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People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige

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Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige

#331

Post by jophde »

duderific wrote: post #304
fourmyle wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going through the realization right now that I need to go “FANG” or get out of the Bay Area right now. Just got engaged and I have been looking at costs. I thought I could make a small family work here on $170k. That’s dead wrong. I would need at least $300k to make a family of 4 comfortable here. My wife and I both want her to stay at home and focus on the kids and she makes non tech money anyway. Even at this amoun…

> Startups in tech aren’t paying close to family raising salaries in the Bay. They are mostly hiring fresh grads anyway, who won't be raising a family anytime soon, so it's not a huge problem for them.

I'm including series D companies under the term startup. I agree with you about early stage companies. Jobs at non FANG that don't IPO are not that sustainable imo.

Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige

#332

Post by paulgb »

glitchc wrote: post #301
paulgb wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I think Jobs is the only one who could really be said to eschew prestige institutuons. Gates went to Harvard and Musk went to Wharton (and Queen's, which is the Canadian equivalent of ivy-league).

Queen’s is far from the Canadian equivalent of “Ivy League.” You must be from Queen’s.

Ha, far from it, I went to Waterloo. Not that I bought into rivalries, but if we had one it was Queen's

The comparison in this context was that Queen's has a reputation for attracting status-seeking people banking on a management consulting career path.

Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige

#333

Post by arrosenberg »

philwelch wrote: post #219
bambax wrote: post #22

OT, and possibly unpopular here, but this really gets on my nerves: > In Paul Graham’s essay on, How to Do what You Love* he warns us about the prestige trap: (...) you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you’re going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies* PG's contempt for anything literary pervades in many of his essays, which may reveal some kind of unhealthy obsession, esp. for…

Novels don't contain some otherwise ineffable TRUTH (in all-capital letters), they're just made-up stories for entertainment. Which is a perfectly fine thing for people to work on and to enjoy. If anything this bizarre attitude that literature "may be the only way to gain an actual comprehension of human nature" might be an artifice of people's desire for success and prestige--puffery motivated by a personal insecuri…

> Put yourself in extreme situations with other people (like joining the military or something).

I don't disagree with your point generally, but for someone with no interest in being in the military, reading Hemingway is a perfectly acceptable way to understand the ugliness of war. He absolutely captures the human condition in his books.

Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige

#334

Post by jlevers »

Loughla wrote: post #103
asdfman123 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed something about subreddits that focus on lifestyle design and center around advice: they all start to converge on fairly narrow groupthink. /r/personalfinance is all about super frugal living and passive investing. In /r/backpacking, the general advice is to go as light as possible and spend money reducing weight. /r/cscareerquestions is about the leetcode grind and getting into FAANG. /r/malefashionadvi…

>In fact, what we think of as "smart" does not correspond to "has high natural ability." "Smart people" are people who have decided to make their identities center around being smart. They've worked hard at it. I would also argue it's the combination of smart and naturally outgoing or extroversion. Being extroverted seems to be naturally correlated to being successful or being a successful leader for most people. It…

Until recently, I agreed with you, but I just read a book called Quiet (by Susan Cain) [1] about introversion, and in the book they give evidence that shows that many of corporate history's most successful leaders were introverts.

I highly recommend the book to anyone who thinks they're an introvert, manages introverts, or has introverted family members -- it helped me understand/be happy with many of my own personality traits that I'd overlooked or misunderstood. (And, after reading the book, I realize I'm an ambivert, not an introvert.)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/...

Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige

#335

Post by jdkee »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #269
jacobolus wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was David Brooks dumping his wife of 3 decades for his 2-decades-younger research assistant and then writing passive-aggressive columns in the NYT about how people abandoned by their spouses should suck it up and stop bothering them an example of résumé virtuous or eulogy virtuous?

Following your heart is a virtue. Writing about it bluntly, doubly so. Is one not free to leave a spouse for someone else? Regardless of age (assuming everyone is a consenting adult!)? I give credit to those who live their life intentionally. You only get one. If you’re unhappy, pull the sails and head towards happiness. Valid point to not be a dick about it though (I haven’t read to know if these articles you mentio…

E.g. Newt Gingrich.

Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige

#336

Post by DoubleGlazing »

TomMarius wrote: post #20
DoubleGlazing wrote: post #15

I look at this from the opposite perspective, the person who doesn't care much for success and prestige but has to deal with the toxic side-effects of those that do. I grew up an only child in as single parent household where I was taught that it's better to quietly build a stable secure foundation for your life, rather than to put yourself "out there" and hope for the best. My mothers attitude was that it is better…

Maybe the issue is that these jobs are basically seasonal but we are trying to force them to be secure jobs in office? I can imagine there is a lot of people who like to jump project to project and not get caught in maintenance, like I do. I think these (secure job / project hopping) are very different things that shouldn't be compared, and people should not forget about the nature of the job at hand (and, IMHO, shou…

I think it's more to do with the demand for talent. The people with their sights on mega success need talented tech people to bring those ideas to reality. Problem is their ain't enough of those people to go around, so as a result salaries are high - but long hours and overtime are expected. As part of the process of convincing people to do that managers try to play to our egos and say we'll e successful and rich of we do.

At a previous job, a developer for a logistics firm, we got reviewed on the amount of overtime that we gave to the company. I refused to do overtime unless it was to fix a problem of my own making. My manager told me that was a very unprofessional attitude. My response was to say that I spent seven years at University getting my BSc and MSc. I lived on ramen and cheap Tennents lager. Why should I give away those hard acquired skills for free? "To be successful!!" my manager said. I told him I was successful. I earned a decent salary and was able to provide for my family and put savings aside... what more did I need?

Later the MD of that company would give a speech at the summer party saying that if you put in less than 10 hours a week overtime then you didn't value success and didn't care for your family.

Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige

#337

Post by jacobolus »

keithwhor wrote: post #316
jacobolus wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was David Brooks dumping his wife of 3 decades for his 2-decades-younger research assistant and then writing passive-aggressive columns in the NYT about how people abandoned by their spouses should suck it up and stop bothering them an example of résumé virtuous or eulogy virtuous?

Food for thought: People live as they live, and can have great thoughts, insights and advice without adhering to your interpretation of their words or actions.

Food for thought: People can publicly express half-baked thoughts, banal “insights”, hypocritical advice, and horribly wrong predictions for decades without ever admitting their mistakes, and can pretend independence where convenient but unfailingly fall in line with their assigned talking points when directed, but still be treated as worth taking seriously because of their social position.

Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige

#338

Post by tmh88j »

fourmyle wrote: post #266
tmh88j wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That’s dead wrong. I would need at least $300k to make a family of 4 comfortable here. The Bay Area has a combined population of over 7 million, with a mean household income of $137k. It sounds like you have unreasonable expectations if you need at least $300k to live comfortably. https://sf.curbed.com/2019/2/25/18239828/report-middle-class... https://smartasset.com/retirement/average-salary-in-san-fran... https://w…

A lot of these people got into the housing market before the explosion in prices over the last 15 years. Also, that stat also doesn't tell you if people on those incomes can afford their houses or how soon they can retire. It sounds like you either don't live in the Bay Area or you make about what I make and haven't realized if you don't make $300k and your options aren't very pleasant.

I don't know if you came from an extremely privileged background, but I find it ridiculous that your minimum standard of a comfortable living starts at over double the median household income for that area.

Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige

#339

Post by bsanr2 »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #260
bsanr2 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on where the home is. With admonishments from every corner for my not squirreling away $100/month out of my ~$1800 take-home pay, someone making $250k a year should be able to easily put away the linear equivalent of $10k a year. 5 years of that is a down payment on something decent, somewhere decent. Of course, my bread costs about as much as their bread, so they could probably getaway with a bit more. It's…

Just to toss out another example. I make about $150k. I'm a single father. I put the legal maximum into my retirement account every year, which I think is $19k this year. I have 6 months of expenses saved up in my emergency fund. We take a nice vacation every year and have luxuries like season passes to Broadway. Yes, I think it's all about making good financial decisions.

*after you're paid enough to make financial decisions of any sort.

Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige

#340

Post by philwelch »

arrosenberg wrote: post #333
philwelch wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Novels don't contain some otherwise ineffable TRUTH (in all-capital letters), they're just made-up stories for entertainment. Which is a perfectly fine thing for people to work on and to enjoy. If anything this bizarre attitude that literature "may be the only way to gain an actual comprehension of human nature" might be an artifice of people's desire for success and prestige--puffery motivated by a personal insecuri…

> Put yourself in extreme situations with other people (like joining the military or something). I don't disagree with your point generally, but for someone with no interest in being in the military, reading Hemingway is a perfectly acceptable way to understand the ugliness of war. He absolutely captures the human condition in his books.

I don't disagree with that; I'm just saying that when you read Hemingway, you're experiencing all that stuff second-hand and I suspect Hemingway himself had a much broader understanding of the human condition than anyone can ever achieve by reading Hemingway.
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