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> Too many of our smartest minds are working on trivial tasks I find this a bit condescending. Too many people act like entrepreneurship is something everyone

> Too many of our smartest minds are working on trivial tasks I find this a bit condescending. Too many people act like entrepreneurship is something everyone has the stomach/personality/capacity for. Too many people write blog articles about how if you're not building the next big thing, you're not contributing to society. Most people I've met in my professional and personal life are supporting their families, trying to raise kids well, making time/$ for their passions, or just generally trying to live a decent life despite the difficult circumstances that life throws at you.

polishdude20 4y ago
Especially this first quote: "People aren’t deliberate enough about choosing what to work on." Hold up. What is this based on? Is it based on a feeling of the author's inflated sense of worth compared to others? Or is this really some objective and measurable metric? Is it possible the author doesn't actually know or has taken the effort to deliberate on this statement themselves? Playing devil's advocate with your own ideas is probably the greatest service you can do for yourself but it seems that's not practised here. I can come up with many examples of how people ARE very deliberate in what they work on. Like you said, raising a family, enjoying time outside of work, just straight up trying to survive. These all seem pretty deliberate.
- lelandfe 4y ago
  > Is it possible the author doesn't actually know It’s a very HN mindset to reject articles not backed up by objective facts. This is an inherently subjective post, pointing out the lack of hard data shouldn’t be an indictment of the author’s thesis.
- altdataseller 4y ago
  He is projecting himself. Everything he is saying is a reflection of himself
  - wnolens 4y ago
    Precisely. He likely had a revelation about himself, and writes about it with the language, "people are mostly xyz." What a joke.
  - ryandvm 4y ago
    Oof. Been there, done that. In my opinion, a major facet of maturity is figuring out that all the negative shit you think about other people is often just the things you don't like about yourself projected onto other people.
  - cecilpl2 4y ago
    Everyone generalizes from a sample size of one. Well, at least I do.
- diob 4y ago
  It's also a Maslow's hierarchy of needs sort of thing. I'm about 33 and finally I feel secure enough to think about things beyond survival.
  - highwaylights 4y ago
    This right here. Depending on how someone’s life goes and the circumstances they were born into they may either start at this point or never get there at all. The naïveté to different people’s situations is really prevalent here sometimes.
    - mgh2 4y ago
      Completely agree, Blind has the same mentality https://www.teamblind.com/post/UyGsEdyC?cid=24327137 https://www.teamblind.com/post/UyGsEdyC?cid=24327137
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Author might be a bit off in the reason but there's a lot of people not working where they'd like because the job market is weird and at one point you need money.
TekMol 4y ago
This kind of thinking leads to a dystopian future where all of us are slaves to one giant almighty company. We already got surprisingly close to it with the power Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon have. Imagine the founders of these companies would have thought like this. How big would Microsoft be today? Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together? Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters?
- wnolens 4y ago
  > Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together? Because most people are not capable of that, or they would not want to. > Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters? Because only they have sufficient capital and expectation of return and intimate knowledge of the space to scratch their own itch.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    > Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together? Because most people are not capable of that i find that extremely condescending. some may not want to, fine, but many also live in an environment where building your own business is being discouraged and made difficult. but for most, it is probably just that it takes more effort to build a business than to get a job. how come that the countries with the most entrepreneurs are all in 2nd or 3rd world countries? uganda having the highest with 28% of the population having their own business. i very much doubt that capacity has anything to do with it, only willingness and need. many people in uganda probably have their own business because they have no other alternatives. but still, the idea of a society where everyone is building their own business is totally possible. all it takes is the right attitude and willingness.
- lezojeda 4y ago
  >Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together? Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters? Some of us are not interested in having our own business, we just want to enjoy life in other ways such as raising a family, hobbies, relaxing, etc.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Is it really condescending on it's own? It's not exactly a big secret many of us choose to work on relatively boring and useless things for the sake of comfort. That's more on society for aligning the benefits that way.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Instead of blog posts, people who are advocating for others to work on "more important work" should be spending their time improving various systems to enable people to work on more important work. Universal healthcare, improved child care accessibility, affordable housing, anything you can think of that is an enabler of talent to do more than survive vs thrive (in some quantified effectiveness to cost sequencing). People are just trying to get by because there is no alternative considering resourcing. Otherwise, these come off as "your risk appetite and budget is too low try harder." The cost of failure is simply too damn high unless you're young and have zero responsibility and obligations or wealthy family/connections to fall back on [1]. (imho it is condescending on its own; treat the root cause, not the symptom, but that's hard and takes years to accomplish with little payoff to the person pontificating, so it's easier to complain on social/public media instead) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 (credit to u/notacoward)
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    I mean I'm just reading this and thinking of the "I got a PhD in math, now I earn fat cash by.. increasing advertisement clickrates by 0.001%" meme. Wouldn't call consumption increase a net positive in today's society, but you bet I'm not going to fight an uphill battle for lower rewards out of some good will. It's only placing it in the context (first sentence) where it becomes condescending to me. Like, dude, you joking? Of course I'm thinking of what I'm doing with my life writing boring CRUD code. But it's lucrative.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      You are acting rationally, I don't blame you. My comment is an indictment of the concept as a whole of the post, in the same way people tell younger cohorts to skip the coffee and avocado toast to afford a house. If you want people to work on more meaningful work, fix the socioeconomics to make that work enticing (which I think we agree on?).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nivenkos 4y ago
> I find this a bit condescending. Is it? I moved from ML and Physics research to optimising the sale of imaginary currencies in mobile games, because the pay and stability is so much better. It's a great shame that academia is terribly paid and an unstable career path in the West. I'd much rather be working on Fusion research or genetic engineering, but that won't pay the mortgage.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lezojeda 4y ago
  >It's a great shame that academia is terribly paid and an unstable career path in the West. Is it better in the East? No loaded question, I genuinely want to know your answer
  - nr2x 4y ago
    In my experience, much worse.
  - yawnxyz 4y ago
    Weirdly enough, Australia pays researchers, including PhDs and post-docs really well. Must be all that coal money
    - grfn 4y ago
      Postdocs are payed well, but PhDs get around 30k AUD per year, which is quite low.
- rhacker 4y ago
  I can't imagine ML research getting paid less than fake currencies in mobile games... I mean unless you're making more than $400k?
  - nivenkos 4y ago
    Research in Academia... in Europe. I was paid ~30k.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
I wish I had the ability to work on something that was the slightest bit meaningful. I know I could if I just had the opportunity. But I don't. If I'd been overcome a compulsion to become a deadbeat when I was 20 years old and my professional career was erased from history, I don't think that reality would be worse than one in which my career existed, not even by the tiniest amount. My entire working life has basically been building nonsense to enable rich people to get even richer with less inconvenience. It's frustrating because everyone knows it's pointless bullshit. I know it's pointless bullshit. My coworkers know it's pointless bullshit. My boss knows it's pointless bullshit. Everyone is just kinda going through the whole charade because it keeps the paychecks coming.
- nuancebydefault 4y ago
  I feel you. The good news is, if you look for it hard enough there are opportunities to make a living while NOT producing pointless/meaningless output. It took me 20+ years to accomplish that, but the reason is somewhat like the author of the post describes (even if this might be projection of his own situation upon others) : we don't try hard enough to use our knowledge, skills and talent productively -- towards improving housing, healthcare, education, charity, energy,... stuff that really matters.
stocknoob 4y ago
Condescending doesn’t mean inaccurate.
w0m 4y ago
Agreed. People don't have to define themselves and/or their worth by their day job.
WJW 4y ago
It would make the article at least 10x better if it included a section where the author describes why he isn't following his own advice and writes a weekly newsletter instead.
- mattferderer 4y ago
  Strong vibes - https://youtube.com/shorts/2rYV681lSGg?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/2rYV681lSGg?feature=share (Charlie Munger - People on TV selling Books) and all the people selling courses about how to sell courses.
cptcobalt 4y ago
> Too many people act like entrepreneurship is something everyone has the stomach/personality/capacity for. Entrepreneurship and making things do not need to be intrinsically linked. It's ok to work on things for the sake of making things. If you release yourself from the impulse of thinking you need to make cash from something, you can often feel more comfortable doing your best work on bigger, harder problems. This, of course, doesn't work for everybody.
- nuancebydefault 4y ago
  Also, if everyone would be an entrepreneur, no-one would work together on the same thing, right? So working on _stuff that matters_ does not have to imply being an entrepreneur. It is perfectly fine to leave that to the people who are talented with or have a strong passion for entrepreneurship.
hinkley 4y ago
> if you're not building the next big thing, you're not contributing to society. I think we can all agree that any book written about the Fall of Google is going to focus pretty strongly on their lack of a maintenance culture. Building bridges is great, but if the opening of the bridge was a major event for a town, the subsequent closure of said bridge will be an even bigger event. When work is going smoothly, the story I'm working on this week is often of a lower priority than the one I worked on two months ago. The major exception being when the current story was blocked by dependencies. A lot of invention comes down to people noticing that ideas have been unblocked. But while the new gadget or surgery can have life altering effects, so can the collapse of infrastructure for food, water, and shelter. Those always need minders or society would unravel.
cam0 4y ago
Especially when you look at the majority of startups getting funded or posting in "Who's Hiring" and the descriptions of what they do boils down to.. trying to solve some trivial problem.

polishdude20 4y ago

Especially this first quote: "People aren’t deliberate enough about choosing what to work on." Hold up. What is this based on? Is it based on a feeling of the author's inflated sense of worth compared to others? Or is this really some objective and measurable metric? Is it possible the author doesn't actually know or has taken the effort to deliberate on this statement themselves? Playing devil's advocate with your own ideas is probably the greatest service you can do for yourself but it seems that's not practised here. I can come up with many examples of how people ARE very deliberate in what they work on. Like you said, raising a family, enjoying time outside of work, just straight up trying to survive. These all seem pretty deliberate.

lelandfe 4y ago
> Is it possible the author doesn't actually know It’s a very HN mindset to reject articles not backed up by objective facts. This is an inherently subjective post, pointing out the lack of hard data shouldn’t be an indictment of the author’s thesis.
altdataseller 4y ago
He is projecting himself. Everything he is saying is a reflection of himself
- wnolens 4y ago
  Precisely. He likely had a revelation about himself, and writes about it with the language, "people are mostly xyz." What a joke.
- ryandvm 4y ago
  Oof. Been there, done that. In my opinion, a major facet of maturity is figuring out that all the negative shit you think about other people is often just the things you don't like about yourself projected onto other people.
- cecilpl2 4y ago
  Everyone generalizes from a sample size of one. Well, at least I do.
diob 4y ago
It's also a Maslow's hierarchy of needs sort of thing. I'm about 33 and finally I feel secure enough to think about things beyond survival.
- highwaylights 4y ago
  This right here. Depending on how someone’s life goes and the circumstances they were born into they may either start at this point or never get there at all. The naïveté to different people’s situations is really prevalent here sometimes.
  - mgh2 4y ago
    Completely agree, Blind has the same mentality https://www.teamblind.com/post/UyGsEdyC?cid=24327137 https://www.teamblind.com/post/UyGsEdyC?cid=24327137
agumonkey 4y ago
Author might be a bit off in the reason but there's a lot of people not working where they'd like because the job market is weird and at one point you need money.

TekMol 4y ago

This kind of thinking leads to a dystopian future where all of us are slaves to one giant almighty company. We already got surprisingly close to it with the power Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon have. Imagine the founders of these companies would have thought like this. How big would Microsoft be today? Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together? Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters?

wnolens 4y ago
> Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together? Because most people are not capable of that, or they would not want to. > Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters? Because only they have sufficient capital and expectation of return and intimate knowledge of the space to scratch their own itch.
- em-bee 4y ago
  > Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together? Because most people are not capable of that i find that extremely condescending. some may not want to, fine, but many also live in an environment where building your own business is being discouraged and made difficult. but for most, it is probably just that it takes more effort to build a business than to get a job. how come that the countries with the most entrepreneurs are all in 2nd or 3rd world countries? uganda having the highest with 28% of the population having their own business. i very much doubt that capacity has anything to do with it, only willingness and need. many people in uganda probably have their own business because they have no other alternatives. but still, the idea of a society where everyone is building their own business is totally possible. all it takes is the right attitude and willingness.
lezojeda 4y ago
>Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together? Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters? Some of us are not interested in having our own business, we just want to enjoy life in other ways such as raising a family, hobbies, relaxing, etc.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

Is it really condescending on it's own? It's not exactly a big secret many of us choose to work on relatively boring and useless things for the sake of comfort. That's more on society for aligning the benefits that way.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Instead of blog posts, people who are advocating for others to work on "more important work" should be spending their time improving various systems to enable people to work on more important work. Universal healthcare, improved child care accessibility, affordable housing, anything you can think of that is an enabler of talent to do more than survive vs thrive (in some quantified effectiveness to cost sequencing). People are just trying to get by because there is no alternative considering resourcing. Otherwise, these come off as "your risk appetite and budget is too low try harder." The cost of failure is simply too damn high unless you're young and have zero responsibility and obligations or wealthy family/connections to fall back on [1]. (imho it is condescending on its own; treat the root cause, not the symptom, but that's hard and takes years to accomplish with little payoff to the person pontificating, so it's easier to complain on social/public media instead) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 (credit to u/notacoward)
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  I mean I'm just reading this and thinking of the "I got a PhD in math, now I earn fat cash by.. increasing advertisement clickrates by 0.001%" meme. Wouldn't call consumption increase a net positive in today's society, but you bet I'm not going to fight an uphill battle for lower rewards out of some good will. It's only placing it in the context (first sentence) where it becomes condescending to me. Like, dude, you joking? Of course I'm thinking of what I'm doing with my life writing boring CRUD code. But it's lucrative.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    You are acting rationally, I don't blame you. My comment is an indictment of the concept as a whole of the post, in the same way people tell younger cohorts to skip the coffee and avocado toast to afford a house. If you want people to work on more meaningful work, fix the socioeconomics to make that work enticing (which I think we agree on?).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nivenkos 4y ago

> I find this a bit condescending. Is it? I moved from ML and Physics research to optimising the sale of imaginary currencies in mobile games, because the pay and stability is so much better. It's a great shame that academia is terribly paid and an unstable career path in the West. I'd much rather be working on Fusion research or genetic engineering, but that won't pay the mortgage.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lezojeda 4y ago
>It's a great shame that academia is terribly paid and an unstable career path in the West. Is it better in the East? No loaded question, I genuinely want to know your answer
- nr2x 4y ago
  In my experience, much worse.
- yawnxyz 4y ago
  Weirdly enough, Australia pays researchers, including PhDs and post-docs really well. Must be all that coal money
  - grfn 4y ago
    Postdocs are payed well, but PhDs get around 30k AUD per year, which is quite low.
rhacker 4y ago
I can't imagine ML research getting paid less than fake currencies in mobile games... I mean unless you're making more than $400k?
- nivenkos 4y ago
  Research in Academia... in Europe. I was paid ~30k.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

I wish I had the ability to work on something that was the slightest bit meaningful. I know I could if I just had the opportunity. But I don't. If I'd been overcome a compulsion to become a deadbeat when I was 20 years old and my professional career was erased from history, I don't think that reality would be worse than one in which my career existed, not even by the tiniest amount. My entire working life has basically been building nonsense to enable rich people to get even richer with less inconvenience. It's frustrating because everyone knows it's pointless bullshit. I know it's pointless bullshit. My coworkers know it's pointless bullshit. My boss knows it's pointless bullshit. Everyone is just kinda going through the whole charade because it keeps the paychecks coming.

nuancebydefault 4y ago
I feel you. The good news is, if you look for it hard enough there are opportunities to make a living while NOT producing pointless/meaningless output. It took me 20+ years to accomplish that, but the reason is somewhat like the author of the post describes (even if this might be projection of his own situation upon others) : we don't try hard enough to use our knowledge, skills and talent productively -- towards improving housing, healthcare, education, charity, energy,... stuff that really matters.

stocknoob 4y ago

Condescending doesn’t mean inaccurate.

w0m 4y ago

Agreed. People don't have to define themselves and/or their worth by their day job.

WJW 4y ago

It would make the article at least 10x better if it included a section where the author describes why he isn't following his own advice and writes a weekly newsletter instead.

mattferderer 4y ago
Strong vibes - https://youtube.com/shorts/2rYV681lSGg?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/2rYV681lSGg?feature=share (Charlie Munger - People on TV selling Books) and all the people selling courses about how to sell courses.

cptcobalt 4y ago

> Too many people act like entrepreneurship is something everyone has the stomach/personality/capacity for. Entrepreneurship and making things do not need to be intrinsically linked. It's ok to work on things for the sake of making things. If you release yourself from the impulse of thinking you need to make cash from something, you can often feel more comfortable doing your best work on bigger, harder problems. This, of course, doesn't work for everybody.

nuancebydefault 4y ago
Also, if everyone would be an entrepreneur, no-one would work together on the same thing, right? So working on _stuff that matters_ does not have to imply being an entrepreneur. It is perfectly fine to leave that to the people who are talented with or have a strong passion for entrepreneurship.

hinkley 4y ago

> if you're not building the next big thing, you're not contributing to society. I think we can all agree that any book written about the Fall of Google is going to focus pretty strongly on their lack of a maintenance culture. Building bridges is great, but if the opening of the bridge was a major event for a town, the subsequent closure of said bridge will be an even bigger event. When work is going smoothly, the story I'm working on this week is often of a lower priority than the one I worked on two months ago. The major exception being when the current story was blocked by dependencies. A lot of invention comes down to people noticing that ideas have been unblocked. But while the new gadget or surgery can have life altering effects, so can the collapse of infrastructure for food, water, and shelter. Those always need minders or society would unravel.

cam0 4y ago

Especially when you look at the majority of startups getting funded or posting in "Who's Hiring" and the descriptions of what they do boils down to.. trying to solve some trivial problem.