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Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

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Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#31

Post by larsberg »

Estragon wrote: post #14
pclark wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academia, Teaching, Charities & Not for profit organisations all improve society and you wouldn't do any of those if you wanted to be rich.

Coming from academia myself, I'd have to say you've been deceived on both counts, there. At an institutional level academic research is all about the money, and the prestige used to bring in more grant money and student-loan money. For instance, I know a professor at a top-tier US university who received an award last year purely for being in the select group who had made the school $1M by bringing in large governmen…

There's a difference between money for the university and money for yourself. I think the poster was trying to point out that taking an academic job is not the path to riches.

For example, I made more at around five years in to working at Microsoft than I will as a professor unless I manage to make full professor at a top university _and_ run my own lab. Undergraduate starting salaries in this field, from top-tier institutions, are still far above assistant faculty salaries, despite ~8 years less education (a post-doctoral stint is basically mandatory to even get a faculty position interview at this point).

So, even if I made the very top tier of my field and stayed there until senility sets in, it's questionable whether I could ever make up for the lost wages during my re-education. And that's assuming I had never gotten another raise beyond inflation, ever.

At least in CS, you don't go into academia for the money.

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#32

Post by marcusf »

andrewfelix wrote: post #20
nirvana wrote: post #4

There's a false dichotomy in a lot of these discussions. There isn't a contradiction between helping society and making money. Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society. The money you make comes from somewhere- generally customers who are parting with it. Why are they parting with it? Because they prefer what you're buying to the alternative. People spend, in the aggregate, because it makes their…

>Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society I respectfully disagree. Here are a few examples why: - In my country 1 in 4 people are employed by the government. Their income does not come from 'customers', it comes from tax payers. Many large gov. contracts are won through corruption. - The weapons industry makes money. It benefits from war. - Paper/oil/meat/mining industries are huge, they're larg…

I guess it's a difference in perspectives, because in your lists I definitely see things that help society:

- Government provides services. Around here, it's healthcare, schools, universities, infrastructure, defense, a justice system, social services, plain governing, etc.

- The weapons industry might be an ethical negative, but they provide benefit to society in terms of basic research and R&D (not saying other things couldn't replace this -- I'm saying right now they provide this value)

- Paper/oil/meat/mining provides tangible goods that while depleting a finite resource pool still provides value today to scoitey.

- etc etc.

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#33

Post by _delirium »

fleitz wrote: post #2

A better question is: Should you live your life through the morality of others? If the answer is yes, then simply read what someone else says about making money and do that. If the answer is no, then you're free and can do what you want.

That seems a bit simplistic as a binary choice. I'll ultimately choose for myself what I think is ethical to do, but that doesn't mean I should ignore everything anyone has ever written. Reading intelligent things other people have written is a good way to improve my own thinking on a subject! In fact I'd say a pure "do whatever you want" approach is somewhat intellectually lazy, because it actively avoids engaging with and working through ideas that might be challenging to my own preconceptions.

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#34

Post by simonh »

tomelders wrote: post #27

It always grates me when people with lot's of money tell people who don't have lot's of money, that it's not about the money. Money my not equal happiness, but a lack of money certainly equals stress and misery. And while people are being stressed and miserable, they're not at their best. I think people would find it hard to be so nonchalant about the importance of money and the benefits it can bring if they were wor…

I think what a lot of people who say that mean by it is that to be successful, your primary focus doesn't have to be about making money. For many successful, people becoming wealthy is a (usually intentional) side effect of building a good business.

Conversely, people who primarily focus on making as much money as possible are susceptible to making mistakes such as scrimping on necessary expenses, or sacrificing relationships with valuable business partners.

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#35

Post by _delirium »

tomelders wrote: post #27

It always grates me when people with lot's of money tell people who don't have lot's of money, that it's not about the money. Money my not equal happiness, but a lack of money certainly equals stress and misery. And while people are being stressed and miserable, they're not at their best. I think people would find it hard to be so nonchalant about the importance of money and the benefits it can bring if they were wor…

In Silicon Valley with a tech background it's rarely a very stark choice, though. If you have good tech skills, a the default/fallback option is a pretty nice one, materially speaking: a low 6-figure programming job at a big company. There is very little chance of ending up unemployed-and-homeless, given how much companies are scrambling to hire technical people.

In that context, it makes more sense to me to encourage people to think about something other than money as their main/only goal. It is indeed something you can only afford to do if you're privileged enough to have the option, but being a tech person in Silicon Valley means there's a high probability that you do have the option, because if you "fail", you can always fail back to the 6-figure corporate job, which is a pretty soft landing. So given that you can live a materially comfortable life just taking the default route, what else do you want to do?

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#36

Post by twelvechairs »

tomelders wrote: post #27

It always grates me when people with lot's of money tell people who don't have lot's of money, that it's not about the money. Money my not equal happiness, but a lack of money certainly equals stress and misery. And while people are being stressed and miserable, they're not at their best. I think people would find it hard to be so nonchalant about the importance of money and the benefits it can bring if they were wor…

> It always grates me when people with lot's of money tell people who don't have lot's of money, that it's not about the money.

That may be true, but it is equally grating (if not moreso) when people with lots of money tell people who don't have lots of money that it _is_ about the money....

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#37

Post by SamReidHughes »

andrewfelix wrote: post #22
retube wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HFT: provides liquidity and increases market efficiency (suppresses pricing inconsistencies) Domain squatting: allows market to set the value of a domain. Not sure what's wrong with either of these, or why they are any worse than any other business that seeks to take advantage of market inefficiencies or speculate on asset prices (after all, most businesses are some combination of the two)

> allows market to set the value of a domain By holding it hostage and waiting for the highest bidder?

Yes. That way the person who would use the domain more efficiently is more likely to get it. Remember that domains are not people, they're property, and it's okay to hold your own property hostage.

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#38

Post by swombat »

edw519 wrote: post #21

2 quick stories: 1. My fraternity brother's father (a successful doctor) took the two of us out to dinner. He asked what I was studying. I told him computers. He said, "Good. As you know, I want John to study medicine. But if he didn't want to, I would want him to pursue computers. But definitely not law. I don't want my son spending the rest of his life chasing dollars." Strange remark. But somehow, it really left a…

If it's only about making money, you've failed, big time.

If it's never about making money, you've also failed, just as badly.

It is shameful that smart, competent, brilliant people let themselves be fooled into thinking that money is bad. If you're smart, competent and hard-working, in the world we live in, you can be well off and deserve to be. Being broke is not a badge of honour. Making money is not a badge of shame - nor is it an incidental event that just happens while you weren't looking.

What you're implying (though you're not saying it directly, so I could be misunderstanding you) with both of your stories is the exact opposite of what I believe. In the first story, you're putting up a straw man of the money-obsessed fool and warding people off the pursuit of money with that. In the second, you're implying that making money is incidental to other pursuits.

The reality, which I'm advocating for, is that money is a useful tool that is worth pursuing - not with soul-destroying obsession, sure, but with some portion of your mind. It makes your life better, extends the reach of what you can do for others, enables you to leverage your intelligence to achieve more in life, etc. And since most of the ways of making money that people on this site would consider are honest and value-creating, if you do something clever and make money from it, it's well earned, well deserved.

The answer to the second point is, as I've repeated many times, that making money will not happen incidentally while you're looking somewhere else, or at least not in 99.9% of cases. If you like those odds, buy a lottery ticket. I can assure you that your mentor and his business associates spent a lot of time sweating the details of how their business model would make lots of money, before it did. That was no accident, and it was not solely the result of customer focus. It was the result of customer focus and commercial acumen. Both are essential.

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#39

Post by swombat »

_delirium wrote: post #35
tomelders wrote: post #27

It always grates me when people with lot's of money tell people who don't have lot's of money, that it's not about the money. Money my not equal happiness, but a lack of money certainly equals stress and misery. And while people are being stressed and miserable, they're not at their best. I think people would find it hard to be so nonchalant about the importance of money and the benefits it can bring if they were wor…

In Silicon Valley with a tech background it's rarely a very stark choice, though. If you have good tech skills, a the default/fallback option is a pretty nice one, materially speaking: a low 6-figure programming job at a big company. There is very little chance of ending up unemployed-and-homeless, given how much companies are scrambling to hire technical people. In that context, it makes more sense to me to encourag…

There is very little chance of ending up unemployed-and-homeless, given how much companies are scrambling to hire technical people.

For now. See how it goes in 20 years.

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#40

Post by jerf »

marcusf wrote: post #32
andrewfelix wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society I respectfully disagree. Here are a few examples why: - In my country 1 in 4 people are employed by the government. Their income does not come from 'customers', it comes from tax payers. Many large gov. contracts are won through corruption. - The weapons industry makes money. It benefits from war. - Paper/oil/meat/mining industries are huge, they're larg…

I guess it's a difference in perspectives, because in your lists I definitely see things that help society: - Government provides services. Around here, it's healthcare, schools, universities, infrastructure, defense, a justice system, social services, plain governing, etc. - The weapons industry might be an ethical negative, but they provide benefit to society in terms of basic research and R&D (not saying other thi…

"The weapons industry might be an ethical negative, but they provide benefit to society in terms of basic research and R&D (not saying other things couldn't replace this -- I'm saying right now they provide this value)"

Actually this is another example of a rich person talking about how it's not about the money. You think weapons are intrinsically unethical, go and talk to the hundreds of millions of unarmed "ethnically cleansed" peoples in the 20th century.

Are they dangerous? Sure, no question. Ethically negative? A lot tougher call. All of those beloved government institutions are fundamentally built on there being a strong government, and when it is all boiled down, that fundamentally depends on having a government that can defend you against foreign incursion. If that is easy to forget, it is only because you are abundantly supplied with defense.

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