I think the percentage of the population for whom this kind of optimization makes sense is fairly small - most people who would be able to extract substantial value out of these types of deals tend to be even more valuable in the job market enough that they are better off financially focusing on their careers. Granted, underemployment is fairly rampant these days so it may not be as true as it seems to me now.

Very few people work on this directly - I think you're overly literal in interpreting a pithy lament which is more about what funds software these days than what software engineers do. Most Google or Facebook engineers are no more engaged in optimizing ad-clicks than you are engaged in optimizing ad-clicks by posting on 2p2. This isn't generally how we judge professions outside of tech, most of which can be reductively dismissed similarly.

I got a lot of fulfillment out of waiting tables compared to most jobs I had to that point. There's something deeply satisfying about feeding people and seeing them walk away happy - like providing for your tribe. I always said I could go back to that if the bottom ever dropped out of tech or something.

When I was 10 I used to fly alone to visit my dad in St. Louis. One time I sat next to a guy selling flooring. He said he used to be an aeronautical engineer until the bottom dropped out of the market. For some reason I always remembered that, and never totally take the high demand of my job market for granted. Although at this point it sure seems like programming is around for the rest of my life, as long as I keep current and don't get age-ism-ed too bad.

The absolute worst was having nothing to do and just watching the clock - pre internet days. I worked in a couple of mail rooms where we'd be done by mid-afternoon but have to stick around until 5 and pretend to be busy. Ugh.

Idk about the whole fulfillment thing. I think it's wrong to think of one type of job fulfilling and another not fulfilling. I was happy at work in restaurants because I was almost always busy. Now, I'm rarely busy in my remote data science job. But that's fine because now I'm eating homemade smoked duck for dinner tonight and I'm not an ambitious man.

Anyway, I think it has a lot to do with how busy you are. And science indicates that busy correlates strongly with happy. So I won't fret if my job changes wildly someday and I become busy. And yet, I don't pursue being busy on my own. Perhaps that's foolish of me, but I'm just not motivated.

I worked the 2000 census monitoring the scanners that fed images to the census bureau, 3rd shift and we had maybe 4 hours of work to do in an 8 hour shift. Sure playing Diablo 2 on my laptop was fun but it was pretty demoralizing as a job. I had also spent a few months at a shipping company sorting packages onto 1 of 3 conveyor belts based on postal code. Of the two, the package handler job was bettter. While it was the same **** every shift there was always the chance to beat your record or zone out on weird place names, and there is something about doing heavy work that is missing from Typing Jobs. It’d probably kill me if I did it now but hearing UPS is hiring shift work has me wondering.

The problem is being busy with mindless tasks like loading popcorn into boxes feels like not being busy. I agree any kind of busy + using your brain = day goes by fast = general happiness.

Homemade smoked duck sounds quite ambitious!

5% seems a lot higher than I thought, is that 5% unrestricted or is it only on select items?

Most places will ask for a substantially sized deposit if you don't have a CC.

I did contest one debit card purchase and my bank credit my account within 24 hours for the full amount and then investigated the claim. About 6 weeks later the retailer refunded me in full and my bank took back their credit. It was pretty painless but it was also a small purchase ($65). I don't know how it would have played out with a large purchase.

Wow that's crazy. That almost seems like it should be illegal.

Luckily I work for myself (freelance / training). I can't say that I was ever put in a position where not having a card was a problem.

RE: Fraudulent debit card transactions

In the states consumers aren't legally protected from fraudulent debit card transactions just fraudulent credit card transactions.

Most banks will refund to avoid the PR nightmare and maintain goodwill with a good customer but that is at the bank's descretion.

Sure, but I think many people also fail to realize that many of these mining jobs paid well above programming salaries.

Or as Mike Rowe says, many of the people on his show are millionaires, you just can't tell because they are covered in pig ****.

Regardless, for a job that's so fulfilling, there sure seems to be a lot of upset and sad programmers, plus a stupidly high attrition rate. Idk... Data, you know?

daveT, do you have any intent on buying a house in the future?

I wonder how anyone with no or poor credit ends up buying a house.

I don't care about buying a house in the slightest bit in the near or even semi-long term future. I always figured I would either pay up front for one or put down a large down payment (like 40-60%) and if the seller didn't want to deal with that then screw them.

Where did mining come from?

I'm talking about jobs like soldering on the filaments of lightbulbs, pressing a button on a stamping machine for 8 hours a day, holding a voltmeter to 1000 items a day doing quality control work, etc. etc.

Mike Rowe is almost always showing interesting / challenging / DIRTY jobs that obviously pay more than the jobs we're talking about because of those things.

Programmers don't have a stupidly high attrition rate compared to the jobs we're talking about. But, by all means, feel free to back your claim up and prove me wrong.

Lol true, but smoking/barbecuing meat and cooking in general are some of my favorite things to do. And it's my own way on my own time.

The crux of it to me is this: It'd probably be different if it were my full time job at Franklin Barbecue or something. Or something I apply myself to like poker where I do make money and enjoy the game, but the more I play, the less I'm driven to play and the less I enjoy it.

daveT,

Ending that comment with "Data, you know?" After providing zero data is.. well I'm not sure but it seems strange.

Mining is also basically the most dangerous profession ever in terms of health that isn't super niche.

Id gladly take my cube desk and home office over losing years of my life and having lifelong ailments.

Lol I have massive massive senioritis at work (6 weeks left ugh) and they're making me do documentation. Motivation couldn't be lower. No one’s ever going to read it anyway. It’s just so some bean counter can mark it “done”. BLAH

I could always leave now and walk away from about $10k after taxes. Not gonna happen.

I think all else equal, manual labor is better for the mind and mental labor is better for the body. With that said, all else is not even close to equal.

I forgot the joy of Word randomly turning your bullet point font to 48 pt. Times New Roman for no reason. Oh you want to copy and paste from one part of the doc to another? Here let's mangle up a couple bullets then change the font to something ridiculous when you try to fix them. Clearly that's what most people want.

I know I often have bulleted lists where bullets 1-3 are 11 pt. arial but bullets 4 and 5 are 24 pt. garamond bold. Glad they automatically figure that out for me instead of trying to keep all the bullets the same font.

And don't ****ing start with me candybar.

suzzer,

You should convince your boss to let you write the documentation using markdown.

Maybe I'm a weirdo, but I really like writing docs, especially if it's in a format that doesn't suck and I have a say in how it's presented.

A lot of the big name projects use jekyll sites and markdown for their docs (bootstrap, react, Docker, etc.) so you can use that as social proof to convince them.

yeah word is lol but big corp gonna big corp.

I tried. I'm basically pasting my markdown readme into Word and adding some stuff. I'm afraid after they're going to want me to go from Word to wiki.

I played live poker recently for the first time in years and with my heart rate monitor on. I enjoyed it, but holy **** I’d forgotten how unhealthy it is and never realized that my heart rate was quite elevated for hours at a time.

Poker is the perfect example to me of a hobby that is great in moderation but way too easy to over do it.

so here's a weird/stupid situation: some dude is trying to "steal" my game. In other words he's cloning my site and trying to recruit my players to play on his instead (no idea why really other than he's a narcissist? I don't allow hate speech maybe he wants that? w/e). He's not writing any code really.

I mean its open source on github but uh I don't really want to write code that someone's going to compete with my game and push it there publicly right? I mean everyone in this situation would just stop pushing to github correct?

Before answering that question, answer this one: why did you put it on github in the first place?