5 ms·

Somehow this article manages to be both wise and presumptuous. The points he makes speak from experience. It's a perspective that is too often ignored by young

• jsonmez 13y ago
  My point is only that if you quit a thing, don't do it without something else lined up, it is just foolish. Doesn't matter if it is your own business or another job, but you don't just say, "I don't like this, so I'm not going to do it anymore."
  • calinet6 13y ago
    Maybe not for you; in general that's a silly detail to argue about. You can always change your situation. This is one of the most valuable pieces of advice I've ever received. How you do it is an implementation detail, but the most important thing is knowing you can.
  • Smudge 13y ago
    Hi Jason -- That point is not quite what I read from your initial post, but regardless I tend to agree with most of your advice. I just really disagree with your assessment of loren. (So apologies if my reaction seemed overly-negative). It sounds to me like loren did have a few project ideas lined-up, and the drive to work on them. While personally I'd want a better guarantee of future revenue before quitting a job, I can't fault someone for following their passions like that. He may someday become wiser and more experienced, but my hope is that he'll be able to look back without regret on his decision to quit.
  • tieTYT 13y ago
    If that was the point you were trying to make, it didn't come across to me at all. I interpreted the point to be, "If you want to quit because things are boring you need to stop whining and keep doing it."
  • scott_s 13y ago
    Sometimes, "lining something up" can consume all of your time and effort, and cannot be done concurrently with what you are trying to escape.
  • nostrademons 13y ago
    I'd argue that assuming you must always know what you're doing next is another kind of foolish. Nature abhors a vacuum. Someone who values creating things and making an impact will find a way to create things and make an impact, even if that way is not immediately apparent at first. What else are they going to do, sit at home and watch TV? I have both gaps and overlaps on my resume. I find that the gaps - where I said to myself "I have no idea what I want to do, I'm going to play around with things and keep an eye out for opportunities" - are far more valuable than the overlaps, where a side project became a startup immediately after I quit. I think that's really common for a lot of folks. PayPal was Max Levchin 4th idea (he got out of college and said "I don't want to work for anyone else, I'll play around with stuff until I figure out something to do"), Parse came out of the wreckage of Gamador and Etacts, Paul Buchheit quit Google without something lined up before founding FriendFeed, getting acquired by Facebook, and then ending up at YCombinator, etc. A lot of people take it to be a sign of confidence and an embrace of vulnerability when you're willing to accept that you don't know what you want to do. Maybe you have something to learn from Loren, too.
• shubb 13y ago
  Having followed what Loren is doing now (Penflip), I think he made the right choice. It may go big, it may not, but it is a great execution of a nice concept, and has a lot of potential. I don't think you can call the guy lazy. He just decided to work real hard on something else.
  • jsonmez 13y ago
    That is not what he said in his post, and I am excited to see him doing Penflip. I wish him the best. Glad that he did decide to commit to something meaningful after-all.
    • Smudge 13y ago
      loren concluded his post with this: > I'm going to build whatever keeps me up at night. I have a long list, but there's one project that I'm particularly passionate about. It might turn into a startup. It might not. Who knows. So, sounds like it was exactly what he said in his post.
      • scott_s 13y ago
        Very much, yes. To conclude otherwise is only possible through not actually reading what was originally written, or deliberately ignoring it.
      • jsonmez 13y ago
        You are still missing it. Doing whatever you passionate about from a long list is not the same thing as committing to meaningful work over the long haul. You have to be able to make it through what I believe Seth Godin calls "the dip."
        • dragonwriter 13y ago
          > You are still missing it. Doing whatever you passionate about from a long list is not the same thing as committing to meaningful work over the long haul. Yeah, it is. Meaningful is subjective, and it is committing to do what is meaningful to the person doing the work. > You have to be able to make it through what I believe Seth Godin calls "the dip." "Have to"...why? So you can be a good cog in someone else's machine?
• rturben 13y ago
  > "Maybe loren quit because he wasn't being fulfilled." This is the thing that strikes me the most. I'm fairly young still and have begun working at a company as a programmer. I've been there for about five months and can already say that this isn't where my passion lies. There's nothing wrong with trying to figure out where you really want to go in life and trying to achieve it. Not everyone gets it right on the first try, so to try and admonish people who quit when they "get bored" isn't the best attitude in my opinion. I don't think that's what this article was trying to say, but the author comes across as thinking that the only reason people quit a job after a year or two is because of boredom/lack of dedication when in reality it could simply be a part of the trial and error that is life.
  • davesims 13y ago
    I'm getting along in (coder) years, and I'll just throw this bit of advice and then yell at you to get off my lawn. I've cycled through "this isn't my passion" about 5 times in 15 years. And what I'm learning, very late, is that it can take about that long to understand the true nature of "passion," and years to develop enough facility, experience and comfort with a particular skill or vocation before you actually understand what it means to be truly at home in something that has become a part of you, probably through years of cycling through thoughts of "this isn't my passion." "Passion," or the lack of, can be many things. It can be a deep-down intuitive feeling that you simply Don't Want To Do This Anymore. It's OK to feel that in your early 20s, or 5 months into your first gig. But, my 2c, don't give too much credence to it. Real passion happens most often with things that have beaten you down 4 or 5 times and finally have been overcome 'cause you kicked back. "Passion" happens most deeply with something that you love like a hometown, warts and all. Where people know you when you walk across the square, know which parts to avoid, and who has the best coffee. Programming, and really any vocation you chose is like a city. It's many things to many people, and rewards best those who practice a discipline of place. So, I'd say, hold those things in tension: your gut feeling that this may not be for you, over and against the possibility that any new vocation you pursue will present the same roller-coaster of emotion: feelings of incompetence and boredom and futility, followed on by euphoric feelings of revelation, victory and at-homeness. The trick is knowing whether you're just on the front end of that cycle, and when your gut is really telling you this isn't for you. For that -- talk to friends and coworkers. A lot, over long periods of time. But don't just go with a gut feeling.
• mpeg 13y ago
  I find it incredibly presumptuous, people's circumstances are different, not every young person who quits his job is a spoiled brat who doesn't know hard work. I might be biased, because I quit my stable but unfulfilling corporate job a few weeks ago; but after reading his post I have cancelled my Pluralsight $49/mo subscription. Maybe a pointless little rebellion, but I feel like the same message he directed at Loren could be directed at me :)
  • StandardFuture 13y ago
    >but after reading his post I have cancelled my Pluralsight $49/mo subscription Haha! :D ... Long live the free market! That makes me wonder if he forgot about the whole 'hey, what I say is practically PR for my entire company' thing. Maybe he was 'working too hard' at writing his blog to see that it may not be the smartest thing to say? Hmmm, maybe he should heed the advice of people like young, stupid, naive, lazy, little and incompetent me when I say to not work hard BUT rather work hard AT working smart. ;)
    • dinkumthinkum 13y ago
      Yes, I will say that was a bit ostentatious.
  • yogo 13y ago
    Everything needs to be put in perspective. If he thinks the HN crowd doesn't know hard work or how to work hard then he must also realize that some people think it is a virtue to be lazy, but smart, when programming. Most of the profession is about automating work and making life easier for everyone. For example, I'm sure data entry is hard work but I think the first thing that comes to mind for all of us is how can we write some code that can automate the entire process, regardless of our generation.
  • dinkumthinkum 13y ago
    Yes it is very into generalizations but you have to admit there is this pattern in the echo chamber ...
• enjo 13y ago
  +1 on the burnout piece. It's a complicated thing. I'd liken it to depression. Lots and lots of people constantly fret about being "depressed". Over time it became easy to dismiss depression as a legitimate illness. Apparently every time you feel sad you're depressed, the whole thing just loses its meaning. It wasn't until I met someone who suffered from true clinical depression did I understand exactly the seriousness of it. The difference between someone feeling down and someone suffering from depression is stark. Hell it's pretty scary. The same thing is true of "burning out". I've met several developers who have talked about burnout and cited it as a reason they just had to quit their job and backpack around Europe. Fair enough, you were clearly just tired of working and wanted to do something that's a bit more fun. Then I met one (and thus far only one) person who truly burned out. That person became, much like someone suffering from depression, a shell of their former self. They became not just unresponsive but completely unable to respond. It was terrifying. They came to work and attempted to function, but they simply couldn't. The company simply rode them to the point that their brain seemed to turn off. When you see it, you know it. That guy wasn't rationalizing anything. He had simply been pushed too hard for too long for his mind to keep up. The company in question was from a VERY high-profile accelerator (not naming names!). The culture of pushing kids at maximum pace over long distances ended costing this company not only key employee but the bulk of their development team as well. After seeing it, no one wanted to be next.
  • AJ007 13y ago
    Whats the timeline for real burnout? I describe burnout is any time an individuals focus drops to the point that their work quality potentially becomes damaging rather than adding value.
    • Ygg2 13y ago
      That's not burnout. Real burnout is more closer to having to leave software development field for farming, because you can't function as a developer anymore. Tbh for me the fear of burnout is enough to leave a job. I don't want to hate/ be unable to program anymore.
      • 13y ago
• InclinedPlane 13y ago
  I think much of the intellectual complexity surrounding the perception of the difficulty of knowledge work stems from comparisons to physical labor, especially factory work and field work. The idea being that work is drudgery, and that basic fact is what justifies being paid for it. There's no doubt a bit of puritan ideology leaking into such concepts, the idea that benefit must be paid for in pain. However, this comparison is inapt and leads to many erroneous conclusions. First of all, valuable work need not be synonymous with drudgery. Many skilled craftspersons and artisans are capable of doing incredibly valuable work with fairly small expenditures of hard labor or time due to their hard to acquire expertise and subject specific wisdom. That doesn't mean such people can't be or aren't typically hard workers, but sometimes they don't have to be in order to make a good living. And there's nothing particularly wrong with that. The work of, say, an optometrist is in some respects vastly "easier" than the work of a field hand in a sugar cane plantation, but that doesn't undervalue that work, optometry requires a lot of specialized knowledge that is difficult to acquire. One of the biggest problems here is the notion that the basic conditions of knowledge work are less strenuous than manual labor. Sitting at a desk in a climate controlled office generally compares very favorably with, say, digging a ditch with a shovel in the hot sun. This leads people to the idea that in order to be worthwhile knowledge work should be strenuous in some way. And typically that involves working extra hours (60 or 80 hours weeks), sinking time into boring activities, or putting up with stress. However, in reality these things don't translate into increased productivity, in fact they typically diminish productivity substantially. Moreover, long-term exposure to stress is extremely bad for an individual's physical and mental health, imposing a toll that can be significantly more damaging even than prolonged manual labor. Again, there is the idea that stress is justified, that putting up with bullshit like office politics or death march conditions are the price that must be paid to allow people to make six figure incomes from just sitting at computers and typing all day. But these things are just sideshows. The true, underlying value of knowledge work lies in the collaboration of many folks with extensive and specialized knowledge toward the goal of solving problems. "Hard work" may be required at times but it doesn't have to look anything like 80 hour weeks, or stress, or repetitive tasks, or backbreaking manual labor. It's possible for knowledge workers to work hard by only putting in 4 hours a week and going home to their lives and families happy, content, and unstressed. Knowledge work isn't factory work. It's not linear, the way to increase output is not to increase input labor. Instead, the way to increase output is to stack as many compounding effects on top of each other as possible. Factory work is additive, knowledge work, when done correctly, is exponential. And it's finding the right conditions to enable knowledge workers to create and stack those exponential effects better which blows away any linear effects. Imagine 3 software teams. The first team works 80 hrs/week building a product, every month they churn out another new feature. The second team works 40 hrs/week, every 2 months they produce a new feature. The third team works 40 hrs/week, and every month they make their product faster, more reliable, more usable, and ensure that the core systems are highly extensible; and every once in a while they will add a feature or change a feature with the criterion that it must be valuable to end-users, work extremely well, and not degrade performance, reliability, or usability. Which team would you bet on to win in the market? Which team "works harder"? Which team is more likely to be able to retain workers?
• jsonmez 13y ago
  Also, did you actually read this part of Loren's post? ""Two weeks ago, I quit. I wasn't headhunted. I don't have another job lined up. I'm not moving away. I didn't start a company on the side. I didn't hate my coworkers, or my bosses, or my commute. So what happened? I just got bored."
• acconrad 13y ago
  > In his post, loren went on to describe an environment where he was slowly pushed-out of the decision-making process. Where he went from being a passionately engaged team member to being a comfortably-paid code monkey. This was not just about getting bored -- his role in the company was changing, and his attempts to reverse the changes had little effect. This is exactly what has just happened to me at my most recent startup. Great guys, but the fit I once had has no longer applied and I left. I'm pretty scared right now because I want to jump into consulting/freelance but I've never done it before, and I want to do that while I carefully evaluate the opportunities presented to me. I don't want to jump into another company quickly as a 27 yr old and ruin my future career by joining another mismatched company, but I also don't want to meander as a freelancer without developing a great reputation. I think it's time for me to put in that hard work, but I want to make sure I do it in the best manner possible. And I have no idea what I'm doing - I know code, I know design, but the politics of finding a great company and doing great work are a huge mystery to me.