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Face it: you're a crazy person

• frahs 1y ago
  The first few questions almost have me convinced I should open my own business. Surely there must be other difficult things? I assume the main difficulty isn't that -- I assume it's the lack of comparative advantage, so competition eats into your margins until you're fighting a race to the bottom, not only making your customers happy, but doing it cheaper than someone else could, and I assume the stress from that makes it hard? And also not being in control of your suppliers, so unpredictable events can affect your profit.
  • pavel_lishin 1y ago
    I also daydream about opening a business, like in the opening paragraph of the post. But I also know that I never will; it's a daydream, not a retirement plan. I know I would hate 95% of the process, without even fully unpacking it. That's why it's a daydream, and that's why when I'm frustrated at work I say "I wish I could quit and become a woodworker" or "I want to walk out of this job and open a D&D cafe." But to your point, yep. There's a coffee shop in town - one of the only ones! - that we go to because we like it. But two more just opened up, both in better locations for both foot & car traffic, which might genuinely kill the other place. And there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.
  • colechristensen 1y ago
    There are different businesses to be in. Some businesses are like arbitrage chasing the smallest margin you can find on the biggest scales. Some businesses are like chasing excellence doing the best you can do. There are many types. You can't impose the kind of business you want to succeed in on the industry you want to be in, you have to find opportunities.
  • lambda 1y ago
    Yes, besides the mundane day to day details, which are actually up the alley of many people, the other thing that prevents people from being a small business owner is the amount of money they need to invest in it, and the fact that they are effectively assuming all of the risk; whether it be competition, changes to supply, changes to demand, etc. Insurance can blunt a few types of rare risk, but not the fundamental business risks. So you have to be willing to take those risks, and want to be handling those mundane day to day details.
  • mattmaroon 1y ago
    I’ve now been self-employed for 25 years and have owned several businesses, one of which is a YC funded startup but most of which were very different. None of them competed on price. Price competition is real I’m sure, but most businesses don’t succeed that way. Most of us have more in common with Apple than Wal-Mart (though of course several orders of magnitude smaller). I’m not necessarily saying I wouldn’t ever consider such a business, but you better have some edge if you do. If you invented some way to manufacture a widget for 25% less than anyone else, sure, go eat that market. That’s not most of us though. Coffee shops (his example and one really close to what I know) for instance don’t. You don’t win in that game by being cheaper than Starbucks and most don’t try.
    • zahlman 1y ago
      What do you compete on, then?
      • jama211 1y ago
        Quality, uniqueness, vibe, location, etc.
      • mattmaroon 1y ago
        Depends on the business! That’s kind of the magic. Marketing, location, service, quality, ambiance. Lots of ways.
  • munificent 1y ago
    > Surely there must be other difficult things? It's not that any of the things in that list are intrinsically difficult. But if you're a small business owner, imagine an endless series of those challenges and with each one, you've got only a few minutes to resolve it before the next one shows up.
  • eloisant 1y ago
    It's not that it's difficult, it's that most people don't realize what the day-to-day job is. They assume they'll be hanging out in a coffee shop all day, chatting with regulars, but in fact the tasks and problems they'll have to solve is very different from what they imagine.
  • intended 1y ago
    No, those aren’t the follow on questions. The follow questions are to establish if you are crazy about this, not sane about this. Anecdote - Incredible introversion, if not social anxiety - and at one point I just up and drove to meet strangers at a cyber cafe to play video games, because I was obsessive about video games at that point. Same for cooking, writing papers, reaching out to people, and so on. You overcome yourself, when it’s something that resonates with you. Going back to your question - the lack of advantage, or bad margins etc - this is the “problem” vs “Challenge” view point issue. IF you are crazy about this, then you will figure out ways to overcome those challenges - pivot business, learn to be lean, or find sustainable ways to build runway etc.
  • _--__--__ 1y ago
    For an independent coffee shop specifically, the important question left out is "How are you going to create a welcoming environment that will attract customers without 1) aggressively kicking out the guy who bought one $5 espresso and then sat on his laptop occupying a 4-top table for 5 hours and 2) aggressively kicking out homeless people who try to use your establishment as a substitute for social services not provided by the local government?"
    • shortrounddev2 1y ago
      I think that the answer to #2 is you HAVE to aggressively kick out (aggressive) homeless people if you want a welcoming environment.
  • projektfu 1y ago
    The main difficulty is that most people do not like running a business, especially a small business. For most of these businesses, you are buying yourself a job. Let's say you take out $1.5MM loan to open a shop, and you net $70,000 per year on a good year after expenses and debt service. After a few years, you have $1MM left to pay and there's no way you could sell the business for that. You have a personal guarantee on the loan. Your vendors are always coming up with new ways to tack on extra charges. You have to deal with training, HR, bookkeeping, payroll, handyman tasks, cleaning, working shifts when your employees flake out, annoying customers, dangerous people, destructive customers, employee drama, the list goes on. If that is not what you enjoy, you will have a lot of your life doing things you do not enjoy. Sipping tasty coffee and chatting with your happy customers is a small part of the whole.
• pavel_lishin 1y ago
  To focus on one very small part of this article: > For instance, shortly after college, I thought I would post a few funny videos on YouTube and, you know, become instantly famous2. I gave up basically right away. I didn’t have the madness necessary to post something every week, let alone every day, nor did it ever occur to me that I might have to fill an entire house with slime, or drive a train into a giant pit, or buy prosthetic legs for 2,000 people. That's not the hard part. The hard part is dealing with all the negative comments. My buddy posted a few videos on Tiktok a few weeks ago. Would any of you like to guess how many comments are straight up telling him to kill himself? Here's a hint: whatever you guess, it's likely much lower than the actual number.
  • ryandrake 1y ago
    Comments sections on mainstream sites are universally garbage dumps, and you just have to ignore them. I don't know why sites even add them. Must be some "best practice" from Web 2.0 back in 2004 that nobody's questioned ever since.
    • JKCalhoun 1y ago
      Ha ha, my site has no comment section, no analytics. Someone on HN asked me "What's the point?"
      • Joel_Mckay 1y ago
        I am guessing it is because you probably have something important to share, and are less interested in the attention economy of narcissists =3
    • AznHisoka 1y ago
      When you post something publicly, first rule of thumb is to never read the comments. Or just read the ones from people you know personally.
      • euvin 1y ago
• pavel_lishin 1y ago
  > Wolff wrote “more than sixty” books between 2007 and 2018. That’s 5.5 novels per year, every year, for 11 years, before she hit it big. > Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” but when you were actually doing them, did you want to stop, or did you want to continue? I think people like Wolff like writing. Brandon Sanderson is another example. He can't stop. I think they'd do it even if they weren't able to make it as novelists. That's what separates a lot of those people from most others. Sure, some people have a goal and the grit to reach for it, to do that dribbling & shooting practice for six hours a day even if it's not actually fun. But some people have this sort of mania for their work. It's not really sensible to talk about being like them, unless you already are.
  • ashton314 1y ago
    There's a short video of two guys parodying what Brandon Sanderson's writing problem is like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcZVAPGE-YE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcZVAPGE-YE I think there are plenty of successful authors who don't have the same obsession as Sanderson and Wolff, but they are obsessed in different ways. And I think that's the key: if there's something that you enjoy doing and can find some aspect that you can really obsess over—it doesn't have to be the same as everyone else (probably better if not)—then you might be able to make that work as a fulfilling career.
  • svachalek 1y ago
    That reminds me of another wolf, Gene Wolfe. He wrote some of the most complex and critically praised science fiction to date, and most of his famous works were done in his free time while working as an industrial engineer. Or for that matter, a certain patent clerk who wrote some really fine physics papers.
    • throwawayoldie 1y ago
      Other examples: Baruch Spinoza, lensmaker by day, philosopher by night. Philip Glass: moving man, plumber, cab driver, and avant-garde composer. E. E. "Doc" Smith: food engineer and science fiction writer. Franz Kafka: administrator in an insurance company, and writer of history's weirdest books. Wallace Stevens: insurance company executive and poet. William Carlos Williams: doctor and poet. And these are just off the top of my head.
• Isamu 1y ago
  >Otherwise you run into Borges’ map problem—if you want a map that contains all the details of the territory that it’s supposed to represent, then the map has to be the size of the territory itself. Is this what everyone describes as “the map is not the territory”, or something else? I can imagine some other subtleties of being within a territory that an exact projection might not provide.
  • mikrl 1y ago
    >“the map is not the territory” Personally I never think of this as something specific or quantitative as in fidelity. In my head it’s more of a statement that the map is a representation, a reference, in the terminology of Stirner a spook or a phantom. The territory is the thing itself, the visceral thing you exist in/on and can change, feel, experience. This applies to anything that both exists and is represented, maps and land are just the best analogy. Even a 1:1 scale map with 100% fidelity will never be the territory.
  • SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
    It refers to Jorge Luis Borges, a writer of surreal and speculative stories. The one about the nigh-infinite library is best known (1) The one about the map, "On Exactitude in Science", is very short indeed https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
  • marcosdumay 1y ago
    It's not. That map would still be a map, and not the territory. It's just a different popular reference. Specifically, this one is about the value of abstraction, while "the map is not the territory" is about model fidelity.
  • almostkindatech 1y ago
    Yes, Borges' and Lewis Carroll's stories are playful illustrations of 'the map is not the territory'. Or you could say they show that the map cannot be the territory.
  • 1y ago
• bee_rider 1y ago
  > Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?” > Most of those students would go, “Oh, no I would not like to do those things.” The actual content of a professor’s life had never occurred to them. If you could pop the tops of their skulls and see what they thought being a professor was like, you’d probably find some low-res cartoon version of themselves walking around campus in a tweed jacket going, “I’m a professor, that’s me! Professor here!” and everyone waving back to them going, “Hi professor!” I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title. Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying. Also, grading was fun, just because you can be an unusually good grader by doing the barest-minimum and including, like, any notes at all (the students just want to know that you actually understood why you took their points away). It strikes me that those are two spots that seem hardest to automate away, and involve satisfying the customer the most. But they don’t really seem to be central to the professor’ actual identities, or to the general perception of them.
  • colechristensen 1y ago
    >I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title. You didn't like teaching like that. Some people really do, some people don't. Nothing wrong with individual preferences.
  • pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    +1, I loved office hours, and felt _ok_ about giving demos/lectures. I honestly didn’t care much for research though lol, it’s very lonely. I wish “teaching professor” was a more viable career, my impression is that it pays poorly
• Isamu 1y ago
  This substack is the best rabbit hole of references I come across in a long while. Thanks!
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• n8cpdx 1y ago
  I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers. I think the “get rich easy” reputation that software engineering gained somewhere around the 2010s really hurt the industry and a lot of people who are chasing the dollar. I’m an unhinged lunatic who loves productivity software and user experiences. The type of kid who was setting up Outlook betas in 6th grade to try the new features. Watching videos about how the Ribbon was designed. Reading C++ for dummies even though I had untreated ADHD and couldn’t sit still long enough to get much past std::cout. Eventually daydreaming about walking into the office, tired from a hard sprint, getting coffee in corporate-sponsored coffee cups. I wake up and reflect how profoundly lucky I am to have my dream job. Not just having the career I have, but having a dream at all and having a dream I could love in practice.
  • LPisGood 1y ago
    I was still in middle school in the early 2010’s and I remember thinking how lucky I am to want to be a computer programmer for a career AND it happens to pay a lot of money. Unfortunately many people today got into for the money and not the passion (or at least the passion and the money). Those people look for shortcuts and are generally unpleasant to work with, in my opinion.
    • walt_grata 1y ago
      I went through that in the late 90s and saw the writing on the wall of the 2010s. Hoping it's not too cyclic
    • munificent 1y ago
      Those are the exact people who are most excited about AI today. They just want the code but they don't enjoy the coding, so they're trying to find something that will give them the former while sparing them the latter.
      • 1y ago
• yunusabd 1y ago
  One of those articles that you'd love to share with certain people but it seems awkward when they receive a message from you with the link preview saying "Face it: you're a crazy person".
• dcre 1y ago
  Love the opening. I have always been interested in what people actually do hour-to-hour at their jobs and have always found it frustrating that a) they don't teach you about this in school AT ALL, b) people don't talk about it socially either. Even with social media I don't think we have a very good public repository of information of this kind. It would be a very interesting project to interview a few hundred people about what they actually do at work.
  • chubot 1y ago
    > people don't talk about it socially either Yeah totally, and I'd say that's exactly because of "status", which is mentioned: High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack Status is the thing people tend to communicate socially, not what they actually do day to day --- I remember a pg line that cuts to the core of this: It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious. How To Do What You Love - https://paulgraham.com/love.html https://paulgraham.com/love.html It seems like a good rule to me ...
    • throawaywpg 1y ago
      sometimes its the power that makes the prestige though.
      • bawolff 1y ago
        Power is often just an alternative method of paying people.
        • lazide 1y ago
          Then it’s a job you will struggle to keep your soul doing.
  • criddell 1y ago
    Alain de Botton wrote a book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work where he describes ten different people and their jobs in detail. I enjoyed the book because I like de Botton's writing, but it turns out most jobs sound a little dull.
• kubb 1y ago
  What I’d like to do doesn’t pay money. What I do is the most buck for the effort that I have to put in. I know I’d be extremely happy doing what I want to do. Unpacking that might be uncomfortable for the unpacker, because you’ll realize that you hate your economic activity too. Add to that all the bullshit jobs that don’t make any difference whether they exist or not. That’s the tragedy. The money is already being wasted. I could take it and be happy. But I can’t. I have to put my time in on the job.
  • eloisant 1y ago
    > What I’d like to do doesn’t pay money That's the thing: plenty of people want to do the fun or fulfilling jobs, so that drives the salaries down. When it's really enjoyable, people will even do it for free! On the other hand, people won't do soul-crushing bullshit jobs unless the pay is good so companies have to give a compelling offer.
• mvieira38 1y ago
  Funny quirk of the website: it says it needs JavaScript to work, but I can read everything and see everything just fine, and the formatting isn't even broken. Then I look at uBlock and 195 trackers are blocked. Yikes
• dumama 1y ago
  [dead]
• donatj 1y ago
  My wife sees what I do as "sitting in a chair all day" and tells me all the time she could not do what I do.
  • svantana 1y ago
    Is it the chair-sitting she couldn't do or the things that you do while sat in said chair? Or both?
  • balfirevic 1y ago
    What does she do?
• ajkjk 1y ago
  I feel like there is another angle to this which is largely glossed over in our modern world, which is: there are at least several viable reasons to pick a job or career. One, of course, is that you need the money. Two is that you enjoy it. The third is often left out, which is the moral angle: that it's the work you want to do in the world. You can do something everyday because it feels important to you, without enjoying it, per se, as long as it's not too stressful or abusive. It's a difference sense of "enjoyment", that it gives a deep satisfaction to do, even if the minute-to-minute experience isn't fun or entertaining or anything like that. For instance (a bad example because I haven't done it yet, but it's illustrative:) I don't really think I'd enjoy the minutiae of running a coffee shop. But I do frequently imagine that I'm eventually going to quit everything else and try to open one. Not cause I fancy myself a cafe owner, but because I'm drawn to the project of creating a certain kind of space in the world, and having control over it so that it can stay close to my vision. Some of my favorite spaces in the world were cafes that have since disappeared or lost their charm and I'd like to try to bring some of that back. I suspect that I can survive and embrace the daily work if it is part of that overall vision. This feels like a different angle than "you can do it because you're crazy". Actually you can do it because you really want to do it, no crazy required. But this only works, I feel, if you're truly morally motivated by the thing you're trying to do. Very hard to pull off with modern jobs: corporate jobs seem to go as far out of their way as possible to destroy any sense of fulfillment; academic jobs (I'm told) subject you to torturous competition and bureaucracy as if to drain any inspiration you had left; menial jobs treat you as disposable and you're disempowered from effecting change. Probably this trend of making work unmeaningful is one of the great tragedies of our society. It is like the only acceptable way to be is for your meaning to come from "take your money and use it to do hobbies and buy things for your family", and it's much harder for the meaning in your life to come from the work itself, because there are so many things waiting to punish you if you try to live that way. But there are still certainly ways to do it. In my opinion it should be a major goal of society to remove as many barriers to doing meaningful work as possible. Fulfillment ought to be seen as equally important to health. (As far as I am aware nobody has any idea how to fix this at a systemic level. The... cult? ... of capitalism opposes it too strongly.)
  • munificent 1y ago
• munificent 1y ago
  > Why is it so hard to unpack, even a little bit? I think a major part of the reason is we like thinking about the packed thing. I'm sure that most people who fantasize about owning a coffee shop will never do so and probably deep down know they'll never do so. But the fantasizing itself is a pleasurable activity. Unpacking the job bursts that bubble and ends the enjoyable fantasy. It takes a lot of self awareness to be mindful and deliberate about when you are planning (which requires unpacking and can be unpleasant but may be ultimately useful) and when you're fantasizing (which is deliberately low stakes and enjoyable but will not materially affect your life). It's very easy to get stuck in the trap of fantasizing while falsely believing you are planning.
  • metalrain 1y ago
    I've been dating recently and I think planning dates is mostly fantasizing. I plan the time, place and activities, imagine things to discuss, how I feel, how other person might feel. Everything feels well thought out and detailed, unpacked. But it never realizes quite like that, plans get cancelled, places are closed, feelings have changed, discussions are sidetracked or don't feel right. It's all revealed to be a fantasy. I don't mean you shouldn't try to plan, but unpacking can also be fantasy as much as the packed thing is.
• pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  > people who like Hawaiian pizza probably think their opinion is more common than it is (false consensus) I supposed I just got called out -- is this actually a rare thing? I thought it was like, a meme to hate pineapple on pizza? Obviously some people do, but I have never thought of my opinion (liking the combination) as especially rare.
  • mekoka 1y ago
    I think only those actually selling Hawaiian pizza know how popular it is. From observing how often I've seen it as an option, over the counter, or frozen, in various countries, my personal suspicion is that it's indeed actually more commonly appreciated than those who think it's a mark of good taste to hate it would believe.
    • Talanes 1y ago
      It's even been an option in every By-the-Slice display I've ever seen that wasn't purely a Pepperoni/Plain cheese affair.
  • abeppu 1y ago
    ... it can't be that rare or it wouldn't be a common combination right? Like, you'd be rare if you wanted black licorice on pizza, and you'd know you're rare b/c you wouldn't find opportunities to order it.
  • jama211 1y ago
    I think I heard it’s about 30% of people who like it. Which is big enough to put it on every menu, but it’s not the majority.
  • Einenlum 1y ago
    It also probably depends on the country. As a French person I never met anyone who thought it was a good idea. I also don't think I have ever seen a pizza with pineapple in a good pizza restaurant. Only in bad fast food restaurants. I guess it's quite different in the US.
• gcheong 1y ago
  "Do you want to be a surgeon? = Do you want to do the same procedure 15 times a week for the next 35 years?" Compared to trying to implement vague feature requests with no clear solutions under arbitrary deadlines and for probably a lot more pay and respect in general? Yes.
  • mekoka 1y ago
    I wouldn't mind doing the exact same thing over and over every day, if it alleviates someone's pain or suffering.
    • criddell 1y ago
      I got a colonoscopy last year and the doctor was pretty proud of the fact that he did more procedures than any other doctor in the state for the past few years running. The guy was very likable and was clearly dedicated to his job and being the best at it that he could be. How can you not respect that?
      • mekoka 1y ago
        The tech equivalent would be having companies line up to meet you, so that you can perform some particular upgrade of their system. The exact same each time. Then having every one of them praising and thanking you profusely after. Hell yeah.
      • chrisco255 1y ago
        I'd ask more questions, but I wouldn't want to probe...
    • alexyz12 1y ago
      you're one of the crazies
  • chrisco255 1y ago
    Yeah the OP critique doesn't even sound bad. There are some types of surgery that are routine and easy after you get it and doing such a thing 15x a week to earn a top 1% salary sounds pretty good. The vast majority of jobs are routine and involve doing the same task at least 15x a week, probably many more times than that.
• PaulKeeble 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • codyklimdev 1y ago
    Who cares?
  • bigstrat2003 1y ago
    None of this language is harmful to anyone. Stop berating people about things which are harmless, it's a dick move.
  • Permit 1y ago
    It cannot be that serious as you've used the word like eight times on Hacker News alone: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=PaulKeeble%20crazy&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • chrisg23 1y ago
      I looked at the uses and it seems like the guy was using the term crazy to describe ideas and things being done, not as a negative label for a human being. Splitting hairs? Maybe but I understand where the OP is coming from. Here's the 8 times (7 because one of them is the post we are discussing) What a crazy thing to be doing, the mad situations companies get themselves into when they should just have networked cameras and VPNs or at the very least distributed ingress machines! Its been getting crazy expensive for decent GPUs for a while for gaming and I can't see the next generation doing anything but being much higher due to the AI boom. Makes you wonder how it is that power from the grid is so ludicrously above its actual capitol cost of production, the systems getting that power to places must be crazy expensive. I sure hope it turns around at some point and it doesn't become C-AIDS, but it explains why Flu and RSV and sepsis et el are going crazy at the moment, immune systems are in bad shape. It is no more crazy than telling them to diet given that is shown not to actually work. People do some crazy things with Spring and interface injections in Java and it can get really Opaque quickly but also often it really is just 1 class implementing an interface and there are no tests using the interface at all. There is a bug in the update process that can cause the phone to slow and drain battery like crazy. So maybe it is that serious for a user with a 9 year history that used the term not once in the manner he is advocating against.
• 827a 1y ago
  Jensen Huang has mentioned something like this similarly before: (iirc) When asked if he would change anything about his life if he could do it all over again, he says something like: if I had to do this all over again knowing what I know now, I wouldn't. If you actually knew the sacrifice and difficulty of that path upfront, deeply knew it and understood it fully in a way only having experienced it can create, essentially no one would walk that path, not even if it meant becoming one of the richest people in the world at the end. The flip-side of that is a quote from DHH on a recent Lex Friedman podcast: "I wouldn't go back and say a thing to my younger self. I would not rob my younger self of all the life experiences I have been blessed with due to the ignorance of how the world works."
• tqi 1y ago
  > This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one Does everyone (or even most people) have a "right" career? I actually think this framing itself is harmful. If comparison is the thief of joy, then what could be worse than believing that there is some yet to be discovered perfect-for-you career out that you are missing.
  • zaptheimpaler 1y ago
    There might not be a single right career, but there can be many wrong careers.
  • a_bonobo 1y ago
    I think I agree with you, it's harmful. If you sit down and unpack everything you're about to do you'll end up not doing anything, except what gives you the most pleasure. There are many things I started in my life that all led to wonderful places, but if I would've sat down and prepared myself about all the horrible steps in the middle, I wouldn't have done them. Even now my work has 'bad' aspects that would've kept me away from taking up the work in the first place, if I'd known about them. I still do them because the work needs to be done.
• alexpotato 1y ago
  LOTS of thoughts here: > If you think no one would answer “yes” to those questions, you’ve missed the point: almost no one would answer “yes” to those questions, and those proud few are the ones who should be surgeons, actors, and wedding photographers. In "What Should I Do With My Life", Po Bronson has a great quote: "Everyone thinks their dream job will be smooth sailing. But let's face it: EVERY job has shitstorms. Thing is, in the jobs you love the shitstorm is part of the 'fun and excitement' of that dream job." I can 100% attest to this with a personal example: having been an SRE for many years I LOVE managing outages. I don't love that there ARE outages but I do love running them. I can imagine a librarian or other similar field that loves peace and quiet and predictably recoiling in horror at this statement. But that's the point. People are different and have different preferences. As patio11 said "everyone's preference space is n-dimensional". > This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one: they don’t understand the craziness that they have to offer, nor the craziness that will be demanded of them This is why the advice of "pick the job that involves the thing you can't stop yourself from doing" is good advice. In my case, it's writing documentation. It's an urge I can not stop. And it's been great in my FinTech SRE career as it saves future me and other people lots of time during outages. > You’ll discover all sorts of unexpected things when unpacking, like how firefighters mostly don’t fight fires, My wife's cousin is a firefighter and he was mentioning that due to improvements in smoke detectors, fire alarms etc, it's becoming rarer and rarer to actually fight a fire. He seemed sad when he said it.
• tetha 1y ago
  This is something I've started to notice as I've talked with artists on tour. Like, I'm a hobby metal musician, and I do have a certain dream of being on stage with a band. Even if it's just a dive bar with 20 people. Gotta be realistic. And I have 15 - 20 years available for that, or even more if you look at Grave Digger or - rest in peace old chap - Ozzy. But I'm not certain if I have the passion to be a touring musician even if that happened (which most likely wont). Like what these people take on is entirely insane. Brittney Slayes from Unleash the Archers had tours during which she worked full-time remote. 8 full hours of work, out of the hotel, soundcheck, gig, meet and greet, back into the bus, sleep, back to work. And from what I've heard they've also done that with a kid on top. That is just nuts. And even without that, big tours are hell from what I've heard. The first one or two tours are an absolute test for bands because it's all a huge rush of adrenaline, excitement, nonsense, strange locations all at once without a second to breathe. If you hear that, a 9-5ish tech job isn't that bad.
  • funkman 1y ago
    creating an account just to respond to you, because i just got to the end of a 8 ish year journey playing with a local band and the reason i stopped has a lot to do with this unpacking. we never toured, and i would have loved to do exactly one, but i realized that i am not crazy about music in the sense of the article. even weekend gigs mean many hours of driving and spending most of your time with the band, who are cool guys but not nearly as cool as your SO. don't get me wrong, i LOVE playing live, and i hope you find a way to do so, because it really is great, but going to that next level really does take being a little nuts. stories about people shedding on their instrument for 8 hours, and then going out and jamming for 6 more hours until 4 am, every day. music is really important to my life, but when push comes to shove i don't care about it that much!
• agentultra 1y ago
  People should unpack what a software developer does before jumping in. Do you enjoy reading tables of letters and numbers from some dusty ISO standard in order to displays strings to a user who literally doesn't care and will never look at it? Under time pressure? With threats of getting replaced every few years by the new technology that will replace you? Enjoy getting paged at 9pm in the middle of your kids' school play to put out the massive... oh the login to the intranet portal that only the one sales guy uses... not a fire. Do you want to sweat bullets solving algorithms puzzles on a whiteboard in front of a bored reviewer... algorithms and data structures you will never use and will get chastised for writing on the job? Enjoy letting others take credit for your work and ingenuity (yay team!) then taking the blame when you don't meet their impossible deadlines that they made up (how could you)? Like getting angry emails from corporate shills that use code you write in your free time to release a new version with their requested features yesterday or else!? Want to be able to remember op-codes from the data sheet of some processor nobody even uses anymore instead of your mothers' birthday? Sure the money is good but they don't tell you that you're going to get hemorrhoids, astigmatism, carpal tunnel, a bad back, type-2 diabetes and a life long partnership with a therapist. ... and yet I still can't stop programming.
  • nik_0_0 1y ago
    Zachtronics has an excellent game(?) Shenzhen I/O which is such a good simulacrum of an embedded SDE; reading datasheets, coding, and sending emails, that I couldn't play it! But I highly recommend it, if thats not your day job - or if you are curious about making it so! https://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/SHENZHEN_IO/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/SHENZHEN_IO/
• jchw 1y ago
  Never even once thought that running a coffee shop would be fun, but then that example kind of made it seem interesting. I mean, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't actually want to do it, but also it does seem interesting to just sit there and explore different coffee beans and mess with the parameters and see what happens. There is an unloved page in my Obsidian notes somewhere where I have a table of grind size vs amount of water where I attempted to figure out the best trade-off for my drip coffee maker. (I have honestly been too lazy to actually do coffee at home for a little while now, but for a while I got sucked in.) That said, unfortunately as much as it is depressing, the thing that I go Mr. Beast levels of obsession with is definitely software. I almost wish it could be drawing or something else that is a little more interesting, because while it is a great career that I probably would've been screwed without, it does feel pretty thankless at the end of the day. I don't think people who make software are really that valued by anyone but their own. You rarely hear people rave about software when it merely just works, even though sometimes it really is doing crazy things to make that happen. The ultimate end goal for software is to make it look and feel effortless, and if you truly win, the reward is that people will think it actually is. That's also why I'm both terrified and excited by the prospect of machines writing competent code. I am not sure I will find the jobs left for me as interesting as actually writing the code itself. But also, if I really could have an army of even junior engineers running locally on a GPU cluster, the possibilities that would unlock feel pretty extensive. I'll just have to figure out how many GPUs I can afford while I'm waiting in the unemployment line. (Or that future may never actually come, if we're really hitting as hard of a wall as it looks like, but I'm not a believer in the meat brain being some sacred piece of matter whose functions can't possibly be replicated by logic gates. So I think it's probably a matter of time, it's just that maybe we're not actually sure how many, in part because people treat it as such an inevitability that they look at you funny if you suggest it might not be tomorrow.)
• Troryetem 1y ago
  I've found this extremely tedious, for three reasons: (1) So many words to say "the devil is in the details". (2) There are jobs that are not detail-oriented. Yes, there are some nuances to them, but they are not detail-oriented. Some people are irritated to death by having to fuck around with details, yet they excel at other jobs. There's nothing "nuts" about either group of people (3) "Unpacking", as in, dumping all the details of a job on someone up-front, is silly. It's OK to have a plan, but it's unrealistic to expect to know everything in advance. "One step a day", "Rome wasn't built in a day". Uninformed choices and risk-taking are inevitable. > When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives, it’s often because they haven’t unpacked. Strongly disagree. It's because financial pressure and time pressure do not let them experiment and test themselves at various studies and jobs. "Unpacking-as-you-go" should be the standard. Instead, we force people to commit to something particular when they're in high-school, and changing course later is prohibitively costly. Whenever someone pulls that off, it always counts as an exception, a big feat to write news articles about.
• supportengineer 1y ago
  I want the same thing I've always wanted. To be a software engineer in the 1990's. I want to come to work and see pyramids of Jolt Cola on the desks. And for lunch, we'll go out as a team in our Honda Civics to get some $3 Chinese food. In the lobby, we'll have back issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal stacked up on the side tables. We'll merge our code by copying it onto floppies and handing it to that one dude. At some point we might setup a machine with a modem so you could dial in, telnet to a machine and check your email with pine. When you leave work at 5:30pm, you're done for the day.
  • throawaywpg 1y ago
    yeah, I was born in 89 and im pretty sure all my love for tech comes from 90s culture
    • supportengineer 1y ago
      Remember the days you could make a reference to Monty Python, or Star Trek: The Next Generation?
      • aoki 1y ago
        Have nerdy kids and you can make references to “Romanes eunt domus” and shrubbery again
  • Apocryphon 1y ago
    Work in a cubicle with privacy instead of the open office bullpen.
• agcat 1y ago
  This is a great piece. My biggest takeaway is that next time if you find someone's job fascinating -- ask them how do you spend their day doing it?
• mieubrisse 1y ago
  Reminds me of a quote from the Projection Lab success story that got posted a few weeks ago: https://projectionlab.com/blog/we-reached-1m-arr-with-zero-funding https://projectionlab.com/blog/we-reached-1m-arr-with-zero-f... > But luckily, success indexes less on IQ and more on consistency. The willingness to doggedly show up every single day can take you to some really suprising and amazing places.
  • jama211 1y ago
    The only issue I have with that quote is the word “willingness” - it makes it sound like a choice. I think if your brain likes it you’ll turn up every day and it’ll never be hard, if you don’t like it it’s almost always unsustainable in the long run, and we overestimate how much choice we have in this.
  • jdhzzz 1y ago
    "Eighty percent of success is showing up." attributed to Woody Allen.
• herval 1y ago
  I never wanted to open a coffee shop, but was able to answer all of the questions. I guess I should consider opening a coffee shop? Joke aside, this is particularly relevant for people who think they want to be entrepreneurs (most just want to not have a boss), and particularly those who think they want to build a VC-backed business (most just want to get rich magically)
  • draw_down 1y ago
    [dead]
• mclau157 1y ago
  Is literally nobody going to bring up this 8 hours per day 5 days a week not being needed for most jobs? A coffee shop could sell more coffee in that time but for majority of engineers it just means we can work slower and spread work over time because we are forced to fill 8 hours
• andy99 1y ago
  My realization about work is that 90% of all one's job is crap (give or take). You'll always have to do ton of really shitty stuff, so trying to minimize that is a lost cause. Focus on what the good parts are. You have to do crappy stuff, do you at least sometimes get to do stuff you really like? The article seems to be literally the opposite framing.
• ossner 1y ago
  My father wanted to open a butcher shop when he was 25, he was given a large loan by my grandfather to do so. He was already a master of his trade at this point and I am sure he had a deep insight into the industry and the practices of the time. However, I think that if my granddad had used the "Coffee Beans Procedure", there would have been a lot of questions that he would not have been able to answer. My father is no longer a butcher, he sold the shop after ~25 years, working every day to afford our family a comfortable life and having enough money to pay for a restaurant that he wanted to run. Again, no one asked about where the coffee beans would come from, and after ~10 years he closed the restaurant after again working tirelessly to support himself, his children and his new grandchildren. He had the money to buy kitchen equipment for a newly built restaurant that he has now been running for 5 years. To make a long story short, he is certainly crazy and he is doing what he wants and, on some level, is meant to do. But if your takeaway from this article is that you need to unpack everything and know everything to the smallest detail, you might get lost or discouraged by the complexity. You can't plan it all out.
  • layer8 1y ago
    The article says that you should at least find those questions interesting, not necessarily have everything already planned out.
  • CityOfThrowaway 1y ago
    I read the post differently – the point of the exercise is not that you need to know the answers to the questions. It's to gauge your emotional reaction to the question itself. By examining the types of tasks you will be consistently faced with, you can ask yourself, "Do I actually want to do that?"
    • NooneAtAll3 1y ago
      and the comment is saying that such emotional reaction might be to complexity and scale itself, rather than the specific individual details
      • 1y ago
• roxolotl 1y ago
  A succinct way to put this as career advice is: do the job with the tedium you love. Doing what you love is nice and all but most jobs aren’t just the top line work so finding a job where you love the tedious parts and might not even consider them tedious is what you want.
• nitwit005 1y ago
  People aren't bad at "unpacking". They haven't made any effort to think about things. I had a coworker ask a nephew in high school to sit with me at work to show them a software job. They said they wanted to be a game developer. It turned out they had never seen software code in any form, and had no idea what programing was generally. I asked them if they had any art skills, and they were baffled why that was relevant. They had no concept of the job at all. They just liked video games. Apparently, I crushed their dreams.
  • johnfn 1y ago
    > Apparently, I crushed their dreams. Why does your post make it sound like you dunked on some poor high school student? Maybe you could have been a tad more supportive? Not everyone is fortunate enough to understand what goes into engineering in high school. I am personally really grateful that when I had my "I wanna make games" moment, and I didn't know engineering at all, that I had the right influences in my life to guide me in the direction of understanding how to get there.
    • nitwit005 1y ago
      No, you're just making an assumption. I happily showed them the code I was working on. I was told afterward that I crushed their dreams by their aunt.
      • throawaywpg 1y ago
        the internet has a habit of making everyone seem flat and cynical
  • gipp 1y ago
    > People aren't bad at "unpacking". They haven't made any effort to think about things. I feel like the author made it pretty clear that's exactly what he means by "bad at unpacking."
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
• locallost 1y ago
  The mundane is a part of every job, and you could reduce every job to it, if you really wanted to. Do you want to chop vegetables for the rest of your life? Well that's what being a cook is. True only if you focus on it because that's what you hate. The thinking is interesting, and I agree that the question "what to do with my life" is a modern phenomenon. But on the other hand, if you know how difficult and challenging something is, you will never do it. There are parallels to analysis paralysis here. So yes, be prepared and think things through, but if I have learned one thing in life, it's that the problems you will run into are not the ones you imagined in the beginning. Instead you will get some you never thought of, and the ones you did will not happen or will not be a big deal. How many people here worked on software changes, and had to estimate and got it all wrong?
• sigbottle 1y ago
  I think this ties into like "observation farming" When I was told to do this when I was like 14, and asked "waht did I want to do", I ran into all the exact traps that the article said in the form of overintellecutalization. It takes a certain kind of maturity to just sit down and really try and observe, non-judgementally. Just what happened. (then the intellectuals among y'all will say stuff like, "well perception isn't objective truth yada yada" this is also a big thought loop trap I had to get rid of. Just like, put it on hold, just say your thought, even if you think it's stupid, or it's some kind of "self strawman" and you want to elaborate more and justify etc. Just say it.) I've been able to do it for things I've really cared about, but often times I don't get into this state. I should practice. I only even observed this thought pattern when I got good at math, and the whole thing was just sitting down, contemplating honestly pretty dumb thoughts, but if you thought loop yourself you get nowhere. Gotta say seemingly stupid stuff and just contemplate. Words are both the thing you should observe but not treat as truth, just... try to observe. idk.
  • ebcode 1y ago
    talk about a strange loop!
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• QuantumGood 1y ago
  You have to love what you're serving. I produced over 70 public events for people wanting to learn voiceover. We had a feature roadmap and wishlist, and we worked our way through it over the years. Many (talent, recording, and advertising) studio owners came and coached at minimal cost because we had such a great reputation for doing it right at low cost to attendees. The great people who wanted to be associated with it, and the enthusiasm of everyone involved was incredibly fulfilling. We expanded to the point that we recorded 350 sessions in a single day, each with a coach with decades of experience, a professional studio engineer (usually), a studio room, and short lectures throughout the day. We had to move to bigger and bigger conference hotels to get enough rooms until Covid shut everything down. There were tons of "unknown unknowns" that had to be solved over time. We were focused initally on protecting the people who probably shouldn't be spending money on training (very frustrating to watch them be ripped off), and produced the event both as a place they could learn a bit at low cost, as well as serving the mission of providing bite-size workshops for people who didn't want weeks or months (or years) or training. I didn't want to be an "event provider". I wanted to figure out how to do something for people I saw being served poorly in an industry I loved, and then to find ways to give more and more to the people who were showing up.
• TrackerFF 1y ago
  I know exactly what I want to do, if I had the money to retire today: I'd build instruments for a living, which is something I already do as a side gig/hustle, and is something I have done for years now. It is one of those things that fall under the category "very enjoyable, but financially difficult". If you're already set financially, living a FIRE lifestyle, you can run a shop at a scale that: - Doesn't burn you out - Doesn't force you to cut corners - Keeps it somewhere between a hobby and a "job" Me and my partner are both both chasing FIRE, and I think we should get there within 4-5 years. So-called "Fat FIRE" in 10-12, if we decide to push on. We have both our dreams of focusing on the things we care most about. We both also know very well that the things we love to do, don't pay much.
• taco_emoji 1y ago
  [flagged]
• shortrounddev2 1y ago
  I think most people (especially software engineers) who fantasize about leaving their office jobs and running a small retail or restaurant business are not upset with having to write code all day - they're upset with the people they work with/for and fantasize about independence, even if that means a more difficult day to day job. Or, they're unhappy with the sterile environment they work in and are disillusioned with the abstract nature of B2B products (what am I selling? Whose life am I improving by selling it?) and want to work with something whose value is more easily demonstrated. I think that when someone tells you they fantasize about starting a small local retail business, that we shouldn't just shit on their naivite; we should listen to what they're really trying to say and help them find something that checks the boxes for them: 1. Something in the real world, preferably with physical products/services on physical products 2. Something with a larger degree of independence 3. Something whose value to the customer is obvious 4. Something which improves the world or their community in some way, and is not just extracting value from others. Personally, I love writing software, but I hate Software companies
  • metalrain 1y ago
    I have found that cooking for family, friends or small communities can scratch that itch. Results are tangible, you are doing something with your hands, it only takes few hours (often much less) and you get to give something to people you love.
• hermitcrab 1y ago
  Can concurr. Writing code is a minority activity when you are running a small software business (if you want to make any money at it, anyway).
• djoldman 1y ago
  If I had one piece of advice for someone trying to pick a career, it would be to require that they shadow someone actually in the professions they're considering. Doctors: you may spend many many hours in front of a mobile computer entering notes, medications, etc. You may also spend a good deal of time fighting insurance companies via email and/or phone. It's likely you feel you are rarely "helping people"; sometimes you have to help people in spite of themselves. Also patients rarely do what you tell them to, contrary to what you judge to be in their best interests. Lawyers: you may never see the inside of a courtroom or even a client. You likely will spend the mass majority of your time using Microsoft Word redlining documents. Trial drama is the exception of the exception. Many jobs are not what people think they are.
  • ThinkingGuy 1y ago
    When I started college I thought I wanted to work in television production. One semester of interning at a local TV station cured me of that.
  • grvdrm 1y ago
    I like this way of thinking. Musician: you may never make it “big.” You might be making close to nothing in bars and other venues and only during later hours. People love covers even if you love your originals. Travel is brutal. Irregular hours make it harder to interact in the regular hour parts of life.
• atoav 1y ago
  I agree with the point of the post tho. It is something I repeatedly keep stressing: many people confuse the goal ("having a nice shop") with the way (everything you need to so to get there and maintain its existence once it is there). You can be good at a thing you don't enjoy, but if it is your dream you should better make sure it is a thing you enjoy. A thing everybody should understand is that enjoying the consuming of a thing, be it coffee, videogames, music, films or books is a vastly different experience from making them. I don't say worse, I don't say better, I say different. And only a minority of those who love consuming a thing also love making it and having to deal with what comes with making it. But I suggest to everybody to try this for themselves.
• ggm 1y ago
  I think this is substantively correct, if misguided: people are going to stick metaphorical fingers in their ears and go LA LA LA LA LA when you explain what doing <x> actually involved, rather than wake up to how being an <x> is different to their dreams. And very probably, it's a good thing. Otherwise, we'd still be banging the rocks together.
• hcs 1y ago
  https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/weird-4 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/weird-4 > The goal in life isn't to find something you love, it's to find something you can get realllll weird about.
• stirfish 1y ago
  Oh damn, it turns out I don't like anything. Maybe it's time to get my meds adjusted.
  • metalrain 1y ago
    I tend to have very periodical special interests, maybe 1-3 months per topic. It's not long enough to make life changes, to chase that crazy in me. Maybe I have to become "Today I Learned" style content creator
• nuancebydefault 1y ago
  If you enter this comments section without having read most of the article: I advise to read it till the end, no regrets.
  • sudokatsu 1y ago
    Took your advice, no regrets.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• jackcosgrove 1y ago
  I received both the worst and the best pieces of career advice when I was an undergraduate. The worst advice was that writing software, after the dotcom bust, was dead as a career. This taught me a lot about the value of "conventional wisdom" vs looking at the underlying supply and demand dynamics of a career. Sort of adjacent to the theme of the essay, I think the best careers are those that you can tolerate and those that have favorable supply-demand curves. The best advice was from a pre-med advisor, who asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life surrounded by people who were old, sick, dying, and - not in so many words - decrepit. At that moment I realized I was not a healer, I found most bodies to be gross, and I had no business considering a medical career.
  • chadcmulligan 1y ago
    > The best advice was from a pre-med advisor, who asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life surrounded by people who were old, sick, dying, and - not in so many words - decrepit. At that moment I realized I was not a healer, I found most bodies to be gross, and I had no business considering a medical career. Ah yes, I came to the same realisation - my family were pressuring me to be a doctor because my marks were there - but spending all day touching sick people was not for me. Building machines is so much more fun and someone will pay me to do it! - crazy. I do this for free in my spare time.
• j7ake 1y ago
  I love this podcast and substack. He is an artist in many ways : revealing from common observations into something revelatory, curious, and funny
• jiggawatts 1y ago
  I got into game engine development knowing full well that it’s “applied linear algebra” and not at all like playing a game… except when you need to test something a hundred times in a row. Lots of my colleagues dropped out of the industry in their first year because they didn’t like maths at all. What really drove the point home for me though was that a decade later I got more satisfaction out of developing ETL pipelines for multidimensional analytics. Think about how “nuts” that is! Everyone likes playing games but nobody installs SQL Server Analysis Services on their home PC for “fun”! Yet… it is, for a certain very select subset of the population…
• bawolff 1y ago
  Interesting, but i feel like it kind of assumes that people are more intentional about their job choices then they are. For a lot of people, they do the job they have because they have limited choices and need money to live. We often picture this for minimum wage jobs, but i think its also true for more high status jobs. I'm a computer programmer. Sometimes i like it and sometimes i don't, but at the end of the day its the only job i have the skills for. Sure i could learn to do something else if i was so inclined, but it took a long time to get good at computer programming, im not exactly eager to start that process over. On days where im feeling frustrated, i might say i want a different job. If someone asked me what, i'd probably give some bullshit answer like run a coffee shop (except i hate customer service, so my go to fantasy is tree planter). But at the end of the day its a fantasy. I know i dont really want to do that. Nobody needs to unpack that for me to know that. I just am having a bad day and want to fantasize about the literal opposite.
• warmbeanwater 1y ago
  Ctrl-F "Profit" Face it: you've missed the point of business. This article presents FOMO as a decision making strategy. Completely bizarre.
• socalgal2 1y ago
  > Well, you know how when you move to a new place and all of your unpacked boxes confront you every time you come home? And you know how, if you just leave them there for a few weeks, the boxes stop being boxes and start being furniture, just part of the layout of your apartment, almost impossible to perceive? No, I do not know this. I've moved ~29 times in my life. I've never once had a problem unpacking. I packed up shelves and drawers and dressers and closets. When I get to the new place I open a box, see what's in it, "oh, this was the stuff in bedroom drawers" so I go put the stuff in there in just a few seconds. In a few hours I'm 100% unpacked. I've never really understood why it would be any different for anyone else except if maybe if they moved to a much smaller place. Is it really that common of an experience? More to the point of the article though - I'm not entirely sure I want to unpack my job - I feel like lots of people would not "do the thing" if they knew how hard it would be. But, looking back, they're proud they "did the thing". I know for me, I started some companies and projects years ago. I was able to do this because I didn't know how much work it would be. Now that I know, I find it extremely hard to get started again. I wish I could go back to my old naive self. Maybe a better example, all though one I have unfortunately not experienced, would anyone have kids if you "unpacked" what having kids is actually like? I think you could list 100s or 1000s of "unpleasant on paper" things but I don't really think you could write the positives in a compelling way against that list of negatives. And, yet I believe the majority of parents would tell you having children was the most fulfilling thing in their lives. I think many of the things mentioned in the post might also have a similar issue.
  • klysm 1y ago
    Moving 29 times is absolutely nuts, unless you have like no possessions
  • angrydev 1y ago
    I agree that following the exercise too closely would dissuade many people from careers they would do fine in. Every job has toil. That being said it has some value but perhaps not much more than just a little critical thinking.
  • ethersteeds 1y ago
    On unpacking after moving: I'd posit that what you describe is an extreme outlier of moving efficiency. More often, there was some amount of disorder introduced along the way. Boxes badly/not labelled, disparate contents mixed. Differences in house mix of drawers/cabinets/closets/etc means there's no direct equivalent for where something used to live. Unpacking that's blocked on other tasks like building the bookcase or deciding what this room will be used for. And if course the classic just having way too much stuff. This all compounds for ADHD people, for whom the large stream of unpacking tasks coupled with their attendant stream of decisions can overwhelm and then depress, resulting in a quagmire as described in your quote. It ain't pretty but I assure you it happens. My friend is going through it right now: six weeks after moving, their living room remains wall to wall boxes.
• _carbyau_ 1y ago
  Humans are amazingly adaptable, even managing to eke out survival under the worst circumstances. You think slaves didn't make jokes about the boss as part of helping them get through the day/week/month? The craziness is in finding ways to vary the experience within what tolerances you have, with whoever you have with you. Workplace colleagues can make or break a "this is a good place to work" assessment.
• marcus_holmes 1y ago
  We see this a lot in startup communities. "I want to be a successful startup founder", or even worse "I want to have a successful app!" (though that was more prevalent 10-15 years ago). This is usually accompanied by no relevant industry experience, tech knowledge, or skills. So obviously doomed to fail, but there's so much bullshit around the community about just believing in yourself and your idea that they'll persist regardless (usually this is perpetrated by the various bits of the ecosystem that feed off newbie clueless founders). The good ones quickly realise that they're in way over their head, and either learn fast or get out fast. As TFA says, the focus is always on the perceived status of being a "successful startup founder" and never on the actual work of building a business from scratch and what that actually involves (usually 5-10 years of grinding poverty and stress).
• dwd 1y ago
  I did work experience in high school with the state department for the environment. Got to go out with one of the rangers for a day which was actually a lot of fun. I still remember what he said as we pulled into the car park for one of the parks they manage, "most of my time is actually spent making sure the toilets haven't run out of paper".
• greesil 1y ago
  That's... why I'm here.
• musicale 1y ago
  OP is asking questions related to opening a coffeehouse, an establishment that focuses on coffee and where you can order a wide range of coffee drinks. OP's friend might very well want to open a coffee shop, a small diner where you can perhaps order two kinds of coffee - caf or decaf. Nobody cares where the beans come from.
• starluz 1y ago
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• musicale 1y ago
  > “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?” That sounds great actually ... but you didn't mention the constant grant-writing and chasing funding, which is what universities actually value.
• voidUpdate 1y ago
  If i was to sit down and unpack every potential job like that, then I dont think I'd be able to find a single job I would actually want to do
• KronisLV 1y ago
  > The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner. If we spent time overthinking everything, nothing would get done because circumstances are seldom perfect. A lot of it is about making stuff up as you go. Of course, reality almost never matches our imaginations either and there unpacking might help. At the same time, not everyone is passionate about the details of every job and as long as it puts food on the table (or something in the retirement account), it's good enough. > High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack because the upsides are obvious and appealing, while the downsides are often deliberately hidden and tolerable only to a tiny minority. For instance, shortly after college, I thought I would post a few funny videos on YouTube and, you know, become instantly famous. Most people who try at anything won't see much success, especially when that depends on standing out from others. Most actors won't be in box office hits. Most content creators will be relatively obscure. Most software devs will write boring CRUD apps in sub-optimal environments and it will sometimes be a bit scrappy. Most employees won't be employee of the month or whatever. Same for trying to run your own business, it being profitable in any sense is already more of a success than one might think. Actually same for various creative pursuits, e.g. when people spend months working on a video game of their own, release it... and realize that they've spent thousands of dollars worth of time and won't even make that back... while something seemingly simplistic like Vampire Survivors blow up and inspire an entire genre overnight. It's the same with having a YouTube channel - you might do ten uploads and see no success. Hundred uploads and see no success. Even a thousand videos and no success yet. Meanwhile, there's someone else who seems to get 10x-100x more views or whatever, after starting building a channel at a similar time to you. You might be able to learn from them... or it might just be some inherent characteristics that you don't have and that's that. Long story short, maybe there is something you excel at and you just have to find it. Statistically (for a general population), probably not. I think a big problem of our time is being exposed to the very best wherever you look - from the highlights of the lives of attractive people on social media, to YouTube videos produced to a crazy high degree of quality, to completely mismatched expectations of what the mediocrity of real life will look like for most folks.
• rpastuszak 1y ago
  Two things: > In my experience, whenever you unpack somebody, you inevitably discover something extremely weird about them. [...] I've spoken to ca. 300 people through the Say Hi page on my site. All of them, without a single exception, and I am not exaggerating, were beautifully weird people. (When a random person calls me, I usually start the call with "So, who/why the fuck are you?". It's cheesy, even for my standards, but it works really well for what I'm getting out of these calls.) God, I wish I had the ease of photographers like Mary Ellen Mark, being able to approach people like that more often, being able to tap into that weirdness with even more people. > Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” [...] > These questions sound so stupid that it’s no wonder no one asks them, and yet, somehow, the answers often surprise us. In my experience (including the calls I've had in the past), that's not necessarily true -- I ask those questions myself all the time, sometimes to the point of overthinking instead of just trying things out. For me, a better question is: what is the specific thing that attracts me to the idea of doing x/becoming x. What is the feeling I'm looking for/getting when thinking about this? It's not that much different from the question mentioned by the author, but (to me) it feels more productive and leads to more actionable results.
• closetkantian 1y ago
  I think one thing that this article misses out on is that people are more and more likely to have many careers over a lifetime. In my case, I was a teacher, then a technical writer, then a teacher again. And now I'm shifting into curriculum development. The skills built in my different careers all have complemented each other, and I don't feel as if any of them are my one and only "dream job."
  • maksimur 1y ago
    In your case the jobs look closely related, don't they?
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• FinnLobsien 1y ago
  I think the direction of this is awesome, though I'd also say there's a reverse argument to be made that I'm more sympathetic to. Rather than figuring out the less glamorous side (i.e. coffee bean suppliers) and wondering if you'd like doing that thing, I think the opposite could be a good question too: Do I love the upside enough to deal with the downside? No cafe owner will enjoy getting permits rejected because your bathroom sink is too high to be wheelchair accessible, replacing a supplier because they no longer carry the butter you like or having a barista not show up for work (all real examples from cafe owner friends). But they love it enough to go through with it anyway because they care about the result. I think we should view it more that way. Ask an aspiring software engineer if they would like to do daily 9am standups, spend hours in Jira and be lectured by a product manager who last wrote code in 2012 and they'll say no. Experienced software engineers don't enjoy that either. They do enjoy building software enough to put up with that stuff though.
  • rglynn 1y ago
    I actually think to some extent the ideas you shared are exactly what this article is questioning In particular some things that stood out to me: > No cafe owner will enjoy ... I don't know about this specific case, but I'll bet you that, contrary to what the majority of people think, there are people who relish this challenge and don't see it as a downside. > ... they care about the result. I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but "result" to me here is precisely what was meant with the professor example. The point was you should enjoy the process, not the result. > Ask an aspiring software engineer if they would like to do daily 9am standups, spend hours in Jira ... I think that this statement is guilty of a rather typical sin on software forums which is assuming we all work similar jobs. I suspect you are right that a large portion of devs would agree with this. However, I certainly have worked with, heck I have even been the dev who enjoys doing this. This is more true if you frame it as "lots of regular meetings with great process obsession, working with a product manager with a technical background". A thought that occurred to me when reading your post was that TFA is somewhat guilty of being on the extreme side. Your framing to me, is actually quite helpful in providing balance, in the sense that it may not always be wise to chase for the white rabbit profession with no downsides. Rather accepting some downsides while still enjoying the process (unlike the dour university admins).
• taylorius 1y ago
  An issue I have with this, is that it poses two rather contrary hypotheses. 1. When considering a career, people do a bad job of unpacking the detailed day-to-day activities that make it up. 2. When shown these detailed day-to-day activities people can do an excellent job of assessing whether they would be "happy" doing it or not. Why would a person who is so bad at making the leap from the vague notion of being a professor to imagining the real-world actualities of that job, suddenly gain 100% detailed insight into whether or not those actual tasks would make them happy?
• noisy_boy 1y ago
  > Which kind of coffee mug is best? I don't want to open a coffee shop. But I have put some thought about the type of cup I like (not what is scientifically the best). All this is in context of plain ceramic cups. First, it shouldn't be too wide. It is an uncomfortable feeling holding such a cup. Relatively taller cups feel nicer to hold. Not sure if that helps with heat retention due to less wide mouth, if you don't have a cover. Secondly, the handle should be just slightly wider than your fingers wrapped around it. Stupid fancy creative ones are the worst. Overly circular ones are terrible. If your fingers are going over each other while holding it, avoid it like plague. Thirdly, the inner seam shouldn't be sharp but bevelled. That avoids buildup of deposit. I prefer black but white might be preferable for those particular about cleaning (also see last point). Extension to previous point: glazed is better than matted - stuff doesn't stick so much. Fourthly, avoid ones with uneven top/lip. Because you want to be able to put any available plate/cover without the steam escaping that much. Tip for cleaning cups for lazy people: squirt some dishwasher liquid, fill it up to the brim with water and leave it until your next round. Make sure to hold it low so that the tap water generates some foam due to impact, basically avoid the soap lumped sitting at the bottom. It'll practically wash itself by the time you are back for your next cup and will be much more clean compared to having to clean a dirty cup that has been sitting for a while.
• pipes 1y ago
  Bunch of smug questions.
  • cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
• jmhammond 1y ago
  > For example, in grad school I worked with lots of undergrads who thought they wanted to be professors. Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?” I’m a professor, and I’d only add gesturing to represent teaching and banging head on a table to represent committee meetings. But I freaking love my job.
• yayitswei 1y ago
  Not sure how much unpacking most founders do beforehand. "We do these things not because they're easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy."
• BrenBarn 1y ago
  There's certainly some truth in this. When I was in grad school, another grad student made a sort of questionnaire for undergrads who were considering going to grad school (and I later made it into a flowchart). It was a bunch of things like "are you willing to spend 5-7 years being paid starvation wages" and "are you willing to move anywhere in the country or possibly the world to take whatever job you're offered", and any "no" answer led to "consider a different path". It's harsh but likely true. There are a couple caveats though. One is that the chance to make these kinds of choices is a privilege. I don't think most people working as supermarket checkers or delivery drivers are there because they had a desire to do it and then unpacked it and decided yeah, this is the job for me. A lot of people don't get to choose jobs because they want to do them. On the flip side, a lot of people have jobs that they didn't choose with too much deliberation --- but still like their job. And that's partly because when you unpack many jobs, you get something like "would you like to hang around with a few pretty good people while you all do X?" Not that those people are part of the job per se, but if you wind up in an environment where your co-workers are reasonably fun to be with, and/or the customers are friendly, and the job itself isn't super demanding, it winds up being okay.
• wkrsz 1y ago
  I'm somewhat disappointed that the article did not describe how you must be crazy to enjoy programming.