Comment by jasonfarnon

10 days ago

Aren't you still better off than the rest of us who found what they love + invested decades in it before it lost its value. Isn't it better to lose your love when you still have time to find a new one?

I don't think so. Those of us who found what we love and invested decades into it got to spend decades getting paid well to do what we love.

Depends on if their new love provides as much money as their old one, which is probably not likely. I'd rather have had those decades to stash and invest.

  • A lot of pre-faang engineers dont have the stash you're thinking about. What you meant was "right when I found a lucrative job that I love". What was going on in tech these last 15 years, unfortunately, probably was once in a lifetime.

    • It's crazy to think back in the 80's programmers had "mild" salaries despite programming back then being worlds more punishing. No libraries, no stack exchange, no forums, no endless memory and infinite compute. If you had a challenging bug you better also be proficient in reading schematics and probing circuits.

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"it lost its value".

It has not lost its value yet, but the future will shift that value. All of the past experience you have is an asset for you to move with that shift. The problem will not be you losing value, it will be you not following where the value goes.

It might be a bit more difficult to love where the shift goes, but that is no different than loving being a artist which often shares a bed with loving being poor. What will make you happier?

This is genuinely such a good take

  • Especially on the topic of value! We are all intuitively aware that value is highly contextual, but get in a knot trying to rationalize value long past genuine engagement!