Fermi estimate - doubling my work hours will also halve my waking free time. Doubling my work hours as an individual contributor will not make the company twice as productive. It will not make my stocks worth twice as much.
Does anyone else see the math this way? Employee stock ownership does not give you linear returns with hours worked.
> Fermi estimate - doubling my work hours will also halve my waking free time.
40h work. 56h sleep. 72h free time.
80h work. 56h sleep. 32h free time.
Ok fair enough close enough to half I though the share would be worse. But in practice, your energy is spent and the free time will suck. Also a reasonable commute of 8h will make the share 64 to 24, a 'third'.
Yeah the thing with stocks is you have to be in a very tiny company or a critical executive for your individual positive contribution to the value of your shares to be even worth thinking about. Maybe it works psychologically on employees even though it's pretty irrational.
>> The lottery is, famously, a tax on people who don’t understand probability
I buy lottery tickets. Usually if I'm at the grocery store, I'll buy one.
I have some understanding of probability. I have a minor in math, I took a graduate combinatorics class. Given the rules of a specific lottery I can tell you the odds of winning it, the expected value of a ticket, and back when I was taking that combinatorics class, I could have given you a proof of those odds. Probably couldn't do the proofs now.
I also took economics classes. I remember having a discussion in micro on the conditions under which it would be rational for someone to play the lottery. They're pretty obvious.
There's a condition called "engineer's disease". One symptom of that terrible terrible disease (along with a general disgust with humor and sarcasm) is that everything under discussion must be converted into the nearest available math problem. I think, sad to say, that the person who originated your famous quote probably had a bit of that condition.
Or maybe I'm just a stupid guy who buys lottery tickets because he can't math.
Large language models have their place, but they’re quite limited and no real substitute for human intelligence or judgement at its best.
That said, abusive corporate environments (and they’re pretty much all abusive) turn people into automatons. Execs can thus wave LLMs around and say, “Look, you’re so useless a machine can do your job.”
And even then it does a shitty job. It misses special cases and causes messes. But it’s cheap in the short term, which is all that matters to the boss’s career. Things will go to shit in a few years, but if you’re good at executive social climbing, you are three promotions away from your bad decisions by the time anyone figures out that’s what they were.
It's ironic because the executive aspects of the job are easily the ones almost anyone can do. I say that as someone who has created and sold startup with a couple friends. We had to take on the role of both engineers and executives. Guess which one was far far easier and which one actually mattered?
Hustle culture is a tax on people who think they will always be in the top 0.01% if they just manifest hard enough.