Piracy
Well, for the amount of money I spend on hard drives and other hardware I could subscribe to Netflix for about 30 years.
Not having kids.
I love the acronym dink. It sounds so insulting but people use it very casually and it’s funny hearing people calling each other dinks.
A literal move actually. 20 years ago I moved from America to a country with universal health care. That has saved my family probably close to a quarter million bucks in health care fees alone.
Not to mention the headache. It feels like every time I get treatment I have to argue with my insurance until they eventually cave (assuming it’s something they actually cover). I asked my mom if this is how healthcare is really like and she said “yeah it’s just the culture, it’s normal” acting as it having to beat the fuck out of a metaphorical piñata to pay for life saving treatment is ok or acceptable. Like why the fuck can’t you just pay for the treatment that I fucking pay you to cover?
Oh god, I hear ya. A long while back I needed some serious treatment and ended up in a hospital for two weeks. It was the first time I had ever gotten truly sick, so I was dreading the final bill. But when the docs said nah you’re good, it’s covered, just take your meds and come back in a week for your follow-up, I damn near died a second time :P
Being born into a rich western country.
Yeah, me too. I pat myself on the back for this one nearly every day. Probably the best financial decision I ever made.
Fuck! No, I fucked that one up too and accidentally picked a crazy Haight-Ashbury 1967 hippie together with a seriously damaged Vietnam vet, the two of them getting involved in weird cultish shit long before I was born.
It was a poor decision on my part. No one to blame but myself.
Underrated answer. Meritocracy is a lie, folks, even within the West. If you do everything perfectly you will climb a little bit, and only on average. All the counterexamples you’re thinking of are people who won a lottery of some kind. And of course, birth is also a lottery.
Bullshitting my way onto a high salary career track and just learning shit as i go.
I think I surprising amount of people are likely just “faking it”. I hope one day we can collectively cut the BS and all admit we don’t know what we’re doing.
I think the main problem is that requiring and checking if someone can learn a skill you need is a lot harder than just making the skill a requirement for the job right out of the bat.
Determining if someone can actually learn certain things on the job is pretty difficult in an interview setting, it’s way easier to just do a technical interview.
The alternative is probably something like a probationary period where you work with no guarantee of continuing but that’s a massive waste of time for everyone involved and not fair to the candidate.
In my experience, if you go with the candidate that seems the most well rounded, you’ll have the most success. Going with someone that’s a technical genius with no people skills makes it harder to fit them in a spot where they’ll shine - at least in a smaller company
I honestly can’t deal with all the theatrics of securing a job (interview and first months/year included). This was a setback at first since when people asked me stuff I didn’t know I’d just say “I don’t know” or at most “I heard this and that but never worked with it”.
Thankfully I ended up at a place that appreciated that frankness and that gives me room (and incentive) to learn new stuff. Every year so far I end up in a new project with different technologies to use and learn. My ADHD brain is extremely satisfied.
Briefly: phd at Super Prestigious Institution. Fuck it, left science because didn’t want to languish making like $50K/year as a postdoc for like 6-8 years, with no guaranteed path forward. Pivoted toward money & people management. At every step up the ladder, I didn’t know shit. So what? I figured it out. Not that hard. Real talk: I benefitted substantially from elitism. I’m mid forties, salary about $220K, should hit $250K/year in the next 2-5 years.
