Similar story to me. Academically fairly gifted from an early age, testing high IQ later (I know, I know) and was recommended to be placed in an advanced school.
My parents were modest and didn't pursue this, nevertheless, everything was easy until it wasn't. The part I never learned properly was effort=reward. I was also diagnosed with ADHD and was on ritalin for several years.
Later school years were bad for me because it involved a lot of rote learning. I did not have the discipline to do this and my grades slipped back to mediocre. University was better and I did very well again. I've done moderately well in my career, top few % of earners but I am unable to break higher because I'm constantly distracted and struggling to complete mundane work tasks which prevents me from getting to the top where my ego says I belong.
I take full acknowledgement of issues, I know it is my own doing. I don't know if it is too late for me to change but I'm slowly (because even here I lack the focus) trying to learn technique to change my entire approach. I've recently started looking at the power of habit forming as a means to improve discipline. I think I could benefit from a very tightly structured day where one thing naturally leads to another. Otherwise I tend to drift in and out of tasks and end of up the web, like now.
Aside from being in that area, did you wish you had a sibling growing up? Selfishly my partner and I want to stick with a single child but for his sake we are thinking of having another.
I don't think that is an ideological aim of capitalism. It is just an emergent behaviour.
In any case, it is a genuine question from someone living in a decent welfare state and happy to continue to do so. I don't really care to engage in debates of who has the moral high ground, just the practical question, if you have an answer.
In my experience, there are few of those type of valuable influencers around and they have a limited career path. Maybe a promotion or two above standard engineer, but that is it.
Those that rise higher to the very senior positions are are able to promote their image, regardless of how much value that actually provide, and in fact they often provide negative value. That is in IT structures. Our primary mechanism for promotion at Big Corp is "influence". But influence is measured in a completely stupid manner by people who have been promoted to senior positions via the same completely stupid process.
People who come up with a "risk reduction" methodology and manage to sell it to someone senior, that requires all engineers to start adhering to this new methodology, which provides very little risk reduction but negatively impacts a huge amount of productivity, is very likely to get promoted.
For example, one person may have inadvertently done something stupid on a production host such as running CPU intensive operations on huge log files. So instead of looking at the correct fix, which would be to immediately form a small, very capable team of engineers tasked with going across the firm and helping teams get log files streamed off correctly, so engineers have very little need to go onto prod hosts, nope, some person with "influence", will decide with no consultation and no notice that all engineer access to prod hosts is gone. So now to support our applications we have to ask a support team to transfer large files around our network in an ad-hoc manner just so we can perform the analysis we need. Not only is this not much risk reduction, it completely hinders engineers ability to do a good job, which negatively impacts the company.
Yet this person if he isn't already senior, will be able to in the yearly review hugely sell his "risk reduction" exercise and will almost certainly be seen by the other idiots as someone equally capable as themselves and worthy of a similar position.
I know you said "almost" but you don't have to re-write huge amounts to achieve zero gc and very low latency. There are open source tools, eg. agrona, aeron, that get you a lot of the way there.
My parents were modest and didn't pursue this, nevertheless, everything was easy until it wasn't. The part I never learned properly was effort=reward. I was also diagnosed with ADHD and was on ritalin for several years.
Later school years were bad for me because it involved a lot of rote learning. I did not have the discipline to do this and my grades slipped back to mediocre. University was better and I did very well again. I've done moderately well in my career, top few % of earners but I am unable to break higher because I'm constantly distracted and struggling to complete mundane work tasks which prevents me from getting to the top where my ego says I belong.
I take full acknowledgement of issues, I know it is my own doing. I don't know if it is too late for me to change but I'm slowly (because even here I lack the focus) trying to learn technique to change my entire approach. I've recently started looking at the power of habit forming as a means to improve discipline. I think I could benefit from a very tightly structured day where one thing naturally leads to another. Otherwise I tend to drift in and out of tasks and end of up the web, like now.