[ChuckMcM]

It was definitely an interesting time. That said, the summer of '78 I was renting a room from an IBM engineer who had bought a Heathkit H-11 and was using it to trade stocks. They would enter the prices from the Wall Street Journal every day of the stocks they were interested it, and then run their "algorithm" over them and it would spit out "weights" for buying or selling various stocks. They could then call their broker and have them execute a trade.

As part of my 'rent' I could help out by entering numbers or verifying numbers for him. I discovered that his portfolio was worth more than $4M and I asked him why he was working at IBM if he was "rich". His answer was that he enjoyed working at IBM, you could just "spend" stock as you would lose out on future growth, and what would he do with his time if he wasn't working? The one conceit he admitted was that his house was paid for so he didn't have to pay a mortgage and that meant he had more disposable income every month.

That was a pretty amazing for me at that age.

The other random factoid was that for 10 years I was President of the "Home Brew Robotics Club" (which is still going on) and it was a direct outgrowth of the Home Brew Computer Club. It was started by Dick Prather as a "SIG" or Special Interest Group where HBCC members who were interested in using their computers with robots would meet and exchange ideas and such.

[dfxm12]

what would he do with his time if he wasn't working?

In a world so full of interesting, wonderful and curious things, I will never understand people who can't think of anything to do if they didn't have a job. Money is usually a limiting factor, but it sounds like it might not have been for this person.

[ChuckMcM]

I will never understand people who can't think of anything to do if they didn't have a job.

Let me ask you a question and perhaps it will help?

What if there was something wonderful and curious that you could explore and someone else would actually pay you money while you were exploring that thing?

I've met a number of folks in research who "work" at a University doing their research and even though the pay sucks love what they are doing. You could pay them nothing and they would still love doing it. They might be forced to do something else if they didn't have enough money to live on, but even if they had millions and millions they wouldn't be doing anything differently.

Keith, the guy I was renting the room from, was in the latter position. He didn't "have" to work, and didn't "have" to work at IBM to work on computers, but in doing so he got to satisfy his curiosity and got to work on much better equipment than if he were funding it himself. Is that something understandable?

FWIW, in the Bay Area we call this "failing" at retirement :-) Failing is in quotes because if you choose to go back to work is it really a failure? Had a great conversation with Guido von Rossum when he decided to 'un-retire' and go "work" for Microsoft. There are a lot of things to like about the office, a community, a continual stream of interesting problems to solve, Etc. And knowing that if you didn't like it you can just stop really helps in dealing with people who would attempt to assert power over you.

[saulpw]

> What if there was something wonderful and curious that you could explore and someone else would actually pay you money while you were exploring that thing?

The days of patronage are basically over; no one pays you real money to explore anymore. Corporations only pay you money to exert your brain towards some goal. There may be an exploration phase but well over half the work will be the grind of bugfixing and maintenance (or equivalent in other fields) that is the actual reason for your employment.

[ChuckMcM]

Could you say more about that? I don't think of it as patronage and I agree with this statement: "Corporations only pay you money to exert your brain towards some goal." but in my experience you can go to a corporation and say "I'm really interested in working on <this thing>, are you interested in that sort of stuff?" And if they are they'll start paying you money to explore that thing with them. I did exactly this the first time I "retired", I'm really fascinated by software defined radio and I was exploring how it works and what one could do with it and a friend said, "I'm working at a company that needs help understanding how to do repeatable software and they are doing a lot of SDR work." Which led to a conversation with the CEO that led to a job offer where I helped their software teams get better and I got to use the multi-million dollar RF lab to continue my explorations. Granted my role was "technical leader" and not "programmer" but how I spent my time was a joint agreement between the company leadership and my interests. I wouldn't expect a company doing accounting software to pay me to design SDRs of course.

And if you passion is something completely different then that can be the case too. A executive I met at IBM retired and has gone head first into their actual passion which is art history. They didn't major in it at school or try to get a job in it because those jobs didn't pay them what they wanted but now that they are retired they are spending their time in libraries and museums all over the place digging into the nuances of various bits of art. Are they "working"? Yes in the sense that they are doing the same thing they would have done if someone had hired an art history major apparently :-).

[keiferski]

Getting paid to work on your hobby only works if your hobby is somehow tangential to industry. For technical people, this isn’t really a big issue, because we live in a society that puts technical achievements (which result in profits) above pretty much everything else.

But for non-technical people, getting paid by a corporation to work on your hobby is mostly impossible, no matter how important the problem is. No company is going to fund things which are deemed important yet don’t make anyone money directly.

[DrillShopper]

"Hey, HP? I'm really interested in working on a new way to tie flies for fly fishing, are you interested in that sort of stuff?"

I wonder why I haven't heard back....

[smokel]

There are still people with too much money who want to do good. In the art world, for example, it is pretty common to sponsor promising artists in one way or the other.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the problem of picking the right person to donate to is a very hard one.

And the amounts of money involved might be on the low end of your expectations.

[paulcole]

> What if there was something wonderful and curious that you could explore and someone else would actually pay you money while you were exploring that thing?

The latter part of this is irrelevant if you’re rich.

I have no issue with someone who is rich who chooses to do what most other people consider work.

The issue I have is someone who says, “What would I do if I wasn’t working?” Figure it out. You’ve got infinite options. Consider enough of them to be confident in your choice.

If you’re just defaulting to “working” because you haven’t really tried anything else, that’s what I don’t get.

[ChuckMcM]

I don't know anyone who "defaulted" to working when they didn't have to. I do know several people who actively avoid explaining why they are working to people who don't have the choice to work or not.

[paulcole]

Huh? Isn't that what the IBM guy in your original story was doing?

[ChuckMcM]

Misunderstanding, I asked him that exact question which was "Why are you working when you could be doing anything you want?" and his response was that he was doing what he wanted. It was a conscious choice. I've mentioned this before but I joined Sun Microsystems the Monday after they had gone public on Friday. As a result I had a unique opportunity to become acquainted with a large number of people > 1000 who had become suddenly wealthy. The observation was that some of them wanted "big things" and some of them wanted "small things." It seems to be an individual preference thing. But mostly people didn't become 'asshole rich people'[1], the majority went off to do the thing they enjoyed doing. One of my co-workers left Sun, paid off their house, and spent their time doing hobby robotics stuff. If you're a curious person with average or better intelligence, working is much more preferable to being bored. That was Guido's complaint, he could do what ever he wanted but he was bored, and one thing "work" does is supply a bunch of things to do.

[1] Some did of course and the contrast was super stark, why live your life antagonizing those less fortunate than you? It's a choice but I never felt it was a healthy one.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I'm pretty sure that guy didn't go around telling people "I'm rich but I only do this job because I like it."

[ghaff]

I think the problem with doing this at companies is that there tends to be a lot of BS associated with actually working at a company (good things as well but not sure as much in a largely remote situation).

I try to do some interesting stuff including going to some selected events (who will mostly comp my attendance) in locations I can do some other activities in conjunction.

[glimshe]

I agree with you in principle. At the same time, analysis paralysis and lack of focus can be problems. When you can do 1000 things, what will you pick? Also, are you going to persevere through bumps if you could switch to other 999 things?

[freeone3000]

Than working at IBM in peak-mainframe era? I could not imagine a more exciting place to be at that time!

[kragen]

You could not imagine a more exciting place to be in 01978? How about Xerox PARC, Microsoft, Apple, the MIT AI Lab, Symbolics, LMI, SRI-NIC, Tymshare, Intel, Mostek, Zilog, Control Data Corporation, Cray, Commodore, HP, Texas Instruments, Tandem, DEC, Data General, Linear Technology, Signetics, or CompuServe? You could spend your time inventing things that changed the world for the better, instead of in pointless political maneuvering within IBM to ship products everybody hated.

What are the nearest equivalents today?

[emmelaich]

For many people, mucking around with computers is a hobby that happens to pay pretty well.

[Someone]

> Money is usually a limiting factor, but it sounds like it might not have been for this person.

Might not have, but still could have been. Chances are that, in 1978 at IBM, he had the opportunity to work with hardware that he couldn’t afford to buy.

Similarly, today, a millionaire might choose to stay in a job at SpaceX because it’s the only way they can afford to work with truly big rockets.

[Gollapalli]

He was a guy interested in computers working at IBM at a time when computers were just getting going.

It'd be a bit like working at Google and being really interested in the internet at a time when it wasn't essentially an alternative to consulting for upper-middle class college grads.

[protocolture]

Lmao, if I had 4 million bucks I would probably be maintaining some old 70s era mainframe trying to get it to do dumb shit like messing with stocks.

This guy got to do it AND got paid.

[WorkerBee28474]

According to [0], 4 million in August 1978 is 19.5 million today.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

[ChuckMcM]

Sounds about right. I certainly thought it was "infinite" money at the time.