I'm not a fan of the original post, but this is absurd and offensive. You're taking the creme-de-la-creme of tech workers and comparing them to medical interns. "Playing life in easy mode"? Would you say that an MD who chooses to specialize in, say, dermatology, and ends up the head of a department, and spends a lot of their 50s golfing, has lived life in easy mode? Probably not, because as you explained, grind is not optional to get to an optimal point in one's career.
Is it privileged to be able to live in a society where you can develop your career and not, like, have to go pick crops for three months? Yeah. Does the geographical freedom of SWEs (in a minority of cases) exceed that of a higher-paid traveling nurse? Sure, but that's a trade-off; the engineer takes less money than the nurse, but gets to travel further.
I'm not asserting that your comment was offensive because I'm whining about global systems of grind and exploitation. It's offensive because you seem to think that no one in the tech industry outside AAA game dev has come up from the mines. I started my career as an unpaid intern, then made $7.50/hr and freelanced on the side. I worked 12-16 hour days coding, and/or 8 hour days while doing 8 hour shifts as a waiter and taxi driver. So now, 30 years later, I can bill $300/hr and work a few hours a day. Is that easy mode?
And if you're referring to the people half my age who are trying to make it in this industry, they have it much harder than I did. They're living after the time when they can specialize and be adopted in as part of the technical debt for clients or companies. They have virtually no chance at job security. They have to constantly scrape and invent in order to stay relevant. So yes, people like me may appear to have easy lives compared with 24 year old medical students, but you seem to be taking for granted the lateral shift in your career - I suppose it's probably easier mucking with python than writing academic papers - but you're taking for granted your status, age, job security, etc. And missing the fact that other people do not get into this industry because it's easy, but rather because they are up for a challenge.
And how many people have said that working in academia is playing life in easy mode? That's the joke of the century.
Is it privileged to be able to live in a society where you can develop your career and not, like, have to go pick crops for three months? Yeah. Does the geographical freedom of SWEs (in a minority of cases) exceed that of a higher-paid traveling nurse? Sure, but that's a trade-off; the engineer takes less money than the nurse, but gets to travel further.
I'm not asserting that your comment was offensive because I'm whining about global systems of grind and exploitation. It's offensive because you seem to think that no one in the tech industry outside AAA game dev has come up from the mines. I started my career as an unpaid intern, then made $7.50/hr and freelanced on the side. I worked 12-16 hour days coding, and/or 8 hour days while doing 8 hour shifts as a waiter and taxi driver. So now, 30 years later, I can bill $300/hr and work a few hours a day. Is that easy mode?
And if you're referring to the people half my age who are trying to make it in this industry, they have it much harder than I did. They're living after the time when they can specialize and be adopted in as part of the technical debt for clients or companies. They have virtually no chance at job security. They have to constantly scrape and invent in order to stay relevant. So yes, people like me may appear to have easy lives compared with 24 year old medical students, but you seem to be taking for granted the lateral shift in your career - I suppose it's probably easier mucking with python than writing academic papers - but you're taking for granted your status, age, job security, etc. And missing the fact that other people do not get into this industry because it's easy, but rather because they are up for a challenge.
And how many people have said that working in academia is playing life in easy mode? That's the joke of the century.