Out of curiosity where are you finding high returns on capital today? I just don’t see them. (As an engineer, conversely, I see very high returns on my labor.)

As an engineer, I see high capital gain from my labor by joining "blow-out" startups, as described by some article written by Wealthfront. Working for a blowing-out startup so far is the best choice for an engineer like me, who is not good at navigating dynamics of a large company nor good at investing nor interested in real estate as many fellow engineers are in Silicon Valley. I personally enjoy the following perks besides decent cash payment:

- Problems come to me instead of me fighting with other teams for fun projects.

- Abundant opportunities for career growth, be it tech leadership or managerial hierarchies.

- Surprisingly high cumulated chance of getting meaningful equity, as long as you switch company quickly when you no longer enjoy your work.

What do I have to do to get into such startups? Well, getting good at leetcode in the early years, and working hard to get a reputation so I don't have to do hard leetcode problems nowadays. I enjoy working on CS fundamentals and applying them, so working on leetcode is never an issue, and working hard is what engineers enjoy anyway.

Working hard is not what engineers enjoy.

Engineers enjoy building architectures to minimize human effort while still producing maximal results. I try to solve problems as efficiently as possible to minimize the amount of work I have to do and minimize the amount of effort some future maintainer will have to do. This will allow a company to reach unlimited economies of scale as the limit of the amount of work required approaches zero.

> Working hard is not what engineers enjoy.

There are different type of engineers. I think people will almost always miss the mark when they state "engineers enjoy xyz" even when it's something like "engineers enjoy problem solving". I actually enjoy fantasizing and being the idea guy, but I was too lazy to find a programmer so I taught it to myself instead. But I still enjoy being the idea guy much more than being a programmer. I like programming (and at times love to dive deep, deeper than a lot of web devs anyways), but I love being the idea guy.

The stock market has gone through the roof for the last six months. Where aren’t you seeing returns on capital?

A simplification, but returns in an efficient market are synthetic: i.e you can target what kind of returns you want wrt volatility.

But speaking a little more concretely, markets have been on a tear: stocks, crypto, bonds, whatever.

I have been dollar cost averaging straight into VTSAX for the past couple of years and have seen something like a 40% annualized return lol. That probably won't continue, but what a ride.

Last year I made 80% across my entire tech portfolio. That's a good start.