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Why do we work so hard?

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Re: Why do we work so hard?

#181

Post by shorttime »

prirun wrote: post #178

One thing that would help is if our governments, all governments, would stop spending money they don't have, and therefore stop devaluing currencies. When the Fed "buys" $4T in mortgages to relieve banks from holding any risk, where do they get all that money? They don't - they just "print" it, by clicking on a computer. And in the process, they devalue everyone's wealth. Take a look at this chart: http://blogs.wsj.c…

Devil's advocate here, definitely not an economist either, but why is devaluing everyone's wealth a bad thing?

Sure, individually it sucks for one's pile of money to be worth less than it was yesterday but it incentivizes one to figure out solutions to inflation - real-estate, stocks, bonds, assets, work more, etc. Also leads people to produce more and not allow a resting-on-the-laurels situation. Overall, big picture wise, the species needs to grow to survive - to obtain the technology to expand outside of Earth. Stagnancy is a deadend death.

Note, I also did not agree with a bailout.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#182

Post by justinjlynn »

jjoonathan wrote: post #128
justinjlynn wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point, there isn't much difference in terms of affordability for your average person.

I think you underestimate how much those of us struck RF fever (a lifelong affliction with no cure) are willing to spend on the hobby. Some common price points I've seen in home labs: $15k oscilloscopes, $10k signal generators, $6k logic analyzers, etc. $50k would be a high-end home lab, but home-lab territory nonetheless. It's affordable on an engineer's salary -- many of us semi-regularly spend more on things like…

Fair enough. Just sour grapes I suppose. Heh. I would love to have such a well equipped lab... as is I have to make do with simulation.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#183

Post by icelancer »

id wrote: post #96
icelancer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My work is my life's dream. I did it for years as a hobby making no $ (losing money really) and worked terrible tech jobs I hated until I could switch the two. Now I work 80 hours per week but it feels like 5. So it's not work to me.

So I guess your profile hasn't been updated in a while? And what is it that you're are doing now? Must be really awesome if it's still enjoyable after 80 hours.

It sure as hell isn't Data Science. Well I guess I do some of that at my job. But now it's for fun.

I work in sports science now. It's great.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#184

Post by mdpopescu »

hiram112 wrote: post #179
nostrademons wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming is not by any means a "fairly low rent blue-collar position". It has a very odd wage curve, though, where the vast majority of your salary increases will come in the first 5 years of your career, and the technologies that you became an expert in will be obsolete within 5-10 years. If you don't retrain, you'll be very much obsolete. That's behind most of the complaints on Hacker News; these were people who…

These $300k+ salaries you speak of are no more common than any other field where maybe 1/1000 makes this. HN is quite heavy with Silicon Valley coders at Google, Facebook, etc. The 99.9% of the rest of developers are making $90k in the Midwest up to $150k in high cost areas on the coasts. Yes this is certainly better than most other jobs, but considering a developer will hit the inflation rate raises by about 30, whi…

Not everybody is an American :)

There are two issues here:

1. The average salary in my area is $300 a month, after taxes. The only reason I'm not making $10K is because I'm lazy, and I prefer to play games. $2K after taxes (again, working from home) is something that's so easy I honestly feel I hadn't been working at all at the end of the month. $4K is almost as easy. I've done $8K but I didn't watch TV or play games.

2. Maybe even more importantly, I do not fear the future. I recently rejected a $8K / month job because I didn't like the project. I remember being afraid of losing my job as recently as three years ago, but it's like in a story about someone else. I have clients who send me emails every month about this or that issue - it takes me a day or two to solve it, and I charge them $300 to $500. Again - this is the average here; in fact, it's what my sister makes - and she works 8 hours a day, standing up, talking to customers, using a computer with Windows 95 on it. THIS is why I keep bugging everybody.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#185

Post by mdpopescu »

adrusi wrote: post #156
mdpopescu wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I keep bugging my friends and relatives to learn programming - I make way more than the local average, and I work from home, whenever I want. I don't tell them about it because I want to brag; I do it because, to quote Miles Vorkosigan, "if I can do it, you can do it". I want them to do better, they're my friends.

The point is that they're definition of "doing better" isn't necessarily the same as yours. Maybe their idea of a good job isn't one that pays well and allows a flexible schedule, it's one that's low stress: they show up, go through the straightforward motions that they do every day, and go home. If they're interested in something intellectually stimulating, they prefer to do it on their own time, without the risk of…

Yeah... it's not that they like their current job (the people I talk to mostly don't). It's that they seem to have this fixation with "it's too difficult"... my brother helps drug addict teenagers and he thinks programming is too difficult! It's driving me nuts.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#186

Post by 3solarmasses »

buf wrote: post #18
Tempest1981 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is "looking at houses in Denver" depressing?

To me, it represents a slower pace of life. EDIT: trust me, I'm not bored.

A slower pace of life allows a person to focus more, in my opinion. I've lived in SV but I live in Tahoe now and get way more done programming from the mountains.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#187

Post by rogersmith »

"They are asking about a job. I am thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide meaning and motivation. I am talking about my life."

Wow, leaving aside the complete "first world problem" approach that makes this relevant for like maybe 1% of the world population at best, this guy didn't just drink the Kool Aid, he's literally douching with it.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#188

Post by norea-armozel »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #155
normalist wrote: post #152

Get Work Done Syndrome is truely a modern notion entirely absent from the laissez faire peasant farmers of yonderyear who tilled soil in return for a long glass of summer wine at the end and maybe a 20 minute long smoke of fine tobacco. Modern notions of work involve McDramas taking place in every western household where first world problems really are a truely despotic problem indeed. Master slave relationships enge…

>Get Work Done Syndrome is truely a modern notion entirely absent from the laissez faire peasant farmers of yonderyear who tilled soil in return for a long glass of summer wine at the end and maybe a 20 minute long smoke of fine tobacco. You mean, tilled soil for endless hours in the spring, fall, and parts of summer, in return for a glass of summer wine at the end, a 20 minute smoke of tobacco (shorter than a lunch…

Actually, by the medieval period farming was mostly till the soil at planting and occasional de-weeding in the mix. The rest of the time was filled with tending animals or doing something else like fixing the roof and the like. It's why many labor saving devices were created in fact (water wheel for running milling stones comes to mind). Farming wasn't all that hard until you get into the beginnings of the industrial revolution since most farming was subsistence prior to that. When the industrial revolution got kicked off in the UK that's when the Lords started forcing more people into the cities, thus making a massive labor shortage in agriculture which made it a hard job (few vs many hands in the task). I'm not saying it wasn't labor intensive, but it wasn't like the average peasant farming household was erecting Cheop's pyramid every season.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#189

Post by ionised »

jrcii wrote: post #62
burgessaccount wrote: post #35

This will sound moralistic, and I don't mean it that way, but I think this relates to our general lack of clear values as a society. With religion absent in many people's lives, not much has stepped in to take up the slack and say "what really matters is being a good person" or "what really matters is wisdom" or "what really matters is family". So we're left with the messages we ARE getting, which are from a combinat…

>This will sound moralistic, and I don't mean it that way It's truly sad that the culture of people in computing reading this forum, which reflects the nation and west as a whole, is so disconnected from God that you feel the need to disclaim the profession of morality or religion.

On the contrary, I find it uplifting to witness people so disconnected from God.

Re: Why do we work so hard?

#190

Post by 1812Overture »

mseebach wrote: post #129
nether wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I think that New York [City] is the new model for the New Concentration Camp where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves where the inmates ARE the guards and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built. They’ve built their own prison and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners and as a result, they no longer have – having been lobotomized – the capacity to…

If you remove literally every single property that makes a prison a prison, then New York is just like a prison. Got it. If you need to model large numbers of other people as suffering from severe mental health issues to make your world view fit, chances are it's your world view that's wrong. But that's no fun.

Reminds me of Wonko The Sane from a Douglas Adams book. He built his house as an inside out asylum to contain the entire outside world.
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