Maybe the world would have been a better and friendlier place if the two people you mentioned, and others like them, had an attitude a bit more muted and humble.
If their attitude had been either, they would not have become what they have become. Humble men do not, by and large, take the throne or become captains of industry.
Are you saying that achieving what these two men have achieved is not desirable? Becoming the most powerful or the richest person in the world? I’d say that’s very much desirable, to most people.
Maybe in abstract. I doubt the majority of people have considered those positions in more detail than "wouldn't it be nice if no one could tell me what to do?", or "wouldn't it be nice to never worry about money ever again?".
Close proximity to a bunch of tech executives very quickly cured me of any illusion that I wanted to belong to that in-group. Most already with more money than they knew how to spend, and still pulling 100-hour work weeks in service of the grind... shudders
Well, you write code for a living, right? I’m guessing the vast majority of humans would shudder at the thought of doing that 40 hours a week. It would be a similar attitude to what you expressed towards executives. Executives are sexier than coders, at least for general population. And it’s not clear which one would become more attractive to an average Joe after personally experiencing both professions.
I’ve read the piece. It’s well written. But, no, that’s not how I would like to live my life, and that’s not the life I want for my kids. Too simple, too boring, not for me. But, to each its own, right?
I go home at the end of my 40 hours (at least now I'm the far side of 30), which I think makes my deal qualatatively better than the exec who barely sees his wife and kids in the first place, and then calls into every SEV from family vacation.
Like... I don't know how evident it is to folks who haven't been on the receiving end of the round-the-clock exec communiques, but those people just don't have an off switch. It's like working with a coked-up energizer bunny
It's not evident. I've had a fairly long career in tech (both as an IC and as a manager) and many execs I worked with didn't do much of really impactful work. Sure, they attended a lot of meetings, created spreadsheets and slides (while they were attending the meetings). They left work at 6pm, with the rest of us, and came back to office at 9am the following morning with the rest of us. I don't remember ever feeling the pressure to respond to an email or Slack message sent after 6pm, and the overall number of times I received those was not large. Typically founders worked more than the rest, but that's not surprising. I'm talking about execs below C level.
Execs probably have a higher ratio of BS artists, and SWEs have a higher ratio of slackers, but overall the fraction of workaholics is about the same.
> Well, you write code for a living, right? I’m guessing the vast majority of humans would shudder at the thought of doing that 40 hours a week.
Yeah, right. The vast number of subsistence farmers in the Third World, and the (tens of?) millions of single parents holding down three jobs (at least one of which full-time) and eking out a subsistence based on constantly increasing their debts to pay-day loansharks in the USA, they all "shudder at the thought" of doing a mere 40 hours a week of a plush sit-down job like tapping code into a computer.
You need to seriously recalibrate your perspective.
> Humble men do not, by and large, take the throne or become captains of industry.
Citation needed. Other than Musk and Trump, how many throne-sitters and captains-of-industry do you know that blow their own propaganda trumpets as hard as those two? (Something which, incidentally, they both only started doing after they had money anyway, not as a means to obtain it, as far as I know.)
The world has many more people like them than you think. The reason for that is the media’s propensity to raise people on pedestal over the smallest things and crash and burn that made-up image. Some people find new tools in that kind of experience. Some people have learned how to raise anyone by crafting a narrative for them with money. And some people become addicted to it and the attention they never got as a child.
