The account @BowTiedFox quote-tweeted the above the post with its own thoughts. This fox account’s bio says “software engineer interested in automating sales and tech jobs with AI agents” so add salt to taste but I’m sharing the fox’s thoughts because my antenna have been vibrating at similar frequency lately.
It’s a long excerpt for a tweet but I’ll share it unedited and meet you on the backside with a couple of my own thoughts.
This is what the fox said:
you know, I’ve been thinking about how there’s a shrinking window of time to jump social classes and why I’m leaving my j*b in a few months
I’m going to explain why by showing you the bullshit I have to deal with at w*rk
corporate software engineering has never been as cucked as it is today. and it’s only getting worse
large-scale software is a completely different game than building your own projects
at w*rk, I sit through useless meetings for at least 2 hours a day:
- managers actively waste your time so they can seem productive
- bureaucratic red tape makes it so that small changes take weeks
- everything requires tons of reviews and approvals
- anything done different from the norm is too risky
- anyone you upset is risky so everyone is treated like a child
- any disagreement is risky so always say yes
np I don’t have to waste much brain energy right? just smile-nod-agree to everything
plus, every time I have a problem, I can just throw it to a team that deals with that problem:
- pipeline issue? not my problem, gl devops
- database slow? database admins are on it
- auth? we have an internal security team
- incident monitoring? on-call SREs
- customer support? filipino VAs
- testing? let QA deal with it
- network? IT and cloud guys
imo this is fine if you want to do nothing. some people might even call me retarded for giving up easy money. “bro I’d love to coast, send me your lead’s @”
but it’s soul-sucking to do shit work, and it makes you half-ass everything else in your life. every action creates a habit which affects your identity
I only have one life, and I don’t want to waste it when I can create something magnificent and beautiful, while pursuing freedom and excellence
even if you don’t buy that, staying at a bullshit j*b is becoming higher risk because AI will just replace you
but there’s no way your boss is going to tell you that your position is a ticking time bomb. yeah it’s nice for a little while, but it’s eventually going to be “move up or move out.” evolve or die
and I’m not even factoring in the opportunity cost of not building your own projects:
- you’ll learn nothing if every problem is handed to a different team
- you can build stuff at lightning speed because no corporate monkey rituals, can use any AI tools, and because you’ll know your own codebase way more than one that’s handed to you
- if you’re context switching too often, you won’t be able to focus. and every extra hour on yourself is worth more than the next because you’re continuously improving the product and your knowledge
imo I think these next few years will be the last chance to make an enormous amount of money before social mobility becomes extremely difficult
think about it: wealth comes from being lucky or being early
jeff bezos is a good example of this. left a comfy senior VP position at a hedge fund to yolo all-in on amazon during the beginning of the internet era
you have one last chance now to take the same gamble as him. the future belongs to those who are willing to take a bet on the future
we will probably get to a point where AI starts closing all market inefficiencies and innovates much faster than you can
the only way to make money in the future will probably be with an eccentric invention, something culturally revolutionary, or becoming an entertainment star
we’re in a weird period where anyone from anywhere can make money because of the internet. if you look at any other point in history, you can see that most big money was made from:
- industrial monopolies
- stock market manipulation
- resource exploitation
- war profiteering
- political corruption
- land grabs
- media control
and this is why a lot of people hate money and think it’s “dirty.” only recently has the internet made it so that you can actually make a lot of money legitimately because of network effects and open information
but this won’t last long. I can’t emphasize enough that competition is increasing across everything everywhere
people are becoming more comfortable using AI to replace humans on a mass scale. plus they’re using it to learn any skill with AI tutoring. it’s harder to stand out when everyone levels up, AND when there’s way more AI-generated slop to sift through
I mean have you seen how much more competitive high-paying careers have become? like med school, law school, investment banking, management consulting
or even university admissions. getting into harvard used to be simpler for boomers. “I like apples, apples fall from trees, gravity makes apples fall, I want to learn more in your physics program” -> congrats accepted under our 36% acceptance rate (now 3.6%)
now you need to go work in a foreign country building houses, “publish” (ghostwrite) an NYT bestseller, author a research paper, have internships, play two instruments, speak three languages, be a multi-sport athlete, have exceptional grades in every subject, perfect exam scores, impeccable interview skills, and partake in whatever other nonsense song-and-dance
I remember even getting a software job in the 2000s was more like “I like computers, can I work here?”
we’re reverting back to the income inequality in older civilizations like in europe and asia:
- most wealth concentrated within old elite families
- intense segregation between rich/poor
- one mistake and you’re cooked for life. “C students hire A students” meme doesn’t exist without the internet
- decreasing standard of living like small bug apartments with multiple people
- regulations are always added, never removed
and if you think the competition isn’t that bad, you probably haven’t reached the upper tiers. it’s easy to become complacent when everyone around you is a monkey
but the margin for error at the top is razor-thin. elite performers do every single thing nearly perfectly
that athlete you’re trying to compete against? he’s eaten the same hyper-calculated meals for the last two decades, engineered for peak performance, with AI analysis of his genetics and the latest studies
and if you’re struggling with the basics? rip in peace!
my point is that elite competition is brutal, so every minute right now is more important than you think it is
minimize the time you waste on stupid bullshit and unhelpful people–the smallest improvements are going to make the biggest difference
think of it this way: you know Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the world…
who’s number two?
The last few weeks here I’ve been thinking aloud about the econo-political-cultural environment with a slant of how to focus on what you can control. This groping is deeply connected to a sense that no matter what the VIX says “vol is high”. The tree of forking cultural paths before us culturally is wide.
I’ve been musing aloud because this topic is like the tag in my shirt stabbing my neck. Low-grade bothered. The fox might be closer to correct than not and that feels like a major change in the playbook that has been a reliable path to a better life. A playbook immigrants passed on to their kids who are now having kids but might find themselves fighting the last war. The doctor/lawyer/software/banker prestige path looks increasingly vulnerable.
Saying “this time is different” whenever an all-purpose technology that raises productivity across the board flirts with your sense that it will reshuffle the deck has a poor track record. Conventional intelligence, the kind school grades you on, has been rewarded at every step of innovation since I’ve been alive. The world has belonged to nerd kids who loved their Apple IIc.
I suspect we are in a goldilocks moment right now where if you use all the new tools you feel powerful. LLMs have raised the put strike on your weakest link. But in the coming years, the red queen treadmill will be at max speed — being massively productive will be the standard. You will be expected to be able to do all the things.
When I read between the lines of Satya’s words I hear a “you will learn or else” even though the formal message sounds more empowering. The hustlers will accelerate, the disengaged employee or person with an email job that knowingly nods to the term “bullshit” job is toast.
[From an economic POV, if these visions turn out to be directionally right then I wonder what happens to all these $2mm 3-bedroom houses from the 1950s in CA underwritten by mid-6-figure W2 jobs. The same ethos that uses “productivity”, “GDP per capita” and “efficiency” arguments to bludgeon more generous PTO and leave policies also thinks you are the biggest cost to its goals. Losing sight of why we choose capitalism to serve the abstract “story” of capitalism is a dystopian maneuver that we seem uniquely prone to.
In a real economic sense, we are both costs and clients but the rules we write are a choice about which role we emphasize.]
I used the word “hustlers” for a lack of better word. It’s a bit low-res but I want to clarify what it’s not: it’s not kids who are just smart and good at following instructions.
When I asked followers to push back on the Fox’s tweet, this one did a great job of explaining why I think the value of smart is reaching a secular peak:
The red queen means they will still need to be able to do that but also have a point of view. Conviction and relentless wrapped around something more than “keeping your options open”. I want to say creativity but the word is a bit too artist-loaded. I think it’s really about risk. They will need a real relationship with risk. The ability to take it (that’s what commitment is…making yourself vulnerable) and the capacity to reason about it. And this only comes from practice.
If that sounds obvious, then how do we reconcile it with the obsession to reduce [perceived risk] via grade-maxxing and college admissions? The reconciliation is we ourselves are fearful. Nobody wants to experiment on their kid even if they see the tides turning.
And it doesn’t go away. When I left my job, my mother turned into the same person who stood over me when I did my math homework. She wants the best for me, of course, but she also doesn’t want to worry about me. If I am financially secure, the impact on both her own material and emotional left tails are shortened. Understandable but I can’t accept her context as my own. It’s a consideration I must discount appropriately.
Look, I expect my kids to get good grades. I want them to have choices. But the number one thing I want is for them to be well-matched to what they do. I’m not sure how much influence I have on that but I do believe you can’t underestimate someone who loves, cares, is good at, and tireless at what they set their sights on.
It’s a cliche, but a good one — you want to get more comfortable being uncomfortable. Chris Cole has this idea that you can’t suppress volatility. It just changes form. You can try to backstop the price of assets but if it creates moral hazard you create inequalities. The volatility comes in the shape of guillotines not sigma. If risk-aversion creates dull boys and girls are we just trading an anti-fragile sense of self for an Audi and private school.
In closing, if you scroll down that first Twitter thread you’ll see a recent clip of Bezos urging us to compensate against our default impulse to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. He adds, “Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy”. Many will say “survivorship bias” but they are overly focused on the obvious fact that he way outperformed his own advice. But it doesn’t make him wrong. Instead, I focus on what he repeatedly said and written over many years. To me he is not defined by his billions but by the fact that he had a point of view, bet on it, hammered it, and would have lived with the consequences.*
Is a point of view and the spirit to follow it going to guarantee anything? Of course, not. But I’m starting to think that the absence of a point of view will leave you stranded.
*And what of the consequences? If he was wrong, he wouldn’t be Jeff Bezos. But he still could have gotten that Audi by cashing checks from David Shaw. Maybe what I’m feeling right now is that the vol is so high that the paths that weren’t risky are now risky and it’s not yet common knowledge. If the spread between risky and not risky is narrower, then on the margin you are a better buyer of the risky path. The historically sure path is overbid if the gap between the tallest and shortest serf narrows.