Keeping up with the Programmers

Weird flash today on the idea that self-esteem is relative to surroundings. That idea is used to explain why people with more wealth are only marginally more happy; why lottery winners don't feel better off a year later, etc. And why otherwise poor people in miserable conditions often report feeling good about their situation. It's relative. If you are wealthier and more successful than your neighbors (or are on your way there) then you are happy. I wonder if surrounding yourself with people who are very similar to yourself (such as, when working at a big company or on a medium sized team) feeds into this. The stuff I know and work with is meaningless jargon and trivia to people who work in other (maybe more meaningful) professions. It's performance review time - is it silly to measure people who are all so similar against each other? We're vastly more productive and knowledgeable than 99% of the world's people; yet in 50 years who will weigh human worth in i/o wait times on a i386 architecture or type-inference on embedded query syntax ?

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

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