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Craftsmanship – The alternative to the four-hour work week mindset

244 points by rpkoven 9y ago

rpkoven 9y ago
"Startup graveyards are full of visionaries without expertise or the proper skills to execute, for no other reason then ideas are not self executing, but are rather made into being by intense engagement by skilled operators." As an engineer who gets approached to build other people's ideas regularly, I find this trait to be true.
- oglowo3 9y ago
  I don't think Tim Ferriss is the issue, nor is the 4 Hour Work Week. I think Tim Ferris chose the title for marketing purposes. I do however, agree that a lot of his followers are looking for too many shortcuts.
  - adventured 9y ago
    Who else was he going to sell to with marketing like that? It was intentional as you note. Calling it the 25 hour work week, wouldn't have sold very well, and would have attracted less of the shortcut crowd. He deserves appropriate criticism for the pandering, intentionally seeking to sell to that audience, with a fraudulent setup premise; the shortcut followers are his created monster.
  - Realist1337 9y ago
    >> a lot of his followers are looking for too many shortcuts. In the old days, people devoted their careers to a company and companies looked out for people. Continuous layoff cycles were rare and long-timers earned pensions. These days there are layoffs in good times and bad. Sometimes layoffs hit entire divisions and even top rated people are let go. Why the heck would i trust some traditional system and not try to find shortcuts?
    - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
      In the old days, people devoted their careers to a company and companies looked out for people. Really? I've been hearing that lament regularly for the last 35 years.
      - iagovar 9y ago
        Yes. IDK in the US, but it was common in Europe until the 80s-90s or so.
        kbenson 9y ago
        That was the impression here too, but I think the truth has been shrouded in nostalgia. I think the truth is that it was just a large growth period (reconstruction, expansion, and population boom after Wii), and there was a lot of demand for workers. When demand for workers is high, and work is prevalent, workers get a really good deal. It was good until the economy changed, but that's why romantacizing it isn't worthwhile. The companies weren't any better, they were just behaving in their own self interest.
  - fsloth 9y ago
    "...nor is the 4 Hour Work Week. I think Tim Ferris chose the title for marketing purposes." He tells this explicitly at the beginning of the book. He tried several names using dummy adverts to gauge click through rates and chose what generated most. I think the book is honest and comes clean on it's intended goal. It's written in the classic marketing buff style of TV shops worldwide. If one takes it seriously in all of it's claims then that's not really the authors problem. I agree the followers and not the source is the problem.
- itgoon 9y ago
  Ah yes, the old "I have a great idea, and if you do all the work, I'll be rich!" pitch. Hm. Yea. How about you just pay me?
- b0rsuk 9y ago
  It also strongly applies to aspiring game designers. What many young people don't understand is having an idea doesn't make you special. The devil is usually in the details - execution is harder. Furthermore, learning a useful game development skill gives you a better understanding of games. Aside from brilliantly simple ideas, it usually takes work to convince someone to your idea. I had a friend that tried to take advantage of me that way. Last time I heard he worked as a software tester at a clothing company, but he had made attempts at managing people. To a certain degree, I used to be like that, except I never explicitly tried managing people, only posted ideas on forums. These days I'm a determined programmer. If you're one of those people who love posting on "Ideas" subforums, I have sympathy for you, but programmers, animators, sound designers etc also have ideas, and can make more things happen.
sneak 9y ago
They are using different metrics of success. That kind of social hustling that is devoid of any meaningful engineering is indeed a way to make a very decent and respectable personal income, even if none of your businesses are ever that useful or produce any good technology. Whereas most hackers I think view success as “changing the world for the better directly via the production of software or electronics”.
insickness 9y ago
While I agree that it's bullshit that you can be successful working 4 hours per week, there was a good point in the book: It's not worth making yourself unhappy working relentlessly in an unfulfilling job in order to enjoy the fruits of your labor in some distant future. Better to work less hours so you can enjoy your life while you're young.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  While bringing your spending and corresponding expectations in line with that income level.
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- quickConclusion 9y ago
  Tim Ferris got to 4 hours per week by working 70+h per week for a long time, then firing his least profitable clients, automating/delegating and giving up about growing his business further. you'll never get there working 4 hours a week. And you'll never do 4 hours a week if you are passionate about your job, or a rat racer. src: his book the 4 hours work week
- gingerlime 9y ago
  There's a pretty wide spectrum between 4 hours per week and working yourself to death. As a co-founder/technical person, I immensely enjoy what I do. Frankly, I'll get bored pretty quickly sitting at the beach and staring at the ocean. It's fun and relaxing, but I kinda "get the point" after some time. Whereas, there are endless challenges to keep me motivated, curious, and ultimately satisfied "at work". It was more or less the same satisfaction and fulfillment I had as an employee. I just enjoyed the challenges and still got compensated generously back then. Disclaimer: I didn't read the book. I'm sure it has some great points or it won't resonate with so many people. Also I should mention that at our company we instated a 45-days holidays per year policy (this includes personal and public holidays, we're 100% remote, no VC, but no dreams of mega money). So we do see a lot of value in not working to death.
dev1n 9y ago
This guy has some great points. I can't get past the fact that he didn't review his writing at all, nor did he have anyone else proof-read it. The writing quality is poor. "... your way your way...", "... just a by standard...", improper uses of "then", "this tasks" etc... all distract from the thesis.
- dtawfik1 9y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out (quite embarrassing). I made those edits and I appreciate you bringing them to my attention/
cyberferret 9y ago
I am probably in the age bracket that puts me in the 'old fashioned' end of the spectrum of HN readers, but I fully agree with the premise of the article. Craftsmanship is a lost art form these days. While I admire, and respect the wishes of a lot of younger people in my industry these days to want to travel a lot, and build a business that can be operated anywhere, I think a lot of them don't yet have the realisation that anything you do day in day out, can become routine, boring and something that you will yearn to be 'free' from after a while.
- wjn0 9y ago
  > anything you do day in day out, can become routine, boring and something that you will yearn to be 'free' from after a while. You seem to both understand, and maybe have overcome at one time or another, this sentiment. Would you have any advice for someone who seems to experience this chronically?
  - cyberferret 9y ago
    I guess I have bumped against this several times. Given my age (52), I think I have done so more times than someone who is 22. I shall use an acquaintance/client of mine that I have known for years as an illustration. A very successful businessman, he and his family have a love of the Balinese lifestyle, though they live here in Australia. His wealth and success meant that he could buy a huge property just outside town and turn it into a little 'mini Bali resort'. He had a beautiful artificial lagoon, plunge pools, thatch huts etc. It really was the envy of most people here. But after about 2 years of that, they sold the property. I was as shocked as most other people and asked him why, but he said that it just became too 'samey' day after day, living in that resort style environment, and they were craving something different. So they actually moved to Bali, and bought a house there. After about 12 months, they moved back. Once again, I asked, and received a similar answer. Living in 'holiday mode' for months on end, and getting waited on hand and foot by locals, while it sounded like heaven for most people, turned into a chore, and they got bored and craved something different. For me personally, I have spent the past decade or so setting up my business so that it can be operated from anywhere. We bought quite a nice house with a downstairs separate office so I could work from home and be near the kids when they were younger and going to school just up the road. Whilst 80% of the time, it IS bliss, and works well, and I am happy - there are the odd times that I get cabin fever, or crave working in an office environment again - just for the change mainly. My solution to that was to essentially go down the 'craftsman' route - by giving up doing general IT support work, which at the time was the mainstay of my business, and focusing on just software development. But not 'software development' where I would basically be a project manager and farm the actual work out to overseas contractors. I meant 'software development' as a craft where it would only be myself touching the code, liaising with the customers, and doing all the design, coding, testing etc. Much as a bespoke cobbler or blacksmith would do in the old days - I would talk to a customer who approached me, help them to work out what they wanted, and then (this is the important bit) I would decide whether to take on the job, or refer them onto another colleague. I would only take on work that I found challenging, or that would push me to learn new technologies or methodologies. Not TOO much, otherwise I wouldn't be productive, but just enough so that I wouldn't get bored by the project, and could add another small skillset to my experience roster when I had finished. I also reverted to working on basically one project at a time, and was turning away more work that I was taking on. I would treat each project as an 'end to end' thing - and would take pride when I finished and delivered the results to my client. Throwing myself wholly and solely into my work like this helped to keep my batteries charged a lot longer. I guess it is a lot like a Startup founder working completely focused on their 'baby' (NB, I am also working on a startup of my own at the moment). Sure that was a bit of a hit on cashflow and profitability, but my personal happiness at work went up. Owning a project from start to finish, then basically being able to hand it over and dust my hands off and stop thinking about it altogether before starting the next one helped to keep me mentally sharp and focused. (Of course, there are always return clients who want extras or enhancements, but I similarly treat those as a whole new separate project each time). The other thing that helped was to turn my office space into a mix of my hobby and professional passions. I am an avid guitarist, so my programming space is also a mini recording studio, and I often pick up a guitar and play while waiting for downloads/compiles or just in between tedious tasks. That also helps to keep my mind fresh and keeps it from wandering and wishing for different things. I believe that the death of passion is what brings about that restlessness that people feel when they crave change. Keeping that passion burning and fresh is the key IMHO. Having said that - there is still no substitute for a lengthy break from the day to day routine in your life. I forgot how nice it was to take a holiday away from tech and even guitars every now and then. Keeps me hungry and reminds me how much I miss it. I need to consciously do it more. Hope this little diatribe helped to answer your question in some small way! :) (Note: For some more background, check the links in my HN bio - you will notice on my business web page, I stress the concept of 'software craftsmanship' there too, so my clients understand how I work).
Swizec 9y ago
As long as you don't confuse being ineffective for craftsmanship. It's not craft when something takes longer to build than it should. Or is of higher quality than needs to be. It's craft when something is juuuuust perfectly suited to its purpose. Do more, work less.
- adventured 9y ago
  > It's not craft when something takes longer to build than it should. Who determines the should part of that? The outside observer that claims they can build an Uber clone in a weekend? (an intentionally absurd example, although not uncommon either) Or the builder. And if it's the actual builder-owner, who else is there to specify to them, how long their building & craftsmanship should take? I say: nobody; period. I'll take the old id Software mantra: it'll be done when it's done. It's glorious in its go fuck yourself attitude toward artificially pressurized deadlines. Or Shigeru Miyamoto: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." Although I might change it to: a delayed game may eventually be good, but a rushed game is forever bad. The spirit of it is correct.
  - Swizec 9y ago
    > Or the builder. And if it's the actual builder-owner, who else is there to specify to them, how long their building & craftsmanship should take? I say: nobody; period. Exactly. The builder will know when they’re being effective and when they’re just fucking around. Deep down we all know even if we sometimes don’t want to admit it. And a great game never finished because it ran out of budget or time or the builder got distracted by a shiny new project is just that, a game never finished.
  - alphaalpha101 9y ago
    To play devil's advocate, some people would say that a rushed game actually exists while a delayed game gets cancelled. To not play devil's advocate, I really prefer finished games over rushed games.
- mt3ck 9y ago
  Exactly. I think there are a lot of individuals that preach things like the 4HWW when trying to achieve a wealthy lifestyle with little or no work, but the author is just taking advantage of that. Work smarter not harder, and it doesnt make you a craftsman by working slower or over longer periods, its about optimizing your time and being as effective as possible. Much of a typical 40hr work week is wasted time.
vadimberman 9y ago
I agree with the central idea, but the "networking events" are not representative of the industry. They attract professional b*itters by definition. There is nothing unique about running a startup, it's another business, but, as of today, with great expectations and generally more money and higher risk of quick failure than a mainstream business.
mch82 9y ago
This author has either not read or not understood the 4-Hour Work Week. At no point does the 4HWW talk about passively creating a business. What the book does point out is that when you sell billable hours you only make money at work, while if you sell product you make money anytime someone buys your product. Making money from a product sale while asleep is referred to as “passive income”. Any app developer selling an app or web subscription is earning a passive income. The criticism also ignores the 4HWW approach, which is to talk to experts & run experiments in order to learn the best way to do things rather than flail wildly without guidance. Lastly, the criticism ignores the “Dreamlining” portion of the 4HWW where Tim explores the difference between ownership of possessions and access to experiences. While many of the methods in 4HWW are now obsolete due to changes in how SEO works and saturation in web businesses, the section on Dreamlining is still worth a read.
- falcor84 9y ago
  You are going against a strawman. The author only had the following to say about the book itself: >>>The book itself is not really the issue. Ferriss indeed outlines some interesting tips on managing resources to get the highest ROI on your work.
- JBlue42 9y ago
  While I still get random snake oil vibes from stuff Tim F. says this is a great breakdown of that first book and the essence of what one can take away from it. Create a flow of income that requires less of your time so you can do the things you want to do (even if those things take 30-40 hrs/wk).
  - linkmotif 9y ago
    Yeah but that’s the snake oil. How many people are going to succeed at doing that? How many such businesses can possibly exist? You’d say I’m not creative, but I’d say I’ve seen the scope of what sells and there is little of anything you can earn passively. There’s no “set it and forget it” beyond informercials. Anyone with common sense who’s not in the business of self deluding themselves will see this. If you try playing a passive role in a business, that business will flounder and fail. If you have a successful cash flowing business, you’re a fool to be passive with it. You should be marketing it and growing it or get into some other business. The idea that entrepreneurs should seek work/life balance is some real Last Man stuff.
danschumann 9y ago
I've been writing animation software for 3 years, about 4-12 hours / day ( I also freelance 4 hours a day for money ). Before I started, I was a guy so obsessed, he was spending weekends and evenings writing painting apps, and 3d programs for fun. I have always likened myself to a carpenter building a house. Anyway, I've re-written most sections of my app 5-10 times. I'm re-writing much of the 50k lines right now (I'm adding in redux + immutable, but also refactoring lots and cleaning up lots). At this point, I'm fairly convinced you can't pay people to make an app like I'm making(to the same quality). I'm also fairly convinced if I was on a team, it wouldn't have worked either. Let me explain why... Re-writing the same stuff to get better code, to help enable things to work a different way, this feels bad, like wasted work, but it moves the project forward. It feels bad even though I'm re-writing my own code. If I was on a team, I think there would be more negativity around it. If I was paid to do something, I would focus my time on adding features, but not really on refactoring. I'd do enough to show results, but I'd paint myself into a corner, at which point development would slow down. It would be hard to get 'cleanup' projects approved. Management wouldn't understand. So, back to general stuff on being a craftsman.. something I've been going through was this constant sensation that "launch is coming", "launching next month!", but it was always in the distance. For a whole year, it felt like I'd launch was one month away. I think the lesson I was supposed to learn from this, was that I need to be hungry for the work I'm doing. The work is the reward, learning to enjoy the process. The work is my food, and I'm learning to be hungry. Loving the work, getting to the point where if I'm allowed to work on it, I've won, that's craftsmanship to me. Steve Wozniak is my hero in this sense. He loved the work, he loved "getting close" to the work and the code. He encouraged going over sections you already knew were pretty spiffy, just to get that much closer to the code. Anyway, I think all the "work less" movement is because people haven't actually found work they actually like. I make animation software, and it's been a hard school to learn to like it, which you would think would be easy. When the definition of anything changes to "work", it almost innately becomes harder to enjoy. I think the real lesson of the next decade is learning to enjoy work, especially when it becomes very difficult and harder to enjoy. To enjoy the unenjoyable is perhaps a secret to living. When I release my software, I want to be standing beside it straight and tall, beaming at the craftsmanship. Part of me hates sales, and in a way, it goes with the craftsmanship part, knowing that only a truly great product is worth selling, and that product does much of the selling itself, after the initial people have used it.
senatorobama 9y ago
TL;DR the Tim Ferris phenomenon? Isn't he just the original blogspammer?
kendallpark 9y ago
Every year devs debate over how to optimize the "X hour work week" function. I personally don't care what X is, I care about variation. I chafe under a steady X hours a week schedule. I'd rather go hard for a season, take a huge break, then go back to working 50-80 hours a week. Is anyone else like this?
- spraak 9y ago
  No, because even 40 is nearing too much for me. I'm happy and productive with my 4 to 6 hour days of development.
- SirZimzim 9y ago
  I am the same, I really hate the grind of year long working. I'm trying to optimize for long breaks but so far without going independent it seems employers prefer to keep you in a seat even if unproductive.
erikb 9y ago
It's a nice fantasy, but sadly not correct. Delivering an important share of the production value is valuable on the business side, that's true. But it's not the major factor. It's one of multiple bargaining chips. Knowing the right people is another. Building hype for the product is another. Being directly involved in the sales process is yet another. And there are multiple more. An enterprise is more than what it produces and therefore an enterpreneur also needs to be more. Not more in the sense of "higher level" but more in the sense of multi-tasking. Scale out, not scale up. And being mediocre in each area is actually quite okay if one therefore is able to understand which area is currently the most important. If you have an exceptional product but nobody buys it, the hype building part is very well the most important area at that time, as an example. So yes, craftmanship is important. It will make you produce great things, and the production of these things may make you a success as entrepreneur. But it's by far not to be singled out as The Major Factor.
jasonkester 9y ago
To lounge on a beach or travel the world and not actively engage in building your arsenal of expertise is professional malpractice. I've seen this thought expressed before in writing about Startups. If you're not burning your life down 24/7 in the struggle to make it Big, you're doing it wrong. But that's silly. The entire goal of building a business, in my mind, is to get the point where you can lounge on a beach or travel the world and not need to actively engage in anything except the pursuit of happiness. I personally averaged out at a little less than four hours of work per week in 2017, running the sort of low maintenance, feature complete, Software-as-a-Service business that the author spends a paragraph explaining is not in fact a "serious company". But look at the product and you'll see craftsmanship. Ten years of work, in fact as of roughly today. But never at the author's pace. Always at mine. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. That's the great thing about building a business. You can do it any way you like.
- tlack 9y ago
  Great post. I think that is actually the author's pace though - he's saying its more important to get something out there, do the work, than talk about it and network. And your work appears to be live and well! Who the hell wants to work for longer than it takes to prepare one margarita anyway?
- icc97 9y ago
  Becoming a craftsman is not about working 24/7 either. It is the love of the craft and dedication to it to overcome problems and learn. Often this means working hard, but not in a way that burns you out.
- chrishynes 9y ago
  Did you _build_ the business on 4 hours a week over 10 years? That'd be maybe one full time year worth of work over the period. Is it now fully supporting you, i.e. more than 6 figures of profit? If you did that on four hours a week over the duration, I salute you, and care to share your niche? If not, and you did spend more time in the first few years getting the business established, then how can you compare your relaxation on maintenance mode of a business after it is running smoothly with the initial effort it takes to get off the ground? That's pulling up the ladder after you succeeded, not relevant advice.
hyperpallium 9y ago
Taking ownership of and responsibility for one's own work, taking pride in it, and seeing the whole project through to completion (rather than being a cog on an assembly line, to mix metaphors) are certainly craftsmanship values. But for code, "craftsmanship" is problematic. Not just that it changes so quickly (compared with traditional crafts), that ideal skills don't have time to be defined, let alone mastered. This is caused by the malleable, abstract thought-stuff of code, and it occurs even within the work of the individual coder: as soon as you master something, it should be abstracted into a library or framework - a product. This puts the coder at a higher level, which is a different level, and therefore not yet mastered. Such factoring opportunities are far rarer in traditional, physical crafts. Productization obsoletes craftsmanship. Of course, not every task is sufficiently self-contained to be usefully factored out - instead, the code itself is pretty much the best "abstraction" you can do. But can these ad hoc tasks really be mastered either? > ‘I didn’t know how to do x, so I just had to figure it out.’ This is what I regularly hear from successful founders, whereas ‘I couldn’t find someone to do X, so I had to reconsider whether to pursue it at all’ is a common refrain from unsuccessful founders. Grit, resourcefulness, improvisation - great! But "figuring it out" is much closer to hacking a solution than achieving craftsmanship-like mastery...
- gurkendoktor 9y ago
  > This is caused by the malleable, abstract thought-stuff of code, and it occurs even within the work of the individual coder: as soon as you master something, it should be abstracted into a library or framework - a product. You can also turn this around: Maybe software craftsmanship is not about writing great code (for the reasons you mentioned; the article also doesn't phrase it that way), but about skillfully using existing tools. Peek into the open source libraries you use, disassemble the closed-source ones, take your time to really understand that occasional bug. There are many tools that rarely change (extreme examples: Unix, RDBMS, programming languages), and grokking them is not something that can be productized. Yet I see few people/businesses making that investment; it's easier in the short term to treat everything as a black box and add more abstraction glue, and that's what I see many people/businesses do.
  - 9y ago
zerr 9y ago
> 4-hour mindset It is usually meant to work 4 hours for others (client/employer), i.e. what you get paid for. And you spend the rest of the time honing your existing skills, acquiring new skills, etc... among other things.
- WJW 9y ago
  That is certainly not what Tim Ferris wrote about in the "4 hour workweek" book, which is what the blog post referred to. The book is quite literally about optimizing your life so that hours worked per week reduces to somewhere very low (four came from an A/B test, as TF explains in one of the first chapters).
  - zerr 9y ago
    I've not read Ferris, but e.g. I consider watching some CS lectures as the part of a recreation and leisure instead of working.
patrickg_zill 9y ago
I can't help but think of Ezra Pound's Canto XLV, "Usura". https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54319/canto-xlv https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54319/canto-xlv ; a line from the poem, "no picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly" We have swapped real value for fake artifice in too many ways in our economy...
vinceguidry 9y ago
The article states this as well, but I wanted to hammer on it. Tim's book is a quite serviceable read on building a sustainable Internet business, and warns against the kind of mentality that everyone seems to associate him with. He's really up-front about the fact that it can take years of 60-hour work weeks before you ever see a four-hour one. He's also stated in a blog post that he chose the title for the book based on market testing. It's far more of an indictment on society than it is on him that people take the spirit of his book wrong.
- Joeri 9y ago
  I felt the whole book to be a bit tongue in cheek anyway, as if no one was expected to actually try it. The point of the book for me wasn’t to achieve the four hour work week, it was to take control of your work week so you can have a better life.
  - vinceguidry 9y ago
    For me the big win was the realization that if you are an excellent performer at your job, you can negotiate perks. And a lot of that perk negotiation can involve asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Huge mental shift.
BeetleB 9y ago
>What is missed in all of this is the mindset of craftsmanship; that one’s expertise and deliberate focus on one’s craft is actually the primary driver for success and not some crapshoot of a series of hacks. I'm all for craftsmanship for the sake of it, but this statement is naive. You need craftsmanship for some type of businesses. For the rest, you do not. I have seen way too many people become successful financially with spaghetti, and even more who never got off the ground because they felt honing their craft would bring in more money. If you're trying to run a business, be as good as you need to be. I suspect many/most businesses will not benefit from becoming a master.
combatentropy 9y ago
> people talk about having an amazing idea that they want to farm out "Ideas are just a multiplier of execution," --- https://sivers.org/multiply https://sivers.org/multiply
andygcook 9y ago
Anything worth doing takes a long time. Sure, you can get going relatively fast to the person who’s doing nothing, but just like a software product, the last 10% is the same amount of effort as the first 90%. There’s a trail of hard work behind every founder that achieves outsized success. Jay Acunzo has a really good podcast about this subject: Unthinkable.fm. It’s focused on not embracing the hacks-culture and instead focusing on the craft. It’s texhnically a podcast about marketing, but a lot of what he talks about applies to other disciplines too. Most of the interviews are super interesting too.

244 points by rpkoven 9y ago

"Startup graveyards are full of visionaries without expertise or the proper skills to execute, for no other reason then ideas are not self executing, but are rather made into being by intense engagement by skilled operators." As an engineer who gets approached to build other people's ideas regularly, I find this trait to be true.

oglowo3 9y ago
I don't think Tim Ferriss is the issue, nor is the 4 Hour Work Week. I think Tim Ferris chose the title for marketing purposes. I do however, agree that a lot of his followers are looking for too many shortcuts.
- adventured 9y ago
  Who else was he going to sell to with marketing like that? It was intentional as you note. Calling it the 25 hour work week, wouldn't have sold very well, and would have attracted less of the shortcut crowd. He deserves appropriate criticism for the pandering, intentionally seeking to sell to that audience, with a fraudulent setup premise; the shortcut followers are his created monster.
- Realist1337 9y ago
  >> a lot of his followers are looking for too many shortcuts. In the old days, people devoted their careers to a company and companies looked out for people. Continuous layoff cycles were rare and long-timers earned pensions. These days there are layoffs in good times and bad. Sometimes layoffs hit entire divisions and even top rated people are let go. Why the heck would i trust some traditional system and not try to find shortcuts?
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    In the old days, people devoted their careers to a company and companies looked out for people. Really? I've been hearing that lament regularly for the last 35 years.
    - iagovar 9y ago
      Yes. IDK in the US, but it was common in Europe until the 80s-90s or so.
      - kbenson 9y ago
        That was the impression here too, but I think the truth has been shrouded in nostalgia. I think the truth is that it was just a large growth period (reconstruction, expansion, and population boom after Wii), and there was a lot of demand for workers. When demand for workers is high, and work is prevalent, workers get a really good deal. It was good until the economy changed, but that's why romantacizing it isn't worthwhile. The companies weren't any better, they were just behaving in their own self interest.
- fsloth 9y ago
  "...nor is the 4 Hour Work Week. I think Tim Ferris chose the title for marketing purposes." He tells this explicitly at the beginning of the book. He tried several names using dummy adverts to gauge click through rates and chose what generated most. I think the book is honest and comes clean on it's intended goal. It's written in the classic marketing buff style of TV shops worldwide. If one takes it seriously in all of it's claims then that's not really the authors problem. I agree the followers and not the source is the problem.
itgoon 9y ago
Ah yes, the old "I have a great idea, and if you do all the work, I'll be rich!" pitch. Hm. Yea. How about you just pay me?
b0rsuk 9y ago
It also strongly applies to aspiring game designers. What many young people don't understand is having an idea doesn't make you special. The devil is usually in the details - execution is harder. Furthermore, learning a useful game development skill gives you a better understanding of games. Aside from brilliantly simple ideas, it usually takes work to convince someone to your idea. I had a friend that tried to take advantage of me that way. Last time I heard he worked as a software tester at a clothing company, but he had made attempts at managing people. To a certain degree, I used to be like that, except I never explicitly tried managing people, only posted ideas on forums. These days I'm a determined programmer. If you're one of those people who love posting on "Ideas" subforums, I have sympathy for you, but programmers, animators, sound designers etc also have ideas, and can make more things happen.

sneak 9y ago

They are using different metrics of success. That kind of social hustling that is devoid of any meaningful engineering is indeed a way to make a very decent and respectable personal income, even if none of your businesses are ever that useful or produce any good technology. Whereas most hackers I think view success as “changing the world for the better directly via the production of software or electronics”.

insickness 9y ago

While I agree that it's bullshit that you can be successful working 4 hours per week, there was a good point in the book: It's not worth making yourself unhappy working relentlessly in an unfulfilling job in order to enjoy the fruits of your labor in some distant future. Better to work less hours so you can enjoy your life while you're young.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
While bringing your spending and corresponding expectations in line with that income level.
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quickConclusion 9y ago
Tim Ferris got to 4 hours per week by working 70+h per week for a long time, then firing his least profitable clients, automating/delegating and giving up about growing his business further. you'll never get there working 4 hours a week. And you'll never do 4 hours a week if you are passionate about your job, or a rat racer. src: his book the 4 hours work week
gingerlime 9y ago
There's a pretty wide spectrum between 4 hours per week and working yourself to death. As a co-founder/technical person, I immensely enjoy what I do. Frankly, I'll get bored pretty quickly sitting at the beach and staring at the ocean. It's fun and relaxing, but I kinda "get the point" after some time. Whereas, there are endless challenges to keep me motivated, curious, and ultimately satisfied "at work". It was more or less the same satisfaction and fulfillment I had as an employee. I just enjoyed the challenges and still got compensated generously back then. Disclaimer: I didn't read the book. I'm sure it has some great points or it won't resonate with so many people. Also I should mention that at our company we instated a 45-days holidays per year policy (this includes personal and public holidays, we're 100% remote, no VC, but no dreams of mega money). So we do see a lot of value in not working to death.

dev1n 9y ago

This guy has some great points. I can't get past the fact that he didn't review his writing at all, nor did he have anyone else proof-read it. The writing quality is poor. "... your way your way...", "... just a by standard...", improper uses of "then", "this tasks" etc... all distract from the thesis.

dtawfik1 9y ago
Thanks for pointing that out (quite embarrassing). I made those edits and I appreciate you bringing them to my attention/

cyberferret 9y ago

I am probably in the age bracket that puts me in the 'old fashioned' end of the spectrum of HN readers, but I fully agree with the premise of the article. Craftsmanship is a lost art form these days. While I admire, and respect the wishes of a lot of younger people in my industry these days to want to travel a lot, and build a business that can be operated anywhere, I think a lot of them don't yet have the realisation that anything you do day in day out, can become routine, boring and something that you will yearn to be 'free' from after a while.

wjn0 9y ago
> anything you do day in day out, can become routine, boring and something that you will yearn to be 'free' from after a while. You seem to both understand, and maybe have overcome at one time or another, this sentiment. Would you have any advice for someone who seems to experience this chronically?
- cyberferret 9y ago
  I guess I have bumped against this several times. Given my age (52), I think I have done so more times than someone who is 22. I shall use an acquaintance/client of mine that I have known for years as an illustration. A very successful businessman, he and his family have a love of the Balinese lifestyle, though they live here in Australia. His wealth and success meant that he could buy a huge property just outside town and turn it into a little 'mini Bali resort'. He had a beautiful artificial lagoon, plunge pools, thatch huts etc. It really was the envy of most people here. But after about 2 years of that, they sold the property. I was as shocked as most other people and asked him why, but he said that it just became too 'samey' day after day, living in that resort style environment, and they were craving something different. So they actually moved to Bali, and bought a house there. After about 12 months, they moved back. Once again, I asked, and received a similar answer. Living in 'holiday mode' for months on end, and getting waited on hand and foot by locals, while it sounded like heaven for most people, turned into a chore, and they got bored and craved something different. For me personally, I have spent the past decade or so setting up my business so that it can be operated from anywhere. We bought quite a nice house with a downstairs separate office so I could work from home and be near the kids when they were younger and going to school just up the road. Whilst 80% of the time, it IS bliss, and works well, and I am happy - there are the odd times that I get cabin fever, or crave working in an office environment again - just for the change mainly. My solution to that was to essentially go down the 'craftsman' route - by giving up doing general IT support work, which at the time was the mainstay of my business, and focusing on just software development. But not 'software development' where I would basically be a project manager and farm the actual work out to overseas contractors. I meant 'software development' as a craft where it would only be myself touching the code, liaising with the customers, and doing all the design, coding, testing etc. Much as a bespoke cobbler or blacksmith would do in the old days - I would talk to a customer who approached me, help them to work out what they wanted, and then (this is the important bit) I would decide whether to take on the job, or refer them onto another colleague. I would only take on work that I found challenging, or that would push me to learn new technologies or methodologies. Not TOO much, otherwise I wouldn't be productive, but just enough so that I wouldn't get bored by the project, and could add another small skillset to my experience roster when I had finished. I also reverted to working on basically one project at a time, and was turning away more work that I was taking on. I would treat each project as an 'end to end' thing - and would take pride when I finished and delivered the results to my client. Throwing myself wholly and solely into my work like this helped to keep my batteries charged a lot longer. I guess it is a lot like a Startup founder working completely focused on their 'baby' (NB, I am also working on a startup of my own at the moment). Sure that was a bit of a hit on cashflow and profitability, but my personal happiness at work went up. Owning a project from start to finish, then basically being able to hand it over and dust my hands off and stop thinking about it altogether before starting the next one helped to keep me mentally sharp and focused. (Of course, there are always return clients who want extras or enhancements, but I similarly treat those as a whole new separate project each time). The other thing that helped was to turn my office space into a mix of my hobby and professional passions. I am an avid guitarist, so my programming space is also a mini recording studio, and I often pick up a guitar and play while waiting for downloads/compiles or just in between tedious tasks. That also helps to keep my mind fresh and keeps it from wandering and wishing for different things. I believe that the death of passion is what brings about that restlessness that people feel when they crave change. Keeping that passion burning and fresh is the key IMHO. Having said that - there is still no substitute for a lengthy break from the day to day routine in your life. I forgot how nice it was to take a holiday away from tech and even guitars every now and then. Keeps me hungry and reminds me how much I miss it. I need to consciously do it more. Hope this little diatribe helped to answer your question in some small way! :) (Note: For some more background, check the links in my HN bio - you will notice on my business web page, I stress the concept of 'software craftsmanship' there too, so my clients understand how I work).

Swizec 9y ago

As long as you don't confuse being ineffective for craftsmanship. It's not craft when something takes longer to build than it should. Or is of higher quality than needs to be. It's craft when something is juuuuust perfectly suited to its purpose. Do more, work less.

adventured 9y ago
> It's not craft when something takes longer to build than it should. Who determines the should part of that? The outside observer that claims they can build an Uber clone in a weekend? (an intentionally absurd example, although not uncommon either) Or the builder. And if it's the actual builder-owner, who else is there to specify to them, how long their building & craftsmanship should take? I say: nobody; period. I'll take the old id Software mantra: it'll be done when it's done. It's glorious in its go fuck yourself attitude toward artificially pressurized deadlines. Or Shigeru Miyamoto: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." Although I might change it to: a delayed game may eventually be good, but a rushed game is forever bad. The spirit of it is correct.
- Swizec 9y ago
  > Or the builder. And if it's the actual builder-owner, who else is there to specify to them, how long their building & craftsmanship should take? I say: nobody; period. Exactly. The builder will know when they’re being effective and when they’re just fucking around. Deep down we all know even if we sometimes don’t want to admit it. And a great game never finished because it ran out of budget or time or the builder got distracted by a shiny new project is just that, a game never finished.
- alphaalpha101 9y ago
  To play devil's advocate, some people would say that a rushed game actually exists while a delayed game gets cancelled. To not play devil's advocate, I really prefer finished games over rushed games.
mt3ck 9y ago
Exactly. I think there are a lot of individuals that preach things like the 4HWW when trying to achieve a wealthy lifestyle with little or no work, but the author is just taking advantage of that. Work smarter not harder, and it doesnt make you a craftsman by working slower or over longer periods, its about optimizing your time and being as effective as possible. Much of a typical 40hr work week is wasted time.

vadimberman 9y ago

I agree with the central idea, but the "networking events" are not representative of the industry. They attract professional b*itters by definition. There is nothing unique about running a startup, it's another business, but, as of today, with great expectations and generally more money and higher risk of quick failure than a mainstream business.

mch82 9y ago

This author has either not read or not understood the 4-Hour Work Week. At no point does the 4HWW talk about passively creating a business. What the book does point out is that when you sell billable hours you only make money at work, while if you sell product you make money anytime someone buys your product. Making money from a product sale while asleep is referred to as “passive income”. Any app developer selling an app or web subscription is earning a passive income. The criticism also ignores the 4HWW approach, which is to talk to experts & run experiments in order to learn the best way to do things rather than flail wildly without guidance. Lastly, the criticism ignores the “Dreamlining” portion of the 4HWW where Tim explores the difference between ownership of possessions and access to experiences. While many of the methods in 4HWW are now obsolete due to changes in how SEO works and saturation in web businesses, the section on Dreamlining is still worth a read.

falcor84 9y ago
You are going against a strawman. The author only had the following to say about the book itself: >>>The book itself is not really the issue. Ferriss indeed outlines some interesting tips on managing resources to get the highest ROI on your work.
JBlue42 9y ago
While I still get random snake oil vibes from stuff Tim F. says this is a great breakdown of that first book and the essence of what one can take away from it. Create a flow of income that requires less of your time so you can do the things you want to do (even if those things take 30-40 hrs/wk).
- linkmotif 9y ago
  Yeah but that’s the snake oil. How many people are going to succeed at doing that? How many such businesses can possibly exist? You’d say I’m not creative, but I’d say I’ve seen the scope of what sells and there is little of anything you can earn passively. There’s no “set it and forget it” beyond informercials. Anyone with common sense who’s not in the business of self deluding themselves will see this. If you try playing a passive role in a business, that business will flounder and fail. If you have a successful cash flowing business, you’re a fool to be passive with it. You should be marketing it and growing it or get into some other business. The idea that entrepreneurs should seek work/life balance is some real Last Man stuff.

danschumann 9y ago

I've been writing animation software for 3 years, about 4-12 hours / day ( I also freelance 4 hours a day for money ). Before I started, I was a guy so obsessed, he was spending weekends and evenings writing painting apps, and 3d programs for fun. I have always likened myself to a carpenter building a house. Anyway, I've re-written most sections of my app 5-10 times. I'm re-writing much of the 50k lines right now (I'm adding in redux + immutable, but also refactoring lots and cleaning up lots). At this point, I'm fairly convinced you can't pay people to make an app like I'm making(to the same quality). I'm also fairly convinced if I was on a team, it wouldn't have worked either. Let me explain why... Re-writing the same stuff to get better code, to help enable things to work a different way, this feels bad, like wasted work, but it moves the project forward. It feels bad even though I'm re-writing my own code. If I was on a team, I think there would be more negativity around it. If I was paid to do something, I would focus my time on adding features, but not really on refactoring. I'd do enough to show results, but I'd paint myself into a corner, at which point development would slow down. It would be hard to get 'cleanup' projects approved. Management wouldn't understand. So, back to general stuff on being a craftsman.. something I've been going through was this constant sensation that "launch is coming", "launching next month!", but it was always in the distance. For a whole year, it felt like I'd launch was one month away. I think the lesson I was supposed to learn from this, was that I need to be hungry for the work I'm doing. The work is the reward, learning to enjoy the process. The work is my food, and I'm learning to be hungry. Loving the work, getting to the point where if I'm allowed to work on it, I've won, that's craftsmanship to me. Steve Wozniak is my hero in this sense. He loved the work, he loved "getting close" to the work and the code. He encouraged going over sections you already knew were pretty spiffy, just to get that much closer to the code. Anyway, I think all the "work less" movement is because people haven't actually found work they actually like. I make animation software, and it's been a hard school to learn to like it, which you would think would be easy. When the definition of anything changes to "work", it almost innately becomes harder to enjoy. I think the real lesson of the next decade is learning to enjoy work, especially when it becomes very difficult and harder to enjoy. To enjoy the unenjoyable is perhaps a secret to living. When I release my software, I want to be standing beside it straight and tall, beaming at the craftsmanship. Part of me hates sales, and in a way, it goes with the craftsmanship part, knowing that only a truly great product is worth selling, and that product does much of the selling itself, after the initial people have used it.

senatorobama 9y ago

TL;DR the Tim Ferris phenomenon? Isn't he just the original blogspammer?

kendallpark 9y ago

Every year devs debate over how to optimize the "X hour work week" function. I personally don't care what X is, I care about variation. I chafe under a steady X hours a week schedule. I'd rather go hard for a season, take a huge break, then go back to working 50-80 hours a week. Is anyone else like this?

spraak 9y ago
No, because even 40 is nearing too much for me. I'm happy and productive with my 4 to 6 hour days of development.
SirZimzim 9y ago
I am the same, I really hate the grind of year long working. I'm trying to optimize for long breaks but so far without going independent it seems employers prefer to keep you in a seat even if unproductive.

erikb 9y ago

It's a nice fantasy, but sadly not correct. Delivering an important share of the production value is valuable on the business side, that's true. But it's not the major factor. It's one of multiple bargaining chips. Knowing the right people is another. Building hype for the product is another. Being directly involved in the sales process is yet another. And there are multiple more. An enterprise is more than what it produces and therefore an enterpreneur also needs to be more. Not more in the sense of "higher level" but more in the sense of multi-tasking. Scale out, not scale up. And being mediocre in each area is actually quite okay if one therefore is able to understand which area is currently the most important. If you have an exceptional product but nobody buys it, the hype building part is very well the most important area at that time, as an example. So yes, craftmanship is important. It will make you produce great things, and the production of these things may make you a success as entrepreneur. But it's by far not to be singled out as The Major Factor.

jasonkester 9y ago

To lounge on a beach or travel the world and not actively engage in building your arsenal of expertise is professional malpractice. I've seen this thought expressed before in writing about Startups. If you're not burning your life down 24/7 in the struggle to make it Big, you're doing it wrong. But that's silly. The entire goal of building a business, in my mind, is to get the point where you can lounge on a beach or travel the world and not need to actively engage in anything except the pursuit of happiness. I personally averaged out at a little less than four hours of work per week in 2017, running the sort of low maintenance, feature complete, Software-as-a-Service business that the author spends a paragraph explaining is not in fact a "serious company". But look at the product and you'll see craftsmanship. Ten years of work, in fact as of roughly today. But never at the author's pace. Always at mine. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. That's the great thing about building a business. You can do it any way you like.

tlack 9y ago
Great post. I think that is actually the author's pace though - he's saying its more important to get something out there, do the work, than talk about it and network. And your work appears to be live and well! Who the hell wants to work for longer than it takes to prepare one margarita anyway?
icc97 9y ago
Becoming a craftsman is not about working 24/7 either. It is the love of the craft and dedication to it to overcome problems and learn. Often this means working hard, but not in a way that burns you out.
chrishynes 9y ago
Did you _build_ the business on 4 hours a week over 10 years? That'd be maybe one full time year worth of work over the period. Is it now fully supporting you, i.e. more than 6 figures of profit? If you did that on four hours a week over the duration, I salute you, and care to share your niche? If not, and you did spend more time in the first few years getting the business established, then how can you compare your relaxation on maintenance mode of a business after it is running smoothly with the initial effort it takes to get off the ground? That's pulling up the ladder after you succeeded, not relevant advice.

hyperpallium 9y ago

Taking ownership of and responsibility for one's own work, taking pride in it, and seeing the whole project through to completion (rather than being a cog on an assembly line, to mix metaphors) are certainly craftsmanship values. But for code, "craftsmanship" is problematic. Not just that it changes so quickly (compared with traditional crafts), that ideal skills don't have time to be defined, let alone mastered. This is caused by the malleable, abstract thought-stuff of code, and it occurs even within the work of the individual coder: as soon as you master something, it should be abstracted into a library or framework - a product. This puts the coder at a higher level, which is a different level, and therefore not yet mastered. Such factoring opportunities are far rarer in traditional, physical crafts. Productization obsoletes craftsmanship. Of course, not every task is sufficiently self-contained to be usefully factored out - instead, the code itself is pretty much the best "abstraction" you can do. But can these ad hoc tasks really be mastered either? > ‘I didn’t know how to do x, so I just had to figure it out.’ This is what I regularly hear from successful founders, whereas ‘I couldn’t find someone to do X, so I had to reconsider whether to pursue it at all’ is a common refrain from unsuccessful founders. Grit, resourcefulness, improvisation - great! But "figuring it out" is much closer to hacking a solution than achieving craftsmanship-like mastery...

gurkendoktor 9y ago
> This is caused by the malleable, abstract thought-stuff of code, and it occurs even within the work of the individual coder: as soon as you master something, it should be abstracted into a library or framework - a product. You can also turn this around: Maybe software craftsmanship is not about writing great code (for the reasons you mentioned; the article also doesn't phrase it that way), but about skillfully using existing tools. Peek into the open source libraries you use, disassemble the closed-source ones, take your time to really understand that occasional bug. There are many tools that rarely change (extreme examples: Unix, RDBMS, programming languages), and grokking them is not something that can be productized. Yet I see few people/businesses making that investment; it's easier in the short term to treat everything as a black box and add more abstraction glue, and that's what I see many people/businesses do.
- 9y ago

zerr 9y ago

> 4-hour mindset It is usually meant to work 4 hours for others (client/employer), i.e. what you get paid for. And you spend the rest of the time honing your existing skills, acquiring new skills, etc... among other things.

WJW 9y ago
That is certainly not what Tim Ferris wrote about in the "4 hour workweek" book, which is what the blog post referred to. The book is quite literally about optimizing your life so that hours worked per week reduces to somewhere very low (four came from an A/B test, as TF explains in one of the first chapters).
- zerr 9y ago
  I've not read Ferris, but e.g. I consider watching some CS lectures as the part of a recreation and leisure instead of working.

patrickg_zill 9y ago

I can't help but think of Ezra Pound's Canto XLV, "Usura". https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54319/canto-xlv https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54319/canto-xlv ; a line from the poem, "no picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly" We have swapped real value for fake artifice in too many ways in our economy...

vinceguidry 9y ago

The article states this as well, but I wanted to hammer on it. Tim's book is a quite serviceable read on building a sustainable Internet business, and warns against the kind of mentality that everyone seems to associate him with. He's really up-front about the fact that it can take years of 60-hour work weeks before you ever see a four-hour one. He's also stated in a blog post that he chose the title for the book based on market testing. It's far more of an indictment on society than it is on him that people take the spirit of his book wrong.

Joeri 9y ago
I felt the whole book to be a bit tongue in cheek anyway, as if no one was expected to actually try it. The point of the book for me wasn’t to achieve the four hour work week, it was to take control of your work week so you can have a better life.
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  For me the big win was the realization that if you are an excellent performer at your job, you can negotiate perks. And a lot of that perk negotiation can involve asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Huge mental shift.

BeetleB 9y ago

>What is missed in all of this is the mindset of craftsmanship; that one’s expertise and deliberate focus on one’s craft is actually the primary driver for success and not some crapshoot of a series of hacks. I'm all for craftsmanship for the sake of it, but this statement is naive. You need craftsmanship for some type of businesses. For the rest, you do not. I have seen way too many people become successful financially with spaghetti, and even more who never got off the ground because they felt honing their craft would bring in more money. If you're trying to run a business, be as good as you need to be. I suspect many/most businesses will not benefit from becoming a master.

combatentropy 9y ago

> people talk about having an amazing idea that they want to farm out "Ideas are just a multiplier of execution," --- https://sivers.org/multiply https://sivers.org/multiply

andygcook 9y ago

Anything worth doing takes a long time. Sure, you can get going relatively fast to the person who’s doing nothing, but just like a software product, the last 10% is the same amount of effort as the first 90%. There’s a trail of hard work behind every founder that achieves outsized success. Jay Acunzo has a really good podcast about this subject: Unthinkable.fm. It’s focused on not embracing the hacks-culture and instead focusing on the craft. It’s texhnically a podcast about marketing, but a lot of what he talks about applies to other disciplines too. Most of the interviews are super interesting too.