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I Wasn’t Prepared for Work (2013) (archive.org)
180 points by reikonomusha on Nov 24, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 74 comments



It’s always a little bit risky to write something personal that will inevitably come across as something other than humble. Especially when it’s also mixed with something that comes across very first-world-problemy. Mind you that showing that one can do a little bit of calculus isn’t a testament to being a genius or anything like that. The examples the story describes might as well be equivalent to something more obviously creative in nature that isn’t bound by the constraints of time, like amateur painting or music making might be. (Professional mathematicians or physicists would agree that a hypergeometric series doesn’t even scratch the surface of “difficult” mathematics.) There are real geniuses in the world having extraordinary intuition being extraordinarily productive and have something to show for it. This is not that.

I posted this because I was reminded of it after reading pg’s Bus Ticket essay—which to me was more about discovery than it was genius. When you have 10+ hours a day, 7 days a week, with no dependents and no job, there’s a lot of room to follow interests, as petty/useless/insignificant as they may be, and frequently if you spend that much time, you’ll discover new things or make new connections.

The conclusion of the story maybe is obvious in retrospect: that doesn’t happen (as easily) if you have a job (or family or partner or ...), even if your work is in an area you ostensibly love. You won’t have the same space to dive deep in areas that you choose, and you may not reach the same level of creative zen. It’s not something I realized going into the job market over a decade ago, and I think it’s a worthwhile consideration for people who value not being preoccupied with what time it is.

(For those expressing concern, don’t. Or those taking away that I’m not doing something that I like or following my passions, I am. I still do the things I like to do, but I don’t sacrifice everything else in life to focus on them exclusively. It remains to this day that that has its costs and benefits.)


Thanks for sharing.

I stared in horror at the following:

"Here in Silicon Valley, it’s even worse. I have an aesthetically nicer place, but I now don’t even have a desk or desktop machine. I type from a small laptop on my couch, being held up by a pillow. I have no room for a chalkboard or whiteboard, unless I wanted to cover up half of my mirrored closet."

I am an east-coast developer and am totally spoiled with my home office. I never had an urge to move to silicon valley and this makes me even happier I'm not there.

Five computers spread out over three desks, two large bookshelves, a couch, and a fireplace.


I am a German developer with a German developer salary (between 60k€ and 70k€ to provide a ballpark estimate) and I live in the center of a large, well-known German city.

The area is extremely nice except for parking and I live in a ~70sqm modernized apartment with my own home office and enough room for tech gadgets, a large couch, a large bed and a balcony... etc.

In the evening, restaurants, bars, cinema and nice parks are < 15mins walk away. Grocery store from cheap to luxurious are in the same range. I have access to good healthcare (aside from getting an appointment for specialists it's fine), insured the most important aspects of my life and if I want to go to another large capital I need 20mins to go to Central Station and take a train or 20mins to the airport and take a flight.

Aside from Apple and depending on what you want, all major Silicon Valley firms provide jobs in at least one of the larger German cities, notably Munich though.

I honestly do not understand why people are drawn to Silicon Valley so much - unless it's simply about the "environment of minds" if you are willing to sacrifice all other aspects of life to it to some degree (worse living situation, worse working conditions...). For innovation and startup life, I suppose it makes sense. But for a normal software engineer?

Can somebody explain this to me?


Salary at FAANG starts at 120.000USD (when you 'just' graduated from Stanford or Berkeley) and will go up to about 300.000 over time.


I understand that. I earn less but don't push half my salary to rent or breaking my bone.


Why are finance people drawn to New York?

Why are film people drawn to Los Angeles?

More is different.


70k might be fine for a single person in munich, but when you have a family (single earner), does it work?


For me the waybackmachine rendered all the equations as boxes and I couldn't read any. In a certain way having the detail missing and just having a taste from the descriptions somehow made it better. You can fill in whatever blank you want.

I feel the same as this guy in many ways. I dread to say it, but maybe it isn't the lifestyle (I didn't follow his path). Maybe this is what getting older does to us.


(Equations work for me on Firefox with JS enabled, as well as Safari mobile.)


It takes courage to articulate something so intimate and authentic. Thanks for sharing.

> Or those taking away that I’m not doing something that I like or following my passions, I am. I still do the things I like to do, but I don’t sacrifice everything else in life to focus on them exclusively. It remains to this day that that has its costs and benefits.

Do you still have such creative intellectual pursuits? Do you think you’ll be able to write a follow-up post describing the equilibrium you’ve settled into now (and the associated trade-offs) and how you got there?


I do, but they’re much more limited in meandering and scope. Projects tend to be more well defined. I haven’t been blogging as of late, but maybe one is due.


I tried replying to your article. Since I now notice it's been six years, I wonder whether you did anything with this?

I don't think professional mathematicians would say you shouldn't pursue it. The opposite, actually. If people like myself who never practiced it in their own time can get degrees in it, so could you. You don't need to be any kind of genius.


I also have similar questions. What did you end up doing about this feeling? I don't believe my own intelligence was (or is) on the same caliber as yours, but I do feel like it has atrophied somewhat since joining the working world, and that is in spite of doing a CS masters. Honestly I believe if I hadn't done the masters I would've gone crazy from the deterioration.


Aristotle articulated all this stuff much better and in far fewer words 2300 years ago in his writings on work and leisure.


One of his (and plato's) conclusions was roughly that excellence is not really possible without slavery facilitating. Some needed to be freed from stress of toil by laborers. It's very sad this fellow's father couldn't fund his further development.


I wonder whether modern robotics would fulfil their definition of "slavery"... Or whether modern patronage on its own (university research, arts funding, etc) would suffice in their view.


My advice would be: rigorously eliminate everything from your life which doesn't fit inside your top X critical priorities.

Where X is as small as possible, and seek to cull it further by combining equivalents and trying to identify why some 'important' things might actually be utter wastes of time in the first place.

The world generally uses a ratchet approach to conquer your attention. Use a ratchet to take it back.


This is excellent advice which has even been echoed by Warren Buffet [0]. Time is a finite resource and therefore everything we do is a trade-off between depth and breadth. In a given day, you could spend 1 hour learning 24 subjects, or 24 hours learning 1 subject. One isn't necessarily better than the other, but it's a constraint we all operate around. Learning 24 subjects may be interesting and fulfilling to some, but from a professional standpoint those that tend to be most influential in their respective fields are those that devote the most time towards their subjects. There are exceptions of course, but this is the general advice for the general population.

Recently, I've started to adopt a similar perspective by rigorously evaluating everything with a simple question: "20 years from now, will my kids be proud that I did this?" If the answer is no, I stop it. So far, I've stopped playing video games and using social media, and I've noticed that I've gotten an extra 10-15 hours per week to spend on things that will make me a better person in the long term, like reading, working out, and spending time with my friends and family.

The same approach could be used with any endeavor: "In X years, will I be better at <subject> if I continue to do Y?"

[0] https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus


> For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


This resonates well with me. I honestly do not understand the benefit of dropping video games in favor of <random hobby>, for example reading. Alternate / do both if you enjoy it!

Before you recoil in disgust, let me note that I have read many many books and love reading. I value literature a lot but when it comes down to what I do in life and what things REALLY REALLY give me in the end, then books don't perform better than a range of selected video games (to my own gusto). In then end, a book doesn't propel to new positions more than a game does, unless it'sa book meant to teach me new technology or so.

It's simply another form of media, another form of story telling and conveying experiences. And while I enjoyed "Marc Aurel's Meditations" and took a lot of benefit out of it, Persona 5 also provided me with some good, memorable experiences that make me rethink life. Even just the "Take your time" loading screen spinner... If I put them on a scale it's simply even for me in value.


I'm with you on Persona 5. I haven't finished it, but it has already influenced my life in a positive way.

You should consider playing "Tales of Berseria". It poses an interesting question: "Why do bird fly?", and gives interesting answers.


I find I have a pretty stable need for a certain amount of unfocused, low-energy time. Social media and other "junk food" activities are just ways to fill it.

They can and should be replaced by more effective forms of rest (meditation, sleep, walking, etc) but intellectual work just isn't happening in that state. Or if it does, it leads to a harder crash later.

I have to roll my eyes a little at the "produce X% more by working through your breaks" thing. If you can do that sustainably, why were you taking breaks to begin with?


The most effective form of “rest” I’ve found is 10 minutes of boredom before bed.

I don’t meditate, I let my mind wander and don’t judge anything. The only rule is I’m not allowed to physically move, I find a comfortable position and must remain in that position for 10 minutes.

It’s excruciating at first, but about 5 minutes in my mind has processes whatever it had stored up and I’m tired. About 8 minutes in I’m shutting my eyes. Sometimes I have to give and just go to bed.


I'm glad that you found something that works for you!

FWIW, that description seems compatible with meditation technique. Meditation can be non judgmental in that way, and just be a matter of experiencing the state of your mind.


This.

Delegating social media and other trivial pursuits to family and friends can free up an additional 10-15 hours per week for HN! :)

More seriously, to get the most out of HN:

1) skip the aviation and database threads and just read my posts. (There are very few qualified commenters on those topics.)

2) for other topics, read a few posts and if it looks interesting, find an in-depth article or blog on that topic.


that sounds like a depressing existence


It depends. You could optimize for having a chill life as one of your top priorities. I think the advice is about consciously and explicitly managing the tradeoffs of your choices.


Chase the extreme pleasures by experiencing much pain.

Or be an Epicurean and enjoy the neutral state most, pleasures but not at the expense of pain.

Or be a Stoic and find comfort in realizing you aren't invading Russia in the winter.


I'd agree. I've seen people who try to min-max their life and "fulfilled" is not a word I'd use to describe them.


I read this article and while it's sad the author doesn't pursue passions anymore, I also can't help think that maybe they just aren't as hungry as they once were. I was diagnosed with cancer 4 years ago and it changed my perspective on life. I'm mid 30's now and more productive than ever. I also work full time and am a single father to two little kids. The way I describe it is that I am hungry. I didn't expect it to last this long but it's been years and I'm still regarded as a very motivated and determined person by others.


Similar situation (though not Cancer, in my case a life a potentially life altering spinal condition and a separate unrelated but equality serious stomach condition) and similar response, I suddenly started going for jobs I wouldn't have dared before and both getting them and doing them well.

I also bought a motorbike and will be upgrading that to a faster one next year, both medical conditions are under control and the medication works but now I'm determined to live my life on my terms for as long as I can rather than just drift.

I also ramped up the exercise and I'm now lighter and fitter than I was in my late 20's (I'm approach 40) - I think sometimes you have two choices, cave or say "fuck you" to the universe and carry on, I'm glad you picked the latter but I understand why someone would pick the former.


> cave or say "fuck you" to the universe and carry on

Props to you! That's a great attitude to have.


+1. I don't know about cancer, but having kids just makes you more productive for a given amount of time. Not necessarily at a coding level, but at the meta/self-management level where you decide what really needs to be done.

It's probably aligned with the "ask the busiest person you know" type of thing.

And yes I am more passionate about coding now, but that came from boredom. I learned Ruby then Haskell because I was bored of churning out C# all day, and I am glad I did. This lead me on to Elm which is my side project engine.


what is the "ask the busiest person you know" thing?


"If you want something done, ask the busiest person you know."


I am curious to why you think working at Google is reserved only for the very best of the field? I don't have good visibility into normal companies, but honestly all FAANG companies essentially employ armies of average developers, although they might have a higher density of exceptional developers than other companies. Mostly they are distinguished by two things:

* They work with economies of scale. What may be viable for a startup might be useless for Google. What might be viable for Google might be absolutely disastrous for a startup.

* They use a management style that fosters innovation and learning.

The interviews can be tough, yeah, but all it takes is practice and given that you seem to have good mathematical skills, hiding a few weeks or months in the basement with an algorithms book and a laptop, should make it easy for you to pass a Google interview.


Having spent a good deal with my of my career in the wilds of technical consulting, I can say with confidence that the product group and engineers at places like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon really are better than average. That's not to say they have a lock on all good engineers, because but they have very few bad ones.

You are right though, getting into one of the bigs isn't impossible with a reasonable amount of work studying for the interviews and aggressively seeking connections It's just that the people willing and able to do that work are already showing they have the right mindset to be a good dev a anywhere


But with these "better than average" types, what is the culture like other than constant, non-stop work?

People died to get us a 40 hour work week and here we have all these brilliant folks putting us right back in chains. They think they're getting rich, but it is all a lie. A few are getting rich, the rest are being tricked.


At Microsoft its pretty good, I can't speak well for others. Work-life flexibility is something we take pretty seriously in the groups I've worked in, and the workload is pretty manageable. It's a little >40h/week on average, but not dramatically so, and most people take their full vacation and holiday packages (3-5 weeks vacation, 12 holidays). There are bad weeks or a bad month, but its not the norm. I'd say almost everyone spends more time then that doing other technical things, but that's because we get joy out of it. Last time I tried to measure it, I'm typically doing about 5-10h/week on top of work reading technical books, researching something, or playing with some new technology on my own time.

There are also a number of true workaholics spending 60 hours + a week strictly working, but that's typically because they want to and not because the organization is running in permanent crunch mode.


> How has this affected me? I’ve mentally atrophied. I now feel like I can’t talk about any subject with more than a centimeter of depth. A half a decade ago, I could dive with you to the penetralia of convergence theorems of hypergeometric series, but now I cannot. Even my programming has taken a toll even though I do it every day. I find myself abstaining from studying advanced topics in programming and computer science, and instead sticking to this comfort zone of what I know.

How does one go about overcoming mental atrophy? Especially after spending a decade or more programming, I think most (if not all) developers battle with this problem...

If any one of you has successfully done this, please share.


I've seen many engineers manage this by simply finding ways to work less.

Programming is sufficiently difficult that time it takes to complete tasks can vary by more than order of magnitude. I've given a junior engineer a task that would take me 2 hours, had them come back with a solution in a week, and been happy with the result.

So if you achieve a certain level of skill you can take jobs that are "beneath you" and claim the tasks that took you 10-20 hours actually took you 40. It's not particularly honest, but most employers aren't willing to engage in fair market rates at 20 hours a week so people find ways to get what they want outside of the system.


Yeah that is kind of how I'm approaching it after I was diagnosed with serious health issues. I just take it easy on my job where I can do in 20 hours what others take 40 hours. I still get paid well above what I need to live. My travel times to work are good. I rarely have to work on weekends.


I think people fail to deeply reflect on what they want from life. I'll share my list, because maybe it will help someone else to figure out theirs:

• Maintain my body

• Maintain a sense of mental tranquility

• Work on projects and learn things I find meaningful and interesting

• Visit my friends and family in my hometown regularly

• Have a good home life with my wife and someday children

• Have a job that keeps me interested but isn't so exhausting it detracts from the above

If you don't have a list like this, and you don't know what resonates with you, then your actions will be unguided and you'll not find any sense of peace or progress. Pay attention to what helps you be happy, reflect on it and use it to guide your choices and use of time in this life.


You cannot... you learn new things, old things fade. What you can do is maintain and dedicate time to learning things, and/or keeping your older skill refreshed.

About a decade and a half ago, I worked on eLearning systems and training materials. I've learned and forgotten about more things than I could probably think about when trying. I used to know, pretty intently how certain aircraft engines worked, now I'd have a hard time just simply describing how a jet engine works in general.

Why, because I don't use it regularly. I've since worked with other languages, platforms, systems and constantly learn. You will learn and forget a great many things in a lifetime. Most people would be hard pressed to remember as a young adult materials they covered in 5th grade.

What it comes down to is keep reading, learning and trying new things. You won't remember everything, don't even try. What you can do is keep your mind able to think.

As a small aside, avoid refined sugars and seed (vegetable) oils. There are a lot of significant links to dementia and Alzheimers disease aside from being two of the largest causes of inflammation from diet.


I think there's a simple solution, but it's certainly not easy.

You set aside time for this intellectual stimulation. Don't let the work drain you off energy, your focus should be elsewhere.

Of course it's only really possible for very few people. But even a little bit might help. Personally we moved away from the city and to a small community. I started working remote and I've been working 60% or 80% for about a year (I wrote some words about it[0]). The rest of the time I've been writing a book.[1]

It's been quite helpful to keep the intellectual stimulation going, although I still have the stress of having to accomplish something, so it's not completely perfect. But I'm scared of going back to work 100% again, as I'm pretty sure it will kill any drive and energy I have.

[0]: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2019/10/18/we_moved_away_fr... [1]: https://whycryptocurrencies.com/


This guy's two hour commute each way seemed to me to easily be his largest issue.


If you don't use it you lose it, but if you had it once, it's far easier to get it back.

I've had multiple times when, for whatever reason, I ended up not coding for months or years. It always takes at least a few days (and honestly, it's getting longer as I get older) to get my head back into it, but after month or so of full time coding I'm making progress again. And honestly, I feel like these breaks have made me a better software developer, because each time I come back with broader experience and a wider view of what I'm trying to accomplish.

Arguably I'm not as good a computer scientist as I would have been if I'd stuck just with coding for my whole life, but I feel like I'm a far better maker-of-useful-things.


(standard disclaimers above generic advice that may or may not apply...) Trust your intuition, but not completely, when it comes to work and challenge. We are all lazy because we have very strong instincts to save energy and avoid risks -- that probably makes much sense in nature (where significant risks can mean death to natural causes or conflict). Even today, if you have life set at a boring job, there's not much to be gained, naively and from a naturalistic perspective, from constantly picking difficult topics to learn and stay out of your comfort zone. I think I can call it naive because of course cognitive flexibility and keeping learning may prove its worth if situations change and your safe occupation isn't so safe anymore. But in the end, as another person called, I think the primary motivator is some hunger, some desire to produce great things, to stay sharp/awesome, to beauty, that goes beyond pure individualistic safeguarding.

If you want to avoid mental atrophy, my advice is to find that hunger, find some sense of intense beauty, and pursue it even if it goes against your instincts sometimes.

(also as others noted: you need to be in a position where you can plausibly even find and satisfy this hunger; if your work and commute occupies all your time that's not going to happen of course)


The author says he's clever, and I believe him. It's easy to believe, because I've heard this story a hundred times before.

I grew up with lots of clever people, met through math and science competitions and camps. Easily 80% of them, maybe 90%, have gone off to FAANG, investment banks, or consulting firms, and had the exact same fate. Nothing was stopping them from continuing to tinker with ideas. None of them would have gone hungry that way. They made a choice -- a perfectly fine, rational one -- but let no one say the result was surprising.


The guy sounds like Stephen Wolfram with how casually he strokes his ego by going on and on about all his wonderful intellectual pursuits.

His account does bring up the awful-but-rarely-discussed issue how to keep even somewhat "mentally sharp" amidst all the demands of life.


It was kind of funny. I recall people talking about what they did like that before. At least here I could skip ahead instead of wait for them to get to the point.


Dude, never accept a four hour a day commute. Go somewhere else. Take less pay. Go to "flyover" country. Anything but a 4 hour commute.

When you regain 3+ of those hours, your mental atrophy will subside.

Also, if you are (or were) as brilliant as you say, then just go to grad school. You don't really need an undergrad degree!


>Even my programming has taken a toll even though I do it every day. I find myself abstaining from studying advanced topics in programming and computer science, and instead sticking to this comfort zone of what I know. I contemplate blaming this last issue on the fact that Silicon Valley is quietly cutthroat; you need to be the best at what you do in order to land jobs at e.g. Google. If I stay in my comfort zone, I am able to keep small unimportant details of a particular language, tool, or implementation in L1 brain cache, which proves useful during interviews.

The way I deal with this is getting the most highly paying job I can and then having three months off where I do what I please.

I've just finished a contract with an Evil Inc that's paid me enough that I can buy a lab to do synthetic biology in. While waiting for the machines to arrive I'm doing some really fun C.S. stuff I have not done before.

When the money runs out I will go back to doing what I was doing before. This is the 4th time I've taken time off. It hasn't hurt my career progression at all.


From your post it sounds like you do consulting or freelancing. If I may, how long do these engagements typically last? I've flirted with the idea of short periods off in between jobs (FTE though) but have typically kept up ~2 year engagements.


I'm somewhere between consulting and contracting. Ideally between 6 months and 1 year. My last gig lasted 18 months which was too long, I've also had 8 week stints but those drain you with all the hustling you need to do between jobs.

My partner and I own our own company and optimizing taxes is the main reason why we can afford buying $50k in equipment. That we have similar interests also helps.


Previous discussion (2013): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5806132


Thanks for writing and sharing. This articulates a lot of the feelings I have about work as well, and it's put more eloquently than I am able to. It's only now that I appreciate my time at university, where I would actually learn things that interest me, and have a lot of free time as well. If I wanted to try something new, e.g. reverse engineering, I could pick up a solid basis in some weeks (or months). I now have an ever-growing list of projects that I just don't have the time for. The scary thing is that the longer I wait, the more I lose motivation to work on these things.

It also seems related to mathematics and computer science as a hobby. If I want to go running, I can do so in an hour and be done with it. With mathematics or programming, I need a couple of hours before I start being productive. Most people who don't do math or programming don't understand this. They frown when I don't make any noteworthy progress in one or two hours, and when I try to work on something I keep getting interrupted which is detrimental to my productivity. I talked to my girlfriend about the long list of projects I still wanted to do (work on programming languages, operating systems, compilers, assemblers, FPGA's, memory controllers, reading/learning math stuff, and writing). A weekend later she asked me something along the lines of "Well, you've had the whole sunday morning to work on these things; Did you manage to cross some things of your list?". I mentioned that these are not one-day projects, but I won't be surprised if she'll ask again after christmas.


I'd hesitate to call the solution to his problems "obvious" but it seems one obvious thing he should do is look for remote work, or at least work someplace with a lesser commute so that he can get 4 hours a day back from his commute.

He should take a less-challenging job, perhaps, and get his work done quickly so that he can have lots of time left over for his own pursuits. I've had jobs in the past where I was able to do this with some success.

The idea that your job should challenge you is, perhaps, BS.

For so many jobs, the "challenges" consist mainly of dealing with political forces and/or forcing yourself to do other things you may not necessarily care about.

I would guess only a tiny percentage of us have jobs that are truly fulfilling. And maybe that's fine. Maybe we should go back to the days where we just punched the clock, figuratively speaking, and ditch the idea of getting fulfillment from our jobs. It's hurting our ability to find fulfillment elsewhere.


Time management, mental and physical energy management, planning and organizing are very underrated skills in tech. No matter how clever you are if you don't have the above, you are going to hit the ceiling fast in a demanding environment.

The dreaded word! Processes and systems, better figure out systems and processes that work for you fast.

You must figure out what works for you, here's a few for me.

I use a trello board to manage home tasks and personal tasks. I schedule things I need to do in my calendar. I use checklist to keep track of things I need to do. I even schedule fun activities so I don't burn out. When I can tell I'm running low on sleep, I schedule sleep alarms to remind me to go to bed. To dive deep into something when you don't have the time is tough, but you can do so by scheduling smaller times and keep detailed notes which you can reference to remember what you have done and where you were.


Best bet would be to find a corporate job that best matched his interests. Back in the day, major corporate labs could manage a limited number of "sheltered workshop" situations for particularly talented people. Academia wouldn't work because of academic politics and the funding mechanisms. Both academia and government are also too "credential" oriented to hire him.


This predates the machine learning boom. Now there's much more demand for people who are into that kind of math.


I would love to read the article because, based on the comments here, it seems interesting. However, regardless of what I do, I can't seem to have the math load for me. I have tried Firefox, Chrome and Edge with no luck.


> I don't like to work too often, unless it's for something groovy...

"Even Dwarves Start Small", by Younger Brother


well, I hope the author is doing well


saved


But the environment matters a lot less than the fact that when I get home from work—which is a two hour commute each way (sorry, I can’t afford to live in downtown San Francisco)—I just feel like being mentally incapacitated.

This person spends 4 hours commuting each day. I would suffer from mental atrophy as well. If you work full-time, that's at least 8 additional hours per day down the drain, and that doesn't even include groceries, cooking, eating, taking a shower, etc. Barely any time is left if you want to get 7-8 hours of sleep. I think the soul-crushing reality here is that a commute like this is very unhealthy, and that he should change this by moving or getting another job.


Either the commute, or the long working day. The commute might be less soul crushing on a 6 hour work day.

In any case, I generally refuse jobs outside Amsterdam (where I live) unless it's Utrecht right next to the station. Otherwise the commute just gets too long. Sometimes a recruiter asks if there's really no way around that, and I tell them counting the commute as hours worked, meaning I'd be present at the office less, would work fine for me. I don't want to be forced to sacrifice private time for work.


[flagged]


Your comment is grade AAA r/tallpoppysyndrome.


I mean the guy is literally talking about how smart he was.


That is not necessarily bad.


Not only that, but the guy also talks of how he was able to appreciate the finer points of graduate level mathematics when he was 16. We're either dealing with another Terry Tao here or he has delusions of grandeur. I'll let you decide which one is more likely. I'm far from being a genius myself, but from spending a few years at research labs I know a few people who could legitimately claim to be genius material. Never in a million years will you find them beating their chest about their intellectual capacity or sophistication.


It was an expression of creativity one might have if they spend the entirety of their time on something, and how a good deal of that is lost when you have to tend to adult life. There was absolutely no judgment on the value of the work. It’s neither Tao-level math nor delusional mumbo-jumbo.


Very cringey stuff.


why do you say that?




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