Everyone in Silicon Valley uses equity, and not debt, to fuel their growth because debt is not available in sufficient quantities to poorly capitalized companies without a strong history of adequate cash flows to service debt.
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Weak-form efficients market hypothesis is a good heuristic for evaluating the public markets but a really, really bad heuristic for evaluating either technical or economic facts about tech companies, startups, your career, etc etc. Optimizations are possible; fruit hangs low.
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Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true.
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Most open source software is written by programmers who are full-time employed by companies which directly consume the software, at the explicit or implicit blessing of their employers. It is not charity work, any more than they charitably file taxes.
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The amount of money flowing through capitalism would astound you. The number and variety of firms participating in the economy would astound you. We don't see most of it every day for the same reason abstractions protect us from having to care about metallurgy while programming.
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CS programs have, in the main, not decided that the primary path to becoming a programmer should involve doing material actual programming. There are some exceptions: Waterloo, for example. This is the point where I joke "That's an exhaustive list" but not sure that a joke.
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Technical literacy in the broader population can be approximated with the Thanksgiving test: what sort of questions do you get at Thanksgiving? That's the ambient level of literacy. Serious people in positions of power eat Thanksgiving dinners, too. Guess what they ask at them.
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Salaries in the tech industry are up *a lot* in the last few years, caused by: a tight labor market, collapse of a cartel organized against the interests of workers, increasing returns to scale at AppAmaGooBookSoft, and the like. Investor money *does not* pay most salaries.
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This concludes, for the moment, an off-the-cuff list of things which would otherwise be too obvious to bring up in conversation. Meta thought: you radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it.
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It is important to bear in mind that specialists are useless outside their furrow. A good leader is a generalist prepared to accept any task in the absence of a proven specialist, handing over their work to the specialist when identified.
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what's an incorrigible generalist to do?
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Become a writer. Do not subject yourself to employment. Every time you get paid, buy income, not junk, not experience, not fun. If you're living of your earnings from work, you're making a mistake. Life off your dividend income alone.
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"Buy income"; have any references?
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That means buy stock for dividend purposes. The bigger the dividend the more the risk, but avoiding that all is well. Don't monitor. Don't worry about the stock price. Did it stop paying a dividend? But nothing is gained and much is lost by selling, paying another commission.
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How much can one expect to make from dividends over time, relative to what they paid for the stock?
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And, you never sell, so your family gets the stock and never sells. Forever compounding works pretty well.
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Sounds like there are loss outcomes though... A) the company fails and then nobody buys their stock B) for whatever reason, the company stops paying dividends and yield drops to zero C) for whatever reason, the company gets delisted
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And, you're paying taxes on your income. I'm not.
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One specialty every effective large company has are people who know how to get things done in THAT company. Not a skill outsiders or recent recruits have, and not to be sneezed at.
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Software/AI replaces specialists before generalists.
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any tips for getting a foot in the door as a generalist?
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dealing with angry beginner users who complain about use cases that have absolutely no value to my employer are still charity cases
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As a self described generalist for 20 years who’s building a team at a growing company, this only recently dawned on me, they can totally compliment each other as well.
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