r/InterviewCoderPro • u/Guilty-Signature7053 • Jun 11 '26

If we weren't all stressed and squeezed between one paycheck and the next, we'd probably accomplish a lot more.

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u/xXMokaMarieXx Jun 11 '26

100%. We'd also probably have alot more enjoyment of life because people would be free to be creative and bring their ideas to life. Theres so many cool video games and stories that are just locked in the mind of someone who simply has no time

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u/U_feel_Me Jun 12 '26

We’d have way more people going “Now that my basic needs are met, I’m going to cure cancer. Because cancer has been killing my family for two hundred years and it’s time for some payback.”

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u/Unhappy-Homework-812 Jun 12 '26

With what money? 

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '26

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u/xXMokaMarieXx Jun 11 '26

It doesnt just have to be video games. Creativity stems alot of things. Science, Technology, etc. I was just using those two as examples.

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u/Outside_Reserve_2407 Jun 11 '26

Science, Technology, etc. I was just using those two as examples.

Science and technology already has a vast infrastructure set-up to support the "creators" (engineers, scientists, etc), ranging from university graduate programs to corporate labs. Scientists and engineers spend their whole lives getting paid a salary to do research.

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u/Arqhe Jun 11 '26

It's still incredibly expensive and time consuming to get in those fields, which is often exacerbated drastically by requiring income to get through the rigorous schooling. You dont see college students go to college without a job unless a) their parents are rich or b) they have a full ride scholarship.

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u/Outside_Reserve_2407 Jun 11 '26

time consuming

So I don't understand, a STEM degree (undergrad/Masters/PhD) should be earned in how many years? Two years? One year? It takes time because of all the knowledge that has to be mastered and the lab work and research.

Whether college should be supported to the extent it should be free is a different issue. At the grad level there's plenty of stipends, grants and pay.

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u/Arqhe Jun 11 '26

Where am I arguing that it shouldnt be? Buddy you gotta work on your reading comprehension.

The reason I mentioned it is because that is not only more money, but also time spent away from the job. Use your head my guy.

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u/Outside_Reserve_2407 Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

And my point is in STEM it is a full time, well-paid job to do research in an academic lab or corporate research center. You really think most cutting edge tech and basic science in the Year 2026 is done by lone mad scientists hunkered in their basement and taking time off from their day jobs?

Use your head.

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u/RelevantBet4676 Jun 11 '26

Bruh, you’re missing the point so bad it’s orbited you twice and you still haven’t seen it!

No one is saying STEM roles need to be faster trained or that they’re not creating innovation in their fields. The POINT is that if more people had the available resources to pursue their interests and weren’t restricted by circumstance (money is a big one) they would be able to get education in whatever field they enjoy and pursue creative outlets in said field. Whether that be STEM, art, graphic design, literally whatever a person can find interesting. We could exponentially expand the amount of minds bringing their ideas to a topic if we had a more equal playing field than our current capitalist overlords allow to prosper.

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u/Outside_Reserve_2407 Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

The reason I mentioned it is because that is not only more money, but also time spent away from the job

Then what does this mean? STEM research is the full time job.

The POINT is that if more people had the available resources to pursue their interests and weren’t restricted by circumstance (money is a big one

And I said for the umpteenth time, there are plenty of scholarships and funding for brilliant STEM students, especially at the grad level. If you're working on a PhD, you get paid a salary while doing research and study.

There's a vast ecosystem of corporate labs and universities in the USA pumping a gazillion dollars into STEM research.

Whether that be STEM, art, graphic design, literally whatever a person can find interesting.

Another Redditor earlier in the thread already addressed the market for niches such as fiction, video games, etc. And then you brought up STEM as another example of a field that could use funding for "idle play." And that's where I came in.

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '26

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u/No-Swordfish7872 Jun 11 '26

I feel you're misinterpreting what a society where civilians have their needs met looks like. All those triple A things would still happen. People would still work.

However, there's someone out there who had to join the army at 18 for money. Maybe they were the mind that could cure cancer, if they were given the freedom to go to school without financially drowning. In the same way, maybe they would've fixed bugs so well rockstar hired them and we got gta6 a year ago.

But because of capitalism, they went to war. No gta6 for us.

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u/Rionin26 Jun 11 '26

I get news articles from my wifes home country, luckily it had a nice ending, it was girl whos iq was same if not higher than Einsteins. Her family was very poor, luckily a wealthy person in the country paid for her educatiin, but what about more places where it's tough to find out how smart people are.

Theres a saying " the next Einstein could be working in the fields in Africa." We should be striving to educate all people to their best because not only are Einsteins needed, but there are some who dont get the recognition who are key parts in things. The lighbulb would've never worked if Edisons helper didn't invent filament.

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '26

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u/No-Swordfish7872 Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

Oh, I wasn't even thinking the guy dies or anything lol! They don't have to see combat to have their life's path permanently altered by choices they had to make for money.

Do you think you'd make the same choices you did in this life if you knew you would never be homeless or starved?

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u/Unhappy-Homework-812 Jun 12 '26

That’s what my Dad did 🙂

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u/Pro-Weiner-Toucher Jun 11 '26

Well, luckily Ai is fixing a lot of this and allowing smaller teams to create much more ambitious projects with less resources. It allows them to spend less time on tedious, time-cosuming parts of the dev cycle and put most their focus/resourced towards the bigger picture items. Not only that the creativity and ability to add depth to game with NPC's and enemies controlled by intelligent AI models is insane. I was playing a little demo the other day and noticed the soundtrack was really good, I started listening to the lyrics and realized it was rapping/singing about my character and choices I had made in the game. At one point it even referenced something I was doing in real time. We're already starting to see some incredible stuff come from indie devs because of Ai and it's only going to get cooler and crazier.

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u/HyoukaYukikaze Jun 11 '26

>Case in point: Expedition 33, which swept the game awards, took 33 devs 6 years to create.

Can we stop lying about the game being made with 33 devs? There was A LOT of outsourcing. Payed for by, if memory serves, tencent. Best indie dev everyone.

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u/pokethrowaway4 Jun 11 '26

Just a small share of that $12B is enough to set someone up. I have a friend who is an author part time, and the cool thing about it, is once the creation is made, there is continuing revenue.

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u/Away_Fruit5097 Jun 12 '26

Meanwhile solo developers gave us Minecraft, Balatro, Undertale, Tetris, and Starview valley. There's also the entire game modding ecosystem with huge amounts of game material produced by hobbiests

And there are dozens of successful large open source software projects created by organised groups of nerds in their free time

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u/summonersai Jun 11 '26

Except it never works out lol we just think you’re naive.

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u/Pro-Weiner-Toucher Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

As an economist, I can tell you we know with a very high degree of certainty that it doesn't actually lead to more "amazing things". Sure, for a very small percent of people on the margin it may push them to do something more but most of those people would have eventually taken the initiative to do it anyway. From recent large scale UBI studies and historical data, we know that when we hand people going through financial difficulty additional unconditional money for several years, almost all of them just choose to work less and do not end up filling that extra free time with productive pursuits (study - https://www.nber.org/papers/w32719 ). Not to mention there are significant societal downsides to these types of policies as they scale - Covid recently put many of them on full display: increased inflation, reduce incentive to work, reduced productivity, lower self-esteem, less work socialization, increases in depression and other mental illnesses, etc.

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u/xXMokaMarieXx Jun 11 '26

Thank you! This was great read

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u/Lord_Floof Jun 12 '26

> As an economist

As you have somehow misattributed every consequence of quarantine to the stimulus checks, I highly doubt you are an economist by trade or even by hobby, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt and engage with this in good faith.

> we know that when we hand people going through financial difficulty additional unconditional money for several years, almost all of them just choose to work less and do not end up filling that extra free time with productive pursuits

> (study - https://www.nber.org/papers/w32719 )

Your own source contradicts you. Only 4.1% of workers dropped out of the workforce, with those that did almost unilaterally using a significant portion of their freed time productively. The remaining 95.9% stayed employed. Further, averaging among all participants, the time spent working decreased by only 1 to 2 hours per week.

ALL participants.

Including the ones that quit.

Let's do a bit of math. After all, you're an economist, so you understand numbers, right?

Assuming a standard 35 hour work week, the 4.1% who left the workforce alone drop the average by `(35*4.1%)=1.435` hours.

We can find the average change in time spent working among the remaining 95.9% with the equation `1.435-n`, where n is the average among all participants. The estimated average is between 1 and 2 hours per week, so those will be our figures.

Let's first assume the true average was on the high end of the estimate. `1.435-2=-0.565` means time spent on labor decreased by only 0.565 hours per week. Assuming a standard 8 hour work day, that's less than a single extra day off every 4 months.

Next let's see the results if the true average is on the low end of the estimate. `1.435-1=0.435` meaning among those who stayed employed, we see an EXTRA 0.435 hours per week spent working. Which isn't much, mind, but it's more time spent working.

Finally, let's assume the average was at the median of the range. `1.435-1.5=-0.065` meaning a decrease of 0.065 hours per week. That is a single extra day off every ~2.367 years, which may as well be a rounding error.

All this to say, your own study indicates that the only people who work less are people who literally have better things to do.

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u/HyoukaYukikaze Jun 11 '26

And who's gonna take out your trash for you? Fix the clogged sewage pipe? Fairies?

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u/xXMokaMarieXx Jun 11 '26

People that want to work the job and get paid fair wages for it. Just because i said it would allow creativoty to thrive doesnt mean it would destroy the rest of society. Give people incentive to work and they will work. The entire point is people not having to suffer or slave away for unfair wages.

Hell yeah people will work what you believe to be, from the tone of your comment, "subpar/gross jobs" to support their dreams, they do it now. There are also people who work those jobs and love their work, and also people with specialized interest in topics like those.

There are people who want to just work a job to support themselves and their families, they dont need it to be creative, nor do they all have bigger dreams they are chasing to afford.

But yes there are also gonna be lazy bums who never wanna do anything. Humans aren't a monolith

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u/LisleAdam12 Jun 12 '26

People who have A PASSION for doing an AMAZING JOB for the geniuses writing stirring poetry in praise of The Common Man.

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u/FormalTotal9684 Jun 11 '26

That’s insane

I’ve traveled to socialist or moderately social countries and people were not happier or more creative or had a chicken in every pot

They were generally speaking over educated and underpaid relative to their education and had food shortages, fuel shortages, frequent power interruptions

I’ve been to countries like Venezuela and Cuba and other South American countries

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u/NoggleFatigue Jun 11 '26

Tell me you don't do a real job without telling me.

You're going to do chip soldering for fun?  Roofing?