So I was the kid playing SimCity and Civ and Legos and all these other "builder" toys growing up, who now has a 7-figure job at a FANG and still plays these sort of constructivist games on the side. I'm also the parent of a kindergartner who spends a bunch of time playing Factorio and Cities/Skylines and Kingdoms Reborn and Legos. I'll tell you why I think people prefer to create elaborate worlds inside games rather than get that 6/7-figure job at a tech company:<p>You are not actually a builder at a modern large tech company.<p>My day job consists of lots and lots of org politics. I'm technically in management (though I tried to keep my SWE title as long as possible), and I view my job as "I put up with the political bullshit so that my reports don't have to." But realistically, they are not builders either. They are spelunkers, hackers, maybe even developers - but the majority of <i>their</i> job consists of digging around in a 5M-line codebase to understand what is possible, communicating that back up to management, and then implementing a trivial change because trivial changes are realistically all you can do in a 5M-line codebase. The builders were the folks I learned from, who were employed as SWEs 20 years ago.<p>Computer games create just enough of an artificial, static sandbox that you can learn the rules and get really good at putting together parts. In a big tech company, some executive is going to change the rules in 3 months, and everything you know will be obsolete in a year. And that's not because the execs are stupid or capricious (although sometimes they are), but because the <i>market's</i> rules change every 3 months or so. Like it or not, a market economy's function is to satisfy <i>people's</i> desires, and as the article notes, people's desires are fleeting. But building requires foundations, it requires stability, and so we create that artificial stability with games so that you can build.
The answer to "why were builders able to create so much economic value two decades ago?" is "its a much more mature industry now: most of the empty space is filled."<p>Here are several real-life examples.<p>3 decades ago, you could've gotten rich by buying 'simple noun' domain names: beer, pinotgrigio, moving on down the list, stuff like that. You could literally just buy ad space on Google for next to nothing, pump money in, get more money out. You could decide to be the Internet expert on 'potato guns' and build an entire business off that, by writing blog posts alone. You could film yourself all day and become a rich YouTuber, just by showing up and recording videos daily.<p>Try doing that now! You can't live off the profit of any of these methods as written. So naturally the builders, who are upstream of that, can't do it either.
They should be working on adtech, like good little drones.<p>The stuff that really needs to be worked on doesn't pay that well and isn't appreciated. Fast factory automation. Security for the power grid and Internet backbone. Non-AI systems to monitor AI systems to keep them from doing something dangerous.<p>"We wanted self-driving cars. We got retracting door handles." - me.
On the job, you have to care about what other people think. Often, you have to care about it more than what you think.<p>You have to document your work, and produce test plans.<p>You have to execute part of someone else's plan, or prepare a plan such that someone else can execute part of it.<p>You have to juggle multiple tasks.<p>You have to write status reports and attend meetings; if you're lucky there isn't a lot of this.<p>You may have something enjoyable to work on, only to have that task cancelled or indefinitely shelved when you're many weeks or months into it and it's 85% complete, and then be put onto something that you like a lot less.
What a sad essay with a simple answer to its title: “Not everything need be monetized”.<p>This essay could be easily transposed into other domains, for example “why are some good musicians not trying to get record contracts?”<p>From the essay:<p>> Many of our values are locally-set by our environment and peers<p>The mentality that $$ reflects social value is a social sickness that to some degree of course has existed in all societies, but it has become particularly pernicious in the USA over the past 40+ years.<p>I was shocked that my tween/teen stepkids knew the financial arrangements of their favorite professional athletes and which of their friends’ parents were on the Forbes Midas list (which I hadn’t even heard of).<p>Culture has become professionalized to the point where I never see kids wearing homemade Halloween costumes — they are all branded.<p>Apparently “doing something because you want to” is no longer considered a mainstream attitude.
> Why are you building a graphics card inside minecraft instead of inside nvidia?<p>Before you can build inside NVIDIA, you have to convince the people in charge that this is a project worth building. They're not going to hire some guy that plays Minecraft all day and the people within the company that do build things are at least 2 layers removed from anyone who directs the new projects.<p>The most I can do within my own company is make small tweaks to an existing project. Anything that will need multiple people turns into a political battle.
Building things on your own time for fun is completely different than building things while being beholden to a manager, having to attend daily scrums, having to take direction from Product people, UI designers, UX experts, filling out Jira tickets, arguing with your coworkers about what a variable should be called, what an endpoint route should be, being asked to point your work, logging your time, thinking about how things will be compatible with the other systems, getting two PR reviews and approval from architecture, being asked to attend the town hall, being questioned about why you used an abstract class instead of an interface. The list goes on and on.<p>It's like night and day.
After setting up static IP between two computers, (1) it was not so bad, and (2) I estimate I am two decades behind.<p>The only way to catch up is to foster an environment where one must create the things one wants to do. Make a game to play one. Write the screenplay instead of watching the movie. Make paper models, sketch wireframes, and read books.<p>All I can do is block, block, block. Be bored or burning calories. Be the only one--for a while, maybe--who can quit vi or compile a program.<p>Fundamentally, mechanics, math, and programming. Write adventures, design levels, and port Photoshop tutorials to Gimp.<p>Foster a network, but (locally) not many may subscribe to this quirky constellation.
This is something I have questioned myself, in many many places there are extremely talented young people who are doing impressive, labor intensive work which is <i>completely useless</i>.<p>On the one hand there is obviously immense value to doing useless things (almost everything I ever learned was from doing useless things) and I think it is impossible to begrudge them in any way. But again and again I see people who are doing <i>nothing else</i> with their immense talent and whose entire life revolves around a singular vanity obsession (video game speed running, as just one example).<p>Surely, there has to be some reason that these people won't/can't live out their obsessions in a way that both financially benefits them and society at large.
One reason someone might build a virtual video card instead of a real one at Nvidia is that they don't have the EE and computer engineering skills to build video cards. The two are not comparable.
The article is asserting that there's some meaningful absence of famous outliers in this generation, but it doesn't really support that assertion...are you sure there aren't any? It took a while for me to be aware of the people listed in the article, they were already very successful before I knew who most of them were. There are plenty of people building graphics cards at Nvidia currently, why don't they count? Plenty of young people are still striking it rich making video games and software, why don't they count? Even if it is true, I would suspect it has more to do with there being fewer low-hanging-fruit opportunities regarding internet tech, rather than the younger generation being too addicted to video games.
"Why aren't you getting paid 300k at NVidia"<p>Well gee maybe NVidia has it wrong asking for Masters and PhD's with a background in semiconductor devices to even be able to play ball! NVidia's wrong!<p>They're so wrong about what they need they're only the 4th most valuable company in the world.<p>OR doing stuff like that might be clever but doesn't translate to useful skills or products?
Why not make your kids do the dishes with some gamification instead of having them play video games and see how it goes.<p>That builder might just be the wrong suspect in this two-party relationship issue.<p>Maybe your products need more awe, your attitude needs more respect and you might just give it a try to look at the person and not just see their exploitable potential as a start.<p>With your kids, reward them with more responsibilty, choice and partial ownership of your household and its direction and decor, and it might actually work out. Share your assets and see what they will be used for by those you see so much potential in.<p>In a way that is what those interships and simple tinkering allowed when companies were smaller and the industry was less complex. Finding ways to encourage them and supporting their ideas instead of looking for work force for your own projects might just be a real investment in everbody's future.<p>You might just have to give up the idea that it's now your turn to lead (from that inherited spot).<p>It just has always been your turn to add value.<p>Invest your (real) assets.
> [Founding of Facebook, Stripe, Snapchat.]<p>> I offer several potential answers:<p>4: The ability to <i>find</i> obsessive geniuses with projects is greater thanks to cheap social media, but most of them (still) aren't born into the entrepreneurial class which has the economic safety-nets and social connections etc. for creating an actual business and retaining control of it.
These people are doing something enjoyable. Having fun is rarely profitable.<p>If working for nVidia was non-stop fun, they wouldn't need to pay people. They could charge for it.
> Minecraft is more enjoyable<p>I think this bears expanding on. Building video cards in Minecraft, you don’t have to do what you’re told, and there’s no project managers or HR.
I find this article incredibly ignorant right from the start. The basic assumption is "people are doing incredible things inside of video games, why aren't they doing this outside?". And then the next portion reads:<p>> Why are you building a graphics card inside minecraft instead of inside nvidia?<p><pre><code> Minecraft is more enjoyable
Minecraft is more addictive
Minecraft found them first
They don’t know the latter option exists, or how they would do it, or think they’d fail at it
</code></pre>
Not that interviews are impossibly hard even if you have the necessary ungodly expensive college degrees and certificates to prove your prowess, have your life entirely together, have plenty of cash lying around to risk relocating to a job where you might fail etc.<p>This idea where "why don't you just overcome all the stuff in your reality that is holding you back to be like all the people who don't struggle with these things" is just such a fundamentally idiotic brainspace.<p>Then they bring up names like Carnegie, Ford and John Rockefeller and how early they got started working and comparing that to themselves how they would "have killed for a tech internship at 14". Carnegie born 1888, John Ford born 1894, John Rockefeller born 1839. They weren't even born in the CENTURY that our concepts of work and education come from let alone the millenial shift in technology that changed literally everything about how we evaluate and view people.<p>But sure, an internship at 14 at FAANG is feasible if your own parents know someone in that space, you have a school that looks at that as an opportunity and you have enough pre-existing access to technology and knowledge to do ANYTHING at one of these companies than fetch coffee or whatever the equivalent of stacking paper is these days. UGH!
This is a fairly good article, but doesn't take into account that now everyone knows how unfair capitalism is through information sharing using the internet... you already lost before you were born. Why play hard into a game of monopoly where everyone already owned all the property and you just keep rolling around the board landing on everyone else's stuff paying them rent?<p>If there was something besides getting an investor who will take over control and make your stock useless by any means possible... then maybe builders would participate more?
Want more people with the builder mindset?<p>Bring back high school and junior high shop classes, along with the obligatory grizzled shop teacher who dispenses cautionary tales ("Yeah, I had a student with long hair who leaned over the drill press that way. Scalped herself." "Yeah, I had a student who spilled some molten aluminum in his shoe. Learned to do the Highland Fling without any lessons.")<p>Those used to be available to all students. Now, when they even exist, they're shoved off into "vocation" programs, which in practice serve as a dumping ground for those deemed unfit for a college education (its own form of bigotry... you can't be a skilled machinist, programming CNC tools, or even machining by hand, if you're stupid).
The person who builds a graphics card in Minecraft isn’t passing an interview and 2+ additional rounds. Plus, requirements are high AF - almost asinine
>Where are the builders?<p>They're not going to wait around for a financial opportunity, they're just going to go ahead and build.<p>Some of them are going to start early too.<p>People are trying to screw you financially all the time anyway.<p>Might as well build whatever the fuck they want.<p>So what if it's world class?<p>As long as it doesn't cost hardly anything or require other people's money, look what can be done when some of these outstanding efforts reach a milestone.<p>The leverage is through the roof.<p>Just imagine if some of these people had actual capital to work with.<p>Sheesh.<p>Naturally, it's all about the terms, always has been.<p>Nothing but an indictment of capitalists who don't know how to do their part and leverage technology as good as they should.<p>The builders are there, they have not left the building.