Poverty (of youth or otherwise) is also a pretty powerful motivation to “tinker.” I spent a lot of time with OSX86, and ended up getting proficient enough (multiple all-nighters trying to get it to boot and get the right kexts loaded early on) to run semi-stable Tiger thru Lion on random PCs and my girlfriend’s Vaio Laptop. Then, one day I could afford a MacBook and basically stopped being as curious about that. Decade or so later, ProxMox allowed me to run Capitan thru Mojave virtually, while more recently it makes more sense (and less legal dubiousness) to just buy macs as/if I need them. Overall, I’m still pretty curious, but not curious enough to risk a “hacky” solution when I can mitigate it for relatively low $

It's not business critical to answer your curiosity now. File it as a ticket, put it on a backlog and move on.

I remember being a teenager and intentionally dialing down my ambitions, because it was socially uncomfortable to have people's perceptions of me be tied to the things I excelled in.

Figured I had my whole life to have a job, so didn't really wanna do a startup or anything like that. Watched all the Macworld et. al. keynotes and knew all the specs of all the devices, until I got tired of being pigeonholed as "the computer kid."

Very, very few people came anywhere near this level of focus and execution at the same age.

People like this are truly extraordinary. You could give a lot of engineers infinite financial runway and no corporate job ever and they’d still never reach this level of performance.

Some people really are next level.

Just take the top ticket, thanks.

All aboard the soul tra…erhm…drain!

It stings how much I relate to this.

But how much wealthier are you?

If you have brilliant mind, but you were born poor / working class, then sure you'll be crushed by 9 to 5 inevitably, where your talents will be ruthlessly "harvested" for the benefits of shareholders until you burn out and get thrown out like a used rag.

If you have talents, use them to achieve financial freedom and then do what you want. Sometimes it is through 9 to 5 unfortunately. Never make a mistake of "climbing corporate ladder". Earn money, invest, don't try to leave beyond your means.

You might have great salary, but don't get tempted by renting a nice pad or getting a nice car. It's a trap to keep you enslaved in 9 to 5 forever.

I was born with heart defects and pre ACA had to be a wage slave to get health insurance.

The moment ACA happened I started several successful businesses.

Honestly we already should have contribution/impact based merit threshold UBI with a much lower barrier than research grants or even just time limited UBI systems for youth and adults that meet a contribution threshold.

VC allocation is too biased towards group think, profit motivation, predatory contracts and hold on to top many class and cultural artifacts.

Yes of course it would be difficult to implement but difficult isn't impossible and gradiated rollouts can help catch unintended side effects. We need to push more money into the hands of the intrinsically motivated. Society already is catering to the whims of consumers and feed zombies.

Me. Got countless old servers as a teenager and self hosted as much as possible. Now I have enough money for new servers (well, besides memory...) but not enough time and energy.

How many went ChaosKlub and found themselves on the run?

Why not start your own software company?

I made big money in my 20s, I can retire. Now I just play and gamble on my company to go from ~2M to 100M.