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The Art of Money Getting

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Re: The Art of Money Getting

#181

Post by armchairhacker »

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…

> It makes me wish I was one of them.

Imagine feeling starved no matter how much you have, knowing the vast majority hate you and would gang up on you, so you form close alliances with others who (like you) would mercilessly betray you if they felt it would benefit them.

Society doesn’t reward every sociopath or even most of them. It rewards people who are smart, disciplined, charming, and (in other ways) lucky.

But society is not the true reward granter, the self is. The real winners are those content with what they have.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#182

Post by alsetmusic »

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…

The older I get, the more I realize what matters to me as well. I worked a FAANG with a long commute. I then worked a job with a short drive (10m morning, 15m afternoon, both via Uber when it was cheap). I now have a 12m walk to and from. The last one is purely luck, as I didn't know it'd be so close when I applied. (None of this omits the importance of working with honest people who have shared values.)

I am focused on the first part of the original line, however:

> pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.

When I was ~20 years old, I thought I should avoid working in a job based on computers. I didn't want my hobby / passion to become my work and ruin it. It took several years to realize that I should obviously be in the space because I was good at it. It still took many years to figure out and understand what fine-grained details about the work must exist to do so successfully. I had some misery before finding what I love.

It's easy to have wisdom after experiencing life for a long time. I'm not knocking wisdom or older people who have it (it's hard fought to win it). I'm just lamenting that it's very hard to know these things before you have experience. What I thought would be my dream job was the one I hated the most.

You gotta do it for a while before you can truly understand what and why you love and hate different aspects of a role. Then you extrapolate after multiple variations before you can really apply the knowledge holistically.

I genuinely feel bad for people who get into the space because money. When I joined, it was still all passionate nerds who were excited about what we were doing. Now it feels like the space is full of people who had to pick from "lawyer, doctor, coder," without really wanting to do any of them. I'm one of the luckiest people in the world since I actually wanted to do this and it turned out to be a good career. What a shame for them.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#183

Post by mbbutler »

dartharva wrote: post #164
Michelangelo11 wrote: post #14

> Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it. Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do." Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.

This is also the kind of advice that only sounds good on paper. In reality there is no clear marker of what you can and cannot do well unless you empirically experiment with everything which would take several lifetimes. Modern gurus like Cal Newport advise the opposite, and for good reason.

Newport's book on this topic is terribly underwhelming, and I say that as someone who has really enjoyed his other books, blog posts, and YouTube videos. Most of the anecdotes he gives to support his "Career Capital over Passion" have an ambiguous directionality of the causal arrow. For example, the fact that the happiest admin assistants have been at the job the longest does not mean that getting good at being an AA makes you happy with the work. There is an equally plausible explanation that enjoying the work of an AA makes one likely to stay in the job longer. Most of his examples in the book are like this.

The place where I think Newport flounders in this area is that, in order to get "So Good They Can't Ignore You", you actually have to be able to put in the time and effort to get good. And the vast majority of people do not possess the self-control and willpower to force themselves to do something they dislike to the level that is necessary to achieve said mastery.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#184

Post by mplanchard »

conductr wrote: post #147
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…

The older I get, the more I feel it’s becoming in shorter supply. Even when I don’t like associating with those that seem to lack it, they seem to find me everywhere I go. This is professionally, as a consumer and even just socially. I’m probably just old and grumpy and this is a yearning for the good old days, but, when I look around it just seems to be getting out of control. For example, politics is huge indicator…

I’m not sure whether it used to just be that everyone had to pretend to have integrity, whether they did or not, since the appearance of integrity was something we indexed on pretty heavily as a society.

I definitely agree with you though: it seems like the need/desire to pretend isn’t even there now much of the time, and I suspect that overall this means there is less integrity: some people who were pretending in the past may have “faked it til they made it,” and even if not, it at least faking it would have led to fewer obviously integrity-less actions being committed in the public sphere.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#185

Post by duzer65657 »

LeanOnSheena wrote: post #145
MrDarcy wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the comment that drives me off this site permanently. It’s been a good decade and a half.

I am CPA, former auditor, and a self-taught programmer. I am in a director level finance & technology role at an American, private-equity backed portfolio SaaS company. I have worked with all kinds of finance professionals. I studied accounting in part because my father was an engineer at a public company that was rocked by an accounting scandal. It impacted my family in many ways for years and left deep impressions…

It may seem glib, but if there are good ones out there, they're not typically "private-equity backed portfolio SaaS companies". IME (3 times now) this is where good companies go to die. I'll reluctantly take the naked (but aligned) greed of the VC startup over PE from here on out; it's one thing to implode on the launch pad but I can't watch PE destroy real value any longer.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#186

Post by duzer65657 »

simoncion wrote: post #160
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's evidently a dig at Trump and Republican morals, although if you were inattentive you might expect that it was the opposite. The giveaway is the "in 2026", which implies that it would not be a dark joke in other years. Thus the poster is evidently indicating that: The legal system has been undermined and been shown to have no integrity because it allows illegal actions by the rich and the political class. Journal…

> ...although if you were inattentive you might expect that it was the opposite. Speaking as a USian: If one hasn't been paying attention, one might have missed the deterioration of the courts and law enforcement apparatus, the normalization of many types of fraud (accounting included), the consolidation of news companies and subsequent decimation of effective investigative journalism, as well as the gradual deterior…

This administration - and last week specifically - has set a new level in corruption; nothing before compares.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#187

Post by monkeyjoe »

jorl17 wrote: post #144
tianqi wrote: post #47

One of my thoughts is that it's not easy for people to discover what they're truly good at. The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. Just as no one thinks they're good at their heartbeat and breathing. Because you have the talent to be good at them from the beginning,…

Sorry to sort of hijack your comment, but as I was reading it I was instantly reminded of a "blog post" that I have in my list of "blog posts for the blog I don't have, and which I will likely never actually share with the world", and thought "Why not share this one today?" As a prelude, I resonate somewhat with your approach to finding what we're good at. I don't look at how good we are at something, but more at a s…

Hey this really resonates. I’ve been looking for a way to describe the observation that talent is multi-dimensional without using that word, or just saying something generic like “people are good at different things.”

Maybe you should write some blog posts after all.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#188

Post by mlsu »

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…

What blows my mind is how little people seem to care about integrity. For how little they are willing to throw it away.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#189

Post by ninalanyon »

amelius wrote: post #179

> 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.

Buying a house was one of the best things I ever did. But it worked for me because houses are relatively cheap (compared to income) where I live compared to many other countries and I was well paid and frugal so I paid off the mortgage over less than fifteen years. My children don't have that luxury partly because house prices are higher but also because they were less ambitious and hence earn less.

So whether it is good advice depends on your personal circumstances and personality.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#190

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

esseph wrote: post #141
MrDarcy wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the comment that drives me off this site permanently. It’s been a good decade and a half.

Why?

I'm not quitting the site myself, but the kind of cynicism evinced in the comment is toxic. If your response to the very ideas of accounting, law, healthcare and journalism is to wave your hand and nonspecifically declare that they couldn't possibly be respectable, you're making things worse and creating cover for unethical people, even if you understand yourself to be doing it in a wise and savvy way.
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