don't be married to principles and mantras. don't be a slave to cliche ideals and slogans that only sounds good but is too general to be useful. example - confidence, self-esteem, etc ... can be vague and interpreted in so many ways. you still need to judge your decisions on a case by case basis. foolish pride can be lethal to your financial health and disastrous to your quality of life.
when i was working at a hi-tech company in silicon valley called altera corporation, people used to ask me if it's good to buy our stock. i discouraged them from buying our stock because the company was still retaining grossly over paid employees like me. i told them if i get laid off or outsourced then that would be a good time to buy. i was committed to undermining my own interest.
i realized early on that my job as a software engineer can easily be done remotely from russia or asia where there are lots of talented engineers way way smarter than me willing to be paid a mere 10% of my salary. i don't have low self esteem. i simply know my abilities and where i stand in the talent field. i was just being realistic. so i never bought expensive cars or luxury items. my friends mocked me for having a junky second hand car even if i was earning boat loads of money ($150k/yr). i did travel a lot and spent my money on sports and hobbies that i can only do while i'm young (golf, snowboarding, basketball). i also invested on rental properties, preparing myself for the expected outsourcing of my job. so when the board of directors of altera finally wised up, they outsourced my team to penang malaysia. instead of being bitter, i actually fell in love with altera stock and bought some more. it quickly doubled and i sold the stocks for a handsome profit. my outsourcing was also such a blessing in disguise because i finally had time to pursue my other interests and passions in life. i hope i did not violate any SEC insider trading rules. the insider knowledge was that i suck :-). this is what i love about corporatism. it has the brilliant consequence of turning working people against their own interest.
any normal person would have been bitter and hated altera's stock (on a side note: i did not know people actually follow my stock recommendations in facebook until my classmate stanely yap told me he followed my recommendation and made a lot of money on altera).
it is not lack of quality of education or quality of teachers or learning tools that made me a mediocre programmer. it's not even lack of motivation or hard work. i worked my ass off my entire school and career life. my inborn aptitude was simply not up to par. i was just very lucky i was able to work for 15 years in a job that was fun, challenging but not so difficult. i got to use my creativity and i was grossly overpaid. most of my success was attributed to my good PR and street smarts, things that i did not learn in school. that is why i lived very cheaply because i knew the gravy train won't last long. thank god my instincts were right because when the industry matured and i got outsourced, i was also ready to enjoy retirement and live off my rental properties. i may not be academically smart but this shows i have good decision making instincts so maybe i have credibility to criticize the policies of the democrats who supposedly has the most educated and knowledgeable people in the world.
example obama is way smarter than me in many ways. but if obama was in my place, he would have lived normally - lived by himself in an apartment instead of having 5 other roommates to lower the cost. obama would have bought a brand new $15,000 car instead of a $200 junkie car. so he would not have enough savings to retire in 15 years. when obama got outsourced, he would have complained about the government's globalization policies instead of accepting reality that it is survival of the fittest. obama is a great person, awesome personality, and an inspirational leader. but that does not mean his policies are better for america, at least in the long run. i'm not saying it's bad either. nobody really knows. we are just making our best guesses. only time will tell. i'm just saying democrats are not really that much better than the republicans.
another example but a sad one: i had a filipina coworker named mary lewis. she worked as a technician doing data backups and software builds. she only had a 2 year associates degree in computer programming at a community college. during the peak of tech boom (late 1990s), opportunities where everywhere. music majors could earn $70k a year as a programmer. there was an in house software in our department that needed to be upgraded from DOS to windows. me and mary were offered the opportunity to do the project. i knew the task was beyond both our pay grade so i backed out. she took the project but i just kept quiet because, anyway, i knew there was no harm in trying, knowing that we had a very benevolent management so when the time comes management realizes she cannot handle the project it will just be given to a real engineer and she will just go back doing her previous tasks.
the project was suppose to take just 1 month, but after 3 months the project was going nowhere so it was given to another engineer. mary mistakenly took it as an insult and told me she wants to leave the company. i told her, "we both are very lucky to be working in altera software department - our jobs are fun, challenging, and we are way way overpaid relative to our skills and abilities. plus we had flex time where we can come in and go home any time as long as we perform our tasks". i also told her we should feel honored and privileged working with the smartest people in the world - top graduates from the best engineering schools in the world. i even told her we were like charity cases :-)
i idolized the super talented and brilliant engineers of our company. they were developing very high tech programmable chips used in life saving medical devices and even f16 fighter jets. even intel corporation tried to penetrate the programmable chips market but kept failing miserably until it gave up and threw in the towel and decided to just buy our company. i felt i didn't belong there but our managers were so down to earth they treated me and mary as if we their equal. but their humility was actually a double edge sword and the lack of realistic honesty played a part in ruining mary's career. management treated her as if she was just as talented as the top graduates from MIT, cornell, carnegie melon, berkeley, stanford, etc ... that's when i first realized that being polite and not being brutally honest with your friends can actually be a bad thing. that's why i started writing my knowledge bomb essays.
i warned mary that altera was a very stable company and one of the best companies in the world to work for. it was even the darling of wall street at that time. i warned her that if she leaves there is a very big chance she will end up doing a job she hates with much less pay. she accused me of having no self confidence. i remember what she said - "oh my god ian. what's wrong with you? you have no self esteem". i then realized she was doomed.
mary got a job at a startup company as a programmer. they matched her salary. but the startup went bust after only a few months. she ended up on a job she did not like (i forgot what it was), paying less than half of what she used to make. ouch !!! meanwhile i continued to work in altera for another 10 years doing a job i loved. my salary tripled plus i was showered with a lot of stock options (https://ian-crystal.blogspot.com/2018/11/tech-innovations-by-a-dummy.html). we continued to keep in touch and one day she finally confessed she regretted her decision and that she should have listened to my advice. when i was finally outsourced as i predicted and prepared for, i was ready to retire and enjoy the remainder of my youth playing basketball (https://ian-crystal.blogspot.com/2015/05/ian-and-steph-curry.html), golf, being a tiger copycat (pun intended), snowboarding, staying in world class beach resorts and dating selena gomez, wonder woman, and ivanka trump.
click the "load more" button at the bottom of my youtube page to view the complete list - https://www.youtube.com/user/scratchrider260/videos
https://web.facebook.com/ian.crystal.90/photos_albums?sk=wall&lst=100021755921365%3A867825320%3A1542451581
(-: if you are offended by my photos just watch the cosmos series so you will realize everything that happens to us is really just insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe. besides the title of this blog has the word "bomb" and bombs are suppose to be horrific :-)
my snowboarding videos: boardercross course - gopro, riding with friends
tiger copycat (pun intended):
golf video: score of a tiger (https://youtu.be/f0ydPxOsRK0)
(for more of my knowledge bombs, click the "ian's knowledge bombs" banner at the top of this article and choose any article in the table of contents that piques your interest)
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