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by adventured 1276 days ago
> they're working on getting you to click on an ad

They're not, and there's zero evidence to back that frequently floated premise up. That's a particularly laughable myth created by those same industry people to feel better about their terrible life choices. If you can't do something meaningful, at least you can pretend to be a genius doing nothing meaningful. It turns out that both things are false, they're not brilliant and they're wasting their lives.

No, the brilliant people are working at TSMC, Intel, AMD, nVidia, Applied Materials, ASML, Illumina, ARM, TI, et al.

They're working on CRISPR. They're working on mRNA vaccines. They're working on stem cells. They're trying to cure HIV just as the same type of people cured hepatitis C. They're working for Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech, Roche, Novartis, Amgen, Regeneron, Sanofi, Gilead, Merck, Glaxo, et al. They're trying to figure out how to roll back or cure Alzheimer's. They're dedicating a lifetime of work into exploring the human genome, so that future generations have a much better, much more useful map.

They're working on robotics at Intuitive Surgical or Boston Dynamics. They're working on self-driving tech. They've been building out the massive, global cloud infrastructure. They're at NASA, or SpaceX, or ESA and they're doing the work to get us a base on the moon or to Mars. They just got done building rockets that can land upright. They're building a massive, extraordinary, global satellite system in Starlink.

They're working on fusion.

And so on and so forth.

Ad clicks? Yeah right. They're not even in the room.

3 comments

A lot of wonderful people are doing that, but do those jobs pay anywhere close to the ad companies? Surely there's a lot of bright minds lost to the allure of money.
At this point, it's not even about "money" in the traditional sense (wealth, prestige, etc.); rather, it's about stability, the alleged "American dream". I live in Chicago, so I'll consider the local national laboratory, Argonne. They pay their software engineers $101,888 per year, according to Glassdoor ($71,640 after state and federal tax). Using the 28% rule most lenders use nowadays, with today's rates, that's a maximum mortgage payment of $1,671 at 7%. However, the median house price in DuPage County is $335,000 [1], and a 30-year mortgage (with 10% down) has a monthly payment of just over $2,000. No dice - even for a highly skilled professional living in one of the most affordable parts of the country. Keep in mind that you still need to pay 2.3% per annum property tax, besides owning a car and saving for retirement. It's just not nearly as feasible a path towards financial stability as taking a $"TECH" job with west coast pay.

[1] This is up 1.1% year-over-year, and only up 6.5% p.a. over the last three years - not a pandemic-driven bubble. Source is https://www.redfin.com/county/733/IL/DuPage-County/housing-m...

Wow. That was long overdue. Thank you!
Thank you for this, sincerely.