The job doesn't pay you to be curious. It pays you to get stuff done. Curiosity makes you jobless. Most of the Silcon Valley people who frequent this website larp as curious people, but are basically incurious status seekers.
Well, you could say mine doesn’t either, literally, but the only reason I am in this role, and the driving force behind my major accomplishments in the last 10 years, has been my curiosity. It led me to do things nobody in my area had the (ability|foolishness) to do, and then it led me to develop enough improvements that things work really well now.
I'd be curious if jobs like yours are not on the tail side of the distribution. It's very common that in work groups, curiosity / creativity gets ignored if not punished. I've seen this even in small techies groups, there was a natural emergence of boundaries in which people don't get to think beyond (you're overstepping, that's not your role, you're doing too much). It seems a pavlovian reflex when leadership doesn't know how to operate without assigning roles.
I've certainly experienced this. The 'stay in your swim lane' mantra is often misapplied to people who are being curious and creative. Some (not all) managers feel undermined if people below them do anything more than exactly what they are told to do.
I mean, think of all the people getting paid eight-digit compensation right now because they were curious about this dead-end deep learning stuff 15 years ago for no good reason!
I couldn't resist... Like the kid at facebook who's buddies with Altman so gets to be a billionare? Like Altman himself (when did he enter the field again? Oh yea he was a crypto huckster). Like everyone I've ever met in the machine learning department? 95% of the people in that field are just following trends and good at winning that game. Call it sour grapes, but I'm just observing reality here. And everyone who thinks following fads = being curious is just doing the larp I described earlier. Moreover, everyone who thinks following fads keeps them safe from AI is deluding themselves. The AI of 2026 can do it better than you can.
Didn't Sam Altman write a "friend locator" app that sold for millions after (angrily) refusing to disclose how many users it had? Then it was summarily shut down after acquisition ... and turned out to have never had more than 500 DAU (though appreantly more registrations)
Yea, because I actually know many, and they're not good people. Also good job missing that this thread is about Altman and friends in addition to every one involved in it. Satvik here just thinks nobody on the internet with a grievance could possibly have any merit to their feelings.
No, you're the only one who brought up Altman (literally, ctrl-F "Altman" and your comment is the one that starts mentioning him), and either way, the vast majority of AI scientists are not personally connected to Altman or Zuck or whoever else you're talking about. If we're swapping anecdotes, I also know many and they're perfectly fine people, not sure what's bad about them, unless you literally think anyone working on AI is bad, in which case, I can't help you there. Just because you have a grievance doesn't mean it's justified, seems like it's some personal vendetta you have instead.
How are you trying to help me lol? I brought up Altman because he's one of the heroes of the AI movement. For some reason anything I add to the conversation isn't a part of it though.
So I know many bad people involved in it and you know many good people. I guess that's the end of it because I have no reason to trust what some random guy on the internet says over my own extensive real life experience.
I stepped away from the keyboard to cool off and I just wanted to apologize for being a bit mean here. I am sorry. I did have a bad experience, but not everybody in any field is bad. Have a good day as well.
Speak for yourself. Maybe get a job that involves intellectual achievement. Then you’ll discover the importance of curiosity.
You are technically correct that no one is directly paid to be curious. But it is also true that no one is directly paid to sleep. Nevertheless, if you don’t sleep when you are away from work, your mind will not function when you ARE at work.
Curiosity is an evolutionary adaptation that enables the discovery of heretofore unknown resources.
Fully expecting to get banned for my comment, but I'll just go on. Look at the silicon valley heroes and they're all business types. There's a few rare exceptions.
I presume many are. It's a different medium, but it's still creative. We got the "Mythbusters" show out of some of the model builders who didn't want to move to CGI.
Another thing I might throw out there is that there are so many domains and niches out there that person A and person B are almost certainly having genuinely different experiences with the same tools. So when person A says "wow this is the best thing ever" and person B says "this thing is horrible" they might both be right.
When did this "junior/senior" lingo get cool? I don't remember it being used when I was young. Maybe the leet code trend brought on a sort of gamification of the profession, with ranks etc..?
As a 51 year old, I hate when other old people think that “back in my day things were different”
> Evans has held his present position
with IBM since 1965. Previously, he
had been a vice president of the Fed-
eral Systems Division with the man-
agement responsibility for developing
large computing systems; the culmina-
tion of this work was the IBM/System
360. He joined IBM in 1951 as a
junior engineer and has held a variety
of engineering and management posi-
tions within the corporation
The title has always existed. I meant the obsession about being a "a junior" or "a senior", like gaining an achievement in a video game or something. I just thought every young person was a junior engineer and every old person was as senior engineer.
You don’t get to be a senior engineer just because of tenure. It’s not gaming the system to expect a level to be based on the amount of responsibility and not just from getting 1 year of experience 10x.
You want a promotion because you want more money. Even though I have found the difference to not be that great on the enterprise dev side. But in BigTech and adjacent, we are talking about multiple six figures differences as you move up.
I work in consulting and our bill rate is based on our title/level of responsibility. It kills me that some non customer facing consultants want to have a “career track” that doesn’t involve leading projects and strategy and want to stay completely “hands on”.
We can hire people cheaply from outside the country that can do that. There is an IC career track that is equal to a director (manager of managers). But you won’t get there hands on keyboard.
The bigger the company the less impressive "senior" is. There are probably three levels of staff above it and then distinguished super fellow territory.
Hardly. Senior at Amazon is pretty prestigious. A Senior at Google is also a pretty nice title. In my experience smaller companies are more likely to give out the Senior title like it's nothing.
A senior software engineer can easily make $300-400K+ at BigTech that’s “impressive” enough to me.
On the other hand, a “senior” working at a bank or other large non tech company will probably be making less than $175K if you aren’t working on the west coast.
When I talk to a senior: “hey we got this initiative, I know only little about it. Can you talk to $stake_holder figure out what they need and come back to me and let me know your design ideas, how long you think it will take, etc”.
I can do that with a few seniors and put Epics together and they can take ownership of it.
For a junior I have to do a lot more handholding and make sure the requirements are well spelled out
When I was a junior engineer, I did not need almost any hand-holding, and could take ill-defined initiatives, figure out the desired goals and outcomes, and ship them.
It's just that my code would be shit (hard to understand, hard to test...), but I learned quickly to improve that through code reviews (both getting them, but also doing them) and architecture discussions. I can't thank the team enough that put up with me in my first 6-12 months :)
When I find a junior engineer like that, I give them as little as I can, and remain available to pair, review or discuss when they get stuck. And they... fly... But I also try to develop these qualities in everyone, but it's sometimes really hard to get people to recognize what is really important to get over the finish line.
And I've seen plenty of "senior+" engineers who can't do it and go on to harp about a field in a data model here or a field in a data model there, adding weeks to shipping something. So really, it is only a paygrade.
Any of those "competency matrices" are really just a way to reject anyone from that promotion they are hoping for: it won't be a blocker if that someone has this innate ability to help the team get things done.
To each his own, but multi-tasking feels bad to me. I want to spend my life pursuing mastery of a craft, not lazily delegating. Not that everyone should have the same goals, but the mastery route feels like it's dying off. It makes me sad.
I get it that some people just want to see the thing on the screen. Or your priority is to be a high status person with a loving family etc.. etc... All noble goals. I just don't feel a sense of fulfillment from a life not in pursuit of something deeper. The AI can do it better than me, but I don't really care at the end of the day. Maybe super-corp wants the AI to do it then, but it's a shame.
I have wondered about that actually. Thanks, I'll read that, looks interesting.
Surely Donald Knuth and John Carmack are genuine masters though? There's the Elon Musk theory of mastery where everyone says you're great, but you hire a guy to do it, and there's the <nobody knows this guy but he's having a blast and is really good> theory where you make average income but live a life fulfilled. On my deathbed I want to be the second. (Sorry this is getting off topic.)
Steve Jobs wrote code early on, but he was never a great programmer. That didn’t diminish his impact at all. Same with plenty of people we label as "masters" in hindsight. The mastery isn’t always in the craft itself.
What actually seems risky is anchoring your identity to being the best at a specific thing in a specific era. If you're the town’s horse whisperer, life is great right up until cars show up. Then what? If your value is "I'm the horse guy," you're toast. If your value is taste, judgment, curiosity, or building good things with other people, you adapt.
So I’m not convinced mastery is about skill depth alone. It's about what survives the tool shift.
I won't insult the man, but I never liked Steve Jobs. I'd rather be Wozniak in that story.
"taste, judgment, curiosity, or building good things with other people"
Taste is susceptible to turning into a vibes / popularity thing. I think success is mostly about (firstly just doing the basics like going to work on time and not being a dick), then ego, personality, presentation, etc... These things seem like unfulfilling preoccupations, not that I'm not susceptible to them like anyone else, so in my best life I wouldn't be so concerned about "success". I just want to master a craft and be satisfied in that pursuit.
I'd love to build good things with other people, but for whatever reason I've never found other people to build things with. So maybe I suck, that's a possibility. I think all I can do is settle on being the horse guy.
(I'm also not incurious about AI. I use AI to learn things. I just don't want to give everything away and become only a delegator.)
Edit: I'm genuinely terrified that AI is going to do ALL of the things, so there's not going to be a "survives the shift" except for having a likable / respectable / fearsome personality
The other surprising skill from this whole AI craze is, it turns out that being able to social engineer an LLM is a transferable skill to getting humans to do what you want.
One of the funniest things to see nowadays is the opposite tho, some people expecting similar responses from people but getting thrashed as we are not LLMs programmed to make them feel good
What I gathered is that Chomsky was genuinely friends with Epstein, even after the sex crimes had been revealed (which is disturbing), but that there's no evidence Chomsky himself did anything criminal or immoral beyond being friends with a monster. The charitable interpretation is that Chomsky is just as easily conned by fun-seeming extroverted people as anyone else. But maybe there's more to it.
