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I spent a year working for an A/V installation company - whole house integrated sound systems, media servers, security, etc - and their clientele was solely mul

I spent a year working for an A/V installation company - whole house integrated sound systems, media servers, security, etc - and their clientele was solely multi-millionaires of various nationalities. My job was primarily as a programmer for the control systems these installations used so I spent the majority of my working day in clients homes. They were without exception the most sterile, vapid, soulless environments I had ever been in. They had everything in them but nothing felt homely. Another thing was the lack of responsibility for cost. You know the line from Arrested Development “it’s one banana, Michael, how much could it cost, $10?” Well, this is their real lives. I was asked to visit a client to arrange a laptop for them to use for day trading. I turn up, start going through options for MacBooks, their pros/cons, costs of models vs features and the guy turns to me, exasperated, and goes “I don’t care about the cost, just give me what I need”. Ok, I say I’ll let my manager know what I picked. I find out a couple weeks later, he’s actually rented a Bloomberg terminal for thousands a week. He then gets me back in to set the thing up. I’m sat at this machine, on the phone to Bloomberg being asked by them for the clients usernames and password, me leaning over to them to ask for the details, being told, relaying that back to Bloomberg, about three times. Until, exasperated, he takes me notebook and writes down every username and every password for every account and service he used. Bloomberg, banking, email, everything. It was worth poor old me having that to not bother him any more than necessary. Plenty of experiences from that too brief 12 months but was a massive eye opener to a side of society that I’d never have got the chance to see. It’s a different world, but not entirely sure it’s one I’d want to live in.

steveBK123 3y ago
There's a lot of jobs/markets where the physical hardware is not even remotely the main cost. Think - $2-3k/mo Bloomberg terminal, various proprietary data vendors at $25k/50k/100k per year, etc. If you are professionally managing money (like a family office or something) at a scale of say $1B then having all these soft costs add up to say $1M/year is basically nothing.. 0.1%. In that world, a $1k vs $4k MacBook is basically irrelevant. If they were smart, they'd have multiple devices on standby so they can immediately get back online in case of any failures. That said, in most cases day trading is basically just high end gambling and a mechanism of turning a large fortune into a small one. Put another way, if you are in any non-technical role that makes $1M/year but you depend on reliable computer access.. every day of being offline is worth $4000, or say $500/hour. For a lot of people, computers are a means to an ends and just a tool. Think about how a professional chef thinks about their dishwashing machine or a car enthusiast thinks about garage door openers. You just expect it to work, and in the 0.0001% scenarios it does fail its really annoying.
- gen220 3y ago
  These stories of justifying great expenses amuse me, because I can't help but compare them to Warren Buffet's office (which is mostly sports memorabilia, loose papers, a telephone [1]). >That said, in most cases day trading is basically just high end gambling and a mechanism of turning a large fortune into a small one. Poignant! There are plenty of people and businesses happy to pry off a chunk along the way. :) [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/take-a-candid-and-personal-tour-of-warren-buffetts-office-guided-by-the-oracle-of-omaha-himself-2012-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/take-a-candid-and-personal-t...
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Warren Buffett is probably the great exception to the rule of Billionaires pretending to live commonly. Most of the other "oh I drive a Honda" or "I live with roommates" origin stories turn out to be factual, but incomplete as we find out they have roommates in a $20M penthouse / commute in the Honda for optics but have a garage full of luxury vehicles / own 27 homes / etc. Kind of like the classic Steve Jobs "hide the Porsches" story. That said, I bet Buffett owns at least 2 MacBooks? And really at the end of the day, anyone with a FAANG level job should have backup compute in the case of failure. It's a nothing expense next to the income we derive from using compute.
    - FireBeyond 3y ago
      Even Elon, "I don't own a house" (but I have a holding company that owns several), but "I stay in a friend's $50M home which has a household staff".

steveBK123 3y ago

There's a lot of jobs/markets where the physical hardware is not even remotely the main cost. Think - $2-3k/mo Bloomberg terminal, various proprietary data vendors at $25k/50k/100k per year, etc. If you are professionally managing money (like a family office or something) at a scale of say $1B then having all these soft costs add up to say $1M/year is basically nothing.. 0.1%. In that world, a $1k vs $4k MacBook is basically irrelevant. If they were smart, they'd have multiple devices on standby so they can immediately get back online in case of any failures. That said, in most cases day trading is basically just high end gambling and a mechanism of turning a large fortune into a small one. Put another way, if you are in any non-technical role that makes $1M/year but you depend on reliable computer access.. every day of being offline is worth $4000, or say $500/hour. For a lot of people, computers are a means to an ends and just a tool. Think about how a professional chef thinks about their dishwashing machine or a car enthusiast thinks about garage door openers. You just expect it to work, and in the 0.0001% scenarios it does fail its really annoying.

gen220 3y ago
These stories of justifying great expenses amuse me, because I can't help but compare them to Warren Buffet's office (which is mostly sports memorabilia, loose papers, a telephone [1]). >That said, in most cases day trading is basically just high end gambling and a mechanism of turning a large fortune into a small one. Poignant! There are plenty of people and businesses happy to pry off a chunk along the way. :) [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/take-a-candid-and-personal-tour-of-warren-buffetts-office-guided-by-the-oracle-of-omaha-himself-2012-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/take-a-candid-and-personal-t...
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Warren Buffett is probably the great exception to the rule of Billionaires pretending to live commonly. Most of the other "oh I drive a Honda" or "I live with roommates" origin stories turn out to be factual, but incomplete as we find out they have roommates in a $20M penthouse / commute in the Honda for optics but have a garage full of luxury vehicles / own 27 homes / etc. Kind of like the classic Steve Jobs "hide the Porsches" story. That said, I bet Buffett owns at least 2 MacBooks? And really at the end of the day, anyone with a FAANG level job should have backup compute in the case of failure. It's a nothing expense next to the income we derive from using compute.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    Even Elon, "I don't own a house" (but I have a holding company that owns several), but "I stay in a friend's $50M home which has a household staff".