Working in an (IT) office

1. Either you are taking advantage of your situation, or the company is.
   • To put it less politely, either you're screwing the company or the company is screwing you. Fair employment is few and far between.
2. Every company is for-profit.
   • Non-profit companies are still for-profit, unless the founders don't collect their fat salaries, which is almost never the case.
3. Corollary of (2): the company is a soulless corporation.
   • The only goal of the company is profit. Your salary (and often, your general well-being) stand in the way of this goal.
   • The language spoken by the management is PR. The company only speaks money.

Before continuing, read that again and make sure you've internalized it. At first glance, it might come across as bitter or evil, but I consider the statements above to be factual. I am not bitter, and I don't want to see my friends bitter. I am not evil; I only wish good for people that I care about. Google, on the other hand, used to hold the slogan "don't be evil" — but it curiously no longer does.

4. Your job does not matter.
   • Most people with office jobs effectively do nothing. They create busy work and their output is of no use to anyone. They exist to keep the economy going. Other than common sense, there seems to be at least some empirical evidence to back this claim.
   • You do not provide food for the hungry or shelter for the homeless.
5. The less your job truly matters, the more money you make.
   • This is not true for heart surgeons, but it is true for office jobs.
6. With certain types of office jobs, it is very difficult to estimate employee productivity. This is especially true for software development.
   • Making any kind of change to a big (low-quality) codebase takes forever, and the vast majority of the time is spent researching and reading the existing code, which is not an activity that can be easily measured (unlike actually typing code out, which takes insignificant work by comparison).
   • Different software developers produce code at extremely different pace. (This is often used as justification for why there is such a high salary spread in software development, but we know from experience that the best developers are seldom the best compensated.)
   • Your manager does not know how difficult a task is. Most of the time, even your colleagues don't know how difficult a task is, unless they are doing it themselves.
   • Task estimates mean nothing. They are only a guess. It is irrational to judge anybody for merely making pessimistic guesses.
7. Following from (6), you are unlikely to get fired for being less productive than your peers unless a) you do no work or almost no work, or b) your higher-ups have something against you, or c) the company is going under (you have no effect on this and it almost always points to a major managerial fuckup).
   • Employees are never all equally productive anyway, and salaries don't correlate with employee productivity. (They generally only correlate to how well the employee does at the interview. This is explained later.)
   • In case you are suffering from b), learn to keep your relationships with people curteous and minimal. See also (8).
8. Your job is to make your manager happy.
   • Even if you do shit work, it doesn't matter as long as your manager likes you.
   • Your manager decides who gets the raise. If he likes you, you're more likely to be chosen.
   • Keeping your manager happy includes doing the "actual" office work. Hence, this point is not metaphoric — it is quite literal.
9. It is up to you to manage your higher ups expectations. If your higher ups don't expect a lot from you, you don't have to do a lot.
   • If you mismanage their expectations, you end up working harder than you would otherwise need to.
10. Management uses lies and deceit to get the most from their employees.
    • Empty promises of raises and bonuses were never uncommon.
    • The company does not "feel bad" about lying to you. If you feel bad about lying to them, you are inviting the company to exploit you. (The company does not "feel" anything, to be precise.)
    • In most cases, stocks are a lie used for this exact purpose. Stocks have a very low chance of coming to fruition, and even if the company does IPO they could have given out any amount of stocks by then, rendering your portion less valuable. Treat stock options as 50/50 at best. They are a nice bonus if they happen, but they are never a guarantee (unless the company is already public, of course).
11. Following from (7.a), (9), and (10), if you manage expectations correctly and can work flexibly from home, it is not difficult to hold two full-time salaried jobs at once. Holding three jobs at once might get difficult, but I know people who have done that, too.
    • Calendar collisions are less common than you think, but sometimes management intentionally sets up more meetings than they need, simply to generate busywork and make themselves seem important. If there is no other choice, you can always find polite and effective ways to avoid any meeting. Turn the volume down and focus on coding in the background.
    • Some people seem to have a fear of their reputation being ruined. This is, for the most part, irrational. Nobody knows about the company that you didn't put on your CV.
12. As a salaried employee, you make less money by working more.
    • To calculate money earned per unit of work, divide your monthly salary by total work done that month. The more work you do, the smaller this number. (It's not clear what a unit of work is exactly, but it is clear that units of work directly correlate with employee tiredness.)
    • This is counter-intuitive because when we work more, we feel like we're doing better. If you were paid for each task completed, working more would result in higher pay. For a salaried employee, working more results in lower pay.
13. Find the minimum amount of work that you can do, and don't do more.
    • Use an empirical approach to discover what the minimum amount of work is. Once you have a relatively good understanding of how little you can do, don't do more.
    • If you are in the mood for doing more at some particular time, you can do work then and open PRs later. It is best to keep your work consistent, and consistently minimal. Alternatively, if you find yourself with excess spare time, consider following (11).
14. Negotiate a high salary.
    • If the employee does not seem to be leaving, giving him a raise is a net loss for the company and generally a bad strategic decision. See (2) and (3).
    • To put it more bluntly: don't expect a raise, especially if you didn't ask for one.
    • Asking for a raise is difficult, because you're in the asking position. You need the company to do something for you that they don't have to.
    • Negotiating an initial salary is easy, because the company is in the asking position. They are asking you to work for them (after they have already spent money on putting you through all various stages of the interview, and not only that, but unless they hire you now, they will have to continue spending more money on their hiring process, which is expensive). This gives you a lot of leverage in making your demands.
15. Your CV does not have to be a crystal-accurate depiction of truth.
    • Lying on the CV is as old as office jobs. Everybody does it. Because everybody already lies on their CV, recruiters expect CVs with lies on them. If you decide to be honest, it puts you at a disadvantage, and severely reduces your chance to even be considered by the recruiter, despite you likely being a better (or at least equally good) candidate compared to other CVs (which decided to be less honest than you). See also the second point in (10).
    • Related to (14), a better CV gives you more leverage when negotiating your salary.
    • Don't go overboard. Only put something on the CV if you can show knowledge for it. You know what you are capable of — your CV only needs to reflect that.
    • Keep in mind that most recruiters asking for 10 years of experience will be more than happy with 4. The years of experience mean nothing (10 years of developing CRUD software are probably just as good as 1) and they are almost always a highly inflated number.
16. Patience is not always a virtue.
    • ...but sometimes it is.
    • If you need to make a change, you already know it. If you are delaying it, you're not doing yourself a favor.
    • You have to wait a month to get your salary, month over month. It is understandably boring and repetitive.

Curiously, in (4) I am telling you that your job does not matter and amounts to nothing more than busywork; in (13) I am telling you that you should be lazy; in (15) I seem to be persuading you to lie on your CV; in (11) I appear to be openly inviting you to secretly work a second job; in (10) I encourage you to lie to your employer.

Perhaps most curious of all is that every one of the points above is presented in a rational and argumented manner. It's game theory, applied to the most prevalent aspect of life: office work. If you make your work better, your life will be infinitely better.

I leave you with this: you're not the bad guy. They're the bad guy. You just need to be smart, and you can beat them at their own game. Or you can be burnt out for the rest of your career — the choice is yours.

Investing in assets

1. If you haven't been, start saving your money aggressively.
   • If you don't make enough to save, look for ways to spend less. Move in with your Mom. Buy a cheap car instead of putting monthly payments into a more expensive one. Most importantly, find ways to make more money. Get a better job. Get a second job. Make more.
2. When the market is low, buy the asset. When the market is high, aggressively save cash so you can buy the asset when it goes low.
3. If the market goes down 5x, it is probably low. If the market goes up 5x, it is probably high. Deciding whether the market is low or high is a judgement call, but it probably isn't as difficult as you think.
4. Don't buy at the initial asking price.
   • When companies release assets, they are unlikely to be asking for less than the real value. They are probably asking for more. It's usually safer to wait a bit to see the market stabilize before buying.
   • This is not a universal rule. There are exceptions, but keep in mind that they are rare.
5. When the market is high, sell the asset.
   • If the market is high now, it will be low again eventually, and you only make a profit if you sell.
6. Make large safe investments and small unsafe investments.
7. If you made a risky mistake, exit early.
   • Risky means potential to lose a lot of money. (What a lot means depends on you and your financial situation.)
   • If you are smart and following (6), this shouldn't happen to you.
8. If you made a low-risk mistake, wait.
   • If you are making a risky investment, it should be with money that you are prepared to lose. Losing this money won't be as bad as the potential gain would be good. Hence the best option is to wait and see if it pays off eventually.
9. Don't spend all of your money.
   • You never know when you will have a real-life emergency.
   • You want to keep your options at least somewhat open in case the market changes and new opportunities present themselves.
10. Monitor your investments.
    • Push notifications usually work, but it can be disastrous when they don't.
    • Collecting your investments into an HTML document is easy (TradingView widgets are one convenient option). You can pin that page and check it whenever you're in your browser.
11. The world is not ending.
    • When cavemen went to war, they knew exactly who they were fighting against and why. When a soldier goes to war, he listens to orders. War is not what it used to be.
    • If the world is really ending, everybody loses, and hence you do not win. The only way to win is to assume that the world is not ending. You will find this an easy assumption to make.
    • The world should have ended already. Stop worrying.