I have also noticed strange behavior that was not present before this perceived update, e.g. basic auth challenges and pop-up windows if I'm waking up my computer and still have azdo pages open.
Exercise helps a lot in my experience. I also got stuck in a position of "Context switching and constant hard thinking" for a long time. Just stepped back and let it burn because it was also an "unofficial" position.
I appreciate that. I tried to leave some ammo for those who had been in the trenches with me, but also had to just let it burn so to speak. Hope you are in a better spot these days.
I think a more interesting story would be about the people that grind for years and years and never make it. You're left without a useful skill and no money, and probably a deficit on your mental health because you didn't go out and talk to people in real life for years. I think its not at all worth getting into as a career because making it big is like starting out as an actor, you have to know people. If you hit it big and are complaining about being burnt out, just walk away. Sorry that you pissed away your money and don't own a house, I guess? Could live pretty damn well on the money you made from it for a decade or more if you have self control, and have zero debt. Find something else to do in the mean time.
What other career can you make as much money, with such a low barrier to entry in skill and capital? Pretty much every other job requires just as much sacrifice of your time with nowhere near the same earning potential. Most of the big earners started streaming within the last 5 years[2], and even then, the top 2000 streamers are making 100k+[1]. I heard YouTube streaming is paying even better now.
The folks who don't make it are an interesting group on their own. Something like 95% of streamers have under five viewers, and the majority of those have exactly zero viewers. Thinking about all those thousands of people broadcasting day in and out to exactly nobody is kind of fascinating. It's not like broadcasting on a ham radio or shouting into the aether or blogging on a little independent site thinking that maybe somebody might be reading it. They know that exactly zero people see it. And they do it for months and months.
> Anyway, not really your point, but a fascinating group of people to think about.
Oh, hey, I sort of fit into this group, since I stream with a VTuber (virtual avatar) persona and play niche indie games. Sometimes a friend or two drops by and we chat, other times someone new drops by and says hi, but there are also those times where I spend an hour or two playing a game alone and talking into the void, expressing my thoughts, maybe getting a clip with something notable in the process to link to friends later, or maybe upload the full video somewhere later.
I'd say it's not that dissimilar from working on my own personal programming projects or even some of the blog posts that I might end up writing off and deleting, since nobody is going to see the majority of those either - if they turn out good and someone does, then great, but if not then it's still a nice experience, that's also mostly free of any expectations.
As for related things, streaming lets you practice expressing your thoughts better and speak more clearly (which is especially relevant if English isn't your first language, at a point where you can use it well enough, but your pronunciation just needs more practice). It also lets you figure out how to have decent audio/video quality and create content - something that has also helped me in meetings and while working on a programming video series.
> Something like 95% of streamers have under five viewers, and the majority of those have exactly zero viewers. Thinking about all those thousands of people broadcasting day in and out to exactly nobody is kind of fascinating.
When you say the majority of 95% have exactly zero viewers, do you mean at a given point in time, or ever? That makes a big difference for how to think of their situation to me.
I'm kind of one of those people (I took a long break, but want to start doing it a bit more again soonish).
I do it in part just because I'm playing the games anyway and have the equipment, might as well stream it. If no one watches, oh well, no big deal, I'm still playing the games I was going to play with that time anyway.
And secondly, I am wanting to start doing some coding in public more. It's fairly stressful having to articulate what you're doing while you're doing it (tried it a couple times), and it sort of feels like I'm in a whiteboard interview at times, but I think it's good practice to become more comfortable doing it, and articulating what I'm doing as well as getting feedback from others could help me become a better coder.
Also the game I'm working on in my spare time (a sequel to my old Proximity strategy board game that was popular once upon a time as a Flash game and on Xbox 360) will eventually have support for a Twitch audience to play along via the chat, so I'll need to stream in order to test the game properly anyway, and hopefully by the time I get to that point I'll have at least a small handful of people who will be on there and can playtest it with me.
Also part of the reason I took a break is it turns out using an ultra-wide monitor isn't ideal for streaming (aspect ratio is off). I love my monitor but when I go into games I have to mess with borders and things can get cut off without adjustment, etc. I did get a Cam-Link recently though and got streaming from my Switch to work (and presumably my PS4), and it let's me stream 1080p without stressing my computer (no worry of dropped frames) and also letting me use my monitor still for Twitch chat, so that'll probably be easier to manage.
I've got some time off starting next week so I'm hoping to start getting into the habit of it again. If anyone's curious, I have the same account name on Twitch as on here, although I'm debating changing it to something that can be a bit more ubiquitous online, and haven't decided what yet.
Probably not all that different from musicians/artists/writers/bloggers who never attain any audience. However, the immediacy of the feedback would be soul crushing.
Mostly true for most academic papers as well. Not just the humanities, but the sciences too. Since you can track how many people actually clicked on the download button for a paper, you can get a sense of how many people actually read it.
Only one of my few papers has ever been downloaded by someone not on the author's list (we can compare with each other). Granted, that one's been downloaded a lot. But still, most of that hard work and going back and forth with editors is for naught.
The difference is creating music, art, writing has its own intrinsic reward. I have a ton of photos on my instagram and barely any followers for the amount I put in. If I was just doing it for the likes, i would have given up on it a long time ago.
The stats are a bit skewed I think, because you have to have an account on twitch to participate as a consumer on twitch, so all those 0 view streamers are very possibly people who are actually consumers and had no intention of streaming themselves.
My OBS recordings (of mostly game footage) come out to between 1 and 1.5 GiB/hour for 1080p resolution. Given that simple external HDDs start at about 20€ for 500 GiB, that comes out to 6 cents of storage per hour recorded. Your power bill for the gaming PC is going to be higher than that in some places.
I have only streamed for slightly over a year, so I cannot say anything definite about "years-old footage". But I can absolutely see myself going back to that footage when I get nostalgic about any of the games that I've played. Especially with games that you can only realistically play once, like Outer Wilds.
I only have really used it for fighting games and my object was more to look for issues in my game. So there isn’t that much point to looking at very old footage.
There are 150+ million accounts on twitch, but only 10+ million people who streamed in the last months, and around 5 millions who seem to stream regular. Doesn't make the impression of being skewed by people who did not aim to stream. Sure, some might hit the button by accident. But more likely, it's just people who have a different aim than making viewers.
I think you're making the mistake that the point of a Twitch account is to stream. Accounts are useful for viewers with no intent to ever stream as well
> I think a more interesting story would be about the people that grind for years and years and never make it.
I wonder the same for athletes. Was recently reading Nadal's biography and parts of book describe his routine in childhood and teenage. And my first thought on reading that was "what if he hadn't made it to the top?" because he essentially had no semblance of a regular childhood/teenage. Being out on the field at 5am day after day, year after year seems only worth it in hindsight if you make it to the top.
I guess, in the end, Gita captured this as well: the only way to be able to put extraordinary effort is to not care about the outcome.
Tennis isn’t pro or bust, though. There are viable career options that make tennis your life if you really want that. You could coach (whether coaching a competitive player or team, or giving lessons at a clubhouse), you could be a tennis writer, you could work adjacent to tennis like designing or selling equipment, etc.
Tangentially, I’ll add that trying and failing to become a pro gamer is very different than failing to become a streamer. At least if you’re playing competitively, you have to move beyond shit talking your opponent. There’s a lot of coordination and communication required if you’re playing a team game. Any game requires a ton of dedication and focus, and a level of creativity within the confines of the game, all of which are valuable and transferable skills. Sitting and playing games by yourself while waiting and hoping someone stops by to watch you doesn’t teach you much.
Sure, but it doesn't seem worth it to give up your childhood and early adulthood if it turns out you couldn't cut it and have to become a tennis coach instead
Startups are much more team work as compared to success in sports. And success of many startups can be attributed to being in the right circles rather than founder's skill/grit. The modern day founder hero worship is exaggerated imo.
It seems like you’re downplaying the importance of teamwork in sports. There are very few who succeed in sports who aren’t team players. Most of them fizzle out before we ever hear about them.
Totally. Deep inside the capitalist machinery, what really propels it forwards is the irrational human need to do something really crazy. If only rational MBAs ruled the world, nothing new would ever happen.
Of course it makes you more employable. If you put in some real effort towards running a business, you have to gain some amount of business knowledge. People who understand business implications of technical decisions are usually pretty well-paid.
Is Twitch earnings their primary source of income? They arent making income as a media personality outside in addition to the subscriptions and/or connections that could help them after?
I have a feeling the same warning could be given to actors going to LA trying to make it. A percentage become dish washers after washing out in a couple years but tons who don't find a reliable pay cheque via work in the thousands of related jobs that help run the movie business. The personable ones could use their media skills in the wider business world (marketing/pr/events/etc).
I guess you could say they are all in their parents house's bedrooms not touching grass 24/7 which is different than a failing actor, but being an internet personality is much more involved than just being a pro-gamer who falls off by 25.
The endgame of twitch-income is getting sponsors and cooperations. Subs and donations are limited by your viewer-numbers and how many whales you can play. But even a small company has pockets which can compete with any whale one has. And you can have multiple companies at your hand, feeding you, if you are good enough.
Grind is also not the hacker mentality. One wants to move a mountain by carring it to another place, the other wants to find a stick, a small rift and cause an avalanch after a nice walk, that will redirect a river.
>Most of the big earners started streaming within the last 5 years[2], and even then, the top 2000 streamers are making 100k+[1].
The leaked data reports earnings made over almost a two year period, 23 months to be exact. So the earning potential isn't quite that good, it's more like around 1000 people earning the US median income and 1000 above it
This smart way to have cash and follow your passions is what needs to be inculcated in the future of tomorrow. Just by chasing and grinding on something with no results after several years then the chances are you (or whoever) won't make it.
The far majority of twitch streamers do not have some illustrious career waiting for them. People in big cities with competitive degrees are underrepresented on twitch relative to other areas.
> Most of the big earners started streaming within the last 5 years
I'm not sure what numbers you are referring to. There was a huge increasing in streaming and watching during the pandemic. Many of the big streamers are in their late 20s or even early 30s. Which is relatively old considering you can start streaming in your teens.
Either it’s easy and nobody should complain or it’s hard and people are making a crazy investment with no idea about return. I don’t know if it’s so different than sports. Yeah, it’s better to be LeBron than a guy who was just short of being good enough for the pros. But playing at that level is not easy no matter how much you are being paid.
e.g. I've watched streamers keep ~50 people entertained on a stream for 3+ hours.
Monologuing that long and still have people listening seems like there is definitely "something" there even if not easily transferable to an office job or whatever.
The dynamics of Mondragon participating in free trade are no different than any other corporate entity. The internal dynamic works because most people that are participating share the same core values of shared ownership, and there is no corporate ladder to climb. IMO, leadership making these values core to the business is going against the grain, putting your probability of survival below or equal to that of others, which is why they are a rare occurrence
It's objectively a better model for ensuring the sustainability of a corporation, with respect to operating in a free market. I would say that being an employee at a high productivity co op is the same as being a highly skilled software developer working for a contracting firm or maybe a sizeable startup. You have a valuable impact and have skin in the game.
I think there is a tipping point where greed can end a corporation, but e.g. for western corporations, the beast is fed by central banking. The problem with that, is that there are clear winners that are chosen, which go on to buy out their competition. At that point, you have management making working conditions less and less favorable, for the sake of share holder bottom line, to the point of societal unrest. Take a look at Amazon.
But do high productivity / high demand employees earn outsized compensation? Software engineers at Uber, for example, earn probably 10x what drivers make. If you look at some of the recent ridesharing coop attempts in the US, they advertise wages of 70-80k for devs, which is just not going to work in a competitive market.
Generally you won't find investors pouring millions into co-op because investors do this in expectation of ownership and control -- the opposite of what they get in a co-op. So it's harder for a co-op to raise the ridiculous amounts of money they need to pay outsized compensation.
Instead, part of the compensation package is to not be beholden to corporate overlords and quarterly report-driven shareholder value-based crap. I'm absolutely willing to take a financial pay cut for that.
I'd say the number of people willing to take a 5x paycut (it is literally 5x) for feeling better about themselves is pretty small. The number of those people who are qualified to work on matching algorithms and pricing algorithms is even smaller. And you need matching and pricing algorithms to compete against Uber and Lyft, because they can price discriminate (e.g. airport rides) against consumers and get better utilization out of drivers, so if they have to compete, they can pay drivers more than you.
> I'd say the number of people willing to take a 5x paycut (it is literally 5x) for feeling better about themselves is pretty small
What do you suppose is the median salary for devs in the US? Tech salaries are increasingly bimodal, take care not to be deceived by big tech/bay area salaries.
Sure, but then you are hiring less skilled talent that is probably incapable of working on pricing and matching algorithms (which along with scale are the real advantage Uber has, since everyone can make a crappy iOS app and call it a day).
If the algorithms didn't matter then Uber wouldn't be maintaining 70% marketshare in the US.
Also, a quick look at levels.fyi says salary at IBM (i.e. your median salary dev) for a senior is 192k. Compared to 80k for a ridesharing coop, that's still quite the salary cut. Don't forget a lot of these coops are based in HCOL areas like NYC.
> Sure, but then you are hiring less skilled talent that is probably incapable of working on pricing and matching algorithms
This sounds like a variation of the just world fallacy to me: in a just world, talented folk who solve hard problems get paid more, and the less talented ones - who are unable to solve hairy problems - get paid less. In such a world, you can identify the talented ones by how much they are earning. Yet in the real world, geography, and luck/ability to bootstrap to HCOL areas plays a huge part
> Also, a quick look at levels.fyi says salary at IBM (i.e. your median salary dev) for a senior is 192k.
I think you're underestimating how wide the gap is between the bimodal peaks. $192 is too high[2] still; it slots just below Senior executive average ($200k) and right above EM ($180k) in the 2022 StackOverflow salary survey[1] for the US
Your survey seems very flawed. It puts an average SRE at 175k yet the CxO's only make 200k. Are you sure you're not excluding stock based comp in those numbers?
In any case, even if you go by the data in your survey, a machine learning specialist is supposed to make 150k and a mobile developer 144k. Those are still a lot more than 70-80k.
> Yet in the real world, geography, and luck/ability to bootstrap to HCOL areas plays a huge part
Considering the bar to get into a FAANG is just 4-5 leetcode medium-hard questions, I think there is little gatekeeping happening. This isn't investment banking where if you don't go to an Ivy you can't get in. And there are a lot more firms than FAANG paying big salaries.
> I think you're underestimating how wide the gap is between the bimodal peaks
IBM is your quintessential example of a consulting bodyshop. If anything, they would be at the lower bimodal peak, not the higher one.
> Your survey seems very flawed. It puts an average SRE at 175k yet the CxO's only make 200k.
My guess is the sample of SREs in the survey is biased towards start-ups & big tech (thats were that role is common), where as CEOs samples have less of that bias.
> Are you sure you're not excluding stock based comp in those numbers?
Yes I'm sure! I'm surprised that you're surprised - the average developer does not get stock-based comp because they are not working at big tech or a start up. "Enterprise software" shops & Small-to-medium businesses do not generally offer stock/options to employees
Won't it work though? The market isn't full of rational salary optimizing actors, there are some (probably a small percentage) that care more about their work env and culture than salary. This might be either because they already feel they have enough money or simply hate the normal corporate culture.
I don't know about you but I'd rather not spend years of my life sedated on drugs just for money. There are places to live outside the states that don't require you to make 100k per year to have a very good life.
At least in this case, it sounds like you buy it upfront.
> Mondragon’s co-ops share the same detailed information with worker-owners, who buy into their co-ops by making one-time payments of roughly sixteen thousand euros in most co-ops.
I'm sure Mondragon's financing coöp will happily assist with funding a loan, underwritten by an insurance coöp and paid through the bank coöp. It's turtles^w coöps all the way down.
> IMO, leadership making these values core to the business is going against the grain, putting your probability of survival below or equal to that of others, which is why they are a rare occurrence
The rarity of co-ops is definitely not from survival rates, because they completely trash regular businesses in that regard:
> A 2013 report published by the UK Office for National Statistics showed that in the UK the rate of survival of cooperatives after five years was 80 percent compared with only 41 percent for all other enterprises.[5] A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises.
> In a 2007 study by the World Council of Credit Unions, the five-year survival rate of cooperatives in the United States was found to be 90% in comparison to 3-5% for traditional businesses.
(This figure seems kind of hard to believe... Maybe there's some self-selection bias in that people in the US might be much more willing to personally risk starting any number of different kinds of businesses for themselves and at most one, maybe two others, whereas they might only be willing to start a co-op with multiple other people if it looks like a pretty sure thing with a well-established model?)
> A 2010 report by the Ministry of Economic Development, Innovation and Export in Québec found that the five-year survival rate and ten-year survival rate of cooperatives in Québec to be 62% and 44% respectively compared to 35% and 20% for conventional firms.[53] Another report by the BC-Alberta Social economy Research Alliance found that the three-year survival rate of cooperatives in Alberta to be 81.5% in comparison to 48% for traditional firms.
There are probably many reasons why co-ops are rarer, but the obvious one of relevance to the startup community is that you wouldn't start a co-op if you were hoping to make tons and tons of money rather than a "merely" reasonable income.
1. Less access to capital. Investors want to exchange capital for ownership. Co-ops oppose this model. There are alternative methods for raising cash (subordinated capital campaigns are a successful example), but banks are conservative in nature and are just not eager to underwrite things they aren't very familiar with.
2. Discriminatory taxation. Are co-op member-owners to be taxed at the earned income rate, the capital gains rate, or both? The IRS has intentionally left this unclear and repeatedly refused to give strong guidance, putting co-ops at a distinct disadvantage in paying members and structuring membership.
3. Consistent legal structure. Unlike with the relatively standardized form of the limited liability corporation, the definition of the legal corporate form for co-ops varies widely between states and countries. This lack of standardization makes each incorporation process a custom, costly, time-intensive exercise.
I am of the opinion that cooperatives are a superior legal structure to LLCs for lots of reasons internal and external to the firm. But until these core problems are addressed, cooperatives will remain relatively rare, despite their many advantages.
- Many companies are tiny, created to pursue a small idea as a side project, and to optimize taxes while doing so. Certainly most of such companies close quickly and likely painlessly.
- Companies more often go for high-risk, high-reward projects that a co-op won't touch. This self-selects co-ops into the niches of stable, long-term, lower-risk business.
Land/housing is the one asset worth owning outright. Nothing else compares in utility and as a safe (assuming you didn't buy in the last year) store of wealth.
