121–130 of 213 posts
I get the sentiment but if you want to be able to point to things that you built years ago software is probably the worst career to take. We shutdown, delete, replace, and rewrite our work all the time. The small amount stuff that lasts over five years gets called legacy and is made fun of.
Why The Lucky Stiff
What every salary-person has to show for it: a life lived; bills paid; food on the table; health; a roof over your head; a body not ravaged and damaged by hard labor; the ability to relax and have some entertainment in the evening; a place to sleep; comfort; relative stability; the ability to make a living using mostly just your brain. Yes, perspective is important, and I’m not saying one should not strive to make mo…
Most part of what we call civilisation, such as industry, sich as the IT industry is simply not sustainable. To survive the 21 century we have to look at better methods to collaborate.
And of course technology is part of the eqaation. Open Source and similar efforts lead the way towards such better methods. But they cannot exist in vacuum or on a island alone.
So we have to change society but by bit. Let’s go!
What every salary-person has to show for it: a life lived; bills paid; food on the table; health; a roof over your head; a body not ravaged and damaged by hard labor; the ability to relax and have some entertainment in the evening; a place to sleep; comfort; relative stability; the ability to make a living using mostly just your brain. Yes, perspective is important, and I’m not saying one should not strive to make mo…
Hannah Arendt draws a useful distinction between "labor" and "work." Labor is effort required to sustain life: catching food, finding water, plowing crops. Because living creatures need these things continually, labor never ends. Food is eaten or decays and new food must be grown. Work, on the other hand, has a defined start and endpoint. Ideally, it produces something enduring and unique. In ancient times, labor was…
But it's Capatilisms fault.
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You forgot to mention millions of dollars of value created for other people.
A lumber jack cuts down a tree and sells the wood for $500 to a high end furniture maker. This furniture maker then produces an armoire that he sells to a rich person for $7000. Was that lumber jack exploited because he only made $500 from the wood?
Compared to what? And someone might propose an alternative system as if to say "well it's better if we do it this way" and you could argue it both ways that they were exploited under the new system too.
The fundamental problem is you need to eat. No matter what political or economic institutions exist, or if any even exist at all, as long as you are alive you are never absolved from having to eat food. For the vast majority of people this means you have to do some form of work. In the base case it means you are a hunter-gatherer and need to forage. This takes all your time and I'm not sure how enjoyable it is either.
Imagine just how ridiculously magical the notion of financial independence through passive income combined with a market where you can procure all the necessities of life would be to a human being living at the turn of the Neolithic Revolution ~14,000 years ago.
It just blows my mind. And people want to throw around words like "exploited". Woe is me.
What every salary-person has to show for it: a life lived; bills paid; food on the table; health; a roof over your head; a body not ravaged and damaged by hard labor; the ability to relax and have some entertainment in the evening; a place to sleep; comfort; relative stability; the ability to make a living using mostly just your brain. Yes, perspective is important, and I’m not saying one should not strive to make mo…
Hannah Arendt draws a useful distinction between "labor" and "work." Labor is effort required to sustain life: catching food, finding water, plowing crops. Because living creatures need these things continually, labor never ends. Food is eaten or decays and new food must be grown. Work, on the other hand, has a defined start and endpoint. Ideally, it produces something enduring and unique. In ancient times, labor was…
In particular, in white-collar work is something that abstracts you almost completely away from reality. You come in, do whatever arbitrary thing you're asked to, and get money for it, which you can exchange to services of the modern society. Any contribution you may have is separated by a couple layers of abstraction from its real-world result, so there's almost nothing you can point to and say "I made that".
Your comment also reminded me of my own thinking on a slightly different subject - maintenance. Maintenance is essentially synonymous to "labor" here, the repeatable, unending activities needed to support things we want, as opposed to being the things we want. It's something I always believed we should strive to get rid of entirely.
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You forgot to mention millions of dollars of value created for other people.
If you create an app that makes some annoying task take half the time, you can potentially save literal lifetimes of frustration for your users. The value created for the founders is a small fraction of the value created for the users.
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If you create an app that makes some annoying task take half the time, you can potentially save literal lifetimes of frustration for your users. The value created for the founders is a small fraction of the value created for the users.
Conversely, if you create an app and optimize it so that users spend way too much time in it relative to what they need, you'll probably rake in lots of money, but you'll also be responsible for much more value being destroyed for your users.
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Being grateful makes perfect sense. But being satisfied with just that sees a bit of a waste. Perhaps even a bit ungrateful. Should I be satisfied if my headstone says simply "I was comfortable"?
That's kinda assuming you want work to be the part of your life that satisfies you. Many people would be perfectly happy with a headstone saying "I had a comfortable job, and raised a family I love" or "I had a comfortable job, and made my art in the evenings and weekends".
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This is an article on dev.to. The home of frustrated redditors trying to make a name for themselves. I'm starting to see too many of these on HN and have never seen anything posted there worthwhile reading.
Is dev.to the new quora? I haven't looked too much at it but it didn't seem to be the worst.