3 ms·

If you are $120k a year SE and play your cards right, you can sometimes maneuver into a situation where your coworkers aren’t just competent-on-average but acti

If you are $120k a year SE and play your cards right, you can sometimes maneuver into a situation where your coworkers aren’t just competent-on-average but actively bright, sometimes brilliant people. At $35k, usually you are trying to identify the one other person in the office who also got unlucky so you can be friends with someone who isn’t getting remarried a month after their fourth divorce. This can't be understated. Sometimes I've been in my successful dev bubble for so long that I forgot my low level preprofessional job interactions. It was miserable. Not because the bosses treated people badly, but because there was literally no kind of incentive that could get a lot of my colleagues to be any better. They only responded to the whip.

ng12 5y ago
This reeks. There are a lot of good, honest, hardworking people out there without Bachelor's degrees.
- erikerikson 5y ago
  Agreed. And I've also been a part of such systems where the defection on every person's part created a terrible environment over the very smallest of stakes. Most of my favorite people are those you reference but it doesn't make how bad it can get go away and I read the GP as indicating some rather than all.
- Mezzie 5y ago
  There's no contradiction between what he says and what you say. My mother is a hardworking, intelligent person (good and honest? Eh...) without a college degree. She'd probably be identified as the person GP would bond with as having gotten unlucky; her parents wouldn't let her go to school for engineering since she was a girl/she had to run away due to being abused, which stuck her in low level jobs. Then she tried to get an associate's in ultrasound technology but the economy crashed and she couldn't cast her net widely enough to make use of it. Which is its own issue: Even if you meet people who are competent in those positions, they also tend to be very cynical and pessimistic + burnt out. That type of relationship can also be poison, but at the same time the only thing keeping you sane. It's hard.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

ng12 5y ago

This reeks. There are a lot of good, honest, hardworking people out there without Bachelor's degrees.

erikerikson 5y ago
Agreed. And I've also been a part of such systems where the defection on every person's part created a terrible environment over the very smallest of stakes. Most of my favorite people are those you reference but it doesn't make how bad it can get go away and I read the GP as indicating some rather than all.
Mezzie 5y ago
There's no contradiction between what he says and what you say. My mother is a hardworking, intelligent person (good and honest? Eh...) without a college degree. She'd probably be identified as the person GP would bond with as having gotten unlucky; her parents wouldn't let her go to school for engineering since she was a girl/she had to run away due to being abused, which stuck her in low level jobs. Then she tried to get an associate's in ultrasound technology but the economy crashed and she couldn't cast her net widely enough to make use of it. Which is its own issue: Even if you meet people who are competent in those positions, they also tend to be very cynical and pessimistic + burnt out. That type of relationship can also be poison, but at the same time the only thing keeping you sane. It's hard.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]