Working in tech may be unjustifiably glamorized, but you have to be incredibly out of touch with reality not to realize that earning six-figures plus benefits working 8-10 hours a day in air-conditioned buildings for employers, many of whom will feed and transport you, is something that millions of Americans would give everything for the opportunity to do.
What?
Even in professions like law and investment banking, where employees do have to work grueling hours on a regular basis, the "80 hour work week" is largely a myth. I think medical residents are one of the few groups that really puts in these types of hours consistently.
so I was probably exaggerating a bit, but I stand by my original comment that many of these overworked, underpaid startup employees lead absolutely miserable lives and work harder than 95% of people on the planet.
For reference, the US in general works more hours per week than any other industrial nation. Hunter gatherers worked only 15 hours/week. Most impoverished nations work very few hours per week. The only people who beat them out are sweat shops in Southeast asia
Getting that first job on your resume can be quite a trick.
Just before he emphasizes, with italics, that this is only "compelling in some cases".
Because of the circumstances in which I got dumped into the job market, I started out with a sysadmin job with some programming, which I turned into more programming, but it was not a great start, and it was only through unique coincidence (about the only person in the community with serious Lisp Machine and UNIX(TM) experience) and connections that I got my first really good job.
They were working with Western Digital, which like everyone else at the time was designing a 68000 based workstation, and conveniently enough, it was based on MIT's Nubus NuMachine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuMachine
So they were doing all the normal infrastructure for a high end workstation, and LMI was designing a 4 board Lisp Machine CPU with a Nubus interface that would work in one of their machines, with or without the 68000 processor board running UNIX(TM).
People with a serious UNIX(TM) background were actually harder to find in the community at that time....
Oh well, lucky you for having been exposed to Lisp machines.
