81–90 of 115 posts
Step 1: Go to a good school where you cultivate great connections.
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A decent chunk of people on HN were born way past after Apollo's, Commodore's and Data-General's heyday. And even for SUN, a 20 year programmer today was only 14 or so when the company was sold to Oracle and probably didn't follow the tech industry.
Good spaghetti monster, if you don't recognize Sun or C64, you really need to study the history of your industry a little better. I am not that old, that I remember Java before it was mostly abandoned by Oracle.
"I went there with a positive attitude. The work was interesting. It was rewarding and intellectually challenging. But after a few months, I remember looking at my boss and my boss’ boss, and my boss’ boss’ boss, and saying to myself, “You know what? I don’t want any of their jobs.” I saw how they spent their time and didn’t find it interesting or very rewarding. They spent their time managing meetings and office pol…
I think it's fine to decide you don't want their jobs, but it's a mistake to frame it as "bullshit" which he does after the section you quote. Human nature isn't bullshit, and any endeavor which requires a large number of people to accomplish requires the management of human nature.
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I started out from a very young age focused mostly on finding sources of interesting/purposeful work that provide enough wage to afford a comfortable life, but not luxury. I have not been able to find meaningful/purposeful work in any organization. The life lessons I've learned can basically be summarized as: there is no such thing as purposeful work for which you are paid a wage, and businesses rarely extract meanin…
start your own company.
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This is a ridiculous trope which keeps getting trotted out. You can easily live in SV for under $100k/year. You can earn >$200k as an engineer in SV (and in few other places). SV is almost certainly going to leave you with more money in your pocket than working at the average tech job.
The ">$200K/yr engineer" is also a ridiculous trope. I'm sure there are a handful of outlier engineers at top companies making that, but the median base Software Engineer salary in the Bay Area is anywhere from $100k to $105k depending on your source (+ maybe a few K in equity depending on the company).
I'm not sure how attainable $200k is, but $105k for a mid-career adult is quite low. Perhaps that is the case at actual startups, definitely not the big ones or unicorns.
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> Human nature isn't bullshit No, but it is bullshit to conflate Dilbert-like management culture for "human nature".
Good thing I didn't do that.
As if its inevitable that the "management of human nature" should necessarily take the form the author argued against.
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I think that depends on your definition of FYM. For me it's $1.3MM. For others it might be $5MM or $750k. I make a good living for my area but have nowhere near $1.3MM liquid or even my entire net worth. Getting and extra $500k would not give me any peace of mind or security that I don't already have.
This is a rather precise number - why $1.3M?
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The ">$200K/yr engineer" is also a ridiculous trope. I'm sure there are a handful of outlier engineers at top companies making that, but the median base Software Engineer salary in the Bay Area is anywhere from $100k to $105k depending on your source (+ maybe a few K in equity depending on the company).
$110k is an opening offer to a new grad these days. A few years in, you'd be at least $140-$150k. These are not outlier rockstars; they are standard pay bands at big tech companies. (And to be clear I'm talking salary, stock would be a few tens of thousands on top of that). I'm not sure how attainable $200k is, but $105k for a mid-career adult is quite low. Perhaps that is the case at actual startups, definitely not…
$111,885 average [1]
$110,554 average [2]
$103,000 average [3]
I know this is HN, where everyone makes $150K and has $1M in savings and a supermodel girlfriend, but in the real world I think things are a little different.
1: http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-facebook-dont-pay-the-...
2: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...
3: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...
Excellent article; I thought the section copy-pasted below to be a rather non-trivial, unintuitive, and meaningful lesson: > Craig : How was it to ride that wave, especially when the bottom fell out in 2000? > Tim : When things are going well and you’re in a growth industry, you don’t have to deal with many difficult issues. It’s the old cliche, winning solves everything. > Craig : For sure. > Tim : It’s really true.…