8 ms·

The art of knowing when to quit

212 points by PebblesRox 4y ago

PebblesRox 4y ago
Reminds me of Bill Watterson.
- Wistar 4y ago
  Precisely what I was going to comment.
geraldwhen 4y ago
I’ll quit when my finances allow me to, and not a second before OR after. When your job is sufficiently easy or non-stressful, and the time commitment is agreeable, you should not quit. Make hay while the sun shines, as they say. Work for me is like a fairly simple and low time commitment money faucet.
- Buttons840 4y ago
  This is complicated by the fact that your finances might never allow you to quit. You may die early, or other tragedies may occur.
- hkkwritesgmail 4y ago
  Finding out when the finances allow one to quit is where half the universe is stuck at and is brainstorming at.
thrownawaydad 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping
TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
Renato Carosone (singer of Tu vuò fà l'americano) quit at his peak: > At the height of his career, Carosone announced his retirement from music in 1960. He felt that the advent of Rock and roll had the consequence of making his swing, big-band sound no longer popular: "I'd rather retire now on the crest of the wave, than being tormented later by the idea of rock and roll wiping away all that I have achieved in so many years of hard work". (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renato_Carosone#Retirement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renato_Carosone#Retirement) That quote has stuck with me.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  Reads like narcissism. Who cares how popular your art is, as long as it pays the bills? What else are you going to do with your time?
  - serf 4y ago
    >Who cares how popular your art is, as long as it pays the bills? every artist, ever? it's a pretty common idea that artists should embrace the passion for the art rather than 'mundane and earthly reason'. That isn't to say that represents practical reality, but 'artistry' is one of the few categories of human endeavor where passion is encouraged by society to be followed almost to the detriment of the artist themselves. we remember the stories of half-starved artists, stuck & starving on the streets and patroned by kings for one last hurrah ; we tend not to remember the artists stuck in corporate buildings that churn out cartoon cels in order to meet deadlines and quotas.
    - jjulius 4y ago
      >every artist, ever? Hi. Artist here. I don't care about how popular my art is and I never want it to pay the bills.
    - samplatt 4y ago
      >but 'artistry' is one of the few categories of human endeavor where passion is encouraged by society to be followed almost to the detriment of the artist themselves. I'd say that almost everyone that works for a living has an employer that cares more about the work than the employees, to the point of driving the employee as close to the grave as possible without actually dying.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
      As an aspiring artist I like to do things due to my own passion, but I can't deny that having an audience for a work has some effect on me. If I got used to having one, losing it might be crushing. And for that matter, for some, pleasing an audience is surely a big part of why they do it.
kris_wayton 4y ago
"It feels like our culture’s impulse is to wring every last cent possible out of any creative endeavor" This rings true to me. There even seems to be more dredging up of other people's past creative work and trying to wring more money out of them.
- Buttons840 4y ago
  And yet undertaking a new creative endeavor is far from guaranteed to succeed financially.
- milchek 4y ago
  Interestingly, what the UK did with “The Office,” the US milked for much longer.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    It's what the British love to do with their shows in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT7TR3Td6KQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT7TR3Td6KQ
    - OJFord 4y ago
      The Office is a good example though, because it's the same premise, so you can't really say 'oh but they just don't come up with good shows so they have to move on'. House of Cards is another, but the (original) UK version isn't so well known as that of the The Office. (Even here in the UK to be honest. It is significantly older though, '80s/'90s.)
- ekianjo 4y ago
  there is a whole industry based on copyright after all
- edmundsauto 4y ago
  My take, this is more common in winner-take-all industries where the long tail in skinny. It's so hard to predict what will be a success when doing something new that you want to milk a success. One of the smaller tragedies of economic inequality - everyone wants to become U2/Jay Leno, nobody wants to be Bill Watterson.
Swizec 4y ago
A really good book on this topic I recently read: Quit, by Annie Duke. The book boils down to "Calculate EV of your decision, try not to fall prey to sunk cost fallacy". But it makes the lesson really sink in which is nice. My favorite bit was her sharing the research that you cannot avoid sunk cost fallacy. Humans don't work that way it seems. What you can do instead is to pre-commit to quitting when certain conditions are met.
- throwaway98797 4y ago
  the point of life isn’t to avoid all fallacies the point of life is whatever you make it for most a focus on rigid logical thinking is a recipe for doom
  - Swizec 4y ago
    She argues for including emotional factors in the EV calculation. "Will this make me feel good" is a question of value. An example she uses is a person who's miserable at their job and is trying to decide whether to take a job offer. They know they'll be miserable without changing jobs, but taking the new job might feel better. Therefore you should change jobs because the expected value of changing is higher than the expected value of staying.
- JacobDotVI 4y ago
  First Round had a good podcast episode with her about the book: https://overcast.fm/+k1HEhCB1U https://overcast.fm/+k1HEhCB1U
SeanLuke 4y ago
> That movie was pretty good, but it would’ve been great if it had been thirty minutes shorter. For me the canonical example of a movie that didn't know when to quit was A.I. Artificial Intelligence. There were at least four points in the movie when I firmly thought to myself, this would be a good point to end the movie. And then the movie just ... kept on going. On and on and on. I understand that Spielberg took it upon himself to remain faithful to the original Kubrick/Watson treatment, but you can just hear him screaming in the background "can't we just end here?" as well.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Missed opportunity for DVDs to popularize optional endings and alternate cuts
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ekianjo 4y ago
  Same for the 100 endings of LOTR that were completely unnecessary. You cant fake being faithful to the books if you dont even include the scouring of the Shire. Worst endings ever.
  - delecti 4y ago
    I can't agree. Even viewed as a single film (Tolkien viewed LotR more as one big book, and the movies reflect that), in the 3:20 movie (3:10 before the "The End" screen) there's only 20 minutes between Frodo getting grabbed by the Eagle and that "The End" screen. I think the movie needed all of that 20 minutes of catharsis. I absolutely think the 9-10 hour trilogy as a whole needed that 20 minutes. The math looks even better with the extended editions, where that 20 minute ending is only about 22 minutes, where the single movie is an hour longer, and the trilogy is ~3 longer.
    - ekianjo 4y ago
      > I think the movie needed all of that 20 minutes of catharsis. I absolutely think the 9-10 hour trilogy as a whole needed that 20 minutes. You could have 20 minutes, but not 5 endings wrapped together with no introduction at all that make absolutely no sense the way they are rushed at the end. And again, missing the Scouring of the Shire, which is a big no-no.
yawnxyz 4y ago
I think there's a big difference between "quitting" and "finishing up / wrapping up" in terms of walking away from something. "Quitting" to me implies "abandonment" or leaving before you're mentally ready to leave. For example closing a startup or product because of a lack of product market fit, or stopping a knitting project because you don't have time for it, but really want to finish it. "Wrapping up" to me means the thing has reached its natural end, and you're happy to leave. For the startup or product, it could mean you've hit your "one year anniversary" of trying to see if you could make it while giving your best shot. For the knitting project, it might mean you've found more fun projects (or hobbies) and you don't have time/effort/energy to pour into the project anymore. In the end though there's just a subtle mental shift to how you think about the thing you're working on, and really it comes down to your mental model, incentive, and amount of "closure" you've given it.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  That’s an interesting take. There might mixes of “quitting” and “wrapping up” when as a contributor to something, you feel you earnestly committed to it, and there’s not much more you can do to bring it further in the direction you wish it goes. You might not be moving away on your terms, but you won’t have regrets either.
ppeetteerr 4y ago
In the context of quitting something successful, why would you? As long as the marginal benefit meets or exceeds the benefit of doing something different (but potentially of higher risk), why not keep going? I understand the concept of the Sunk Cost fallacy, but the article is describing things that are actually successful! Maybe from the consumer's perspective, it seems bad that this thing you once loved is now mainstream or banal, but they can always quit consuming based on personal preference. For instance, as the audience, I want all shows to be three seasons and a movie. As at the producer, I would milking a good idea to its last drop.
- SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
  You never know, do you, if "the marginal benefit meets or exceeds the benefit of doing something different"? You can't ever nail that down to a degree of accuracy that'd actually be pluggable into a formula (bayesian analysis users have a real hard time applying credible intervals IMO), so you have to guess, and the article's point (IMO) is that many people guess too conservatively to reality, that more often than is intuitive there's a larger benefit of moving on than in sticking with the familiar, and it happens earlier than is intuitive.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Well, an 'exit' (!!) is a great time to, financially. Your compensation that year is going to dwarf next, presumably. (Perhaps unless acqui-hired by FAANG.) Yet the company (unless bought out to shut down) presumably warrants being called 'successful'. Even if not for a raise, it's a good time to move on to another start-up and hope to repeat, financially.
- JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
  > > In the context of quitting something successful, why would you? At some point people get tired of playing Stairway to Heaven for the 1300th time, even if you are the guys who wrote Stairway to Heaven. They want to drive a Ferrari through the Cork Screw corner in Laguna Seca or buy an apartment in Central Park West instead.
  - 4y ago
hprotagonist 4y ago
An epitome of this, i think, is Bill Watterson. He said what he set out to say. And then he stopped. And his work is so much stronger for it.
jrochkind1 4y ago
The OP is in part a reflection on the sunset of the Go Gorilla package. The blog post about that which it links to at the end is very much worth a read (I didn't know about it, or the fate of the Gorilla package, before getting linked to it here), and I'd actually love to see an HN thread about THAT one! https://onengineering.substack.com/p/there-is-no-secure-software-supply https://onengineering.substack.com/p/there-is-no-secure-soft... Looks like that's been submitted to HN, but never got traction. It has the somewhat misleading title "There is no secure software supply-chain," which probably didn't help it's HN votes on previous submissions. It's really about the maintainers deciding to sunset Gorilla, in the context of that being a good idea to prevent it from becoming an insecure untrustworthy dependency, but more than that too. I found it a very thought-provoking read, and would love to hear others responses to it, including folks from Go community but also on the general issues.
- jpmcb 4y ago
  John here - thanks for the kind words on my piece. You can also find it here (without the substack subscription stuff): https://johncodes.com/posts/there-is-no-secure-software-supply-chain/ https://johncodes.com/posts/there-is-no-secure-software-supp... There was some good discussion on the /r/programming subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/zyf9rb/there_is_no_secure_software_supplychain/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/zyf9rb/there_i... I would love to continue the conversation: I think it's a really important topic in the world of increasingly deep dependencies. I too hadn't heard of the Gorilla maintainers reaching out for new contributors or sun-setting the project until after the fact.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> It feels like our culture’s impulse is to wring every last cent possible out of any creative endeavor — or at least leave open the possibility for more from the outset. It's easy to criticize other people for wanting to ride their success after they've peaked But I can't really blame them. We only get so many big wins in our lifetime. When someone hits on something successful, riding it as far as they possibly can makes a lot of sense. Some people get lucky and hit success with different ventures throughout their lives, but I suspect most successful people may only get a small number of opportunities to capitalize on. Seize them while you can. Ignore the critics.
- Retric 4y ago
  Success breeds success. If you’ve created one successful book/startup/song/etc and suddenly a great number of doors open up. However, riding something to failure taints that legacy. As the saying goes, always leave them wanting something more.
  - leygo 4y ago
    In what way does a legacy help me? Who's to say what I perceive as a legacy will even be perceived that way by others later?
    - Retric 4y ago
      Would you prefer to offer seed funding to someone who sold their last startup to Google for 100 million or got 100 million in funding before crashing and burning? That’s what I meant by a legacy. It’s possible you walked away from each of those startups with the same money, but the perception is very different.
- zeruch 4y ago
  It's also about what is "success" at different scaling. People can enjoy different levels of success at different stages and not always chase the same big targets. I remember seeing an interview with a band that had some major hits in the 80s (the Fixx) whose members effectively have day jobs now, but they still successfully tour smaller clubs every year or other year, and do things at a scale they can manage, still make money at, and thoroughly enjoy. They get to be what they enjoy, and make a living at. The fact that they arent playing arenas/on MTVs equivalent/etc is orthogonal to that.
teuobk 4y ago
The key to knowing when to when to quit is being financially able to quit in the first place. A lot of people get stuck and are unable to afford to quit.
- abirch 4y ago
  I remember that amazing feeling when I was financially free. It's so great. It absolutely sucks when you can't quit and it magnifies any issue you face.
pygar 4y ago
Every TV show/Movie franchise has two endings, when the story ends and when the money ends. Just stop watching when you're done. It might even send a signal. There is no prize for watching it all. We don't need to watch every Star Wars movie ever made.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
There's ending something; then, there's turning it over to a new team, and walking away. I've done the latter. It's not easy, but can really work out well.
ralphc 4y ago
On The Tonight Show, Carson explained to guest, Roseanne Barr, that he wanted to quit while still on top of his game. He shared, “Beverly Sills, who's a wonderful opera singer, once said, 'I would much rather have people say to me at a party, Beverly, why did you quit singing, rather than why didn't you quit? '”
- abirch 4y ago
  Kahneman discusses the peak-end (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak%E2%80%93end_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak%E2%80%93end_rule) and how the ending is as important as the best or worst part of an experience. You can't control your peak popularity but you can and should manage the end.
adenozine 4y ago
I've told some young people in mentor/mentee situations before: Knowing when to quit is a useful skill ONLY IF you also possess superior judgement about what you might stand to gain by remaining, and data to support the decision either way. If you know you can land the better job, or even have a better offer, THAT is the situation where you need to know when to quit. If you have no leads and you're trying to break into a competitive space but could probably climb the ladder where you are up a few rungs in 2-5yrs, then sometimes it just pays to stay and grind it out a little. I think sometimes uncertainty is misrepresented a little bit. I've been blessed to be able to make my own prices and so I don't really have to job-hop, but any moron with a brain can see that it's better over a long period of time to change jobs more often rather than less. It's just good sense at this point. Still, with that being said, when you're facing incomplete data, it's easy to let anxiety overrule the fact that your present employment, shitty as it may seem, shitty as it may feel to punch in and see the smug, passive, whatever it is you hate about your coworkers' faces, it's a steady job. I've made mistakes where I jumped too soon, and where I've jumped too late or not at all. Personally, I regret the ones where I jumped too soon a lot more because I associate those decisions with low resilience to frustration I had, and low discipline to exert my patience further. Maybe I'm wrong, but looking back on several decades of fucking things up in professional environments, that's the way I feel. If anybody is reading this and thinking about how much they hate their jobs, I could not more strongly advise you to hold the course for now unless you have an absolute certainty in hand, if you're in the United States especially. I've lived in DC for many years now, and it feels more tense and nervous now than 2002 and 2008-9 put together. Free your mind, do what you have to do, but don't jump ship with clouds like these on the horizon. Just wait a little bit, and see what happens first.
- nerdface 4y ago
  > because I associate those decisions with low resilience to frustration I had, and low discipline to exert my patience further Absolutely this. You’re always going to end up in testing environments somewhere so it’s good to practice both patience and resilience. The more you train that muscle the easier it becomes to work in those situations.
- higeorge13 4y ago
eduction 4y ago
One of the most nonsensical things I have read on here in a long time. Software is not like a tv show or a stand up comedy set or an album. It is not a cultural artifact. It is machinery. We don’t really get bored of a bread slicer. A school bus does not become tiresome. “My french press, it lacks its initial spark!” Machines break, or fall behind evolving requirements (e.g. the bus only takes leaded gas). These are functional shortcomings. The idea of somehow withdrawing a functional useful piece of software from society does not make much sense. There are copies out there, first of all. What are you going to do, hunt them all down? You can stop maintaining it but in many cases, you can’t even prevent other people from working on it. Do you think even Larry Ellison could kill the Oracle database?
- et1337 4y ago
  > Machines break, or fall behind evolving requirements Requirements now evolve so fast that a "functional useful piece of software" without a maintainer will become useless in about 5 years. Imagine trying to compile a project you haven't touched in 5 years. I know for a fact that even Go, which offers arguably the strongest backward compatibility guarantees out there, wouldn't compile my employer's codebase from 5 years ago.
  - 2h 4y ago
    Highly misleading. I've compiled plenty of older Go code. It just seems like you don't know how to deal with Go code, unless it's been nicely packaged as a module with go.mod
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    That's why I've basically quit software. The vast (vast) majority of the code I've written over the past three decades is useless. It is no longer used, and it could not be used even if someone wanted to use it. It's obsolete, because all the underpinnings have moved on. It's sort of depressing to be in the final years of my career and be able to point to nothing that I've created. I'm still working but I've quit learning new frameworks or languages. It used to be fun, now it's just tiring and seems pointless.
codazoda 4y ago
I’ve also seen and been impressed with the opposite. I think the singer, Jimmy Buffet, is a really good example. He created a few albums that became hits (or sleeper hits maybe) and then he rode the wave well into retirement. In a way, he did quit, I guess. For years he didn’t make new songs, just singing and merchandising the ones that were hits. I have a lot of respect for someone who took a single album hit and turned it into a life-long career. I realize that I may be mistaken about his career. Maybe he continued to make songs, but this is what his career feels like to me. Edit: I changed the word “money” to “songs”, which was my original intent. I realize he’s merchandised those early songs into an amazing franchise. I’ve been to two Jimmy Buffet concerts in Vegas and will be at a third in a couple months. Parrotheads are crazy.
- pjmorris 4y ago
  Would you believe Jimmy Buffett has made more money than Bruce Springsteen and is well on his way to being a billionaire? I love his early albums, but he really hit his stride as a businessman, merchandising the 'Margaritaville'/'Parrothead' lifestyle, and providing all kinds of supplies for which to practice it, ranging from t-shirts to luxury hotels.
  - munificent 4y ago
    As someone who has lived in Florida, yes, I absolutely 100% would believe this. Unless you've been around it, it's easy to not realize how huge the whole Parrothead thing is. Buffett realized that there's a million aging Boomers pining for some illusory lifestyle of leisure in the tropics and figured out how to get them to part with their money to buy a slice of that idea. I put Buffett and Harley-Davidson in the exact same category: They exist primarily to sell a dream to Boomers.
    - pjmorris 4y ago
      Florida native here. Can confirm. Been around the block with all things Buffett for a long time. Favorite memory: I've heard 'The Sauce Boss', a much smaller Florida institution, plays Margaritaville as a blues number (think 'Heartbreak Hotel') replacing the line 'smell of shrimp they're beginning to boil' with 'smell of shrimp they're beginning to spoil.'
soumyadeb 4y ago
Related and relevant question for software products: At what point we should say the product is DONE and no new features will be added. There will always be new customer requests for some weird corner case but there is a cost of adding every feature - engineering cost and complexity cost for the user. Thinking for consumer products like Gmail etc but applies broadly.
- BarryMilo 4y ago
  As a PO, this is certainly a million dollar question. Too many features means bloat, too few means missed opportunities. However, the market (and your users' reality) usually never stops changing, and as long as that's true, the product cannot be "done". The only reason why gmail can afford to be unchanging is that the use case is so universal, so basic, the users' needs are stable (and basic). 99.99% of products have to actually target someone.
topkai22 4y ago
Knowing when to quit also means knowing what your objective is. Many of the OP’s examples have seem to have “make great art and gain status” as the objective. If your objective is “maximize income”, than your stopping point is well after where it is to make art or gain status.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sitkack 4y ago
A great lesson on knowing when to quit from Spongebob https://vimeo.com/445441493 https://vimeo.com/445441493
SLWW 4y ago
I don't uh.... i don't get it. What was the point? Yes things come to an end sometimes, how is completely tearing support out from under anyone who uses a framework just like ending Seinfeld? Can you still watch Seinfeld? Can you still rewatch your favorite parts, upload clips with commentary to YT as a docu-series of some sort? Yes and yes. Keeping a repo up is just about the best thing you can do. I just don't understand why you thought to say nothing but "quitting is a thing".
deathanatos 4y ago
IDK that the analogy to jobs works. When I've quit, I've largely left what I wanted to accomplish unaccomplished. I'm quitting, partly because it's never going to happen — there will never come a day during which the team is adequately staffed to really tackle the tough problems that exist before it. (But more often than not, for far more Maslow's Hierarchy reasons than that.) And that's been true at every single employee I've had, without fail, without regards to the team size or how bright (or dull) its members are. The day to day "must haves" from people outranking us will forever, at any enterprise, be prioritized above the desires of the people who understand the system. And I see this when I see people far smarter and more capable than me job hop, too. They're not leaving fulfilled, they're leaving burnt out, unable to bring their dreams to fruition. Dilbert resonates well with most readers. "What color do you want that database?" still gives me a chuckle. It will forever be mauve. Firefly never got a second season. OTOH, how many will The CW's "The Flash" get?
maCDzP 4y ago
There is a new episode of the POD Freakconomics named “Is it bad to be a one hit wonder” and it touches this topic. It’s a really good episode. A book that also touches the same topic is Quit by Annie Duke. One takeaway from the book is our bias against quitting. We should probably quit more often. So basically, if you are thinking about quitting, then you should already have quit, since there are biases working against the quitting decision. I liked it because it made me view quitting in a new light. As a sign of strength. I’ll finish with a quote from Homer Simpson: “It’s never too late to quit!”.
ant1oz 4y ago
As a contractor choosing max 3 months contract after more than a dozens of quits. In my experience, 95% of tech team are disfunctional beyond repair. It pisses me off everytime, and I chose to let it go, stopping the energy hemoragy, and I usually take 2-3 months off, recharge. Now it's been 18 months, no income, enjoying life in SEA. At the end of the day, month, year, decade, I own less, but my life is much more interesting than dealing with mediocre people who knows how to fake it very well, knowing they'll never make it, happy to take the pay check.

212 points by PebblesRox 4y ago

PebblesRox 4y ago

Reminds me of Bill Watterson.

Wistar 4y ago
Precisely what I was going to comment.

geraldwhen 4y ago

I’ll quit when my finances allow me to, and not a second before OR after. When your job is sufficiently easy or non-stressful, and the time commitment is agreeable, you should not quit. Make hay while the sun shines, as they say. Work for me is like a fairly simple and low time commitment money faucet.

Buttons840 4y ago
This is complicated by the fact that your finances might never allow you to quit. You may die early, or other tragedies may occur.
hkkwritesgmail 4y ago
Finding out when the finances allow one to quit is where half the universe is stuck at and is brainstorming at.

thrownawaydad 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago

Renato Carosone (singer of Tu vuò fà l'americano) quit at his peak: > At the height of his career, Carosone announced his retirement from music in 1960. He felt that the advent of Rock and roll had the consequence of making his swing, big-band sound no longer popular: "I'd rather retire now on the crest of the wave, than being tormented later by the idea of rock and roll wiping away all that I have achieved in so many years of hard work". (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renato_Carosone#Retirement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renato_Carosone#Retirement) That quote has stuck with me.

jonny_eh 4y ago
Reads like narcissism. Who cares how popular your art is, as long as it pays the bills? What else are you going to do with your time?
- serf 4y ago
  >Who cares how popular your art is, as long as it pays the bills? every artist, ever? it's a pretty common idea that artists should embrace the passion for the art rather than 'mundane and earthly reason'. That isn't to say that represents practical reality, but 'artistry' is one of the few categories of human endeavor where passion is encouraged by society to be followed almost to the detriment of the artist themselves. we remember the stories of half-starved artists, stuck & starving on the streets and patroned by kings for one last hurrah ; we tend not to remember the artists stuck in corporate buildings that churn out cartoon cels in order to meet deadlines and quotas.
  - jjulius 4y ago
    >every artist, ever? Hi. Artist here. I don't care about how popular my art is and I never want it to pay the bills.
  - samplatt 4y ago
    >but 'artistry' is one of the few categories of human endeavor where passion is encouraged by society to be followed almost to the detriment of the artist themselves. I'd say that almost everyone that works for a living has an employer that cares more about the work than the employees, to the point of driving the employee as close to the grave as possible without actually dying.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
    As an aspiring artist I like to do things due to my own passion, but I can't deny that having an audience for a work has some effect on me. If I got used to having one, losing it might be crushing. And for that matter, for some, pleasing an audience is surely a big part of why they do it.

kris_wayton 4y ago

"It feels like our culture’s impulse is to wring every last cent possible out of any creative endeavor" This rings true to me. There even seems to be more dredging up of other people's past creative work and trying to wring more money out of them.

Buttons840 4y ago
And yet undertaking a new creative endeavor is far from guaranteed to succeed financially.
milchek 4y ago
Interestingly, what the UK did with “The Office,” the US milked for much longer.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  It's what the British love to do with their shows in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT7TR3Td6KQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT7TR3Td6KQ
  - OJFord 4y ago
    The Office is a good example though, because it's the same premise, so you can't really say 'oh but they just don't come up with good shows so they have to move on'. House of Cards is another, but the (original) UK version isn't so well known as that of the The Office. (Even here in the UK to be honest. It is significantly older though, '80s/'90s.)
ekianjo 4y ago
there is a whole industry based on copyright after all
edmundsauto 4y ago
My take, this is more common in winner-take-all industries where the long tail in skinny. It's so hard to predict what will be a success when doing something new that you want to milk a success. One of the smaller tragedies of economic inequality - everyone wants to become U2/Jay Leno, nobody wants to be Bill Watterson.

Swizec 4y ago

A really good book on this topic I recently read: Quit, by Annie Duke. The book boils down to "Calculate EV of your decision, try not to fall prey to sunk cost fallacy". But it makes the lesson really sink in which is nice. My favorite bit was her sharing the research that you cannot avoid sunk cost fallacy. Humans don't work that way it seems. What you can do instead is to pre-commit to quitting when certain conditions are met.

throwaway98797 4y ago
the point of life isn’t to avoid all fallacies the point of life is whatever you make it for most a focus on rigid logical thinking is a recipe for doom
- Swizec 4y ago
  She argues for including emotional factors in the EV calculation. "Will this make me feel good" is a question of value. An example she uses is a person who's miserable at their job and is trying to decide whether to take a job offer. They know they'll be miserable without changing jobs, but taking the new job might feel better. Therefore you should change jobs because the expected value of changing is higher than the expected value of staying.
JacobDotVI 4y ago
First Round had a good podcast episode with her about the book: https://overcast.fm/+k1HEhCB1U https://overcast.fm/+k1HEhCB1U

SeanLuke 4y ago

> That movie was pretty good, but it would’ve been great if it had been thirty minutes shorter. For me the canonical example of a movie that didn't know when to quit was A.I. Artificial Intelligence. There were at least four points in the movie when I firmly thought to myself, this would be a good point to end the movie. And then the movie just ... kept on going. On and on and on. I understand that Spielberg took it upon himself to remain faithful to the original Kubrick/Watson treatment, but you can just hear him screaming in the background "can't we just end here?" as well.

Apocryphon 4y ago
Missed opportunity for DVDs to popularize optional endings and alternate cuts
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ekianjo 4y ago
Same for the 100 endings of LOTR that were completely unnecessary. You cant fake being faithful to the books if you dont even include the scouring of the Shire. Worst endings ever.
- delecti 4y ago
  I can't agree. Even viewed as a single film (Tolkien viewed LotR more as one big book, and the movies reflect that), in the 3:20 movie (3:10 before the "The End" screen) there's only 20 minutes between Frodo getting grabbed by the Eagle and that "The End" screen. I think the movie needed all of that 20 minutes of catharsis. I absolutely think the 9-10 hour trilogy as a whole needed that 20 minutes. The math looks even better with the extended editions, where that 20 minute ending is only about 22 minutes, where the single movie is an hour longer, and the trilogy is ~3 longer.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    > I think the movie needed all of that 20 minutes of catharsis. I absolutely think the 9-10 hour trilogy as a whole needed that 20 minutes. You could have 20 minutes, but not 5 endings wrapped together with no introduction at all that make absolutely no sense the way they are rushed at the end. And again, missing the Scouring of the Shire, which is a big no-no.

yawnxyz 4y ago

I think there's a big difference between "quitting" and "finishing up / wrapping up" in terms of walking away from something. "Quitting" to me implies "abandonment" or leaving before you're mentally ready to leave. For example closing a startup or product because of a lack of product market fit, or stopping a knitting project because you don't have time for it, but really want to finish it. "Wrapping up" to me means the thing has reached its natural end, and you're happy to leave. For the startup or product, it could mean you've hit your "one year anniversary" of trying to see if you could make it while giving your best shot. For the knitting project, it might mean you've found more fun projects (or hobbies) and you don't have time/effort/energy to pour into the project anymore. In the end though there's just a subtle mental shift to how you think about the thing you're working on, and really it comes down to your mental model, incentive, and amount of "closure" you've given it.

makeitdouble 4y ago
That’s an interesting take. There might mixes of “quitting” and “wrapping up” when as a contributor to something, you feel you earnestly committed to it, and there’s not much more you can do to bring it further in the direction you wish it goes. You might not be moving away on your terms, but you won’t have regrets either.

ppeetteerr 4y ago

In the context of quitting something successful, why would you? As long as the marginal benefit meets or exceeds the benefit of doing something different (but potentially of higher risk), why not keep going? I understand the concept of the Sunk Cost fallacy, but the article is describing things that are actually successful! Maybe from the consumer's perspective, it seems bad that this thing you once loved is now mainstream or banal, but they can always quit consuming based on personal preference. For instance, as the audience, I want all shows to be three seasons and a movie. As at the producer, I would milking a good idea to its last drop.

SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
You never know, do you, if "the marginal benefit meets or exceeds the benefit of doing something different"? You can't ever nail that down to a degree of accuracy that'd actually be pluggable into a formula (bayesian analysis users have a real hard time applying credible intervals IMO), so you have to guess, and the article's point (IMO) is that many people guess too conservatively to reality, that more often than is intuitive there's a larger benefit of moving on than in sticking with the familiar, and it happens earlier than is intuitive.
OJFord 4y ago
Well, an 'exit' (!!) is a great time to, financially. Your compensation that year is going to dwarf next, presumably. (Perhaps unless acqui-hired by FAANG.) Yet the company (unless bought out to shut down) presumably warrants being called 'successful'. Even if not for a raise, it's a good time to move on to another start-up and hope to repeat, financially.
JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
> > In the context of quitting something successful, why would you? At some point people get tired of playing Stairway to Heaven for the 1300th time, even if you are the guys who wrote Stairway to Heaven. They want to drive a Ferrari through the Cork Screw corner in Laguna Seca or buy an apartment in Central Park West instead.
- 4y ago

hprotagonist 4y ago

An epitome of this, i think, is Bill Watterson. He said what he set out to say. And then he stopped. And his work is so much stronger for it.

jrochkind1 4y ago

The OP is in part a reflection on the sunset of the Go Gorilla package. The blog post about that which it links to at the end is very much worth a read (I didn't know about it, or the fate of the Gorilla package, before getting linked to it here), and I'd actually love to see an HN thread about THAT one! https://onengineering.substack.com/p/there-is-no-secure-software-supply https://onengineering.substack.com/p/there-is-no-secure-soft... Looks like that's been submitted to HN, but never got traction. It has the somewhat misleading title "There is no secure software supply-chain," which probably didn't help it's HN votes on previous submissions. It's really about the maintainers deciding to sunset Gorilla, in the context of that being a good idea to prevent it from becoming an insecure untrustworthy dependency, but more than that too. I found it a very thought-provoking read, and would love to hear others responses to it, including folks from Go community but also on the general issues.

jpmcb 4y ago
John here - thanks for the kind words on my piece. You can also find it here (without the substack subscription stuff): https://johncodes.com/posts/there-is-no-secure-software-supply-chain/ https://johncodes.com/posts/there-is-no-secure-software-supp... There was some good discussion on the /r/programming subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/zyf9rb/there_is_no_secure_software_supplychain/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/zyf9rb/there_i... I would love to continue the conversation: I think it's a really important topic in the world of increasingly deep dependencies. I too hadn't heard of the Gorilla maintainers reaching out for new contributors or sun-setting the project until after the fact.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> It feels like our culture’s impulse is to wring every last cent possible out of any creative endeavor — or at least leave open the possibility for more from the outset. It's easy to criticize other people for wanting to ride their success after they've peaked But I can't really blame them. We only get so many big wins in our lifetime. When someone hits on something successful, riding it as far as they possibly can makes a lot of sense. Some people get lucky and hit success with different ventures throughout their lives, but I suspect most successful people may only get a small number of opportunities to capitalize on. Seize them while you can. Ignore the critics.

Retric 4y ago
Success breeds success. If you’ve created one successful book/startup/song/etc and suddenly a great number of doors open up. However, riding something to failure taints that legacy. As the saying goes, always leave them wanting something more.
- leygo 4y ago
  In what way does a legacy help me? Who's to say what I perceive as a legacy will even be perceived that way by others later?
  - Retric 4y ago
    Would you prefer to offer seed funding to someone who sold their last startup to Google for 100 million or got 100 million in funding before crashing and burning? That’s what I meant by a legacy. It’s possible you walked away from each of those startups with the same money, but the perception is very different.
zeruch 4y ago
It's also about what is "success" at different scaling. People can enjoy different levels of success at different stages and not always chase the same big targets. I remember seeing an interview with a band that had some major hits in the 80s (the Fixx) whose members effectively have day jobs now, but they still successfully tour smaller clubs every year or other year, and do things at a scale they can manage, still make money at, and thoroughly enjoy. They get to be what they enjoy, and make a living at. The fact that they arent playing arenas/on MTVs equivalent/etc is orthogonal to that.

teuobk 4y ago

The key to knowing when to when to quit is being financially able to quit in the first place. A lot of people get stuck and are unable to afford to quit.

abirch 4y ago
I remember that amazing feeling when I was financially free. It's so great. It absolutely sucks when you can't quit and it magnifies any issue you face.

pygar 4y ago

Every TV show/Movie franchise has two endings, when the story ends and when the money ends. Just stop watching when you're done. It might even send a signal. There is no prize for watching it all. We don't need to watch every Star Wars movie ever made.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

There's ending something; then, there's turning it over to a new team, and walking away. I've done the latter. It's not easy, but can really work out well.

ralphc 4y ago

On The Tonight Show, Carson explained to guest, Roseanne Barr, that he wanted to quit while still on top of his game. He shared, “Beverly Sills, who's a wonderful opera singer, once said, 'I would much rather have people say to me at a party, Beverly, why did you quit singing, rather than why didn't you quit? '”

abirch 4y ago
Kahneman discusses the peak-end (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak%E2%80%93end_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak%E2%80%93end_rule) and how the ending is as important as the best or worst part of an experience. You can't control your peak popularity but you can and should manage the end.

adenozine 4y ago

I've told some young people in mentor/mentee situations before: Knowing when to quit is a useful skill ONLY IF you also possess superior judgement about what you might stand to gain by remaining, and data to support the decision either way. If you know you can land the better job, or even have a better offer, THAT is the situation where you need to know when to quit. If you have no leads and you're trying to break into a competitive space but could probably climb the ladder where you are up a few rungs in 2-5yrs, then sometimes it just pays to stay and grind it out a little. I think sometimes uncertainty is misrepresented a little bit. I've been blessed to be able to make my own prices and so I don't really have to job-hop, but any moron with a brain can see that it's better over a long period of time to change jobs more often rather than less. It's just good sense at this point. Still, with that being said, when you're facing incomplete data, it's easy to let anxiety overrule the fact that your present employment, shitty as it may seem, shitty as it may feel to punch in and see the smug, passive, whatever it is you hate about your coworkers' faces, it's a steady job. I've made mistakes where I jumped too soon, and where I've jumped too late or not at all. Personally, I regret the ones where I jumped too soon a lot more because I associate those decisions with low resilience to frustration I had, and low discipline to exert my patience further. Maybe I'm wrong, but looking back on several decades of fucking things up in professional environments, that's the way I feel. If anybody is reading this and thinking about how much they hate their jobs, I could not more strongly advise you to hold the course for now unless you have an absolute certainty in hand, if you're in the United States especially. I've lived in DC for many years now, and it feels more tense and nervous now than 2002 and 2008-9 put together. Free your mind, do what you have to do, but don't jump ship with clouds like these on the horizon. Just wait a little bit, and see what happens first.

nerdface 4y ago
> because I associate those decisions with low resilience to frustration I had, and low discipline to exert my patience further Absolutely this. You’re always going to end up in testing environments somewhere so it’s good to practice both patience and resilience. The more you train that muscle the easier it becomes to work in those situations.
higeorge13 4y ago

eduction 4y ago

One of the most nonsensical things I have read on here in a long time. Software is not like a tv show or a stand up comedy set or an album. It is not a cultural artifact. It is machinery. We don’t really get bored of a bread slicer. A school bus does not become tiresome. “My french press, it lacks its initial spark!” Machines break, or fall behind evolving requirements (e.g. the bus only takes leaded gas). These are functional shortcomings. The idea of somehow withdrawing a functional useful piece of software from society does not make much sense. There are copies out there, first of all. What are you going to do, hunt them all down? You can stop maintaining it but in many cases, you can’t even prevent other people from working on it. Do you think even Larry Ellison could kill the Oracle database?

et1337 4y ago
> Machines break, or fall behind evolving requirements Requirements now evolve so fast that a "functional useful piece of software" without a maintainer will become useless in about 5 years. Imagine trying to compile a project you haven't touched in 5 years. I know for a fact that even Go, which offers arguably the strongest backward compatibility guarantees out there, wouldn't compile my employer's codebase from 5 years ago.
- 2h 4y ago
  Highly misleading. I've compiled plenty of older Go code. It just seems like you don't know how to deal with Go code, unless it's been nicely packaged as a module with go.mod
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  That's why I've basically quit software. The vast (vast) majority of the code I've written over the past three decades is useless. It is no longer used, and it could not be used even if someone wanted to use it. It's obsolete, because all the underpinnings have moved on. It's sort of depressing to be in the final years of my career and be able to point to nothing that I've created. I'm still working but I've quit learning new frameworks or languages. It used to be fun, now it's just tiring and seems pointless.

codazoda 4y ago

I’ve also seen and been impressed with the opposite. I think the singer, Jimmy Buffet, is a really good example. He created a few albums that became hits (or sleeper hits maybe) and then he rode the wave well into retirement. In a way, he did quit, I guess. For years he didn’t make new songs, just singing and merchandising the ones that were hits. I have a lot of respect for someone who took a single album hit and turned it into a life-long career. I realize that I may be mistaken about his career. Maybe he continued to make songs, but this is what his career feels like to me. Edit: I changed the word “money” to “songs”, which was my original intent. I realize he’s merchandised those early songs into an amazing franchise. I’ve been to two Jimmy Buffet concerts in Vegas and will be at a third in a couple months. Parrotheads are crazy.

pjmorris 4y ago
Would you believe Jimmy Buffett has made more money than Bruce Springsteen and is well on his way to being a billionaire? I love his early albums, but he really hit his stride as a businessman, merchandising the 'Margaritaville'/'Parrothead' lifestyle, and providing all kinds of supplies for which to practice it, ranging from t-shirts to luxury hotels.
- munificent 4y ago
  As someone who has lived in Florida, yes, I absolutely 100% would believe this. Unless you've been around it, it's easy to not realize how huge the whole Parrothead thing is. Buffett realized that there's a million aging Boomers pining for some illusory lifestyle of leisure in the tropics and figured out how to get them to part with their money to buy a slice of that idea. I put Buffett and Harley-Davidson in the exact same category: They exist primarily to sell a dream to Boomers.
  - pjmorris 4y ago
    Florida native here. Can confirm. Been around the block with all things Buffett for a long time. Favorite memory: I've heard 'The Sauce Boss', a much smaller Florida institution, plays Margaritaville as a blues number (think 'Heartbreak Hotel') replacing the line 'smell of shrimp they're beginning to boil' with 'smell of shrimp they're beginning to spoil.'

soumyadeb 4y ago

Related and relevant question for software products: At what point we should say the product is DONE and no new features will be added. There will always be new customer requests for some weird corner case but there is a cost of adding every feature - engineering cost and complexity cost for the user. Thinking for consumer products like Gmail etc but applies broadly.

BarryMilo 4y ago
As a PO, this is certainly a million dollar question. Too many features means bloat, too few means missed opportunities. However, the market (and your users' reality) usually never stops changing, and as long as that's true, the product cannot be "done". The only reason why gmail can afford to be unchanging is that the use case is so universal, so basic, the users' needs are stable (and basic). 99.99% of products have to actually target someone.

topkai22 4y ago

Knowing when to quit also means knowing what your objective is. Many of the OP’s examples have seem to have “make great art and gain status” as the objective. If your objective is “maximize income”, than your stopping point is well after where it is to make art or gain status.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sitkack 4y ago

A great lesson on knowing when to quit from Spongebob https://vimeo.com/445441493 https://vimeo.com/445441493

SLWW 4y ago

I don't uh.... i don't get it. What was the point? Yes things come to an end sometimes, how is completely tearing support out from under anyone who uses a framework just like ending Seinfeld? Can you still watch Seinfeld? Can you still rewatch your favorite parts, upload clips with commentary to YT as a docu-series of some sort? Yes and yes. Keeping a repo up is just about the best thing you can do. I just don't understand why you thought to say nothing but "quitting is a thing".

deathanatos 4y ago

IDK that the analogy to jobs works. When I've quit, I've largely left what I wanted to accomplish unaccomplished. I'm quitting, partly because it's never going to happen — there will never come a day during which the team is adequately staffed to really tackle the tough problems that exist before it. (But more often than not, for far more Maslow's Hierarchy reasons than that.) And that's been true at every single employee I've had, without fail, without regards to the team size or how bright (or dull) its members are. The day to day "must haves" from people outranking us will forever, at any enterprise, be prioritized above the desires of the people who understand the system. And I see this when I see people far smarter and more capable than me job hop, too. They're not leaving fulfilled, they're leaving burnt out, unable to bring their dreams to fruition. Dilbert resonates well with most readers. "What color do you want that database?" still gives me a chuckle. It will forever be mauve. Firefly never got a second season. OTOH, how many will The CW's "The Flash" get?

maCDzP 4y ago

There is a new episode of the POD Freakconomics named “Is it bad to be a one hit wonder” and it touches this topic. It’s a really good episode. A book that also touches the same topic is Quit by Annie Duke. One takeaway from the book is our bias against quitting. We should probably quit more often. So basically, if you are thinking about quitting, then you should already have quit, since there are biases working against the quitting decision. I liked it because it made me view quitting in a new light. As a sign of strength. I’ll finish with a quote from Homer Simpson: “It’s never too late to quit!”.

ant1oz 4y ago

As a contractor choosing max 3 months contract after more than a dozens of quits. In my experience, 95% of tech team are disfunctional beyond repair. It pisses me off everytime, and I chose to let it go, stopping the energy hemoragy, and I usually take 2-3 months off, recharge. Now it's been 18 months, no income, enjoying life in SEA. At the end of the day, month, year, decade, I own less, but my life is much more interesting than dealing with mediocre people who knows how to fake it very well, knowing they'll never make it, happy to take the pay check.