7 ms·

Reading about Galileo, Newton, and others when I was young, I felt that they came from means or had the means to do 'deep' work. Until you have the means, the B

Reading about Galileo, Newton, and others when I was young, I felt that they came from means or had the means to do 'deep' work. Until you have the means, the Bullshit Industrial Complex seems like the rational path to follow. It gets attention which gets you paid. I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research or worked on personal projects. But there is greater external validation in saying you work at FAANG vs. I'm working on some highly technical topic only .01% of people will ever care about. Edit: I 'ass'umed why people don't do quiet research/building when they have the money but would love to hear first hand reasons.

munchbunny 5y ago
A lot of FAANG programmers are people who "work to live". Even with the financial means, the freedom to do what they want isn't necessarily something they value very heavily. Instead, it's a steady 9 to 5 and they have time for family, friends, and hobbies, and they're content with that. Also important to note though: while FAANG pays well, it doesn't pay so well that you can consistently retire at 35 unless you pay very close attention to your wealth management. If I had financial independence, I'd try to become a teacher. Unfortunately, even fully vested, I'm a good ways out from financial independence.
- tppiotrowski 5y ago
  I think I picture "freedom to do what I want" as a studio apartment with a laptop, an internet connection and a library card needing something like $30K a year. So I think for every year I make $150K I can take ~3 years off. Everyones situation is different. Hope you get to teach some day.
  - tayo42 5y ago
    Your going to live in a studio doing nothing but hack on a laptop for the rest of your life? No other things to do discover or try? No people in your life?
    - tppiotrowski 5y ago
      Studio, laptop, internet cost money. Human relationships are free. Some hobbies are free or low cost. You would not be buying the latest gadgets, seeking out the best restaurants and visiting the 100 places you must see before you die. It's a trade off.
      - tayo42 5y ago
        It's costs money to do things with people. Friends want too go places, do things, activities. I can't imagine you'll be hosting guests in your studio eating beans and rice. Life can be so much more interesting.
        tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        >Friends want too go places, do things, activities. No, mostly they are too busy working.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - munchbunny 5y ago
    Just to give a different perspective, I am budgeting for a not-ascetic but also not-extravagant lifestyle (cook at home, buy nicer clothes less often, buy cars new but stick to low maintenance budget models, etc.), dual-income family, kid(s), one or two trips a year (one to travel, another to visit family), some hobbies with equipment costs, a chronic medical condition I was diagnosed with at 25 that is minimal impact right now but will almost certainly get expensive when I'm retirement age, some ongoing memberships like for state parks, etc. Factoring in taxes, it adds up to more than I'd like but less than I would intuitively assume.
  - bluedino 5y ago
    When I was 19 all I wanted was enough money to buy mt dew, pizza, a couple programming books, whatever the newest laptop was, and an internet connection. Not sure what happened there.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      What happened was adults pay their own bills.
      - munchbunny 5y ago
        As someone in their 30s, married and preparing for kids, what has surprised me is how much all of the little things add up. Not the sheer dollar amount, but rather just how many bills you can get in a single month and how many little bits of infrastructure are required for a stable baseline day to day living. The answer for me was “enough that I have to actively dedicate time to managing them.”
  - herval 5y ago
    I think most young FIRE people think that way. I certainly did too, in my early 20s. Then 3 years become 10, 15, 20, and you accumulate an actual life in the meantime (sometimes kids, sometimes pets, sometimes spouses, sometimes hobbies, etc), and the mere thought of living in a studio with a library card becomes a prison. Compounds when you realize you'll no longer have the same energy to "do what you want" when you're 40/50/60, so even maintaining that bare minimum living would be unsustainable.
helen___keller 5y ago
> I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research or worked on personal projects. But there is greater external validation in saying you work at FAANG vs. I'm working on some highly technical topic only .01% of people will ever care about. Something that's weighed on my mind for the past 6 years: when I graduated CMU, in a speech the head of the CS department told us [paraphrased] to work on things that matter and to be a force for good in the world. I never felt like I've accomplished that. I also don't know what I would work on if I did have the means to chase some deep work without worrying about money. I guess if I could get paid to do anything I'd probably do something silly like write a new programming language built for expressing mathematical proofs. These exist, but I've always been interested in starting from the UX side (how do I like to write proofs on paper) and working from there to a formal language; instead of the cutting edge research that is often the other way around (here's homotopy type theory, now let's unify it with modern math) Now the question: even if I had the means to do this while continuing to pay my mortgage, would this be doing any good for the world? Would anybody care about the end result? Would I regret it after 20 years? Edit: I guess the crux of the issue is, it's hard to optimize for being a force for good because the world is big and complicated. But it's quite easy to optimize for making more money, you just go down the list of top paying employers on levels.fyi and filter the ones you don't like.
- zelias 5y ago
  sounds like an excellent way to make mathematical proofs more accessible to the masses!
  - helen___keller 5y ago
    Potentially! But it would likely be years of effort and research to get something usable, which may end up being a dead end. It's simultaneously a tantalizing and torturous proposition.
    - mattmoose21 5y ago
      whether the project is a success or not it seems you would get a lot out of the process. Sometimes you have an idea of what you would like to do and only by going down the path do you realize what you should be doing.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
> I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research or worked on personal projects. But there is greater external validation in saying you work at FAANG vs. I'm working on some highly technical topic only .01% of people will ever care about. Wish granted (in my case). Actually, I didn't really have a choice. No one wants to work with a 55-year-old developer, so I was forced into early retirement. Best thing that ever happened to me. I started spending my nest egg a bit earlier than planned, but it will be fine. I have no intentions of ever working for anyone, ever again. Good riddance. I wish you the very best, at your windmill-tilting. I've done OK, with mine.
- nomoreplease 5y ago
  Congrats on retiring to what you want to do! What are your plans?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    I have already accomplished a fair bit, on the "side work" that I did over the years. I'm currently working with a nonprofit team, and developing an app, aimed at recovering drug addicts. I have some fairly relevant prior art in this field, having designed a worldwide infrastructure platform.
sidibe 5y ago
>I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research A lot of the most interesting research stuff is happening in FAANGs though where there are more resources and direction for research. I'd love to be able to do something useful outside of it, but I don't think there's more opportunities to do impactful research in academia or on your own than in a FAANG
tayo42 5y ago
Idk if you need to be so cynical about motivation. It takes a lot of money to just quit young and do nothing but what you want. Buy a house, travel, have hobbies, family. You need millions in your back account to do these things. So we continue to work. How much money do you think people are making and how much do you think people need?
- david_allison 5y ago
  > It takes a lot of money to just quit young and do nothing but what you want No it doesn't. You can do so with very little money, but doing so requires sacrificing other aspects of your life
  - tayo42 5y ago
    Expecting people do sacrifice everything kind of goes against this cynical take that people are only working to feed their egos
- mym1990 5y ago
  There is a large spectrum between quitting young and doing some of the things you want and quitting young and doing nothing but what you want. There are plenty of people that travel in extremely economical ways. People don't have to live in million dollar homes. Most hobbies don't require a 7 figure bank account to maintain over the course of their life. BUT...generally people will come to live at their means(and sometimes above with the abundance of credit in today's world). Ultimately it becomes difficult to back out of a lavish life and the paychecks become the only way to sustain it.
  - tayo42 5y ago
    That's not sustainable. You need millions to retire today. That's why people are working. Not to feed their ego like the poster suggests.
    - mym1990 5y ago
kodah 5y ago
I work at a large engineering firm. Even if you do get the big pay days it doesn't mean you can suddenly retire. You still have to put in a good 10-15 years to get reliable financial independence. I say that in the light of that I'd much rather be working on personal projects or projects which deal in resource efficiency/conservation/telemetry, but these gigs don't pay as well.
joe_the_user 5y ago
I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research or worked on personal projects. I think "deep" building requires specific resources that having been a programmer may or may not give you. The purpose of PhD programs, in particular, is to prepare a person to do original research in an existing field. While these may have some unnecessary hazing, a significant part of their difficulty is that leaping to one's own original research or building is hard. One has to navigate avoid both excessively small steps and vacuous (or unprovable) big ideas. Someone without a PhD needs to apply some similar level of discipline imo if they're going accomplish an important thing. For a few people, that might be an easier rout but for most, I suspect it's even more difficult - at least if you honestly avoid both the trivial and vacuously ill-defined. PS: I am indeed doing the "quit job and follow what you love" thing so I think a view of how challenging that can be.
throwwy28459533 5y ago
Another option for those with FAANG (or other) money: Personally fund other people who are already doing research or "deep" work. Perhaps first people you already know, and then strangers on the internet who are asking for funding. These other people doing research or deep work are likely to have the qualities and knowledge to effectively direct the usage of funds in a manner that progresses their work; also see the comment by 'joe_the_user. (There is currently no shortcut for determining who to fund, as it ultimately comes down to a synthesis of intuition/taste and empiricism. Current funding systems are overly biased toward a form of empiricism, i.e. an implicit assumption that past results signal and legitimate the potential for continued future performance. Deciding on the basis of one's own intuition and taste is one approach to correct for overreliance on externalized empiricism.)
taylodl 5y ago
You're still playing their game, you're living your life by their rules. Once you realize there aren't any rules and "success" is being satisfied with your own life then you may begin to forge a different path. Sadly, very few people go this route, but the few I know who have are profoundly content.
orware 5y ago
I would love to just focus on dozens of problems / interesting areas to myself, but those of us without healthy bank accounts don't really have that luxury. I really wish there was a sponsorship model of some sort where folks that just love programming for the sake of it could be sponsored by those wealthy enough not to worry about money anymore. While there are still a lot of interesting problem areas within a typical workplace, sometimes the interests one has within programming don't necessarily align with the workplace's needs, making it so that to work on the interesting stuff in your own time, which gets harder as "life" happens and bills become plentiful. I too though read about those famous folks in science and noticed how they had either financial sponsors, or were themselves already wealthy, and that allowed them to pursue their own learning paths in earnest, where I would say that isn't an option for the vast majority of us today (it also circles back to general opportunity...there are so many smart and intelligent people out there that may never get the chance to reach their full potential due to the lack of opportunity and instead have to focus on more basic needs, etc.).

munchbunny 5y ago

A lot of FAANG programmers are people who "work to live". Even with the financial means, the freedom to do what they want isn't necessarily something they value very heavily. Instead, it's a steady 9 to 5 and they have time for family, friends, and hobbies, and they're content with that. Also important to note though: while FAANG pays well, it doesn't pay so well that you can consistently retire at 35 unless you pay very close attention to your wealth management. If I had financial independence, I'd try to become a teacher. Unfortunately, even fully vested, I'm a good ways out from financial independence.

tppiotrowski 5y ago
I think I picture "freedom to do what I want" as a studio apartment with a laptop, an internet connection and a library card needing something like $30K a year. So I think for every year I make $150K I can take ~3 years off. Everyones situation is different. Hope you get to teach some day.
- tayo42 5y ago
  Your going to live in a studio doing nothing but hack on a laptop for the rest of your life? No other things to do discover or try? No people in your life?
  - tppiotrowski 5y ago
    Studio, laptop, internet cost money. Human relationships are free. Some hobbies are free or low cost. You would not be buying the latest gadgets, seeking out the best restaurants and visiting the 100 places you must see before you die. It's a trade off.
    - tayo42 5y ago
      It's costs money to do things with people. Friends want too go places, do things, activities. I can't imagine you'll be hosting guests in your studio eating beans and rice. Life can be so much more interesting.
      - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        >Friends want too go places, do things, activities. No, mostly they are too busy working.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- munchbunny 5y ago
  Just to give a different perspective, I am budgeting for a not-ascetic but also not-extravagant lifestyle (cook at home, buy nicer clothes less often, buy cars new but stick to low maintenance budget models, etc.), dual-income family, kid(s), one or two trips a year (one to travel, another to visit family), some hobbies with equipment costs, a chronic medical condition I was diagnosed with at 25 that is minimal impact right now but will almost certainly get expensive when I'm retirement age, some ongoing memberships like for state parks, etc. Factoring in taxes, it adds up to more than I'd like but less than I would intuitively assume.
- bluedino 5y ago
  When I was 19 all I wanted was enough money to buy mt dew, pizza, a couple programming books, whatever the newest laptop was, and an internet connection. Not sure what happened there.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    What happened was adults pay their own bills.
    - munchbunny 5y ago
      As someone in their 30s, married and preparing for kids, what has surprised me is how much all of the little things add up. Not the sheer dollar amount, but rather just how many bills you can get in a single month and how many little bits of infrastructure are required for a stable baseline day to day living. The answer for me was “enough that I have to actively dedicate time to managing them.”
- herval 5y ago
  I think most young FIRE people think that way. I certainly did too, in my early 20s. Then 3 years become 10, 15, 20, and you accumulate an actual life in the meantime (sometimes kids, sometimes pets, sometimes spouses, sometimes hobbies, etc), and the mere thought of living in a studio with a library card becomes a prison. Compounds when you realize you'll no longer have the same energy to "do what you want" when you're 40/50/60, so even maintaining that bare minimum living would be unsustainable.

helen___keller 5y ago

> I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research or worked on personal projects. But there is greater external validation in saying you work at FAANG vs. I'm working on some highly technical topic only .01% of people will ever care about. Something that's weighed on my mind for the past 6 years: when I graduated CMU, in a speech the head of the CS department told us [paraphrased] to work on things that matter and to be a force for good in the world. I never felt like I've accomplished that. I also don't know what I would work on if I did have the means to chase some deep work without worrying about money. I guess if I could get paid to do anything I'd probably do something silly like write a new programming language built for expressing mathematical proofs. These exist, but I've always been interested in starting from the UX side (how do I like to write proofs on paper) and working from there to a formal language; instead of the cutting edge research that is often the other way around (here's homotopy type theory, now let's unify it with modern math) Now the question: even if I had the means to do this while continuing to pay my mortgage, would this be doing any good for the world? Would anybody care about the end result? Would I regret it after 20 years? Edit: I guess the crux of the issue is, it's hard to optimize for being a force for good because the world is big and complicated. But it's quite easy to optimize for making more money, you just go down the list of top paying employers on levels.fyi and filter the ones you don't like.

zelias 5y ago
sounds like an excellent way to make mathematical proofs more accessible to the masses!
- helen___keller 5y ago
  Potentially! But it would likely be years of effort and research to get something usable, which may end up being a dead end. It's simultaneously a tantalizing and torturous proposition.
  - mattmoose21 5y ago
    whether the project is a success or not it seems you would get a lot out of the process. Sometimes you have an idea of what you would like to do and only by going down the path do you realize what you should be doing.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

nomoreplease 5y ago
Congrats on retiring to what you want to do! What are your plans?
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I have already accomplished a fair bit, on the "side work" that I did over the years. I'm currently working with a nonprofit team, and developing an app, aimed at recovering drug addicts. I have some fairly relevant prior art in this field, having designed a worldwide infrastructure platform.

sidibe 5y ago

>I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research A lot of the most interesting research stuff is happening in FAANGs though where there are more resources and direction for research. I'd love to be able to do something useful outside of it, but I don't think there's more opportunities to do impactful research in academia or on your own than in a FAANG

tayo42 5y ago

Idk if you need to be so cynical about motivation. It takes a lot of money to just quit young and do nothing but what you want. Buy a house, travel, have hobbies, family. You need millions in your back account to do these things. So we continue to work. How much money do you think people are making and how much do you think people need?

david_allison 5y ago
> It takes a lot of money to just quit young and do nothing but what you want No it doesn't. You can do so with very little money, but doing so requires sacrificing other aspects of your life
- tayo42 5y ago
  Expecting people do sacrifice everything kind of goes against this cynical take that people are only working to feed their egos
mym1990 5y ago
There is a large spectrum between quitting young and doing some of the things you want and quitting young and doing nothing but what you want. There are plenty of people that travel in extremely economical ways. People don't have to live in million dollar homes. Most hobbies don't require a 7 figure bank account to maintain over the course of their life. BUT...generally people will come to live at their means(and sometimes above with the abundance of credit in today's world). Ultimately it becomes difficult to back out of a lavish life and the paychecks become the only way to sustain it.
- tayo42 5y ago
  That's not sustainable. You need millions to retire today. That's why people are working. Not to feed their ego like the poster suggests.
  - mym1990 5y ago

kodah 5y ago

I work at a large engineering firm. Even if you do get the big pay days it doesn't mean you can suddenly retire. You still have to put in a good 10-15 years to get reliable financial independence. I say that in the light of that I'd much rather be working on personal projects or projects which deal in resource efficiency/conservation/telemetry, but these gigs don't pay as well.

joe_the_user 5y ago

I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research or worked on personal projects. I think "deep" building requires specific resources that having been a programmer may or may not give you. The purpose of PhD programs, in particular, is to prepare a person to do original research in an existing field. While these may have some unnecessary hazing, a significant part of their difficulty is that leaping to one's own original research or building is hard. One has to navigate avoid both excessively small steps and vacuous (or unprovable) big ideas. Someone without a PhD needs to apply some similar level of discipline imo if they're going accomplish an important thing. For a few people, that might be an easier rout but for most, I suspect it's even more difficult - at least if you honestly avoid both the trivial and vacuously ill-defined. PS: I am indeed doing the "quit job and follow what you love" thing so I think a view of how challenging that can be.

throwwy28459533 5y ago

Another option for those with FAANG (or other) money: Personally fund other people who are already doing research or "deep" work. Perhaps first people you already know, and then strangers on the internet who are asking for funding. These other people doing research or deep work are likely to have the qualities and knowledge to effectively direct the usage of funds in a manner that progresses their work; also see the comment by 'joe_the_user. (There is currently no shortcut for determining who to fund, as it ultimately comes down to a synthesis of intuition/taste and empiricism. Current funding systems are overly biased toward a form of empiricism, i.e. an implicit assumption that past results signal and legitimate the potential for continued future performance. Deciding on the basis of one's own intuition and taste is one approach to correct for overreliance on externalized empiricism.)

taylodl 5y ago

You're still playing their game, you're living your life by their rules. Once you realize there aren't any rules and "success" is being satisfied with your own life then you may begin to forge a different path. Sadly, very few people go this route, but the few I know who have are profoundly content.

orware 5y ago

I would love to just focus on dozens of problems / interesting areas to myself, but those of us without healthy bank accounts don't really have that luxury. I really wish there was a sponsorship model of some sort where folks that just love programming for the sake of it could be sponsored by those wealthy enough not to worry about money anymore. While there are still a lot of interesting problem areas within a typical workplace, sometimes the interests one has within programming don't necessarily align with the workplace's needs, making it so that to work on the interesting stuff in your own time, which gets harder as "life" happens and bills become plentiful. I too though read about those famous folks in science and noticed how they had either financial sponsors, or were themselves already wealthy, and that allowed them to pursue their own learning paths in earnest, where I would say that isn't an option for the vast majority of us today (it also circles back to general opportunity...there are so many smart and intelligent people out there that may never get the chance to reach their full potential due to the lack of opportunity and instead have to focus on more basic needs, etc.).