be an outlier is reasonable, but it was a revelation to me that most of the wildly successful outliers I knew of growing up were also harder working than anyone I'd ever met. Yet no one ever talked about that, only how lucky it would be to be "born with" X. From there I realized that most people have this fallacy where they discount what they can achieve because they don't see how hard others work to get to whatever level they are at. Aiming for Bill Gates would be foolish, but understanding the recipe is not.
So why not showcase the data that supports the point rather than pick an outlier and have people question if the recipe really works?
The successful people I know mostly got there by luck. Sure hard work and intelligence played a role, but I know people who were smarter and worked harder and didn't get half as far.
I'm arguing that working hard is not the main goal. PG completely misses how you need to be in a position to benefit from that hard work. Without that positioning it will be pointless/useless.
Gates was also extremely lucky and in the right place at the right time born to the right parents. Gladwell covers this in one of his books. As a 13 year old he got access to a time share computer. His school even bought hours on one and the school was only able to do that via the PTO which was wealthy and run by his mother etc...
Yes he was interested and worked hard but there's a lot more to it.
It’s so hard to get $1MM that only about 19% of people age 65 or over ever reach it. Is software overrepresented in that group? Probably. But not to the extent that it’s reasonable to make the claim that it’s common for software developers to reach it in their 20s and 30s.
Not that they _do_ reach it, but that they can. I think the general argument is that most people are not sufficiently financially literate to appreciate that the path to a million dollars is paved with consistent savings and reasonable budgets.
It's a bad argument, though. Financial literacy isn't even necessary, though it may help. Life happens, things occur that make sustained savings impractical or impossible, and so on.
I think you misread the comment. Or at least read it differently than I did. I read that most software engineers who work hard in their 20s and 30s can become millionaires at some point. You seem to have read it that they will become millionaires in their 20s or 30s, which I don't think is what it says. My reading is more that putting hard work in early in the career sets you on a path to pay off debts and start saving and also have the experience to get good jobs later, which allow you to save more. This meshes with my experience of the industry.
Is "financially independent by 30, or even 40" the definition of "being a millionaire"? Or does it count if you save up a million dollars by some point in time? I'm honestly asking what we're discussing here, because they seem like very different things.
The whole point of this comment thread is that it wasn't appropriate to use a statistical outlier like Gates to represent that hard work for normal people leads to his level of success (financially independent, multimillionaire in his 30s).
The Millionaire Next Door is about as misleading as it gets, at least for today. Let's not forget that $1M in the mid 1990's is about the same as $2M today, at least in terms of terms of CPI. Even then, that is after 20+ years of housing prices outpacing inflation by 2x or more.
In the mid 1990's, the top 20% could get to $1M with some good financial discipline and hard work. Today? Maybe the top 1% could save $1M, and unless you inherited the family home, you're still living a lifestyle that is somewhat median in 1995 terms.
The fact that $1M is still some kind of mental benchmark that we hold up for being "rich" tells us everything we need to know about today's economic conditions.
So the principles of the book may still apply, but the outcomes are worlds away from reality.
I can't speak to the book, but I would say that you should examine your thinking regarding the top 1% saving $1mm. While it might be that only the top 1% can save an actual million dollars in cash, saving about $10,000/year with somewhat conservative estimates will get somebody to around $900,000 over 30 years. Granted, that's still not most people, but it's a much larger group than the top 1%. I made a separate comment here with the same OP if you'd like to run some numbers yourself. Compound interest is crazy.
> The fact that $1M is still some kind of mental benchmark that we hold up for being "rich" tells us everything we need to know about today's economic conditions.
This is a very interesting comment. I wonder why the mentality of this benchmark amount hasn't changed. Economic conditions certainly have, $1mm isn't the same now as it would have been in 1970. Maybe it's a financial independence thing? At $1mm you really are independently wealthy in most cases.
Using the standard definition of "independently wealthy" as "no longer needs to work to cover living expenses", I would say that $1MM is nowhere enough to do that in almost any place in the US, especially if you have kids. I'd say at least $3MM in cash and as much as $5-6MM in higher cost-of-living areas would be required to maintain an upper middle class standard of living.
If you had $1mm today you for sure no longer need to work to cover living expenses in most places in America. I guess healthcare is a question, but even then your annual income rate will probably qualify you for Obamacare subsidies.
Even with kids. Though that makes the budgeting a little more tight.
On $1MM, one can almost certainly safely take out $35k/year (after taxes on any gains) and still grow the portfolio (so as to offset inflation). That's definitely sufficient to support the barest minimum of "lower middle class" living expenses. Without kids. Add a kid and it blows right up.
But, yes, to support an upper middle class style of living one would certainly need more.
> At $1mm you really are independently wealthy in most cases.
This doesn't strike me as true. A big facet to consider also is liquidity. Are you talking about $1M in net worth? If so, I disagree with you: a big chunk of that $1M is likely very illiquid for a younger person, tied up in a house and retirement accounts with penalties for withdrawal. But sure, if you have managed to save $1M above and beyond equity in your home and tax advantaged retirement accounts, then you are probably independently wealthy (but your actual net worth is probably significantly higher than $1M).
Well, I'd say if you look at what I wrote it was a savings rate of $10,000/year so my underlying assumption is that goes into the market, which will be liquid. You could choose to do a Traditional 401k or Roth 401k. Both are liquid enough.
My point wasn't to really give a breakdown of all savings forms, but just to show that saving $10,000/year with historical returns will net you close to $900,000. You don't even have to put it in a tax-advantaged account. Though you should.
And that amount is plenty to retire on and be independently wealthy at least today and for the next 5 or so years. Though I guess maybe that's not the best choice of words since what I mean to say is that you can just live pretty comfortably without working - more financially independent than "wealthy".
Certainly economic conditions can change, so the more the better.
And just to be clear, you could take $1mm right now with 0 assets and buy a decent enough house for <$200,000 and pay pretty low taxes. You'd still have $800,000 left over to appreciate with low cost of living in the vast majority of America.
Retirement accounts aren't liquid at all if what we're talking about is reaching financial independence and retiring really early (in your 30s or 40s say), which is what I thought we were talking about. But if you're strictly talking about being financially independent enough to retire at the normal time (when you can access retirement accounts), then I agree with you.
On the house point, people always seem to forget that people already live someplace and also often have families. No, it is not possible to find a house for a family of four where I live for less than $200k.
Sure they are. For example your Roth IRA contributions can be taken out at any time. You’ve already paid taxes on them. The interest though has to wait until I believe 55 years old. You should do your own research (you as in anyone reading this) to see what investment options are right for your personal goals.
> No, it is not possible to find a house for a family of four where I live for less than $200k
Well we weren’t talking about you specifically, but Americans in general. If you need $10mm retire in the Bay Area or something g ya know that’s just what you’ll personally have to work on. I don’t have an answer for you. You can buy affordable houses and live comfortably in almost anywhere in America. In fact there are people who retire and move to other countries, or live very frugally on much less, like $400,000.
You're right about the principal in Roth accounts, but most people (especially high earners at time of contribution) put their savings in traditional retirement accounts, for good reason. The age to withdraw without penalty (for both types of accounts) is 59.5.
200k is unrealistic in most population centers in the country, not just the Bay Area (I don't live there).
Why are you shifting goalposts? You don’t need to live near a population center. Even so, it depends on what you mean by population centers. If you’ve got a million dollars you don’t need to work, so you don’t have to incur the higher expenses. You can live 30 minutes or so outside of MCOL cities like Columbus and get houses for $200,000 or $300,000. That might be unrealistic for you but that doesn’t generalize to the vast majority of people in America.
> but most people (especially high earners at time of contribution) put their savings in traditional retirement accounts, for good reason.
Not so clear cut. So first if you’re a high enough earner you’re adjusted family income is >$200,000 or so before the Roth IRA starts being phased out for you. So we’re already talking about the top 10% or so of all income earners in the U.S.
Second, you tend to put the money in a traditional IRA, but you might withdraw (probably actually) less than you were making with your income. So if you’ve been phased out and can only contribute to a Traditional IRA, depending on when you want to retire you might withdraw $100,000/year (or less) and potentially pay a lower tax rate on that income then your marginal contribution rate on a Roth.
Lastly, you can still contribute $19,000 to a Roth 401k which doesn’t have contribution challenges related to income (at least for the income the vast majority of people would ever make - idk what happens if you make $1mm or something).
I don't think I am shifting goal posts? Most people don't have enough of their savings in liquid assets to retire early was, I think, the original goal posts. You haven't convinced me that this isn't true...
Your point about housing (and mine) would benefit from actual data. My contention is that for greater than 50% of people in the US, that they cannot, without moving (say the concrete metric here is a move that doesn't require children to switch schools), purchase a home for $200k or less. This is my intuition based on experience with housing markets and a general sense for how the population is distributed in the country, but it may well be wrong.
On the retirement account front, what I'm saying is that most professionals in their 40s will have a large amount in traditional 401k/IRA accounts, and much less in Roth or non-tax advantaged accounts. I believe this is accurate.
I think the confusion in our conversation is that you seem to be talking about what people can do, if they're focused from an early age on accumulating liquid savings, whereas I'm making a descriptive point that most people, even with large net worth, do not have most of it in liquid assets.
> Most people don't have enough of their savings in liquid assets to retire early was, I think, the original goal posts.
This must be a misunderstanding. I never made this claim so now this wasn't the original goal posts. Apologies if I somehow gave off that interpretation. I actually was pretty explicit I think when saying you could save $10,000 (this is cash) via a 401k or other investment vehicle and the math works out to be around $900,000 saved.
> Your point about housing (and mine) would benefit from actual data. My contention is that for greater than 50% of people in the US, that they cannot, without moving (say the concrete metric here is a move that doesn't require children to switch schools), purchase a home for $200k or less. This is my intuition based on experience with housing markets and a general sense for how the population is distributed in the country, but it may well be wrong.
Again, not a claim I've made. I've simply stated that you can buy a house for less than $200,000 and live just fine (this was based on accumulating a million dollars and that there was an assertion that you couldn't live off of that). It's trivially easy to see for yourself on Zillow or via another product that you can buy an affordable enough house and live just fine in most of the U.S..
> I think the confusion in our conversation is that you seem to be talking about what people can do, if they're focused from an early age on accumulating liquid savings, whereas I'm making a descriptive point that most people, even with large net worth, do not have most of it in liquid assets.
Yea that about sums it up. So I'm not sure where you're really going with any of this. I guess it's cool as a general assertion (and I think it would be interesting to discuss) but I'm bewildered as to why it would used as a rebuttal to something I've said. That's why I asked why you were shifting goalposts.
I understood your claim to be that most people on a typical salary in our industry can be financially independent prior to retirement age. My point was merely that this may seem true on paper if just looking at net worth, but that liquidity is important if you actually want to live off savings (ie. be financially independent).
So in my original post I said you could save $10,000/year. That savings can be liquid if you do choose, and even 401ks can be liquid. If you are a typical software engineer in America you can contribute to a Roth 401k and withdraw contributions penalty free. You’re liquid if you want to be.
Then on top of that $10,000 maybe you buy a house or something. You have the rest of your money to do stuff with too.
The financially independent thing really depends on individual circumstances and desires. For some, $1mm isn’t enough. For others it’s more money than they can spend for the rest of their lives.
I went back to my very first comment in the thread. I quoted this:
> > At $1mm you really are independently wealthy in most cases.
Firstly, my working definition of "independently wealthy" is when you can stop working and keep living. I think this is the common definition, but it's possible you're using a different one.
So from that quote and that definition, what I have been saying is that I don't think it is true that "in most cases" people with $1m are independently wealthy. I think that in most cases, those people have most of that $1m net worth tied up in their house and in illiquid traditional retirement accounts, and could not actually live off of just the remaining liquid wealth once those are subtracted. That's really all I've been saying. It's based on just that one quote that hinges on "independently wealthy" and "in most cases".
> Firstly, my working definition of "independently wealthy" is when you can stop working and keep living. I think this is the common definition, but it's possible you're using a different one.
You are independently wealthy in America at $1mm and do not need to work. It takes very little time to see that hit is the general case. You can buy a cheap house, and buy groceries and probably actually grow the principle amount.
Now from here you can say like it’s not enough money for you, or you don’t want to leave California (or wherever) but you can easily live off of that amount of money in the vast majority of America. You can also say that people accumulated that money in some distribution and all of that too. But even if you had that amount in a house + retirement you can sell the house and move to a different location or downsize or something. If you have a million in assets you’re making a choice to work. Period. There might be some thing you don’t want to give up, or some place you want to live. That’s fine, but you’re making a choice after you’ve become independently wealthy.
At this point you are willfully failing to understand my point. It's extremely simple, many mid career people with $1M dollars in net worth are not able to retire, because their net worth is not liquid, and liquidity is necessary to pay for things. If you do not understand the concept of liquidity, then I really can't help you out. Cheers.
> many mid career people with $1M dollars in net worth are not able to retire, because their net worth is not liquid
It really depends on the assets and the choices you want to make. Generally speaking, if you have $1mm worth of assets, you do not need to work. That's it. Period.
If you find that you need to work, you're making some other choice to work because of some factor that's overriding your desire to not work.
The liquidity of the assets is only relevant if you want to talk about specific cases, and even then it's likely not an issue. You can sell your house. You can withdraw from an IRA or 401k. Etc.
The key factor in being able to do so is to have money to save early in your career. The median household may have 10k/year to spend, but the median household is already 10-15 years into their career, and thus 10-15 years behind on that compound interest.
And nobody really has that kind of money early in their career, except maybe the top 1%. You either make a lot of money and spend most of it on housing, or you make a little bit of money and spend most of it on housing.
All I’m doing is providing information. Saving $10,000 is very achievable. Some people get higher paying jobs by the time they are 30 and save $15,000/year instead. Some buy a house and save some. There are lots of paths. I completely disagree that saving $10,000/year is only something the 1% can do. I started my first job at a salary of $60,000 and was able to save $10,000/year via my 401K + 6% matching. I lived in a MCOL city, drove a Honda Civic, and traveled a little bit but not much. That’s not a 1% lifestyle. It’s better than average no doubt, but it’s accessible to many Americans.
We should talk more about how people can do it and how we can help those who don’t make enough money instead. Maybe instead of paying into Social Security we could develop a different savings plan?
Okay, but you have to understand that you're exceptional...at least top 1% in terms of capability. Only 88% of teenagers graduate high school. Some 60% of those will go to college, and only 46% of those will eventually graduate. Of those that eventually graduate, on average they will earn an average $50k starting salary, which takes your savings rate down to zero. 17% might get a salary of $85k. [Too lazy to cite the Google results, I'm on mobile].
So at least from my napkin math plus estimates, you've probably got less than a 10% chance of making enough to save any money at all for your first job out of college.
And I don't know about you, but I spent the first 5 years out of college paying off student loans...and I had a pretty low student loan burden compared to most. And many others might start families sooner than you've chosen to, which is expensive as well...and half of them will get divorced which is even more expensive.
I don't have anything against teaching people to do the best they can with the shit hand they've been dealt in life. But selling that by claiming that average people can be millionaires (even in today's terms, let alone 1990's terms) is selling an expectation that will never pan out for the vast majority of them. Any belief in the truth of that claim inherently relies on a very privileged view of the world, either because they were born with a silver spoon, or because they don't truly understand the scope of expenses that other people face, or because they think that average people are even capable of the kinds of jobs that they hold. It is flat out irresponsible to peddle this fantasy.
Please tone down the hyperbole. I'm not "peddling a fantasy" but looking at numbers and giving my best guess to speak of generalities with these numbers. Initially we were talking about software engineers. Now we're talking about the general population. Even in the initial estimate for software engineers you wouldn't reach $1mm with a 6.7 average return (it could be more, it could be less).
The person making $50,000 may have other benefits. Items like social security and a lower cost lifestyle in the first place. So maybe for them saving $5,000 is doable, and so they wind up with $500,000 and social security. Maybe that person marries someone and combined they make $90,000 and can save $8,000. I don't know. Y
> And I don't know about you, but I spent the first 5 years out of college paying off student loans...and I had a pretty low student loan burden compared to most.
Yes. I joined the Army to pay for college. Nobody in my family has ever attended. I didn't know what the SAT was. That took up 4 years, and I had no savings (obviously never learned what stocks were or anything like that, though there was some government program called the TSP but I was taught to be weary of the government of course so I didn't invest), and then I spent 3 years getting my undergraduate degree so I was around 25 when I started working. So about the same age, at least investing-wise.
> And many others might start families sooner than you've chosen to, which is expensive as well...and half of them will get divorced which is even more expensive.
Sure. Plenty of things that could happen. They could also choose to start a business, or marry a spouse that makes significantly more than they do. Idk. All kinds of things happen.
> Okay, but you have to understand that you're exceptional...at least top 1% in terms of capability.
Ha. I appreciate the accolades but promise that this is certainly not the case. I'm opinionated, and I'm no dummy, but I wouldn't consider myself exceptional in any meaningful sense to me personally. Maybe statistically.
The data indicate that it is quite rare to have $1MM at (roughly) the retirement age (fewer than 20% of those aged 65 have that amount[1]). It may seem like 20% is "common" or even "infrequent," but it's not: it's rare.
Moreover, the median SE salary is just below $100k/year[2]. It's uncommon (certainly not rare but uncommon) for a SE to be able to have a sustained savings rate necessary to achieve $1MM by retirement.
So maybe "peddling a fantasy" is a bit strong, but it's not exactly wrong. For most software engineers (over 50%) it simply is not a realistic scenario.
Yes, absolutely people don’t save like this. That $10,000/year can buy a boat, or maybe a bigger house. But most don’t do that, especially the Boomer generation.
And it’s even worse because if they actually retire at 65 they had like a good 40 years of compound interest too, 10 years is a big difference versus the 30 we were talking about.
The median US household has ~$12k/year available to save/invest after all ordinary living expenses, per the US government (BLS), and that number goes up very rapidly for people above the median.
Americans are notoriously poor savers, also per the US government, but a large percentage of all households -- at least 40% -- could fairly easily accumulate $1M if they were diligent about saving and investing a decent fraction of that surplus income. The surplus income is available but Americans choose to use that income for things other than saving and investing.
Whiler I agree with the thrust of your comment, your committing an error: the distribution of incomes isn't uniform across time/age. That is, the set of under 30 and under 40 household with 12k/ year is lower than 40%. If you look at not the median household at this moment, but the lifecycle of the median household from when it started to when, it probably couldn't save 10k/yr until recently.
That surplus income is only surplus until you have medical event, catastrophic loss, or need a major repair (roof). Ot to mention the need to save for retirement. It's those extraordinary living expenses that kneecap you.
All these replies with the typical 7% return for 20-30 years calculations are missing the point. I know what the arithmetic is. It is not common to be in a position to do that, even in the software industry.
If you start maxing out retirements in your first job and continue to do so throughout your career, raises will be raises and you'll continue to save. If you tap into your max savings per year in start of your career, you'll have trouble pairing that income back and putting it away for savings. Max out your retirement funds early and never look back.
The fact that over 80% of individuals don’t even have $1MM in assets certainly is a basis to dismiss the point. “It’s possible” is technically correct (no, that’s not the best kind of correct), but leaves out just a ton of context. “It’s possible” for a Boltzmann brain to form. Doesn’t mean it’s likely, common, or that people who don’t achieve it have somehow done something wrong.
How does the percentage of those with 1MM in assets relate to whether or not you should prioritize savings?
Are you suggesting individuals should not be saving for retirement or long term financial well being? If so I'm not sure I have anything to offer to you.
I can only speak for myself. I do and I know lots of friends who do as well. I made 42k when I finished undergrad and have always maxed out my available tax beneficial savings (401k/403b/IRAs). Doing anything else would be negligent on my ability to prepare for my future where I would like to retire and not rely on social security, children or other programs.
Where were you living and when was that? My starting salary about $15k higher than that, but I still couldn't max out. Rent, insurances, car payment (eventually), food, taxes, etc really eat a big chunk. I always tried to save a lot, but it was probably only $14k per year (IRA + 401k). I'd say I'm still only around that because I now have a family to support and medical bills.
No, it is. If you don't retire (at 65~) with 2+ million in the bank you did something wrong (or had a rare cataclysmic event that drains your financial resource). I have a modest salary in the Midwest and should retire with $3m+ making reasonable contributions to a 401k, and that's if I don't change anything.
> Or you could be served divorce papers from your partner and lose a substantial fraction of your net-worth and future income.
This definitely implies a questionable decision.
> Or you ( or a member of your family) could have a debilitating/rare disease and your insurance does not cover all the treatments for it
Sure, there could be rare cataclysmic events that drain you of your financial resources. That's not really on-topic to what the discussion is about though.
> Or you could have been fired and opened your own business and your partners fleeced you out (ask me how I know)
This is 100% a bad decision. Do not take money out of your 401k to start a business.
> Or you live in a country where salaries are below 45 k /y.
Then you likely live in a country where the CoL is significantly lower than in the US and the dynamics of retirement are very different. I'm speaking 100% from an American-centric point of view.
> You have a very naive, simplistic and privileged worldview so I hope for your own sake you never have to leave that cocoon.
I'm sorry my short internet comment on a technology forum is not comprehensive enough to account for all potential scenarios and nuance. I grew up in poverty, and I'm going to do everything I can to prevent myself from ending back up in that situation.
I grew up in poverty, too. Not the caricature "TV in every room" "fake-poverty" nonsense some use to try to "prove" poor Americans aren't poor, but actual poverty. Like, almost homeless, single-mom skipping meals so me and my brother could eat, exposed to drugs and gun violence, pest-infested inadequate housing, style poverty. In America. I can do the poverty olympics all damn day with anyone here, even those from so-called under-developed nations.
I am...skeptical...of your statement. I'm rich now thanks to an IPO--and my hard work in being in a position to be employed at a successful company. But I recognize that a lot of what you've written there is just...wrong. It's "right" enough in some respects, but just so very wrong in so many ways.
There's definitely different levels of poverty. Rural American poverty is different from urban American poverty, there's different problems. We didn't have pest problems, but one of the houses we lived in had severe mold that caused health problems (so we had to move). We didn't have gun violence or drugs, but we chopped and burned wood from the area to heat our house through the cold winters because we couldn't afford fuel. We didn't go hungry, but only because we got heavily subsidized or free lunches from the school. We had our electricity shut off on several occasions. I was lucky in the sense that we lived within the territory of a decent school district, so I was able to dig a computer out of the school dumpster that only had a failed hard drive, which I fixed and used to teach myself programming (by this point, we could at least afford internet service). It wasn't consistently like that, and not as bad as what you described, but it was absolutely still poverty.
According to him if your partner divorces you it is always a bad decision of yours. If people betrays you it is a bad decision if you get sick it is a bad decision, if you live in Haiti earning 300 USD/month it is fine because COL is lower. Living in hindsight-land, but it is OK since he grew up in "poverty". Totally absent of any sense of perspective of what a normal human life consists of, typical of an upper-middle class able, white, male in IT.
10% of Americans are millionaires. I would say that 90% of full time software engineers will end up becoming millionaires. FAANG engineers become millionaires in their 20s. For others it will take longer.
It seems like $100k is conservatively a pretty typical salary these days even outside the big companies. That is $4M after a 40 year career, which makes you a millionaire when you retire if you can save 25%, even if the savings appreciate 0%. This seems pretty accomplishable.
But perhaps the idea of "being a millionaire" you're thinking of is not that you slowly manage it over a long career, but that it happens more quickly?
It's not about eventually becoming a millionaire. It's about using Gates and other successful outliers as a pattern for normal people. There are tons of smart and hardworking people out there who are not very successful. There's a lot more going on than just hard work.
I.e. choosing companies that have (or eventually get) publicly traded stock that goes up a bunch.
There are whole classes of people who sit around all day trying to figure out which companies will grow and succeed and which ones won't. They aren't really that good at it.
There's a certain point of working hard enough to clear the interview bar of the FAANG companies or similar, but beyond that your financial success is largely tied to a favorable roll of the dice.
> Working hard in the mailroom or stocking shelves at a grocery store isn’t going to translate into a successful software career
Right, but it might lead to satisfaction regardless. Even the most menial positions are often rewarded. I have worked a few menial jobs, and effort is even more important. When I worked hard and went the extra mile when required, I got rewarded with better shifts, more flexibility and more respect. It also personally felt good.
I find that people who don't work hard and are apathetic about the work they do are often deeply unhappy, while people that take pride in their work and work hard are satisfied. The best feeling I get in the day is after a grueling workout. There are health benefits sure, but its not worth the amount of discomfort and suffering I have to endure. If there were a pill that gave me the same benefits, I would be less satisfied than putting in the work. But maybe that's just me.
People who work hard often have better personal circumstances as well. Who would want to be with a partner that just spends their life going through the motions with no real purpose or drive?
I don't know what to tell you if you think that. I guess don't put in effort in a menial job? Just quit, slack off and post on HN instead?
I don't think menial work leads to "mortgaging your body". Some jobs sure, but those very physically demanding jobs pay well because the alternative would be a job that pays equally as poorly and is not physically demanding. You can always default to working at a grocer or fast food job.
Those factory jobs at Amazon that are fairly grueling pay a lot better than similar jobs in those areas w/ that skill set. People don't really work them very long either due to the demands. So you can do that for a few years, make more money and hopefully invest it in building out a more valuable skill-set or give better opportunities to your children.
> Putting the extra effort into a menial job isn't "a grueling workout", it's mortgaging your body and health for a price you'll regret in 20 years.
Maybe if you're working grueling construction jobs or consuming fast food and soda for 3 meals a day because you're too busy for anything else.
However, having worked in an industry with a lot of people who are on their feet and doing physical work throughout the day, I've come to realize that sedentary jobs like programming are a huge risk to long-term health. Sitting at a desk all day every day takes a toll on the body. The people who were active and moving about every day for decades are still in good physical health years later. The people who sit at desks all day (without compensating with exercise) accumulate a lot of health problems and weight gain if they're not careful.
Great point. I've actually done some of my hardest work for hobbies, volunteer positions, or just helping friends with huge projects. And I loved every minute of it. There's a lot to be said for being able to appreciate accomplishing things and working together with other people.
I've had good success hiring some bootcamp grads for this reason. Some of them may not have the years of experience that senior candidates or even college grads might have, but you can find a lot of hard working and highly motivated people among bootcamp grads.
This is especially true for those who came from careers that involved a lot of hard work or manual labor. It's refreshing to work with people who enjoy getting things done and can appreciate how lucky we all are to be able to sit in air conditioned offices and type on computers all day. Contrast this with some of the perpetually disgruntled college grads I've seen lately who think we're taking advantage of them unless we pay them Google L6 compensation that they saw on levels.fyi .
That's honestly the only thing you can optimize for: do the very best you can at what you are doing. Take care of what is right in front of you. You'll be fulfilled, and in many world-lines you will also be successful. But also, when you are resting, rest thoroughly. Don't just rest to work more later or try to scheme this or that in your day dreams. Just let go of the effort and relax.
Allow yourself to be exploited by capital in exchange for experience and you'll probably be rewarded later when you get to exploit inexperienced people? Sounds like a big risk for labor and a big win for capital.
Well said. That's why capital has to write essays like this to make it seem like a better deal than it is, lest the rest of us figure it out and organize.
Strange framing. Working very hard in the US has made my compensation increase 7X in 9 years. I’m not capital (this isn’t a static group, btw), I don’t feel exploited, and I don’t exploit anyone - I invested in myself and successfully optimized for long-run outcomes.
I’m in the midst of people who essentially have had the same career trajectory, while starting in this country with debt and zero social capital. It’s not applicable to everyone, but it’s also pretty darn attainable - unless you’re convinced that it’s not/
I updated to multi-millionaire. The idea was that people would have enough money to quit their job and live very comfortably.
I think the network effect is highly overblown for the average person. Sure, networks can be good for the people in the top 10%, but I don't see it really helping most of us because what are the chances our average friends will be in a position to hire us to a high position.
I don't see an average developer being even a millionaire after a decade. Average salary is about $100k, but might be skewed due to the high cost areas. That's $1M before tax, living expenses, etc. Maybe you could hit $1M after 2 decades if lucky.
Is the average for a developer really that low (in the US)? In the Boston-area market (now remote, but same pay scale), we're paying more than that for fresh college hires.
Get hired, contribute to your 401(k), buy a house, and do that for 15 years and in most markets I think your change in net worth over the 15 years is more likely to be >$1MM than less.
Well, I have to support a family on it. I dont get time to do anything enjoyable. I don't have any upward mobility. All with no end in sight for when I'll be able to quit this job I hate.
Start working some l33tcode problems and applying to other jobs. If you hate your job, it pays poorly, you have no upward mobility, and you don't get to do anything enjoyable, get another job. The companies on levels.fyi are all hiring, go do what it takes to get hired by them.
There really aren't any job options in my area. I don't consider remote an option for a new job since it's much more difficult to onboard virtually. I dont have time to LeetCode due to family constraints.
> buy a house
In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY, a 1 bedroom is approximately a million dollars. COL in the area where your job is is critically important as well.
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Stats May 2018 for the job category "Software Developers, Applications" mean salary is $108K. They provide percentiles 10% at 66K and 90% at 161K.
> I think the network effect is highly overblown for the average person. Sure, networks can be good for the people in the top 10%, but I don't see it really helping most of us because what are the chances our average friends will be in a position to hire us to a high position.
Your friends don't need to be in a position to hire you into a high position. They just need to be in a position to recommend you for a good job that might be a step up. Or put in a good word for you when you apply at their company.
They don't even need to be friends. In fact, most of the time I get my back-channel references from people who simply worked at a company at the same time as another person.
Network effects aren't always obvious. I can't tell you how many times I've changed my mind on a candidate (in either direction) due to a friend of a friend giving me some more info about their experience working with the candidate.
> just wise job selection, a reasonable amount of financial savvy and budget adherence, and a deliberate effort to work on your career path.
None of that requires working 12+ hours a day. I am one employee out of x,000 at my company. The difference between me giving 75% and me giving 150% (hours) seems very unlikely to affect the stock price in any meaningful way.
Do you think your colleagues can distinguish between someone who excel's and someone who does not? Do you think when they find some lucky opportunity, they would be more likely to reach out to the harder working colleagues they know or the lazier ones? It doesn't require 12 hour work days and we could exagerate ad nauseum, but generally speaking working hard and working smart earns you more than just a marginal impact on your current business -- it earns you a reputation that you can leverage towards greater opportunity.
Sure. There are definitely colleagues I would recommend over others if I had to only choose one, but I don't. Bouncing between large companies means "sure, I'll refer you and get $5k for doing so" as long as I think you can pass the interview.
> Working hard in the mailroom or stocking shelves at a grocery store isn’t going to translate into a successful software career
Equally, working hard as a software engineer isn't going to translate into the "uncapped salary" class of employment like CEO/CTO, VP, Founder, etc. There's a class ceiling where only a certain type of person gains entry. You can hard-work yourself to the bone writing code, but that "VP of Engineering" role is going to go to the external candidate who is already "VP of Engineering" somewhere else, and who has been some flavor of Director or VP his whole career. Jobs are a lot more class-stratified and career immobile than we like to think they are. This reminds me of a previous "hard work" discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27517158
This has nothing to do with class, similar to how declining a junior engineer for an architect role is not classist. A VP Engineering role is a senior management position, and being a fantastic programmer is not a reasonable transition point. It's a lot more reasonable to either make a lateral hire or promote internally from a lower level (say, Director). Tiny startups take more chances with whom they place into these positions out of necessity. At the end of the day though, vast majority of coders don't have the right set of skills to be a successful VP right there and then, as their day-to-day responsibilities do not meaningfully overlap. Doesn't mean they can't get there, but there's a career progression aspect to it which is certainly within their grasp. Vast majority of Directors and VPs work their way up, just like everyone else.
But that is not argument against what he said. All software engineers cant be VPs. It is not possible - there are not enough positions and many people are not suitable for that role.
If everyone worked super hard, still only minority would got these positions.
That was not the main argument of the parent comment, this was:
> There's a class ceiling where only a certain type of person gains entry
It is true that working hard alone is not going to get you into a VP role, but working hard on the right things has a much higher likelihood of accomplishing that. Impact != hours put in, and vice versa, and frankly this is where a lot of the hard working people find themselves. Doing a difficult, but low leverage activity (relatively speaking) really well does not automatically entitle one to a role that is intended to be high leverage, all the time.
I think my use of the word "class" was problematic. The word doesn't really capture what I mean, and I struggled to find the right description. Those people who always seem to end up SVPs and CEOs and Founders all seem to be cut from a certain cloth. Not a "class" in the literal sense of English aristocracy, but it's always the same "Ivy Leaguer" type of person. Smooth talker, big smile, outgoing, and credentialed up the wazoo. Like a game show host but with a business degree. Look at all the CxO folks at your company and tell me they are not all basically cut from this same fabric.
It's almost never the smart, hard working kid whose parents were factory workers in Pittsburgh, who hard-worked their way up from the mail room.
EDIT: Maybe not a perfect comparison, but how many current active duty 4 star military officers started out their careers as enlisted grunts rather than as officers?
That's nonsense. Look at the "about us" pages for tech companies and startups. You'll see a huge diversity of backgrounds among SVPs of engineering, including many first generation immigrants.
There are also a lot of senior military officers at the O-5 to O-6 level who started out enlisted. The relative lack at the O-7 level and above is due more to retirement age limits than anything else. If a service member did a couple enlisted tours, then went to college and OCS, they usually just run out of time.
What you said is simply not true. There are countless people work on different positions in different fields are enjoying hard work as part of their life.
If you read the essay through, he never said "hard work == long hours of work". He explicitly wrote "Trying hard doesn't mean constantly pushing yourself to work, though."
And the Bill Gates thing? PLEASE. Yeah, I agree with the previous comment. A horrible example.
Bill Gates was one of the most lucky sons of bitches in the history of the planet. Born to wealthy parents, he was impossible to deal with, so they took him to a therapist (again, a lucky pick) that advised them to set Gates free. They put him in this prep school with other privileged kids, and like a meteor made of pure gold, by luck, it had a computer. Almost no schools had a computer at the time.
Hard work is only part of the equation. You have to be at the right place, at the right time. Most people never are.
Might as well read the next article on "Ten morning habits of billionaires". Luck. Is. A. Factor.
In my opinion, no, not really. Hard work could be necessary but not sufficient, or contingently necessary. Or the success criterion could be defined in a way that obscures the link to hard work. This is from a review of Taleb's The Black Swan:
As Cicero pointed out, we all suffer from 'survivorship bias': that is, we confine our evidence to that adduced from those few who succeed or survive, and ignore the silent evidence of all those who didn't make it. The graveyard is silent, the awards ceremony is noisy.
It's necessary but not sufficient. What if you work hard all through your 20s, not a day off, and it doesn't work out (which it doesn't, in the billionaire sense, for most people)? How do you get back the first flush of youth?
This essay from Paul reminded me once again how relatively blinkered he is. He has his mental model of a good life - for obvious reasons, it's one which is somewhat similar to his own - and he doesn't question his assumptions. What is his utility function? Is it a universal utility function, or is it actually just his preferred, locally, personally optimal way of increasing its value?
Dismissing whole departments at college is part of that. You might not see value in the philosophy - PG is on record as dismissing it - but philosophy has changed the world more than almost anything else. It's at the foundation of science, law, government and politics, and most of the wars of the 20th century were fought, ultimately, over philosophy. PG knows this, maybe he views it differently - he studied it in college after all - but in his shoes, I wouldn't be so dismissive.
I've heard hard work described as increasing your luck "surface area". So imagine you're trying to catch luck "raindrops" and you're Bill Gates - sure you're busting your ass but you're starting off with a football stadium sized bucket in monsoon season. A poor kid from Baltimore with divorced parents could work as hard and end up with the analogy-equivalent of a coffee cup in Death Valley
Well said! I came here to say this. Founders of successful businesses usually are not exceptional geniuses. They often happen to be in the right place at the right time, or they steal ideas from other people when the business is too young to be worth litigating over. See, e.g., Microsoft, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. Or they get government assistance at a critical time. E.g., Elon Musk. There are so many species of selection bias at work here; I totally agree with your comment about reading "Ten morning habits of billionaires."
Also, the idea that one should be "constantly judging both how hard you're trying and how well you're doing," _while_ trying to try hard and trying to do well, is insane. You can't be the CEO and the ditch-digger at the same time. You have to be able to inhabit both perspectives as _separate_.
That said, it was an interesting read, albeit a self-consciously unhelpful one. It was helpful and humbling to read that you just think some things are easy for you because they were taught at a low level in school. I can adapt that same logic to suggest that this author isn't imparting serious, deep knowledge about the true nature of hard work and success.
also it was his mom's connection with IBM that made him a billionaire, but the rest helped as well. Bill was also able to secure a contract because a competitor Gary Kildall did not show up. Luck is the factor.
Why? Unless you are working so hard that it drains you outside of office hours, what's wrong with it? I just feel plain worse when I slack off at work, and feel accomplished and valued when I work hard. I work the same number of hours either way.
Yeah, people like having purpose and feel good contributing to a shared goal.
If the work is stimulating, and the company is doing something you find valuable (or it’s your own company) then that’s very fulfilling.
There’s some cultural trope that everything is zero sum and that people can’t possibly enjoy their work or get value from it. I think this is just empirically wrong. People don’t just “think” they enjoy hard work, many actually do - and feel worse when they’re having trouble doing it.
I like the essay a lot, but I’m not sure it meets its title How to work hard. It lays out that to do great work you must and that it often feels good to do so. John Carmack proofread the essay and is probably one of the hardest working programmers alive (in addition to massive natural ability).
I think a more common problem is people that want to work hard, feel good when they do so, but have a hard time getting themselves to do so. Strategies around getting better at this (the “how”) are difficult. He touches on it a bit with how goals must be set once out of school and no one will set them for you. Interest helps, but is often not enough.
There’s of course also the group of people that don’t value hard work and don’t feel bad from not working hard/meeting potential, but I actually suspect this group is smaller than most think (and less interesting to discuss given the topic).
if you are actually doing software 12+ hours a day for a decade, I find it hard you wouldn't find great success.
unless you spend none of that time improving and just doing the same thing you learned in the first year, you will become an expert. Experts are well rewarded for their skills
My personal experience was that once I became an expert the company wouldn't promote me and then outsourced the team. It was obscure tech, so it was basically a dead end.
That seems to conflict with the preface that you are constantly learning and improving, which should include changing jobs when you have become stagnant. you can make absurd money working in finance with java programming.
the ability to work hard(defined as continuous focus, improvement, work ethic) with reasonable intelligence as a trait follows a Gaussian. I am not going to sugar coat the fact that that will naturally create a hierarchy of success
People doing CRUD apps at Google makes lots of money and Google still hires everyone who pass their general tests afaik. Not everyone can work at Google, but if all software engineers were great we would have way more well run tech companies and therefore more companies paying similar to Google. So that argument doesn't really makes sense, software demand is still far from being met so all value any programmer can be delivered will be used up. Unlike for example cleaners, if every cleaner did 2x the work then we would just hire half as many cleaners.
>The real world doesn't work that way and using statistical outliers like Gates is disingenuous to the discussion about hard work and how it applies to normal people.
Exactly. This is the central lie that sustains capitalism. Wealthy C-level executives get rich when the rest of us work hard, which is why they harp on "working hard" so much. There's no reason to work hard when all the benefits go to the already-wealthy above you, which is why they try to obscure that fact in as many ways as possible.
// There's no reason to work hard when all the benefits go to the already-wealthy above you, which is why they try to obscure that fact in as many ways as possible
I have always been an employee and yet I am thrilled and thankful for the financial returns.
Looking around my neighborhood, the same is true for most folks around me.
There are not guarantees in life but if you have the combination of luck, skill and hard work, you can land in a place where you and employer are mutually benefited.
I am lucky enough that this has been the case for my 18 year career so far and not uncommon.
What you are saying on the other hand is a dead end. If you don't believe good employer/employee relationship is possible, you won't do your part and it will be a self fulfilling prophecy. I feel bad for people who think like this.
Honestly it reminds me of the incel movement. Someone somewhere owes you something and you have no agency on how it shapes out. I fundamentally disagree.
>I am lucky enough that this has been the case for my 18 year career so far and not uncommon.
You shouldn't need luck to get food and shelter, which is how our current economic system works and the fact that it works this way upsets me greatly.
>What you are saying on the other hand is a dead end. If you don't believe good employer/employee relationship is possible, you won't do your part and it will be a self fulfilling prophecy. I feel bad for people who think like this.
Why is change always demanded from those without power by those with power? The employers are the ones ruining the relationship and I think the employer side of the relationship needs to change. One way of changing that is through labor unions.
// You shouldn't need luck to get food and shelter
Most people in the US have both, but that's also irrelevant to the point I responded to - his claim was that you can't do well by being an employee which is untrue.
// Why is change always demanded from those without power by those with power?
I am not demanding any change. However, if you are not happy with your situation, the most actionable place for you to change it is with yourself. Start with yourself FIRST.
"If you don't believe good employer/employee relationship is possible, you won't do your part and it will be a self fulfilling prophecy."
I agree that it can become self-fulfilling. However, there are some of us who started out believing the best and changed their minds after being repeatedly screwed over.
>> and changed their minds after being repeatedly screwed over.
I both sympathize for you and still don't think the "changing your mind" is helpful here. My personal example here is in my dating life. I only got married at 38. Before that I had probably 15 semi serious or serious relationships that ultimately didn't work out. Each one of them would have been a good reason to say "oh, well, it's not for me to find love" or "I am doomed because my parents divorce messed me up" or "everyone out there's not good enough for me" or whatever.
But while I would be "justified" in thinking that way, I'd also actually doom myself by thinking that way. Instead I kept looking for changes I can make (mainly in how I feel about and value others in this case) that eventually allowed me to meet an amazing woman and start a family together.
The paint I am making is - we have agency. Whatever shitty work situation you have, do you have some room to find a better employer? To beef up your skills so you're more valuable? To contribute more to the org and be deeply recognized? To build such a network that if something ever happened you can find another job in a matter of weeks? In my experience, almost everyone has SOME leverage they can use to improve their situation. If they continuously use it, their situation is statistically likely to iteratively improve (and give you bigger levers over time.) If you get jaded and give up, nothing will magically improve and just get worse.
So no matter how much you may justify jadedness, it's not a thing worth accepting because it will just kill you.
The question isn't whether a good employer-employee relationship is possible. the question is whether a horrible employee-employer relationship, one that has significant butterfly effects, is possible. More pertinently, the question is whether it's possible for someone to be in such complex circumstances that finding a good employer, or even job opportunity, is possible for that person.
The incel community isn't the right comparison maybe? A more apt comparison might be domestic abuse worldwide.
Sometimes I'm amazed at the assumptions being made here and elsewhere that what applies to one person's life applies at large. It's not just survivorship bias, it's some kind of egocentrism (in a perceptual sense) bias.
You yourself say you consider yourself lucky. Do you really? What about the unlucky ones?
It's easy to say "well for two decades it's worked out for me and hundreds of neighbors" forgetting that there's many more decades in a life, and billions of people.
The main point is - you can't control your luck. you can control what you do. For some reason, there's an attitude that "because you can't control your luck, you shouldn't control what you actually can control" which is dumb.
You can acknowledge both. But you need to maximize that which is under your control (and if you don't do that you have no room to complain about anything else.)
Jeff Bezos could bankrupt himself giving each of his current employees $200K (one time only, after 25+ years of work, not per year).
And that's by far the most extremely case.
You can argue that it's exploitative or that no one should be as rich as he is, but you can't say that working hard to do better for yourself as an employee is useless just because that small amount gets skimmed off.
>you can't say that working hard to do better for yourself as an employee is useless just because that small amount gets skimmed off.
I like this argument, but for higher taxes on the wealthy instead. Taxes benefit everybody, but my surplus labor value goes only to Jeff Bezos and his substantial money hoard.
You got downvoted not because you are wrong but because you are right.
Some people would rather hear they have no power and no chance because it takes away the bad feeling for their own agency in their situation. Others are empowered by their agency and act on it.
I totally agree. If you want to get ahead, you need to “hack” the system by convincing people in the upper class that you belong there too. Working hard is a great way to signal that you’re middle class labor.
As someone who has gone from being poor to being upper middle class via the tech industry, I can say without exception hard work had nothing to do with it. Every quantum leap in my career came from convincing some rich guy to allow me to bask in the mist of the cash firehose being directed at them.
I would say working hard is actually negatively associated with success. Once you get branded a “worker bee”, your chances for high level advancement quickly bottom out.
If you really want to get ahead go to the right parties. The VP no one can ever get a hold of is making an order of magnitude more money then the middle manager putting in 80 hours a week. That person will correctly have been identified by the execs as not belonging to the upper class.
That being said, once you see how the game is played it can be hard to stomach. It is reality though.
That's not what I'm getting at. You can accumulate >1M net worth just by being an engineer/contractor - no need to get into upper management or socialise with rich people.
Working on acquiring experience early on in your career will accelerate the point where you're making decent money where you're able to save/invest a decent portion of your income.
You don’t need to work hard to acquire that much money as an engineer. You can totally coast and make market salary. The hard part is going to be having the discipline to save and live beneath your means.
You have to work hard to get the job in the first place. A large majority of people can't even get through the basics of learning to code so can't even get a degree or do the basics to get a job as a self learner. To them getting a software engineering job is too much hard work and they instead just continue earning their poor salaries.
I love programming and know a dozen languages. I learned them for fun and didn’t consider it work.
I also know people who know a little Python or JS and can make >$100k a year.
You may have to learn a bare minimum to get in the door, you may consider that hard work or not, but once in, you no longer need to work hard. Sweet talking your boss or jumping jobs will get you way more bang for your buck.
Working 12+ hours a day isn't necessarily working hard. It may be physically and mentally draining, but people can do that by just grinding rather than challenging yourself. Working hard is more about the relentless drive towards self improvement rather than your economic output.
I think you are using a narrow definition of hard work.
Doing "actual work" is hard. Figuring out what your business is and who you need to hire is also hard work. Hard in a different ways but perhaps also harder in that fewer people are capable of doing it and it's less obvious.
I think this is a great argument for a decentralized economy for creatives (and anyone else who wants it). Society would be more productive. People would see the products of their effort, share in the rewards. Even if the rewards are small it is still nice to see a direct effect between your work and the results.
> then you can reap the benefits and live a life worth living
I wish we could make the "inequality" point without resorting to hyperbole like this. The median American lives a life that is the envy of 99.9% percent of people who have ever walked this earth including most monarchs and emperors, and certainly >90% of people alive today.
I do agree that something needs to be done to keep inequality in check; I just happen to think that hyperbole and dishonesty create more problems than they solve.
Like causing people to lose trust in the "anti-inequality" message. If we need to lie or exaggerate to persuade then we may rightly lose credibility. Pro-inequality folks can even deflect the conversation to our own exaggeration. I didn't mean to imply that hyperbole is comparable to inequality in scale or severity, but rather that any gains afforded by hyperbole tend to be short-sighted.
I don't feel it was a lie or exaggeration. Many people do not feel like their life is worth living when they work a job they hate just to pay the bills, get no time to enjoy life, etc. It shouldn't be a surprise when the general trend is for highly industrialized countries to experience higher suicide rates.
Whether or not we are happy, the fact remains that the median American lifestyle is positively luxurious by world standards and “America is a third world country” rhetoric is hyperbole. Most everyone today or throughout history has had to work far harder than our median American to secure much less. That we are unhappy only indicates that wealth isn’t the major factor in happiness.
Personally, for causes of declining happiness, I would look at rampant social media and technology addiction, falling-sky media narratives, rapidly increasing political division (itself a product of the traditional and social media), decreasing religious participation, weaker family/community ties, and good ole fashioned keeping up with the Jones’s.
I really don’t think 99.9% of people want to pay 1K /month for health insurance or be a missed paycheck away from living on the street. Americans make a lot of money but the cost of living is through the roof and there is practically no safety net. That’s not even touching on our complete lack of social and family support structures.
Again with the wild hyperbole. The American safety net may not be the absolute best in the world but it is still far better than what is available to the overwhelming majority of people. Indeed, a huge swath of the world is far below the American poverty line. Why do you suppose so many millions of people risk their lives to get into America in the first place?
Come on. We can advocate for better healthcare and social services without going full “AmErIcA iS a ThIrD wOrLd CoUnTrY”.
It’s not hyperbole it’s reality. The US has the largest prison population in the world. It has massive problems with homelessness and violent crime. It has extreme wealth inequality. We have the most expensive healthcare and education in the world.
The reality is that the US is a harsh place to live. Yes there are upsides but the hyperbole is that there aren’t significant downsides.
> Yes there are upsides but the hyperbole is that there aren’t significant downsides.
The original claim was that the median American’s lifestyle is enviable to the overwhelming majority of people on Earth today or at any other point. In other words, the downsides are few and far less significant than the upsides for most people today or at any time in the past.
It’s so exhausting to transparently argue that relative to the world, the US is a very nice place and suffer responses like “but there is lots of violent crime!” Of course there is always some referand for which the US has “lots of violent crime” but by world standards it does not. The US homicide rate for example is something like 30% below the global homicide rate. The poverty rate in the US is pretty comparable to European countries (bit worse than western Europe, bit better than eastern Europe) and far, far better than Asia, Africa, or South America. Even our wealth inequality is not “extreme” by global standards.
There is no truth whatsoever to claims that the US is a harsh place to live. According to the quality of life index which does not cherry pick metrics, the US is 15th globally (lower is better). https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...
Again, I'm not glossing over problems, I'm contextualizing them. I've been very clear about that in this entire thread. Cherry picking individual metrics doesn't present a clear picture, and I'm striving for a clear (not distorted) picture. Notably, healthcare costs don't mean much on their own, you have to adjust for per-capita wealth as well. With respect to wealth inequality, would you rather live in a country where almost everyone is below the poverty line or one in which almost everyone is above the poverty line but some moreso than others? Again, I want to reign in inequality in the US, but I don't need to invoke hyperbole to get there.
You aren't going to get a clear picture by cherry picking statistics that support your conclusion. You need to contextualize. Of course, if your goal isn't to get a clear, honest picture then we're aiming for different things and we may as well part ways now.
EDIT: From wikipedia, regarding measures of inequality:
> Gini coefficients are simple, and this simplicity can lead to oversights and can confuse the comparison of different populations; for example, while both Bangladesh (per capita income of $1,693) and the Netherlands (per capita income of $42,183) had an income Gini coefficient of 0.31 in 2010,[53] the quality of life, economic opportunity and absolute income in these countries are very different, i.e. countries may have identical Gini coefficients, but differ greatly in wealth.
Your original argument is flawed. You actually have no way of knowing if most people are “envious” of the US. That’s pure speculation on your part. We can look at numbers, if we do we see some where the US looks really good and some where it looks really bad. That’s not even touching less tangible things like culture, community and family values (all of which are extremely subjective). The US is definitely a harsh place to live in many ways. And yes, I’ve lived in other countries and traveled extensively. I’ve seen plenty of poor (by American standards) families living happily together in ways that would make many Americans envious.
In short, your claim is too subjective to be useful and is directly contradicted by multiple metrics.
The context of the thread assumes that we're talking about wealth. The original claim was something like, "in the US you must be in the management class in order to have a life worth living". I.e., we're talking specifically about wealth and not other subjective factors. To be perfectly clear, there are no metrics that contradict that the median American is wealthy by world or historic standards.
Maybe you're arguing that I have no way of knowing that poorer people would be envious of richer people; fair enough, "envious" was figurative language on my part.
- Why is wealth inequality a problem? If average people is relatively wealthy (which i think is the case for USA), why does it matter that some people are very wealthy? This is different than some 3rd world countries where average people is poor and some very small percentage have wealth (and mostly due to corruption / crime / political influence)
- Rate of incarceration may also mean that USA does a good job of imparting justice / catch criminals.
- Healthcare costs looks like an issue, but socialized systems also have their problems (bad quality, wrong economic incentives for doctors to improve their practice, etc.)
Wealth inequality is bad in part because the wealthy then control policy and have wide ranging impact in the day to day lives of those who are not wealthy. It’s a centralization of control.
The rate of incarceration is largely due to the war on drugs. There’s nothing just about it.
I’d take NHS (despite its flaws) over my >2k /month health insurance any day of the week.
> I’d take NHS (despite its flaws) over my >2k /month health insurance any day of the week.
Would you also take the 40% reduction in post-tax, post-healthcare, post-retirement pay?
I actually favor a stronger social safety net and I agree that we need to reign in inequality (because an egalitarian society of very wealthy people and very poor people strikes me as completely infeasible in the same way that a prosperous socialist or communist country is completely infeasible), but that will almost certainly mean the professional class is worse-off. Reasoning soberly about tradeoffs is imperative IMO.
> Would you also take the 40% reduction in post-tax, post-healthcare, post-retirement pay?
Yes, and I have! What I missed most when not living in the US:
* variety of everything
* large appliances
What I missed least:
* driving/car culture
* overwork
So sadly I found I was actually a typical “consumer” who wants things that are pretty crappy for the environment (except for the car thing). I was fine with getting paid less than I would in the US because as a senior technologist, I was making way more than most of the locals and the economy was tuned to their pay.
Instead of worshipping hard work, maybe we should be promoting "smart work". As a society, we don't need a bunch of overworked and burnt out people in their late twenties. That's not good for anyone.
To add to this: there are people who earn minimum wage doing what some might call menial jobs (or 3 jobs back to back) and they work 10x harder than the average startup programmer or founder.
They might not have gone to school at all. Or they might have a PhD from country most Americans couldn't find on a map but still end up cleaning the offices of startups.
Working hard is an attitude, not just hours. The Gates example is more approachable as we’ve all heard of them.
I’ll use myself as an example both ways. You don’t know who I am, and you never will, I’m just a cog in the wheels of society. I was a shitty student, always interested in whatever wasn’t being taught. I became good at working the system instead of working.
When I started working in high school at farms and later in sales, it clicked that the people who worked harder and did a better job… did better. That didn’t always mean money, but it meant respect, better shifts, etc. It was more real to me than academics.
Later on in my professional life, working really hard and delivering more, whatever more was, paid off in innumerable ways. It turns out the way to know what you’re talking about is to do stuff. Now I’m a midcareer director level person and that hard work means when I pick up the phone, someone answers. When there’s a problem or a solution, people listen.
That said, there’s lines I won’t or can’t cross. I won’t sacrifice my family’s life, which is a career ceiling. My mediocre performance as a student effectively locked me out of high end schools and the jobs that follow.
I accepted a job at a startup not too long ago. They offered a pretty good salary, but no equity. Shame on me for not doing better research. As soon as I got in the role, they made it clear they expected 70 hours a week, oh and by the way, the CEO is really excited about the prospect of selling the company, and how rich he's going to get. He's going to mention potential valuations all the time, and he's also "really depending on me" to shape up core business functions to make the company sale-ready. LOL! Fuck that, I left within 3 months.
I guess it depends on what we're calling "hard work". I think most software devs have already done lots of different types of hard work to get where they are. Going to school, doing intern work, finding a job and learning new languages, etc. It gets easier once you've established a career, but it takes significant work to get there.
But if we're defining it as "working lots of hours," then yeah, I agree, don't do that.
1,160 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 409 ms ] threadBut the person you're correcting seems to have already noticed that, and has corrected themselves.
That said, I think there's more of a zeitgeist change than actual change in pg's content. Things sound different 10-15 years apart. A lot of things age poorly, often: idealism, stand up comedy... most anything avante garde-ish.
Clever people spoke highly of agile,for example, when it was manifestos and such circa 2005.
Not that that is necessarily bad per se, there can be a lot lot of value to reminding people of things that may seem obvious. But it's annoying when people treat him like a genius for saying fairly standard platitudes in a clever way
> There may be some people do who, but I think my experience is fairly typical
Not having the content inside of `<p>` blocks is a departure from Paul Graham's older content, and a confusing one at that.
EDIT: It looks like the posts with the "Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator." banner are contained within a `<p>` block, and can be read with Firefox reader view, but those without the banner are not within a `<p>` block, and cannot be read with Firefox reader view.
"If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness."
"Season of what?"
"Mists, sir, and mellow fruitfulness."
- Working hard starts at school, but there is a lot of "distortion"
- It's complicated to since it depends on multitude of person's factors and likes
- You have to be honest with yourself
- You have to find something you want or/and talented to do
- More competitive areas or ambitious goals will required more effort
- What was said before may not work given the circumstances of each individual
>If hard work and long hours could be consistently transformed into “success”, then my friends and family who are teachers, nurses, social workers and factory workers would be far more successful than I am.
Because that is really rare and close to impossible if you are not an entrepreneur : I have. personally never ever worked on a really interesting project, and tbh, the few times I switched jobs following my attraction to the product, it went terribly wrong.
I’m not saying that you can’t be happy and fulfilled in this situation : my current company is really nice and I’m happy to be paid correctly to do what I wanted to do, but our products are extremely boring and I would never choose to work on my current project if I had a true open choice. And I don’t think I’m the exception on this one.
If a life of hard work is needed to get you into heaven that's fine. Or if anything less would mean you and your dependants going hungry. But once your basic needs are met then it's irrational not to start spending time on all of the other things that life has to offer.
I feel like drive and energy and work-ethic are great, and you're useless without them. All the same if you have nothing else then you just become enslaved by your need to output more or increase your wealth or whatever, without connecting that to any healthy goal like health or happiness or wellbeing. It's like a cognitive defect, a disability except you're unable to not-do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbgkMhio3jY
I expereinced this a few times in my life and I never regretted about working hard on it. Why would I regret about playing hard and achieving what I can? But sadly due to my shortcomings these events are short and far between.
Speaking from my own experience of founding a startup. There are also times it was absolutely miserable. But it’s true: I wasn’t beholden to my VCs or angels. I could have quit. I just enjoyed the work so much, so deeply, that I didn’t want to quit.
The challenge was not burning out: I needed to take more vacation, because it not feeling like work didn’t mean it wasn’t, still, hard work which people need a respite from.
It seems that the only way for me to finish something is to have the task coming from _someone else_, from a friend or from work.
I’m a spectacular starter, prototyper, and builder. But I cannot complete the damn project for the life of me. My best friend and first employee though? Thrives on that.
He is also glorifying anxiety, which is unfortunate, and I think this essay stands stronger without those particular points.
What's difficult, and more common amongst mere mortals is twofold; trying to find motivation to overcome difficult things, and learning the skills and expertise to accomplish these things. Love for those things isn't really a factor.
Graham really is trying to simplify things a bit too much, and recycling the tropes of natural ability, practice and effort.
I agree with the rest of what you said, but it is orthogonal to the essay’s main point.
He specifically trained himself to have leisure anxiety and advises other people to do this as well:
>> The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off.
It's certainly effective, but as you say, effective to what end?
But as usual, he's writing for a very specific group of people - young people with a strong urge to do late nights building something.
> When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m.
> I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.
> But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.
In my experience, there is no such thing as hard work. There’s a universal river of truth that I can tap into in flow state, and if something is blocking me from getting there, I might as well watch a show and see if the river is open later.
One thing I find important relates to other people. Some say that success comes from hard work, or that the right focus is essential to success. But that's a false dichotomy.
In truth, there are many people out there who work incredibly hard, and some of them are even good, and some of those have the right focus.
Hard work is the precondition. Even if your focus is right and you're clever, you are always competing with people who also have that but put in many hours on top.
It's a tower, and if you want to rise, you need to tackle all the layers.
I'd like to add that it is more than fine to not do great work. If you like to spend a lot of time with your kids and tend to your vegetable patch, by all means only try hard enough to keep the job that pays for that lifestyle.
So, no dig on the author, but there is more than maximizing for great work. Try for a while to instead maximize for life happiness and experience how that feels for you.
Including, by the way, being a parent. Many of us aren't born with (or have a sufficiently healthy childhood) to have naturally great parenting abilities. But hard work and practice sure do go a long way.
Of course one of the great things about parenting is that mostly you get to have the same situations over and over again, and get to change your approaches (including consistency) to see what happens with different approaches. So you get practiced at each thing. And the talent needed for parenting is more intimate that for writing software - it's the talent to make your toddlers laugh, to make your 4 year old confident enough to try something they want to try. It's a set of skills for doing stuff between a particular parent/child system. My tricks might not work for you; my tricks for my first born did not work for my second born.
In addition, you mistakenly exclude great work / achievement from happiness. Spending time with your kids is great, tending your vegetable patch is great, doing great work is also great. Life is not a single purpose process. Happiness is not a single threat process either.
Currently all the critics on the essay are terrible, but you are better at least know to keep it civil.
I will say that it is better to do great work than good work all other things being equal. But other things aren't necessarily equal. I would not want to have the discomfort with idleness that the author of this blog post lauds, for example. Although, if you do have that and are pleased to, then good for you!
If we take a different perspective, I think the author is much less likely to be the target of ire.
>working hard means aiming toward the center — toward the most ambitious problems.
To those in a society hyper-focused on productivity, this can certainly rub people the wrong way because so few are able to dedicate themselves to super ambitious vocations. As the saying goes, the world needs ditch diggers too.
But if your ambition is to cultivate a meaningful, verdant life I don’t see why the author's statement is incompatible with the GP comment. Maybe we just need to broaden our definition about what is worthwhile “work”. It’s certainly possible to do great work cultivating relationships if that is your goal rather than, say, creating a new field of mathematics.
I agree with your point. But I have the feeling that in the context of the linked essay, work is narrowly interpreted as "working at your job".
I might be wrong though.
I would also suspect the author scores highly in the conscientious personality trait. So it would follow they have high levels of discipline, derive pleasure from achievement etc. Maybe the title should be changed to “How to Work Hard (and why that matters to people like me)”
The article strongly correlates this interpretation of "working" with "being happy". Two quotes:
> When I asked Patrick Collison when he started to find idleness distasteful, he said
>> I think around age 13 or 14. I have a clear memory from around then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside, and wondering why I was wasting my summer holiday.
And
> Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful.
My point to the above is: if you feel awful when you don't work hard on a job, by all means work hard on a job.
But if you feel fine only working moderately hard, and that is enough to fund your true passions, pleasures and happiness, do not feel bad for not wanting to work hard on a job.
And the reason I felt the need to say that, is that "hustle culture" [1], which this essay is not far away from in my opinion, might make people believe (incorrectly) that only people who work hard at a job are valuable and worthy human beings.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hustle+culture
Yes, but how do I work hardly?
Having quality time off with your partner is "good work" Raising your children is "good work"
In a more philosophical way. "Work" could be defined as trying to make a change in your reality. So yeah, that life discovering the arts, eating tasteful and healthy food, and spending time with your beloved ones is "good work" and requires ability, practice, and time to do it well.
I very much agree with you. But I have the feeling that in the context of the linked essay, work is narrowly interpreted as "working at your job".
I might be wrong though.
It's along the lines of how people say whatever you do, do it well.
I loved all of my CS courses in college. They were my bread and butter. I also liked a lot of my math courses and even an English class or two. I just wish I didn't take 5 history courses (three as part of an elective set that had to be liberal arts), three unrelated sciences (bio 1+2, and astronomy - imaging science was great and applicable), and two women and gender studies courses (nothing against the major, just unrelated to my degree).
I've been told countless times that these courses help round out a student. Most of them don't. I end up bullshitting them as much as possible and getting a B so I can focus on the courses I care about. A streamlined college education where we remove some (not all) non-major course work and save two or three semesters of time would be amazing, but of course that's two or three semesters of lost cash for a university...
I hear where you're coming from on this (and have been in similar shoes), but I suppose there is more nuance to it, mostly because professors and departments play such an important role in the experience.
The argument of liberal arts electives lending themselves to a richer education experience is a well-intentioned one, and does reap benefits if executed well by the professor, the department, TA's and so on. If not, well, it is just like you mentioned, one is inclined to BS their way out of a class to focus on things more important to them.
Speaking from my anecdotal experience, I have had to take three electives as part of my undergrad: microeconomics, macroeconomics, and a philosophy class on the philosophy of the mind. I have thoroughly enjoyed macro-econ and philosophy simply because the professors put in an incredible amount of work to inspire me to work hard and care about the subject. Micro-econ, on the other hand, was one giant mess and I did not show up to more than 3 lectures over the course of the semester.
I believe in the earnest that students stand to gain so much if some university departments and professors gave a crap about the experience that they are offering.
If you went not knowing how the institution operated, well, that's completely your issue.
You could have chose to seek your studies at any institution that caters to the ideals you've stated in your post. Yet you didn't, and you have the audacity to complain, about how the place you chose to attend operates, while they fully and publicly disclose how they operate
I'm simply baffled by this thought process.
Universities have their historical origins in educating the children of elites in the ways of the world: which by definition is a varied education consisting of many different subjects. I can only guess at the reasons why one can't commonly attend a Computer Science University in the U.S; but there are a handful of institutions in the world that are more focused (The Max Planck Institutes in Germany come to mind)
A world where everyone is a nose-to-the-grindstone overachiever seems like a pretty dreary one to live in.
But: those people aren’t the folks for whom this essay is written.
http://paulgraham.com/spam.html
If you remember email before and after those techniques were implemented into mail clients of the time, it was night and day.
I actually just posted this article on HN today:
https://4dayweek.io/blog/how-to-code-faster
I wouldn’t dare question Paul Graham’s accomplishments, but I’ve always found it odd that some people are so proud of their abstention from television. There are time-wasting things on tv, but there are also time-wasting books, albums etc. I think not watching television and advertising that one didn’t was once an easy intellectual badge of honor. When there were only a few networks and the programming didn’t vary much, perhaps this made sense.
Every so often I still hear someone proudly say that they don’t watch television today. I usually wonder exactly what they mean, now that we are all able to choose the exact film or program we want and play it on demand. Surely it’s not a mark of excellence not to stream, say, the Criterion Channel?
So for my - "No TV" is a easy way to express "I'm trying to maintain a ballance between living a vigorous life and consuming meaningful media"
NOthing wrong with that, but you're not exactly achieving anything by doing it.
It's probably due to hidden third causes (the kind of personality + circumstance + challenges that cause people to abstain from TV are the same that cause this and that positive outcome), but it's there, at least according to lots of anecdata in this very same thread.
First of all, TV and movies have their strengths. Videos can communicate phenomena that are difficult to portray with the written text. They're also very accessible. However, all but the most low-budget shows and movies need to make money. Therefore, they need to appeal to a reasonably large audience. The economic motive limits the depth of the content.
Books can be written by individuals. Great books, and especially classics, are usually written for non-economic reasons. Often the author has a passion or a world view they want to share.
Books, as a medium, are older. Old books are filtered by time. They also let us learn about peoples who have different assumptions than we do. You can do this by reading about other cultures that exist today.
Books, as a medium, let one pause and think. You can write in the margins. It's possible, but more difficult, to do this when watching a show, listening to an audio book, or listening to a podcast. I like that I can listen to podcasts when I run or clean the dishes, but I grasp much less then when I read.
I agree that it's not enough to not watch TV. You need to discriminate regardless of the medium you're consuming, but I believe books are a better way to learn than most other mediums. Therefore, skipping television is probably a good idea if your goal is to develop a deep understanding of the world.
As far as fiction, books have told richer stories, though, again, things are somewhat different in the “prestige TV” era.
Books require constant attention to progress, TV doesn't, for me that's the big difference. If you start to drift out and don't remember the last few paragraphs, you know you can pause, read them again and continue. With a TV, you usually can't go back. You may be conscious that you were not engaged, but you can't take the steps to fix this.
"Hard work" is the mantra that keeps you a slave. "Success stories" are the tasty carrots that keep you toiling away your best years enriching others in pursuit of the things you're supposed to seek in life: Power, success, status. "Life hacks" are little dopamine hits to keep your eye on the carrot.
And the kicker is that those few who actually do attain these things mistakenly attribute it to their own prowess, when it's mostly luck and circumstance with a smattering of ambition and striking deals in the right networks. They then take it upon themselves to perpetuate the system that now feeds them at your expense.
So you go on toiling away, pushing that wheel around and around for years as your masters feed you stories of their success and a promise of your own one-day-someday, until eventually you hopefully realize the futility of enriching these parasites, and get off their treadmill.
The proletariat are only useful to the rich if they're toiling for them.
Edit: In case you're wondering why this tanked to the bottom of the comments despite being at 38 points after 30 minutes, it's because the admins can artificially drop a comment's priority if they don't like it, and prevent further upvotes (downvotes still work though).
Perhaps we could: sell everything and move into a van to live on the road; or get a cheap house boat; or declare bankruptcy and move into a Buddhist monastery; quit jobs to transition into a more mindless one that allows more free time; find a nonprofit organization in a different country to throw oneself into; teach English in a foreign country; etc...
It's like, when we're brooding so much that we're done with life, it just seems like that's the best time to give life a chance, because at that point there's nothing left to lose.
Sure, I could go live in a cabin in the woods. That will mean my wife divorces me, I'd still need a job to pay for taxes and medical bills, I would likely end up incarcerated for not being able to pay child support, and loose the cabin/land anyways.
I get being frustrated if your dream is to live in a cabin in the woods. But it’s hard to fathom being frustrated if you value the relationship with your wife more than living in said cabin. What are the underlying expectations from your life that you feel shut out from? Based on your earlier post, the only expectation seems to be “not to work in a job I hate” which seems completely attainable.
How would you define “a job you like” and how much would you have to make to pay your bills? Are there main drivers for those bills like high cost of living, medical issues, student debt?
Obligatory not GP, but fee very similar. To me, “job I like” is a very difficult category for me to explain. Normally, when browsing jobs, I see something I think would be cool to work on. Most things disinterest me, so I maybe will see one of these once every few months, always woefully unqualified. There’s not really a specific domains, industry, etc. tying them together, just me thinking it sounds cool to work on.
I could work with $80k per year if the healthcare and other benefits are good. It would also be nice to have the ability to advance and make it to a tech lead at $120k.
Name one of those things you can do when you have family members depending on you.
To ignore that element just telegraphs a complete lack of understanding of the basic premise that underpins human existence.
You are making the extremely generous assumption that the person is unbound and able to effectively disappear with no responsibilities to anyone other than themselves.
Among the truly miserable people I have encountered, the most common reason was bearing the burden of one or more dependents. A little sister with severe mental health problems, a sick parent unable to work, a drug-addicted and orphaned nephew. Can't exactly sell the house and move to Japan when your sister needs her SSRI and therapy to not hurt herself.
And the second most common reason was having little or no income at all, for whatever reason, in which case getting a job that they hated would _already_ have been a step up.
Is it to strive for something other than power or status? To “not work hard”? To focus on endeavors that disproportionately enrich yourself?
I do think this type of mindset is perpetuated by those with highly industrious personalities (who would probably ‘work hard’ anyways).
- Relationships: The single biggest deathbed regret is neglecting relationships (either not forming them, or squandering them).
- Finding time to live: The second greatest deathbed regret is missing out on life: Travel, arts, discovery, etc. As you get older many parts of this become a LOT harder.
- Stress free living: Stress is one of the top causes of a short lifespan.
I used to work at K-Mart, one day a windy storm blew in. I was really hustling to get all the shopping carts in before they blew around the lot and damaged vehicles. I was still trying to get my other responsibilities done and noticed the patio furniture was starting to blow around too. I mean at this point I'm literally running to get to everything.
New guy, chatting up the manager. I can't remember the exact reason, but at some point on the same day the manager got upset that my stuff wasn't done. (my stuff being organizing and fronting shelves)
This guy didn't do anything. Like literally just hung out and made the manager laugh.
That's when I knew. Hard working people don't get ahead on their hard work alone. Sure, it gets recognized when you've got good leadership in charge. Honestly though, after that experience, I've seen it over and over.
Do solid work, know what you're doing and help others around you. Just don't kill yourself trying to impress your boss. The old saying goes, "If you want something done, give it to the busiest person."
You're just asking for someone to dump their load on you in some way. If you have the capacity and enjoy your work, get it done. If you don't, and there's no deadlines, why stay late?
The business model of his company is built on the backs of those people. The more of those people he can attract, the richer he becomes (to a first approximation)
This would, in my opinion, truly define their success as luck. I will outwork them, out hustle them, learn things and do things yet I am a whole Everest beneath them with wealth.
But they will strike up a conversation in a hot tub in Mexico and end up partnering up on a major project/deal over mojito's and bubbling water. Whilst I build my landing page stuffed with SEO keywords because I have 'data' to guide me.
All of my 'successes' (granted they are very small but hey you gotta take some wins from time to time) have come from opportunities which arose from conversation.
People who’ve succeeded at achieving ambitious goals are able to look at success from both vantage points: from having yet to succeed and succeeding. You’ll hardly ever, if ever, hear them say it’s solely the consequence of having the right networks and being lucky.
Sure some luck is involved, but most of it is attitude, and this is NOT the attitude.
I say thank God for people with this faulty perspective. It makes it easier to succeed when the playing field is full of people who’ve told themselves it’s futile to even try.
Luck is the trump card of life. You can be smart, hardworking, all the business traits that are espoused by "successful" people, and still fail. As Lefty Gomez said "I'd rather be lucky than good."
Look at Michael Jordan. He had talent and an incredible work ethic. Yet until the Bulls drafted Scottie Pippen, he didn't have the team required to win a championship. Imagine if the Bulls missed out on drafting Pippen and had drafted Dennis Hopson instead? Would Jordan have still become the GOAT?
Yes, people tend to adopt a personal narrative that maximizes their own moral status, so successful people artificially minimizes the effect of circumstance on average and unsuccessful people artificially minimize the effect of choice.
But we don't have to rely on competing personal narratives weighted by who has the resources to reach a larger audience; these are concrete fact questions, and there is plenty of evidence that (1) circumstance beyond personal traits has a very large role, (2) personal traits contribute in ways different than the popular narrative of the successful, and (3) the personal traits that contribute are themselves largely products of (mostly inherited and early childhood) circumstance, not active choice.
Exactly, that's what I'm saying about rationalizing. The only thing those who've yet to succeed lack is the vantage point of the successful. So I'd argue the successful are operating with an information advantage.
No, that's a pre-Enlightment (or maybe postmodernist, it can be hard to tell the difference at times) attitude.
What both most who have succeeded and most who have not succeeded lack who don’t actively seek it out is the perspective of structured, broad information gathering, analysis, and hypothesis testing beyond self-justifying rationalization of personal experience.
But no one needs to lack that, because plenty of that has been done, so there is no need to rely on duelling self-justifying constructed narratives to understand the world.
You fell for the classic survivorship bias fallacy.
It kinds of reminds me of a published story on hn [0]
> "That is why we like noise and activity so much. That is why imprisonment is such a horrific punishment. That is why the pleasure of being alone is incomprehensible. That is, in fact, the main joy of the condition of kingship, because people are constantly trying to amuse kings and provide them with all sorts of distraction.—The king is surrounded by people whose only thought is to entertain him and prevent him from thinking about himself. King though he may be, he is unhappy if he thinks about it"
It seems that being in the passive mode or `flow` is a therapy itself, we can't seems to even stand non-productive ourselves to a certain extent. And modern convenient distractions only steer ourselves down this path even further.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25482927
The arrogance! This is one of my pet peeves at work: When someone looks at another person's work and judges its value or difficulty. "That's easy." "That's pointless."
Ugh.
Everyone else's job looks easy and/or pointless until you're the one doing it. Then it's important and challenging (hopefully).
Most people who feel their own work is pointless simply don't understand how their role fits into the bigger picture. I assure you, the profit motive is very good at weeding out truly unnecessary costs. It may lag, sometimes. But if there's a dollar being spent that doesn't need to be spent, someone is going to eventually find out and eliminate the expense.
I think this mentality comes from a deep need to feel superior to others. So when we can't understand or appreciate someone's job, it feels powerful to declare their work easy or pointless.
But that's just ignorance, arrogance, and, frankly, bullying by other means: I'll make myself feel bigger by making you feel small, and I'll do it in front of all of my friends so they can affirm how big and tough and awesome I am.
>the profit motive is very good at weeding out truly unnecessary costs.
For context, in my home town of Sudbury, Ontario, our leading university (Laurentian U) kept growing and investing in new things. There's lots of debate around the merits of what they were spending on. But it caught up to them in the form of bankruptcy.
One of the few things I like about capitalism (there aren't many, but that's just me) is that it gives a laser-clear focus. Just because an organization is a non-profit doesn't change that. At some point, you either bring in more revenue than you spend, or you fail.
Governments that continuously overspend eventually have their debts catch up to them, too. (See: Every empire in history.)
Sometimes people study stuff for intellectual fulfillment. I haven't studied gender studies, but according to HN, if I were to study sociology I'd be an ass with a pointless degree.
PG’s point is that those degrees have no extrinsic value, even if they provide lots of time to think, learn, and gain enjoyment. That can certainly be valuable, but it isn’t necessary or helpful in achieving success.
Nothing wrong with that, and his choice of wording wasn’t ideal, but that was my takeaway.
Is lying in the grass pointless?
It's not because it doesn't impact your field/industry, isn't marketable and profitable, or because your politics don't comingle with them, that such studies are pointless or useless.
Handwaving humanities on the premise that they are humanities is just another very stereotypical show of STEM arrogance.
You talk about "STEM arrogance", but maybe you should take some time to analyze where you feelings comes from, and if you're not suffering from a huge bias against these fields yourself. If the defenders of social sciences aren't even able to apply their teachings to themselves, people have the right to be skeptic about the value of their fields.
I don't like the "STEM arrogance" bit (I wouldn't go so far as to say there is anything inherently arrogant about those in STEM), but I also don't think you can ever fairly judge the value of someone else's field.
You don't know why they went into the field -- I promise it's because they saw more value in it for themselves than other fields.
You don't why the school offers such programs, but I promise they wouldn't offer it if they didn't think there was some demand for it. (Programs that don't get students to enrol stop existing pretty quickly.)
So while I don't believe in "STEM arrogance" or "HN arrogance" (I'm here because I believe this is one of the least arrogant and most open-minded online communities I've ever encountered), I do believe it's arrogant to proclaim yourself the authority on whether someone else's field has value. Just because you don't see the value doesn't mean it's not there. It might even be more valuable than your own.
By the way, not sure if this was intentional on your part, but "maybe you should take some time to analyze where your feelings come from" is very much an idea that came from the humanities. So there's a certain amount of irony in your comments.
> By the way, not sure if this was intentional on your part, but "maybe you should take some time to analyze where your feelings come from" is very much an idea that came from the humanities. So there's a certain amount of irony in your comments.
There's no irony except the one I was highlighting: someone is saying that humanities are important and have lots of value, while not applying that really fundamental concept.
I would say that, like most interdisciplinary and many other degrees, its not particularly useful as a vocational credential outside academia.
OTOH, gender studies as a component of or elective within other degree programs that are more vocationally useful outside of academia is useful, and you don't have that without gender studies professors who you don’t have without people focussing on gender studies.
You can say that the degree "leads to no jobs", but saying it's pointless seems like you are angry at it when it is just a subset of social science
Is History a _useful_ degree? Is Economics? Is Politics? Psychology or Sociology?
I actually don't want to make those determinations. I don't think I'm qualified. I have a rough view that highly specific degrees are worse overall than general ones. Eg Actuarial Mathematics vs Mathematics. Marine Biology vs Biology.
But those are personal dinner table views, and I'm not certain I'm right! I certainly don't want to define policy on it, and I'm not sure I know of anyone I think is qualified.
History: often useful
Economics: can be useful, has a lot of fiction mixed in
Politics: irritatingly useful
Psychology: mostly garbage
Sociology: almost entirely garbage
Who’s to determine these criteria? And aren’t they just opinions instead of real facts?
Likely the criteria made up in the heads of those who feel they've somehow been "wronged" in life by somebody who participates in said studies.
That aside, let's say that a degree is "pointless" if it doesn't lead to good job prospects. By that definition, there's an awful lot of fields of study that are "pointless".
For example, I love philosophy. It was my favourite topic in school. But the only job that a philosophy degree seems to make available is that of teaching philosophy.
I think what we're seeing now is the market at work. There was, for a long time, a push to simply get a post-secondary education. It didn't matter which field. Just get a degree! Now we have a couple generations of heavily indebted students in fields that did not improve their job prospects, and they're telling the next generation: don't do it.
So I think we're going to keep seeing financial pressure on these fields until they shrivel up and go away. Capitalism at work, for better or worse.
But that's not the same as thinking these fields were pointless. I see tremendous social value in them. Having entire generations raised with a healthier and more accurate understanding of race, gender, class struggle, etc., is good for society. It's just not good at creating jobs.
So I guess my point (no pun intended) is that "pointless" is in the eye of the beholder. No one sets about wasting money pointlessly, and the things that you see no value in may be of great value to many others. You're not the arbitrator of what has value. Nor am I. But the market does a pretty damn good job.
Just because you think something is pointless doesn't make it so.
It would be much more truthful to say that everything in life is genuinely pointless than what you've said - and I'm saying this as a lifelong multidisciplined engineer.
Perhaps you meant to say useless instead of pointless? Yes, I would agree, that the overwhelming vast majority, if not all of gender studies degrees are useless in the world/societies we live in. But pointless? No.
I'd argue that the social sciences need more people involved in them, not less. For example, the way behavioural psychology has been weaponised during the pandemic by political actors (particularly the British government) has been very unethical in my opinion but as the social sciences are often seen by the general public as a bit woolly there's not been an awful lot of publicised expert criticism in the same way, say, a government denying genetics in favour of LaMarckism would put angry biologists directly into every newspaper.
What's the point of this essay, to convince people who don't want to work hard to work hard? Is this meant to chastise people? Motivate? Demoralize? Self-congratulate?
ADHD makes this hard, fwiw, and PG is not saying this mode is right for everyone. But I would agree with that idea: working hard isn’t natural, at least for some people, but it is a requirement for attaining success. If you’re going to work hard, it makes sense to do it on something you love. And there are people who thrive on hard work.
There are a bunch of prerequisites, some of which he explicitly states (find something you love, eg) and some implicit (sometimes you have to take the job you don’t like, because circumstances dictate that; families, eg).
But it certainly isn’t for everyone.
The Polgar sisters(1) serve as evidence that while "natural ability" may be a thing it's even less important than you might imagine. Instead this and work like that of Ericsson(2) on the development of expertise point to repeatable environmental factors for success.
I look forward to a day when we can eliminate this phrase and replace it with measurable phenomena and repeatable processes.
(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r
(2) - https://smile.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Han...
In decades past, he'd discuss similar issues ("how to identify a good hacker", stuff like that), but the focus was on the talent and what it meant and how it worked. Now... suddenly this kind of genetic stratification is just a given? Not a good smell.
And modern educational thought (be it "woke" or not), has very much moved away from a focus on the Best and Brightest students and onto a theory of education that prioritizes the needs of the disadvantaged. PG's kids just aren't what people are talking about. Educators tend to assume they'll do just fine given their existing advantages.
But PG didn't do fine, in his mind. He thinks society is moving in the wrong direction.
Which is ironic, because if anything modern educational environments (my kids are almost the same age) are much MORE inclusive and benign and much less likely to produce the kind of anxiety he experienced. His kids will do better than he did BECAUSE the school brings everyone else into the discussion and doesn't drive a competetive prison. He just can't see it.
If you tell people that if they work 12+ hours a day in their 20s that they would be multi-millionaires or billionaires, then almost everyone would accept that position. The real world doesn't work that way and using statistical outliers like Gates is disingenuous to the discussion about hard work and how it applies to normal people.
Billionaire isn’t a realistic goal, but millionaire is a common outcome for software developers who work hard through their 20s and 30s now. It doesn’t even require a FAANG job or living in a super expensive city any more, just wise job selection, a reasonable amount of financial savvy and budget adherence, and a deliberate effort to work on your career path.
You don’t need to own substantial equity in a company in your 20s to have a reason to work hard, as long as you’re doing work that builds your skill set, reputation, and network. Everything you do (or don’t do) has some impact on your persona capital over time.
Working hard in the mailroom or stocking shelves at a grocery store isn’t going to translate into a successful software career, but making an impact and helping people get things done at several companies through your 20s is the easiest way to build a strong network that opens doors in your 30s and beyond
The "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. You seem to be saying that privileged people become successful, which is kind of a tautology.
No, it's not. It's common for some FAANG engineers. It's not common at all for the industry as a whole.
Look at all these comments doubling-down on the "7%/$10k-per-year" arithmetic, as if the only thing that affects savings rates is knowledge of this basic math. For a data driven community there sure are a lot of people ignoring the data.
I think this is largely due to inflation. A million dollars in the 50s or 60s would be around 10 million today, while at the turn of the 20th century when the term really became popular it would be worth 30 million today. A "millionaire" of the time is really living a different lifestyle and can likely afford a very extravagant upper class lifestyle purely on interest of their wealth.
With housing costs having risen so much faster still beyond inflation, today you can easily be "a millionaire" simply by having a bit of equity in a modest home in a costal city.
If I'm wrong, please correct me, but my interpretation of what the person you're replying to was trying to get at was that modest savings from a 23+ year old software engineer, to the tune of $800/month or $10,000/year (this could be 401k match and contributions) will get you pretty close to a million.
Using this calculator[1] with an assumed rate of 6.7%, $0 initial investment, $800/month, compounded semi-annually and a variance of 1 netted $891,000 within 30 years.
I think $800/month for nearly all software engineers is doable.
[1] https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calcula...
There are a lot of variables too. $800,000 with a paid off house is different than $800,000 and still renting, for example. Depends on your country of residence too, etc.
But you can get to that point by saving, using common assumptions.
$800/month is $9.6K per year. Approximately half of the maximum 401K contribution limit, so it can be tax-advantaged as well. If you can swing the full 401K maximum, you’ll hit the millionaire status even faster. Add some taxable savings and it can be done in a decade without getting too extreme. A married couple doing this together makes it even more achievable.
Unless someone has maxed out their career options (unlikely) almost everyone in software could get a $10-20K bump in the coming year through negotiation or changing jobs. Allocate that raise entirely to tax-advantaged savings and stay consistent for a few decades and it will add up to a million dollars.
It doesn’t require FAANG compensation or extreme frugality. It just requires consistency over 20-30 years.
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics
401ks are taxed (either a Roth or Traditional 401k) but are tax advantaged.
Please feel free to contact me directly. Happy to help. It'll be difficult to get to $1mm in purchasing power of today's value in 10 years without saving around $50,000/year or getting extremely lucky.
Consistent moderate savings on top tier income, sure.
> $800/month is $9.6K per year. Approximately half of the maximum 401K contribution limit,
Also, approximately 1/3 of national median household disposable income after taxes and transfers (NB: not essential expenses, just taxes and transfers) in the United States.
> A married couple doing this together makes it even more achievable.
Yes, you can become a half-millionaire much faster than a millionaire—brilliant observation.
> Unless someone has maxed out their career options (unlikely) almost everyone in software could get a $10-20K bump in the coming year through negotiation or changing jobs.
“Software” includes a lot of different occupations, but most of the nob-management ones have median compensation around or substantially below $100K; so you are suggesting most people are leaving upward of 10-20% on the table. That's...unlikely.
> It just requires consistency over 20-30 years.
Asserting that that is easy in software would be more convincing if we were more than 20-30 years from a major industry crash, or had some structural guarantee of it not happening again.
Not completely convincing even then, but more convincing...
Do keep in mind that the context for this thread was software engineers. The median pay makes saving $10,000/year very, very achievable.
> “Software” includes a lot of different occupations, but most of the non-management ones have median compensation around or substantially below $100K; so you are suggesting most people are leaving upward of 10-20% on the table. That's...unlikely.
Below $100k sure, but closer to $60,000 or so which again makes this amount of savings very achievable. My first job out of college was exactly this amount and I was saving about $1,000/month in a MCOL city. And if you're making that amount and living in a HCOL of city you may need to consider changing your location. You might not like it, but that's reality.
> Asserting that that is easy in software would be more convincing if we were more than 20-30 years from a major industry crash, or had some structural guarantee of it not happening again.
This is only a problem if you happen to retire right when a market collapse happens. Even then you adjust your withdrawal rate or try to put retirement off a bit. For those saving 20-30 years, those market dips are buying opportunities as the ROI of the market compounds over time. Given what we know, there's no reason to assume things won't just keep chugging along, at least for the purposes of general discussion. You can say that it won't and give great reasons for that, but I think it's fair to state those up-front.
If you want to discuss specifics I think that would make sense, but given that the person your responding to and myself were speaking generally about the software engineering profession (sure maybe there's some confusion there but for my part I was speaking about software engineers) so obviously there's some generalizations and built-in assumptions that are pretty common in the finance space.
Hardly easy but not out of the realm of possibility for a persistent and highly paid software developer.
Budget has always been very frugal. I make my own cheap beer/wine, make soap, grow food in a garden, almost never take vacations (honeymoon was the only expensive one), cook 99% of the time at home, etc.
You can't trust companies to keep their word. Working hard gets you no where. The greedy people at the top are the ones who get everything and will screw you over constantly. And I'm not even talking about success in terms of $200k+ salary and fancy titles like CTO etc. I'm just talking about success as making it to the natural progression of senior dev and techlead with a salary over $100k.
But I must be a loser who didn't work hard since other people made it.
My reading of the Essay was that hard work was necessary for great success not sufficient, which would be a very different claim.
We can abstract this a little. You don't have to work hard. You just have to appear useful to the people in power.
I worked hard in the past. I'm not working hard now - I'm really slacking now that I know I'm screwed. I'm still getting paid the same.
The article is not titled “How to be rich af”. It’s How to do Great Work.
So Gates is the example here because he built a huge company that made software used by almost every human on earth, and because every reader will know who he is.
I guess the author could have used RMS, or John Carmack, or Bill Joy, but that would have excluded people who aren’t into free software or gaming or Unix etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door
The point is that the vast majority of people are not going to be financially independent by 30, or even 40.
Use inflation-adjusted calculators. Any good savings and retirement calculator will have an option for this.
Inflation is commonly misunderstood in long-term financial planning. It’s important to consider inflation for expenses and future savings amount, but many people don’t realize that inflation will also life their investments to some degree.
For example, if a common house costs $5,000,000 on your future retirement date and you’ve been saving your money in cash this whole time, you’re in a bad spot. However, if you buy a house in your 30s that meets your needs, the value of your house will also rise with inflation. Inflation is also loosely coupled to rising stock prices (except for hyper-inflation or other economic catastrophes) and asset prices. Just don’t keep your money all in cash, because that’s the only guaranteed way to lose out to inflation.
This is really getting off topic.
Do you really think using Gates as an example is legitimate to talk about hard work for normal people? That was the main point.
The successful people I know mostly got there by luck. Sure hard work and intelligence played a role, but I know people who were smarter and worked harder and didn't get half as far.
Are you arguing that people shouldn't work hard or work to improve their knowledge or networks because its not important and won't impact their lives?
Yes he was interested and worked hard but there's a lot more to it.
In the mid 1990's, the top 20% could get to $1M with some good financial discipline and hard work. Today? Maybe the top 1% could save $1M, and unless you inherited the family home, you're still living a lifestyle that is somewhat median in 1995 terms.
The fact that $1M is still some kind of mental benchmark that we hold up for being "rich" tells us everything we need to know about today's economic conditions.
So the principles of the book may still apply, but the outcomes are worlds away from reality.
> The fact that $1M is still some kind of mental benchmark that we hold up for being "rich" tells us everything we need to know about today's economic conditions.
This is a very interesting comment. I wonder why the mentality of this benchmark amount hasn't changed. Economic conditions certainly have, $1mm isn't the same now as it would have been in 1970. Maybe it's a financial independence thing? At $1mm you really are independently wealthy in most cases.
Even with kids. Though that makes the budgeting a little more tight.
On $1MM, one can almost certainly safely take out $35k/year (after taxes on any gains) and still grow the portfolio (so as to offset inflation). That's definitely sufficient to support the barest minimum of "lower middle class" living expenses. Without kids. Add a kid and it blows right up.
But, yes, to support an upper middle class style of living one would certainly need more.
This doesn't strike me as true. A big facet to consider also is liquidity. Are you talking about $1M in net worth? If so, I disagree with you: a big chunk of that $1M is likely very illiquid for a younger person, tied up in a house and retirement accounts with penalties for withdrawal. But sure, if you have managed to save $1M above and beyond equity in your home and tax advantaged retirement accounts, then you are probably independently wealthy (but your actual net worth is probably significantly higher than $1M).
My point wasn't to really give a breakdown of all savings forms, but just to show that saving $10,000/year with historical returns will net you close to $900,000. You don't even have to put it in a tax-advantaged account. Though you should.
And that amount is plenty to retire on and be independently wealthy at least today and for the next 5 or so years. Though I guess maybe that's not the best choice of words since what I mean to say is that you can just live pretty comfortably without working - more financially independent than "wealthy".
Certainly economic conditions can change, so the more the better.
And just to be clear, you could take $1mm right now with 0 assets and buy a decent enough house for <$200,000 and pay pretty low taxes. You'd still have $800,000 left over to appreciate with low cost of living in the vast majority of America.
On the house point, people always seem to forget that people already live someplace and also often have families. No, it is not possible to find a house for a family of four where I live for less than $200k.
> No, it is not possible to find a house for a family of four where I live for less than $200k
Well we weren’t talking about you specifically, but Americans in general. If you need $10mm retire in the Bay Area or something g ya know that’s just what you’ll personally have to work on. I don’t have an answer for you. You can buy affordable houses and live comfortably in almost anywhere in America. In fact there are people who retire and move to other countries, or live very frugally on much less, like $400,000.
200k is unrealistic in most population centers in the country, not just the Bay Area (I don't live there).
> but most people (especially high earners at time of contribution) put their savings in traditional retirement accounts, for good reason.
Not so clear cut. So first if you’re a high enough earner you’re adjusted family income is >$200,000 or so before the Roth IRA starts being phased out for you. So we’re already talking about the top 10% or so of all income earners in the U.S.
Second, you tend to put the money in a traditional IRA, but you might withdraw (probably actually) less than you were making with your income. So if you’ve been phased out and can only contribute to a Traditional IRA, depending on when you want to retire you might withdraw $100,000/year (or less) and potentially pay a lower tax rate on that income then your marginal contribution rate on a Roth.
Lastly, you can still contribute $19,000 to a Roth 401k which doesn’t have contribution challenges related to income (at least for the income the vast majority of people would ever make - idk what happens if you make $1mm or something).
Your point about housing (and mine) would benefit from actual data. My contention is that for greater than 50% of people in the US, that they cannot, without moving (say the concrete metric here is a move that doesn't require children to switch schools), purchase a home for $200k or less. This is my intuition based on experience with housing markets and a general sense for how the population is distributed in the country, but it may well be wrong.
On the retirement account front, what I'm saying is that most professionals in their 40s will have a large amount in traditional 401k/IRA accounts, and much less in Roth or non-tax advantaged accounts. I believe this is accurate.
I think the confusion in our conversation is that you seem to be talking about what people can do, if they're focused from an early age on accumulating liquid savings, whereas I'm making a descriptive point that most people, even with large net worth, do not have most of it in liquid assets.
This must be a misunderstanding. I never made this claim so now this wasn't the original goal posts. Apologies if I somehow gave off that interpretation. I actually was pretty explicit I think when saying you could save $10,000 (this is cash) via a 401k or other investment vehicle and the math works out to be around $900,000 saved.
> Your point about housing (and mine) would benefit from actual data. My contention is that for greater than 50% of people in the US, that they cannot, without moving (say the concrete metric here is a move that doesn't require children to switch schools), purchase a home for $200k or less. This is my intuition based on experience with housing markets and a general sense for how the population is distributed in the country, but it may well be wrong.
Again, not a claim I've made. I've simply stated that you can buy a house for less than $200,000 and live just fine (this was based on accumulating a million dollars and that there was an assertion that you couldn't live off of that). It's trivially easy to see for yourself on Zillow or via another product that you can buy an affordable enough house and live just fine in most of the U.S..
> I think the confusion in our conversation is that you seem to be talking about what people can do, if they're focused from an early age on accumulating liquid savings, whereas I'm making a descriptive point that most people, even with large net worth, do not have most of it in liquid assets.
Yea that about sums it up. So I'm not sure where you're really going with any of this. I guess it's cool as a general assertion (and I think it would be interesting to discuss) but I'm bewildered as to why it would used as a rebuttal to something I've said. That's why I asked why you were shifting goalposts.
Then on top of that $10,000 maybe you buy a house or something. You have the rest of your money to do stuff with too.
The financially independent thing really depends on individual circumstances and desires. For some, $1mm isn’t enough. For others it’s more money than they can spend for the rest of their lives.
> > At $1mm you really are independently wealthy in most cases.
Firstly, my working definition of "independently wealthy" is when you can stop working and keep living. I think this is the common definition, but it's possible you're using a different one.
So from that quote and that definition, what I have been saying is that I don't think it is true that "in most cases" people with $1m are independently wealthy. I think that in most cases, those people have most of that $1m net worth tied up in their house and in illiquid traditional retirement accounts, and could not actually live off of just the remaining liquid wealth once those are subtracted. That's really all I've been saying. It's based on just that one quote that hinges on "independently wealthy" and "in most cases".
> Firstly, my working definition of "independently wealthy" is when you can stop working and keep living. I think this is the common definition, but it's possible you're using a different one.
You are independently wealthy in America at $1mm and do not need to work. It takes very little time to see that hit is the general case. You can buy a cheap house, and buy groceries and probably actually grow the principle amount.
Now from here you can say like it’s not enough money for you, or you don’t want to leave California (or wherever) but you can easily live off of that amount of money in the vast majority of America. You can also say that people accumulated that money in some distribution and all of that too. But even if you had that amount in a house + retirement you can sell the house and move to a different location or downsize or something. If you have a million in assets you’re making a choice to work. Period. There might be some thing you don’t want to give up, or some place you want to live. That’s fine, but you’re making a choice after you’ve become independently wealthy.
It really depends on the assets and the choices you want to make. Generally speaking, if you have $1mm worth of assets, you do not need to work. That's it. Period.
If you find that you need to work, you're making some other choice to work because of some factor that's overriding your desire to not work.
The liquidity of the assets is only relevant if you want to talk about specific cases, and even then it's likely not an issue. You can sell your house. You can withdraw from an IRA or 401k. Etc.
And nobody really has that kind of money early in their career, except maybe the top 1%. You either make a lot of money and spend most of it on housing, or you make a little bit of money and spend most of it on housing.
We should talk more about how people can do it and how we can help those who don’t make enough money instead. Maybe instead of paying into Social Security we could develop a different savings plan?
So at least from my napkin math plus estimates, you've probably got less than a 10% chance of making enough to save any money at all for your first job out of college.
And I don't know about you, but I spent the first 5 years out of college paying off student loans...and I had a pretty low student loan burden compared to most. And many others might start families sooner than you've chosen to, which is expensive as well...and half of them will get divorced which is even more expensive.
I don't have anything against teaching people to do the best they can with the shit hand they've been dealt in life. But selling that by claiming that average people can be millionaires (even in today's terms, let alone 1990's terms) is selling an expectation that will never pan out for the vast majority of them. Any belief in the truth of that claim inherently relies on a very privileged view of the world, either because they were born with a silver spoon, or because they don't truly understand the scope of expenses that other people face, or because they think that average people are even capable of the kinds of jobs that they hold. It is flat out irresponsible to peddle this fantasy.
The person making $50,000 may have other benefits. Items like social security and a lower cost lifestyle in the first place. So maybe for them saving $5,000 is doable, and so they wind up with $500,000 and social security. Maybe that person marries someone and combined they make $90,000 and can save $8,000. I don't know. Y
> And I don't know about you, but I spent the first 5 years out of college paying off student loans...and I had a pretty low student loan burden compared to most.
Yes. I joined the Army to pay for college. Nobody in my family has ever attended. I didn't know what the SAT was. That took up 4 years, and I had no savings (obviously never learned what stocks were or anything like that, though there was some government program called the TSP but I was taught to be weary of the government of course so I didn't invest), and then I spent 3 years getting my undergraduate degree so I was around 25 when I started working. So about the same age, at least investing-wise.
> And many others might start families sooner than you've chosen to, which is expensive as well...and half of them will get divorced which is even more expensive.
Sure. Plenty of things that could happen. They could also choose to start a business, or marry a spouse that makes significantly more than they do. Idk. All kinds of things happen.
> Okay, but you have to understand that you're exceptional...at least top 1% in terms of capability.
Ha. I appreciate the accolades but promise that this is certainly not the case. I'm opinionated, and I'm no dummy, but I wouldn't consider myself exceptional in any meaningful sense to me personally. Maybe statistically.
Moreover, the median SE salary is just below $100k/year[2]. It's uncommon (certainly not rare but uncommon) for a SE to be able to have a sustained savings rate necessary to achieve $1MM by retirement.
So maybe "peddling a fantasy" is a bit strong, but it's not exactly wrong. For most software engineers (over 50%) it simply is not a realistic scenario.
[1] https://personalfinancedata.com/networth-percentile-calculat...
[2] https://personalfinancedata.com/income-percentiles-by-occupa...
And it’s even worse because if they actually retire at 65 they had like a good 40 years of compound interest too, 10 years is a big difference versus the 30 we were talking about.
Americans are notoriously poor savers, also per the US government, but a large percentage of all households -- at least 40% -- could fairly easily accumulate $1M if they were diligent about saving and investing a decent fraction of that surplus income. The surplus income is available but Americans choose to use that income for things other than saving and investing.
And the early years are the most important ones.
That sounds like a lot of software developers are in a position to put away $10k+/year to me.
Source: BLS, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
Are you suggesting individuals should not be saving for retirement or long term financial well being? If so I'm not sure I have anything to offer to you.
Or you ( or a member of your family) could have a debilitating/rare disease and your insurance does not cover all the treatments for it.
Or you could have been fired and opened your own business and your partners fleeced you out (ask me how I know)
Or you live in a country where salaries are below 45 k /y.
And so on ...
You have a very naive, simplistic and privileged worldview so I hope for your own sake you never have to leave that cocoon.
This definitely implies a questionable decision.
> Or you ( or a member of your family) could have a debilitating/rare disease and your insurance does not cover all the treatments for it
Sure, there could be rare cataclysmic events that drain you of your financial resources. That's not really on-topic to what the discussion is about though.
> Or you could have been fired and opened your own business and your partners fleeced you out (ask me how I know)
This is 100% a bad decision. Do not take money out of your 401k to start a business.
> Or you live in a country where salaries are below 45 k /y.
Then you likely live in a country where the CoL is significantly lower than in the US and the dynamics of retirement are very different. I'm speaking 100% from an American-centric point of view.
> You have a very naive, simplistic and privileged worldview so I hope for your own sake you never have to leave that cocoon.
I'm sorry my short internet comment on a technology forum is not comprehensive enough to account for all potential scenarios and nuance. I grew up in poverty, and I'm going to do everything I can to prevent myself from ending back up in that situation.
I grew up in poverty, too. Not the caricature "TV in every room" "fake-poverty" nonsense some use to try to "prove" poor Americans aren't poor, but actual poverty. Like, almost homeless, single-mom skipping meals so me and my brother could eat, exposed to drugs and gun violence, pest-infested inadequate housing, style poverty. In America. I can do the poverty olympics all damn day with anyone here, even those from so-called under-developed nations.
I am...skeptical...of your statement. I'm rich now thanks to an IPO--and my hard work in being in a position to be employed at a successful company. But I recognize that a lot of what you've written there is just...wrong. It's "right" enough in some respects, but just so very wrong in so many ways.
But perhaps the idea of "being a millionaire" you're thinking of is not that you slowly manage it over a long career, but that it happens more quickly?
It's not about eventually becoming a millionaire. It's about using Gates and other successful outliers as a pattern for normal people. There are tons of smart and hardworking people out there who are not very successful. There's a lot more going on than just hard work.
I.e. choosing companies that have (or eventually get) publicly traded stock that goes up a bunch.
There are whole classes of people who sit around all day trying to figure out which companies will grow and succeed and which ones won't. They aren't really that good at it.
There's a certain point of working hard enough to clear the interview bar of the FAANG companies or similar, but beyond that your financial success is largely tied to a favorable roll of the dice.
Right, but it might lead to satisfaction regardless. Even the most menial positions are often rewarded. I have worked a few menial jobs, and effort is even more important. When I worked hard and went the extra mile when required, I got rewarded with better shifts, more flexibility and more respect. It also personally felt good.
I find that people who don't work hard and are apathetic about the work they do are often deeply unhappy, while people that take pride in their work and work hard are satisfied. The best feeling I get in the day is after a grueling workout. There are health benefits sure, but its not worth the amount of discomfort and suffering I have to endure. If there were a pill that gave me the same benefits, I would be less satisfied than putting in the work. But maybe that's just me.
People who work hard often have better personal circumstances as well. Who would want to be with a partner that just spends their life going through the motions with no real purpose or drive?
Putting the extra effort into a menial job isn't "a grueling workout", it's mortgaging your body and health for a price you'll regret in 20 years.
I don't think menial work leads to "mortgaging your body". Some jobs sure, but those very physically demanding jobs pay well because the alternative would be a job that pays equally as poorly and is not physically demanding. You can always default to working at a grocer or fast food job.
Those factory jobs at Amazon that are fairly grueling pay a lot better than similar jobs in those areas w/ that skill set. People don't really work them very long either due to the demands. So you can do that for a few years, make more money and hopefully invest it in building out a more valuable skill-set or give better opportunities to your children.
Maybe if you're working grueling construction jobs or consuming fast food and soda for 3 meals a day because you're too busy for anything else.
However, having worked in an industry with a lot of people who are on their feet and doing physical work throughout the day, I've come to realize that sedentary jobs like programming are a huge risk to long-term health. Sitting at a desk all day every day takes a toll on the body. The people who were active and moving about every day for decades are still in good physical health years later. The people who sit at desks all day (without compensating with exercise) accumulate a lot of health problems and weight gain if they're not careful.
I've had good success hiring some bootcamp grads for this reason. Some of them may not have the years of experience that senior candidates or even college grads might have, but you can find a lot of hard working and highly motivated people among bootcamp grads.
This is especially true for those who came from careers that involved a lot of hard work or manual labor. It's refreshing to work with people who enjoy getting things done and can appreciate how lucky we all are to be able to sit in air conditioned offices and type on computers all day. Contrast this with some of the perpetually disgruntled college grads I've seen lately who think we're taking advantage of them unless we pay them Google L6 compensation that they saw on levels.fyi .
I think the network effect is highly overblown for the average person. Sure, networks can be good for the people in the top 10%, but I don't see it really helping most of us because what are the chances our average friends will be in a position to hire us to a high position.
I don't see an average developer being even a millionaire after a decade. Average salary is about $100k, but might be skewed due to the high cost areas. That's $1M before tax, living expenses, etc. Maybe you could hit $1M after 2 decades if lucky.
Get hired, contribute to your 401(k), buy a house, and do that for 15 years and in most markets I think your change in net worth over the 15 years is more likely to be >$1MM than less.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-developer-salary...
BLS shows median as $110k
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
That median includes QA and Testers, do folks in these job titles always code? If not I wouldn't call them SWE/SDE.
It’s frustrating because increasing housing supply has so many positive effects for the group. It’d make life so much easier.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/2018/may/oes151132.htm
The single highest ROI thing you can do for your life is to drop that "very".
Your friends don't need to be in a position to hire you into a high position. They just need to be in a position to recommend you for a good job that might be a step up. Or put in a good word for you when you apply at their company.
They don't even need to be friends. In fact, most of the time I get my back-channel references from people who simply worked at a company at the same time as another person.
Network effects aren't always obvious. I can't tell you how many times I've changed my mind on a candidate (in either direction) due to a friend of a friend giving me some more info about their experience working with the candidate.
None of that requires working 12+ hours a day. I am one employee out of x,000 at my company. The difference between me giving 75% and me giving 150% (hours) seems very unlikely to affect the stock price in any meaningful way.
Equally, working hard as a software engineer isn't going to translate into the "uncapped salary" class of employment like CEO/CTO, VP, Founder, etc. There's a class ceiling where only a certain type of person gains entry. You can hard-work yourself to the bone writing code, but that "VP of Engineering" role is going to go to the external candidate who is already "VP of Engineering" somewhere else, and who has been some flavor of Director or VP his whole career. Jobs are a lot more class-stratified and career immobile than we like to think they are. This reminds me of a previous "hard work" discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27517158
If everyone worked super hard, still only minority would got these positions.
> There's a class ceiling where only a certain type of person gains entry
It is true that working hard alone is not going to get you into a VP role, but working hard on the right things has a much higher likelihood of accomplishing that. Impact != hours put in, and vice versa, and frankly this is where a lot of the hard working people find themselves. Doing a difficult, but low leverage activity (relatively speaking) really well does not automatically entitle one to a role that is intended to be high leverage, all the time.
It's almost never the smart, hard working kid whose parents were factory workers in Pittsburgh, who hard-worked their way up from the mail room.
EDIT: Maybe not a perfect comparison, but how many current active duty 4 star military officers started out their careers as enlisted grunts rather than as officers?
There are also a lot of senior military officers at the O-5 to O-6 level who started out enlisted. The relative lack at the O-7 level and above is due more to retirement age limits than anything else. If a service member did a couple enlisted tours, then went to college and OCS, they usually just run out of time.
lol, the world isn't limited to SF and FAANG.
Software developers are the new factory workers, becoming millionaire is far from "common"
In some bubble yes. There are 10s of millions of software developers in the world, and hardly 1% of them is any kind of millionaire...
If you read the essay through, he never said "hard work == long hours of work". He explicitly wrote "Trying hard doesn't mean constantly pushing yourself to work, though."
This TED talk can be a revelation: https://www.ted.com/talks/bj_miller_what_really_matters_at_t...
And the Bill Gates thing? PLEASE. Yeah, I agree with the previous comment. A horrible example.
Bill Gates was one of the most lucky sons of bitches in the history of the planet. Born to wealthy parents, he was impossible to deal with, so they took him to a therapist (again, a lucky pick) that advised them to set Gates free. They put him in this prep school with other privileged kids, and like a meteor made of pure gold, by luck, it had a computer. Almost no schools had a computer at the time.
Hard work is only part of the equation. You have to be at the right place, at the right time. Most people never are.
Might as well read the next article on "Ten morning habits of billionaires". Luck. Is. A. Factor.
As Cicero pointed out, we all suffer from 'survivorship bias': that is, we confine our evidence to that adduced from those few who succeed or survive, and ignore the silent evidence of all those who didn't make it. The graveyard is silent, the awards ceremony is noisy.
[1] https://sunwords.com/2009/08/24/to-understand-success-and-fa...
This essay from Paul reminded me once again how relatively blinkered he is. He has his mental model of a good life - for obvious reasons, it's one which is somewhat similar to his own - and he doesn't question his assumptions. What is his utility function? Is it a universal utility function, or is it actually just his preferred, locally, personally optimal way of increasing its value?
Dismissing whole departments at college is part of that. You might not see value in the philosophy - PG is on record as dismissing it - but philosophy has changed the world more than almost anything else. It's at the foundation of science, law, government and politics, and most of the wars of the 20th century were fought, ultimately, over philosophy. PG knows this, maybe he views it differently - he studied it in college after all - but in his shoes, I wouldn't be so dismissive.
not even necessary if you inherit it
Next time, I will be sure to be born in the Hamptons. He made the right first choice.
I would posit that luck is THE differentiator between these people, not hard work.
Also, the idea that one should be "constantly judging both how hard you're trying and how well you're doing," _while_ trying to try hard and trying to do well, is insane. You can't be the CEO and the ditch-digger at the same time. You have to be able to inhabit both perspectives as _separate_.
That said, it was an interesting read, albeit a self-consciously unhelpful one. It was helpful and humbling to read that you just think some things are easy for you because they were taught at a low level in school. I can adapt that same logic to suggest that this author isn't imparting serious, deep knowledge about the true nature of hard work and success.
Some people are biochemically unhappy.
Also known as "suckers", or "employees".
If the work is stimulating, and the company is doing something you find valuable (or it’s your own company) then that’s very fulfilling.
There’s some cultural trope that everything is zero sum and that people can’t possibly enjoy their work or get value from it. I think this is just empirically wrong. People don’t just “think” they enjoy hard work, many actually do - and feel worse when they’re having trouble doing it.
I like the essay a lot, but I’m not sure it meets its title How to work hard. It lays out that to do great work you must and that it often feels good to do so. John Carmack proofread the essay and is probably one of the hardest working programmers alive (in addition to massive natural ability).
I think a more common problem is people that want to work hard, feel good when they do so, but have a hard time getting themselves to do so. Strategies around getting better at this (the “how”) are difficult. He touches on it a bit with how goals must be set once out of school and no one will set them for you. Interest helps, but is often not enough.
There’s of course also the group of people that don’t value hard work and don’t feel bad from not working hard/meeting potential, but I actually suspect this group is smaller than most think (and less interesting to discuss given the topic).
unless you spend none of that time improving and just doing the same thing you learned in the first year, you will become an expert. Experts are well rewarded for their skills
Exactly. This is the central lie that sustains capitalism. Wealthy C-level executives get rich when the rest of us work hard, which is why they harp on "working hard" so much. There's no reason to work hard when all the benefits go to the already-wealthy above you, which is why they try to obscure that fact in as many ways as possible.
I have always been an employee and yet I am thrilled and thankful for the financial returns.
Looking around my neighborhood, the same is true for most folks around me.
There are not guarantees in life but if you have the combination of luck, skill and hard work, you can land in a place where you and employer are mutually benefited.
I am lucky enough that this has been the case for my 18 year career so far and not uncommon.
What you are saying on the other hand is a dead end. If you don't believe good employer/employee relationship is possible, you won't do your part and it will be a self fulfilling prophecy. I feel bad for people who think like this.
Honestly it reminds me of the incel movement. Someone somewhere owes you something and you have no agency on how it shapes out. I fundamentally disagree.
You shouldn't need luck to get food and shelter, which is how our current economic system works and the fact that it works this way upsets me greatly.
>What you are saying on the other hand is a dead end. If you don't believe good employer/employee relationship is possible, you won't do your part and it will be a self fulfilling prophecy. I feel bad for people who think like this.
Why is change always demanded from those without power by those with power? The employers are the ones ruining the relationship and I think the employer side of the relationship needs to change. One way of changing that is through labor unions.
Most people in the US have both, but that's also irrelevant to the point I responded to - his claim was that you can't do well by being an employee which is untrue.
// Why is change always demanded from those without power by those with power?
I am not demanding any change. However, if you are not happy with your situation, the most actionable place for you to change it is with yourself. Start with yourself FIRST.
I agree that it can become self-fulfilling. However, there are some of us who started out believing the best and changed their minds after being repeatedly screwed over.
I both sympathize for you and still don't think the "changing your mind" is helpful here. My personal example here is in my dating life. I only got married at 38. Before that I had probably 15 semi serious or serious relationships that ultimately didn't work out. Each one of them would have been a good reason to say "oh, well, it's not for me to find love" or "I am doomed because my parents divorce messed me up" or "everyone out there's not good enough for me" or whatever.
But while I would be "justified" in thinking that way, I'd also actually doom myself by thinking that way. Instead I kept looking for changes I can make (mainly in how I feel about and value others in this case) that eventually allowed me to meet an amazing woman and start a family together.
The paint I am making is - we have agency. Whatever shitty work situation you have, do you have some room to find a better employer? To beef up your skills so you're more valuable? To contribute more to the org and be deeply recognized? To build such a network that if something ever happened you can find another job in a matter of weeks? In my experience, almost everyone has SOME leverage they can use to improve their situation. If they continuously use it, their situation is statistically likely to iteratively improve (and give you bigger levers over time.) If you get jaded and give up, nothing will magically improve and just get worse.
So no matter how much you may justify jadedness, it's not a thing worth accepting because it will just kill you.
That would be ok too.
The incel community isn't the right comparison maybe? A more apt comparison might be domestic abuse worldwide.
Sometimes I'm amazed at the assumptions being made here and elsewhere that what applies to one person's life applies at large. It's not just survivorship bias, it's some kind of egocentrism (in a perceptual sense) bias.
You yourself say you consider yourself lucky. Do you really? What about the unlucky ones?
It's easy to say "well for two decades it's worked out for me and hundreds of neighbors" forgetting that there's many more decades in a life, and billions of people.
The main point is - you can't control your luck. you can control what you do. For some reason, there's an attitude that "because you can't control your luck, you shouldn't control what you actually can control" which is dumb.
You can acknowledge both. But you need to maximize that which is under your control (and if you don't do that you have no room to complain about anything else.)
And that's by far the most extremely case.
You can argue that it's exploitative or that no one should be as rich as he is, but you can't say that working hard to do better for yourself as an employee is useless just because that small amount gets skimmed off.
I like this argument, but for higher taxes on the wealthy instead. Taxes benefit everybody, but my surplus labor value goes only to Jeff Bezos and his substantial money hoard.
In software development this is a realistic goal if you play your cards right. Plenty of other careers too.
I think there's also statistical data to support this as well (hours worked early on increasing your income and net worth down the line).
Working hard early on in your career does pay off.
Some people would rather hear they have no power and no chance because it takes away the bad feeling for their own agency in their situation. Others are empowered by their agency and act on it.
Thank you for spreading the 2nd point of view.
Do you have any links to the data you mention?
I would say working hard is actually negatively associated with success. Once you get branded a “worker bee”, your chances for high level advancement quickly bottom out.
If you really want to get ahead go to the right parties. The VP no one can ever get a hold of is making an order of magnitude more money then the middle manager putting in 80 hours a week. That person will correctly have been identified by the execs as not belonging to the upper class.
That being said, once you see how the game is played it can be hard to stomach. It is reality though.
Working on acquiring experience early on in your career will accelerate the point where you're making decent money where you're able to save/invest a decent portion of your income.
Your path doesn't sound widely reproducible.
I also know people who know a little Python or JS and can make >$100k a year.
You may have to learn a bare minimum to get in the door, you may consider that hard work or not, but once in, you no longer need to work hard. Sweet talking your boss or jumping jobs will get you way more bang for your buck.
Doing "actual work" is hard. Figuring out what your business is and who you need to hire is also hard work. Hard in a different ways but perhaps also harder in that fewer people are capable of doing it and it's less obvious.
I wish we could make the "inequality" point without resorting to hyperbole like this. The median American lives a life that is the envy of 99.9% percent of people who have ever walked this earth including most monarchs and emperors, and certainly >90% of people alive today.
I do agree that something needs to be done to keep inequality in check; I just happen to think that hyperbole and dishonesty create more problems than they solve.
Like what? Or was this ironic use of your own hyperbole?
Personally, for causes of declining happiness, I would look at rampant social media and technology addiction, falling-sky media narratives, rapidly increasing political division (itself a product of the traditional and social media), decreasing religious participation, weaker family/community ties, and good ole fashioned keeping up with the Jones’s.
Come on. We can advocate for better healthcare and social services without going full “AmErIcA iS a ThIrD wOrLd CoUnTrY”.
The reality is that the US is a harsh place to live. Yes there are upsides but the hyperbole is that there aren’t significant downsides.
The original claim was that the median American’s lifestyle is enviable to the overwhelming majority of people on Earth today or at any other point. In other words, the downsides are few and far less significant than the upsides for most people today or at any time in the past.
It’s so exhausting to transparently argue that relative to the world, the US is a very nice place and suffer responses like “but there is lots of violent crime!” Of course there is always some referand for which the US has “lots of violent crime” but by world standards it does not. The US homicide rate for example is something like 30% below the global homicide rate. The poverty rate in the US is pretty comparable to European countries (bit worse than western Europe, bit better than eastern Europe) and far, far better than Asia, Africa, or South America. Even our wealth inequality is not “extreme” by global standards.
There is no truth whatsoever to claims that the US is a harsh place to live. According to the quality of life index which does not cherry pick metrics, the US is 15th globally (lower is better). https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...
The #1 rate of incarceration (by far):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
The #1 healthcare costs (by far):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_h...
There are a lot of problems here that you are glossing over.
You aren't going to get a clear picture by cherry picking statistics that support your conclusion. You need to contextualize. Of course, if your goal isn't to get a clear, honest picture then we're aiming for different things and we may as well part ways now.
EDIT: From wikipedia, regarding measures of inequality:
> Gini coefficients are simple, and this simplicity can lead to oversights and can confuse the comparison of different populations; for example, while both Bangladesh (per capita income of $1,693) and the Netherlands (per capita income of $42,183) had an income Gini coefficient of 0.31 in 2010,[53] the quality of life, economic opportunity and absolute income in these countries are very different, i.e. countries may have identical Gini coefficients, but differ greatly in wealth.
In short, your claim is too subjective to be useful and is directly contradicted by multiple metrics.
Maybe you're arguing that I have no way of knowing that poorer people would be envious of richer people; fair enough, "envious" was figurative language on my part.
- Rate of incarceration may also mean that USA does a good job of imparting justice / catch criminals.
- Healthcare costs looks like an issue, but socialized systems also have their problems (bad quality, wrong economic incentives for doctors to improve their practice, etc.)
The rate of incarceration is largely due to the war on drugs. There’s nothing just about it.
I’d take NHS (despite its flaws) over my >2k /month health insurance any day of the week.
Would you also take the 40% reduction in post-tax, post-healthcare, post-retirement pay?
I actually favor a stronger social safety net and I agree that we need to reign in inequality (because an egalitarian society of very wealthy people and very poor people strikes me as completely infeasible in the same way that a prosperous socialist or communist country is completely infeasible), but that will almost certainly mean the professional class is worse-off. Reasoning soberly about tradeoffs is imperative IMO.
Yes, and I have! What I missed most when not living in the US:
* variety of everything
* large appliances
What I missed least:
* driving/car culture
* overwork
So sadly I found I was actually a typical “consumer” who wants things that are pretty crappy for the environment (except for the car thing). I was fine with getting paid less than I would in the US because as a senior technologist, I was making way more than most of the locals and the economy was tuned to their pay.
Instead of worshipping hard work, maybe we should be promoting "smart work". As a society, we don't need a bunch of overworked and burnt out people in their late twenties. That's not good for anyone.
They might not have gone to school at all. Or they might have a PhD from country most Americans couldn't find on a map but still end up cleaning the offices of startups.
Some people just like working hard, regardless of the financial incentives/disincentives.
In my experience the zero sum nature of those things tends to make it harder to be intrinsically motivated towards the work.
I’ll use myself as an example both ways. You don’t know who I am, and you never will, I’m just a cog in the wheels of society. I was a shitty student, always interested in whatever wasn’t being taught. I became good at working the system instead of working.
When I started working in high school at farms and later in sales, it clicked that the people who worked harder and did a better job… did better. That didn’t always mean money, but it meant respect, better shifts, etc. It was more real to me than academics.
Later on in my professional life, working really hard and delivering more, whatever more was, paid off in innumerable ways. It turns out the way to know what you’re talking about is to do stuff. Now I’m a midcareer director level person and that hard work means when I pick up the phone, someone answers. When there’s a problem or a solution, people listen.
That said, there’s lines I won’t or can’t cross. I won’t sacrifice my family’s life, which is a career ceiling. My mediocre performance as a student effectively locked me out of high end schools and the jobs that follow.
But if we're defining it as "working lots of hours," then yeah, I agree, don't do that.