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Somewhat related: I have this fantasy where I actually make a living working a non-technical job that is relatively simple to do but where I'm able to read and
by tbrock 11y ago
Somewhat related: I have this fantasy where I actually make a living working a non-technical job that is relatively simple to do but where I'm able to read and think about what I would build when I get back to the keyboard all day long.
I'd spend the days thinking about building and how you would do it for 90% of the time but only spend 5-10% of my time executing. The rest of the time is thinking, planning, and re-thinking things I've done, imagining the tweaks and enhancements I'd get to pump out when I have the chance.
The best code I write is when I have it all figured out ahead of time, the problem is paged-in, and my fingers are merely transcribing the stream of consciousness. I just need a couple of moments to get it out.
Dissimilarly, I would imagine that, being deployed in Iraq, this guy doesn't have much time to think about his startup when doing his non-technical job (as it IS a demanding one) but imagine being a sniper spending your time hiding in the brush thinking about what you would build when you could build it. I'm romanticizing war now though...
- adanto6840 11y agoMail carrier, or maybe police officer. I have the same fantasy. :-)
- tbrock 11y agoI always think it would be security guard of an extremely secure and remote facility. Something snowed in where it's warm inside and there is fast internet.
- fratlas 11y agoStore clerk in a small town shop :)
- asciimo 11y agoAmazing. That's almost exactly my fantasy scenario. Also: lighthouse keeper, park ranger.
- tbrock 11y agoLighthouse keeper! Brilliant. If monkey brains could do gigabit for me there I'd be in heaven.
- lazyant 11y agoI don't think there's any lighthouses left that require a keeper, at least in first world countries.
- bluejekyll 11y agoI think these are fantasies, it seems a little mean to burst them with reality.
- jacalata 11y agoThere's at least one left in the US that requires a keeper by law: http://in.mobile.reuters.com/article/idINN0741330520080526?irpc=932 http://in.mobile.reuters.com/article/idINN0741330520080526?i... Other than that, there are a bunch of lighthouses that have some sort of guesthouse in them and need someone to run it (usually decent pay but not a quiet job), or volunteer positions to maintain lighthouses around the Great Lakes and possibly elsewhere.
- tempestn 11y agoPretty soon truck driver might fit on that list (at least until they're no longer legally required to be present, as with lighthouse keepers).
- derefr 11y agoI've heard of a number of famous writers who got their first book done while doing a security-guard job.
- bliti 11y agoI did that for a while. Worked at some industrial park as security. A very productive time in my life. But it got really boring and dangerous when assigned the night shift.
- pcrh 11y agoSomewhere like the Overlook Hotel?
- qq66 11y agoPolice officer will certainly not give you downtime to think.
- adventured 11y agoThat really depends on location. In smaller towns, cops often sit in their vehicle at night and do absolutely nothing but wait for an infrequent car to go by. They occasionally drive around doing nothing, going from one place to another to check on pretty much nothing. Tons of downtime to think.
- bluejekyll 11y agoI find it fascinating that we all believe that these jobs require no thought or attention. Don't you wonder what they think of us?
- delazeur 11y agoI've done a lot of engineering work in the manufacturing sector (both directly employed and as a consultant), and I know for a fact that most of the mechanics/machinists/electricians/operators/etc. believe that engineers do absolutely nothing all day.
- timv 11y agoI have a small storage unit at a local suburban self storage facility. Often when I go there I'm the only customer there, and I've never seen more than 3 other customers present at the same time. The office is almost continuously manned during business hours (+ weekends), but hardly anyone goes in there. Even when I go to grab stuff from my unit I don't go into the office or talk with the staff - I just pick-up/dump-off my stuff and go. The guys that work there must have some sort of side project/hobby to prevent them from going insane.
- marincounty 11y agoIt's the perfect enviornment to program, read, repair watches, do homework, art, etc. The units are always filled, so you just sit there. I got through college working for a storage facilities. I got all my homework done there. There were times I felt like I was about to loose it though. I had a bad panic attack at a facility in Daily city one Sunday. It weird how being isolated can play with the mind. Even for someone as myself, who is not a people person. You basically sit in a room, and make a run around the facility every hour, or so. If an owner has you doing busy work--leave the job. The wage is not livable, so you should be free to presue your hobbies. To renters, don't keep your stuff there more than a couple of months. I saw people loose so much money I over junk. If renting, get the manager to get your rental date on the first/last day of the month. The owners make so much money off late fees. I don't think I've ever heard of a owner losing money on a mini-storage.
- asgfoi 11y agoFor the former it really depends on your position. If on foot and on a monotonous route, then maybe if you can handle thinking in 5 minute bursts, anything else, not a chance. You'd be surprised how much of a workload just sorting and text recognition is.
- SocksCanClose 11y agoTaleb talks about these types of scenarios in Antifragile, where actually many of his predecessors took jobs with the Lebanese Civil Service in order to put bread on the table, and then were sort of philosophes in their spare time, writing and reading.
- tbrock 11y agoSound like a good read. I really enjoy nassim taleb's other books so I'll definitely give Antifragile a look.
- hermanradtke 11y agoAntifragile is good, but nowhere near as good as his others. Fair warning.
- codingcharlatan 11y agoI have to disagree. My biggest complaint (if I could call it that) with his previous book, The Black Swan, was that it lacked practical application of his principles, e.g., he exposes the hidden prevalence of asymmetries but doesn't place them within the broader context of how one should live. Antifragile does just that. His title alone is worth the price of the book. Antifragile describes something that gains from disorder rather than is merely robust to it, and we don't have a word in English to describe this
- ethagknight 11y agoSecond for Antifragile. His earlier books are more approachable, but I found Antifragile fascinating and I think about various principles from the book regularly. One of a handful of books I keep on the bookshelf at my office at all times.
- SocksCanClose 11y agoAgree agree agree. He's bidding for the sort of intellectual immortality with Antigragile. The Fat Tony dialogues are really a pleasure, and a throwback to Plato's Dialogues. Really enjoyable, meaty stuff.
- Swizec 11y agoMy patch for this is long distance running. You'd be amazed by how much thinking you can do when running for 2 hours. Even just a 1 hour run is amazing for thinking things. The longest I've done was a 5 hour run ... after running out of things to think about, I was mostly just in pain.
- brianwawok 11y agoOh the bugs I solve while running. Biking I worry about cars. Swimming I worry about drowning. Running I am just free.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoI wrote my first few video games this way. I'd bring reams of fanfold to high school and then to my job at the very quiet rural gas station back in the 80s.
- jszymborski 11y agoThat's pretty much the route I'm taking, save for the non-technical part. I'm writing a SaaS for biomedical data analysis, while completing a graduate degree in Experimental Medicine. I don't anticipate graduating any time soon, but I see it as an opportunity to develop the foundation of a start-up while supporting myself. It's sort of a way to avoid having to go the fundraising route (at least for now), and can potentially allow me to onboard large clients without even talking to VCs. I was happy to find that PG wrote about this sort of thing (albeit fairely indirectly): "Another way to fund a startup is to get a job. The best sort of job is a consulting project in which you can build whatever software you wanted to sell as a startup. Then you can gradually transform yourself from a consulting company into a product company, and have your clients pay your development expenses." http://paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html http://paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html
- ausjke 11y agoTo get a job while doing sideline startup may have legal consequence? your employer may claim what you developed belongs to him.
- vinceguidry 11y agoOnly if you signed a contract saying that all the code you write is their property. Even then, in theory it's a potential problem, in practice how would they ever know? The code I write for my employer, I could re-engineer any of the pieces within a week or so if I needed to. If they told me to stop using it, I could satisfy the demands and not even lose steam. But it's never going to happen because my employer doesn't think of code as valuable in and of itself except as a vehicle to solve the business problems.
- rejschaap 11y agoIt also depends on the local laws. Where I live it is the other way around. Everything belongs to your employer unless your contract specifies otherwise.
- aswanson 11y agoThe less the cognitive requirement of your day job, the greater the mental surplus you have to work on something else at the same time.
- Gustomaximus 11y agoThere's a guy in my suburb that runs a local shop. It doesn't have great trade and cant be making much in the way of profit. I also know he is quite wealthy with numerous side ventures and investments. He must just like standing behind that counter, chatting to locals and having a routine no-pressure job. You'd never know he's more than a small store owner unless you were told. So not sure the point here... but maybe you dont need to find the job, you can create your own fantasy?
- hueving 11y agoAlso sounds like a great type of business to have to write off a bunch of equipment and a shop on your taxes.
- tbrock 11y agoOut of curiosity, what kind of shop is it?
- Gustomaximus 11y agoNot to be difficult but I'll not say. It would be fairly easy to figure out who if someone sleuths my comment history.
- munificent 11y agoI have about a 25 minute walk to work, which I, unfortunately, rarely set aside the time to do. But when I do, I swear I get more work and side project stuff done in that time than in hours of staring at a laptop.
- dyadic 11y agoThis is very similar to what Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) talks about when he talks about Hammock Driven Development, I recommend watching him talking about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
- bbcbasic 11y agoEinstein being the ultimate example
- IndianAstronaut 11y ago>The best code I write is when I have it all figured out ahead of time I come up with ideas and debug when I step away from the computer. Ass in chair is not a good measure of productivity.
- flashm 11y agoI work like this when I can. Sit still, thinking, sometimes with my eyes shut for at least 20 minutes. I'll be thinking about the best way to solve a problem, then will 'wake up' write a couple of lines of code, and carry on. Sometimes I'll spend the whole day just thinking about the best way to implement something, and then a couple of hours at the end of the day to actually write the code. I find I'm much more productive this way.
- joshkpeterson 11y agoIt doesn't work that well. You can think about a problem for like 20 minutes, but then you're going to hit a wall. For most endeavors, you actually need to be sitting there with the relevant tools of thinking / recording to get anywhere. Source: I used to work in a factory.
- SuperChihuahua 11y ago...or you could do an Albert Einstein, who worked as a patent officer. He could finish the job in 2 hours and spend the next 6 hours working on his theories.
- bbcbasic 11y agoYes you just need a job where (a) you can do it in fewer hours and (b) you can do your other thing without being noticed and (c) your other thing is in the public domain / learning based as you don't want to give the IP to your employer and (d) there is no scrutiny about how you spent your time via Jira reports etc. and (e) it is an environment where you can concentrate on the other thing. I think AE's job was such a job but harder to find nowadays but I think government jobs are more likely to have these qualities.
- celticninja 11y agoHow about fruit picking. I did some of my best thinking when I was picking watermelons in Australia. Plenty of thinking time, lots of exercise and being away from a screen all day means that when you sit down at one it doesn't feel like you have been there all day.
- hyperpallium 11y agohttp://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programming.php http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi...
- tbrock 11y ago"During the next few weeks I filled notebooks with ideas for programs I was going to write, in some cases setting them down in code. I also strung the oaks and madrones with twelve hundred feet of electrical cord to power the machine." Glorious! Great story.
- paradigmshiv 11y agoThis is basically what I do. I'm a supervisor for a county government, and spend a lot of my day at a desk waiting for the phone to ring. I'm still learning to code, so it helps to actually do something other than think sometimes. To this end, because I can't install a programming environment on my work computer, I installed Linux on my 15 year-old Dell and use the secure shell extension for Chrome to connect. Being forced to do everything in a terminal has really sharpened my Emacs skills. I typically spend a good portion of my day secretly hacking away.
- cheez 11y agoSo just don't code all day. I spend half the day on customer support and marketing where problems swirl around in the background so that when the second half of the day comes around, I'm good to go.