Joined 19 years ago
I guess I just wanted to caution people that a career in computers and/or academia can very isolating unless one picks the right path. Moderation in all things.
However, Academia for the most part I think is just that sort of environment, I have commiserated with numerous PhD students who say the same thing. If one is into computers, both academia and computer engineering as career tracks are rather isolating, but some seem to like it, vs some get lonely, perhaps it's something psychological, and I'm not really intended to be such an introvert. Who knows.
I don't think academia is a bad career as long as one can get tenure at a good school, or in a good industry lab, so as to work with good people. I guess whether one can take it psychologically just depends on the individual.
Although I do agree that maybe if one had kids+wife or worked hard to be social, the 8 hours of isolation a day wouldn't be that bad. It might even be relaxing! So maybe professor is a good job for one in old age. But still I would worry about causing my students to suffer through isolation.
How history remembers you only matters after you're dead. Can you really tell someone to live a life of solitary confinement? The isolating parts of academia honestly suck. But everyone convinces themselves that academia is so great, in part because so many have gone before, suffering, down the same path.
Look at all the theoretical physicists and mathematicians. Do you think these people are HAPPY? Remember, if you leave math you are "dead." It's about sacrifice, not about your health or happiness as a human being.
The best part of academia is the collaboration, the social aspects. As for the environment, it could definitely be renovated to make accommodation for humanity. Obviously that will never happen. So there needs to be big CAUTION signs posted up whenever someone lauds the greatness of academia, saying it is not all fun and games, lots of people spend decades locked in offices hunched over pieces of paper.
By the way a shout to pg. I have mad respect for him and Jim Clark, both computer scientists/entrepreneurs who have worked really hard and selflessly to get engineers more equity over the wealth they create.
In any case, it's probably easier to find loopholes, like startups, or being an early arrival to an industry, or starting at a smaller company that inflates later, or tunneling your way between points in the corporate topology, by switching from one company to another, if you're ambitious. But betting against statistics never pays.
Of course in Ancient Greece it would be optimal to not have a job, but in America it's a liability.
I don't understand the get-rich-quick mentality for making startups. It's illogical. Making a startup to accomplish a meaningful goal is interesting, but money per se isn't. Making lots of money to "be free" reduces to non-meaningful goals, no-goals centered around the rejection of much of what is worthwhile in life. It's better for people to have real, tangible goals and pursue them, which nearly always leads to work, even if said people already have "enough money."
If one needs time to contemplate, sure, take a few years off. But normally during such years, people who are healthy and challenging themselves will automatically start doing things interesting enough that they can convince someone to pay them for it. If you can't do this, then you've essentially proved the irrelevance of your work (or that you need to go into academia, if your work is too theoretical to earn money in the "normal" world.)
A strong argument for making a startup is when you want to accomplish something so ambitious that no job would let you tackle that task, simply because jobs have smaller scope.
Maybe there are other good arguments for startups, but people are very unclear when they throw a bunch of confusing messages about money out there, because increasing income doesn't make people much happier [1], and it's easy for people who live in their means to take years off from jobs, if that's the issue at hand.
Even if you want to never work again, there's a greater probability of success in taking a high paying, dull job and working hard for several years, than working on a startup. But many ambitious people would have a lot less pride in doing this, despite the higher probability of success. Again this indicates that startups are really about pride of ownership, pride of tackling new ideas, changing the world, etc, than money.
[1]. http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S15/15/09S18/inde...
I know what you mean though about cities sending a message. I used to ignore what groups of people think, for reasons of principle, because human nature doesn't scale. But then I got the naivete cauterized out of me, and so now I pay attention to these messages, even though I don't entirely like being tuned into them. I'm not sure if I go along with the messages, maybe I'm neutral or slightly against (for reasons of principle).
In any case, I think ambition is good, because the human condition can be improved. (If it couldn't then ambition would be harmful, because it would be a zero sum game.) It's too bad the word has a connotation of money, because it would otherwise be a decent word, and I don't believe in money.
As for avoiding distractions, I agree with Paul that the Internet is like crack, it's really bad. Like Paul, I never watched TV. (As an aside, I think the reason most people are so dumb is because they watch a lot of TV). The Internet is like TV -- it makes one dumb, it's like crack, but it's also unavoidable when working as a programmer. I used to deal with the Internet by removing the wireless card from the laptop, and physically walking to my 'work location', which didn't have a LAN port, to get work done.
The problem with that now is that I need to use the Internet frequently to SSH into servers, download libraries, programs, and so forth, simply to get work done. I suppose I only have about 15 libraries that I use with the typical program that I'm writing. So maybe the overhead cost of me browsing the Internet and wasting time doing so is high enough that it would be better to go back to the old setup.
My point was that because school systems are hackable, sometimes hackers will have hacked the signs of the costs involved. For example, my graduate school costs less than -$12,000 a year, but some peoples' schools may cost more than $12,000 a year (so they're not "doing something right?"). Big deal. In the long run, education wins financially and in terms of helping people accomplish their goals.
One can easily make the argument that startups are education, but obviously this consists of more than "Web 2.0" and a few other buzzwords thrown together at random. (I'm not criticizing Paul here, but I am criticizing the lunatic fringe that seems to grow around Paul.)
Now on the theory underlying your essays.
If it's barbaric to work, then one should note that it's feasible to stop working immediately, without significant wealth. It can be done piecewise: many of my friends save up and travel for a year or two, or get schools to pay for their traveling. Assuming one is investing, and not increasing spending, it will get easier rather than harder to take more and more time off from jobs over the years. Of course most people shoot themselves in the foot by taking out loans or increasing spending, but that's their problem.
If autonomy is important, then why assume startups and develop lots of minor contradictions with autonomy? Why not assume autonomy, and see where this leads?
Given your value set, which seems centered around autonomy and creating/hacking, I can't see why you promote startups as a lone solution rather than promoting a variety of solutions. For example, living cheaply, moving to cheaper nations, taking years off to travel, only reproducing when one's children need no longer work (so as to make the problem of work globally and locally decrease, rather than increase), working to bring high tech to areas without it (which might give different kinds of autonomy, as well as cheap living), working contract type jobs where taking say six months off isn't a problem, working in journalism in the areas of high tech or art (more traveling, less pay), or working in academia, where the problems with autonomy go away and hence work becomes non-pernicious.
Your work with startups is really great, but I think there are lots of other options that are equally consistent with the values of long-term autonomy and creating/hacking. I don't see that you have any particular duty to present these options, but I do think that hackers should be trying to increase the sphere of jobs known to be consistent with their values, by discussing them publicly.
