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> I've worked with who must be multi-millionaires (at least one has told me they are); I don't know what keeps them working corporate jobs. What many people di

> I've worked with who must be multi-millionaires (at least one has told me they are); I don't know what keeps them working corporate jobs. What many people discover is that they actually have a desire to work in some way or another, which makes sense in the big picture of being human: feeling like you're making some kind of contribution to a communal end seems like a pretty innate since that's how communities and cultures sustain. If you've matured a career and gotten sufficiently comfortable with its processes, many people can find satisfaction in it even when they become aware that the "communal end" is bullshit. You just do your part, complain to friends at dinner parties, bank the paycheck, and justify your indulgences in luxury to how much you put up with to earn them. Many find that once you take that away, you find yourself staring at a blank slate where you're not really prepared to make comparably significant contributions to anything else and are reluctant to start grinding from the bottom in a new field/skill. Retirement is harder than many assume, and especially early retirement. And not just because of the financials involved.

ndriscoll 2y ago
I get the desire to keep oneself productive and make contributions to the world, but it seems like standups and sprint planning aren't that, and for the most part, corporate work involves doing a satisfactory job, but realizing that doing a particularly good job at anything isn't worth it for various reasons (i.e. the idea of "craftsmanship" is generally inappropriate in a corporate context). Surely there's communal satisfaction to be found making improvements to e.g. digikam. Or we've seen bright college kids try to make things like diaspora or mastodon over the years, but they don't know what they're doing, so it always ends up being something that barely runs and costs way too much to be able to scale. Someone that actually knew what they were doing could easily write something 100x more efficient. It's not so much "why do you do stuff", but "why do you work at a corporation and worry about OKRs and sprints and 360 peer reviews instead of doing stuff?"

ndriscoll 2y ago

I get the desire to keep oneself productive and make contributions to the world, but it seems like standups and sprint planning aren't that, and for the most part, corporate work involves doing a satisfactory job, but realizing that doing a particularly good job at anything isn't worth it for various reasons (i.e. the idea of "craftsmanship" is generally inappropriate in a corporate context). Surely there's communal satisfaction to be found making improvements to e.g. digikam. Or we've seen bright college kids try to make things like diaspora or mastodon over the years, but they don't know what they're doing, so it always ends up being something that barely runs and costs way too much to be able to scale. Someone that actually knew what they were doing could easily write something 100x more efficient. It's not so much "why do you do stuff", but "why do you work at a corporation and worry about OKRs and sprints and 360 peer reviews instead of doing stuff?"