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You are certainly lucky that your natural interests lead you to something lucrative, but you are good with technology because you presumably spent considerable

You are certainly lucky that your natural interests lead you to something lucrative, but you are good with technology because you presumably spent considerable amount of time practising with the technology. If you spent more time drawing, you would eventually become good at that too. If we imagine technology jobs dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow and drawing suddenly became a high paying career, would you invest the time and effort required to become good at drawing, or would you rest on your innate interests and watch your job opportunities fade away? That is the distinction the parent appears to be making. The tools are available to become good at just about anything you can imagine, but it requires a certain type of person to push towards that goal when the natural curiosity is not present.

_delirium 13y ago
I guess it depends on the degree of need. If I were starving and had no choice but to take up drawing as a career, I guess I would try. But if technology were still something you could make $40k/yr doing, I'd probably stick with it, because it's more interesting to me. I'm in technology for the technology more than for the money. In some ways I kind of wonder if it'd like it more: what would technology as a field be like if the $100k+ jobs and big exits were gone, and the people who were here primarily for the money therefore lost interest and went elsewhere? I think that's reasonably common. I can't think of people I'd consider "highly meritorious" technologists who have no strong like of technology, and picked the field just because it was a good career. In fact may of them picked the field in a previous era, when it wasn't as lucrative of a career. I think many people who are good at and interested in something have fairly high "stickiness" to it, so salaries tend to track the rise and fall of the fields, more than the merit of individual people, who don't switch fields that easily or quickly. It's in that sense I'm skeptical that salaries are a good indication of "merit". They're just an indication of what they literally are: the current relationship between market supply and demand for a specific skill. This may even related to all kinds of structural issues, e.g. quick spikes in demand coupled with slowly responding training pipelines may cause high salaries in an area to persist for a decade or two, but this has more to do with the training pipeline's slow response than the existing workers' high merit. (And similarly in reverse.)
- randomdata 13y ago
  Perhaps that means you are not the kind of person the parent was referring to? For me, I tend to get excited about doing just about everything. Since I cannot possibly do everything, I usually tune my interests to where industry interests are. While I've never had a job drawing sketches specifically, I have had jobs using other artistic mediums. I've spent a lot of my career as a programmer. I've been farming for several years now. If there was strong external interest for drawing, I'd probably be quite keen to hone my skills there too. I've been spending my spare time recently introducing myself to a few other industries that seem promising. I haven't worked professionally in those industries yet, but who knows what the future holds? That all seems natural to me, though it is clearly not for everyone. I can see where the parent is coming from though. From my point of view it is somewhat difficult to imagine someone who wouldn't want to become an expert in computing, drawing, or whatever industry needs.
humanrebar 13y ago
> You are certainly lucky that your natural interests lead you to something lucrative There is certainly luck involved, but chalking all success up to fortunate nerd-dom is a simplification. Also consider the importance of avoiding pitfalls like drug abuse, crippling debt, and unexpected pregnancies. Also, millions of students do boring and pointless schoolwork every day to improve their grades so they can get into a good college, not because they were born with the "I like dioramas" gene. Calling success luck diminishes that brand of responsibility and hard work.
- _delirium 13y ago
  Isn't Valley culture pretty much the opposite of what you describe, for better or worse? Classic engineering culture does have some of those features: work hard at school, get good grades, get into a good college, work hard in college, do an internship, graduate with a good GPA, get a good white-collar job. Valley startup culture seems to sort of hate that culture, though, and considers it a kind of obsolete old-people culture that needs to be (wait for it) disrupted.
  - humanrebar 13y ago
    I certainly hate go-along-to-get-along culture. For the record, I would love to see the need for crap work be disrupted. I'm just saying that for the time being, some boring responsibility is necessary even in Silicon Valley (large swaths of QA come to mind) and hardly anyone (no one?) is lucky enough to like all of it.
  - prostoalex 13y ago
    And yet everybody hires from Stanford or CMU.
- randomdata 13y ago
  > Also consider the importance of avoiding pitfalls like drug abuse, crippling debt, and unexpected pregnancies. Wouldn't avoiding those things largely fall under the "certain type of person" I mentioned? There are certainly some variables there too, like being born into poverty, but we can, for argument's sake, assume outside factors are otherwise equal when comparing people under this.
sharemywin 13y ago
It's more than just interest and lots of time practicing, though. I have a good programming job. But from early on I just got things like algebra and boolean logic, didn't spend nearly the time on them that others did. etc. I remember some calculus homework in high school and the rest of the class was working on the problems and I was goofying off. They got stuck on the last problem and it took me about 10 mintues and I traded them for the other 9 problems.

_delirium 13y ago

I guess it depends on the degree of need. If I were starving and had no choice but to take up drawing as a career, I guess I would try. But if technology were still something you could make $40k/yr doing, I'd probably stick with it, because it's more interesting to me. I'm in technology for the technology more than for the money. In some ways I kind of wonder if it'd like it more: what would technology as a field be like if the $100k+ jobs and big exits were gone, and the people who were here primarily for the money therefore lost interest and went elsewhere? I think that's reasonably common. I can't think of people I'd consider "highly meritorious" technologists who have no strong like of technology, and picked the field just because it was a good career. In fact may of them picked the field in a previous era, when it wasn't as lucrative of a career. I think many people who are good at and interested in something have fairly high "stickiness" to it, so salaries tend to track the rise and fall of the fields, more than the merit of individual people, who don't switch fields that easily or quickly. It's in that sense I'm skeptical that salaries are a good indication of "merit". They're just an indication of what they literally are: the current relationship between market supply and demand for a specific skill. This may even related to all kinds of structural issues, e.g. quick spikes in demand coupled with slowly responding training pipelines may cause high salaries in an area to persist for a decade or two, but this has more to do with the training pipeline's slow response than the existing workers' high merit. (And similarly in reverse.)

randomdata 13y ago
Perhaps that means you are not the kind of person the parent was referring to? For me, I tend to get excited about doing just about everything. Since I cannot possibly do everything, I usually tune my interests to where industry interests are. While I've never had a job drawing sketches specifically, I have had jobs using other artistic mediums. I've spent a lot of my career as a programmer. I've been farming for several years now. If there was strong external interest for drawing, I'd probably be quite keen to hone my skills there too. I've been spending my spare time recently introducing myself to a few other industries that seem promising. I haven't worked professionally in those industries yet, but who knows what the future holds? That all seems natural to me, though it is clearly not for everyone. I can see where the parent is coming from though. From my point of view it is somewhat difficult to imagine someone who wouldn't want to become an expert in computing, drawing, or whatever industry needs.

humanrebar 13y ago

> You are certainly lucky that your natural interests lead you to something lucrative There is certainly luck involved, but chalking all success up to fortunate nerd-dom is a simplification. Also consider the importance of avoiding pitfalls like drug abuse, crippling debt, and unexpected pregnancies. Also, millions of students do boring and pointless schoolwork every day to improve their grades so they can get into a good college, not because they were born with the "I like dioramas" gene. Calling success luck diminishes that brand of responsibility and hard work.

_delirium 13y ago
Isn't Valley culture pretty much the opposite of what you describe, for better or worse? Classic engineering culture does have some of those features: work hard at school, get good grades, get into a good college, work hard in college, do an internship, graduate with a good GPA, get a good white-collar job. Valley startup culture seems to sort of hate that culture, though, and considers it a kind of obsolete old-people culture that needs to be (wait for it) disrupted.
- humanrebar 13y ago
  I certainly hate go-along-to-get-along culture. For the record, I would love to see the need for crap work be disrupted. I'm just saying that for the time being, some boring responsibility is necessary even in Silicon Valley (large swaths of QA come to mind) and hardly anyone (no one?) is lucky enough to like all of it.
- prostoalex 13y ago
  And yet everybody hires from Stanford or CMU.
randomdata 13y ago
> Also consider the importance of avoiding pitfalls like drug abuse, crippling debt, and unexpected pregnancies. Wouldn't avoiding those things largely fall under the "certain type of person" I mentioned? There are certainly some variables there too, like being born into poverty, but we can, for argument's sake, assume outside factors are otherwise equal when comparing people under this.

sharemywin 13y ago

It's more than just interest and lots of time practicing, though. I have a good programming job. But from early on I just got things like algebra and boolean logic, didn't spend nearly the time on them that others did. etc. I remember some calculus homework in high school and the rest of the class was working on the problems and I was goofying off. They got stuck on the last problem and it took me about 10 mintues and I traded them for the other 9 problems.