Our industry is plagued by a money problem. We have too much of it, or, rather, we see too much of it. The chances of becoming incredibly wealthy in this country (USA) are slim for most people. It would be fair to acknowledge that no one would bat an eyelash at such an insipid declaration. In the tech world, because our industry really is the one of the next engines of the global economy our chances are all increased by orders of magnitude compared to everyone else. This can create the illusion that the opportunity to become incredibly wealthy is well within reach (even though increasing the average person’s chances of becoming wealthy by an order of magnitude isn’t even all that great).
This attitude is so pervasive that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Almost everyone in tech accepts that incredible success involves hard work, getting a good balance in your product, a little bit of luck, and timing. Timing is the thing that freaks the hell out of us. Hard work and perfecting a product scare almost no one (though maybe they should), and most people resign themselves to the fact that chance may screw them over or give them a multiplier effect they had not expected, but timing scares us, because it seems like it should be under our control, but it doesn’t feel that way. Have a great product idea? Better get it out the door soon, because someone’s going to beat you to it.
This attitude towards timing produces an unhealthy amount of anxiety in our industry. It seems that a lot of people buy into the fallacy that all the best opportunities are being snatched up now, and that if you don’t grab a slice of the pie now you’re going to miss out. The story of Kevin Systrom (founder of Instagram) wandering around the Valley with his laptop, 24/7, to ride out one of the craziest scalability stories of all time, spinning up EC2 instances while intoxicated, is the stuff of legends, and is looked upon with envy and glory by a lot of fellow hackers. Who knows how true the insanity of Instagram was while scaling (I suspect these stories have some grain of truth), but one thing is certain, these are the narratives we tell ourselves. “Look at Instagram! Holy shit! We’ve got to get onboard now!”
I’ll say it again, there’s too many overnight success stories. People are getting tempted by the money through anxiety, which is never good. I disrespect all my fellow engineers who decide to do something they don’t enjoy because they think it will get them money. Let me be clear, I think being business savvy, and understanding the value-proposition of what you provide to your organization is very important. Developers who have incredible technical wherewithal, but mumble to themselves about “machine learning” and “not being understood” can only provide as much value as the direction they take. Developers who actually understand business and products are the people who are getting shit done right now. I’m all for this, what I’m not all for is chasing after money at the expense of my own personal development.
What I want to say is this: Chill. If you have a great idea it doesn’t mean anything if you can’t execute. Allow yourself to enjoy what you do, and don’t worry so much about money. If you get really good at your job (programming paradigms and business intel), it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing, eventually the money will follow. I’m giving you permission to ignore your ideas, tell them to fuck off for a while. If someone of something basically makes your idea while you’re still getting up to snuff, don’t worry, another one will come along. If it doesn’t, you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that you made the wrong career choice to begin with and enjoy your upper-middle class salary.
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