I quit the tech industry (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#211

Post by pc86 » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:26 PM UTC

yata69420 wrote: post #198

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the weirder side effects of the early retirement (FIRE) movement is that it selects for people who value freedom and time away from work and then convince them that they need to work the highest paid job they can find no matter how miserable it makes them right now. A lot of tech companies capitalize on this by offering 20% raises to recruit people and then demand 50-100% more work until they burn out. They ca…

I'm doing the weird thing you're describing right now! I have a miserable high paying tech job that I would absolutely not do if I wasn't being paid so well. Maybe I'm delusional, but I believe this is my best strategy for buying my freedom. The way I see it, it takes about $3M to bond yourself away from a lifetime of servitude. That much capital would allow me to pay myself a middle class income without any time com…

I don't know how to say this without sounding like an asshole, but why do most people who are all about FIRE talk this way? Am I the only one who doesn't look at working a cushy office job 30-35 hours a week as "a lifetime of servitude?" I'd rather give up some time for a few decade, and enjoy life during that time, and retire earlier than most but later than I could, than be miserable for a decade just to live a lower middle class life without any skills to fall back on (as would certainly be the case if the market drop 50% 8-10 years into your retirement - you're now in your 40s, a decade removed from tech, and you need a job now).

How does anyone read fringe nonsense like "ethically I wouldn't want to birth a child into a life of bondage under capitalism" and not roll your eyes hard enough to get RSI?

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#212

Post by kingnothing » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:27 PM UTC

pesfandiar wrote: post #207

ryandrake wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between these "FIRE" techies and your cousin is your cousin has to keep working to live. I guess I fit right into your stereotype: My family's end state is almost certainly in that cabin, away from the insanity of California, the insanity of proximity to the city, the insanity of hustle culture. I have a sign above my office that says "THE GOAL IS TO NOT HAVE TO WORK". If I ever get to the point where…

I'm curious about the viability of that 4% draw-down scheme. Does it hold up in a high-inflation, high-interest economy?

It has held up in basically every economic situation in the US since the 1920's.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#213

Post by kingnothing » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

haswell wrote: post #25

logical_ferry wrote: post #13

It's pays off to be rich. Not having to work is a luxury. I love money too much to simply take a year off, even if I could afford it. I would think about the opportunity cost the entire time. Maybe I just haven't had a proper burn out yet.

As someone who once couldn’t imagine burning the cash, I’m a month into a 6-12 month sabbatical after finally burning out pretty hard. My advice to my former self would be to take extended time before it became a borderline personal crisis. The funny thing about that opportunity cost - I’m now spending time just building the energy to use this time away for things I find personally interesting. Had I taken the time s…

I originally planned on a 3-6 month sabbatical and I'm now 8 months in and starting to look for work. It's been a phenomenal refresher and I highly recommend it to everyone who is able to do so. I plan on taking another one in 5-10 years if I'm not retired by then.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#214

Post by dc-programmer » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #167

robotburrito wrote: post #137

Seems like a huge # of techies I meet out here are trying to reach a million dollars in savings in a job they hate so that they can "go live in a cabin in the woods." I try to tell them that my Cousin has been doing that for 40 years, and he dropped out of high school and worked at a gas station.

One of the weirder side effects of the early retirement (FIRE) movement is that it selects for people who value freedom and time away from work and then convince them that they need to work the highest paid job they can find no matter how miserable it makes them right now. A lot of tech companies capitalize on this by offering 20% raises to recruit people and then demand 50-100% more work until they burn out. They ca…

I have a theory that if a team reaches a critical mass of FIRE people the culture begins to suffer. Mostly due to what you are describing: they are hustling all of the time instead of approaching thing in a more sustainable way, setting unrealistic expectations.

But teams also benefit from having at least a few people innately interested in tech (too much “passion” is probably bad too). If lots of people consciously take the mercenary position, it can damage the whole team’s morale because unsurprisingly the necessary but unglamorous work gets de-emphasized more than usual. This eventually drags down everyone’s performance and increases the likelihood of stressful events like outages.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#215

Post by Kon-Peki » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

lostcolony wrote: post #132

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have intrinsic interest in CS that will get destroyed pretty quickly because you may be put on to some super boring project. Potentially unpopular opinion: This is why I’m actually very bullish on graduates from famously demanding colleges like Ivy League and other competitive universities. To graduate, you can’t just be smarter than average and coast your way through to graduation. You actually have to work…

Are Ivy League colleges famously demanding? I haven't seen their CS departments on any rankings or similar that would imply they're particularly good. Law, sure, but CS? And given some of their most notable graduates, and what it took both to get in, and what led to their successes on getting out, I'm not sure "working hard" would be the description I would give it (though, of course, it's the description they would…

> Are Ivy League colleges famously demanding?

Yes, absolutely. They demand a lot of hard work, much more than your typical public university. As you go through life however, you start to realize that accomplishment comes from working hard on the right things - a subtle but important distinction from plain old hard work.

Imagine that you are running and come to a wall. You are big, strong, and have lots of resources at your disposal. You almost certainly can bust through the wall and keep going. Do you do it? Or do you check to see if there is an unlocked door around the corner? The reward for you is exactly the same (a grade of A in the class; a promotion at work) and you aren't the person that has to clean up the mess you leave behind. What do you do?

The Ivy League schools have plenty of people that would choose one option and plenty that would choose the other. The other schools don't have very many people for which busting through the wall is even an option, which is definitely not the same thing as "working harder"

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#216

Post by barrysteve » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

jseban wrote: post #201

barrysteve wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so that people can go to church more, and church is healthy. Really? That's highly debatable, and obviously another power structure which is also old fashioned This one is so debatable because the definition and theological implications of Church 'healthiness' depend upon many different variables and can differ subtly across all Churches. Church isn't a 'power structure' though. It relies on voluntary participation…

Haha ok so church has no power. And people can never be free, they must be institutionalised, and we should use shortening of working hours to just move them to a different institution that is even more old fashioned and increasingly failing, than then ones we are freeing them from. Well I guess we can say that we have a fundamentally different view on what constitutes development and improvement of life and society.

I doubt we have a different view, as I haven't stated one on 'what constitutes development and improvement of life a society'.

Freedom is the ability to swim in any direction you want, so go ahead. Do whatever you want. The map of your possible options already exists and the institutions are just one or many worthwhile places to visit. When people do whatever they want it quite often ends up on a place on the map where there is a lot of hedonism and not much in the way of higher meaning or valuable aims.

As a dispassionate observer it is my inclination to suggest that people will take the argument for more free time off work in the favour of church and family as an easier argument to make, given it's connection to a higher meaning and relatable values. A boss will likely see anything connected to 'wants' as room for more work.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#217

Post by throwaway894345 » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:57 PM UTC

nonrandomstring wrote: post #195

throwaway894345 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reality is, a great many jobs make us sick. Depression, anxiety, heightened aggression, sedentary atrophy, getting overweight because there's no time for the gym... the modern office workplace is no heath-farm. And Google throwing a few coloured bean bags around, or providing healthy food and gym equipment is only a sticking plaster if the foundational culture is toxic. What is the cost to society? I have no id…

> maybe that work itself is inherently unhealthy (which I kind of believe, but at least until we have automation meeting our physical needs 'work' seems healthier for society). You remember the Tom Sawyer story, where he gets the others to paint the fence for him? Work is very much "in the mind". You can have the work of Sisyphus and get to love the rock. In the best cases work is the making of some people. It can li…

> We must not equate indentured servitude, wage slavery, and pointless anxiety driven makework for "real work".

I'm explicitly not doing that. My whole comment can be rephrased as: "if we can meet society's needs with less soul-crushing, we should do so, but some of the soul crushing may be inherent (needing to work to meet our own physical needs can be inherently exasperating for some)".

> Please don't fall for that 18th century factory-owner terminology.

I'm inclined to defer to credentialed economists over arbitrary Internet strangers.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#218

Post by lobocinza » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:59 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #211

yata69420 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing the weird thing you're describing right now! I have a miserable high paying tech job that I would absolutely not do if I wasn't being paid so well. Maybe I'm delusional, but I believe this is my best strategy for buying my freedom. The way I see it, it takes about $3M to bond yourself away from a lifetime of servitude. That much capital would allow me to pay myself a middle class income without any time com…

I don't know how to say this without sounding like an asshole, but why do most people who are all about FIRE talk this way? Am I the only one who doesn't look at working a cushy office job 30-35 hours a week as "a lifetime of servitude?" I'd rather give up some time for a few decade, and enjoy life during that time, and retire earlier than most but later than I could, than be miserable for a decade just to live a low…

They lack insight about nature and other political systems.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#219

Post by wnolens » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 6:18 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #200

wnolens wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I did them for no money And I assume you acquired the means to do that for free by.. doing the opposite for long enough to buy you freedom to do so? Or marry/born rich?

> > But I did them for no money > And I assume you acquired the means to do that for free by.. doing the opposite for long enough to buy you freedom to do so? Or marry/born rich? By working my butt off for over 30 years, making a rather humble salary, but never living large, avoiding personal debt like the plague, driving old cars, or crappy company cars, living in apartments and a small house, saving 25-40% of my ea…

Thanks. Sounds like a ride. Glad you're able to have space to do work well-aligned with your values.

I'm finding it really hard to do. Even if I wanted to make the personal sacrifice (and thus sacrifice my future children's stability and environment..) for more virtuous pursuits for far less compensation, I have a hard time believing in any organization's ability to affect meaningful change.

I'm trying to start small by helping my one friend who is a doctor to streamline her office tech. I think I could give her 20% of her time back performing repetitive tasks.

Re: I quit the tech industry (2015)

#220

Post by awillen » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 6:36 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #211

yata69420 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing the weird thing you're describing right now! I have a miserable high paying tech job that I would absolutely not do if I wasn't being paid so well. Maybe I'm delusional, but I believe this is my best strategy for buying my freedom. The way I see it, it takes about $3M to bond yourself away from a lifetime of servitude. That much capital would allow me to pay myself a middle class income without any time com…

I don't know how to say this without sounding like an asshole, but why do most people who are all about FIRE talk this way? Am I the only one who doesn't look at working a cushy office job 30-35 hours a week as "a lifetime of servitude?" I'd rather give up some time for a few decade, and enjoy life during that time, and retire earlier than most but later than I could, than be miserable for a decade just to live a low…

That last part is definitely overdramatic, but I do think that you're looking at the math of work in a way that I (and presumably the poster to which you're responding) don't agree with.

The thing is, your 30-35 hours at a cushy office job isn't just 30-35 hours of fungible time - it's a commitment to a lifestyle that revolves around office work. A lot of folks talk like a person who has a job has the same amount of freedom as someone without a job, just minus the time they spend in the office. That's part of it, but there's also the loss of spontaneity/flexibility/control.

If those are things you really prize, then it can be perfectly rational to optimize your life for the maximum number of years in which you have total control (i.e. you're not working). If that's what you want to do, then it makes perfect sense to work as much as humanly possible and save as much money as possible on any year in which you're working at all, since you're giving up that total control of your life whether you're working 20 hours or 80. Then, when you've got enough money, you get total control of your life for as many years as possible. Depending on what you value, it can be a totally reasonable optimization.