I have noticed the same thing, but I still think it's an interesting question. It would be strange for me to have a close friend and never have any kind of curiosity about how they spend nearly half of their waking hours. We don't live in severance-world: understanding someone's vocation feels like part of understanding them as a person.
I guess if you live in a community where most people do sort of menial interchangeable jobs then it's probably different, maybe everyone has a job as an unfortunate necessity but would rather think and talk about it as little as possible.
Our society used to have religious beliefs that put special value on human lives / souls / whatever. Now for many people, capitalism and materialism is the only religion, and in this religion humans are reduced to their dollar value. But you should recognize that this is not a neutral choice: you have in fact chosen one of many possible value systems, and others may choose differently.
Much of human behavior is not explained by economic incentives: for example, many elderly people are cared for by their children out of a love or a sense of familial duty.
And exactly none of that is sourced from religion. Nobody is born religious, and when they aren't they behave the same. They might not do the same special genuflections and drink the same special holy tea or whatever, but they're similarly human.
Religion has varied continuously throughout human existence. Its not the foundational requirement here.
While that could be true, it's important to remember that these people probably grew up in a culture that had religion influence for thousands of years. In order to become atheist, one needs to renounce god, therefore have the idea of god, therefore, have some background knowledge of or about religion. That is to say, that these processes a not as simple, as one might think: take soviet union as an example - official atheist state - yet so much on interpersonal level remained based on humane values formed by thousand years of east orthodox chiristianity. And even though measly 70 years are not enough to make a significant dent in human behaviour - it did produced a lot of cynicism and misanthropy before going out the window.
It might be the other way around: religions came to be _because_ humans have values that became the backbone of religions.
The evolution of "gods" is obvious in retrospect as well (a tale of some good deeds passed on through generations gets added to with every retelling and suddenly Joe who gave a child an apple and protected it from a rabid dog was walking around feeding everone and killing dragons that stole everyone's sheep).
I recommend reading literature, philosophical and historical works from more than 2000 years ago.
I don't buy it. People were decent and nice to each other long before any "holy" books were written. As my sibling commenter said, it's far more likely that some people one day finally caught up to that fact and figured they'll start writing stuff down.
So exactly was this? I am sure all of the slaveholders to the people who spit on a little black girl for dare trying to get educated in public integrated public school to the 80% of evangelical Christians who support a three times married man who admitted in his own autobiography of being a adulterer consider themselves religious.
As an older Black guy I’ve seen how both corporate America works and religious institutions. I’ve seen much less discrimination in the former than the latter.
It sounds like you could get very high ROI from chilling out a little bit. If one social lunch per month is an unfathomable hardship then you're probably leaving a lot of other opportunities on the table. Do you have OCD or social anxiety or something?
> We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties precisely because of the time embedded in them
Lost me in paragraph three. We pay for those things because they're recognizable status symbols, not because they took a long time to make. It took my grandmother a long time to knit the sweater I'm wearing, but its market value is probably close to zero.
I would say that wearing a sweater knitted by one's grandmother is its own kind of status symbol. I'm more impressed by that (someone having a grandmother willing to invest that much effort in a gift for them) than someone spending $1000 on an item of clothing.
The fact that those items took a long time to make is part of what makes them status symbols though, because if you pay a lot of money for something that took no time to make at all (see most NFTs) you look like an idiot to a lot of people.
This sort of thing was done at a time when everybody did it, and now that it's not done, nobody does it
No kid ever said "did you see the sweater that Timmy's grandma knitted for him? That kid is so cool! "
Mostly because they all had grams sweaters as well.
I don't know what term you were looking for, but a handmade present for someone dear is about the furthest thing from a "status symbol" that I can think of:
- it can't be bought
- it can't be transferred without losing almost all value (ie: it's only valuable to you, or at most your family, eBay doesn't want it)
- it provides no improvement whatsoever in one's social standing
What are you referring to with the phrase "status symbol"?
I can't connect it at all to your listed points. An Olympic medal is about obvious a status symbol as I can imagine but it can't (meaningfully) be bought or transferred.
The status signified with a knit sweater is membership (and good standing!) in a caring family with elders not yet fully subsumed into their phones.
People, acquaintances and strangers alike, frequently comment on the knit socks I often wear, ask after who made them, and all of a sudden we're on "how's your mom" terms.
Status symbols signal different status in different contexts. Some contexts (mostly lower middle class and below) are impressed by Rolex watches because they are expensive and the struggle for money forms a collective experience.
The old rich doesn't give a shit about Rolex watches beyond noticing the newb rich using them to tell on themselves.
To be worthy that much time is the statussymbol of love. Its a rare thing, money can't buy. Somebody gifts part of his finite time on the planet to you bundled in an artifact.
I like the sweater, and some people like you might recognize it as special, but it doesn't have the universal cachet of a Rolex or something. It's also a bit chunky and funny-looking (but I guess so are some Rolexes).
I feel you, I guess i succeeded in not being lost and keep reading by solving the conendrum in telling myself: it certainly should take time to grow the cows for the bags. Nonetheless I'm glad i finished reading it, it was a good essay.
The point of the essay is good. You called out exactly my reaction; we value those things because of the marketing dollars that went in to them. As a wealthy friend from Geneva said to me once, “Look around this dinner party - the Swiss here have either an Apple watch or nothing on their wrist.” Swiss watches are an export good, and Hermes is a luxury brand. Both of generally good quality. And much, much better marketing.
Not really. Some items naturally have value due to utility. Natural resources only lose their value if we somehow move on from all its utilities (like coal is, day by day).
Some are indeed via marketing, but any itema have intrinsic or at least, emotional value.
Yes, Veblen goods, and there are examples of cloning Hermès bags for example (still by hand) where they're much cheaper yet took the same amount of time to create.
I agree there, but there are plenty of examples of time cost being baked into an item, regardless of status symbols.
The sweater is with whatever value a single person values it as or would pay for it. Said another way, would you sell it to me for $10? 50? 100? If you said no to all three, it's worth at least $100.
It would be more accurate to say "we value these things highly". Most people don't give a damn about your sweater, but it's probably extremely valuable to you precisely because of the time your grandmother put into it.
Maybe their point is that the brands themselves have a lot of time embedded in them. Generally, status symbols (whatever they are) aren't things that are recently established.
I think when Andreessen said “long-term memory is mostly fake” he probably meant that we fabricate a lot of our memories, not that it’s impossible for a human to ever remember something. The author could keep in mind the principle of charity.
I wonder if this lack of interiority is a common trait amongst the most economically successful. I wouldn’t be surprised. The less introspection I do the more I end up optimizing for wealth, it’s pretty much the default in our society unless you consciously pick something else.
> 50k hours of design, 200k hours and 100 people to build
Wow, this is an enormous amount of wealth and human effort spent on a sport that I'm barely aware of. I'm curious about the economics of it; is there enough of a spectator base to make this profitable, or is it mostly just a few ultra-wealthy patrons?
The French public pays attention to it, as do offshore sailors in general, but it’s a tiny “market” of eyeballs. My Naval architect friends who don’t sail also find it interesting from an engineering perspective and Gitana puts out good content, albeit in French, so I’m using the translator a lot.
The programs and races are mostly sponsored by large French banks and dynastically wealthy families, I assume there is some overlap there…
It’s like formula 1 but less eyeballs and more French prestige.
A vast majority of the skippers and crew of these yachts these days are French, with the occasional Brit thrown in there.
It's an unholy circle jerk of rich people's pet projects and back handed corporate R&D. Don't try and make it make sense. It doesn't. It may be partially self funding through viewership and other but it's still a money fire no matter how you cut it. Think of it like space exploration circa 2005 only funded by rich people and interests rather than by nation states. Every now and then something trickles down into "normal use". Plastic braided rope is a good example.
My last FAANG team had a soft 4-hour review SLA, but if it was a complicated change then that might just mean someone acknowledging it and committing to reviewing it by a certain date/time. IIRC, if someone requested a review and you hadn't gotten to it by around the 3-hour mark you'd get an automated chat message "so-and-so has been waiting a while for your review".
Everyone was very highly paid, managers measured everything (including code review turnaround), and they frequently fired bottom performers. So, tradeoffs.
Why does it sound horrible to have your code reviewed quickly? There is no reason for reviews to wait a long time. 4 hours is already a long time, it means you can wait to do it right before you go home or after lunch.
Why would I care if my code is reviewed quickly? If the answer is some variant of "I get punished if I don't have enough changes merged in fast enough," that's not helping. From the other side, it's having someone constantly breathe down your neck. Hope you don't get in a flow at the wrong time and need to break it so Mr. Lumbergh doesn't hit you up on Teams. It just reeks of a culture of "unlimited pto," rigid schedules, KPI hacking, and burnout.
You do a lot of small changes (<100 loc) that get reviewed often. If it doesn't get reviewed often then the whole idea of continuous development breaks down.
Argueable you have 8 hours of work a day. How many of them do you need to write 100 loc? After that 100 loc or maybe 200 take a break and review other people's code.
Plus you also have random meetings and stuff so your day already fragments itself so adding a code review in the time before a meeting or after is "free" from a fragmentation standpoint.
IMO code reviews are not pair programming. By the time I've raised an MR, it's already perfect. I've had multiple client calls, talked to my team about design, unit tested it, tested it on a container environment, thought about it.
So it really doesn't matter when the review gets done. I mean, even a week and it's fine.
Sounds kind of amazing to me. 4 hours is a bit ridiculous, but I wish we had some kind of automated system to poke people about reviews so I don't have to. It's doubly bad because a) I have to do it, and b) it makes me look annoying.
My ideal system (for work) would be something like: after 2 days, ask for a review if the reviewer hasn't given it. After a week, warn them the PR will be auto-approved. After 2 weeks, auto-approve it.
That category has a median pay of $105,350, and includes "general and operations managers" as well as "chief executives". I assume it includes executives of very small enterprises.
Good point. To take it one step further, if they are including 'general managers' and 'operations managers' in this bucket, then that should include the GM and Ops Manager at places like retail stores as well (for example, every Best Buy location has both positions, I'm sure it's similar for Walmart and other big box retailers too).
I have no reason to believe that you aren't motivated mostly by curiosity and interest, but the mass of CS undergrads are primarily driven by economic incentives.
Feels like CS used to be for nerds who wanted to understand how computers work, and then it became much more popular because there were good career opportunities.
Maybe with AI it will go back to "CS for nerds", and those nerds will be the ones landing the jobs that require actual understanding?
Almost every single developer I’ve met since 1996 talked about other hobbies they had outside of computers and didn’t think about coding outside if work.
> Most developers have always just been “dark matter developers” who only saw it as a way to put food on their tables.
Is that what the article you share says? I read: "Where are the dark matter developers? Probably getting work done." It calls "dark matter developers" the ones that are not vocal on the internet. Doesn't say anything about how nerdy they are...
> Almost every single developer I’ve met since 1996 talked about other hobbies
Are you a developer yourself? And do you consider yourself a nerd? I am, and I do. And I actually have other hobbies. And I know a lot of developers who studied computer science because they were interested in computers (and not because they thought it would pay well).
I started coding as a hobby in 1986 in assembly on an Apple //e. In the 6th grade as a short fat kid with a computer. By the time I got to ninth grade, I got over the “fat” part and had other “nerdy” after school activities. But they involved other people.
By the time I got to college, I was the typical college student - except I didn’t drink or smoke weed - I hung out with friends, dated, etc.
My hobbies when I got out of college included hanging out with friends and coworkers of both sexes because we all had money (not by today’s standards) and were all single and I was a part time fitness instructor and runner with friends - we did monthly charity races and trained for them together.
I did that until I was 35 and got remarried and spent most of my free time still exercising and with my wife and step sons.
They are both grown as of 2020 and after Covid, my wife and I got rid of everything we owned that wouldn’t fit in four suitcases and city hopped around the United States for a year [1]. We still travel a lot and this year we will be out of the country for a total of two months and away from our home for a third of the year traveling.
I have not done a side project or written a single line of code that I haven’t gotten paid for or to get a degree since 1992.
Right now, my free time is enjoying being in another country outside of the toxicity of the US, learning Spanish and exercise and of course finding random things to do with my wife and hanging out with friends.
[1] our “home” is a condo unit in condotel we own. When we aren’t there, we pack up everything we own and it is rented out as a hotel room and we get half the income that covers our mortgage and expenses.
Maybe, but it'll probably be a subtle shift rather than all-or-nothing. Like people will be 20% more nerdy on average or something.
Note that the kids going into top CS schools were never exactly dumb jocks, they still have to be smart and good at math in addition to being (possibly) money-motivated. I think people with brains that can do CS well tend to also find it at least somewhat interesting.
Business majors typically. I remember seeing a small graffiti in my engineering lecture hall that said something along the lines of "limit gpa -> 0: major= business administration"
titanopathy asks"What did they change to? Pre-med?"
Such innocents could never compete in premed, which is replete with sociopaths/psychopaths willing to sabotage each others for a seat in med school. [We should consider a secret government program to siphon off toxic pre-med students to business/military/intelligence programs for which they are much more suitable]. Our medical biosphere is much less than healthy today thanks to these demon seed "flowering" into practice.
That, along with removing caps on medical school residencies:
I guess if you live in a community where most people do sort of menial interchangeable jobs then it's probably different, maybe everyone has a job as an unfortunate necessity but would rather think and talk about it as little as possible.