This post really resonated with me, as I have between a dozen and a hundred abandoned projects, mostly games, since I started programming around 1989. Most of them written for the Mac Plus or Mac LC. And many of them following a similar mechanic or art style to the ones in the post.
I think of the few shipped projects I've released or been part of as a shadow of who I am. Same with my resume and work experience. They're a fingerprint of a whole being living a dream life that never manifested, because I never had an early win to build upon. That's why I think UBI might magnify human potential by 10 or 100 fold, to get us from the service economy to agency and self-actualization, producing our own residual incomes.
I do have a different opinion to you, and it was formed during the pandemic when there were UBI-like circumstances for me and my friend group. Those who didn't need to work any more, became rather depressed, quite quickly, compared to those who kept working. And it changed my view on UBI. Maybe in your friend group that was different or your country didn't follow such an approach?
What's the difference between working on several games or focusing and finished one to you?
Would you work on these things enough to produce finished projects if you had UBI? For more than a while?
I think at some life stages, like parenthood or childhood, UBI makes sense. At others, when you are finding yourself - having a responsibility is useful.
> Those who didn't need to work any more, became rather depressed, quite quickly, compared to those who kept working.
I'm going to be completely honest with you, I really think you need to consider other reasons why people might be depressed in the situation that occurred during the pandemic. I don't know anyone who was doing particularly well, including those working (heck, people at my job at the time were struggling pretty badly with mental health to the point where they started reaching out to us.)
I'm not even saying this as a person that has a strong opinion on UBI, and I am sure some people sincerely believe not having a job was a major detriment for them. I absolutely think it did help me, but the way I see it, it helped because it was something to cling onto for a bit of normalcy, and of course, a bit of social interaction. Outside of the pandemic, a job is not nearly as critical for those two things.
I also do personally think that I still broadly like having a job, and I have had almost no gaps in employment since I started working professionally. That said, if money were no object, I would absolutely take breaks off of professional work for months at a time. For me, I find both professional work and hobby work important in very different ways, and wish I had dedicated time for both. Anecdotally I've definitely known engineers who periodically take months or even a year off of work when they get the opportunity and it seems to be a very healthy thing for them.
The existence of UBI would maybe tempt people to rely on it even if it is detrimental to their lives, but I think it's wrong to draw the conclusion that it's bad because jobs can be a source of fulfillment for many. In the future it's very possible we're going to need to approach the problem from another angle anyways, since there's simply no guarantee there will be meaningful work for us all in the future. (I'm not really convinced there won't be, but it feels unreasonable to consider it outside the realm of reasonable possibility.)
> I don't know anyone who was doing particularly well, including those working...
I and many others did great. I think someone should do a study of the experiences of introverts vs extroverts and you'll find the latter suffered more and many of the former had a better quality of life as a result.
Working from home was simply a huge boost for many. We suddenly found more time to do our personal projects. Got to work less without dropping productivity etc.
I think you are missing my point. Actually, ever since the pandemic, I prefer WFH/remote work. I mean, I actually did like working in an office for reasons, but there's no doubt about it: I am an introvert.
But being an introvert didn't fix anything else. I had to constantly cycle through masks, got harassed by random strangers when going to the store, had my medical appointments delayed for several months, people I knew were dying, there were shortages of basically everything, and the news cycle was full of panic and anger. And the pre-existing problems with the Internet somehow got even worse.
Maybe it's because I live in a rural area, but life here really was great. The impact of the pandemic was really confined to prices increasing. Nobody really got that sick in my community. We all sort of just spent WAAAAYYYY more time with each other.
I'll grant they were a pain. I don't miss them. They didn't make my life miserable, though.
> got harassed by random strangers when going to the store
Why? Not my experience at all (unless you were refusing to wear a mask).
> had my medical appointments delayed for several months
I can see that being a major problem if you have medical conditions.
> people I knew were dying
Same here. It definitely sucked, but I didn't get depressed by it. I think it comes down to expectations in life. If you go through life thinking "people in their 30s aren't supposed to die", then yes, I can see it being depressing. If you go through life with "one can die any time - be it from disease or a car accident", then a pandemic isn't much of a shock.
To give a different perspective: Long before the pandemic, people I knew died in places like Palestine and Iraq due to conflicts. Yet the whole world lived a happy life despite it. Is this all that different?
And go back a century or more, and people around you dying from disease was the norm (think tuberculosis, etc). That didn't prevent people from having a happy life, and did not make them depressed. It's not (primarily) the circumstances that lead to the depression, but the narrative one has around them.
> there were shortages of basically everything
I got lucky. We happened to accidentally buy an extra set of Clorox wipes just prior to the pandemic. We were going to return them and then the pandemic hit. I was never short.
Hand sanitizer shortages sucked. We certainly conserved our use, and were fortunate never to run out.
As for everything else, I didn't deal with any serious shortages. Somehow always found paper towels, bathroom rolls, soap, etc. And things like cars/appliance shortages - these are not meaningful quality of life things for me.
> and the news cycle was full of panic and anger
If this caused you depression, I say this with the utmost sincerity: I hope you learned the lesson not to waste much time with the news. I was a news junkie for many years, and had cured myself of it years before the pandemic hit (and thankfully never jumped on the social media bandwagon). Video news is the worst, and has almost no redeeming value. You can get much, much more from text sources.
At the end of the day, it wasn't the pandemic but the news media that caused you problems.
> And the pre-existing problems with the Internet somehow got even worse.
I guess I'm fortunate in that my Internet never had problems.
The other obvious difference between you and me: You seem to have experience with remote work prior to the pandemic, so your baseline was clearly different. For people like me, the pandemic was the cause of my appreciating remote work.
BTW, I'm not claiming it was great for the majority. Merely pointing out that for many - albeit a minority - it was an improvement on life.
Being able to go for walks on days of nice weather in nice neighborhoods during work hours can be a major improvement on one's mood.
As an introvert who fell quickly into depression at the start of the pandemic, I'm having a very difficult time seeing this comment as anything but gaslighting.
EDIT: Instead of trying to persuade you that the pandemic was a bad thing, I'll just say that perhaps your wonderful work-from home experience was different than a lot of other people.
> Instead of trying to persuade you that the pandemic was a bad thing
Never said it wasn't. I lost people I know to COVID.
> I'll just say that perhaps your wonderful work-from home experience was different than a lot of other people.
I'm not denying that either.
I think you're misreading my comment as saying "For the majority of introverts, it was better than before". I am not asserting any such thing. I am saying that for some, it was better.
You just need to scan HN comments from that time period to find plenty of people who enjoyed their work from home experience during the pandemic.
BTW, I refused to work from home prior to the pandemic. At times I made it a condition of employment that I leave my laptop at work when I went home. So this is definitely not coming from a guy who always liked working from home. When I had to, though, I found the experience to be far superior than commuting every day and dealing with nosy managers.
There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before they started working on useful or interesting hobby projects.
Whats more, if you drop out of work to live on the UBI, by definition, you are the poorest person in the country, and if that is not a reason to be depressed I don't know what is.
> There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before they started working on useful or interesting hobby projects.
I've taken quite a bit of time off between jobs and lived off minimal savings (over a year several times now) and I've experienced exactly what you describe - the boredom and depression. However, I also came out the other side and now I wish this for everyone.
The boredom and depression was because I was operating from the typical mode of being where there was a belief that my only value was that which I could provide to society. This was a belief that's indoctrinated in us from a very young age - through school, grades, parents, and work.
Once this belief fell away, a new kind of motivation has opened up - the curiosity I felt as a kid to create and explore and experiment and follow my interest. The joy of simply being alive, being allowed to live this life without having to perform for anyone, force a persona, or act a particular role.
The thing is, to lose that belief that only a job/work/career can provide us fulfilment, you have to be willing to go through and sit with the depression and grief of realising that that belief was a lie all along.
Yes, it was a lot easier to do this as a single guy without a family and pretty minimal material desires.
Mostly it was just living from savings - the first time was a working holiday overseas doing seasonal work with long stretches of time off in between. Later on in my career I was able to save more by keeping my standard of living low (and not buying a house, perhaps unfortunately).
Ultimately I don't think you need to quit everything to see through these beliefs. Meditation was a big part of the process for me and I didn't spend that long doing it. If you watch the mind close enough it becomes clear that so much of what seems so true and real is nothing more than a belief.
I disagree with your first points. I believe the majority of people are trying to get ahead, not just subsist. Why else do so many people work so hard? I think it goes to the myth that the poor in the US are poor because they don't work hard. IMO, I've known so many people with teo jobs, ut has a lot more to do with making $25k/yr for full time work. The median income is low, pay is low.
OTOH, I think you also neglect what benefit UBI would have to those who are currently the poorest. Child poverty, poverty, are big problems for millions of Americans.
You can just take money from the rich and give it to the poor. That doesn't have anything to do with UBI. And many of us live in a democracy, so if we all get on the same page, we can decide to just do that.
UBI is some bullshit handwaving to try make social safety nets sound fair. (We give the money to everybody!). We should just stop kidding ourselves and build a more caring and supporting society.
> You can just take money from the rich and give it to the poor. That doesn't have anything to do with UBI.
The reason to write that first sentence is because I pointed out that UBI helps those making less than UBI. Of course then it is pertinent to UBI in so far as it is a mechanism to achieve that goal.
Your original claim that UBI would cause laziness and depression is not further supported by making more claims that UBI is there solely to seem fair.
An argument that I have heard for UBI is: UBI is more effective than social safety nets that are doled out by merit, decided by committee. If you recall the so-called "death panels", government committees who decide who gets what healthcare, there is essentially that with various social programs. UBI has the virtue of simplicity, and uniformity helps ensure reach and therefore efficacy.
I am personally unsure whether UBI is the most effective way to build a supportive society, or if it is as good as its proponents claim. Though, neither do I think (respectfully) that your claims about UBI are well supported either
>Your original claim that UBI would cause laziness and depression is not further supported by making more claims that UBI is there solely to seem fair.
Sorry, I was attempting to make two separate claims, both perhaps over generalizations for the sake of impact.
Research doesn’t show the government providing cheap or free money doesn’t inflate prices? We’ve just lived through four years of insane government spending correlated with the highest inflation in over 40 years.
This is an experiment that has been tried and always has the same results: the cost of an item increases by approximately the amount of the subsidy the government provides. UBI experiments “work” because they are elevating the income of a small portion of the population above their peers. It’s not actually universal.
> Research doesn’t show the government providing cheap or free money doesn’t inflate prices?
The post being replied to said:
> There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before they started working on useful or interesting hobby projects.
So, the response saying that the research doesn't support that conclusion is not about the "that would not just result in" there, it's about countering the remainder of that point. Most people will not choose to do absolutely nothing. (And if some people do, that's fine!)
That's separate from the many arguments that UBI is not inherently inflationary, which neither the post you replied to or the post it replied to were making.
> the cost of an item increases by approximately the amount of the subsidy the government provides.
Vis-a-vis food stamps and unemployment checks, I don't think you can draw the correlation you think exists. Particularly past a certain level of poverty, the state ends up spending more to manage the consequences of unemployment than it saves by refusing to fix it. UBI in this case perpetuates inequity but it also greases the wheels of a down-and-out working population that can be motivated by higher standards of living.
From a net-gain perspective, developed nations investing in themselves like this makes sense. The alternative is letting the middle class rot, which is something that only the upper-class would stand to gain from.
Heck, I'm convinced even the upper class benefits long term from the kind of investment you're talking about, for a bunch of reasons.
To name just two examples: Technological progress happens more smoothly when there are mass markets. Society is healthier and safer when everybody feels like they have a stake in it.
Well, the way I see it, there is a real possibility that we're going to have to figure out what to do after that happens some day. There's no fundamental law of nature that guarantees we'll have enough work to keep the vast majority of people working.
It already feels like many of the jobs that exist today are bullshit, and knowing that your job is bullshit is not exactly good for your mental health, either.
As others commented there can be a dozen other reason to be depressed under the pandemic other than UBI like revenues.
Also UBI does not stop you from doing work. UBI does not want to be a complete replacement of work related revenues, just the basic needs are covered. So if you have a minimum of ambition, you'll go for a job. UBI is just your safety net, so you must not become something that you feel is a slave or stuck in with bad people just to pay rent. Quite different story compared to what you painted here like people just don't work. Also would be interesting to see this unfolding for 10 years. Maybe humans are just lazy but quite the opposite can happen as well and those stories will drag people along. Of course some of us are going to fuck it up that's for sure.
Interesting that I observed the opposite. During the pandemic people I know who had to work were sent into extreme psychological dysfunction that they're still dealing with the fallout that followed. Those that didn't need to work flourished.
I doubt it was the UBI-like aspect of the pandemic that caused the depressive states. Isolation, less active lifestyles, locked inside. Imagine UBI, but with the opposite of all of those!
That's why in the sci-fi, utopian economics of the Star Trek Federation they have a "participation based" UBI, where your ticket to the Federation's generous UBI (made possible by effectively infinite material resources) is contingent upon you doing something productive. You can't just sit on your ass all day and collect it.
Now how they measure/judge what's "productive" and the fact that it works at all is what makes it sci-fi, but it highlights that responsibility is critical, even in a utopia.
Star Trek mostly just kind of handwaves this sort of thing rather than actually explaining how it works, which is probably the right narrative decision because it's usually beside whatever point the story is trying to make.
Star Trek handwaves away pretty much all questions about its utopian economics. What's the point in Picard's family owning a vineyard in a world with replicators that can make perfectly aged wine for you in seconds?
I think that almost every episode featuring food from replicators always has someone lamenting that it isn’t the real thing though. So tastes vary. There is tradition. Point enough to have a be vineyard.
It's not a Universal Basic Income if it's not Universal.
It's been a while since I watched the series admittedly. IIRC it's honor, influence, and prestige that motivates the people working for the federation.
UBI is a failure of imagination for jobs programs. Don't get me wrong, as a society we should take care of everyone so that no one dies of starvation or freezes to death, but don't just give people handouts, pay people to do stuff. Even something as simple as planting trees.
I think jobs programs are a failure of society to imagine what true abundance looks like, and how abundant our lives are.
In the US, we produce and throw away so much food that overconsumption is vastly more deadly than underconsumption. Hell, we even put corn ethanol into our petro products just to keep the farmland in use.
We could have “universal basic food stamps” pretty much immediately. Affordably too - society is collectively already paying for a multiple of all consumption needs (just out of pocket instead of via government subsidy). People could work for extra income for their specialty foods.
UBI allows people to choose what stuff they consider productive. UBI means anyone can work on a startup, or try to start a project, or try an artistic endeavor, or do research. UBI means everyone can afford to take some risks and still have a fallback plan.
UBI means you don't have to be productive or take any risks. Just sit back and collect the dole and drink beer and enjoy the sun. Or fentanyl. I'm not against giving people a chance or taking care of people when they're down. I don't think UBI is the way to accomplish that though, and that a well funded, and properly managed jobs programs would do more to improve society, and is more tractable, than giving everybody a magic money fountain.
> UBI means you don't have to be productive or take any risks.
And that's a great thing. My comment is about what it allows people to do and what they can do, not about forcing them to do anything.
If some subset of people choose to relax, temporarily or otherwise, rather than go work a low-paying job, so be it. That's not just an "acceptable negative", that's a positive, that people can do that.
UBI shouldn't be set at a level that makes it comfortable to have zero income forever. UBI should be set at a level that makes it reliably survivable to have zero income. There will always be incentives to work, and there will always be people who choose not to, and both of those things are fine.
> properly managed jobs programs
The difference I was highlighting between UBI and a jobs program is precisely that UBI doesn't require defining what qualifies as a job, and supports trying novel things that don't immediately pay out enough to support you. You don't need make-work jobs, you don't have the problem of people being automated out of a job (so automation is much more often a good thing), you have a massive renaissance in startups and ventures of all sorts, you have lower administrative costs because you don't have means testing or ...
All the cases of people suddenly finding themselves with an obsolete skillset? They'd be able to afford to take a year off to reinvent themselves and become more productive again, rather than having to immediately jump on whatever work they can get.
> and is more tractable
I've seen many cases made that UBI is an easier sell across the political spectrum than jobs programs or welfare programs would be. Lower administrative costs, smaller public sector, net win for the economy, higher likelihood of more people becoming more successful and depending on it less...
> You're describing properly motivated people. Those people, properly motivated, have found ways to do the same without UBI.
Those two sets are not identical; many motivated people nonetheless do not have the resources to take a risk and still have something to fall back on, or to take a long time learning something that will not immediately pay off.
It's been a few years but my recollection is something like:
1. The jobs that are crappy enough for jobs programs are not useful jobs to be done anyway.
2. The overhead involved in having a job (Transportation, childcare, all kinds of second-order negatives on your life) can easily outweigh shitty salaries. Also jobs programs would be worse for people with kids, unless you add more child tax credit to prop up that side of the stool.
3. Having a job takes away free time that otherwise could be used for training or education. Planting trees by hand in the sun is not going to look like anything on anyone's resume. You could put another leg on the stool by having a college grant program or something, but it's another step away from jobs and towards UBI
If you're going to pay people to do something pointless, maybe just pay them to exist anyway?
Why do they have to be crappy? Why wouldn't childcare be a job in the jobs program? Or teaching? or driver? Scott Alexander doesn't think deeply or fully address that in that piece, choosing instead to use a strawman to say it just won't work, but less critically that UBI somehow magically would.
Would you be willing to trust your child to the care of someone who is unwilling or incapable of finding work outside the jobs program?
For any useful job you can think of, ask yourself: What's stopping the unemployed from doing that job right now? They could already be making decent money driving or caring, so why aren't they?
I'm less worried about the current unemployed; that's a whole other can of worms. I'm more worried concerned about a supposed AI job-pocalypse where everyone (including me) can't find a job because AI robots can perform the role I currently perform, for cheaper, and tirelessly.
For the jobs that immediately come to mind, the reason there's no one working then is because I don't have the money to pay for them. I'd love to have a driver and a carer; There's a number of businesses I want to start but I don't have the money to hire people to do things so they limp along with the time and effort I'm able to give them after my main job.
How about reforming the WPA [1] and build free basic housing. Let the for profit house building corporations handle the luxury stuff. Actually, that's all they are interested in doing anyways.
We should stop begging them to build what we need and just do it ourselves.
Your friends are not working because of people are so used to the “rails” that a job guides them and spoon feed them what exactly to do and with what consequences, this is why UBI isn’t gonna be what that commenter fantasies about. Most people does not have the will power to force and give themselves consequences and stick to it, because they are their own boss.
I expect that advances in AI and robotics will make most human labor obsolete (economically unviable) in the next few decades. I expect widespread adoption of UBI as a consequence.
I have also considered the fact that most people just sort of "drift" if there isn't an external system forcing them to stay on track. I suspect we're going to see "fake jobs" subsidized by the system for the sake of maintaining widespread sanity.
Well fake jobs isn't quite the right name, rather they'd be real jobs but a portion of the UBI budget (or wherever it comes from) would be spent maintaining a human economy for the people (most people?) who apparently require such a system to stay sane. I say fake because they wouldn't be economically viable without the subsidy.
Is there an actual reference to the idea that the minimum wage was meant to be a "universal basic wage"? Is this in the original congressional debates, the legislation, comments by Roosevelt? (Searching for references to the phrase, I couldn't find anything from the timeframe of when the legislation was enacted.)
>and it has been corroded to uselessness over time.
The federal minimum wage has basically kept up with inflation since the 1930s. In the states where costs are higher, they generally have higher rates.
During the pandemic, my roommate and I built so much shit.
We built a full wooden camper setup with electrical and plumbing. We sketched and crafted new furniture for our apartment. We designed and built our own hydroponics system.
And we skated a lot and hiked where we could. We did also play a lot of video games.
Super honest feedback on UBI. I'm glad we saw it develop before us with COVID, there is something there that may work, but simple UBI doesn't work evidently
I'm replying to you since you got the most upvotes :-)
I take issue with your main point: that not having to work and receiving financial aid cause depression. Did anyone receiving the $1400 pandemic check from the government feel down about it? The notion is frankly preposterous.
From this, we can infer that reducing one's labor burden also doesn't cause depression.
So depression might come from elsewhere: maybe boredom, existential angst, who knows. But it's not pertinent to the debate around UBI.
Now, we can talk about the financial toll of paying taxes for UBI, or the risk of inflation (there is none - that comes from increasing the money supply not incomes - although political machinations tend to preserve wealth at the top), or the collapse of various service industries that profit from underemployment. But those are probably best analyzed in simulation, since like with ventures and startups, there is no way to predict the benefits to society if 1% succeed even if 99% fail or are idle.
My personal take is that sentiment for UBI will fall along political lines. We can use other spectrums for reference:
* female vs male
* positive reinforcement vs tough love
* liberal vs conservative
Since HN is mostly composed of tech workers, I'd predict a male-dominated slant with a preference for tough love and conservative values. It would have an inherent bias towards work over caregiving. So the majority of HN might disfavor UBI, regardless of any actual merits it provides.
-
I decided to get an estimate of UBI support on HN based on the sentiments of the replies here:
please analyze the text from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41638103 (the text follows the news.ycombinator.com forum comment structure).
divide the text into a list of replies.
note that any line starting with ">" is a comment from a parent reply.
determine the sentiment of each reply as to whether it favors UBI or disfavors UBI.
count the replies favoring UBI, the replies disfavoring UBI, and the replies that are neutral/defensive/etc about UBI.
* Favors UBI: 12 replies
* Disfavors UBI: 26 replies
* Neutral/Defensive: 12 replies
Unfortunately, it started saying "I currently cannot access external websites, including the one you provided" so I had to stop at that preliminary estimate.
I also tried changing the first line of the prompt and with manually pasting the page between "<< ... >>":
please analyze the text between "<<" and ">>" that I've pasted after this prompt (the text was obtained from a news.ycombinator.com forum and follows the same comment structure).
That returned similar results.
https://chatgpt.com/ has an arbitary length limit that can't separate prompt from context data, which makes it generally useless for this type of work. https://iask.ai has similar limitations which negate its usefulness also.
But going by the first estimate, it looks like about 1/4 of HN users favor UBI, 1/2 disfavor UBI, and 1/4 are neutral.
It would be interesting to see this analysis on a larger sample size.
-
With 50% of HN seemingly disfavoring UBI, since we're essentially thought leaders in tech, it's highly unlikely that society as a whole will vote to adopt UBI.
I think that's ..sad, for lack of a better word.
We're basically saying that even though we know automation better than anyone, we don't believe that it can lead to a decrease in labor, or that its proceeds should be used to benefit everyone.
I think that's an abdication of our role in working to make the world a better place, and why we got started in tech in the first place.
So without a viable plan of action for getting to UBI, it's probably time to form an independent organization outside of public government and private industry. One that's opt-in, with a commitment to contribute a portion of one's future profits to an even payout of UBI, without means testing.
After a lifetime of struggle with countless losses and no big win, despite hard work on a level that most people probably wouldn't believe, I would opt-in in a heartbeat. And I'm going to make it my life's work to focus on manifesting self-actualization for everyone, starting with bringing about UBI. That's how strongly I believe in its potential to change the world for the better, for us and for future generations.
I realized after sleeping on this that without verifying the sentiments manually, I don't have enough evidence to make a prediction about HN users' support of UBI. So my conclusions may not have enough basis in fact.
To play devil's advocate for a moment, what if we imagine that the votes went the other way, with 50% favoring UBI, 25% disfavoring UBI, and 25% neutral? And what if HN were left-leaning, and wished to work towards UBI, convincing others on the left to join? What kind of opposition would they face?
* women who are primary caregivers wouldn't want UBI because?
- they make plenty of money already, earning the same wages as men?
- receiving assistance would diminish the perceived value of the money they earn being away from their children, elderly parents, etc?
- they've seen how depriving people of enough income to meet basic needs builds strong communities?
* parents practicing positive reinforcement wouldn't want UBI because?
- taking that money as a handout sends the wrong message to their children, that societies are stronger than individuals?
- they work enough hours already that they have all the money they need to spend quality time with their family?
- it's better for kids to have their hopes dashed than know their parents have enough money to feed and clothe them, eventually sending them to college?
* liberals in favor of government programs, agencies and social safety nets wouldn't want UBI because?
- it might interfere with existing institutions like the Department of Health and Welfare, known for their efficiency and effectiveness?
- it might undermine unions, the Peace Corps, etc that already promote meaningful work and fair pay?
- it might help conservatives, which could undermine leftist agendas like making sure that everyone has a fair shake?
Do any of these pass the sniff test?
After writing this out, I think I can safely say that even without knowing the sentiment towards UBI, we can make predictions about who will favor or oppose it and why. It has to do with empathy or the lack thereof, and how traditional notions like responsibility, community and patriotism have been coopted during the Information Age by moneyed interests in the status quo.
I've kind of reached the point in life where talking about problems till I'm blue in the face does nothing to fix them. I'm more interested now in joining and forming coalitions that bring about meaningful change and give people alternatives that pay dividends larger than the way things are currently.
At the simplest level, we can ask: does giving people who are already rich even more money at the cost of those struggling without enough resources (Social Darwinism) build a more prosperous society? Or does using excess wealth to provide for those in need (Social Planning) heal society?
In these matters, I tend to think that the opinion of a 5 year old child is generally more in line spiritually with the greater good than whatever serious-sounding adults preach, even academics. So I know where my sentiment stands regarding UBI.
UBI won't work: it's almost implemented in my country (you can get 600€/month + many other welfare stuff by not working) and what's the result? Highest public deficit in the EU zone, highest tax rate in the world, rampant criminality, difficulty to get money by working because of said taxes, educated people leaving the country in mass, etc.
Reality #1: Universal Basic Income (UBI) will empower people to break free from the grind of work. They'll have the freedom to start innovative companies, create art, make music, learn to dance, and generally enjoy happier, less stressful lives.
Reality #2: Alternatively, many might find themselves stuck at home, glued to their screens. This could lead to boredom and depression, resulting in online trolling and petty arguments. Some may even resort to crime out of frustration.
What you’re describing isn’t UBI; it’s just traditional welfare. UBI advocates are aware of problems with welfare and believe that UBI wouldn’t suffer from the same issues.
Why not though? The money has to come from somewhere. Why would UBI not tremendously raise taxes and thereby undermine the incentive to work just as GP observes?
There's actually two ways that the situation described above undermines the incentive to work.
The first is that - and this is one of the key distinctions - welfare programs are means-tested whereas UBI is (as the name implies) universal: everyone gets it whether they're working or need it or not. The post above says "you can get 600€/month + many other welfare stuff by not working"; if you lose that welfare by starting to work, this hugely incentivizes not working! Worse still, it incentivizes black market labour - money earned under the table isn't going to be counted against your means-testing. This is at best productive but untaxed, at worst actively destructive or criminal.
The other is, as you've pointed out, high taxation. I believe the UBI advocate's response to this would be some combination of: 1) UBI will supersede a multitude of complex, means-tested welfare programs and will be cheaper to administer as well, so the increase to taxation won't be as substantial as you might imagine; 2) giving people freedom to pursue education/creativity/entrepeneurship, UBI will spur on economic growth that will help it pay for itself (as would disincentivizing black market labour, as described above); and 3) the extent to which taxation disincentivizes productivity is overstated, or is perhaps contingent on the particular taxation scheme, and they support one that they think won't have deleterious effects.
FWIW I personally suspect UBI would be a pretty good idea, but I'm at least a little skeptical about some of these arguments as I understand them; nevertheless, various people who've studied the issue extensively and with a stronger background in economics buy them, so I accept that they're at least worth taking seriously.
Where is that $600/month going to come from? Is it going to be printed (i.e. causing inflation) or is it going to come from taxation?
Let's try some math: if there are ten people in society, and they all get $600/month, you need to generate $6000/month of tax income. So if there are five of them working, and making an additional $1200/month, that entire sum needs to be taken by the government so it has enough money to pay all of them $600. Are you going to be working, just so someone else doesn't have to, with zero additional benefit to yourself? And I'm not talking about "I'll make myself useful doing art", I'm talking about basic jobs that are MANDATORY to keep society going at all, such as growing food, building roads, and repairing sewers.
Who will be repairing sewers, under UBI? Do you believe that people do that kind of thing for fun, and that they would continue doing that if the state takes all of their money through taxation?
Why do you think $600/month is even sufficient to live on? What about people that live in really expensive cities like San Francisco, are they also going to get $600, even though that realistically represents maybe a week's worth of rent to them?
UBI is only cheaper to administer if you look purely at administration costs. In reality administration costs are a tiny, tiny fraction of the total program cost, and reducing administration costs of existing programs would not have any meaningful impact on state finances, making the administration costs of UBI a non-argument.
There's also the matter of fairness: providing everyone with the same amount of money may sound fair, but is it really fair to give someone who has significant additional costs just to stay alive (for example, because of medical costs) the same amount of money as someone who is fully able to provide for himself already anyway?
Your appeal to authority in your last sentence does not convince, and every attempt to make the math work for UBI ends in complete failure. And don't forget: to 'try it out', we'd have to completely restructure all of society, and the opponents of UBI have highlighted the risk of complete societal collapse if it turns out that UBI is an unworkable scheme after all. Are you willing to take that risk?
Finally, UBI seems to share the incentive structure of communism wrt. human productivity. Given how communist societies throughout history have tended to result in mass starvation with millions, if not tens of millions dead, why do you believe UBI is something we should be trying?
> No true Scotsman or appeal to purity is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect an a posteriori claim from a falsifying counterexample by covertly modifying the initial claim.
No one has covertly modified the initial claim. UBI has a long-standing definition that’s distinct from welfare.
Answering your literal question, how could it "possibly" be good:
Minimum wage probably doesn't work because it means a lot of people live in precarity while both emotionally and physically exhausting them. It might just be that minimum wage has stagnated while COL has skyrocketed. If the point of minimum wage is that it provides people with a guaranteed dignified life as long as they are employed, that needs to keep up with the cost of living a normal life in order to keep its effectiveness. That is one reason it might be "failing" although I don't know exactly what you mean by that.
> get us from the service economy to agency and self-actualization
This is the thing I think most people have a hard time connecting to "measurable utility" but will probably be the most sweeping effect of UBI or similar. Think about your typical gig worker, minimum wage worker in some high-turnover environment etc. This person probably does not have the financial safety net to pursue something meaningful, or to take the risk reskilling, or to otherwise improve their emotional and financial well-being.
You will probably always have free-riders or people who just want to consume without producing. But is it better to have a society of exhausted, frustrated, barely-hanging-on people, or a society of people with the _potential_ to to be creative, passionate, and exploratory?
Conversely to you, I find it hard to imagine that a society with surplus wealth would be more effective if it chose to subject its people to precarity and emotional strife instead of empowering as many of its people as possible.
Why not just have unemployment benefits or new enterprise grants? Why do you need UBI?
Here in Australia there is quite a bit of money floating around for those people with passions and potential. I've received quite a bit over the years taking chances, some of it as grants, some as government investments.
I've been fortunate and never had to rely on unemployment benifits, but I always knew in the back of my mind it was available if I fail. Soon I'll be able to fall back on my aged care benefits :)
Unemployment benefits and other income-dependent benefits are a strong incentive against working, unless the job pays particularly well. It's common that the effective tax rate for low-paying jobs is 80-90%, if you count lost benefits in addition to taxes. Sometime the rate exceeds 100%. In order to get unemployed people back to work against their own interests, unemployment benefits often come with strict time limits, a lot of surveillance and bureaucracy, and a general loss of dignity.
The "basic" in UBI aims to solve that by changing benefits and taxes. Everyone from the homeless to the billionaires gets the same benefits, while income taxes will make sure that most people won't see any additional money. The differences are only seen by people with low incomes. While the benefits may be a little lower, taking a low-paying job makes much more sense, as your tax rate may be as low as 40%.
Many old-school unions oppose UBI because it makes low-paying jobs more viable. They consider it morally wrong. According to them, if you work full time, the employer should pay you enough that you don't need any government handouts for a dignified live.
Id love to understand how unemployment benefits discourage working more than a UBI. Either you need to work to survive or you don't.
I've read some comments here recently that suggests people feel like they have a right to a nice life after being born. As I get older I see humans more like any other animal born into an uncaring universe out in nature. You have to get out of that borrow, hunt and forage to survive. It's not the responsibility of every other human to have food delivered to your burrow.
Look up welfare trap. Many benefit programs are implemented such that they go away the second you start working. This means if I am getting $X per week in welfare but I get an employment offer of $Y per week where Y<X, then I am incentivized to stay on welfare. Even if Y>X, it often makes sense to stay on welfare because you might have to start paying for child care, or buy a second car to get to work, etc...
> You have to get out of that borrow, hunt and forage to survive.
Modern society has put significant constraints on how I can pursue survival. I can't just go and fish in the ocean, because there are regulations on how and what I can catch. I can't just go and farm a little piece of land because almost all land is owned by someone or something. Of the many reasons I think UBI is a good idea, a major reason is that I consider it payment for the loss of "natural rights" that we give up in order to live in a modern society. I think fishing regulations are good thing, but they also curtail my ability to subsist, so I think UBI is a good compensation for that.
> This means if I am getting $X per week in welfare but I get an employment offer of $Y per week where Y<X, then I am incentivized to stay on welfare.
Yes, sure, but this applies to UBI as well. If Y is not worth my time actually doing the work, after you pay for that card and child care, would I bother? Is UBI a comfortable life, or is it bare minimum to live?
>a major reason is that I consider it payment for the loss of "natural rights" that we give up in order to live in a modern society.
I don't mind this argument, but lets remember that in order to assert your natural rights you need to actually work. If you were allowed to fish and hunt, you would have go out and do it. UBI suggests you can just do nothing and be handed a living.
I would much prefer we provide unemployment or disability to anybody who wants it because I want to live in a compassionate and caring society, but we don't have to call it a UBI, give it to everybody, and turn the world on its head.
Then I think we should also guarantee a job for anybody who wants one, with a significant step up in income. (And right now that job should be capturing carbon.)
It does not. THE primary difference between UBI and unemployment is that UBI does not disappear once you are unemployed. So in my hypothetical scenario above, the person would be making Y+X. Assuming UBI is paid for via income taxes, and that those income taxes are applied progressively, at some point up the income ladder you will be paying more in taxes than you receive in UBI, but at the lower income scales it is all accretive making for a strong incentive to work.
> Then I think we should also guarantee a job for anybody who wants one, with a significant step up in income. (And right now that job should be capturing carbon.)
I think we should have a UBI and then combine that with eliminating the minimum wage. Maybe we limit that to just nonprofits, but the goal would be to make it easier to pay people to do work that is currently not incentivized in our current economy. For example, near me, I volunteer for beach cleanups and at the community garden. These groups are well funded, but they need to rely on volunteers because the minimum wage near me is over $17 and the operations are very labor intensive. If you have a UBI, the idea of paying people a few bucks an hour to clean the beach becomes much more palatable. Right now, we need to try to strong arm companies into paying livable wages, but there is only so much economic activity that is profitable at those levels. A UBI that provides very basic subsistence (we are talking squalor levels of assistance, FYI), combined with reducing barriers to employment would go a long way towards resolving some major ills in our current economy.
With UBI, the job effectively pays more, and the incentives to take it are stronger.
A hypothetical example with arbitrary numbers:
You get $20k/year in benefits. You are offered a job that pays $30k/year, but then you have to pay $5k in taxes and you lose the benefits. The job would effectively pay you $2.5/hour after taxes, which is not very attractive.
With UBI, you get to keep the benefits, but you pay a 40% tax for all earned income. Your after-tax income would be $38k/year, and your effective wage would be $9/hour after taxes. Still not very good but much better than the $2.5/hour.
Yes. Moreover, all prices will jump 3-100x, so UBI will be useless anyway: you must go to work or die in poverty. UBI is also known as "true socialism".
If UBI is revenue neutral, whether by increasing taxes or cutting other programs or some combination of both, then it would not increase inflation. You should brush up on your macroeconomics.
Any income, that is not backed up by a product or service, changes the equilibrium, thus accelerates inflation. I saw this multiple times already in my own country.
Who said minimum wage didn't work? It works, provided you adjust its value regularly.
Anyway, I've met a few people who, through a combination of welfare and inherited wealth don't really have to work.
While most are simply living their best life spending time on unprofitable hobbies like photography one example stands out as he's currently busy driving into Ukraine and back with supplies for the people there.
What I'm getting at is that in reality we don't actually know what would happen under UBI. Maybe more children would be born, as another example from my list is currently a father and (to the best of my knowledge) still jobless?
Part of me wonders if this parallels the venture capital approach. Many won't don't anything economically productive with the opportunity UBI affords them, but the ones that do may make the cost worthwhile.
Not sure if that's how it would actually pan out, of course, but I think it's plausible.
>How could that, possibly, be sustainable or even good?
It isn't. Like most magical thinking economic proposals, it's simply a matter of ignoring reality.
"In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die.""
...
"And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!"
We live different lives. I only played part in projects (none game though) where the product should have been abandoned! In the state released of course. A theoretical option could been to finish it properly. However attempting that would have meant the end of the organization (bankrupcy), that's why saying theoretical option.
Looking at the state of software I have the misfortune to work with and use in private time all of my peers live this life... : (
Luckily the users have no choice then, all need to buy the crap or not buying anything at all. We are safe selling crap!
I just call that unfinished stuff "research". I have a bunch of UnrealEngine 4/5 projects I'll never finish, but they were fun from a point of view of testing a game mechanic, rigging and animation, shader development, creating the 3D assets etc.
Can you recommend any resources for writing for system 6/7 on the old 68k devices? I cut my teeth using computers on those but haven't written anything targeted at that platform.
Many companies I have worked for operate like this. Engineers get to work on shiny new features, they get released, everyone is happy. Months later tons of bugs accumulate. The original authors are already part of another team (because “breaking silos”, but actually because “make everyone replaceable”). The engineers that inherit the project need to maintain it and fix the bugs until another team takes over.
Such is the hellscape we’ve brought on ourselves from the widespread adoption of “minimum viable product” as the right way to build things. We judge viability by some feature set, not whether the stupid thing is resilient or can be maintained.
It also doesn’t help that “minimum viable” is only one step away from “non-viable”. Every project then becomes like Icarus, testing how close to the sun we can fly before our wings melt.
But what's the alternative here? "We spent longer than was minimally viable but we still don't have a good idea if it has market fit"-product? In my experience the code usually gets binned whether the idea gets traction or not. Some companies misjudge when to rewrite, but that doesn't make the MVP part of the process wrong.
The absolute greatest wastes of talent and humanity I've ever seen in tech didn't come from tech debt, those efforts were almost always at least working on a product that people were paying money for. The biggest wastes were from over-delivering products that hadn't and were never going to succeed.
A portion of “product-market fit” failures are actually software quality failures. I think it’s easy to blame the ensh*ttification of software on corporate incompetence, but I think “minimally viable” is part of the story as well.
The world we have now where everything is built to be thrown away, including software, has had the side-effect of destroying craftsmanship. And I'm becoming more convinced as I age that the world is poorer for it.
> The world we have now where everything is built to be thrown away, including software, has had the side-effect of destroying craftsmanship. And I'm becoming more convinced as I age that the world is poorer for it.
Not every area in the software market is like this. For example, in ERP software often applications from the 90ies are still in use (maybe revamped, maybe not) by many customers. And the maintenance periods are measured in decades (typically not initially, but there always seems to be a maintenance extension).
The MVP shows if the idea would get traction. But what good is an idea that gets traction if it is unfeasible to scale, or the organisation is not willing to support it. I think this is what google does with many of its products that end up cancelled. They tested the MVP, people bought in, but the organisation already moved on, so there is no will to support and further develop it. We should be responsible and do an MVP only after deciding if the organisation would be able and interested to scale a product and support it. Otherwise, the downsides are a toxic crunch to support the product, customers are unhappy with yet another product dies, etc...
In my opinion, instead of searching for alternative we should use good programming languages that are extremely refactor-friendly and legacy-resistant.
That's why I love ELM as a front-end langauge (and hope to see a successor ROC succeed).
For back-end, that's why I love Rust, Haskell etc. All languages that are closer to Pure, FP. Because I can leave codebase to other devs and still know that it's not gonna turn into something which I've seen happening to Python, PHP and other OOP language codebases.
Nope, it's not really about the language - any mainstream language/platform can be used well or badly depending on who's guiding the design of the app (assuming somebody is, instead of falling into the "agile means no design up front" cult). You can create an elegantly structured, maintainable app in python, node, rails, .net or you can create a big ball of mud. Perhaps apps in Elm, Rust, Haskell et al have a bias towards better design because they themselves attract an elitist crowd who think more consciously about these things. If Haskell ever caught on enough to have an "eternal September" moment then the world would be littered with shitty codebases of pseudo-pure-functional code that somehow broke all the idioms that are supposed to make the language great.
I once had a client who'd had a shiny but disorganized MVP developed on .NET, and of course as the org tried to scale and ramp up new features, the devs had to fight more and more against the design (or lack of it in some parts, or overly complex over-design in other parts). At some point he met some dude at a networking event who had built a successful business on a Node codebase, and became convinced that we should rewrite from the ground up in Node because our performance problems were all the platform's fault. Wrong wrong wrong. But it's much easier to believe a sales pitch than to do the hard work of learning what good, performant design in your chosen language/framework looks like.
Who knows whether Haskellers are better, on average, at designing software. As a Haskeller I'd like to think they are! But I really have no idea. What I do know is that _I_ can design better software in Haskell than in Python, and I put that down to qualities of the language.
Help, I've seen bad elixir. Ecto queries spanning dozens of tables with the performance grinding to a halt as load increased, with models and logic so intertwined that you had little hope of untangling the ball of string so you could refactor and scale the database.
You can make bad things in any language. I like Go for the same reasons you like FP. And there too, people can do strange and unmaintainable things
If it didn't get traction someone defined badly what was the MVP. As it wasn't viable. The M gives the idea of a minimal feature set or low effort but it shouldn't, a MVP now that competition is high needs much more quality and features than a decade ago
I don’t think MVPs are the problem here. Most projects were like this before MVPs were conceived of. Usually the failure is that the project isn’t minimal at all. It’s usually the maximum complexity that a given team can handle.
I don't blame mvp at all. At $prev_gig, we did agile and mvps and all that. BUT we also focused on ownership. You build it, you support it. Forever, or until officially handed off and accepted by another team. Everything has an owner.
You can still get teams who are scared of what they own and refused to update it, but that is a whole lot of "and so? Do it" when you have a healthy product backlog that is single stack priority and the higher priority thing requires output from them (while a pain, it didn't happen _that_ often).
To be fair, $prev_gig was a very well ran company in a lot of ways and better than any other shop I have been in.
What I'd like to see managing expectations towards the new product well before anything started, considering resource (time, money, workforce, etc.) limitations.
And not going for the shiny things do not fit!
Because limitations are everywhere. Ok, software engineers like to pride themselves in the ability to do anything and everything (not as much as salesguys of course) but this stems from the ninja attitude towards technology and forgetting other dimensions of reality. Should only attempt managable goals on all necessary levels.
I am still waiting for place where this is achieved...
I often joke that every startup job post <<getting lots of funding>> is you playing <<game about cleaning up gore>> for the <<people who made the MVP>> of the <<before getting lots of funding>> stage.
having been the original author on a company defining feature and then told that the silo must be broken only to see my work stepped on for years to come i wholeheartedly agree. the inheritors not qualified to make the decisions, my grand ideas pushed to the side, and having watched the incompetance in managing said feature has been a hard thing to overcome and im still salty about it every time a stupid bug arises. especially when warnings were raised with ample time to adjust. but i learned an important lesson and i can say with certaintly that i wont hesitate to be perceived as an asshole and die on hills about it the next time
completely correct, but I dont think thats where OP is coming from or what the article intends to suggest either. Its recommending that you try multiple things, get a feel for whats technically feasible & if it looks interesting to the customer and push that forward. Its very well applicable to indie devs & also applicable to large companies to some extent. This philosophy is great to identify the feature/product you want to spend meaningful time on.
In fact, one could wager that the situation you described is directly a consequence of not adhering to what OP is suggesting.
"Make Everyone Replaceable," by the same people who brought you "Return to the Office." Sometimes it's code for "Prevent Competition From Rising Through the Technical Ranks."
It's one of those interesting and infuriating things. There's a category of PHB managers who can't code, can't design, can't inspire, can't really do marketing well at all. They're marginally more skilled and way less funny than Michael Scott.
Their advantage is being unencumbered by knowledge. They don't suffer the technical decision-making process. They don't try to compete on the value-added charts. By not really caring, they sail through dotting the i's and just forget about the t's. The product ships with a hundred blemishes and two major flaws. It was rushed out the door by the asshole with the padded resume and the HR surfing history.
They abused the flaws in the system to subvert the meritocratic outcome. From their perspective, they did what they had to do to "win."
I drew a comparison between “iterate and fail fast” vs “lots of upfront design” as a personal process, rather than a company’s modus operandi. For instance someone might do 2 or 3 prototypes when tasked with delivering a certain feature in order to explore the problem space.
I worked at a Canadian bank that operated like this. They had one "rock star" UI/UX developer that was deployed to build every new customer-facing initiative, but they moved them to the next project as soon as the current one made it to the testing phase.
The residual team was left to clean up their code and make it work, which often involved significant rework.
I raised my concerns with management that they were cheating their "rock star" dev out of valuable learning experiences and perpetuating the problem - the dev made the same errors on each new project. Not to mention, perpetuating their testing nightmares.
One of the things I like about my current project is that more than half of the original team have stuck with it after we went live. The work itself is, admittedly, a bit less interesting, but it’s rewarding in a different way.
> The original authors are already part of another team (because “breaking silos”, but actually because “make everyone replaceable”)
I've been there and i've inherited some stuff to manage, and it's painful.
But there's another side of this, which is even more painful and definitely infuriating: some people get to stay on the same project for years, and they become "key people" just because they've either A) stumbled on the issues before or B) have introduced the issues themselves.
This is completely infuriating because now you have to play cat and mouse with these people to get help, and they get to play the "super busy, everybody ask me stuff" role because they're the only people with that historic knowledge.
Needless to say, they can also back the claim they deserve a promotion (and a salary increase) by executing on.this playbook. And they usually do.
I've seen this thing happen in pretty much all company sizes (200 people, 1000 people, 500k+ people).
At this point, after almost ten years in the industry, I'm starting to think this is the winning playbook for the meta-game: go rogue in a maliciously-compliant way, artificially claim superiority over your peers, get promoted.
I’ve been going back and working on retro development. These days, making software for the 68K Macintosh, which is where I learned to program in the first place. I dug a lot through old books, comp.sys.mac.programmer posts, and the source code from Soft Dorothy and others (like the GliderPro source).
It’s a trip seeing this old code through new eyes. I can see why the old Macs crashed so much (beyond the basic “they had no memory protection” explanation). I’m also fond of the 1-bit art, like the author mentions, and I curate a list of accounts on Twitter which post 1-but artwork (if you know anybody who’s missing from the list, let me know): https://twitter.com/i/lists/1578111923324944397
The nice thing about programming for a limited system is that it limits your options. It’s a nice break from the more modern experience where you can do anything by pulling in the right library. I sometimes imagine a world where computational power is frozen, and we simple get better and better software for systems that are well-understood. The thing about these old systems like the Mac 68K machines is that the pace of hardware development was so fast it made you dizzy. If a new processor came out like the 68020 or 80386, then you had maybe a couple years at most to make something that really used it to its full potential. If you waited too long, you’d be competing against a new generation of software written for a new generation of hardware.
Going back and looking at my code — with over 30 years of hindsight — I want to refactor it, simplify the common crap you had to do like responding to window events, etc....
Never mind making wrapper functions for dealing with Handles and such.
To your point though, wow, how much simpler the Toolbox was compared to a modern OS. It does indeed feel fun to try some retro development again.
That's a neat blog all around. Lots of interesting stuff to poke around in.
I think it's okay to abandon things, and you can certainly learn things and reuse parts from abandoned projects. For me, a breakthrough moment was when I decided to make things so small that I could finish them. It helped me develop the skill of finishing things, which is a separate skill that's hard to learn, because it only happens at the end of a process so long and hard you almost never make it there. All my friends who are making video games start by writing their own engine, and get burnt out somewhere around the point where they're making a level editor. They learn a lot about things like tooling (which, coincidentally, is a lot like what they already knew how to do), but never actually make the game. It'd be like learning stone masonry by building a cathedral—you won't live to see the end. Start so small that you can't fail, then work your way up to bigger and bigger projects.
> All my friends who are making video games start by writing their own engine
I've been there and done that one a few times. Even if you decide to use existing tools, you can easily get caught up in these infinitely-deep pools of complexity.
I am working on a Unity project right now wherein I found myself antagonizing over how to best develop an RTS-style building placement system. Instead of doing what I would typically do (dive right in), I decided that I would rework the game concept to eliminate the need for the player to place buildings at all. After some experimentation, it turned out that this was actually a superior user experience for what I was trying to achieve. I initially rationalized it as "I'll add the building system in the next iteration". It likely won't happen now.
Less is almost always more. That small starting point actually being finished is like nitromethane for the next iteration. Getting to 100% is what makes that next pass so much better. Getting to 80% will leave you feeling like you need to push the rock back up the hill all over again.
Sure. I replaced the building system with a big portal that each team controls. Instead of in-game buildings, I built a menu/UI system that allows the player to control which units would come out of the portal. Units don't take commands from the player (another massive simplification). They only seek out the enemy portal and will engage other units on that path automatically. Destruction of the portal is the win condition.
Unity's navmesh system is doing most of the heavy lifting right now. It's amazing how much functionality you can get out of it before you have to reach for physics and animation.
This reminds me of something mixing the Age of War flash game (which had great music) and TeamFight Tactics (TFT). An RTS without some kind of unit control seems strange, but interesting as it is often the greatest barrier to accessing the game.
Sounds vaguely similar to a late 90’s pc/playstation game I recall playing, although that also had capture points and the ability to build defense structures along the predetermined paths.
Thank you for sharing this! I think a focus on shrinking personal projects to the point I might actually finish them, might be just what I need right now
>> I think it's okay to abandon things, and you can certainly learn things and reuse parts from abandoned projects.
I recently moved from front-end development into accessibility. Years ago, I had built a bunch of static sites, templates and other design projects that I had eventually abandoned for various reasons.
Now that I'm in accessibility, I've gone back and dug many of these out and have re-built them to be accessible. Several used very old versions of bootstrap, so part of what I did was also upgrading to the latest version of bootstrap as well.
I learned so much just from going back and making those older designs accessible. Its something that I definitely feel gave me a better perspective on stuff we look for when we're assessing sites and applications. It was also a real wake up as to how much of the stuff I built wasn't accessible at all.
> It helped me develop the skill of finishing things, which is a separate skill that's hard to learn, because it only happens at the end of a process so long and hard you almost never make it there.
Great insight. The skill of finishing what you started, is something that feels elided in discussions around productivity. Is there a blogpost or article that explains it even more?
John, your games were an inspiration to me when I was a kid first learning my way around programming on the Mac. I spent a lot of time playing Glider and even more playing Pararena. I still have the echo-y startup sample of that lodged in my head.
I probably spent even more time poking around in the resource forks of your games in ResEdit.
I didn't finish much, but I did complete a couple of little shareware games and uploaded them to AOL. I was beyond surprised when a check from far away California appeared in my mailbox many months later.
Those early Mac days really did feel like a special time where anything was possible a solo developer could make a thing and put it out into the world without needing more than creativity and time.
Thank you for writing these posts and sending me down memory lane. I hope you're enjoying your retirement.
I did end up being a game programmer at EA for eight years and still do software today. I'm not sure if the check from California sealed the deal, but it was definitely a memorable experience for me. It made me feel like the code I wrote was real in a way that it hadn't before.
If the goal of this article is to normalize abandoning your projects then I'm not so sure it's a good idea. All else aside it can be a horrendous waste of time and no amount of "at least I've learned something" can justify that. Learn by also finishing stuff, right?
There's a great Smarter Every Day episode where Destin works with a glassblowing shop to create shattered Prince Rupert's drops encased in blocks of resin.
Nobody has done this before, they're working out how to do it as they go along, they make quite a few mistakes along the way. One of the things the video highlights is how, when this happens, the team wouldn't just stop and try the same thing again. They'd keep going, break it all the way, basically just use it as an opportunity to fuck around with their materials.
He waxes poetic about how great this is. They're taking advantage of an unparalleled opportunity to learn more about the behavior of the materials they're working with. Because they're now free to try things they wouldn't want to do if they were still on the path to creating a complete, polished product. It doesn't even really count as taking risks anymore, because you can't really mess up something that's already trash.
And he points out, rightly, that a mindset like that that values learning and experimentation over always succeeding, is one of the best ways to become truly great at what you do.
That is a misreading of the article. It's more about discovery through quick, iterative prototyping, which can include rapid discovery of fatal flaws early.
+1 I am reading this is exactly pointing to the same concept as the todo management, but not addressing the todo paralysis. Everyone's mileage may vary. I accept that. Yet misreading something is far more dangerous than ignorance.
The man that spent his time on an overpriced takeover and subsequent ruining of Twitter instead of spending that time with the children he abandoned is a cautionary tale of wasted time, not a sage to be mined for wisdom.
Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed his mental illness and filled his life with the richness of family and social bonds instead of wasting that time gaming an algorithm on a platform he paid too much for to become the leading proprietor of authoritarian-conservative junk posting.
If anyone thinks he doesn't have enough time for that, go over to Twitter and look at what he's doing with that time he doesn't have right now.
> Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed his mental illness and filled his life with the richness of family and social bonds
His life might be richer, but I don't think he would get more done. I do think he is a cautionary tale, but there are also many insights to be gained.
You shouldn't optimize your life for output, but for those moments when you do want to optimize your output it makes sense to glean from those who are very good at it.
Is being an avoidant parent a precondition to being a successful executive? My direct anecdotal experience with successful executives is quite the opposite.
I really think we're giving him far too much credit to assume this is all an intentional time-saving life hack to improve his ability to optimize his output for some planet-saving goal (which his most recent work, frankly, has not been).
> Imagine how much more he would get done if he addressed his mental illness and filled his life with the richness of family and social bonds
The people I know who satisfy that definition don't generally get shit done. The ones who do are outliers; i.e. so rare that you may as well judge them to be a rounding error.
My only takeaway from this exchange is you're jealous the man had the money to just go and buy Mysterious Twitter X and do with it as he wants, instead of complaining about it like the rest of us.
His pleasures, accomplishments, fears, and compulsions.
A personality and a lifestyle that drives away everyone except acquaintances and employees.
The kind of insecurity that causes a person to gravely insult a someone who risked their life, many times over, to save the lives of strangers half a world from their home because they dismissed your media ploy in public.
The kind of personality that is so addicted to attention that despite repeated public embarrassments that would make most people rethink their actions, they reform their own worldview in order to blame society instead of rightfully feeling ashamed.
A person who has a compulsion to make money constantly when there is no longer any purpose to do so -- to the point where they use guest appearances on comedy shows to pump and dump novelty crypto coins in order to make a few more pennies.
Does that sound like a happy, content person? If anyone is jealous of that life just so that they can have the fame then all I can say is that there is ever an opportunity where one of us can grab that for themselves, please -- be my guest.
> The kind of insecurity that causes a person to gravely insult a someone who risked their life, many times over, to save the lives of strangers half a world from their home because they dismissed your media ploy in public.
Called him a pedophile no less. He didn't win the libel case in court, but he certainly deserved to.
The actual story of the cave rescue and the highly specialized cave divers that pulled it off is quite incredible, I highly recommend seeing it as it happens in The Rescue. The documentary takes the high ground and doesn't mention the Musk fiasco, but without directly doing so, also lays waste to how impossible the submarine idea was: https://films.nationalgeographic.com/the-rescue
It is funny how much criticism you are taking for saying things that are obviously true.
Yes, Musk's personal life is a mess and noone would enjoy being him.
That can be true at the same time as his business philosophy effectively pushes forward multiple businesses more quickly than their competitors. That can even be true while his businesses are run in ways that most of us would find unacceptable.
It's worth pointing out here that SpaceX's current product development practices and Boeing's current product development practices is a bit of a false dichotomy. We could also, for example, consider how Boeing did things a few decades ago.
One particular reason I don't like this false dichotomy is that SpaceX's approach has negative externalities that aren't getting enough attention because everybody's so starstruck by all the fancy rockets. There's a reason the FAA and EPA are starting to pressure SpaceX about the environmental and social impact of their way of doing business. Maybe next OSHA can get on them for the high workplace injury rate. You're not actually doing things more cheaply if what you're really doing is hiding costs that would belong on your balance sheet by surreptitiously foisting them onto the public with the help of corrupt politicians.
(Ostensible libertarians, pay extra attention to those last six words.)
I think it's a bad title. The moral is more like "work on everything you can think of but don't release anything until it's ready. And some projects will never be ready, but that's OK - you can look at them 30 years later and release them on github for nostalgia." ChatGPT summarizes it as "Build Fast, Ship Never (Until You Do)"
I think it's healthy for projects to die. It frees up your time to start another project, instead of being stuck in a rut.
I sometimes find myself working on a project that goes nowhere, thinking that if I just put enough effort it will go somewhere, and I'm not having any fun or learning new things. And I'm hard on myself with thoughts like "I need to finish it, I need to finish it" but then when I ask myself: 'why?', it's usually because of this fear of _not finishing the project_ or maybe it's the fear of not being able to distinguish the grinding phase from the failed project phase.
Either way, too many times I have experienced a liberating feeling when I failed. It's a chance to start over.
I think your reluctance comes from a different prioritization. The writer is clearly interested in developing their creativity (and are wildly succeeding!). The project is the means to do that. Continuing on a project even after it no longer is the best use of your time is just a type of sunk cost fallacy.
I like this and find it interesting, but at an organizational level, it strikes me as trickier to do. A lot of the things we discover about projects and technologies have to do with its feasibility at whatever scale our real projects operate on, and don't necessarily pop-up in smaller experiments. (And sometimes they aren't really technical issues at all, but issues of "can we get most developers here to understand doing it this way.)
None of which means we shouldn't do more of this. You can learn things by trying smaller projects. It's just not a guarantee it will work in the large.
I'm a junior, currently trying to get an internship and subsequent job.
I envy anyone that can do what you do. At the moment it feels like the industry is a cult, only looking for people that make tech and programming their entire life.
I don't even mind the requirements, I have a work ethic and want to perform well,
but the expectations seem higher than ever.
I'm looking forward to finally having enough job security for a hobby that doesn't involve staring at computer screens (hoping to get into metal work soon).
Basing your understanding of the industry on HN/blogs/social is just an apex fallacy, it seems everyone is a FAANG 10x-er with plenty of oos contributions. That's far from reality. I gave up on programming in my personal time almost immediately. I've picked up hobbies that require physical work instead.
Eventually I got comfortable enough to just take that time that I needed and say, damn the consequences. "Sorry, boss, I was busy with family last night."
And as it turned out that was not the problem that I thought it would be.
When I read articles like this, I feel nostalgia and envy. Why was I not born 10 years earlier?
I see other people in my industry who are 10 years older than me and they not only had a way more fulfilling career, they are much better off financially too. It's like everything fell on their lap.
When I started programming professionally (post dotcom crash mid-2000s) you could really achieve results that were considered game-changing for businesses as a solo contributor writing all your own code from the ground up. The field as a whole had not been really mapped out all the way, so even someone of moderate intelligence like me could feel like they were creating new useful things (especially on the web).
Modern software development frequently feels like gluing together towers of shit from other people's towers of shit. Additionally, the parts of the industry where the business case is "a computer could markedly improve this process and make people's lives so much easier" are pretty much saturated. The high paying career opportunities that are left generally seem to trend towards either value extraction or rent-seeking behavior.
I actually agree completely with you — feel, frankly, like I retired at the right time in the arc of "programmer" as a career.
At the same time I suspect that those that came before us are happy to have also had a career where they also wrote the firmware, OS, boot-loader — feel our generation had to build software on top of shitty OS dylibs, etc.
Wait ten years and see how you feel about these times — and how others, ten years younger, feel about you.
I have always been envious of the kids that wrote the Apple II text adventures, envious of the Woz's that built 8-bit computers in a time when "anything goes".
Financially, time addresses that.
I had student debts, made only a little money for a while. But, over time, you pay down your debts, begin to put money away ... compound interest and all that.
But on a more ... spiritual level ... I see now that in life I have, from time to time, come to crossroads where I could choose one path or another. If you have gained any wisdom up to that point in your life there is a good chance you will choose the path that will bring you closer to what it is you seek. If it is financial comfort you seek, you're going to find that you more often than not choose the path toward financial success.
We only wish though that the spending money had come when we were younger.
I love this but I approach it a bit differently. I don't think this is a good excuse to write bad or unmaintainable code. Sure some shortcuts are fine but it should be useful for the next person.
Personally I try to use free hosting services so that I don't have to pay to keep it running when I abandon it. (That could be AWS free tier or blockchain or IPFS etc).
Use a public repository so someone else can find it when it's inevitable dropped.
I always make sure to have good documentation so that once it's found anyone can get it running.
this seems like a fantastic way to look back on a career where the author started as a prolific solo developer and later became an effective, fast, and contributing part of an effective development team. it was also just really fun to read, about the code reuse, the scrapping of ideas, the rewrites, etc.
"In the end I think Apple got an engineer for the next twenty-five years that, though not the cleverest engineer, was one that worked quickly to prototype new ideas and took on some of the gruntwork that not every engineer wanted to work on."
Some of us like doing the blue-collar parts. Plumbing, prototyping, fixing bugs, fit & finish, tackling tech debt.
Alas, today's leetcode themed hazing rituals, err, interviewing filters out people like me, and presumably John Calhoun.
I was fortunate to manage project and product teams with a mix of skills, temperments, experience. Pairing up doers with esthetes can work out great. In that "whole greater than the sum" sort of way.
FWIW, most of the doers (I've managed or worked with) had no CS education and experience. Just an interest, curiousity in tech. Notables were a ballet dancer, historian, handful of mechanics, biologist, aeronautic engineer, sculpture, and of course musicians. People who would never get hired, much less considered, today.
It’s interesting to consider how your guerrilla programming techniques could integrate with contemporary development tools and practices.
For instance, leveraging version control systems more extensively or utilizing collaborative platforms might enhance the efficiency and scalability of your projects.
Somewhat related, I think, I am always surprised at how often we don't have non-critical paths in jobs. Half the reason stress is so high, it seems, is we have backed ourselves into a situation where things have to succeed.
That's exactly the playbook how they destroyed Perl6 then. They had the very same outspoken motto "Move fast and destroy things".
They indeed do so very successfully, instead of fixing just the few outstanding bugs.
That's not what the OP said. He said, "Try things quickly, and abandon the ones that don't pan out." Nothing in there about destroying things that are working.
Abandoning things is essential to development. If we didn't let things go, we'd be stuck with all of our weaker ideas. That doesn't mean they are bad or a waste of time, but rather you reach a point at which you realize there is something better you could be doing and move on. This can be painful but it's necessary.
I keep beating this drum but I believe there is a significant amount of pain in software because people shipped first drafts and got stuck with foundational design issues. Once this has gone on long enough, even a greenfield rewrite is hard because both the programmers and the users have internalized the flawed design.
And in many cases the entire org chart has been built around the first draft. It's psychologically hard for developers and for people paying the bills to throw stuff away, so we often dig in our heals and accept the first solution that works, along with the tech debt and resulting pain.
Now the drum I keep beating is - software process needs a design phase. You need some plan, some coherent vision of the architecture, otherwise you get a system held together with duct tape and prayers.
Agile made it fashionable to sprint ahead without any coherent plan.
Waterfall obsessed about the plan and failed to adapt to new circumstances.
There has to be somewhere in the middle where a design is subject to empirical testing. We have to change the design based on results of running real code. In other words, when the first draft doesn't work quite right, you don't ignore it (Agile) or try to shoehorn it into the existing design (Waterfall) - you change the design and try again. "Throwing stuff away" could be reframed as the scientific method. This needs to be normalized as a part of the process so we remove the stigma of "failed" experiments, which are not failures but valuable sources of information that improve the final product.
I'm not sure I am all for abandoning all projects, but I do remember reading a comment on this very website that really resonated with me.
Someone was complaining about always starting projects, but never finishing said projects.
To paraphrase another user's response, it was something like, "Not all projects need to be finished in order for value to be gained. To borrow a concept from Buddhism, perhaps you found what you were looking for all along?"
I think that these ideas are both compatible. In this blog post, it looks like the author finished working prototypes of several games but elected not to push them to a full release. So I think they “finished” the work, and we can’t fault them for estimating that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to make a full release.
Not finishing a project in this case would be abandoning a game idea that you liked before you even got to a working prototype stage. Because then you can’t even see if your new idea plays well.
Yeah totally, I don’t disagree with that assessment. I would say it’s not productive to try to complete every single thing we start. It was just the headline snippets that were funny to me.
Closure is important! I do feel that I get in the mindset of saying “I’m gonna get back to this later” and it just never happens, meanwhile taking precious mental capacity every time I think about doing that thing. It’s okay to say “I tried it, I don’t need to prove anything, on to the next adventure”.
I usually think of abandoning and finishing as two different ways to resolve a project. Resolution is a good goal that allows you to be explicit about what was finished or not before stopping.
I think of the few shipped projects I've released or been part of as a shadow of who I am. Same with my resume and work experience. They're a fingerprint of a whole being living a dream life that never manifested, because I never had an early win to build upon. That's why I think UBI might magnify human potential by 10 or 100 fold, to get us from the service economy to agency and self-actualization, producing our own residual incomes.
Oh and I played Pararena a ton!