> 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.
Someone on HN asked me "What's the point?"
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
>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
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.
The latter is still inexcusable by default, but I don't like seeing it miscategorized.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation...
> 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.
You didn't like teaching like that. Some people really do, some people don't. Nothing wrong with individual preferences.
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.
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.
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).
This is awesome, I love the way you phrase this and having that mindset.
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.)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
It was there in the 90s
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.)
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
What you really need in life is financial independence and then you can choose what you want to do.
Wish you all financial independence.
Dijkstra famously wasn't exactly keen on computers.
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 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!
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.
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.
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'm a masochist, I like the challenges and pain I have to deal with everyday for a product I don't care about.
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'm a hard group 1, and I don't really mind if LLMs take my job, just please don't take my passion.
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.
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 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.
Sometimes the interest just fades. What stimulated me at age 14 no longer does at age 36.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
>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.
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 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 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.
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.
Speaking of which, if you're ever at a Mellow Mushroom, get the Pacific Rim.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
But I highly recommend it, if thats not your day job - or if you are curious about making it so!
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.)
(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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
By examining the types of tasks you will be consistently faced with, you can ask yourself, "Do I actually want to do that?"
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.
It was what they DON’T do that put me off.
Silly me, I thought they spent most of their time doing research!!!
Do you think nobody wants to write and debug code, or tend to plants, or write books, day in day out?
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.
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
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 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…
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).
I suspect there is a strong evolutionary reason why Mom’s tend to forget the really tough part/pain in having kids though.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
I feel like the author made it pretty clear that's exactly what he means by "bad at unpacking."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
And very probably, it's a good thing. Otherwise, we'd still be banging the rocks together.
> The goal in life isn't to find something you love, it's to find something you can get realllll weird about.
Maybe I have to become "Today I Learned" style content creator
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.
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.
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…
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.
Face it: you've missed the point of business.
This article presents FOMO as a decision making strategy. Completely bizarre.
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.
That being said it has some value but perhaps not much more than just a little critical thinking.
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.
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 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).
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".
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.
That sounds great actually ... but you didn't mention the constant grant-writing and chasing funding, which is what universities actually value.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
frahs•20h ago
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.
pavel_lishin•20h ago
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.
colechristensen•20h ago
lambda•19h ago
So you have to be willing to take those risks, and want to be handling those mundane day to day details.
mattmaroon•19h ago
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.
zahlman•17h ago
jama211•17h ago
mattmaroon•10h ago
Marketing, location, service, quality, ambiance. Lots of ways.
munificent•19h ago
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.
eloisant•19h ago
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.
intended•19h ago
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.
_--__--__•16h ago
shortrounddev2•16h ago
projektfu•15h ago
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.