5 ms·
Funny, but there's nothing wrong with that if Arthur was/is happy (which isn't mentioned).
by whoisthemachine 3y ago
Funny, but there's nothing wrong with that if Arthur was/is happy (which isn't mentioned).
- emptyfile 3y ago[dead]
- Otek 3y agoExactly this. Guy had a comfortable stable job for years. Probably knew codebase and technology enough to have lots of time for family/friends/hobbies. More than this story scares me how HN reacted
- bowsamic 3y agoI can only assume it's because HN is full of young, inexperienced people whose main wish is to stay on the cutting edge of technology rather than sinking into a stable profession
- version_five 3y agoYou may be right, but I don't think experience is what makes people prioritize stability over anything else. I'd be so depressed at a real job like the one described, it would be irrelevant that it was stable and gave me extra time. Some people are ambitious, some just like variety.
- bowsamic 3y agoVariety for the sake of variety is foolish though. If variety is not required, injecting it where it's not needed is just called "breaking things"
- Double_a_92 3y agoMost jobs are like that though... Unless maybe if all you do is develop very small applications, that your company just sells and forgets.
- chasd00 3y agoThe scope of ambition is larger than your job. Very ambitious people use a job as just the means to an end.
- sneak 3y agoHaving a comfortable, stable job for many years sounds like the worst version of hell one could possibly invent for people who live like I do. There are better things to aspire to than predictability whilst making someone else rich.
- pjc50 3y agoThis view may change as you get older and "unpredictability" starts to mean more negative experiences.
- jebarker 3y agoPerhaps his aspirations had nothing to do with his day job?
- junon 3y agoOnly if you don't have other aspirations in life. My day job is solely to fund my personal projects that I actually enjoy. Not everyone is out to be insanely rich.
- sneak 3y agoIf you fairly profit from your direct efforts in a lifelong career as a productive programmer, you will merely become rich, not insanely so. You appear to have constructed a strawman. Making someone else rich is the objection.
- oars 3y agoArthur was also able to purchase his large family home in the 1990s for $90,000 which is now worth $2.3 million.
- 0x445442 3y agoNothing in the article said Arthur lived in the Bay Area.
- fsociety 3y agoIt’s not just the Bay Area experiencing this.
- 0x445442 3y agoMaybe Arthur lived in Springfield, MO and worked at Bass Pro or O'Reilly Auto Corporate offices and lives here. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/8057-W-Farm-Road-100-Willard-MO-65781/50272224_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/8057-W-Farm-Road-100-Will...
- ryukafalz 3y agoIt’s not, but from the outside the Bay Area’s cost of living looks impressively bad. A typical house in my neighborhood in the Northeast goes for less than 1/4 of that.
- thumbuddy 3y agoSome people like to either suffer or think they are so great that even their if statements will survive into the next millennia
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jojobas 3y ago>More than this story scares me how HN reacted Projections, my dear Watson.
- soco 3y agoOr whether the employer was happy (it was - he stayed there for 35 years).
- ModernMech 3y agoI mean… he’s eating cat food. Do you know many happy people who eat cat food?
- Double_a_92 3y agoCat food is relatively expensive though... I don't undertand why people do (or claim to) eat that.
- sumtechguy 3y agoIt was from when there was a time when cat/dog food was wildy cheap. So people would eat it. It is just a leftover from the 60s/70s.
- perrygeo 3y agoI met a thru-hiker on the Appalachian Trail that carried a few pouches of cat food. You need to carry emergency rations and they need to have decent nutritional content. But how do you stop yourself from eating it when mildly hungry? His theory was, it should be so gross that you wouldn't possibly eat it except in a true emergency. He made in from GA to CT without dipping into the forbidden slop.
- sixstringtheory 3y agoSo really he just carried unnecessary weight. He could’ve carried an extra pouch of tuna fish meant for humans and it’d have been the same.
- mabbo 3y agoThere is though. It's 2023 and today companies will quite happily lay you off the moment you aren't profitable to them. This fictional person made it all the way to retirement and good for him. But the guy who followed this strategy for 15 years and now is job hunting because the company needed to cut 18% of its staff? He's got a huge gap in useful skills and decades left before he can retire. That guy is in real trouble.
- JackMorgan 3y agoThis is the real reason I put moderate effort into staying current: I've interviewed too many guys with 15 years in the field who can't write actual code at all because they only have written a few dozen lines ever. They are a sad lot and it's embarrassing to even interview them. If I could be guaranteed I'd have the same job forever with the same tech then who cares, but I've never met anyone for whom that was true. The people that don't learn either retire early or are forced to switch careers.
- mabbo 3y agoThey worked the same year 15 times, or maybe the same two months 90 times.
- sixstringtheory 3y agoPost hoc ergo propter hoc. They aren’t incompetent because they worked the same job for 15 years. And they probably weren’t even laid off because they were deemed incompetent. You just got unlucky enough to interview them instead of someone who got laid off after 15 years and were amazing at their job and could pick up a new tech they’d never heard of and immediately be off to the races.
- Shrezzing 3y ago35 years in a single easy role with good job security, plus an early retirement. Arthur was happy.
- icepat 3y ago> The struggle itself towards the lack of bugs is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Arthur happy My favourite passage from Camus' little known book Software Development is Existentialism