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I feel sorry for the author of this post - he actually believes hard, boring work is the only way to accomplish anything. I've done both hard, boring work, and

by RyanZAG 13y ago

I feel sorry for the author of this post - he actually believes hard, boring work is the only way to accomplish anything. I've done both hard, boring work, and easy, efficient and enjoyable work. The easy work was both more enjoyable, more profitable and far better for my life as a whole. Life is not fair, there are no points awarded for working harder or being more diligent - there are only 'points' awarded for accomplishing things. Make sure you accomplish the right things in the right way. Nobody is interesting that you slaved away coding for 6 months to develop something when someone launches something with 6 hours of work that solves the right problem.

StandardFuture 13y ago
>...there are only 'points' awarded for accomplishing things.Make sure you accomplish the right things in the right way. Exactly, and I find a complete bias towards hard work for the sake of "feeling good" about your hard work is actually ... lazy. Feeling good about tediously slaving away at manually inserting data into a database rather than coding a handler to automate that is actually working hard to avoid doing things the way they SHOULD be done. An older generation getting mad at a younger generation for wanting fulfilling and meaningful work is exactly this laziness. It's code for: "look I know we should have made things be this way but we can't do anything about it so you(plural) just do this boring stuff that we want you to do right now b/c we are too lazy to find a better way to work meaningfully... " My two cents: don't work hard. Work Smart. And then work hard AT working smart. ;)
- rprospero 13y ago
  I largely agree with you and am usually the first to start automating things. However, I'll also say that sometimes doing it the boring, hard way really is the smart way to handle it. I've seen the pressure to work smarter used to spend weeks automating a system that could be performed by hand in hours. Using an hour to write a program that saves a month of work is smart. Using a month to write a program that saves a night of tedious manual labor is lazy.
  - crucini 13y ago
    But it's not always that clear-cut a difference in time. And the manual way has more problems. Quite often you are asked to do the same task again a bit later. At which point you wish you had automated the first time. The manual way also tends to be error-prone and unreproducible.
d--b 13y ago
Don't feel sorry for the dude, hate him. What kind of philosophy praises work over enjoyment? Fuck that! Take it easy, enjoy the sun, smoke weed, isn't that what California was all about?
mac1175 13y ago
Good ol' puritanical work ethic. I do my best to work smarter. One of the reasons I try to stay current with the latest technology is to see what benefits it would have on my work efficiency.
nostromo 13y ago
It's not a dichotomy. You can work hard. You can work smart. You can also do both.
gavanwoolery 13y ago
Likewise, I have done every permutation of hard/easy->fun/boring work - I've found that many jobs are "as hard as you want them to be." 99 percent of the time there is a preexisting solution or library, which ironically many people are either too lazy to integrate, or think they can invent a better wheel. I've actually found that some of the most successful people are the people who attack "easy" problems and do it well. If you look at games like Minecraft, Spelunky, Hotline Miami, Super Meat Boy - they were all relatively simple to implement (at least their initial implementations). That said, the author has plenty of valid points if you dig around the article. The majority of young people do fail because they have not yet failed enough (i.e. "put in the hard work"). I think that most inexperienced people fail because they have not learned the right problems to attack, or how to attack the right problems properly (I've been guilty of both, multiple times over).
return0 13y ago
Ironic that this is the most voted comment, because it validates the post's view. Despite you feeling sorry for him (adding entitlement to injury), he seems to have a good assessment of the HN crowd.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  It's not ironic in the slightest. He's correct - the HN crowd is definitely afraid of slaving away for hours working on our own or other people's ideas that are simply not useful to the world around us. We're the guys who can dedicate our lives to the right cause and actually change human civilization in some small way (eg. searching Google for recipes, booking your holiday with some taps on a screen, paying your bills without going to the post office). However, if we're not watching where we're going, we end up spending 6 years (of 15 hour days) making a cat simulator that even cat lovers ignore after two minutes. So he's got the right assessment - we're deadly afraid of slaving away at pointless work. If you follow the posts on HN, you'll see it's a constant reinforcement of people trying to determine if they're doing something worthwhile - how to test the waters, which ideas are working well, how to efficiently accomplish tasks. He's completely off the wall in believing this is a bad thing though. I pity that he believes spending an extra two hours each day digging his own grave deeper is in any way a good thing. His message is simply incorrect - work itself has no meaning. Only outcomes have meaning.
  - ionforce 13y ago
    I think you're misconstruing the linked article. Answer the following. In a generation raised to believe that "how I feel" is the metric to be optimized, who will do work that does not provide "a positive amount of feels". Not all work is sexy work. And loads of people are inheriting this prima donna attitude of, well, I'm above unsexy work. How do you reconcile this?
    - kybernetyk 13y ago
      What's there to reconcile? Let people who are OK with doing boring work do the work (and get paid well) and let people who are more about the "feels" pursue their interests. That way everyone wins and no one needs to do something he/she doesn't want to do.
calinet6 13y ago
Seriously. This article is just useless flamebait, unworthy even of the slightest praise. It fails to comprehend any of the complexities of circumstance, time, or humanity, yet claims to have a point above them all. This is the mark of a single-minded spoiled child without worldly experience, who has fallen into some success after a short stint of hard work and doesn't understand his place in the stochastic processes which led to his creation, upbringing, and situation. This bullshit is to be shredded; not lightly but intently and with prejudice. It should be put down for its failure as a perspective. For its disservice to the betterment of our profession.
- BadassFractal 13y ago
  Love your phrasing and clarity. If you ever decide to write a blog, I'll be your first subscriber.
- LogicX 13y ago
  Well said, I agree. and its always comforting to see former co-workers. shout-out ;)
jakejake 13y ago
I find as I've gotten older that it's tempting to write off the next generation as lazy, having bad taste in music, bad sense of style, etc. We all heard our grandparents saying these things to us, yet we don't recognize the annoying, condescending attitude coming from our own mouths as we get older! That being said, I do think that hard work will almost always take you places, unless you are working "dumb" (as opposed to working smart). You might create something in 6 hours and then sell that idea to google for a billion dollars. The problem comes into play if you actually bank your future on that. Most 6-hour creations, when you look at the history, is the 100th idea or the 100th variation of an idea. So it is somewhat of a false perception that you can create a billion dollar product in an afternoon without putting in any labor before or after.

by RyanZAG 13y ago

StandardFuture 13y ago

>...there are only 'points' awarded for accomplishing things.Make sure you accomplish the right things in the right way. Exactly, and I find a complete bias towards hard work for the sake of "feeling good" about your hard work is actually ... lazy. Feeling good about tediously slaving away at manually inserting data into a database rather than coding a handler to automate that is actually working hard to avoid doing things the way they SHOULD be done. An older generation getting mad at a younger generation for wanting fulfilling and meaningful work is exactly this laziness. It's code for: "look I know we should have made things be this way but we can't do anything about it so you(plural) just do this boring stuff that we want you to do right now b/c we are too lazy to find a better way to work meaningfully... " My two cents: don't work hard. Work Smart. And then work hard AT working smart. ;)

rprospero 13y ago
I largely agree with you and am usually the first to start automating things. However, I'll also say that sometimes doing it the boring, hard way really is the smart way to handle it. I've seen the pressure to work smarter used to spend weeks automating a system that could be performed by hand in hours. Using an hour to write a program that saves a month of work is smart. Using a month to write a program that saves a night of tedious manual labor is lazy.
- crucini 13y ago
  But it's not always that clear-cut a difference in time. And the manual way has more problems. Quite often you are asked to do the same task again a bit later. At which point you wish you had automated the first time. The manual way also tends to be error-prone and unreproducible.

d--b 13y ago

Don't feel sorry for the dude, hate him. What kind of philosophy praises work over enjoyment? Fuck that! Take it easy, enjoy the sun, smoke weed, isn't that what California was all about?

mac1175 13y ago

Good ol' puritanical work ethic. I do my best to work smarter. One of the reasons I try to stay current with the latest technology is to see what benefits it would have on my work efficiency.

nostromo 13y ago

It's not a dichotomy. You can work hard. You can work smart. You can also do both.

gavanwoolery 13y ago

Likewise, I have done every permutation of hard/easy->fun/boring work - I've found that many jobs are "as hard as you want them to be." 99 percent of the time there is a preexisting solution or library, which ironically many people are either too lazy to integrate, or think they can invent a better wheel. I've actually found that some of the most successful people are the people who attack "easy" problems and do it well. If you look at games like Minecraft, Spelunky, Hotline Miami, Super Meat Boy - they were all relatively simple to implement (at least their initial implementations). That said, the author has plenty of valid points if you dig around the article. The majority of young people do fail because they have not yet failed enough (i.e. "put in the hard work"). I think that most inexperienced people fail because they have not learned the right problems to attack, or how to attack the right problems properly (I've been guilty of both, multiple times over).

return0 13y ago

Ironic that this is the most voted comment, because it validates the post's view. Despite you feeling sorry for him (adding entitlement to injury), he seems to have a good assessment of the HN crowd.

RyanZAG 13y ago
It's not ironic in the slightest. He's correct - the HN crowd is definitely afraid of slaving away for hours working on our own or other people's ideas that are simply not useful to the world around us. We're the guys who can dedicate our lives to the right cause and actually change human civilization in some small way (eg. searching Google for recipes, booking your holiday with some taps on a screen, paying your bills without going to the post office). However, if we're not watching where we're going, we end up spending 6 years (of 15 hour days) making a cat simulator that even cat lovers ignore after two minutes. So he's got the right assessment - we're deadly afraid of slaving away at pointless work. If you follow the posts on HN, you'll see it's a constant reinforcement of people trying to determine if they're doing something worthwhile - how to test the waters, which ideas are working well, how to efficiently accomplish tasks. He's completely off the wall in believing this is a bad thing though. I pity that he believes spending an extra two hours each day digging his own grave deeper is in any way a good thing. His message is simply incorrect - work itself has no meaning. Only outcomes have meaning.
- ionforce 13y ago
  I think you're misconstruing the linked article. Answer the following. In a generation raised to believe that "how I feel" is the metric to be optimized, who will do work that does not provide "a positive amount of feels". Not all work is sexy work. And loads of people are inheriting this prima donna attitude of, well, I'm above unsexy work. How do you reconcile this?
  - kybernetyk 13y ago
    What's there to reconcile? Let people who are OK with doing boring work do the work (and get paid well) and let people who are more about the "feels" pursue their interests. That way everyone wins and no one needs to do something he/she doesn't want to do.

calinet6 13y ago

Seriously. This article is just useless flamebait, unworthy even of the slightest praise. It fails to comprehend any of the complexities of circumstance, time, or humanity, yet claims to have a point above them all. This is the mark of a single-minded spoiled child without worldly experience, who has fallen into some success after a short stint of hard work and doesn't understand his place in the stochastic processes which led to his creation, upbringing, and situation. This bullshit is to be shredded; not lightly but intently and with prejudice. It should be put down for its failure as a perspective. For its disservice to the betterment of our profession.

BadassFractal 13y ago
Love your phrasing and clarity. If you ever decide to write a blog, I'll be your first subscriber.
LogicX 13y ago
Well said, I agree. and its always comforting to see former co-workers. shout-out ;)

jakejake 13y ago

I find as I've gotten older that it's tempting to write off the next generation as lazy, having bad taste in music, bad sense of style, etc. We all heard our grandparents saying these things to us, yet we don't recognize the annoying, condescending attitude coming from our own mouths as we get older! That being said, I do think that hard work will almost always take you places, unless you are working "dumb" (as opposed to working smart). You might create something in 6 hours and then sell that idea to google for a billion dollars. The problem comes into play if you actually bank your future on that. Most 6-hour creations, when you look at the history, is the 100th idea or the 100th variation of an idea. So it is somewhat of a false perception that you can create a billion dollar product in an afternoon without putting in any labor before or after.