The author is essentially hoping to usher in an end-times world divided solely into middle managers and sapient jumping beans. This is a far from sensible goal.

>I don’t mean to pick on this person; there’s no reason to be familiar with the history of the US aerospace and rocketry industry (unless, of course, you’re going to make an argument that hinges on claims about the industry).

Failing to grasp the broadly satirical nature of copypasta like this, then doubling down on an i-know-more-than-you literal interpretation of the text, is not a situation in which the author should be concerned that readers will worry the other guy is getting roasted too hard.

>Barons of the Sky is a nice history of the early days of the aerospace industry, and it shows that in the early days, everyone was a hobbyist.

Acutely pursued hobbies with upside potential become professions! I am shocked. This is my shocked face. :o

>At another fund I’ve heard about, the head of research liked to poll the interns and ask them if they thought the market was efficient. If the answer was yes, he said, they were fired effective immediately.

This example is just an nth-hand anecdote about an empirically incorrect manager on a workplace power trip. Less shark, more dipshit. Parroting the desired response to some manager's arbitrary psychodrama isn't relevant to making money on money for a living. Does the manager need a date to prom, too?

>(As a friend put it a few years ago, when such pop culture references were relevant, “If you know what a ‘Khaleesi’ is, you had time for side projects.”)

Consider the following: humans experience the same number of hours per day.

If you know what a ‘number’ is, you have time to appease me. Reexamine your life to spend more of it appeasing me.

It's a good argument, because humans experience the same number of hours per day. Not enough of them are spent appeasing me!

>In a field with a low marginal cost of scaling results and tournament-like economics (for example: investing, software, writing, some kinds of hardware), there’s a moral component as well. The better you think you are, the more it’s your responsibility to work extra hard, since the results will be distributed so widely.

Just try to say "there is a moral component to scaling IoT toasters" with a straight face among people you respect.

Note: The author reads HN[1] and likely crafted this blurb as bait. He should come away from this thread more insulted by the inanity of his own writing than grateful for the attention.

Promotion of workified mediocrity like the kind on display here is unnecessary in an era that has already caricatured this worldview past the point of no return with such literary works as the Student Athlete copypasta[2]. You do not need to tamper with your inner life in the vague hope that an interviewer, somewhere down the line, will grade you on your hobbies like all code is a take-home test regardless of its genesis.

Stagnant real wages in the author's home country (US) further reduce the blogpost's relevance. As do OECD data[3][4] showing no positive correlation between average hours worked and stereotypical innovation rate at the country-level.

[1]: https://twitter.com/ByrneHobart/status/1278782161559138304

[2]: https://files.catbox.moe/2srmab.png

[3]: https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm

[4]: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS