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Cutting your salary by 40%

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Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#431
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good post. its funny, im a musician too. i decided the conservatory could fuck off after 1 year. ive found gypsy jazz a breath of fresh air personally... wonderful people and spirit, tons of gigs, technical virtuosity to the extreme, AND even some truly creative players. i do agree the paralells are strong esp between jazz people and swe. i dont know, you probably are further on your musical journey, but, i feel like…

> i decided the conservatory could fuck off after 1 year. Yes and no. Remember Picasso: "It took me four years to paint like Rafael, but a lifetime to paint like a child". Being patient enough to acquire the mountains of knowledge, the sound bases achieved by generations before yours, pays great dividends later in life, no matter the field. It's truer for some fields than others, of course. There are some surprising…

also to the "you must have lived" to have anything artistic to say... depends on your defenition of artistic. Certainly, in order to reproduce the piano compositions of middle aged European men, it might help to have lived, especially to the age of the composer. Maybe that gets in the way of your only children and the near-dead understand how to play Mozart. Martha Argerich and Pollini say hi, but when they were middle aged. This whole dusty notion of music is the basis of this completely un-artistic, elitist notion of classical music. Elitism is the good pal if monoculture. It promotes the homogenization and dumbing down of the arts and I fear it will do the same for computer programming if we aren't careful to look out for it and push back with diversity measures.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#432
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could I ask where you are in your career and when you started this regimen? I would like to adopt something similar, I'm not sure if I have the willpower just yet but I'm seeing one of two options: following your approach or burning out gradually.

I'm a Senior Site Reliability Engineer in Brisbane, Australia. I started out in the UK at about 27 as a Junior SysAd. I'm 33 now. I highly recommend you space out your working day like I have, perhaps even going as far as using a method such as [Pomodoro]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique ) to avoid burn out. Also, maybe do what I've done, but do it within a 9-5 window for now. Just remember that burn…

Awesome, thanks!

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the conservatory really should fuck off. Creativity is definitely present in music, but unless you are a composer, you won't get paid for it. --not much anyway. Unfortunately, creativity doesn't really exist in classical performance anymore. When it exists in jazz, it is happening very rarely. There are exceptions, but no one knows these folks outside of jazz. - as you probably already know. The gypsy jazzer…

you average jam, sure, its a bunch of licks mostly. but like... bireli? angelo debarre? sebastien giniaux? the list goes on... there are lots of people who come up with crazy shit on the fly. though you will find lots of licks in everyones playing

with all respect to the great players of gypsy jazz (many of whom I like) gypsy jazz and solos over changes in that style is not really creative. It is a formula that has been invented. People like it;I like it too. But it's what I mean--- not innovative. It has nothing to do with our time. It is retro like BeBop. Recreating BeBop and Gypsy jazz is not creative- it is like really cool Civil War Reenactment. This is what I mean by music lacking creativity for the most part. I mean we don't support innovators- we support technically excellent practitioners of a well-known style. This is a craft, not an art. Nothing against great craft at all-- I love it. But we are in desperate need of art. Ditto in computer programming. It is important that it notice these pitfalls.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#435
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's linked to the question of "how many hours can we extract from these human widgets before they revolt?" It doesn't hold true in times of crisis, such as war. When the US ramped up for WWII, people were happily working around the clock. And I'm not sure that it applies to the knowledge workers. My own view is that knowledge workers are productive in bursts.

People were happily working around the clock, but I'm fairly certain the people breaking Enigma didn't try doing that more than a fair number of hours a day (fuck if I know what it is, but it's not equatable to making bombs or tanks).

That's a great question. I wonder what the working habits of the code breakers and other knowledge workers were like. Anybody know more details?

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#436
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the odds are that the salary is the only thing you'll actually see as compensation.

Obviously YMMV. My hit rate is about one in two, with wildly varying numerators. Even excluding googlers and facebookers, I have dozens of friends who've made millions apiece. Bay area mortgages paid off, kids off to college debt free, parents healthcare paid for, etc.

Dozens, out of several million who live in the Valley. That's still pretty poor odds.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you average jam, sure, its a bunch of licks mostly. but like... bireli? angelo debarre? sebastien giniaux? the list goes on... there are lots of people who come up with crazy shit on the fly. though you will find lots of licks in everyones playing

with all respect to the great players of gypsy jazz (many of whom I like) gypsy jazz and solos over changes in that style is not really creative. It is a formula that has been invented. People like it;I like it too. But it's what I mean--- not innovative. It has nothing to do with our time. It is retro like BeBop. Recreating BeBop and Gypsy jazz is not creative- it is like really cool Civil War Reenactment. This is w…

interesting. craft is central to the style sure, but its not the only thing! but in any case, im curious how you are drawing the line... surely youd call django an artist? what about antoine boyer now? he sound so new! isnt that newness an artistic vision, not just an expression of mastery of craft? maybe you think the ratio is too heavy towards craft, or that requiring such a high degree of craft to be heard in the first place is whats keeping us from hearing artists? who are the artists you know?

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think the key here is the risk, not necessarily not practicing. its always good to boost you technique. its always good to know more rather than less. but, if you practice in such a way that you are trying to eliminate risk when performing, thats i think where you run into trouble. far be it from me to think i know more about this subject than rubenstein... but just my 2c. risk kind of seems like the empathic gatew…

btw, pretty sure I know who you are, but won't out you. ;)

if you think im adrien holovaty you are wrong, and if you think im someone else im scared lol

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#439
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed this +1 but sadly and inevitably there are replies saying essentially "no no, all man hours are not equal". Why doesn't the intertube get satire/sarcasm/irony ?

Text is a bad way of conveying tone, though there was the smiley at the end. I interpreted it the same as you, but I can see how a lot of people would miss the tone. Poe's Law is why the internet doesn't get sarcasm - that without additional information, it's impossible to differentiate between an extreme position and one mocking it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

The comment we're talking about was skillfully constructed, there's only one way of interpreting it. On a phone so quoting from memory, but the second paragraph starting "that's why I am spending the time perusing HN..." is just an elegant way of saying that the first paragraph was tongue in cheek.

Re: Cutting your salary by 40%

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

btw, pretty sure I know who you are, but won't out you. ;)

if you think im adrien holovaty you are wrong, and if you think im someone else im scared lol

do you play violin? if so i do know
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