People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige

I hate the reality that developers can't easily develop a portfolio of work because generally their work is owned lock, stock, and barrel by the companies they work for, and can't be legally shared outside of those places.

So we have github, but even that is suspect and many potential employers don't look at it, unless you are some well known contributor or founder to one or more open-source projects. Even then it can be a crap shoot; I've read on more than one occasion somewhat famous developers of tools being turned down for positions at companies that use the very tools they developed. It is somewhat maddenning.

You can just about forget it if your repositories are for your own personal projects, but that's better than nothing - and that's also where a blog has some influence. Basically, as a place to show something of your coding ability and knowledge, and the value you can bring as a new hire.

But honestly, that can get tiring; sometimes when I go home from work, I'll do something interesting - but many times, I just want to relax and not think about coding or other projects too much. I've found myself becoming more this way as I've grown older (currently approaching 50).

I've been an SWE for over 25 years now, but every time I find myself looking for a new position, it feels as though my previous experience counts for nothing. I can't show any future employer what I worked on in the past (and in many cases, that work is long gone along with the previous employer), they rarely want to look at my github or (back when it existed - I really need to restart it - sigh) my personal blogging site. It feels like every such interview and encounter I am starting fresh.

It sickens me. I don't know of any other kind of career where this kind of thing is the norm, except software development and engineering. If you aren't extremely famous and known, or you don't have a deep and wide network, or whatever - you can't just drop your resume, have a decent conversation about your past work and skills, and be given a chance. Instead, you are more often than not forced to jump thru a variety of ill-conceived hoops (many of them on fire, too!), which in the end might get you the position, or more often than not, you are rejected without any explanation or reasoning that might help you to understand what you need to work on in order to be more successful the next time around.

It's fairly absurd when you are on the younger end of the scale; now imagine you are old enough in some cases to be the parent of the person interviewing you, and still being questioned in such a manner, after likely being employed in the past longer than they've been alive.

It's almost Kafkaesque.

The need for recognition in some way or another is hardwired into us, and I don't believe it's intrinsically bad - we are a communal animal and we want to provide value for our community, our brains want success and prestige as a way to motivate us to do that - like feeling hungry motivates us to nourish ourselves. It's a basic need to feel useful, and prestige is the metric our primitive brains use to measure that usefulness, hence office drones find happiness as little league coaches.

Like any force, it can be both good or bad, and it turns bad when your ONLY concern is success and prestige, leading you to optimize external appearances and get some of that sweet sweet second hand prestige. But when combined with something you enjoy doing, and that can provide real value to the world, this desire can be truly world changing, and I think it's a vast oversimplification (being HN I can say it's over-fitting to a one-dimensional metric) to say that the Jobs, Musks, Gates and other folks weren't motivated to some degree by it.

Side note: I remember flying out of LA a few years back and seeing FIVE gaunt bald men dressed in black turtle necks and blue jeans. Either there was a call for a Steve Jobs biopic and nobody took off their costumes, or LA is the the poster child for over-optimizing external appearances.

Let's say that I'm getting by, but only just. There's things I'd like to do - take a vacation, or replace the carpet, or trade up to a better car - but I don't bother thinking much about them, because there's no point. Those things I can't do bother me a bit, but I don't dwell on them very much.

Now my circumstances improve. Now I can take that vacation, or replace the carpet, or trade up to a better car. But note that I said "or", not "and". I can do one of the things I want, but only one. Now each of those things is realistically possible, and I can seriously consider doing it. But in the end, I can only do one of them.

In this way, it's possible to have more money, and therefore more options, and still feel worse about the things you can't do because you don't have enough money.

That is the shortest, best description of Machiavelli's ideas that I've ever seen.