They didn't fail because the margins are narrow or because the hours are long. They failed because they didn't love the minutia of running a restaurant. They ar

They didn't fail because the margins are narrow or because the hours are long. They failed because they didn't love the minutia of running a restaurant. They aren't the kind of people built to work long hours. Some people handle long hours like it's a breeze. When I went to school, you could pick out the kids who were going to fail on the first day. Not because they were stupid but because you could tell just from talking to them that they wouldn't enjoy coding for hours on end. They were only there in the first place because they had a mixed up idea about what a game programmer actually does. What's more, besides having a selectively edited vision of what a job actually involves, we wrap it up in an identity. We ask kids, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" So even when a lot of people are pretty sure they don't want to do a thing anymore, guilt over quitting and fear of not achieving their identity pushes them forward. If we were smart, job shadowing, even for adults would be ubiquitous. Our attitude would be, so lets see if you can even handle 8 hours of this before we go much further. We would ask kids, "when you grow up, what could you do for hours on end and still be happy?"