Patrick McKenzie: disagreement

Transcript context

…But what would that look like in this context? What would you have done differently? Ultimately, I'm happy with the decision I made although it might seem like the wrong decision. I’m happy because of other life factors. Working in Japan as a young engineer had some very rough parts. But on a mental level, this was an early opportunity to trust institutions less and trust systemically viable reasoning patterns more. Assuming I’m remembering this article correctly — and it was a pivotal moment for me — The Wall Street Journal asserted that no future Americans would be hired at software companies. Assume this is true. What happens in the American software industry? Maybe I didn’t have enough knowledge to confidently predict that at the time. But I can confidently predict some things now. For example, software companies are going to break as older engineers age out and no one is coming up to replace them. The industry must hire people every year. Hiring freezes are necessarily temporary as a result of that. That’s as close to a law of physics as one can have. If you tell me something which says the laws of physics have been suspended and will be in the future, I won't agree with that. How would I learn the law of physics? I didn’t know anyone in software engineering at the time, which is partly why I was getting my advice from The Wall Street Journal. I was at a research university in the US. If I had been slightly more agentic about it, I could have found someone who knew someone in the software industry to explain this to me. Couldn't you use that same logic to say that journalism jobs won't go down because senior journalists will have to be replaced by new journalists? It’s true, but it doesn't take that many people to study journalism. It actually would have been a bad call to major in journalism and pursue that as a career.…

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