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The Art of Money Getting

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Re: The Art of Money Getting

#171

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

globular-toast wrote: post #169

The first one is something I've been saying for years. I worked in computational biology for a while and it took me a while to realise, but eventually I noticed I wasn't very good at it. The people who were good at it lived and breathed biology. They would come to the lab on weekends and even the middle of the night to water plants and generally tend to their experiments. Above all, they cared . I was just a computer…

I just do business apps and websites, and it pays the bills, but none of it is really interesting since a lot of it involves recurring patterns and simply fixing other peoples' past mistakes (and future people will probably fix mine). I give a shit only because doing that means less work and annoyances and not getting fired, but I still only give a shit 8 hours a day, usually less.

All this advice runs into time constraints and luck, which means you can get unlucky trying 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. things and you're not good at any of them while you still have bills to pay.

It's also an accessibility problem as some careers are gated by degrees (physician) or capital (farming). Doing the sample work (shadowing a physician, hired farm worker) to see if you like it has a risk of not giving a real picture of the actual work. If that happens, you have to rely on tenacity to stick it out.

Some people need to be in the deeper parts of the job before their brain kicks on and starts enjoying it (just being a hired laborer at a farm vs. owning and running the farm) because they don't have any 'ownership' when it's just a job.

All this to say that the quick advice like the OP is technically right, but it has about the same nuance and considerations of reality as clubbing baby seals.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#172

Post by HexPhantom »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #5

> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too. I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. I like the Integrit…

I think that's a good distinction: not everyone in tech has to be "passionate" in the romantic sense, but it's hard to do good work for years if you actively dislike the underlying activity

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#174

Post by yard2010 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #167
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and that's pretty important to me The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble. I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject miser…

> we did bad things to people and made filthy money I blame society. It systematically rewards sociopathic behavior. I was raised with integrity and honesty as core values. Every single day I am psychologically assaulted by the fact we not only have all these sociopaths running around but also the fact that they are the ones making it . It makes me wish I was one of them. Maybe one day I'll finally break and start ca…

Let me ramble about this: in your position you have to pay a moral price to make more money. It's just logical. But it creates a systemic incentives problem, especially when the cost of living is going up, making the price you have to pay relatively lower, or in other words making you can't afford to not pay it.

I hate this kind of people. But some of them simply can't afford not acting this way, more than you do. Instead, people of power, who can and do set the agenda, don't care about it, because again, incentives problem - they won't change the system to one in which they make less money.

Part of this in my opinion is the fact that the western world ideology, the trash can we are all eating from, is simply money.

I wonder what Slavoy Zizek would say about this.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#175

Post by HexPhantom »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #39
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #5

> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too. I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. I like the Integrit…

> and that's pretty important to me The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble. I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject miser…

I think that's why integrity matters so much: it removes a whole layer of moral bookkeeping from daily life

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#176

Post by HexPhantom »

neilv wrote: post #56
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and that's pretty important to me The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble. I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject miser…

Like you, I've found that working with people of integrity (or some qualities closely related to that) is very important to me. Not in a "new-grad or corporate PR appropriating meaningless platitudes" kind of way. But in a "I have seen multiple times how one untrustworthy person can easily wreck all the work of a team or organization, and make their lives miserable, so averting that is a high priority" kind of way. L…

Maybe a respectable company is one where the answer to "what would make this business more profitable but worse for the world?" is not treated as a product roadmap

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#177

Post by HexPhantom »

MrDarcy wrote: post #83
neilv wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like you, I've found that working with people of integrity (or some qualities closely related to that) is very important to me. Not in a "new-grad or corporate PR appropriating meaningless platitudes" kind of way. But in a "I have seen multiple times how one untrustworthy person can easily wreck all the work of a team or organization, and make their lives miserable, so averting that is a high priority" kind of way. L…

> But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush? Look for those who are trying to serve established respectable professions, ideally have already done so for many years or decades. Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism (in the ideal sense). Then look at their own mission. Then look at their own work. Do they show their work? Are they open? Do they willingly allow their customers to audit their work produc…

I especially like "do they show their work?" In a gold rush, obscurity is often part of the business model: vague claims, unverifiable demos, hand-wavy benchmarks, carefully managed customer stories. Companies serving serious professions eventually have to deal with people who ask boring, concrete questions and expect boring, concrete answers

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#178

Post by globular-toast »

hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #171
globular-toast wrote: post #169

The first one is something I've been saying for years. I worked in computational biology for a while and it took me a while to realise, but eventually I noticed I wasn't very good at it. The people who were good at it lived and breathed biology. They would come to the lab on weekends and even the middle of the night to water plants and generally tend to their experiments. Above all, they cared . I was just a computer…

I just do business apps and websites, and it pays the bills, but none of it is really interesting since a lot of it involves recurring patterns and simply fixing other peoples' past mistakes (and future people will probably fix mine). I give a shit only because doing that means less work and annoyances and not getting fired, but I still only give a shit 8 hours a day, usually less. All this advice runs into time cons…

I don't think the point was finding a job that isn't work. My job is definitely work; I wouldn't be doing it if I wasn't getting paid. It's more about just being good at it.

There's definitely luck involved. I'm lucky to have found a thing with basically zero barriers to entry (computing). But maybe I'd be even better as a farmer or physician. We will never know.

It's good enough just to find something that you don't struggle in, though. Not swimming upstream, as the OP puts it.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#179

Post by amelius »

> Debt eats self-respect. Barnum says young people, especially, should avoid it. The moment you owe somebody money, you’ve handed them a piece of your freedom. The whole game is keeping income above outgo.

So don't buy a house, I suppose. But this goes against popular financial advice.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#180

Post by 1123581321 »

didgetmaster wrote: post #69

Even if you find a vocation that you generally enjoy, it doesn't mean that you will enjoy every part of it. I love to program, but there have been a number of jobs and tasks during my career that I definitely did not like. I think this probably applies to every career. You have to navigate within your available options to balance things that pay well with the ones you enjoy doing. I have a side project that I truly e…

That’s a healthy perspective. I’m someone fortunate to work a perfect job for me, and there have still been clients that almost burnt me out of it. It also can be painful to see work in your favorite field be misunderstood or misused.
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