Finance people are welcome to go live in shoeboxes and invest in higher yielding assets, clears them out of the housing market for the rest of us who value a house to live in over higher yields.
Adam Smith observed in his famous book that when people get more money they almost always spend it on a better place to live.
I have observed people from the very poor homeless all the way up to multi-millionaires - his observation hold true for the vast majority. Nearly all of them are living paycheck to paycheck despite the massive amount of difference in income.
When you are young investing in education - that is tuition - is the correct call. When you finish school though many people stop investing at all instead of investing in equities.
> Like a friend of mine without even a highschool degree became a tree surgeon and his business is making enough money now that rivals the rates of tech and finance bros in London
Intelligent or "smarts" is not measured by how successful you are or how much money you make.
Also great for your friend, but no one would hire him to do that if machines could do it for them
> When was this ever NOT the case? Without inherited generational wealth you're at the mercy of the capital/asset owning class to make a living.
What are you talking about? The capital class always relied on the professional class just as much. A wealthy person who owns a machine shop relies on machinists to make money. :/
Yeah, but what if we are at the point we don’t need machinists any more?
The rich get richer, even if you’re enriched solely with an above-average intelligence. The bar for break even just moved up. If the US thought 13 million unemployed/underemployed people was problem, just wait until it’s 30 million. They could afford a 10% drag on the economy, who wants to bet they can double it to 20%?
>Intelligent or "smarts" is not measured by how successful you are or how much money you make.
I never said that. I side intelligent people are adaptable to environmental challenges to not worry too much about being left out economically. You're just doing a bad faith interpretation of my comment.
>A wealthy person who owns a machine shop relies on machinists to make money. :/
I'll push back against this slightly: learning what good code is requires debugging bad code, whether by way of a symbolic debugger or judicious use of printf() or breaking an algorithm down into its steps so that you can figure out its asymptotic behaviors.
I harped on checking someone's ability to debug code back when I interviewed candidates, in part because I found that people who could debug effectively could also sniff out bad code. It was something of a bonus that I also happened to select for candidates who could explain their debugging strategies and what that meant for the software they were working on.
It's kind of the same distinction between backups and restores, wherein the restores are what's important, but they're impossible without the backups to restore from.
One of the first things I do in any new-to-me project is set breakpoints in the integration tests and start stepping through the code so that I can establish some mental context. However, if there aren't integration tests, I begin writing them so that I can walk around with my debugger.
It's such a bizarre attitude. Like I think this stuff deserves decade+ long prison sentences for everyone involved, and they just don't care. Like imagine if mugging were legal and the people doing it just said "hey, if I don't rob you, someone else will."
> I don't feel pride in it (even when I write it by hand).
Hard for me to imagine. You feel no pride in using a tool to accomplish a goal?
> Code has no such personality. I don't tie my identity or ego to code the same way I would an essay
Code certainly does have a personality. When working with teams for a while you can absolutely get a sense for which person wrote what code in a codebase, just by subtle little tells.
You may not tie your identity or ego to it, bully for you, but for me I take a lot of pride in writing clear and maintainable code that contributes to big projects in meaningful ways.
Maybe the problem with software is there's too many people who treat writing code as a mere means to an end, instead of a very important part of the process.
Well, there's some nuance. I'm not really proud of my code. I'm proud of the software that gets built with it.
Code is just sitting in a git repo somewhere, not necessarily running. That's a big distinction for me. Consider that code volume has increased 14x on github this year, but we see nowhere near that increase in the actual usable software. Code is cheap and getting cheaper. Running software ain't.
Another way to put it: I'm only interested in code so far as the value it provides. That value, not the code itself, is the source of pride. If I can provide similar value without any code at all, I'd gladly do so.
But code is the mean to get an idea across to someone. It’s the difference between “I think this can work” and “I’ve worked on this and it does work”. I’m part of the OpenBSD mailing list and it quite nice someone sharing a diff for an idea or experiment. It may not get merged, but it’s better than realm of deliberations.
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