181–190 of 344 posts
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This is literally my height. Repeating it, is about as effective as you'd expect, especially since my son topped six feet. Sometimes you can spot sour grapes at 50 paces.
Intraday height variation and slight changes in posture mean that your height can't really be specified to the half inch.
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> Status usually represents having done some social good. For whatever value of "good" applies in that particular social network, yes. But that value of "good" might not be anything we would call "good" in ordinary language. For example, Bill Gates does have high status, but he has it because he is rich, not because of the particular things he did that made him rich. Those things happened to be reasonably beneficial…
People make money by providing value to other people. The people who provide the most perceived value have the most money. It is a signifier of status whether you like it or not. Most people who make money are providing a service to many people, or to someone else with a lot of money (who therefore provided value previously). Care to provide a counterexample?
Not sure how this will sit with the HN crowd, but a couple of years back I got into menswear, and I derive some pleasure from being the "best dressed guy" at the office. Beyond personal opinions on that particular hobby, I can confirm first hand that living at the intersection of two or more personas (e.g. a programmer that dresses well) brings a peculiar sense of joy. I might no have much status in either of those c…
My career advice to nearly everyone starting out these days is to bring different professional interests together if they have more than one. There's thousands of specialists in most fields, but not nearly as many generalists or people who can walk in two interconnected worlds. Finding a niche can be very valuable to oneself and others. One way to carve that out is by going deeper than one's peers in a specialization…
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> If the answer is no, then you've been playing the money game all along. I’ve wondered about this for some time now. If I won the lottery, I would quit software engineering in a heartbeat. But it’s not software engineering that I want to quit. I love writing software and having computers do my bidding automatically and elegantly. What I loathe is all the BS around work, the posturing, the being told to drive the bus…
The 'Office Space' scenario might be more interesting/fun, keep working and ignore the BS, worst case you get fired and at least you learn you were right to follow the rules, best case you get to keep the good (actually writing code) and lose the bad. Normally you can never find out where the line is without crossing it.
This is straight-up paraphrasing David Foster Wallace in This Is Water, just that DFW was talking about these things as de-facto personal religions that we're usually unconscious of. So the "choose" part isn't nearly that explicit in his view.
The bit in This Is Water:
> If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you... Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
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I actually feel pressure to dress down in my role as a SWE: hoodies and jeans seem like the norm, and forget about wearing a suit (lol!) or even a dress shirt. I've found black/grey turtlenecks to be a nice middle ground, and apart from the occasional "one more thing" (Steve Jobs) or Elizabeth Holmes comment, those tend to work well.
Being well dressed isn't about dressing in fancy or expensive clothes; It's about looking good in clothes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Status usually represents having done some social good. For whatever value of "good" applies in that particular social network, yes. But that value of "good" might not be anything we would call "good" in ordinary language. For example, Bill Gates does have high status, but he has it because he is rich, not because of the particular things he did that made him rich. Those things happened to be reasonably beneficial…
I think maybe GP was talking about what Bill Gates chose to do with his money and influence once he had them. In terms of the number of lives saved and improved, Bill Gates has had more impact than most of us could ever hope to.
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I actually feel pressure to dress down in my role as a SWE: hoodies and jeans seem like the norm, and forget about wearing a suit (lol!) or even a dress shirt. I've found black/grey turtlenecks to be a nice middle ground, and apart from the occasional "one more thing" (Steve Jobs) or Elizabeth Holmes comment, those tend to work well.
> black/grey turtlenecks Jobs bought lots of them for everyone at Apple to wear, nobody accepted, and he kept them for himself.
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My career advice to nearly everyone starting out these days is to bring different professional interests together if they have more than one. There's thousands of specialists in most fields, but not nearly as many generalists or people who can walk in two interconnected worlds. Finding a niche can be very valuable to oneself and others. One way to carve that out is by going deeper than one's peers in a specialization…
As someone who has been trying to convince hiring managers of this very thing (dual major in electrical and mechanical engineering) it's harder than it sounds to find a job that crosses the bridges. Just my two cents.