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Comment by arilotter | Hacker News Reader

Built one of these with my dad when I was about 8, and this was one of the things that got me bitten by the "working with computers" bug.

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> this was one of the things that got me bitten by the "working with computers" bug.

Do you ever regret being bitten by this bug? I was bitten by it as well, at an early age.

It worked out OK for me in that I've made lots of money, but I feel that it's come at the expense of possible greater impact and glory should this neurodivergent mind have latched onto something more "real" instead.

I wonder how this experience has been for others.

what is more real than distributing and transforming information?

at least in our society money is a measure of impact, or at least desired impact, but of course there are other measures.

I'm a bit puzzled by your perspective because I dropped out of music school because I felt I could make more impact writing software :)

I was originally going to be a mechanical engineer...but the early time of the digital age put its (more immediacy-driven or maybe dopamine-driven?) hooks into my brain...and, so I finished my university major in the realm of computers. I can NOT complain, as i have made a great life for my family through my career...But now, as i am in my late 40s/early 50s...i wonder if maybe instead I should have had either a non-tech career or maybe only a slightly tech-adjacent (but not exactly tech hardcode) career, and then simply focused on computer stuff only as a hobby/pursuit/interest instead?

I know that i am not alone in this feeling...as i have heard others my age - and who were orignally not going to "go into tech as a career" - cite similar feelings. Maybe its burnout, or maybe i feel that too much intelligence in tech is wasted on getting silly clicks and things (as the famous saying goes about this age's greatest engineers, etc.)...or maybe a combination of many factors (not excluding age). Anyway, yeah, others have such a feeling about *working* with computers. ;-)

I would like to hear of this saying about this age's greatest engineers. I have never heard it, but I have often thought of the tremendous amounts of brainpower wasted on the silly and ephemeral in IT.

Apologies it's not specifically engineers...it refers to "great minds", and is attributed Jeff Hammerbacher: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/747678-the-best-minds-of-my...)

Ah. I have a similar, if longer, itch about the tech brain drain, where we have taken people who might have been scientists, or physicians, or non-computing engineers and we have them doing any number of, at the space of five years or so things which are wasteful. We have brilliant people reporting to the mediocre and attempting to appease the foolish.

Yes, but only for the stress it causes me in thinking really really hard all day and then being exhausted at night, which i think is not unique to a computers career. I don't regret it in that it's an incredibly high paying job with very low social barriers to entry.

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