Most of us admire artists and musicians who have totally devoted themselves to their craft, and we don’t condescendingly pity their “unhealthy work life balance”. My hero growing up was Feynman, who was doing physics every waking hour (or so I’ve read). It’s not like his estate is going to reap the economic benefits of his work; so was Feynman a pitiful sucker, abused by his university employers? Is it my responsibility not to become too passionate about my work so that I don’t somehow exacerbate the class tensions in our country?
I really don’t understand the logic of your comment and most of the others downvoters. He never said his ambition was to make another guy money; perhaps he’s making a lot of it himself, or regards the money as to some extent incidental. The comments about America aren’t in the best taste, but that doesn’t make it okay to put words in his mouth.
Here's one possible take on the difference of perspective.
There's a distinction to be made in the nature of the output. Feynman's physics work was investigating nature on behalf of humanity. What artists produce is spiritually/intellectually/emotionally edifying for other people. Contrast this with OP's [killing themselves to make a rich banker richer][0], or, say, working on the next addictive mobile game.
This is putting things in the strongest possible light, of course: Feynman also worked on the bomb. Artists can be navel-gazers. And some people break their backs working for a company that is "curing cancer". So it's not black and white.
To my mind that isn’t a meaningful distinction. If an artist is doing no harm, and is meanwhile enthralled by his work and his individual notions of beauty or truth or excellence, then I admire his vitality. I don’t know what OP does, but I similarly appreciate his passion.
I do believe that much of the heat he’s taking is from people projecting their own insecurity and lack of fulfillment, or some other form of jealousy. I suspect that, because I used to be ashamed to feel that sickly, condescending impulse in myself, before I had found a purpose (I.e. a domain of application) for my engineering work that I believe in. I used to have the usual bifurcation of work versus life, and y’know what? Turns out it can get a lot fking better! If OP isn’t hurting anyone, more power to him.
> I do believe that much of the heat he’s taking is from people projecting their own insecurity and lack of fulfillment, or some other form of jealousy.
Are you new here? A lot of us in this community have found fulfillment and happiness through the opposite mindset of OP. Compounded by his tone it’s not a surprise he’s taking heat.
> If OP isn’t hurting anyone, more power to him.
OP wants to “win”, which is usually a way to say he wants to be above others.
First I'm not offended. This is of course not comparable with athletes because athletes compete in a game with a clear defined goal. In real life there is no goal to win. And if you set your own personal goal to maximize your own wealth (which I have no problem with btw), then at least it's basic economy understanding that it's not a zero sum game, you don't win at the expense of others, that any trade is for the mutual benefit of the parties, and that your wealth also depend on the wealth of the society as a whole (otherwise obviously your money would just be a piece of paper). You earn money because you provide value to people.
But I can understand how working as a derivative trader with one big number to increase like in a video game can narrow your perspectives, to the point of having the pretention of being a winner on top of that.
I still don’t understand the derision. An athlete is indeed a useful analog. They speak of ‘winning,’ but we tend to assume they mean ‘be the best at the sport,’ not ‘be the most valuable human being’ or ‘dominate other people’, a sentiment I didn’t automatically project onto OP. Even in a real life arena where wealth isn’t conserved, you can still ‘win’ in the sense of increasing it faster than anyone else, and I didn’t automatically assume OP meant otherwise. Finally, I don’t understand why it’s wrong let alone distasteful for OP to form a psychological relationship to his labor similar to an athlete’s, even if his work isn’t a game, if that works for him; how is he beholden to anyone else’s idea of what ought to make him happy? Your point of view appears to me to boil down to “I specifically don’t like derivatives traders,” or some other gut-level attitude, which would be fair enough on its own and might find easy agreement with me were it not being rationalized in this way.
Well I'll say one thing about the "heat", I didn't expect this thread to get so noisy and thought my post was going to defuse it so now I regret that. I thought I was being nice.
Anyway, speaking of projection. I'm not the one that said a single thing about domain or work-life balance. You're making up stuff in your brain based on your just-stated tendency towards a false sense of superiority. Which is funny given the point of my damned original post.
Whatever. I give up. I'm only here because the site for and by hackers doesn't have an account delete button.
> “I think the downvotes (that's what gray means right?) are people's way of saying that the personal narrative that defines your life is so boring that your job is the only place you can achieve feelings like that. I feel bad for you so won't downvote.“
Okay... Maybe it came out not as intended, or maybe I misinterpreted it, but this statement shocked me with its (in my interpretation) condescension. “So boring”, ”I feel bad for you,” being I suppose the key phrases. What I had recalled was my own former inferiority complex, of which I believed I saw an echo in your post and many others’ responses. It no longer occurs to me to feel offense (as in many other comments) or pity (as in yours) when someone else speaks in a competitive tone of a singleminded desire to “win,” whatever winning happens to mean to them, and I now regard such reactions as irrational and egocentric, whatever internal mechanism they arise from. To illustrate, I’d predict many of the commenters would to varying degrees celebrate an athlete expressing himself in a similar manner (the most famous example I guess being Muhammad Ali, but there are many other such personalities in individual and team sports), and I believe that is primarily because athletes are in a profession they don’t identify with and therefore cannot locate any basis on which to feel either psychologically threatened or in any other way contrast with their own choices. But I may still be missing nuance in your individual comment.
Both the OC and your assumption that he is “handing [his] life over to the guy [he] works for” seem to me to be speaking pretty squarely of the popular notion of work-life balance. Perhaps I’m again missing some nuance there.
Anyhow, it’s not important. Hope you have a nice week.
I’ve said this before in another thread, that it baffles me how so many people in this community, who I presume are terribly rigorous about their degrees of certainty with various technical matters at work, nevertheless know exactly what everyone else should do in some barely specified life situation.
On the contrary, I'm the only one not judging this guy by his profession. As a result their mindset and platitudes look just as pitiable and silly to me than if he were to make a post saying that he works as a grocery clerk.
P.S. Sincere apologies to clerks, you deal with the shit and are respected. Just using as a point about perception and weird notions of what people wear as badges of honor.
Edit: I also don't believe Feynman or any other scientist would define his life by the uni he researched for just as I don't believe an artist would define himself by his job with coca-cola
I and my closet colleagues have the same attitude and can’t exactly say where it comes from. I feel incredibly lucky that my work is capable of fascinating me, and I want to become as good at it as I’m capable of being.
A big part of that is the subject matter, and getting to work with (build software tools for) artists and sound designers. It probably helps that the work is a well rounded social-creative-technical experience much of the time. Once I stopped seeing myself as a repository of generic, commoditized skills for sale, and found an actual purpose, the sort of ‘employee mentality’ I used to have vanished and my relationship to work became simpler and more gratifying...and I work a lot harder. And yes, I also get paid a lot more, although that came later and I don’t regard that as a requirement - would much sooner give up the money than the passion. I’ve seen a similar transition happen in others.
To some of the downvoters: we all admire artists and musicians who have totally devoted themselves to their craft, and we don’t condescendingly pity their “unhealthy work life balance”. My hero growing up was Feynman, who was doing physics every waking hour (or so I’ve read). It’s not like his estate is going to reap the economic benefits of his work; so was Feynman a pitiful sucker, abused by his university employers? Why does someone else’s ambition anger you so much?
I had a similar experience until I realized how many other hobbies exist among friends and family that I could apply the knowledge to. I worked with my brother and cousin to add “push to” functionality to their homebuilt telescopes using IC linear magnetic encoders, which are so small they can be embedded in pockets in the wood, making for a much more integrated and beautiful scope than is possible with off the shelf products. Now making a more robust version of a similar gizmo to instrument my brother’s millwork shop. Then a wireless temperature/fan regulator for my grill. Guitar (or keyboard) effect pedals make for an endless series of wonderful, creative projects as well. In other words, all stuff we’d be doing anyway, to which the widget hacking adds an extra dimension of improvement and interest. As a kid I imagine I would have loved to build weird game controllers with my dad. Or customized RC airplanes.
I hope companies like osh park, sparkfun and so on never go the way of radio shack.
I think it’s a safe assumption that driver alertness positively correlates with lives saved. But it’s hard to market this product with the sort of rhetoric that would optimize for that, so they’ve found a few ways to console themselves as they name the feature “autopilot” and endeavor to make the tech appear magical.
If they think they’ve cleared the bar just by beating the crash statistics of all cars, then they are still in the business of trading lives.
As of this morning, I am still unable to reliably start my docker+machine autoscaling instances. In all cases the error is "Error: The zone <my project> does not have enough resources available to fulfill the request"
An instance in us-central1-a has refused to start since last Thursday or Friday.
I created a new instance in us-west2-c, which worked briefly but began to fail midday Friday, and kept failing through the weekend.
On Saturday I created yet another clone in northamerica-northeast1-b. That worked Saturday and Sunday, but this morning, it is failing to start. Fortunately my us-west2-c instance has begun to work again, but I'm having doubts about continuing to use GCE as we scale up.
And yet, the status page says all services are available.
As of this morning, I am still unable to reliably start my docker+machine autoscaling instances. In all cases the error is "Error: The zone <my project> does not have enough resources available to fulfill the request"
An instance in us-central1-a has refused to start since last Thursday or Friday.
I created a new instance in us-west2-c, which worked briefly but began to fail midday Friday, and kept failing through the weekend.
On Saturday I created yet another clone in northamerica-northeast1-b. That worked Saturday and Sunday, but this morning, it is failing to start. Fortunately my us-west2-c instance has begun to work again, but I'm having doubts about continuing to use GCE as we scale up.
And yet, the status page says all services are available.
As of this morning, I am still unable to reliably start my docker+machine autoscaling instances. In all cases the error is "Error: The zone <my project> does not have enough resources available to fulfill the request"
An instance in us-central1-a has refused to start since last Thursday or Friday.
I created a new instance in us-west2-c, which worked briefly but began to fail midday Friday, and kept failing through the weekend.
On Saturday I created yet another clone in northamerica-northeast1-b. That worked Saturday and Sunday, but this morning, it is failing to start. Fortunately my us-west2-c instance has begun to work again, but I'm having doubts about continuing to use GCE as we scale up.
And yet, the status page says all services are available.
