My father wanted to open a butcher shop when he was 25, he was given a large loan by my grandfather to do so. He was already a master of his trade at this point and I am sure he had a deep insight into the industry and the practices of the time. However, I think that if my granddad had used the "Coffee Beans Procedure", there would have been a lot of questions that he would not have been able to answer.
My father is no longer a butcher, he sold the shop after ~25 years, working every day to afford our family a comfortable life and having enough money to pay for a restaurant that he wanted to run. Again, no one asked about where the coffee beans would come from, and after ~10 years he closed the restaurant after again working tirelessly to support himself, his children and his new grandchildren. He had the money to buy kitchen equipment for a newly built restaurant that he has now been running for 5 years.
To make a long story short, he is certainly crazy and he is doing what he wants and, on some level, is meant to do. But if your takeaway from this article is that you need to unpack everything and know everything to the smallest detail, you might get lost or discouraged by the complexity. You can't plan it all out.
I read the post differently – the point of the exercise is not that you need to know the answers to the questions. It's to gauge your emotional reaction to the question itself.
By examining the types of tasks you will be consistently faced with, you can ask yourself, "Do I actually want to do that?"
When you break down anything into its subtasks there's basically nothing that anyone wants to do. Sometimes the ends help justify the means too.
I always wanted to program games. I programmed games as a hobby. When I graduated university there were no gamedev jobs in my region, so I went to work at Boring B2B java company.
After a while I moved to a bigger city and I started having friends who work in gamedev. They told me about crunch, bad salaries etc. I decided to keep doing Boring B2B stuff. But I went to a few job interviews in gamedev companies.
Every time the questions on the interviews were FUN. Like doing 3d math, some low level C, writing a collision detection function or simple pathfinding.
Just solving these problems made me giddy.
Maybe it's the nostalgia for the time I've learned these things as a teenager with no stress, or maybe it's just that it's something completely different to what I'm doing normally - but I felt great during these interviews.
But I'd have to get a huge salary cut and abandon work-life balance and I'm too old for this.
TL;DR: I think there's a lot of value actually looking at day-to-day problems you need to solve in your dream job, even if you decide it's not for you for different reasons.
I think your story is about a person who wouldn't take their dream job because they want more money and don't want to change.
Or perhaps someone who has learned that there is more to life than their job, and is making a prioritization decision accordingly.
Perhaps. There is also more to life than your job, family, friends, and finding love. There's things like grocery shopping, washing dishes, and going on vacation. That doesn't mean we should settle into occupations we don't like. Like it or not, your work is going to consume a lot of your time, and we should strive to do something we enjoy and find meaningful if possible. In the parent comment it sure sounds like it is possible for them to pivot, and that they might find much more happiness and meaning if they do.
What makes you think that?
Do you think nobody wants to write and debug code, or tend to plants, or write books, day in day out?
You're claiming that any subtask that is unappealing automatically makes you not want to do the whole thing. Which is silly.
I read their comment as saying that we shouldn't expect every subtask to be fun, but the overall task can still be fun. Do I want to sand wood? Not really. Do I want to grab sand paper from the drawer? No... Do I want to use a saw? A little bit. Do I want to build a chair? Yes! But if I break it down too much the overall big picture gets lost.
and the comment is saying that such emotional reaction might be to complexity and scale itself, rather than the specific individual details
I think the questions in the article did the article a disservice. It's not about whether you know the answer to business-related trivia right off the bat, but about whether finding out the answer to such trivia seems interesting to you, because that's going to be your life from now on.
I'd argue the questions are simply a tool to force a person to confront the reality of a profession vs. a fantasy they've built in their head.
I think the problem is that when confronting all future plans you might find out you don't like any of them.
But you have to do something, choose something. So it's almost better if you don't think too hard, just do it and find out, learn to become content with it.
I really don't think it's better to choose your life path based on lack of understanding of your plan's consequences, rather than choosing the least unappealing option.
So, now you need to study choosing so maybe a career in philosophy?
Yea, it's about confronting yourself. I'd agree. I think the whole thing about investing into a store isn't really what this article is about.
Exactly. I certainly recognized myself in the story. I wanted to be professor, until I learned what they do.
similarly i wanted to be an entrepreneur until i met the daily grind of it. no questionnaire would have dissuaded me. the highs were high and the lows were low; even in retrospect i’m not sure it was the wrong choice. but it would take abnormally high certainty for me to do it again now that i know the score first hand.
Had a similar experience.
It was what they DON’T do that put me off.
Silly me, I thought they spent most of their time doing research!!!
>"Do I actually want to do that?"
There's no reason to believe you can be any more confident about your answer to this then the person in the article is about their hazy idea about what something is like.
If people "unpacked" marriage or childbirth to the extent suggested in the article everyone would be frozen in dread. That's not because they're smart and have just disovered what those things are truly like, it's because they overestimate their current emotional state and underestimate what they can grow into.
In fact the article I think is far removed from how people live. We don't chose professions because of our secret "true" interests, we make decisions based on circumstance, luck, financial security and then we adapt our emotional state. And that's a good thing, the emotional state of a young person isn't a good yardstick for anything.
My friend in college was worried she would fall into trap that she eventually fell into: She wanted to be a writer, and she felt that Comparative Lit put you in danger of knowing your writing was crap before you had the motivation and discipline to do something about it.
I tend to give junior devs as much rope as I can because they're just going to be awful until they get about 1000 hours in, and no amount of me scaring them is going to make that any better. And once in a while they surprise me by doing something they shouldn't have been able to do. We all have our preconceptions and nobody's are right all the time.
One way out of this trap is to set yourself ridiculous constrained writing challenges. "Write a story about a duck, but each paragraph has to invoke or subvert the corresponding item of this list of 30 random TVTropes articles; also the prime-numbered sentences have to each introduce a new character, and the even square-numbered sentences have to each kill one off." You can't compare that to a Franz Kafka Prizewinner.
And then once you've built up a small nest egg, you can set yourself ridiculous editing challenges: "salvage the story I wrote this time last month, in two 20-minute editing sessions".
This is the basis of "The E-Myth". A book I didn't read a long time ago because the title made me think it was about Scientology, but a consultant encouraged me to read it and I did. Essentially, the book is about this:
Person A likes to bake and has creative recipes that people like. Person B likes to develop companies and knows a baker who can make a recipe. Person A struggles to keep a bakery open and could really live to never see another pie in their life. Person B creates Cinnabon.
And Person A would probably prefer to gouge out her eye with a cookie scoop than sit at a board room meeting discussing Cinnabon's quarterly revenues.
Person A was happy enough as a mid-level manager who baked for fun. But everyone said they should open a bakery and so they did, and now they're miserable and worn out.
Where is the person B exploits person A to the max stealing all their recipes and pays them as little as possible where they can barely afford to live within 30 minutes drive to the underpayed job
That person A wouldn't have the resources to open a business.
Not so sure person B didn't create rise in diabetes deaths at the national level big enough to show up visibly on the graph
The Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths article strikes again. In this telling, Person A is a geek (creator), Person B is a sociopath, and "regular customer at the bakery" is a MOP.
Nope, it's not that. Baking wasn't a cool subculture in this story, it's just a the production of baked goods.
For me, I have a small business because I have a pathological aversion to bosses. Unfortunately, I would prefer to work on my own hobbies than make my business super great so it's stressful in its own way. But I do enjoy bookkeeping and some financial analysis.
Yep, agree. I got into info sec because I found info sec fascinating. The actual reality of working in info sec is like many other jobs: lots of tedious shit with moments where you get close to what you actually found interesting.
If I had sat down and "unpacked" what the actual job was like I doubt I'd have bothered. But that doesn't make it a bad choice for me. I'm still glad I work in the field, I get a lot of value from knowing I'm helping keep things motoring and sometimes it can be fun too.
Unpacking does not sound like a good way to figure out what you want to do. It sounds like a good way to argue yourself out of doing anything.
I feel the same thing as you but that’s just a default choice : I did that (programming) because I know I liked it when I was a teenager.
Unfortunately, you know pretty much nothing about what you really like when it’s time to start choosing what you’ll study or to start your career.
About two decades later, I still like programming but having the knowledge I have now about life, I don’t think I’d still make a career in programming, let alone in computer science.
Honestly I still think that I’m pretty lucky because most people don’t even know one thing they would like to do when they have to take those great early in life decisions.
At the end of the day, it really looks like enjoying your career has more to do with luck than anything else.
It’s unfortunate that most societies are built on the same schema of specializing early and doing more or less the same thing for your whole life.
This is problem with the places like 90% of the Kitchen Nightmares, Bar Rescue, etc., type shows. An owner retires with a huge nest egg and decides that, as a dive bar regular, they'd really like to think of themselves as the owner of the neighborhood bar. The "unpacking" that they never did would have involved cleaning up vomit regularly, violently drunk patrons, just having to do a shit ton of work yourself because labor is expensive, etc.
I would agree with the post, in this case your dad knew a lot about his trade, so it wasn't a new industry for him.
The coffeeshop example is great, i've seen that a couple times, where people that like drinking coffee, open a coffeeshop, and since they don't know a lot about beans, or equipment, they end up doing bad purchases, choosing bad providers, and the result is just bad.
my neighbor is a coffee roaster and started with production in his garage
when i visited he showed me the setup and i had a bunch of questions to unpack the production situation. he told me id been more interested than anyone who had visited which surprised me because hes very popular with many local lifelong friends frequently parking in the cul-de-sac
its an engineers nature to want to take things apart
> He was already a master of his trade at this point and I am sure he had a deep insight into the industry and the practices of the time.
This is exactly what the article is saying is needed in order to predict whether you will enjoy a job or not.
i think youre right that unpacking could get in the way of enthusiasm. speaking for myself i simply enjoy the challenges of software development and enjoy most new challenges the deeper i go
on the other hand i think unpacking is good because most people dont really know what they want to do coming out of high school, at least in the USA. in america adult jobs are a nebulous concept: i did well at accounting in DECA because i could do mental math better than peers. i assumed id be an accountant because i had to get some job. i assumed id wear a suit and do some math. its a good thing to tell adults because they approve. i took one database class and bailed on accounting to teach myself to code
maybe unpack a career path if there isnt passion and enthusiasm for the process
my daughter loves chemistry and says she wants to be a chemist. she does great ai it at school. so mom and dad helped her find an unpaid spot in an actual lab. so far she loves it but has also learned that it means working all day at 18 degrees c and constantly smelling her colleagues’ lab animal feed. we’ll find out soon if that was too much reality too soon. i hope it will lead her to double-down with the full reality in sight.
> working all day at 18 degrees c and constantly smelling her colleagues’ lab animal feed
That sounds more like biomedical research than chemistry? At the risk of stating the overly obvious to you do keep in mind how great the differences are between subfields. Synthetic organic versus materials science labs will look like entirely different professions from the perspective of a layman glancing in the window (which they are I suppose).
Weird, 18c is the sweet spot, like ideal perfect temperature for me.
is this also an early experience at a job whether paid or unpaid? if so there could be some noise in the signal from that.
yes first time in a work-like environment. she’s mostly excited about it though we realize in retrospect it might be a bit of a risk to a fledgling interest. fortunately it seems to be a supportive environment (got lucky).
I always thought it would be so much fun to work in a lab with monkeys until Chris Kattan unpacked that one for me.
There is the anti discussion, about where to know is to be ruined in some way, which is valid, the inference I get is that there is merit in engineering your approach to a career in engineering, and for some fickle few that clearly works, everybody else has to self decieve or seek help in that, or the world would grind to a halt. The game is stacked for those who can chanell there primal urges into abstractions and other disiplined outlets, the rest end up represed , acting out or some combination that is less "efficient"
if i understand your eloquence i think youre right that im lucky to apply my kind of "crazy" (tfa) for money
i recently spoke with an extended family member who works a secure 9-5 job for which they are paid well, requires little effort, is physically active but not taxing. they feel pressured by society or internal expectations to reach for something more challenging
they are young and asked if i have advice. i told them them are in an ideal situation and not to care so much about work. they can consider that box checked and seek satisfaction outside collecting paychecks
this is like a lifelong smoker telling their relative never to smoke. programming is my biggest hobby
I also picked my profession because it’s what I always liked and wanted to do.
I dreamt of going to college just to learn the things I wanted to know, not to make money. Even imagined learning them and then finding a job don g something else.
Was just very fortunate that it ended up in a lucrative field.
One relative tried to persuade me to go into medicine or law to make more. Put it as “you’re going to work the same hours so might as well be better paid.”
So glad I didn’t take their advice…
Like many things in life (including those we end up succeeding at), if we knew what it would entail (and already had the experience), we wouldn’t go at it with the same vigor - and might fail outright. Or maybe it would be easier.
I suspect there is a strong evolutionary reason why Mom’s tend to forget the really tough part/pain in having kids though.
The article says that you should at least find those questions interesting, not necessarily have everything already planned out.
I think the point of that procedure is more to illustrate when someone hasn't thought about the logistics _at all_. The problems aren't when you can't answer one random question, but when you can't answer any, even the basic ones like what kind of espresso machine you want to buy.
Even there I'd say that "Yeah, I'll have to do some research on that" is fine as an answer at least at a very early stage. It's when the honest answer is "I don't care, and I don't want to care" that you have a strong indicator that you shouldn't go beyond daydreaming when it comes to this goal.
My dad bought a burnt down pub for a dollar. He spent 15 years working on the place and now its worth quite a lot. He is always telling me to find something that requires hard work, but in the end leaves you with a significant asset. He put a cafe in the pub, and a coffee machine. He worked out the beans at some point. I think he had like 6 different POS systems.
I didn't become a physician, because my teenage-self unpacked being a physician as telling fat people to eat better food and start exercising -- for 50 years. Turns out there are other specialties... Despite thinking the human body is fascinating, I'm largely happy I don't have to tell unhealthy people to do what they probably already know they should do and then give them a bandaid for their gaping lifestyle problems.
They’re not even allowed to do that any more despite it being a legitimate medical risk (top 5 reasons for death according to the CDC are related to obesity).
Why not?
Patient reviews. So you can tell a patient they can lose weight, but if you do they might leave you a bad review. If you get enough of them, your practice might not keep you. Try few doctors own their own practice these days, so they have to care about patient satisfaction surveys.
This resonates. The article has some interesting points, and get where they're coming from. Unpacking can be helpful to think about the next smallest step, but I agree, thinking of all the things ends up creating a mountain that looks too hard to climb, nevermind that many of the questions and challenges you ask may not even materialise. My main takeaway is just to ask the question of why you want to do this thing you've said you want to do, and what the next smallest step is to do it. If you find yourself enjoying it, carry on.
For example, when people say they want to write a book or be a novelist, what they really mean is, they want to have written a book and been a writer. They're looking at the finished product. This is likely true of most people who want to do X, because they see it as a solution to their current situation.
The better thing is just sit down and write stuff. Poems, diaries, letters, very short stories and vignettes. See where it takes you.
The professor thing made me laugh, because some people like helping others grow and learn and blossom, despite all the day to day stuff. That was my step father's motivation for it. He found he enjoyed it.
There is value in just throwing yourself into something and seeing if you enjoy it. For example, I have a friend who started brewing his own beer. He loved everything about it, and enjoyed it. He connected with other home brewers, and gradually he ended up becoming a master brewer. He didn't start with the end in mind, he threw himself into what he was doing and carried on because he enjoyed it. Funnily enough, another friend started roasting his own coffee beans because he liked drinking coffee, and today he sells his own beans, and has just opened his own coffee shop. He carried on doing it, because he enjoyed it.
I've always liked Tim Minchen's advice on this: "And so I advocate passionate dedication to the pursuit of short-term goals. Be micro-ambitious. Put your head down and work with pride on whatever is in front of you… you never know where you might end up. Just be aware that the next worthy pursuit will probably appear in your periphery. Which is why you should be careful of long-term dreams. If you focus too far in front of you, you won’t see the shiny thing out the corner of your eye."
> There is value in just throwing yourself into something and seeing if you enjoy it.
Absolutely, when the stakes are low and the timelines short. Then it's a very good option for "not knowing what to do".
It's a really bad idea when you have to start by taking on six-figure student loans, or when it will take years of your life to get to the point where you're confronted with the unappealing aspects, which will dominate your time thereafter.
Sounds to me that your dad would have been interested by the question and engaged with the interview.
The article was about "I hate my job people" and finding the difference between someone with enough interest to really change his life.
As an analogy, I'm sure car salesman know from experimental evidence that there's a difference between an interested buyer and a tire-kicker. ... that a few questions can discern with high probability.
> if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting
I think you missed the second part of the sentence, it's one thing to not know the answers, but you should have a personal interest in finding them
> Wolff wrote “more than sixty” books between 2007 and 2018. That’s 5.5 novels per year, every year, for 11 years, before she hit it big.
> Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” but when you were actually doing them, did you want to stop, or did you want to continue?
I think people like Wolff like writing. Brandon Sanderson is another example. He can't stop. I think they'd do it even if they weren't able to make it as novelists. That's what separates a lot of those people from most others. Sure, some people have a goal and the grit to reach for it, to do that dribbling & shooting practice for six hours a day even if it's not actually fun. But some people have this sort of mania for their work. It's not really sensible to talk about being like them, unless you already are.
That's the point of the article though. They're saying that instead of trying to grit your teeth and push through something you hate to satisfy an arbitrary goal, you should find the thing that you're crazy for enjoying so much and pursue that, because doing it is what the vast majority of your life will actually be spent on
I get the point, but this is fantasy thinking. The vast majority of people will actually never find that thing despite trying their entire life to find it, and for those that do find it, it will likely be a thing society doesn't care about. Obsession is a gift in my opinion, many people don't have it, and im envious of the clarity of purpose those that do have it seem to enjoy.
The primary reason Bill Gates is a billionaire is because he was born at the perfect time for someone to be obsessed with how computers work. What would he have done if he was born 100 years earlier?
> What would he have done if he was born 100 years earlier?
Introducing the Microsoft Slide Rule
That reminds me of another wolf, Gene Wolfe. He wrote some of the most complex and critically praised science fiction to date, and most of his famous works were done in his free time while working as an industrial engineer. Or for that matter, a certain patent clerk who wrote some really fine physics papers.
Other examples: Baruch Spinoza, lensmaker by day, philosopher by night. Philip Glass: moving man, plumber, cab driver, and avant-garde composer. E. E. "Doc" Smith: food engineer and science fiction writer. Franz Kafka: administrator in an insurance company, and writer of history's weirdest books. Wallace Stevens: insurance company executive and poet. William Carlos Williams: doctor and poet. And these are just off the top of my head.
This is messing with my head. I love Spinoza and Kafka and couldn't imagine them as anything else but being full-time thinkers and writers.
Who told you they weren't? Are you only a programmer or a thinker about programming while at keys?
i think by full time they meant sitting around in some dingy room, smoking cigarettes and positing/thinking rather than filling most of their days with other activities that have nothing to do with this craft (and i would say to posit well, you need life experiences and they did exactly what they needed to do to become legendary)
'Another county heard from.'
Thanks for dropping by. No need to hurry back.
Thanks for that substantive contribution.
Personally, the line between 'administrator in an insurance company' and Kafka's works fits neatly within my mental model of the world.
Which makes me wonder what he called the kind of experience a person has when dealing with an insurance company: the word "Kafkaesque" didn't exist yet.
"Inspiration", perhaps.
Wilfred Owen: soldier and poet (whose poetry was ignored/neglected until the 1960s)
Bukowski: pickle factory for a while then 13ish years at the united states postal service
and a lot of his work revolves around working at the post office and pickle factory
Anthony Trollope worked at the post office, Andy Weir was a programmer until he hit it big with The Martian.
Robert Frost was an insurance guy or something
No, Frost was a teacher and a farmer to make money.[1] Tom Clancy was an insurance agent.
Was thinking of T.S. Eliot
Just took a look at Wikipedia. No mention of insurance, but he did write much of his early work while farming during the day. As did Robert Burns.
The best advice about writing for a living I ever got was in a book I read as a young aspiring writer. It was to the effect of "Most people who say they want to write actually want to 'be a writer'. If you can be happy doing anything else for a living, do that instead. Only write if you feel like you'll go crazy if you don't."
I'm not a writer, but I do write, and I also read this advice when younger then promptly ignored it. I think it was from Bukowski.
It sounded, and still sounds, like "Only run if running bursts from the soles of your feet and you feel like you'll go crazy if you don't." Well, no. It might be good advice for a professional athlete -- I wouldn't know -- but you can run whenever you damn well feel like it as an amateur. So too for writing.
I got that advice too, but now I feel like they say that about every profession
There's a short video of two guys parodying what Brandon Sanderson's writing problem is like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcZVAPGE-YE
I think there are plenty of successful authors who don't have the same obsession as Sanderson and Wolff, but they are obsessed in different ways. And I think that's the key: if there's something that you enjoy doing and can find some aspect that you can really obsess over—it doesn't have to be the same as everyone else (probably better if not)—then you might be able to make that work as a fulfilling career.
This may be a place where writing for magazines for instance is a good thing.
Standup comics try out new material on tour, and then save up the bits that work for big gigs and specials. Creative writing isn't that different from joke writing. Write yourself a bunch of short stories, try things out, see what sticks, novelize the good ones. Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik was a short story. There are some famous books out there that were originally done as serials.
Do more, but find ways to shed the unsuccessful attempts, or otherwise give yourself permission to fail. If you're not failing occasionally you aren't reaching far enough.
Writing is interesting, though, because there's also a steady stream of writers regurgitating the "I don't like writing, I like having written" line too.
George RR Martin possibly the most famous/contemporary example, but here's a page tracing back recorded instances of it. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/10/18/on-writing/
I think this applies to many creative activities, or even general problem-solving tasks as well. I don't like going through the frustrations of the puzzle-solving process in programming, but it sure increases the accomplishment of having debugged the issue and finished the program, later on.
Interestingly enough, i know some people who love programming. They make side projects, contribute to open source etc. But they kind of hate it as a job.
One problem with programming as a job is that you have to work on the project (and with the tools) that your employer or customer wants you to.
On side projects, open source etc, you get to work on projects (and with tools) that you care about and/or want to use or work on.
This kind of thing probably applies in some other jobs, but not all. Music, writing, visual arts and design, and construction at least seem like something where the particular target or process may be a vital part of the interest and satisfaction.
My first thought when I read this, and it may very well be misinformed, was that she is probably using a team of ghostwriters. Many novelists at that level are. Your name just becomes a brand at a certain point.
People always say that about productive writers
And then you have guys like Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who wrote a single, and quite short, book, and it is vastly better than all the crap those writing multiple books per year can produce.
> Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
The appeal of short form names like these is clear considering his full formal name and title is
Don Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa, 12th Duke of Palma, Baron of Montechiaro, Baron of La Torretta, and Grandee of Spain of the first class.
The vast majority of the most-successful people in any field, by whatever definition of "success" that field has, are people who would do it even if they weren't successful. You can't fake it. The old saying that "hard work trumps anything else" is an almost-cruel thing to say to kids who don't know any better: A person swimming downstream will exert the same calories as one swimming upstream, do the same work, but end up swimming ten times further.
Asimov was the same apparently, as is Stephen King, its what they do.
Paul Graham wrote a nice article about this.
https://www.paulgraham.com/genius.html
In my life, I knew a guy who was obsessed with the Beatles. You couldn't get him to shut up about it. People hated listening to him but he didn't care, he just wanted to talk about the Beatles. Now imagine if he was obsessed with software development - he could change the world.
it is so exhausting to talk to some people who obviously don't like what they have to do for a living and then expect others to also hate what they do.
I get that it must suck to do some bullshit job you don't want to just so you don't starve, but I studied for the thing I wanted to do, found a job doing what I wanted to, and now someone is paying me relatively well to do the thing I would do on my own time. Then I get called wage slave and capitalism boot licker just because I found someone to pay for my hobby.
> Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”
> Most of those students would go, “Oh, no I would not like to do those things.” The actual content of a professor’s life had never occurred to them. If you could pop the tops of their skulls and see what they thought being a professor was like, you’d probably find some low-res cartoon version of themselves walking around campus in a tweed jacket going, “I’m a professor, that’s me! Professor here!” and everyone waving back to them going, “Hi professor!”
I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.
Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.
Also, grading was fun, just because you can be an unusually good grader by doing the barest-minimum and including, like, any notes at all (the students just want to know that you actually understood why you took their points away).
It strikes me that those are two spots that seem hardest to automate away, and involve satisfying the customer the most. But they don’t really seem to be central to the professor’ actual identities, or to the general perception of them.
> I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.
I think you're misusing the analogy completely. In the analogy, the cartoon version of the professor doesn't actually _do_ anything. I don't see how you could compare that to your real life, where you were actually doing something (teaching students). Unless you're dismissing the act of teaching students as a lecturer as a completely empty pursuit.
FWIW I wasn’t trying to contradict the analogy or argue against it, just had some reflections based on it. In the story, the students have an entirely imagined idea of professoring. I think if most people put a little more thought into it, they’d come up with lecturing as a major job of a professor.
I didn’t go all the way down that path, but got one step closer to the job, so I’m reflecting on the bits that were surprisingly rewarding and what wasn’t (for me).
> Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.
This is awesome, I love the way you phrase this and having that mindset.
+1, I loved office hours, and felt _ok_ about giving demos/lectures. I honestly didn’t care much for research though lol, it’s very lonely. I wish “teaching professor” was a more viable career, my impression is that it pays poorly
The college I went to explicitly billed itself as for teaching, and most of our professors were just that. They might do research with the upperclassmen, but their priority was teaching.
That is, until we got a new president who set a new strategic goal for being a top research school and adjusted all hiring and tenure standards for that.
Maybe in the future AI will take all the big lecturing and research jobs, but will need teaching assistants to do the in-person stuff, haha.
> Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.
You sound like one of those rare souls who might both enjoy and be good at people management.
(Line management, at least. The higher up you go, the less fun it gets, unless you're a psychopath whose primary motivation is Number Go Up.)
I once knew a manager who told a group of us engineers that they love getting contacted by customers. The angrier the better.
This was baffling, of course. But the explanation was that every time it was an opportunity to listen to their problems and ask questions and figure out what the problem was and try to work out a solution. Might be their expectations or their situation or it might be the company product or service. Either way, they could usually find a way to make things better and the customer would end up being happier than they were before the talk.
It's still pretty far down the list of jobs that I'd ever want to do, but I can really relate to the motivation. Made a lot of sense.
I found that example weird, probably because it's the one I had the most experience with, having been a grad student at two different universities. (I don't have enough familiarity with the other examples to know if they're weird or not.)
I don't know any grad student (outside perhaps a first-semester master's student) who has delusions about what a professor does. First off, they know academia is publish-or-perish, they've been told it every day, and they're prepping for it right from the get-go, with qualifying papers that are going to turn into their dissertation which is going to turn into their first academic book -- the first of many they know they're going to need to write. And they know that it also involves a lot of face time with the students, since as grad students they spend a lot of face time with the professor. And they know about the teaching because they're having to do it too now, as barely-paid lecturers.
> "Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan"
Did those students not have advisors?
Sorry, I got the point of the article, and it was fine, but this whole anecdote felt off.
That anecdote was about undergrads who thought they wanted to be professors.
So it was. I swore I read grad students. I guess my eye skipped on after "In grad school..." and filled it what it imagined. Ignore my comment above, then.
>I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.
You didn't like teaching like that. Some people really do, some people don't. Nothing wrong with individual preferences.
Love the opening. I have always been interested in what people actually do hour-to-hour at their jobs and have always found it frustrating that a) they don't teach you about this in school AT ALL, b) people don't talk about it socially either. Even with social media I don't think we have a very good public repository of information of this kind. It would be a very interesting project to interview a few hundred people about what they actually do at work.
Two things that the article neglects:
1. People grow into jobs and start to like stuff they didn't expect to like when they imagined doing them before.
2. The hour-to-hour things at a job like going to a meeting depends heavily on the people you're with. The same person might hate meetings at company 1, but like them at company 2, just because of other people and the atmosphere. The people-aspect is probably very important and impossible to unpack before you tried the job.
Alain de Botton wrote a book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work where he describes ten different people and their jobs in detail. I enjoyed the book because I like de Botton's writing, but it turns out most jobs sound a little dull.
> people don't talk about it socially either
Yeah totally, and I'd say that's exactly because of "status", which is mentioned:
High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack
Status is the thing people tend to communicate socially, not what they actually do day to day
---
I remember a pg line that cuts to the core of this:
It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
How To Do What You Love - https://paulgraham.com/love.html
It seems like a good rule to me ...
sometimes its the power that makes the prestige though.
Power is often just an alternative method of paying people.
Then it’s a job you will struggle to keep your soul doing.
> people don't talk about it socially either
I've noticed this as well; especially with the more abstract professions that have words like consultant or strategy in them. Even from friends you'll often get a surprisingly 'corporate-BS' answer.
The best answers I've gotten is by asking people to take me through their last work day hour by hour.
Then again, I've had plenty of people not understand my job either: "I build software applications" sounds obvious to us but I've had people ask the follow up "So how do you actually do that?". The answer they're expecting is something like "I sit in front of a computer and type text into something equivalent to notepad".
I’ve worked in technology roles for 20 years. If you told me 20 years ago that my career was going to evolve the way it did, I never would have believed it. I’ve worked at 8 companies in that time, had 12 different roles, and managed people for the last 7 years. Every role I’ve had has been wildly different than the one before it. Passion and interest comes and goes, and the biggest factor is usually other people. In the last decade or so, most of my disinterest in my career has stemmed from collective shiny object syndrome from everyone I work with. People who want to adopt and build new things no matter the cost (or need). People trying desperately to pad their resumes, rather than truly improve things. Some of the more successful people I’ve seen in my career have been those that are truly curious, make sound decisions, constantly dig into solving difficult problems, teach others around them effectively, and can manage their own ego (not an exhaustive list by any means). What I do on a daily basis changes with every different team I’ve managed. Every team has been at a different stage, has different dynamics and challenges, needs different input and oversight, and needs more or less hands on leadership. I’ve played the role of a thought leader, salesman, mediator, therapist, project manager, etc. If you’re hands off (no technical contributions), it can be boring. You need to find a balance of being prepared for meetings (meaningful ones, with actual decisions and team driven outcomes), for your team members (1-1’s, performance management, mentorship, venting, etc.), following up on their asks (servant leader), keeping a backlog of work, addressing HR tasks, digging into PRs, planning execution around people possibly disappearing for a week or 12, etc, etc. Think about and answer the questions “What does the next month look like? What about 3? 12?” Hire, coach, fire, and everything that goes into all 3. Oh, and surprise Prod is down - now you’re behind on something, and you’re interrupting the business. Oh, the adult toddlers who are all the smartest person in the room are angry at each other? That was expectedly unexpected. The thing someone asked to work on suddenly isn’t as fun as they thought it would be? Couldn’t have predicted that since the last time it happened. If you’re working people too hard and they can’t self-regulate, you’re burning them out. If you’re not working them hard enough, they’re not growing and they’re bored. But everyone has different thresholds and skills and interests, and you need to figure these all out to make sure you can put them on tasks that keep them engaged, and challenge them, otherwise supplement with other work that will. What does this all look like at the end of the day? Click. Type, type. Click. Talk. Write (yes, on paper). Type type. Click. Talk talk talk.
Nice illustration that it's a real skill to be able to describe this stuff. At the "type, type, click, talk" level of abstraction, every white collar job is exactly the same.
I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.
I think the “get rich easy” reputation that software engineering gained somewhere around the 2010s really hurt the industry and a lot of people who are chasing the dollar.
I’m an unhinged lunatic who loves productivity software and user experiences. The type of kid who was setting up Outlook betas in 6th grade to try the new features. Watching videos about how the Ribbon was designed. Reading C++ for dummies even though I had untreated ADHD and couldn’t sit still long enough to get much past std::cout. Eventually daydreaming about walking into the office, tired from a hard sprint, getting coffee in corporate-sponsored coffee cups.
I wake up and reflect how profoundly lucky I am to have my dream job. Not just having the career I have, but having a dream at all and having a dream I could love in practice.
I was still in middle school in the early 2010’s and I remember thinking how lucky I am to want to be a computer programmer for a career AND it happens to pay a lot of money.
Unfortunately many people today got into for the money and not the passion (or at least the passion and the money). Those people look for shortcuts and are generally unpleasant to work with, in my opinion.
Those are the exact people who are most excited about AI today.
They just want the code but they don't enjoy the coding, so they're trying to find something that will give them the former while sparing them the latter.
I don't think that's true at all. I think people who enjoy coding, but don't like AI, like to believe that's true, because it makes it easy to write off AI as useless, and to look down on people who use it ("they're not real programmers anyway. Not like me."). But my experience is that there's a ton of talented people who love programming who also find AI super exciting and useful.
For a hobby I'm writing a little videogame in C using Raylib. I write a lot of the code myself, but sometimes there's an annoying refactor that won't be any fun. I have limited time and motivation for hobby programming, so if an AI can save me 10 minutes of joyless drudgery when I only have 30 mins to work on my project, that's fantastic. Then I get 10 more minutes to work on coding the stuff that's actually interesting.
Not to mention it's an invaluable source of information for how to do certain things. Asking Claude to give me guidance on how to accomplish something, without it writing the code explicitly, is a big part of what I use it for.
Saying those people are only there for the money is a little bit reductive IMHO.
I like computers but I actually don't like programming that much as an action.
Programming is just a tool I use and try to master because it allows me to do what I like and that's building things.
I'm happy that AI is there to help me reduce the friction in building things.
I'd also argue that people who sees programming as an end and not as a mean are also going to either don't like working in most software companies or to be pretty negative contributors despite their mastering because, in my experience, those people tends to solve inexistant problems while having a hard time understanding that what pays their salary are boring CRUDs calling tangled ORM queries.
I said absolutely nothing about money.
> I actually don't like programming
Right, that's my point exactly.
> in my experience, those people tends to solve inexistant problems
Yes, that's definitely a risk with people who really just love writing code. Fortunately, most people who like to write code also like to have useful code written, so in my experience, the folks who will go off an yak shave a thing no one needs for months are fairly rare.
Telling an AI to implement CRUDs calling tangled ORM queries sure sounds like an exciting profession!
Really? That hasn't been my experience at all. There are a lot of brilliant developers who love programming and are excited about AI. (Just read Simon Willison's blog, or any number of other people.) Conversely, my sense is that a lot of the people who are just in it for the money don't want AI to change the industry because they don't like learning new things and they feel it threatens the six-figure salaries they get for churning out boilerplate code without having a deep understanding of architecture or systems.
And they may be right to be worried! If you are in the game out of love and you like learning new things about computers you are well-positioned to do well in the AI era. If you just want to get paid forever to do the same thing that you learned to do in your bootcamp in 2018 when the job market was hot, not so much.
..but but... I've never had the opportunity or helpful environment to focus on learning languages and focused on other skillsets.
Other efforts to try and coordinate the time, finances and a team to accomplish the projects that I have in mind also failed miserably..
Am I (for example) so bad to believe that I could possibly accomplish some of my dreams with the help of LLMs as another attempt to be an accomplished human being?
(partly /s but partly not)
I made no moral claims about whether it's bad to want to have code without wanting to go through the experience of writing it.
I want a nice lawn, but I don't want to mow it myself. I pay a landscaper. I don't think that makes me a bad person.
But it does make me a different person from someone who enjoys the process of manicuring a lawn.
The more powerful the tool, the more responsible its wielder should behave.
Ideally. In reality, that's impossible to enforce.
>The more powerful the tool, the more responsible its wielder should behave.
Anyone with a will to an objective will utilize any tools at their disposal, only the observer from another perspective will judge that this is 'good or not'. To the beholder, this has become the only way to achieve their goals.
An anecdote goes by the lady who was using a ww2 era hand grenade to crush spices in her kitchen for decades without anything happening. Goals were met and nothing bad happened but general consensus states that this is bad for many reasons, to which nothing happened.
Maybe it's not only responsibility, but the capability for one to understand the situation one is in and what is at their disposal. ..and a hint of 'don't be evil' that leads to good outcomes despite what everyone thinks.
> Maybe it's not only responsibility, but the capability for one to understand the situation one is in and what is at their disposal. ..and a hint of 'don't be evil' that leads to good outcomes despite what everyone thinks.
This understanding, and hint of broader/benevolent perspective, is what I meant by responsibility.
I'm not so naive as to expect it in general but I have known it to exist, that there are people who respect the responsibility implicit in proper use of their tools. The world is a labyrinth of prisoners' dilemmas so I get that there's a reasonable argument for being "irresponsible" whatever that means in the context.
For the greater good, would you go as far as saying that the act of responsibility comes from the top, the people who lead, and those in the public spotlight? Or would this ideology need to be indoctrinated in educational systems? Or do we have to hope and pray that each and every human born would need to go through the same process of learning and understanding to reach this level of responsibility?
I've taken to having a hobby car, and I'm pretty sure I could have been solving automotive problems for a living rather than computer problems; these days, automotive problems are computer problems, but my hobby car is my age and only has one computer in it, but it's not servicable ... it just works and runs the fuel injectors, or it stops working and I'll get a used replacement or a megasquirt. Computer problems are nicer, cause I don't smell like car for 2 days afterwards, but if there was no money in computer problems, I might have been redirected into car problems or other similar things.
Incredibly lucky, honestly. It's a rare thing to have a passion line up with a healthy income.
I went through that in the late 90s and saw the writing on the wall of the 2010s. Hoping it's not too cyclic
Right - there are two types of people working as developers.
1) People who love programming, do it as a hobby, and love being in front of a computer all day.
2) People who doing it because it's a decent paying job, but have no passion (and probably therefore not much skill) for it, and the last thing they want when they clock off their job is to be back on a computer.
If you are from group 1) - getting paid to do your hobby, then being a developer is a great job, but if you are from group 2) I imagine it can be pretty miserable, especially if trying to debug complex problems, or faced with tasks pushing your capability.
As someone who does this because it's a decent paying job, I don't think this comment is fair. I think I'm quite skilled, and I've been told so consistently. I don't have passion; I have discipline and professionalism. I take my job seriously. It pays well, and I make sure that I deserve that paycheck.
Passion for me is a nasty world, in the mouth of bosses. It's almost always a way to ask people to work unhealthy hours, and it results in bad work being done, which I have to fix later. If people talk live their own passion, it's fine, but whenever I hear someone appeal to the passion of someone else, it's to sell them into doing something that's not in their best interest.
I find it hard to believe that your discipline and professionalism doesn't come from, or go hand in hand with passion. Or maybe you are passionate about being disciplined on itself?
Sure. I'm passionate about turning off my computer at 18:00. And I'm passionate about not hurting our customers. These two go hand in hand: I work very hard to avoid prevent doing things that are likely to cause incidents, as those hurt customers who are not at fault, and they often mean I have to stay late.
I guess you could say I'm passionate about testing and observability, though that doesn't really describe how I feel. It just puts me in a sour mood when something breaks and we could have prevented it with better practices from the start.
Is it that hard to believe that certain people simply have the skill to apply themselves? That's what discipline kind of is.
But do you think you wouldn't be more skilled if you had passion for it? Sounds implausible to me.
The amount of times I've seen passionate people make bad technical decisions in the name of trying something exciting is too many to count. I obviously agree that passion is valuable, but not without faults. I think I'm better in some ways and worse in others due to the way I approach the job.
Have you ever met certain singers at talent shows? Even if they'd be better at it than if they wouldn't have the passion, there's also a certain bar one should be able to reach.
I love(d) programming when I was a hobbyist and still get the itch to hack around with stuff now and then.
But even then, I was never interested in doing it as a career. I knew I’d hate it. And lo and behold here we are. I just don’t care about most of the crap products people pay me to work on.
But I was also young and way too broke to go to school so it was really the best financial option at the time. In retrospect, I’d have wasted my time doing something else.
> I just don’t care about most of the crap products people pay me to work on.
I'm a masochist, I like the challenges and pain I have to deal with everyday for a product I don't care about.
Same, same. It was my main hobby since I discovered a little terminal in my dad's 80s videogame that could run BASIC, used my rudimentary 9 years old reading skills to look hard enough to the manual and figure out something about that puzzling black screen.
Discovered I could make it do stuff.
I could make stuff, just by typing some white characters in the black screen.
Fell in love, was my main indoors hobby, bought books, learned enough C/C++ to try to mod games before I was 14.
The web started to be a thing. I asked for HTML books for Christmas. Then learnt about ASP, it had something to do with Visual BASIC, I knew BASIC.
Learnt the web, got a job, worked my ass off. 12 hours day and loving it, I was 18, and lucky. My hobby was my job.
20+ years later, it's a job, programming is a skill I have and I'm extremely grateful for being so lucky that it also made me a career, allowed me to live in other countries, and ultimately settle down in a very different place than what used to be my home.
But still, it's a job now, not my hobby. After working in many different places, seeing the transformation of this industry, me getting older, it's just all a bit jading, I don't aspire to do this for more than a job these days, the only figment left of the old hobby is the odd electronics project for artists.
I have other hobbies that fulfill me in a very different way, I think it's just life :)
I guess it's those two same groups arguing about vibe coding. How many of group 1 say LLMs are too low quality when they really mean that it's diminishing their love of coding? And how many of group 2 say LLMs are the best thing ever when they really mean that they are diminishing their pain of coding?
I'm a hard group 1, and I don't really mind if LLMs take my job, just please don't take my passion.
I’m in group 1 but I do find LLMs to be helpful. I just tend to comb through their output and fix a bunch of issues. Maybe it’s not that much faster that way but it gets over the activation energy of starting a new project/module/ticket.
I do find that they’re pretty much only useful when I already know how I’m going to complete a task. If I can describe the implementation at the stack trace level I’ll do fine with AI. If I’m even a little lost the AI is a total crapshoot.
I want to challenge the statement that a sw dev is "sitting in front of a computer all day". It's like saying a professor is writing on the blackboard all day. If think about what I did today, several hours was spent talking to my manager and peers about work as well as personal stuff.
I was person 1, then I spent 13 years as an engineer, experience severe burnout, and became person 2. I am /very/ skilled, but I no longer enjoy things in the same ways I once did when it comes to computing. I don't despise it, but it no longer fuels me. I prefer to spend my time away from work indulging in other hobbies, like hiking in nature with a camera or playing board games with friends. My experience has been that turning your hobby into a job can kill all the enjoyment of the hobby.
“if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.”
Heh. And then they go become a "real" engineer (mechanical, electrical, whatever), and end up sitting in front of a computer all day, dealing with poor UI and poorly designed SW because a lot of CAD tools are either built in-house or owned by monopolies who have no incentive to improve the experience.
I've lived both worlds.
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2016/Jan/code-monkey-or-cad-mon...
I imagine the people who say that would like a more people-facing job (like, I dunno, maybe a DJ) rather than a computer-facing one. They don't necessarily imagine being a "real" engineer as an alternative to being a programmer, they put them both in the same category.
Not the ones I dealt with.
Mechanical Engineer: I build real things that I can touch!
Electrical Engineer: I get to play with oscilloscopes, and do soldering!
You get the idea.
I think this is because as students, a lot of engineering work is either labs, or on paper. They don't realize how much dependent on computers professional engineering work is.
> I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.
I went to college in the late 1990s at the height of the dotcom boom. Saw a bunch of people who had this same feeling.
Which made no sense to me b/c I loved programming so much that I would do my homework assignments ahead of time!
> I think the “get rich easy” reputation that software engineering gained somewhere around the 2010s really hurt the industry and a lot of people who are chasing the dollar.
Yup.
Also, "The Company is the Product," where the goal is to sell the company, and the end-users are just food for the prize hog.
Just start talking about improving software quality, or giving end-users more agency, privacy, and freedom, around here, and see the response.
I am a mechanical engineer who browses hackernews, if you want to get up and move around get a mechanical engineering degree
This is me too! Everything about writing code, running it, messing with Github, tinkering with my dotfiles, automations... even as a preschooler, I was always dissatisfied that my drawings didn't do anything. I feel astoundingly lucky to have a job I was born to do.
It's nice to get paid to do what I would be doing anyways.
Same. Maybe this AI text generator trend will bring salaries back down, the opportunists will leave for greener pastures and us mega-nerds will have the software-writing all to ourselves.
> The type of kid who was setting up Outlook betas in 6th grade to try the new features.
Oh man, this brings up memories of me being inordinately excited about Office 2007 when it was in beta. I was in elementary school.
And memories of staying up late reading my collection of outdated tech books (Borland C++, UNIX SVR4, HTML 4, and the MS-DOS 6.22 manual were the big ones). Initially learning about programming and UNIX from those books were extremely formative for how I view programming today, and I suspect that's given me quite a different perspective on a lot of things (especially things like HTML & CGI) than a lot of other folks in my age cohort.
But sitting in front of computers isn't what computer science is about, and some of those students might have aspirations to change the HCI status quo.
Software engineering and computer science seem to have two strict criteria to consider and neither of them is the same sort of continuous, analog suffering as wearing large shoes or practicing shooting a basketball. These criteria are
1) can you solve hard problems? 2) do you want to continue solving hard problems?
At least to me it seems that those two things take more effort and willpower than anything else in software. So I don't think challenging a person about whether they would love to sit in front a computer all day is the right approach.
> somewhere around the 2010s
It was there in the 90s
Far less prominently. I'll never forget when a programmer I worked with in 2001 or so said that he had decided to study CS in college for the money, having never written a line of code beforehand. The rest of us looked at him like he had squeezed a second head out of his neck. We had first gotten into it as a hobby and were later surprised to find that we could get paid for it. Only a few of us had CS degrees or had even taken CS coursework in college.
Yeah. I learned programming in high school in the mid-80's and was hooked. I liked electronics too, and got a BSEE. But took a summer job writing code and never looked back... still coding now, professionally.
My analogy is that the 80's and 90's were like the "Golden years" of software jobs... maybe like being in the aircraft industry was in the 30's. Lot's of learning and discovery and fun to be had. Working in software now is probably like I imagine being an aeronautical engineer at Boeing now... you'd better be prepared for being satisfied working on some small part of a much larger and complex system and moving at a glacial pace (compared to the Golden years).
(And yeah, the workplace now is flooded with people who seem to be here because they heard it paid well.)
My Information Systems major in college had 6 graduates in 2006. It had been over a hundred a few years prior.
1) I LOVED computer science school
2) I really love certain aspects of being a software engineer.
3) I have definutely said Ill kill myself if I have to sit in front of a computer for my entire life
4) this job will afford me a future where I can retire at a reasonable age. Whereas a non-computer oriented alternative (the other career available to me was house painting) will not.
Therefore I will bear the monotony of sitting in front of a computer all day for a few decades
True, teamblind.com shows how horrible people have become software engineers. no wonder software quality has become very bad
> Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.
Dijkstra famously wasn't exactly keen on computers.
I haven’t heard that, but if it’s true, it’s probably because he enjoyed math more than engineering or programming.
Computer science as a branch of mathematics has a long and fruitful history
Or to be more pithy, nobody accomplishes what Dijkstra did without liking their work. I’d say it’s zero people
I think I relate with most of the things you've said, even with the ADHD part (not officially diagnosed, however) but what annoys me these days is the amount of work we have to do. The work is rewarding but very often just * too much *. Maybe I'm unlucky or maybe it is the companies I worked for...
I actually find i tend to dislike non-programming computer activity. Love programming, but if someone suggests taking notes with a laptop instead of paper, my reaction is ewww computers.
For the same reason i chose not to go into computer science, changed to a different degree after 1st year in college, best decision.
What you really need in life is financial independence and then you can choose what you want to do.
Wish you all financial independence.
I think there are a lot of people who liked programming until it became a job.
OP is a decent article which just becomes fodder for the usual
1. I love my job because (1) CRUD apps are so immensely satisfying (2) turns out that optimizing ad metrics at FAANG was my innately-sought destiny (3) being acquired by GOOG is bitter-sweet because now my wife will complain that I am not retiring even though I can
2. As opposed to the normies that just have this job because they need a job
> I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.
This was a discussion that came up a few times in College. I argued that with hyper-specialization, you can't satisfy a desirable balance of cerebral and manual work, socializing, and being outdoors. Pick your poison. I didn't want to do shift work at the bottom of a mine pit so here I am.
You can have flexibility in your free time to do something else. My father was always tired from shift-work and did basically nothing at leisure even as we grew up.
It depends on your ideal balance. There are jobs that involve field work, thinking, and socializing, but there are always trade offs. I find that being indoors from dawn to dusk with a 30 minute walking commute and a hike once or twice a year is my ideal balance.
Police officer actually has a really good balance of physical exertion, mental/social challenge, and indoor/outdoor exposure. And you get to write A LOT. But there are lots of adjacent roles, and many more not so close; e.g. I know someone who used to do field data collection and data analysis for some conservation nonprofit; lots of nature, physical exercise, and mental stimulation.
You're right. Some with a academic slant I knew took biology and ended up working as park conservationists. That allowed them to be outdoors and do assessments for research.
I'll also concede that some proponents for trades will argue that their work is cerebral, but this probably depends on the job. Dev can be like that too. I knew union guys who would describe their work as pretty rote and dull despite the long hours (even for electrical), and others who'd say it was interesting.
> Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.
Well, people who do real computer science don't program a lot, it's all theoretical math. Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy does with telescopes.
That's why the real term is computing science.
> Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.
Sometimes the interest just fades. What stimulated me at age 14 no longer does at age 36.
This is something I've started to notice as I've talked with artists on tour.
Like, I'm a hobby metal musician, and I do have a certain dream of being on stage with a band. Even if it's just a dive bar with 20 people. Gotta be realistic. And I have 15 - 20 years available for that, or even more if you look at Grave Digger or - rest in peace old chap - Ozzy. But I'm not certain if I have the passion to be a touring musician even if that happened (which most likely wont). Like what these people take on is entirely insane.
Brittney Slayes from Unleash the Archers had tours during which she worked full-time remote. 8 full hours of work, out of the hotel, soundcheck, gig, meet and greet, back into the bus, sleep, back to work. And from what I've heard they've also done that with a kid on top. That is just nuts.
And even without that, big tours are hell from what I've heard. The first one or two tours are an absolute test for bands because it's all a huge rush of adrenaline, excitement, nonsense, strange locations all at once without a second to breathe.
If you hear that, a 9-5ish tech job isn't that bad.
creating an account just to respond to you, because i just got to the end of a 8 ish year journey playing with a local band and the reason i stopped has a lot to do with this unpacking. we never toured, and i would have loved to do exactly one, but i realized that i am not crazy about music in the sense of the article. even weekend gigs mean many hours of driving and spending most of your time with the band, who are cool guys but not nearly as cool as your SO.
don't get me wrong, i LOVE playing live, and i hope you find a way to do so, because it really is great, but going to that next level really does take being a little nuts. stories about people shedding on their instrument for 8 hours, and then going out and jamming for 6 more hours until 4 am, every day. music is really important to my life, but when push comes to shove i don't care about it that much!
> Which kind of coffee mug is best?
I don't want to open a coffee shop. But I have put some thought about the type of cup I like (not what is scientifically the best).
All this is in context of plain ceramic cups.
First, it shouldn't be too wide. It is an uncomfortable feeling holding such a cup. Relatively taller cups feel nicer to hold. Not sure if that helps with heat retention due to less wide mouth, if you don't have a cover.
Secondly, the handle should be just slightly wider than your fingers wrapped around it. Stupid fancy creative ones are the worst. Overly circular ones are terrible. If your fingers are going over each other while holding it, avoid it like plague.
Thirdly, the inner seam shouldn't be sharp but bevelled. That avoids buildup of deposit. I prefer black but white might be preferable for those particular about cleaning (also see last point).
Extension to previous point: glazed is better than matted - stuff doesn't stick so much.
Fourthly, avoid ones with uneven top/lip. Because you want to be able to put any available plate/cover without the steam escaping that much.
Tip for cleaning cups for lazy people: squirt some dishwasher liquid, fill it up to the brim with water and leave it until your next round. Make sure to hold it low so that the tap water generates some foam due to impact, basically avoid the soap lumped sitting at the bottom. It'll practically wash itself by the time you are back for your next cup and will be much more clean compared to having to clean a dirty cup that has been sitting for a while.
One of those articles that you'd love to share with certain people but it seems awkward when they receive a message from you with the link preview saying "Face it: you're a crazy person".
Funny quirk of the website: it says it needs JavaScript to work, but I can read everything and see everything just fine, and the formatting isn't even broken. Then I look at uBlock and 195 trackers are blocked. Yikes
I think this ties into like "observation farming"
When I was told to do this when I was like 14, and asked "waht did I want to do", I ran into all the exact traps that the article said in the form of overintellecutalization.
It takes a certain kind of maturity to just sit down and really try and observe, non-judgementally. Just what happened.
(then the intellectuals among y'all will say stuff like, "well perception isn't objective truth yada yada" this is also a big thought loop trap I had to get rid of. Just like, put it on hold, just say your thought, even if you think it's stupid, or it's some kind of "self strawman" and you want to elaborate more and justify etc.
Just say it.)
I've been able to do it for things I've really cared about, but often times I don't get into this state.
I should practice. I only even observed this thought pattern when I got good at math, and the whole thing was just sitting down, contemplating honestly pretty dumb thoughts, but if you thought loop yourself you get nowhere. Gotta say seemingly stupid stuff and just contemplate. Words are both the thing you should observe but not treat as truth, just... try to observe. idk.
talk about a strange loop!
I received both the worst and the best pieces of career advice when I was an undergraduate.
The worst advice was that writing software, after the dotcom bust, was dead as a career. This taught me a lot about the value of "conventional wisdom" vs looking at the underlying supply and demand dynamics of a career. Sort of adjacent to the theme of the essay, I think the best careers are those that you can tolerate and those that have favorable supply-demand curves.
The best advice was from a pre-med advisor, who asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life surrounded by people who were old, sick, dying, and - not in so many words - decrepit. At that moment I realized I was not a healer, I found most bodies to be gross, and I had no business considering a medical career.
> The best advice was from a pre-med advisor, who asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life surrounded by people who were old, sick, dying, and - not in so many words - decrepit. At that moment I realized I was not a healer, I found most bodies to be gross, and I had no business considering a medical career.
Ah yes, I came to the same realisation - my family were pressuring me to be a doctor because my marks were there - but spending all day touching sick people was not for me. Building machines is so much more fun and someone will pay me to do it! - crazy. I do this for free in my spare time.
If I had one piece of advice for someone trying to pick a career, it would be to require that they shadow someone actually in the professions they're considering.
Doctors: you may spend many many hours in front of a mobile computer entering notes, medications, etc. You may also spend a good deal of time fighting insurance companies via email and/or phone. It's likely you feel you are rarely "helping people"; sometimes you have to help people in spite of themselves. Also patients rarely do what you tell them to, contrary to what you judge to be in their best interests.
Lawyers: you may never see the inside of a courtroom or even a client. You likely will spend the mass majority of your time using Microsoft Word redlining documents. Trial drama is the exception of the exception.
Many jobs are not what people think they are.
I like this way of thinking.
Musician: you may never make it “big.” You might be making close to nothing in bars and other venues and only during later hours. People love covers even if you love your originals. Travel is brutal. Irregular hours make it harder to interact in the regular hour parts of life.
When I started college I thought I wanted to work in television production. One semester of interning at a local TV station cured me of that.
You have to love what you're serving. I produced over 70 public events for people wanting to learn voiceover. We had a feature roadmap and wishlist, and we worked our way through it over the years. Many (talent, recording, and advertising) studio owners came and coached at minimal cost because we had such a great reputation for doing it right at low cost to attendees. The great people who wanted to be associated with it, and the enthusiasm of everyone involved was incredibly fulfilling.
We expanded to the point that we recorded 350 sessions in a single day, each with a coach with decades of experience, a professional studio engineer (usually), a studio room, and short lectures throughout the day. We had to move to bigger and bigger conference hotels to get enough rooms until Covid shut everything down. There were tons of "unknown unknowns" that had to be solved over time.
We were focused initally on protecting the people who probably shouldn't be spending money on training (very frustrating to watch them be ripped off), and produced the event both as a place they could learn a bit at low cost, as well as serving the mission of providing bite-size workshops for people who didn't want weeks or months (or years) or training.
I didn't want to be an "event provider". I wanted to figure out how to do something for people I saw being served poorly in an industry I loved, and then to find ways to give more and more to the people who were showing up.
People aren't bad at "unpacking". They haven't made any effort to think about things.
I had a coworker ask a nephew in high school to sit with me at work to show them a software job. They said they wanted to be a game developer. It turned out they had never seen software code in any form, and had no idea what programing was generally. I asked them if they had any art skills, and they were baffled why that was relevant.
They had no concept of the job at all. They just liked video games. Apparently, I crushed their dreams.
> People aren't bad at "unpacking". They haven't made any effort to think about things.
I feel like the author made it pretty clear that's exactly what he means by "bad at unpacking."
The article describes it in relation to the limitations of human imagination. That's only relevant if you've made an attempt to think about it.
> Apparently, I crushed their dreams.
Why does your post make it sound like you dunked on some poor high school student? Maybe you could have been a tad more supportive? Not everyone is fortunate enough to understand what goes into engineering in high school. I am personally really grateful that when I had my "I wanna make games" moment, and I didn't know engineering at all, that I had the right influences in my life to guide me in the direction of understanding how to get there.
No, you're just making an assumption. I happily showed them the code I was working on. I was told afterward that I crushed their dreams by their aunt.
the internet has a habit of making everyone seem flat and cynical
> Well, you know how when you move to a new place and all of your unpacked boxes confront you every time you come home? And you know how, if you just leave them there for a few weeks, the boxes stop being boxes and start being furniture, just part of the layout of your apartment, almost impossible to perceive?
No, I do not know this. I've moved ~29 times in my life. I've never once had a problem unpacking. I packed up shelves and drawers and dressers and closets. When I get to the new place I open a box, see what's in it, "oh, this was the stuff in bedroom drawers" so I go put the stuff in there in just a few seconds. In a few hours I'm 100% unpacked.
I've never really understood why it would be any different for anyone else except if maybe if they moved to a much smaller place.
Is it really that common of an experience?
More to the point of the article though - I'm not entirely sure I want to unpack my job - I feel like lots of people would not "do the thing" if they knew how hard it would be. But, looking back, they're proud they "did the thing". I know for me, I started some companies and projects years ago. I was able to do this because I didn't know how much work it would be. Now that I know, I find it extremely hard to get started again. I wish I could go back to my old naive self.
Maybe a better example, all though one I have unfortunately not experienced, would anyone have kids if you "unpacked" what having kids is actually like? I think you could list 100s or 1000s of "unpleasant on paper" things but I don't really think you could write the positives in a compelling way against that list of negatives. And, yet I believe the majority of parents would tell you having children was the most fulfilling thing in their lives. I think many of the things mentioned in the post might also have a similar issue.
On unpacking after moving: I'd posit that what you describe is an extreme outlier of moving efficiency.
More often, there was some amount of disorder introduced along the way.
Boxes badly/not labelled, disparate contents mixed. Differences in house mix of drawers/cabinets/closets/etc means there's no direct equivalent for where something used to live. Unpacking that's blocked on other tasks like building the bookcase or deciding what this room will be used for. And if course the classic just having way too much stuff.
This all compounds for ADHD people, for whom the large stream of unpacking tasks coupled with their attendant stream of decisions can overwhelm and then depress, resulting in a quagmire as described in your quote.
It ain't pretty but I assure you it happens. My friend is going through it right now: six weeks after moving, their living room remains wall to wall boxes.
Unpacking the boxes is just a small piece of moving, but pretty sure you're "crazy" (and you should use that) if you don't associate it with physical and mental pain. Apart from the cognitive drain there is a point in doing it slowly so that you remember where everything went.
Moving 29 times is absolutely nuts, unless you have like no possessions
I agree that following the exercise too closely would dissuade many people from careers they would do fine in. Every job has toil.
That being said it has some value but perhaps not much more than just a little critical thinking.
The first few questions almost have me convinced I should open my own business. Surely there must be other difficult things?
I assume the main difficulty isn't that -- I assume it's the lack of comparative advantage, so competition eats into your margins until you're fighting a race to the bottom, not only making your customers happy, but doing it cheaper than someone else could, and I assume the stress from that makes it hard?
And also not being in control of your suppliers, so unpredictable events can affect your profit.
The main difficulty is that most people do not like running a business, especially a small business. For most of these businesses, you are buying yourself a job. Let's say you take out $1.5MM loan to open a shop, and you net $70,000 per year on a good year after expenses and debt service. After a few years, you have $1MM left to pay and there's no way you could sell the business for that. You have a personal guarantee on the loan.
Your vendors are always coming up with new ways to tack on extra charges. You have to deal with training, HR, bookkeeping, payroll, handyman tasks, cleaning, working shifts when your employees flake out, annoying customers, dangerous people, destructive customers, employee drama, the list goes on. If that is not what you enjoy, you will have a lot of your life doing things you do not enjoy. Sipping tasty coffee and chatting with your happy customers is a small part of the whole.
I also daydream about opening a business, like in the opening paragraph of the post. But I also know that I never will; it's a daydream, not a retirement plan. I know I would hate 95% of the process, without even fully unpacking it. That's why it's a daydream, and that's why when I'm frustrated at work I say "I wish I could quit and become a woodworker" or "I want to walk out of this job and open a D&D cafe."
But to your point, yep. There's a coffee shop in town - one of the only ones! - that we go to because we like it. But two more just opened up, both in better locations for both foot & car traffic, which might genuinely kill the other place. And there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.
No, those aren’t the follow on questions.
The follow questions are to establish if you are crazy about this, not sane about this.
Anecdote - Incredible introversion, if not social anxiety - and at one point I just up and drove to meet strangers at a cyber cafe to play video games, because I was obsessive about video games at that point. Same for cooking, writing papers, reaching out to people, and so on.
You overcome yourself, when it’s something that resonates with you.
Going back to your question - the lack of advantage, or bad margins etc - this is the “problem” vs “Challenge” view point issue.
IF you are crazy about this, then you will figure out ways to overcome those challenges - pivot business, learn to be lean, or find sustainable ways to build runway etc.
> Surely there must be other difficult things?
It's not that any of the things in that list are intrinsically difficult. But if you're a small business owner, imagine an endless series of those challenges and with each one, you've got only a few minutes to resolve it before the next one shows up.
I’ve now been self-employed for 25 years and have owned several businesses, one of which is a YC funded startup but most of which were very different.
None of them competed on price. Price competition is real I’m sure, but most businesses don’t succeed that way. Most of us have more in common with Apple than Wal-Mart (though of course several orders of magnitude smaller).
I’m not necessarily saying I wouldn’t ever consider such a business, but you better have some edge if you do. If you invented some way to manufacture a widget for 25% less than anyone else, sure, go eat that market. That’s not most of us though.
Coffee shops (his example and one really close to what I know) for instance don’t. You don’t win in that game by being cheaper than Starbucks and most don’t try.
What do you compete on, then?
Depends on the business! That’s kind of the magic.
Marketing, location, service, quality, ambiance. Lots of ways.
Quality, uniqueness, vibe, location, etc.
For an independent coffee shop specifically, the important question left out is "How are you going to create a welcoming environment that will attract customers without 1) aggressively kicking out the guy who bought one $5 espresso and then sat on his laptop occupying a 4-top table for 5 hours and 2) aggressively kicking out homeless people who try to use your establishment as a substitute for social services not provided by the local government?"
I think that the answer to #2 is you HAVE to aggressively kick out (aggressive) homeless people if you want a welcoming environment.
It's not that it's difficult, it's that most people don't realize what the day-to-day job is.
They assume they'll be hanging out in a coffee shop all day, chatting with regulars, but in fact the tasks and problems they'll have to solve is very different from what they imagine.
Yes, besides the mundane day to day details, which are actually up the alley of many people, the other thing that prevents people from being a small business owner is the amount of money they need to invest in it, and the fact that they are effectively assuming all of the risk; whether it be competition, changes to supply, changes to demand, etc. Insurance can blunt a few types of rare risk, but not the fundamental business risks.
So you have to be willing to take those risks, and want to be handling those mundane day to day details.
There are different businesses to be in. Some businesses are like arbitrage chasing the smallest margin you can find on the biggest scales. Some businesses are like chasing excellence doing the best you can do. There are many types. You can't impose the kind of business you want to succeed in on the industry you want to be in, you have to find opportunities.
> people who like Hawaiian pizza probably think their opinion is more common than it is (false consensus)
I supposed I just got called out -- is this actually a rare thing? I thought it was like, a meme to hate pineapple on pizza? Obviously some people do, but I have never thought of my opinion (liking the combination) as especially rare.
I think only those actually selling Hawaiian pizza know how popular it is. From observing how often I've seen it as an option, over the counter, or frozen, in various countries, my personal suspicion is that it's indeed actually more commonly appreciated than those who think it's a mark of good taste to hate it would believe.
It's even been an option in every By-the-Slice display I've ever seen that wasn't purely a Pepperoni/Plain cheese affair.
Pineapple has a +22 approval rating https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Pizza_poll_r...
I think this is just the joke, where the author must not like pineapple on pizza, and is insinuating that those of us who do are making a cognitive error in thinking that there are numerous others who do.
Speaking of which, if you're ever at a Mellow Mushroom, get the Pacific Rim.
It also probably depends on the country. As a French person I never met anyone who thought it was a good idea. I also don't think I have ever seen a pizza with pineapple in a good pizza restaurant. Only in bad fast food restaurants. I guess it's quite different in the US.
> As a French person I never met anyone who thought it was a good idea.
If they serve it, whether in "good" restaurant or in fast food in France, it's probably because the strange people that pay money to enjoy them do exist. Perhaps you need to enlarge your social circle.
Its a Canadian invention
I don't think France should be the standard for acceptable Pizza toppings. What do the French know about Pizza?
I think I heard it’s about 30% of people who like it. Which is big enough to put it on every menu, but it’s not the majority.
... it can't be that rare or it wouldn't be a common combination right? Like, you'd be rare if you wanted black licorice on pizza, and you'd know you're rare b/c you wouldn't find opportunities to order it.
Reminds me of a quote from the Projection Lab success story that got posted a few weeks ago: https://projectionlab.com/blog/we-reached-1m-arr-with-zero-f...
> But luckily, success indexes less on IQ and more on consistency. The willingness to doggedly show up every single day can take you to some really suprising and amazing places.
"Eighty percent of success is showing up." attributed to Woody Allen.
The only issue I have with that quote is the word “willingness” - it makes it sound like a choice. I think if your brain likes it you’ll turn up every day and it’ll never be hard, if you don’t like it it’s almost always unsustainable in the long run, and we overestimate how much choice we have in this.
"Do you want to be a surgeon? = Do you want to do the same procedure 15 times a week for the next 35 years?"
Compared to trying to implement vague feature requests with no clear solutions under arbitrary deadlines and for probably a lot more pay and respect in general? Yes.
Just to unpack a bit more; Would you inevitably be willing to stand in front of the family of one of your patients and tell them there had been unforeseen complications and that their loved one has died?
Knowing a few people who work in surgery rooms, this kind of thing can happen with most surgeries. It is getting rare, but still possible.
Yes. One of the particular features of engineering and especially software is that you don't usually solve the same problem twice. You just use the previous solution. That kind of thing can make you dream of having a job where you can just do fairly routine and well understood tasks as well and as efficiently as possible instead of spending days going "WTF" and "how is that possible".
I wouldn't mind doing the exact same thing over and over every day, if it alleviates someone's pain or suffering.
I got a colonoscopy last year and the doctor was pretty proud of the fact that he did more procedures than any other doctor in the state for the past few years running. The guy was very likable and was clearly dedicated to his job and being the best at it that he could be. How can you not respect that?
The tech equivalent would be having companies line up to meet you, so that you can perform some particular upgrade of their system. The exact same each time. Then having every one of them praising and thanking you profusely after. Hell yeah.
I'd ask more questions, but I wouldn't want to probe...
you're one of the crazies
Yeah the OP critique doesn't even sound bad. There are some types of surgery that are routine and easy after you get it and doing such a thing 15x a week to earn a top 1% salary sounds pretty good. The vast majority of jobs are routine and involve doing the same task at least 15x a week, probably many more times than that.
> This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one
Does everyone (or even most people) have a "right" career? I actually think this framing itself is harmful. If comparison is the thief of joy, then what could be worse than believing that there is some yet to be discovered perfect-for-you career out that you are missing.
I think I agree with you, it's harmful. If you sit down and unpack everything you're about to do you'll end up not doing anything, except what gives you the most pleasure.
There are many things I started in my life that all led to wonderful places, but if I would've sat down and prepared myself about all the horrible steps in the middle, I wouldn't have done them. Even now my work has 'bad' aspects that would've kept me away from taking up the work in the first place, if I'd known about them. I still do them because the work needs to be done.
There might not be a single right career, but there can be many wrong careers.
I never wanted to open a coffee shop, but was able to answer all of the questions. I guess I should consider opening a coffee shop?
Joke aside, this is particularly relevant for people who think they want to be entrepreneurs (most just want to not have a boss), and particularly those who think they want to build a VC-backed business (most just want to get rich magically)
We see this a lot in startup communities.
"I want to be a successful startup founder", or even worse "I want to have a successful app!" (though that was more prevalent 10-15 years ago).
This is usually accompanied by no relevant industry experience, tech knowledge, or skills. So obviously doomed to fail, but there's so much bullshit around the community about just believing in yourself and your idea that they'll persist regardless (usually this is perpetrated by the various bits of the ecosystem that feed off newbie clueless founders).
The good ones quickly realise that they're in way over their head, and either learn fast or get out fast.
As TFA says, the focus is always on the perceived status of being a "successful startup founder" and never on the actual work of building a business from scratch and what that actually involves (usually 5-10 years of grinding poverty and stress).
I think the direction of this is awesome, though I'd also say there's a reverse argument to be made that I'm more sympathetic to.
Rather than figuring out the less glamorous side (i.e. coffee bean suppliers) and wondering if you'd like doing that thing, I think the opposite could be a good question too:
Do I love the upside enough to deal with the downside?
No cafe owner will enjoy getting permits rejected because your bathroom sink is too high to be wheelchair accessible, replacing a supplier because they no longer carry the butter you like or having a barista not show up for work (all real examples from cafe owner friends).
But they love it enough to go through with it anyway because they care about the result. I think we should view it more that way.
Ask an aspiring software engineer if they would like to do daily 9am standups, spend hours in Jira and be lectured by a product manager who last wrote code in 2012 and they'll say no.
Experienced software engineers don't enjoy that either. They do enjoy building software enough to put up with that stuff though.
I actually think to some extent the ideas you shared are exactly what this article is questioning
In particular some things that stood out to me:
> No cafe owner will enjoy ...
I don't know about this specific case, but I'll bet you that, contrary to what the majority of people think, there are people who relish this challenge and don't see it as a downside.
> ... they care about the result.
I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but "result" to me here is precisely what was meant with the professor example. The point was you should enjoy the process, not the result.
> Ask an aspiring software engineer if they would like to do daily 9am standups, spend hours in Jira ...
I think that this statement is guilty of a rather typical sin on software forums which is assuming we all work similar jobs. I suspect you are right that a large portion of devs would agree with this.
However, I certainly have worked with, heck I have even been the dev who enjoys doing this. This is more true if you frame it as "lots of regular meetings with great process obsession, working with a product manager with a technical background".
A thought that occurred to me when reading your post was that TFA is somewhat guilty of being on the extreme side. Your framing to me, is actually quite helpful in providing balance, in the sense that it may not always be wise to chase for the white rabbit profession with no downsides. Rather accepting some downsides while still enjoying the process (unlike the dour university admins).
> I think that this statement is guilty of a rather typical sin on software forums which is assuming we all work similar jobs. I suspect you are right that a large portion of devs would agree with this.
Thinking of myself, I guess it's kind of true. I work in marketing (content specifically) and while I consider myself a writer, I actually quite enjoy writing about things like usage-based pricing or product strategy.
For most writers, those things would be the thing they want to be liberated from so they can write speculative fiction while my desire to write speculative fiction doesn't extend beyond wanting to be "wrote a novel" guy.
On the other side, I was into photography as a teenager and thought I wanted to be a photographer. But when I read about the actual workday of photographers, I lost all interest.
---
> A thought that occurred to me when reading your post was that TFA is somewhat guilty of being on the extreme side. Your framing to me, is actually quite helpful in providing balance, in the sense that it may not always be wise to chase for the white rabbit profession with no downsides. Rather accepting some downsides while still enjoying the process (unlike the dour university admins).
I think the biggest problem with the article's take is that if we say you should enjoy the "underbelly" parts of a job, then wouldn't that select for people who don't care about the result?
Do we want the researchers who love writing grant applications and teaching hungover undergrads more than they do working on visionary ideas?
Ultimately, I guess one thing the article is missing is that sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too. In many situations, you can bring in a co-founder/creative partner who loves the stuff you hate and vice versa.
> For example, in grad school I worked with lots of undergrads who thought they wanted to be professors. Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”
I’m a professor, and I’d only add gesturing to represent teaching and banging head on a table to represent committee meetings.
But I freaking love my job.
An issue I have with this, is that it poses two rather contrary hypotheses.
1. When considering a career, people do a bad job of unpacking the detailed day-to-day activities that make it up.
2. When shown these detailed day-to-day activities people can do an excellent job of assessing whether they would be "happy" doing it or not.
Why would a person who is so bad at making the leap from the vague notion of being a professor to imagining the real-world actualities of that job, suddenly gain 100% detailed insight into whether or not those actual tasks would make them happy?
I know exactly what I want to do, if I had the money to retire today: I'd build instruments for a living, which is something I already do as a side gig/hustle, and is something I have done for years now.
It is one of those things that fall under the category "very enjoyable, but financially difficult". If you're already set financially, living a FIRE lifestyle, you can run a shop at a scale that:
- Doesn't burn you out
- Doesn't force you to cut corners
- Keeps it somewhere between a hobby and a "job"
Me and my partner are both both chasing FIRE, and I think we should get there within 4-5 years. So-called "Fat FIRE" in 10-12, if we decide to push on. We have both our dreams of focusing on the things we care most about. We both also know very well that the things we love to do, don't pay much.
Is literally nobody going to bring up this 8 hours per day 5 days a week not being needed for most jobs? A coffee shop could sell more coffee in that time but for majority of engineers it just means we can work slower and spread work over time because we are forced to fill 8 hours
I think one thing that this article misses out on is that people are more and more likely to have many careers over a lifetime. In my case, I was a teacher, then a technical writer, then a teacher again. And now I'm shifting into curriculum development. The skills built in my different careers all have complemented each other, and I don't feel as if any of them are my one and only "dream job."
In your case the jobs look closely related, don't they?
Humans are amazingly adaptable, even managing to eke out survival under the worst circumstances. You think slaves didn't make jokes about the boss as part of helping them get through the day/week/month?
The craziness is in finding ways to vary the experience within what tolerances you have, with whoever you have with you.
Workplace colleagues can make or break a "this is a good place to work" assessment.
> “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”
That sounds great actually ... but you didn't mention the constant grant-writing and chasing funding, which is what universities actually value.
> Why is it so hard to unpack, even a little bit?
I think a major part of the reason is we like thinking about the packed thing. I'm sure that most people who fantasize about owning a coffee shop will never do so and probably deep down know they'll never do so. But the fantasizing itself is a pleasurable activity. Unpacking the job bursts that bubble and ends the enjoyable fantasy.
It takes a lot of self awareness to be mindful and deliberate about when you are planning (which requires unpacking and can be unpleasant but may be ultimately useful) and when you're fantasizing (which is deliberately low stakes and enjoyable but will not materially affect your life).
It's very easy to get stuck in the trap of fantasizing while falsely believing you are planning.
I've been dating recently and I think planning dates is mostly fantasizing.
I plan the time, place and activities, imagine things to discuss, how I feel, how other person might feel. Everything feels well thought out and detailed, unpacked.
But it never realizes quite like that, plans get cancelled, places are closed, feelings have changed, discussions are sidetracked or don't feel right. It's all revealed to be a fantasy.
I don't mean you shouldn't try to plan, but unpacking can also be fantasy as much as the packed thing is.
I did work experience in high school with the state department for the environment.
Got to go out with one of the rangers for a day which was actually a lot of fun.
I still remember what he said as we pulled into the car park for one of the parks they manage, "most of my time is actually spent making sure the toilets haven't run out of paper".
Not sure how much unpacking most founders do beforehand. "We do these things not because they're easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy."
I've found this extremely tedious, for three reasons:
(1) So many words to say "the devil is in the details".
(2) There are jobs that are not detail-oriented. Yes, there are some nuances to them, but they are not detail-oriented. Some people are irritated to death by having to fuck around with details, yet they excel at other jobs. There's nothing "nuts" about either group of people
(3) "Unpacking", as in, dumping all the details of a job on someone up-front, is silly. It's OK to have a plan, but it's unrealistic to expect to know everything in advance. "One step a day", "Rome wasn't built in a day". Uninformed choices and risk-taking are inevitable.
> When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives, it’s often because they haven’t unpacked.
Strongly disagree. It's because financial pressure and time pressure do not let them experiment and test themselves at various studies and jobs. "Unpacking-as-you-go" should be the standard. Instead, we force people to commit to something particular when they're in high-school, and changing course later is prohibitively costly. Whenever someone pulls that off, it always counts as an exception, a big feat to write news articles about.
To focus on one very small part of this article:
> For instance, shortly after college, I thought I would post a few funny videos on YouTube and, you know, become instantly famous2. I gave up basically right away. I didn’t have the madness necessary to post something every week, let alone every day, nor did it ever occur to me that I might have to fill an entire house with slime, or drive a train into a giant pit, or buy prosthetic legs for 2,000 people.
That's not the hard part.
The hard part is dealing with all the negative comments. My buddy posted a few videos on Tiktok a few weeks ago. Would any of you like to guess how many comments are straight up telling him to kill himself? Here's a hint: whatever you guess, it's likely much lower than the actual number.
Comments sections on mainstream sites are universally garbage dumps, and you just have to ignore them. I don't know why sites even add them. Must be some "best practice" from Web 2.0 back in 2004 that nobody's questioned ever since.
Comment sections are often actually also the place where the gold is. Tons of authors find the answer to the problems that they were trying to solve in comments or they find greetings from other people doing similar things, or sometimes someone points them at some other person or group doing similar things. Other readers/viewers may find the answer to the question that lead them to read/watch the content in the comments. Or there's a TLDR or a correction there that's really useful.
Depending on the site and community, a comment section vs needing to find a way to email or phone or meet someone in person in order to give them something is often a make or break threshold for contributions. Sadly, it's often also the threshold for bad contributions.
But why do sites do it? Yes, like another commenter said, it boosts engagement. Both for the platform and the users. Creators and commenters and even lurkers.
Ha ha, my site has no comment section, no analytics.
Someone on HN asked me "What's the point?"
I am guessing it is because you probably have something important to share, and are less interested in the attention economy of narcissists =3
When you post something publicly, first rule of thumb is to never read the comments. Or just read the ones from people you know personally.
In many cases, the comments can be filled with people agreeing with the creator, the people who follow the creator, the people who would defend the creator.
If you're gunning to be a creator with an audience, I don't think the answer is to completely ignore your audience. It's to learn how to cultivate a target audience, how to not engage with malicious people, how to be strategic about your messaging, outreach, branding...
Of course, if you're not interested in those (truthfully tiring) things, then your rule of thumb is a pretty good one for most people.
Engagement, channel and platform loyalty. YouTube channels are asking for comments because it makes them rank higher.
Death threats are always inexcusable & unjustifiable; that said, what exactly did he post? Perhaps some forms of content attract way more spite and hate than others?
I think in this day and age, with the combination of a young & unruly audience plus the edginess allowed on many platforms, you're going to be exposed to shockingly unfiltered behavior.
I also think there are specific forms of content (and your strategy of engagement online) that can mitigate this, e.g. posting political content versus some non-topical artwork.
Death threats are claims of intent to kill others. They are not advice to others to kill themselves.
The latter is still inexcusable by default, but I don't like seeing it miscategorized.
As someone who's also posted quite a bit on sites like YouTube over the years, I wouldn't say the amount of negative comments have been that overwhelming. They certainly exist, but they've always been a minority of the comments on my own videos.
But it's definitely dependent on the topic you're posting videos about, the audience you're aiming at and I guess how unlucky you are when it comes to attracting trolls and other troublemakers.
You definitely do need a thick skin though.
Developing a thick skin is a part of all art. It just takes time.
This is so important.
Humans feel evolved to attack one another with criticism to lower the fitness of rivals. Deflecting the garbage while still being able to receive and process valid criticism is a true skill.
> The hard part is dealing with all the negative comments.
That's the easiest part for anyone who's been on the internet long enough.
> Would any of you like to guess how many comments are straight up telling him to kill himself?
I wouldn't and don't care and your buddy shouldn't either. Modern content creation aka TikTok is basically shouting into the void. Why would I care what the void shouts back?
> That's the easiest part for anyone who's been on the internet long enough.
I've been on the internet for awhile. I've had people tell me to kill myself, I've had 3am phone calls insulting me, I've had to drop a handle on a social networking site because I got a death threat that was just plausible enough that I decided to adopt a pseudonym going forward.
But that doesn't compare to seeing dozens, hundreds, thousands of those comments directed at you day by day. I refuse to believe that it doesn't wear down your psyche after some time.
> I wouldn't and don't care and your buddy shouldn't either. Modern content creation aka TikTok is basically shouting into the void. Why would I care what the void shouts back?
I straight up told him to not read any of the comments, because you're right - it's better to shout into the void, than to attempt to make friends with it.
I have a feeling the usual "just have a thicker skin / ignore it" retort goes right back to the article's point.
People who are predisposed to having/developing a good "filter" suffer from false consensus effect (and in the case of internet personas, survivorship bias) that leaves them somewhat baffled as to why others don't-Just do whatever they do.
Like picking espresso machines and hiring/training employees, or "raw-dogging" long distance flights, successfully handling the vitriol of a tide of internet people hurling vitriol (whether it's someone's bad day or they're just crazy, tilting at windmills or containing a kernel of valid criticism) is highly personality-dependent in a way that many cannot just will themselves into powering through it every day forever (and will be absolutely miserable if they put themselves in a position where they have to).
> is highly personality-dependent in a way that many cannot just will themselves into powering through it every day forever
Should probably do something other than content creation or commenting on the internet. Luckily, there are hundreds of different fields where one can be useful that have professional, non-toxic work environments.
I call this the "load-bearing just". :)
Statistically there are always people that try to find entertainment in others misery. Expect a base rate of 1:10 sociopaths, 1:100 psychopaths, and 1:5000 in active psychosis. Those groups covert narcissism means any perceived slight to their ego is never forgiven, and they often try whatever scheme they think they can get away with... The funny part is often at trial these people are honestly shocked their world theory doesn't hold up under community laws.
However, expecting other people to accept personal behavioral choices is also ethically a big ask of society. In some ways, honesty is less insulting than disingenuous sycophancy, or demanding people change to suit your preferences.
One must accept there are bears in the woods, lions on the plains, and poisonous snakes in the grass. Have a great day =3
It's not lions on the planes, it's snakes. Lions are on plains.
After all, you're explicitly restricted from bringing large Li-ions on planes!
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
Good one!
Yes, base error rates are also high in predictive text. lol =3
psychopathy and sociopathy are the same pathology.. they cannot have different occurrence rates. You have obviously no idea what you're talking about. I didn't read the rest of your comment (because why would I?)
The most common (layperson) use for the terms I see is that sociopaths are psychopaths who know how to behave themselves. That leads to an obvious difference in occurrence rates.
Depends when you attended classes, and how you defined the antisocial behavioral spectra. In some ways, the >DSM-5 muddled a lot of disorder definitions to better cover more complex diagnosis under the US healthcare system.
>they cannot have different occurrence rates
I can see how one might reason this to be true, but that is just not consistent with the data collected over the past hundred years.
Psychopaths are born that way, and often start harming pets or other kids very early in life. The Internet just supplied an ecosystem to normalize parasitic behavior, and satiate their demanding egos. Even when proven wrong, they often still insult people during an attempt to apologize.
Have a wonderful day =3
If i was to sit down and unpack every potential job like that, then I dont think I'd be able to find a single job I would actually want to do
Can concurr. Writing code is a minority activity when you are running a small software business (if you want to make any money at it, anyway).
This substack is the best rabbit hole of references I come across in a long while. Thanks!
My realization about work is that 90% of all one's job is crap (give or take). You'll always have to do ton of really shitty stuff, so trying to minimize that is a lost cause. Focus on what the good parts are. You have to do crappy stuff, do you at least sometimes get to do stuff you really like? The article seems to be literally the opposite framing.
People should unpack what a software developer does before jumping in.
Do you enjoy reading tables of letters and numbers from some dusty ISO standard in order to displays strings to a user who literally doesn't care and will never look at it? Under time pressure? With threats of getting replaced every few years by the new technology that will replace you?
Enjoy getting paged at 9pm in the middle of your kids' school play to put out the massive... oh the login to the intranet portal that only the one sales guy uses... not a fire.
Do you want to sweat bullets solving algorithms puzzles on a whiteboard in front of a bored reviewer... algorithms and data structures you will never use and will get chastised for writing on the job?
Enjoy letting others take credit for your work and ingenuity (yay team!) then taking the blame when you don't meet their impossible deadlines that they made up (how could you)?
Like getting angry emails from corporate shills that use code you write in your free time to release a new version with their requested features yesterday or else!?
Want to be able to remember op-codes from the data sheet of some processor nobody even uses anymore instead of your mothers' birthday?
Sure the money is good but they don't tell you that you're going to get hemorrhoids, astigmatism, carpal tunnel, a bad back, type-2 diabetes and a life long partnership with a therapist.
... and yet I still can't stop programming.
Zachtronics has an excellent game(?) Shenzhen I/O which is such a good simulacrum of an embedded SDE; reading datasheets, coding, and sending emails, that I couldn't play it!
But I highly recommend it, if thats not your day job - or if you are curious about making it so!
I feel like there is another angle to this which is largely glossed over in our modern world, which is: there are at least several viable reasons to pick a job or career. One, of course, is that you need the money. Two is that you enjoy it. The third is often left out, which is the moral angle: that it's the work you want to do in the world. You can do something everyday because it feels important to you, without enjoying it, per se, as long as it's not too stressful or abusive. It's a difference sense of "enjoyment", that it gives a deep satisfaction to do, even if the minute-to-minute experience isn't fun or entertaining or anything like that.
For instance (a bad example because I haven't done it yet, but it's illustrative:) I don't really think I'd enjoy the minutiae of running a coffee shop. But I do frequently imagine that I'm eventually going to quit everything else and try to open one. Not cause I fancy myself a cafe owner, but because I'm drawn to the project of creating a certain kind of space in the world, and having control over it so that it can stay close to my vision. Some of my favorite spaces in the world were cafes that have since disappeared or lost their charm and I'd like to try to bring some of that back. I suspect that I can survive and embrace the daily work if it is part of that overall vision.
This feels like a different angle than "you can do it because you're crazy". Actually you can do it because you really want to do it, no crazy required.
But this only works, I feel, if you're truly morally motivated by the thing you're trying to do. Very hard to pull off with modern jobs: corporate jobs seem to go as far out of their way as possible to destroy any sense of fulfillment; academic jobs (I'm told) subject you to torturous competition and bureaucracy as if to drain any inspiration you had left; menial jobs treat you as disposable and you're disempowered from effecting change. Probably this trend of making work unmeaningful is one of the great tragedies of our society. It is like the only acceptable way to be is for your meaning to come from "take your money and use it to do hobbies and buy things for your family", and it's much harder for the meaning in your life to come from the work itself, because there are so many things waiting to punish you if you try to live that way. But there are still certainly ways to do it.
In my opinion it should be a major goal of society to remove as many barriers to doing meaningful work as possible. Fulfillment ought to be seen as equally important to health. (As far as I am aware nobody has any idea how to fix this at a systemic level. The... cult? ... of capitalism opposes it too strongly.)
It's a bit trite but this Venn diagram (perhaps inaccurately) labeled "ikigai" I think does a pretty good job of teasing apart exactly what you're talking about:
https://performanceexcellencenetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/...
Jobs are a combination of:
1. How much you enjoy the work
2. How good you are at it
3. How much it benefits the world
4. How well it pays
The ideal job will tap all four but those are rare. Most jobs are some mixture. Shit jobs tend to only do one or two.
I think what you're talking about is #3 which I think a lot of people undervalue in our culture today.
Oh yeah, that's exactly the same thing. As usual Japan has everything figured out that we're missing in the west. (We've got some things they're missing too, of course.)
Very unrelated, but when I clicked that link the image immediately appeared on my screen. It actually confused me for a second. Going to any webpage, even tiny images, takes at least a split second to happen these days, or is delayed by a new tab opening animation/load time. What a world.
It's coming directly from cloudflare ('server: cloudflare' in the response header) and it is only 92 kb, takes about 50ms for me which is comparable to realtime video game latency. I don't know how to find out more, but guessing it's coming from essentially down the street!
I like what you wrote, thanks for that comment.
>because I'm drawn to the project of creating a certain kind of space in the world, and having control over it so that it can stay close to my vision.
So you have multiple success conditions. You just want a space, maybe it's a restaurant ? A bar ? A pub ? Maybe it's actually just decorating it, not owning it ? Co-managing it ? Could be as well a hackerspace ? A school ?
> it's much harder for the meaning in your life to come from the work itself, because there are so many things waiting to punish you if you try to live that way. But there are still certainly ways to do it.
I'd say untrue. I see many colleagues identifying with their job even though they are "just" employees. The global economy, to some extent I'd say, run because of such people. Managers, directors, lead whatevers...
>In my opinion it should be a major goal of society to remove as many barriers to doing meaningful work as possible.
I'd argue the barriers are a feature, not a bug : how do you know you truly want something ? Make it hard to get. So only deserving people will get it, and we will have the best of it.
Gosh, no, the barriers just make few people feel like there's any meaning at all. You want a world designed to keep everyone depressed? No, it's a skill issue: it shouldn't be that way but we suck at fixing it, or even conceptualizing the problem. So much so that they do what the managers and directors and a lot of everyone else fo: pretend really hard that their life is giving them fulfillment. It's so hard in this economy to find meaningful work that pays decently that it's easier for most people to lie to themselves and pretend (or take the right drugs) because being honest about how fake it is would reveal the falseness of the whole thing.
What I’d like to do doesn’t pay money. What I do is the most buck for the effort that I have to put in.
I know I’d be extremely happy doing what I want to do. Unpacking that might be uncomfortable for the unpacker, because you’ll realize that you hate your economic activity too.
Add to that all the bullshit jobs that don’t make any difference whether they exist or not.
That’s the tragedy. The money is already being wasted. I could take it and be happy. But I can’t. I have to put my time in on the job.
> What I’d like to do doesn’t pay money
That's the thing: plenty of people want to do the fun or fulfilling jobs, so that drives the salaries down. When it's really enjoyable, people will even do it for free!
On the other hand, people won't do soul-crushing bullshit jobs unless the pay is good so companies have to give a compelling offer.
Interesting, but i feel like it kind of assumes that people are more intentional about their job choices then they are.
For a lot of people, they do the job they have because they have limited choices and need money to live.
We often picture this for minimum wage jobs, but i think its also true for more high status jobs.
I'm a computer programmer. Sometimes i like it and sometimes i don't, but at the end of the day its the only job i have the skills for. Sure i could learn to do something else if i was so inclined, but it took a long time to get good at computer programming, im not exactly eager to start that process over.
On days where im feeling frustrated, i might say i want a different job. If someone asked me what, i'd probably give some bullshit answer like run a coffee shop (except i hate customer service, so my go to fantasy is tree planter). But at the end of the day its a fantasy. I know i dont really want to do that. Nobody needs to unpack that for me to know that. I just am having a bad day and want to fantasize about the literal opposite.
I think this is substantively correct, if misguided: people are going to stick metaphorical fingers in their ears and go LA LA LA LA LA when you explain what doing <x> actually involved, rather than wake up to how being an <x> is different to their dreams.
And very probably, it's a good thing. Otherwise, we'd still be banging the rocks together.
If you enter this comments section without having read most of the article: I advise to read it till the end, no regrets.
Took your advice, no regrets.
>Otherwise you run into Borges’ map problem—if you want a map that contains all the details of the territory that it’s supposed to represent, then the map has to be the size of the territory itself.
Is this what everyone describes as “the map is not the territory”, or something else? I can imagine some other subtleties of being within a territory that an exact projection might not provide.
>“the map is not the territory”
Personally I never think of this as something specific or quantitative as in fidelity.
In my head it’s more of a statement that the map is a representation, a reference, in the terminology of Stirner a spook or a phantom.
The territory is the thing itself, the visceral thing you exist in/on and can change, feel, experience.
This applies to anything that both exists and is represented, maps and land are just the best analogy.
Even a 1:1 scale map with 100% fidelity will never be the territory.
Borges referenced it, but did not originate the idea or the phrase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation...
Yes, Borges' and Lewis Carroll's stories are playful illustrations of 'the map is not the territory'. Or you could say they show that the map cannot be the territory.
It's not. That map would still be a map, and not the territory.
It's just a different popular reference. Specifically, this one is about the value of abstraction, while "the map is not the territory" is about model fidelity.
It refers to Jorge Luis Borges, a writer of surreal and speculative stories.
The one about the nigh-infinite library is best known (1)
The one about the map, "On Exactitude in Science", is very short indeed https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf
Not quite -- it's certainly a famous related hypothetical/sub-problem, but the original is a much more fundamental point about human cognition being inherently representational.
The phrase was coined[0] by Alfred Korzybski who has some related stuff linked from his wiki page[1], though I'd give credit for the first+best modern explanation to Kant's work[2] on Sensibility (the first of four human cognitive faculties). I'm a Kantian cultist of sorts though, so take that with a grain of salt ;)
Certainly some would prefer to follow the idea all the way back to ancient Greece and/or China, or focus on more recent critiques of the concept by Hegel[3], Wittgenstein[4], or Deleuze[5]. I'm not a fan, but an even more (post-?)modern interpretation is Baudrillard's work on Simulacra.[6]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-spacetime/
[3] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hl...
[4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#PhilInve
Two things:
> In my experience, whenever you unpack somebody, you inevitably discover something extremely weird about them. [...]
I've spoken to ca. 300 people through the Say Hi page on my site. All of them, without a single exception, and I am not exaggerating, were beautifully weird people.
(When a random person calls me, I usually start the call with "So, who/why the fuck are you?". It's cheesy, even for my standards, but it works really well for what I'm getting out of these calls.) God, I wish I had the ease of photographers like Mary Ellen Mark, being able to approach people like that more often, being able to tap into that weirdness with even more people.
> Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” [...] > These questions sound so stupid that it’s no wonder no one asks them, and yet, somehow, the answers often surprise us.
In my experience (including the calls I've had in the past), that's not necessarily true -- I ask those questions myself all the time, sometimes to the point of overthinking instead of just trying things out. For me, a better question is: what is the specific thing that attracts me to the idea of doing x/becoming x. What is the feeling I'm looking for/getting when thinking about this? It's not that much different from the question mentioned by the author, but (to me) it feels more productive and leads to more actionable results.
My wife sees what I do as "sitting in a chair all day" and tells me all the time she could not do what I do.
Is it the chair-sitting she couldn't do or the things that you do while sat in said chair? Or both?
What does she do?
A succinct way to put this as career advice is: do the job with the tedium you love. Doing what you love is nice and all but most jobs aren’t just the top line work so finding a job where you love the tedious parts and might not even consider them tedious is what you want.
I got into game engine development knowing full well that it’s “applied linear algebra” and not at all like playing a game… except when you need to test something a hundred times in a row.
Lots of my colleagues dropped out of the industry in their first year because they didn’t like maths at all.
What really drove the point home for me though was that a decade later I got more satisfaction out of developing ETL pipelines for multidimensional analytics.
Think about how “nuts” that is! Everyone likes playing games but nobody installs SQL Server Analysis Services on their home PC for “fun”! Yet… it is, for a certain very select subset of the population…
I think most people (especially software engineers) who fantasize about leaving their office jobs and running a small retail or restaurant business are not upset with having to write code all day - they're upset with the people they work with/for and fantasize about independence, even if that means a more difficult day to day job. Or, they're unhappy with the sterile environment they work in and are disillusioned with the abstract nature of B2B products (what am I selling? Whose life am I improving by selling it?) and want to work with something whose value is more easily demonstrated.
I think that when someone tells you they fantasize about starting a small local retail business, that we shouldn't just shit on their naivite; we should listen to what they're really trying to say and help them find something that checks the boxes for them:
1. Something in the real world, preferably with physical products/services on physical products
2. Something with a larger degree of independence
3. Something whose value to the customer is obvious
4. Something which improves the world or their community in some way, and is not just extracting value from others.
Personally, I love writing software, but I hate Software companies
I have found that cooking for family, friends or small communities can scratch that itch.
Results are tangible, you are doing something with your hands, it only takes few hours (often much less) and you get to give something to people you love.
Never even once thought that running a coffee shop would be fun, but then that example kind of made it seem interesting. I mean, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't actually want to do it, but also it does seem interesting to just sit there and explore different coffee beans and mess with the parameters and see what happens. There is an unloved page in my Obsidian notes somewhere where I have a table of grind size vs amount of water where I attempted to figure out the best trade-off for my drip coffee maker. (I have honestly been too lazy to actually do coffee at home for a little while now, but for a while I got sucked in.)
That said, unfortunately as much as it is depressing, the thing that I go Mr. Beast levels of obsession with is definitely software. I almost wish it could be drawing or something else that is a little more interesting, because while it is a great career that I probably would've been screwed without, it does feel pretty thankless at the end of the day. I don't think people who make software are really that valued by anyone but their own. You rarely hear people rave about software when it merely just works, even though sometimes it really is doing crazy things to make that happen. The ultimate end goal for software is to make it look and feel effortless, and if you truly win, the reward is that people will think it actually is.
That's also why I'm both terrified and excited by the prospect of machines writing competent code. I am not sure I will find the jobs left for me as interesting as actually writing the code itself. But also, if I really could have an army of even junior engineers running locally on a GPU cluster, the possibilities that would unlock feel pretty extensive. I'll just have to figure out how many GPUs I can afford while I'm waiting in the unemployment line. (Or that future may never actually come, if we're really hitting as hard of a wall as it looks like, but I'm not a believer in the meat brain being some sacred piece of matter whose functions can't possibly be replicated by logic gates. So I think it's probably a matter of time, it's just that maybe we're not actually sure how many, in part because people treat it as such an inevitability that they look at you funny if you suggest it might not be tomorrow.)
That's... why I'm here.
I love this podcast and substack. He is an artist in many ways : revealing from common observations into something revelatory, curious, and funny
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/weird-4
> The goal in life isn't to find something you love, it's to find something you can get realllll weird about.
This is a great piece. My biggest takeaway is that next time if you find someone's job fascinating -- ask them how do you spend their day doing it?
LOTS of thoughts here:
> If you think no one would answer “yes” to those questions, you’ve missed the point: almost no one would answer “yes” to those questions, and those proud few are the ones who should be surgeons, actors, and wedding photographers.
In "What Should I Do With My Life", Po Bronson has a great quote:
"Everyone thinks their dream job will be smooth sailing. But let's face it: EVERY job has shitstorms. Thing is, in the jobs you love the shitstorm is part of the 'fun and excitement' of that dream job."
I can 100% attest to this with a personal example: having been an SRE for many years I LOVE managing outages. I don't love that there ARE outages but I do love running them. I can imagine a librarian or other similar field that loves peace and quiet and predictably recoiling in horror at this statement. But that's the point. People are different and have different preferences. As patio11 said "everyone's preference space is n-dimensional".
> This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one: they don’t understand the craziness that they have to offer, nor the craziness that will be demanded of them
This is why the advice of "pick the job that involves the thing you can't stop yourself from doing" is good advice. In my case, it's writing documentation. It's an urge I can not stop. And it's been great in my FinTech SRE career as it saves future me and other people lots of time during outages.
> You’ll discover all sorts of unexpected things when unpacking, like how firefighters mostly don’t fight fires,
My wife's cousin is a firefighter and he was mentioning that due to improvements in smoke detectors, fire alarms etc, it's becoming rarer and rarer to actually fight a fire. He seemed sad when he said it.
I want the same thing I've always wanted. To be a software engineer in the 1990's.
I want to come to work and see pyramids of Jolt Cola on the desks.
And for lunch, we'll go out as a team in our Honda Civics to get some $3 Chinese food.
In the lobby, we'll have back issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal stacked up on the side tables.
We'll merge our code by copying it onto floppies and handing it to that one dude.
At some point we might setup a machine with a modem so you could dial in, telnet to a machine and check your email with pine.
When you leave work at 5:30pm, you're done for the day.
yeah, I was born in 89 and im pretty sure all my love for tech comes from 90s culture
Remember the days you could make a reference to Monty Python, or Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Have nerdy kids and you can make references to “Romanes eunt domus” and shrubbery again
Work in a cubicle with privacy instead of the open office bullpen.
OP is asking questions related to opening a coffeehouse, an establishment that focuses on coffee and where you can order a wide range of coffee drinks.
OP's friend might very well want to open a coffee shop, a small diner where you can perhaps order two kinds of coffee - caf or decaf. Nobody cares where the beans come from.
Bunch of smug questions.
Oh damn, it turns out I don't like anything. Maybe it's time to get my meds adjusted.
I tend to have very periodical special interests, maybe 1-3 months per topic. It's not long enough to make life changes, to chase that crazy in me.
Maybe I have to become "Today I Learned" style content creator
I agree with the point of the post tho. It is something I repeatedly keep stressing: many people confuse the goal ("having a nice shop") with the way (everything you need to so to get there and maintain its existence once it is there).
You can be good at a thing you don't enjoy, but if it is your dream you should better make sure it is a thing you enjoy. A thing everybody should understand is that enjoying the consuming of a thing, be it coffee, videogames, music, films or books is a vastly different experience from making them. I don't say worse, I don't say better, I say different.
And only a minority of those who love consuming a thing also love making it and having to deal with what comes with making it. But I suggest to everybody to try this for themselves.
The mundane is a part of every job, and you could reduce every job to it, if you really wanted to. Do you want to chop vegetables for the rest of your life? Well that's what being a cook is. True only if you focus on it because that's what you hate.
The thinking is interesting, and I agree that the question "what to do with my life" is a modern phenomenon. But on the other hand, if you know how difficult and challenging something is, you will never do it. There are parallels to analysis paralysis here.
So yes, be prepared and think things through, but if I have learned one thing in life, it's that the problems you will run into are not the ones you imagined in the beginning. Instead you will get some you never thought of, and the ones you did will not happen or will not be a big deal. How many people here worked on software changes, and had to estimate and got it all wrong?
> The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner.
If we spent time overthinking everything, nothing would get done because circumstances are seldom perfect. A lot of it is about making stuff up as you go. Of course, reality almost never matches our imaginations either and there unpacking might help. At the same time, not everyone is passionate about the details of every job and as long as it puts food on the table (or something in the retirement account), it's good enough.
> High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack because the upsides are obvious and appealing, while the downsides are often deliberately hidden and tolerable only to a tiny minority. For instance, shortly after college, I thought I would post a few funny videos on YouTube and, you know, become instantly famous.
Most people who try at anything won't see much success, especially when that depends on standing out from others.
Most actors won't be in box office hits. Most content creators will be relatively obscure. Most software devs will write boring CRUD apps in sub-optimal environments and it will sometimes be a bit scrappy. Most employees won't be employee of the month or whatever. Same for trying to run your own business, it being profitable in any sense is already more of a success than one might think. Actually same for various creative pursuits, e.g. when people spend months working on a video game of their own, release it... and realize that they've spent thousands of dollars worth of time and won't even make that back... while something seemingly simplistic like Vampire Survivors blow up and inspire an entire genre overnight. It's the same with having a YouTube channel - you might do ten uploads and see no success. Hundred uploads and see no success. Even a thousand videos and no success yet. Meanwhile, there's someone else who seems to get 10x-100x more views or whatever, after starting building a channel at a similar time to you. You might be able to learn from them... or it might just be some inherent characteristics that you don't have and that's that.
Long story short, maybe there is something you excel at and you just have to find it. Statistically (for a general population), probably not. I think a big problem of our time is being exposed to the very best wherever you look - from the highlights of the lives of attractive people on social media, to YouTube videos produced to a crazy high degree of quality, to completely mismatched expectations of what the mediocrity of real life will look like for most folks.
Jensen Huang has mentioned something like this similarly before: (iirc) When asked if he would change anything about his life if he could do it all over again, he says something like: if I had to do this all over again knowing what I know now, I wouldn't. If you actually knew the sacrifice and difficulty of that path upfront, deeply knew it and understood it fully in a way only having experienced it can create, essentially no one would walk that path, not even if it meant becoming one of the richest people in the world at the end.
The flip-side of that is a quote from DHH on a recent Lex Friedman podcast: "I wouldn't go back and say a thing to my younger self. I would not rob my younger self of all the life experiences I have been blessed with due to the ignorance of how the world works."
Ctrl-F "Profit"
Face it: you've missed the point of business.
This article presents FOMO as a decision making strategy. Completely bizarre.
