20 ms·

What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

712 points by achariam 12y ago

genericone 12y ago
Dell's origin story follows this idea. Many consumers don't enjoy building their own computer, Dell enjoyed building your computer for you at a fair price.
ritchiea 12y ago
Ugh I hate stuff like this. Sometimes programming feels like work, sometimes it doesn't. I write, I make art. A lot of people wouldn't consider either of those real work. Yet sometimes each activity feels like work, other times the activity feels great and feels like something I could do forever uninterupted. Virtually all of the time you find something you enjoy, even if someone else thinks it's work, there will be parts of making it a career that will definitely be work (e.g. programming is always fun but maybe corresponding with your boss isn't). I have a friend who will program all day. He spends all his time on Project Euler. He loves studying algorithms to understand them completely and trying to devise better algorithms. This is what he does in his free time. He does it all the time because he hasn't had a job in years. My friend is probably a much better programmer than I am but I have steady well paying work because sometimes I like programming and sometimes I like talking to people and the second part helps me work with clients and co-workers. My friend the obsessive programmer for whom it is always a hobby can't hold down a job for the life of him. I hope for his sake he finds something that can support him as well as fulfill him. But the advice pg presents in this article is so trite as to be useless.
- NhanH 12y ago
  It seems to me that the essay tried to answer the question "What is it that you want to have as your career". Now, whether you can actually make that your career is an entirely different question. I might love playing tennis, but if I'm 30 years old. There is no chance I could start now and become a professional player.
- tutufan 12y ago
  Not particularly a PG fan, but I think that ("trite/useless") might be a bit harsh. If trite means obvious, well, that sort of thing wasn't obvious to me early in my career, and even now after decades, it's hard to keep advice like this firmly in mind. I, too, hope that your friend is able to find a happy niche for himself.
delluminatus 12y ago
Personally, I experienced this with programming. When I learned to program in high school, it never struck me as a chore; it was always just interesting and I enjoyed it. However, I think the only reason I was able to enjoy learning programming was because of how adept I already was with computers as a "power user", because it gave me the physical skills and conceptual underpinnings required to appreciate the field. To me, this raises an important question. If you lack the physical skills or are a novice in a field, it can be frustrating or intimidating to learn even if you would otherwise enjoy being competent. For example, learning to draw: should one accept their dislike of basic beginning drawing practice to imply that drawing is not an appropriate vocation for them? Difficult question; probably depends on the person. The only way to know if you love drawing at a competent level is to reach that level. In a sense it begs the question: how can you tell if you will enjoy doing something until you have the ability to actually do it? I don't think there is an easy way to solve this problem; you simply have to put the effort into practicing new things even if you don't enjoy the practice. That's where you get into willpower, commitment, etc. My experience of the world is that you simply cannot expect to be successful by only doing things that don't feel like work; sometimes, you have to actually do the work.
- Pyret 12y ago
  Is it always intimidation, though? I find programming unimaginably boring.
  - leviathan 12y ago
    It probably depends on the type of programming and the challenge it presents. A typical month, for me, has probably 5% exciting programming work. The rest is just tedious churn that you inevitably have to do to support the exciting bit.
    - jes 12y ago
      I stumbled a bit on the part where you said "The rest is just churn that you inevitably have to do to support the exciting bit." I found myself wondering what a person might have to change to be able to up the exciting work to 10, 20 or 30% of the work-month.
cryptoz 12y ago
This dichotomy, and the realization that it can fuel smart people to use their abilities to do amazing things in the world, is what upsets me most about the startup ecosystem. I'm a programmer. Writing weather software doesn't seem like work to me. However, since going through a startup accelerator, I'm supposed to all these things that are very much "work" - and it gets me down. Things that are important, for sure, like pitch decks, financial modelling, market research, raising capital in general. They're distracting me from the things I like doing but I do them because they're necessary for the business. My "fun work" quickly became "work that I don't like doing", and it's hard to stay in love with your startup after a lot of that. I wish there were a way for startup founders to do what they love doing, and not what the VC/fundraising cycle tells them they should do. If someone can solve that problem I'd be really really happy.
- rhc2104 12y ago
  You could get a "Business co-founder" while you focus on the technical side.
  - cryptoz 12y ago
    Yeah, that would be awesome - our startup has three co-founders: me, a designer, and a CTO. So even though I'm the initial programmer, idea guy, and CEO, I'm also the business role at the moment. We'll hire a CFO+others...once we raise funding ;).
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- d357r0y3r 12y ago
  I think it actually is possible for startup founders to take the route you're talking about. Check out this talk by Lew Cirne (CEO of NewRelic): http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3367 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3367 He basically talks about how much he loves programming and problem solving, so when the company grew, he just hired people to do the parts of the CEO role that he didn't want to do.
erikig 12y ago
Reading HN never seems like work. I feel like I could do it all day.
- abstractbill 12y ago
  You're supposed to come up with something that feels like work to other people.
  - ferrari8608 12y ago
    I know plenty of people who consider reading, in any form, work.
    - scott_karana 12y ago
      Are they hiring? ;)
    - erikig 12y ago
      My point exactly. I showed this to a couple of my non-tech friends and they couldn't quite understand why we'd spend hours looking at what seemed like "work stuff"
  - chadgeidel 12y ago
    I read "net news" - a lot. So much so that people comment on it. I always wondered if there was any value in "here's what is hot" in the tech world - like a personal link aggregator. Yeah, I could share/blog/tweet (and I do, but not much) but often the things that are interesting later aren't things I share right away. Still trying to solve that problem.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      One way in which I benefit from being a Hacker News junkie is that I have like third of (the better part of) the Internet cached in my head. Every now and then (usually many times a month) someone mentions a problem they're working on and I immediately chime in with "you know, two months ago there was this article on Hacker News, which described this tech/tool/advice that solves exactly this". Among many others, I managed to positively affect my company this way by pointing my boss in the direction of good solutions and clarifying which of his ideas are actually feasible.
rabbyte 12y ago
Is it common for programmers to dislike debugging? I'm stunned. I never considered the possibility, it's always been something I enjoyed. I don't believe it impacts you either way in terms of capability but I imagine it impacts your desire to continue.
- afarrell 12y ago
  I enjoy debugging when I feel like I have some grasp on things. I hate it when I don't know where to look and don't have a good mental concept of the program in general.
  - chippy 12y ago
    I actually like the lost feeling. Debugging is a learning experience for me, on the whole, it's investigating, tweaking, probing and testing. But one of the main things with debugging is identifying the actual bug. Once the bug is identified the challenge is partly gone, or changes.
- WillNotDownvote 12y ago
  It's my favorite part of programming, by a very long stretch. For me it's often a chance to really dig into understanding exactly how all the gears click together, which is my true joy. On a couple of teams I fell into the role of "team debugger", helping everyone with whatever was broken, and those have been my happiest times.
  - eru 12y ago
    Seems like a great position to learn about everything the team does.
- dm8 12y ago
  If you are working on support/maintenance roles (in engineering) at big enterprise product company then debugging is major part of your job. I enjoy debugging as it is another way to solve problem. But for some people it gets repetitive (and boring) since you have to do that day in day out as a part of support roles.
davros 12y ago
If you do something and get that 'doesn't seem like work' feeling - great! Like all the best heuristics it seems obvious once you say it clearly. My question, though, is about the case where something does feel like work - does this imply you should not pursue it? Or are there cases where sticking with it and over time you find the vocation? For example I hated people management at first, but its a huge component of the 'doesn't seem like work' vocation I'm following now. Are there signals to look for that would indicate there is the prospect for this transition?
pw 12y ago
I'm very glad to see that PG's departure from YC has led to a significant uptick in his essay output.
- ProAm 12y ago
  Eh, it's just a more verbose "If you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life."
  - FLUX-YOU 12y ago
    If there's one thing I could change, it's to know of something that I could do and not feel like I was working. If there's one thing I regret, it's not knowing about that something at a young age and letting it mold my life, decisions, and motivation. At 30 I've got nothing but a track record of jobs I hate.
    - Retra 12y ago
      You could be in my situation: I know exactly what I love to do and nobody wants to pay me to do it. I have a track record of jobs I never had.
alexholehouse 12y ago
Sadly, I think this is perhaps the only (?) reason to stay in academia any more (albeit a very good one).
dluan 12y ago
I wonder if it's possible to do things that others don't like, but doesn't pay - that then ends up becoming something that does pay. I wonder why PG didn't charge his friends for writing papers. Not sure where this is going, but imagine something like the first public musician. Or the first ever commissioned artist. It must've been valuable, because someone funded them to make it happen.
emptytheory 12y ago
I had a lot of experience programming in high school. When I practiced on my own, it never seemed like work because it was fun and I had experience telling me that I could accomplish something meaningful. Something made me feel confident in my ability to produce and discover. When I was an undergraduate, a lot of my peers who didn't have a similar CS background struggled. I experienced this myself when I transferred into the mathematics program. I never had a serious engagement with mathematics until I was in university. I think reaching the stage where an activity becomes natural requires a serious personal engagement. That is, you have understand the questions which guide the activity (your interests have to align) and you have to have the freedom to ask and answer your own questions (being able to solve your own problems). The activity has to become personal in some sense.
dm8 12y ago
How important is it to do something you love that helps you in live comfortable life? For example, I always loved theatre and plays but I was told in young age that it's very hard to support comfortable life as a thespian (unless you are breakout success); so best not to take that as a career even though it may really work out for you.
- allendoerfer 12y ago
  I am glad you successfully rebelled against your parents, as you are now here, writing this on the community website of a startup incubator.
im3w1l 12y ago
I love reading (and finding flaws in) proofs. Solving math problems is ok I guess but feels like work. The moment of insight is nice, but staring at the wall with a blank mind, mumbling "come forth, ideas" not so much. Oh, and trading I love trading. All kinds of trading. I've spent many many nights trading items in various games. Oh, and programming a bitcoin arbitrage trading bot was super fun. Hmm, it was good thinking these things over I guess.
zippergz 12y ago
I found something that didn't feel like work, turned it into my career, and then realized that when there are real business outcomes riding on it, suddenly it feels like work. To the point that I now don't even like doing it as a hobby.
- atarian 12y ago
  This. It's not just about doing stuff you enjoy, I think that's a broken record everyone has been playing. There's a certain level of authority that I think we all want to have on the stuff we do as well.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  Programming does feel like work when it's my work. But if I stop doing it, I miss it too much.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Totally. I'm a very productive programmer as long as I do my hobby projects, random hacks, fun things, hackatons or work that I have no personal stake in. But whenever I have to work, my productivity drops to literally 1/10 - 1/100th of the normal level and I often feel axious and sick. This is completely absurd - sometimes I get more done in one hour on a bus for a side project than through entire week for work.
q845712 12y ago
i enjoy chopping vegetables much more than most people, and i'm told i'm quite good at e.g. making sauerkraut - an activity i truly enjoy. but i get paid a lot more to write software, which is also reasonably fun. to be honest i think i only enjoy writing software about as much as the next person! can we be honest that it's an absurdly good job currently? https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  > i only enjoy writing software about as much as the next person The "next person" completely dislikes it. Almost everybody with such twisted tastes as to like creating huge incomprehensible orders to machines is already a programmer.
- bshimmin 12y ago
  Would you enjoy chopping vegetables if you had to do it for 40 hours a week? Would it become a little less pleasurable, perhaps, if someone were sending you emails asking why you haven't updated the carrots ticket with your current progress, or moved the potatoes card on the Kanban board? (I have a bit of a thing for grating cheese - I find it strangely therapeutic.)
  - q845712 12y ago
    agreed!
teekert 12y ago
I like playing with Linux and sometimes other OSs. I regularly set up servers, at home or on digital ocean. For fun I recently wrote a Dockerfile that would setup a Drupal install, it worked well on CoreOS. Doing this felt like relaxing, meditating. I like that feeling of having a fresh, secure system running smoothly. I can get pretty distracted and annoying if my systems are not running smoothly (when I was younger I'd skip a night getting Beryl to work on Gentoo with the beta Nvidia driver but those times are over now). Recently I thought, I have to do something with this and I started a Drupal system for searching locally cultured vegetables for sale. It was fun in the beginning but my wife is a designer and pretty soon I was editing CSS all the time and I completely lost interest. It felt like work. I left it in an ugly, unusable state. Still, I keep setting up servers with the occasional blog with some articles if my attention span allows it. Who knows what I might do with it some time. I have this vague vision of setting up a web services company with CMSs for sportsclubs but that will come with paper work and I know I will regret it. I have a nice job as a biophysicist by the way and I get to play with large Linux clusters from time to time and I try to take those chances as much as possible. Some things just start feeling like work as soon as they become work, as soon as there are any milestones to catch or things to finish. To me things feel like work if I can't just quite half way into a "project".
duderific 12y ago
Funny he used the example of popping zits as something that most people don't enjoy. I rather enjoy popping a nice juicy zit on the occasion that I get one - it's quite cathartic. I wonder if I can make a career of it.
- nhayden 12y ago
  I think you misread it, it sounds like he's saying people like popping zips but they don't volunteer that information.
- sjg007 12y ago
  sure, go to med school and become a dermatologist.
- tutufan 12y ago
  Watched a couple, in their 30s, doing this on the subway the other day. She was sitting in his lap, going at his face, for the length of my ride (10-15 minutes). Guess I should be happy for them... :-/
dxbydt 12y ago
This excerpt - "what he really liked was solving problems. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems—to the slight annoyance of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually." is literally me. I did that. Every year at my school I did exactly that. Once I actually turned in my solutions and my math teacher was quite upset because she didn't know what I'd do for the rest of the year in her class. She thought I was being arrogant and I should take in the material slowly, not swallow it all like a whale. But I wasn't arrogant or anything, because unfortunately this skill didn't transfer to the rest of my classes. I wasn't particularly good at history or physics or anything else, only math. Even now, I have tons of Schaums at my home. Like this one - http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-000-Solved-Problems-Calculus/dp/0071635343 http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-000-Solved-Problems-Calculus/d... I work problems in it just because it is a craving - I simply have to solve it. Sadly, society doesn't pay for this sort of addiction. I have been a professional programmer for the past 2 decades to pay the bills, but I secretly hate programming, debugging, programmers, git, the whole enterprise - just seems so stupid & futile. But hey, atleast I can spend my salary on Schaums.
- ta75757 12y ago
  As (failed) physics major, it sounds so strange to hear someone claim to be good at math but not physics. To me physics is 98% math. It's a few empirical facts from experiments and then bucketloads of math.
  - MarkPNeyer 12y ago
    i was a physics major, too. the student in our year who was best at math had trouble with the "hand wavy" stuff we'd do. "well, this term is basically zero, so we'll just remove it" and then she'd pull her hair in frustration, like "how can you just do that? how is it still valid?" it wasn't enough to tell her "well it still gives us the valid results" - she had to be able to interpret every portion of an expression and then make intuitive sense of it. at first i was annoyed with this habit of hers, but eventually i started doing it to. for a lot of really math-minded people, hand waviness is anathema, and physics was full of "2 + 2 = 5 for sufficiently large values of 2, so we'll just assume that to make things easier"
spike021 12y ago
I've noticed somewhat similar issues with my peers in school studying to become programmers. They don't enjoy the long hours of debugging or coding. They seem to have come into the CS program expecting it to be a lot easier and less boring. For me, I can get frustrated when I'm coding and can't figure out a bug right away. But on the other hand there's nothing I enjoy more than spending N time trying to understand what's going on, solving the problem, and feeling a spurt of elation at succeeding at my task. I'm not sure how people who don't see it the same way could handle that kind of work. With that said, I do think there are areas where even if you don't initially enjoy the activity, you can come to appreciate it and eventually enjoy it.
BrainInAJar 12y ago
What if you don't have anything like this?
- afarrell 12y ago
  Then you are in the position of most people on earth and should pick something that has some enjoyable parts, few infuriating parts, and is reasonably financially rewarding.
  - BrainInAJar 12y ago
    And that, for me, is software engineering. I don't love tech, I like it well enough, I'm good at it, and it pays the bills.
flipside 12y ago
Edge cases, I love exploring edge cases and even better, the intersection of edge cases (corner cases?). The more edge cases there are, the more interesting something is and sometimes they lead to discovering entire new spaces. I consider myself lucky to have stumbled into an opportunity with my startup that I find endlessly fascinating.
- DenisM 12y ago
  I see a pen-testing career in your future.
drawkbox 12y ago
I enjoy: Creating useful things, or something that is fun to do. Making something come to life, a product, a character, a moment, that people use or enjoy experiencing. It could be in programming, art, a system, a product, something digital, something physical, anything useful that removes part of the monotony of life, reduces drag, and improves the thrust of life. To me a comic strip, a rocket ship, a new game, a system that takes away boring tedious parts of life, quality of life improvements, and anything helpful to make the day more of an adventure, are all on the same plane.
chubot 12y ago
I'm surprised that Paul Graham likes debugging. I tend to stereotype programmers into two camps: one that likes debugging, one that doesn't. I thought he was part of the latter group. Some programmers are engineers: they deal with the world as it is -- messy, inconsistent, evolved. They are good at debugging, because they are in tune with how things actually work (not how people SAY they work.) They like trying things before reading about them. Some programmers are philosophers and mathematicians: they like to consider things from first principles, read a lot, and build up systems in their head. They make huge breakthroughs because they question fundamental assumptions. But sometimes they over-model things and ignore how the world actually works, in favor of "elegant" ideas. They may not like debugging because it is often dealing with other people's broken assumptions (i.e. legacy code), and not any real fundamental idea. So PG clearly seems to have the philosophical bent and has made breakthroughs. But if he really likes debugging, then that means he comes at programming from BOTH the engineering and philosophical traditions, which probably explains why he's a great programmer. (I just stumbled across a copy of ANSI Common Lisp at work -- looking forward to seeing his style more closely.) I think to be really good at something, you have to understand it in two different ways. Same goes for being able to write code from scratch (maker perspective) and being able to hack into it (breaker perspective). Although, I have to say, there is a big difference between debugging your OWN code and other people's code. Not sure if anyone likes debugging typical enterprise code. :)
- Retra 12y ago
  Perhaps your two camps are just not a very good representation of how programmers actually think?
  - staunch 12y ago
    Some Joe Kraus wisdom i picked up is to always be suspicious of anyone who divides the world into two groups.
    - chubot 12y ago
      That's why I used the word "stereotyped" at the beginning. And why I said it's possible to have both ways (and multiple ways) of looking at things -- and indeed the best programmers do have both. I do think that most people have an natural disposition toward one way of thinking, and trying the "opposite" way of thinking is a great way to improve.
TrysterosEmp 12y ago
Well this line of reasoning works beautifully for engineers, because solving the types of problems engineers love also HAPPENS to be extremely lucrative. What if acting doesn't feel like work? Playing soccer? Hiking? It's extremely difficult to make money doing these things. "Follow your folly" career advice can work, or it can just make people feel terrible because they realize they're doing things they don't love because they can't make money doing the things they do love.
- frevd 12y ago
  Besides the finding something that you enjoy part (and given that that makes you good at it) there was this second part - something that is work for somebody else. He probably should have mentioned that there is an implicit third part - finding and convincing somebody to actually pay you for doing this work, plus a fourth issue - the competition. However, there are careers in soccer, not sure about hiking though, that's more recreational, you might make a teaching business out of it though.
  - ar_turnbull 12y ago
    It may not be the most lucrative business for the person who loves hiking, but somebody has to write the guidebook.
tegeek 12y ago
I grew up in a remote rural area of a third world country. My mother & father taught me to read. And I developed interest in reading books at the age of 6 or 7. When I was 9 or 10 years old, someone (may be my cousin or my fathers' uncle) gave me a book on simple electronics (it was in my native language). That was the first time I read about P-Type & N-Type materials and some other physics. It was so fascinated to me that I used to read it all the time to understand. The book also included about very simple digital logic design and concepts like NAND Gate etc. I didn't understood at all what it is all about. But It developed my interest in Physics and Electronics. By the age of 13 or 14 I learned myself about soldering, creating very simple chips and some LEDs on-off work. I never learned any math or could develop any mental model about true electronics but all that work created an infinite desire to know about the nature of "materials" & physics behind everything. My parents put me in school which was 12 KM from my village, I used to bike every day 24 KM two way with some other friends no matter if it was summer with 43 degrees or winter with -2 degrees. And I was just 9 years old young kid. I started skipping school and start searching more books like that great Electronics books. I bought many but couldn't understand the foundations at all. That same book had chapters how you can create a sequence of LEDs which keep going on & off one after other and make some interesting visual. I opened every electronic device at home and tried to understand its chips but couldn't get at all what is going on. None of my friends studies beyond class 8 but I kept going. I started studying physics at the age of 15 at school but it was all so bookish and memorisation that I never liked school at all. But I studied Physics, Biology & Chemistry myself and enjoyed every single moment of that time. That was the only time I studied Sciences and developed an intuition about the scientific world. My parents took loan and sent me to a bigger city for my Bachelors degree. But the education was so artificial that I couldn't learn anything more at all. Every single book was in English (which is not my native or national language) I feel so empty & everything useless. At the same time my parents were sending me more money than they could afford. I went into depression & at some point in my Bachelors' degree I found out about Internet & "Software". I started learning about Web Site development. I learned HTML, Adobe Dreamweaver & Fireworks. Then I learned a bit of C++ & C#. (I remember I started learning about C# in April 2002). I got a job as a programmer in an off-shore office of a USA company. I then saved some money and escaped from that country and came to Sweden because of free education. I studied Computer Science & developed an intense love with Mathematics (even though I'm not good in maths) & Programming Languages. Now I'm working as a Software Engineer but I have deep love with Electronics & Physics. And that all goes back to the days when I was reading that simple electronics book.
DenisM 12y ago
>But you may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which programming consists of it. Odd. I barely do any debugging at all. If it compiles, it's usually right, and when it's not, I just kick back and think. Thinking takes a lot more of my time than writing or debugging. Perhaps that's because I work largely by myself on those components - there is no one else's intent to grasp.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
blahedo 12y ago
I am surprised at how casually he dropped this in there: "When I was in college I used to write papers for my friends. It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking. Plus they were always so relieved." Yikes. Really?
- imjk 12y ago
  Actually, I appreciate the way he candidly writes things like that. I get that you're pointing out the moral implications of doing other people's school work, but that'd be another essay all its own. In this context, it's an example that proves his point very well as it's a context almost everyone can relate to.
- dmourati 12y ago
  That jumped out at me to. I did the same a few times. Now, I realize, that runs afoul of the academic integrity most schools now require. Same is true for the writer (me) as the one who turned in the work.
- mahmud 12y ago
  I did it a few times for exchange students who struggled with English. I made sure they understood the concepts and could explain them to me in Arabic. It was a mix of editing, translation, and tutoring.
- solve 12y ago
  Most surprising thing I've ever seen him write. Gave me a bit of a laugh.
stegosaurus 12y ago
What if the idea of work itself is what you dislike? There are plenty of activities I can enjoy, and some, quite a few of them in fact, are profitable. Once you shoe-horn them into the power dynamic situation of a traditional job (with the bureaucracy that entails unless you're dealing with Actual People as opposed to corporations), suddenly a lot of the luster disappears. As a ridiculous example - I enjoy reading. It's not really work at all, right? Ask me to read 9am-5pm and I'd start to find it frustrating. Or add in a commute, or very low pay. The actual job itself is very rarely the issue for me. It's what you miss out on, and also the fact that it invariably involves submission, acceptance of being subordinate, etc. edit: To be clear here; I'm not talking about work ethic in the sense of 'pushing through something you find difficult'. More the general idea of not wanting to be a part of a machine, a construct that you don't agree with. Large corporations and their 'policy documents', for example. I don't want to work for a company in which my boss doesn't have the autonomy to speak to me as a human being - this stands regardless of whether my job is backbreaking labour or eating chocolate bars.
- ashark 12y ago
  Anytime I read one of those "just do what you're passionate about!" posts, or job postings that read like "we're looking for people who are passionate about [thing that literally no-one has ever been passionate about]" I try to think whether there's anything whatsoever that I'd enjoy (let alone stay passionate about) doing (at least) 40 hours a week, 49ish weeks a year. I haven't thought of anything yet. Left to my own devices, I'd probably spend 100 hours one week programming, then not touch a computer for two or three weeks, reading or building something or doing stuff outdoors instead. Lock me down to 40 hours every week, even weeks when I'm not in to it and would rather curl up on the couch for hours on end with some math books and a notebook or marathon-watch some Criterion movies or go camping with my family or whatever, and any fun I was having in those 40 hours will disappear fast. It doesn't matter if the thing I'm clocking in to do is play video games of my choice and in the way that I choose, even—I'll be ready to not look at a video game for the next year within a matter of weeks. That's not to say that I consider all work equally bad, but I'm probably not going to love anything at 40+ mandatory hours every week. The only way I can imagine enjoying that many hours on the clock is by splitting it between at least two very different things, like programming 4 hours/day then carrying heavy stuff at a construction site the next 4 hours, and even that might not do it over the long haul.
lokeshk 12y ago
That's a fair advice, but I wonder what if we start working on something that at first does not seem like work, but later we realize was merely a hobby? For instance, I enjoy cooking. I love figuring out the recipes of intricate Indian curries, and then I will cook them. I enjoy eating curries even more! :D However, if I was to translate that to a full time job, I would probably hate it. I love my job as a programmer, and cooking just does not have the same breadth of intellectual stimulation, or excitement in it for me. How do you separate hobby from a potential work/job?
- imjk 12y ago
  I think you addressed your own question there. The answer is essentially, "I enjoy doing this, but I would never want to do this as a full-time job." I think deep down you realize it's a hobby that you enjoy in your free time but it's not something that brings you true fulfillment and sense of achievement you would doing something else as a profession.
dkrich 12y ago
I think a lot of what makes something that seems like it is work to one person actually enjoyable to another is purely environmental. For example- I knew from an early age that I liked tinkering around on computers. However when I got to college, I found programming monotonous and boring. When I worked as a software engineer for a large boring company I hated it even more. To the point that I actually quit and switched careers. Then, a few years later I discovered Ruby on Rails and development on a new Mac. These seemingly small changes to a new environment rekindled my love of computers to a point that I spent nearly every weekend for three years teaching myself Rails. I remember one weekend I flew to a bachelor party in New Orleans and all the way there I read a book on Rails. It wasn't work anymore, but a hobby that I truly loved. This is not to say that everyone is cut out to be or will enjoy being a programmer with just the right tools. However I think a lot of people take a first glance at something and give up on it without having a comprehensive understanding of the reality of doing the work in an ideal environment. To this day it annoys the hell out of me when non-technical friends ask me questions about coding as if it is some awful task that has to be done- "Why would you ever want to do that?" These people never actually have tried it so they don't know what is actually involved or whether they might actually enjoy it.
- episteme 12y ago
  Out of curiosity, what was your new career? Have you ever returned to software engineering or considered it?
noonespecial 12y ago
This is also why it's difficult for some of us around here to charge customers what our work is worth. It doesn't seem like work to us at all. It feels just like reading comics and playing WoW. It's hard to feel like we should be paid for such things.
lisper 12y ago
Ron's second law: the hardest part of getting what you want is figuring out what it is.
timetraveller 12y ago
What the hell Paul? Why you're using image for the title. I can send it to my Kindle.
- frevd 12y ago
  Times have changed in the web (nowadays you can embed fonts and CSS-style menu items), but not on this site.
Htsthbjig 12y ago
The question is : Is that hardwired or is programmable? I discovered early in my life that by changing the perspective of a problem you could transform something dull and tedious into something exciting and highly interesting. For example , when I learned to visualize mathematical problems I become much better at solving them. Mindmaps, and memory tools can make someone who struggle(and suffers as for example when he does not pass an exam) in something to fly around it. I had a history teacher that went to wars in his youth as a news reporter, learned languages and traveled the world, studied history by correspondence(from a distance University), went back and settled with a young lady as a teacher. History for us (the class he teached) changed forever. It was not about words on paper, but about real people, real places, interest and fights, and winners and losses, consequences. We saw photographs of the victims of the wars, some of them taked by him,the stories on how politics and decisions affected their lives and their families', other pics taken by his friends. After that course, even with completely different teachers History was so easy to study, to remember. About debugging. I believe the best programmer is the one who hates so much debugging that is able to work terribly hard in automating it and not have to debug EVER again. People who loves debugging is a problem for me. I want things so well documented and well designed that debugging becomes almost non necessary. The fact that people believe it is ok to have crappy documentation, crappy design, and spend months trying to catch problems(because they enjoy it) is a misfortune.
- sbov 12y ago
  I enjoy debugging, and don't believe anything you claim. Anyone I know that enjoys it doesn't believe it either. What you write is pretty offensive actually. Its like me saying you liking programming means you run around deleting everyone's software because it would let you program more.
- UrMomReadsHN 12y ago
  What...? I like debugging, it can be incredibly satisfying.
CurtMonash 12y ago
I've made a similar argument for a long time. About my fifth choice job coming out of academia was from an interview in which I was told that 90% of my job would be drudgery, but the same was true for everybody, even the CEO. So I decided that careers were not just about passions, but also about what you didn't hate. I don't mind writing. I don't mind public speaking. I don't mind grappling with tough problems. I don't mind working alone. I don't mind being indoors. I do mind physical labor. I do mind cold calling. I do mind having to worry a lot about people's feelings. If you have different preferences from mine, then you probably should also be in a different line work.
kabdib 12y ago
The only time that programming seems like work are when I'm under an artificial deadline, or when I have to use something that is just irretrievably fucked-up (like this morning, an issue with SOAP and WSDL, which I loathe). Even the artificial deadlines can be fun, though there is a definite cost to working an 80 hour week. Most days are like playing, really. Sometimes you have to come into work and push a pencil, but hopefully those are rare.
arbuge 12y ago
One wrinkle to this is that it is quite possible to become passionate about something which is initially a grind, at which point the state described in the article of it not feeling like work would kick in. In fact there are several successful entrepreneurs out there (eg. Mark Cuban) who openly advocate passion following work rather than the other way round. If you do know of something which doesn't feel like work to you, but does feel like work to everybody else, there's indeed probably something there. But if you don't, it may be possible to create such a something...
heurist 12y ago
I like figuring out what other people are thinking. They'll give me a bunch of requirements and I can look at them and their situation and crunch the requirements down into a tight, beautiful solution that addresses the needs they didn't know they had. I also really enjoy the process of understanding things in general - figuring out the important/disparate parts, determining how they link together, exploring connections, etc. Once I understand something all of the possibilities hidden in that topic are open to me and my creativity. But I'm terrible at taking time to create things. Once I have the solution it is very difficult to find the drive to actually continue and build on it. It's always a slog, as if I were a kid being forced to eat vegetables. I think I'm slowly improving, though.
rjammala 12y ago
This reminded me of the time when I solved most of the problems in this book just for the fun of it: http://books.google.com/books/about/Problem_book_in_high_school_mathematics.html?id=NdJUAAAAYAAJ http://books.google.com/books/about/Problem_book_in_high_sch...
amelius 12y ago
The problem with programming is: in the beginning it seems like fun; but then the system gets bigger, and suddenly it seems like work...
capex 12y ago
Does entrepreneurship feel like work to anyone?
- jacquesm 12y ago
  The first 20 years or so: no. The last decade: definitely.
- gdulli 12y ago
  As an engineer I love working for entrepreneurial companies and with entrepreneurial people because they're ambitious and innovative and fast-moving. I would absolutely hate to be an entrepreneur myself and be responsible for selling a product, figuring out which product would sell, figuring out how to monetize or advertise, and so on.
- LouisSayers 12y ago
  No, and this is why I always scratch my head when people mention how many hours they 'worked' a day building their startup. People always mention things like "I was working 15 hours a day", and here I am thinking - you were counting?"
thisjustin2015 12y ago
This just in: do what you love
- returnofdjedi 12y ago
  Read the full article by pg to understand the intricacies of it :) One of the best articles for understanding how loving your work is possible. http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
  - thisjustin2015 12y ago
    Thanks, I appreciate the link. Unfortunately none of this is all that deep. As others have pointed out, the advice is trite and often short sighted. There are many things that one may love to do that simply aren't rewarded monetarily by our current economic system.
iliasch 12y ago
video : Taylor Swift's AWKWARD Moment With Harry http://skyfoot1.blogspot.com/2015/01/taylor-swifts-awkward-moment-with-harry.html http://skyfoot1.blogspot.com/2015/01/taylor-swifts-awkward-m...
dreamdu5t 12y ago
You can get paid to do that kind of math. But what about stuff that doesn't pay? The things that don't seem like work to me aren't profitable or even monetizable. And please don't tell me something to the effect of "I'm not trying hard enough".
- tomasien 12y ago
  I think if that's the case holistically, that what you like to do that other people think is "work" literally can not be monetized in the current economy, then that's just a tragedy. If the economy hasn't developed a model for what you uniquely like to do then I think that's just a very unfortunate reality. However, I wonder if perhaps you're taking it too literally. It's quite possible that what you like to do has manifested itself in economically unpalatable ways generally, but if you thought creatively you MAY find that there are economically beneficial places that aren't so obvious where you fit perfectly.
  - dreamdu5t 12y ago
    It is a tragedy, and that's why I find this essay naive, arrogant, and simply dishonest. Passions don't all have the same economic viability. "Do what you love" is trite and useless advice. I think part of it was growing up with a thesbian mother and painter father and seeing first hand how doing what you love isn't enough to feed yourself. It stings a little for other people to claim that you don't need to "work" if you just do what you love. I don't bemoan Paul Graham for his success... but its insulting.
    - tomasien 12y ago
      Interestingly enough, PG also loves painting almost more than anything. He wrote a book about it called "Hackers and Painters". Extrapolate whatever you'd like from that fact.
paulvs 12y ago
I spent the first 12 years of my life living onboard a boat with my family, and then on and off throughout my teenage years. My father wanted to give us kids an environment conducive to learning, so I grew up surrounded by his Shaums Outlines, IC pinout reference manuals (thankfully the Internet age has replaced those), dos and qbasic books, etc. and lots of old computers running windows and dos. While I don't think he ever excelled at these subjects, they were his hobby and he was always trying to get us interested in them, too. I remember after some of us kids displayed an interest in tearing out the cardboard subscription forms from his vast collection of Scientific American, he actively encouraged us to do so in the hope that the articles would catch our eye and we might also develop an interest in science at a young age. My siblings and I were rushed through the high school curriculum in a home schooled environment and at around the age of 13 started taking some long distance first-year math courses from universities (Monash University, Australia). I, being the youngest, waded heavily through after my siblings, but never was particularly interested. The temptation to move to a normal home, go to a normal school and have friends was growing, so at the age of 13 I enrolled in ninth-grade at a public school. In the whole time I was at school I never had an interest in maths or science and the library was definitely a no-go zone for me (trying to fit in was a full time job). I applied for uni with a score of 16 out of 25 (1 best and 25 worst). I scraped into environmental engineering with a vague idea of changing to electronics or it (which my score hadn't let me directly into, but it was possible to change engineering majors once in). Uni seemed boring until about 3rd year of electronics and computer engineering. Ever since then I have begun developing a steadily growing interest in programming, science and maths, although I'm not good at the latter two. I'm now two years out of uni, working as an iOS developer. I hope that as my interest grows my learning keeps up. I think my father gave me the spark, but now it's up to me to keep nurturing the interest to get its full enjoyment.
giis 12y ago
>The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do. Completely agree. I came across similar thing 5 or 6 years back. When one-of my co-worker called me to debug/show a problem with his website-download module to export data as spreadsheet. The data came as some junk characters,even though site-page shows proper data and db-records are fine too. I clearly remember the following conversion.When I tried, I also got spreadsheet with unreadable chars, and I said, "nice,that's interesting!!" and my co-worker laughed and responded "what? is this interesting???"
- returnofdjedi 12y ago
  Maybe if the owner said it's intresting to his employee, the employee would try to go deep into the problem and figure out the flaws.Henry Ford did that too.
smaccoun 12y ago
Very refreshing to see this on HN. Often I feel bewildered and sometimes even somewhat infuriated when I read about people demanding a new work week of X days/hours. For me, as long as I'm programming - which is almost all the time at my job - it never feels like I'm working. I often have to set timers to cap myself for working on a programming problem for too long, else I'll never go to the bathroom! So work is something I love to do and a huge part of my life that I often don't want to cut out. Further, working with others who are passionate about what they do produces one of the most wonderful pleasures in life, as it blends deep community/social bonds while plugging into life!
stickhandle 12y ago
Lesson learned from having 3 kids in hockey: Until you reach a level of "good enough" to participate in "the game", its not much fun. Once there, the better you get, the more fun it becomes and turns into a virtuous circle of try_harder->get_better->more_fun->try_harder->get_better ...
mkagenius 12y ago
It can be about the crave to be "different". People want to do things that make them _different_ than others. People hate programming when they do it with 1000 other colleagues. The same programming is rewarding when they do it alone - since, that lets them do things that no one in the world is doing. That may be true for startups in general. Doing startups seem cool since only a handful (<10%) of total population is doing it. If everyone starts doing it, it may not be as cool.
known 12y ago
You are a product of your environment.
nnd 12y ago
Finding to do what you love is easy. I mean anyone can do that by iterating through different activities to find "what doesn't feel like work". Getting paid for it is difficult. Arguably one has to become extremely good at a particular skill which is in demand and be able to promote himself.
deleted 12y ago
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elwell 12y ago
I enjoyed the short length and poetry of this 'essay'; kind of different from PG.
callesgg 12y ago
I have always had the image that debugging is like this thing that one has to do when one has fucked up. But thinking of it after reading the last part of the article i realized that i actually find that debugging is quite fun, i have never really thought of it until now.
nnq 12y ago
So if I absolutely hate debugging, it means I'm not meant to be a programmer after all (even if I otherwise love everything about programming)?! I hate debugging (and more generally "diagnostic reasoning" in general... also went through med school long time ago), that I've actually become a "language geek", researching language after language and programming pattern after pattern in order to find strategies to reduce as much as possible the debugging work that I have to do. I've learned Lisp. I've started learning Haskell. Rust is on my "to learn" list now too. And my absolute hate for debugging work makes me research new things every day in the search for that nirvana where code that compiles always works and where you don't have to work 5x as hard to please the compiler either...
dogweather 12y ago
I'm like this, and other successful programmers I know are like this. But I wonder how applicable this is to people in other industries. Does everyone have something they like to do for which the market will reward them?
yason 12y ago
For me, programming is to build mechanisms. There's something similar there as in building mechanical constructs. That's the juicy bit for me. Building mechanisms of course implies some core problem (i.e. how to model what you need to solve and how to compute the result) and interfacing (how to run that thing at all in a physical computing environment and how to talk to all the other), but those don't raise up as major appeals. One or both can even be trivial and I don't get bored yet. The play of ideas and experience and using those to build something that works is highly enticing. So, the more I gain experience, the more rewarding programming has become, which in turn gives me more ideas that I try out or problems that I try to solve, which accumulates the experience, and so on. The most boring part of programming is often interfacing. This means anything from negotiating with other people/teams to learning obscure one-off APIs just to get the juicy bits running. The actual problem (think in terms of maths or CS) can sometimes be interesting but not necessarily per se. Rather, a tricky problem can serve as an excuse to build a very complex or advanced mechanism. Debugging is just pure fun. It's like trying to find out that slightly loose part in the transmission of a car that sometimes makes the 2nd gear a bit difficult to engage. Debugging happens when the mechanism is mostly built but not yet completed. You can almost see it working, sans a few problems that you know are there. It's hard to imagine sources of greater motivation and mental satisfaction than debugging.
CmonDev 12y ago
Being a VC.
jsprogrammer 12y ago
>When I was in college I used to write papers for my friends. It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking. Sorry, did Paul just say that he helped people cheat in their college classes? Or did the professors know he was writing others' papers?
stuff4ben 12y ago
I'm a little late to the conversation, but I need to say this just for myself. But yeah I totally get this. As a rising fifth grader in the mid-80's, "somehow" I heard of or got invited to some summer school computer class. Basically for 4 weeks I went back to school and learned about computers on an Apple IIe. We played some lemonadestand game and even wrote BASIC on some Trash80's. That was my watershed moment. Ever since then I knew I was going to be a programmer. I remember as a senior in high school, the only computer class they had was on BASIC programming. Since I had literally been doing it for 7 years, I aced it. The teacher would hand out exams (yes on paper) and I would be done before she finished handing them out to the rest of the class. I hated that I was out in the sticks in highschool though. If only I had someone I could have been mentored from, there's no telling where I'd be now. But hey, I still enjoy programming (debugging MY code, creating code, etc). I'm attending way too many meetings now and I rarely open my IDE at work. But the thrill of creation and making the computer do what I tell it to do is pretty awesome after 30+ years. I need a side project...
stevenspins 12y ago
Some programmers are philosophers and mathematicians: they like to consider things from first principles, read a lot, and build up systems in their head. They make huge breakthroughs because they question fundamental assumptions. But sometimes they over-model things and ignore how the world actually works, in favor of "elegant" ideas. They may not like debugging because it is often dealing with other people's broken assumptions (i.e. legacy code), and not any real fundamental idea.
karlb 12y ago
Jerry Seinfeld says[1]: “Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with.” Jerry describes writing comedy as “The torture I love.” [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2GW2JS_A4g&t=32m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2GW2JS_A4g&t=32m20s
ribs 12y ago
Paul talks about this subject like it's a breaking of the code or something, but it's just economics. If there's a commodity you can get for cheaper than other people, you stand to gain. In this case the commodity is pleasure, which you can buy for negative money.
sktrdie 12y ago
I used to think this of software development. The problem is that when I started doing it "because I had to" instead of "because I wanted to" it took all the fun out of it.
smoyer 12y ago
@pg I built electronic parts for Westinghouse's Nuclear Reactor Simulators (near Monroeville PA) in the mid 1980's. There were a ton of intelligent people working there and since every reactor built had to have an identical training simulator, there was quite a bit of knowledge required to make the systems realistic. Sometimes simulating the required behavior of a nuclear reactor was more complex than what occurred in the real reactor (simulating the pulse shape and randomness of a Geiger counter or driving a synchroscope with hopped up audio amplifiers). In any case, those guys provided a lot of on-the-job education for a young engineer ... thank your dad for me as I might not have interacted with him, but surely some other "youngster" did.
gregfjohnson 12y ago
I am 60 and still cannot believe that people will actually pay you to play with computers and robots all day long! The robots I play with know how to breathe air, which involves a lot of interesting fluid dynamics in addition to all of the other interesting things that go into building and playing with robots. (The technical term for these robots is "intensive care unit ventilator".) I love and am probably addicted to programming. RE debugging: while the rush of relief and victory is satisfying when a problem is found and fixed, I find these days that it is more fun to do technical things differently. Consider a Venn diagram with two overlapping circles to describe a given technical problem. Circle A is "have something working happily, but may be overly simplistic." Circle B is "covers the real problem domain adequately, but may be buggy." The intersection is where you want to be. The question is, from which direction do you approach the intersection? I used to start from Circle B and debug to the intersection. Now, I start from Circle A and stay happy/working, expanding that state until it gets to the intersection. Especially in pair programming I find this to be the best way to go. If two pairing partners are "lost in the woods" trying to debug a problem, they can start stepping on each others' toes and get really unhappy. On the other hand, if they are collaboratively growing an ever-expanding "working/happy" program, things usually go an awful lot better. Related topic: I've come to realize that I am good at "really easy" mathematics, and bad at "really hard" mathematics. So, in struggling with a math problem or new area, my instinct is to massage and massage until the problem magically transforms from "really hard" to "really easy". Just last week I had that huge sweet "AHA" rush. In lambda calculus, there is a cute trick called Church numerals that allows you to encode the non-negative integers as functions. The functions to add, multiply, exponentiate, etc. are all easy, but the function to take the predecessor of a Church numeral is really tricky. I knew the predecessor formula and could mechanically apply it, but did not have any clear insight at all as to how or why it worked. Finally, KAPOW! Came up with a beautifully straightforward, satisfying, and intuitive way to derive the predecessor function of Church numerals.
hasenj 12y ago
There are many activities that I enjoy doing as a hobby, but can't imagine doing them as a profession or for a living. One of them for example: if I like a song in a foreign language I'm learning, I will look up the lyrics and try to translate it by carefully analyzing each sentence and using lots of dictionaries and Google searches (sometimes asking on Forums or asking native speakers in person). It takes anywhere from hours to days. It might seem to most people that this requires discipline and tenacity, but when I do it I just do it for fun. I'm not so sure though that I would enjoy it the same way if I had to do that kind of work for a living.
fisheuler 12y ago
I just misunderstand the meaning of the word "work".I intepreted it as a verb meaning dosn't operate normally. After reread other people's comment. I realized it's meaning : similar to the job.
meigwilym 12y ago
OT: siarad Cymraeg Paul?
AnonJ 12y ago
Well the usage of the word "work" here is peculiar. Has "work" in our society already become a word equal to "travail, toil", "something done with the explicit intent of earning one's living but uninteresting"? Isn't "work" supposed to be fun, challenging and rewarding in itself? The article surely reads a little bit weird to me in this sense, though I get the idea.

712 points by achariam 12y ago

Dell's origin story follows this idea. Many consumers don't enjoy building their own computer, Dell enjoyed building your computer for you at a fair price.

ritchiea 12y ago

Ugh I hate stuff like this. Sometimes programming feels like work, sometimes it doesn't. I write, I make art. A lot of people wouldn't consider either of those real work. Yet sometimes each activity feels like work, other times the activity feels great and feels like something I could do forever uninterupted. Virtually all of the time you find something you enjoy, even if someone else thinks it's work, there will be parts of making it a career that will definitely be work (e.g. programming is always fun but maybe corresponding with your boss isn't). I have a friend who will program all day. He spends all his time on Project Euler. He loves studying algorithms to understand them completely and trying to devise better algorithms. This is what he does in his free time. He does it all the time because he hasn't had a job in years. My friend is probably a much better programmer than I am but I have steady well paying work because sometimes I like programming and sometimes I like talking to people and the second part helps me work with clients and co-workers. My friend the obsessive programmer for whom it is always a hobby can't hold down a job for the life of him. I hope for his sake he finds something that can support him as well as fulfill him. But the advice pg presents in this article is so trite as to be useless.

NhanH 12y ago
It seems to me that the essay tried to answer the question "What is it that you want to have as your career". Now, whether you can actually make that your career is an entirely different question. I might love playing tennis, but if I'm 30 years old. There is no chance I could start now and become a professional player.
tutufan 12y ago
Not particularly a PG fan, but I think that ("trite/useless") might be a bit harsh. If trite means obvious, well, that sort of thing wasn't obvious to me early in my career, and even now after decades, it's hard to keep advice like this firmly in mind. I, too, hope that your friend is able to find a happy niche for himself.

delluminatus 12y ago

Personally, I experienced this with programming. When I learned to program in high school, it never struck me as a chore; it was always just interesting and I enjoyed it. However, I think the only reason I was able to enjoy learning programming was because of how adept I already was with computers as a "power user", because it gave me the physical skills and conceptual underpinnings required to appreciate the field. To me, this raises an important question. If you lack the physical skills or are a novice in a field, it can be frustrating or intimidating to learn even if you would otherwise enjoy being competent. For example, learning to draw: should one accept their dislike of basic beginning drawing practice to imply that drawing is not an appropriate vocation for them? Difficult question; probably depends on the person. The only way to know if you love drawing at a competent level is to reach that level. In a sense it begs the question: how can you tell if you will enjoy doing something until you have the ability to actually do it? I don't think there is an easy way to solve this problem; you simply have to put the effort into practicing new things even if you don't enjoy the practice. That's where you get into willpower, commitment, etc. My experience of the world is that you simply cannot expect to be successful by only doing things that don't feel like work; sometimes, you have to actually do the work.

Pyret 12y ago
Is it always intimidation, though? I find programming unimaginably boring.
- leviathan 12y ago
  It probably depends on the type of programming and the challenge it presents. A typical month, for me, has probably 5% exciting programming work. The rest is just tedious churn that you inevitably have to do to support the exciting bit.
  - jes 12y ago
    I stumbled a bit on the part where you said "The rest is just churn that you inevitably have to do to support the exciting bit." I found myself wondering what a person might have to change to be able to up the exciting work to 10, 20 or 30% of the work-month.

cryptoz 12y ago

This dichotomy, and the realization that it can fuel smart people to use their abilities to do amazing things in the world, is what upsets me most about the startup ecosystem. I'm a programmer. Writing weather software doesn't seem like work to me. However, since going through a startup accelerator, I'm supposed to all these things that are very much "work" - and it gets me down. Things that are important, for sure, like pitch decks, financial modelling, market research, raising capital in general. They're distracting me from the things I like doing but I do them because they're necessary for the business. My "fun work" quickly became "work that I don't like doing", and it's hard to stay in love with your startup after a lot of that. I wish there were a way for startup founders to do what they love doing, and not what the VC/fundraising cycle tells them they should do. If someone can solve that problem I'd be really really happy.

rhc2104 12y ago
You could get a "Business co-founder" while you focus on the technical side.
- cryptoz 12y ago
  Yeah, that would be awesome - our startup has three co-founders: me, a designer, and a CTO. So even though I'm the initial programmer, idea guy, and CEO, I'm also the business role at the moment. We'll hire a CFO+others...once we raise funding ;).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
d357r0y3r 12y ago
I think it actually is possible for startup founders to take the route you're talking about. Check out this talk by Lew Cirne (CEO of NewRelic): http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3367 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3367 He basically talks about how much he loves programming and problem solving, so when the company grew, he just hired people to do the parts of the CEO role that he didn't want to do.

erikig 12y ago

Reading HN never seems like work. I feel like I could do it all day.

abstractbill 12y ago
You're supposed to come up with something that feels like work to other people.
- ferrari8608 12y ago
  I know plenty of people who consider reading, in any form, work.
  - scott_karana 12y ago
    Are they hiring? ;)
  - erikig 12y ago
    My point exactly. I showed this to a couple of my non-tech friends and they couldn't quite understand why we'd spend hours looking at what seemed like "work stuff"
- chadgeidel 12y ago
  I read "net news" - a lot. So much so that people comment on it. I always wondered if there was any value in "here's what is hot" in the tech world - like a personal link aggregator. Yeah, I could share/blog/tweet (and I do, but not much) but often the things that are interesting later aren't things I share right away. Still trying to solve that problem.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    One way in which I benefit from being a Hacker News junkie is that I have like third of (the better part of) the Internet cached in my head. Every now and then (usually many times a month) someone mentions a problem they're working on and I immediately chime in with "you know, two months ago there was this article on Hacker News, which described this tech/tool/advice that solves exactly this". Among many others, I managed to positively affect my company this way by pointing my boss in the direction of good solutions and clarifying which of his ideas are actually feasible.

rabbyte 12y ago

Is it common for programmers to dislike debugging? I'm stunned. I never considered the possibility, it's always been something I enjoyed. I don't believe it impacts you either way in terms of capability but I imagine it impacts your desire to continue.

afarrell 12y ago
I enjoy debugging when I feel like I have some grasp on things. I hate it when I don't know where to look and don't have a good mental concept of the program in general.
- chippy 12y ago
  I actually like the lost feeling. Debugging is a learning experience for me, on the whole, it's investigating, tweaking, probing and testing. But one of the main things with debugging is identifying the actual bug. Once the bug is identified the challenge is partly gone, or changes.
WillNotDownvote 12y ago
It's my favorite part of programming, by a very long stretch. For me it's often a chance to really dig into understanding exactly how all the gears click together, which is my true joy. On a couple of teams I fell into the role of "team debugger", helping everyone with whatever was broken, and those have been my happiest times.
- eru 12y ago
  Seems like a great position to learn about everything the team does.
dm8 12y ago
If you are working on support/maintenance roles (in engineering) at big enterprise product company then debugging is major part of your job. I enjoy debugging as it is another way to solve problem. But for some people it gets repetitive (and boring) since you have to do that day in day out as a part of support roles.

davros 12y ago

If you do something and get that 'doesn't seem like work' feeling - great! Like all the best heuristics it seems obvious once you say it clearly. My question, though, is about the case where something does feel like work - does this imply you should not pursue it? Or are there cases where sticking with it and over time you find the vocation? For example I hated people management at first, but its a huge component of the 'doesn't seem like work' vocation I'm following now. Are there signals to look for that would indicate there is the prospect for this transition?

pw 12y ago

I'm very glad to see that PG's departure from YC has led to a significant uptick in his essay output.

ProAm 12y ago
Eh, it's just a more verbose "If you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life."
- FLUX-YOU 12y ago
  If there's one thing I could change, it's to know of something that I could do and not feel like I was working. If there's one thing I regret, it's not knowing about that something at a young age and letting it mold my life, decisions, and motivation. At 30 I've got nothing but a track record of jobs I hate.
  - Retra 12y ago
    You could be in my situation: I know exactly what I love to do and nobody wants to pay me to do it. I have a track record of jobs I never had.

alexholehouse 12y ago

Sadly, I think this is perhaps the only (?) reason to stay in academia any more (albeit a very good one).

dluan 12y ago

I wonder if it's possible to do things that others don't like, but doesn't pay - that then ends up becoming something that does pay. I wonder why PG didn't charge his friends for writing papers. Not sure where this is going, but imagine something like the first public musician. Or the first ever commissioned artist. It must've been valuable, because someone funded them to make it happen.

emptytheory 12y ago

I had a lot of experience programming in high school. When I practiced on my own, it never seemed like work because it was fun and I had experience telling me that I could accomplish something meaningful. Something made me feel confident in my ability to produce and discover. When I was an undergraduate, a lot of my peers who didn't have a similar CS background struggled. I experienced this myself when I transferred into the mathematics program. I never had a serious engagement with mathematics until I was in university. I think reaching the stage where an activity becomes natural requires a serious personal engagement. That is, you have understand the questions which guide the activity (your interests have to align) and you have to have the freedom to ask and answer your own questions (being able to solve your own problems). The activity has to become personal in some sense.

dm8 12y ago

How important is it to do something you love that helps you in live comfortable life? For example, I always loved theatre and plays but I was told in young age that it's very hard to support comfortable life as a thespian (unless you are breakout success); so best not to take that as a career even though it may really work out for you.

allendoerfer 12y ago
I am glad you successfully rebelled against your parents, as you are now here, writing this on the community website of a startup incubator.

im3w1l 12y ago

I love reading (and finding flaws in) proofs. Solving math problems is ok I guess but feels like work. The moment of insight is nice, but staring at the wall with a blank mind, mumbling "come forth, ideas" not so much. Oh, and trading I love trading. All kinds of trading. I've spent many many nights trading items in various games. Oh, and programming a bitcoin arbitrage trading bot was super fun. Hmm, it was good thinking these things over I guess.

zippergz 12y ago

I found something that didn't feel like work, turned it into my career, and then realized that when there are real business outcomes riding on it, suddenly it feels like work. To the point that I now don't even like doing it as a hobby.

atarian 12y ago
This. It's not just about doing stuff you enjoy, I think that's a broken record everyone has been playing. There's a certain level of authority that I think we all want to have on the stuff we do as well.
marcosdumay 12y ago
Programming does feel like work when it's my work. But if I stop doing it, I miss it too much.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Totally. I'm a very productive programmer as long as I do my hobby projects, random hacks, fun things, hackatons or work that I have no personal stake in. But whenever I have to work, my productivity drops to literally 1/10 - 1/100th of the normal level and I often feel axious and sick. This is completely absurd - sometimes I get more done in one hour on a bus for a side project than through entire week for work.

q845712 12y ago

i enjoy chopping vegetables much more than most people, and i'm told i'm quite good at e.g. making sauerkraut - an activity i truly enjoy. but i get paid a lot more to write software, which is also reasonably fun. to be honest i think i only enjoy writing software about as much as the next person! can we be honest that it's an absurdly good job currently? https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/

marcosdumay 12y ago
> i only enjoy writing software about as much as the next person The "next person" completely dislikes it. Almost everybody with such twisted tastes as to like creating huge incomprehensible orders to machines is already a programmer.
bshimmin 12y ago
Would you enjoy chopping vegetables if you had to do it for 40 hours a week? Would it become a little less pleasurable, perhaps, if someone were sending you emails asking why you haven't updated the carrots ticket with your current progress, or moved the potatoes card on the Kanban board? (I have a bit of a thing for grating cheese - I find it strangely therapeutic.)
- q845712 12y ago
  agreed!

teekert 12y ago

I like playing with Linux and sometimes other OSs. I regularly set up servers, at home or on digital ocean. For fun I recently wrote a Dockerfile that would setup a Drupal install, it worked well on CoreOS. Doing this felt like relaxing, meditating. I like that feeling of having a fresh, secure system running smoothly. I can get pretty distracted and annoying if my systems are not running smoothly (when I was younger I'd skip a night getting Beryl to work on Gentoo with the beta Nvidia driver but those times are over now). Recently I thought, I have to do something with this and I started a Drupal system for searching locally cultured vegetables for sale. It was fun in the beginning but my wife is a designer and pretty soon I was editing CSS all the time and I completely lost interest. It felt like work. I left it in an ugly, unusable state. Still, I keep setting up servers with the occasional blog with some articles if my attention span allows it. Who knows what I might do with it some time. I have this vague vision of setting up a web services company with CMSs for sportsclubs but that will come with paper work and I know I will regret it. I have a nice job as a biophysicist by the way and I get to play with large Linux clusters from time to time and I try to take those chances as much as possible. Some things just start feeling like work as soon as they become work, as soon as there are any milestones to catch or things to finish. To me things feel like work if I can't just quite half way into a "project".

duderific 12y ago

Funny he used the example of popping zits as something that most people don't enjoy. I rather enjoy popping a nice juicy zit on the occasion that I get one - it's quite cathartic. I wonder if I can make a career of it.

nhayden 12y ago
I think you misread it, it sounds like he's saying people like popping zips but they don't volunteer that information.
sjg007 12y ago
sure, go to med school and become a dermatologist.
tutufan 12y ago
Watched a couple, in their 30s, doing this on the subway the other day. She was sitting in his lap, going at his face, for the length of my ride (10-15 minutes). Guess I should be happy for them... :-/

dxbydt 12y ago

This excerpt - "what he really liked was solving problems. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems—to the slight annoyance of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually." is literally me. I did that. Every year at my school I did exactly that. Once I actually turned in my solutions and my math teacher was quite upset because she didn't know what I'd do for the rest of the year in her class. She thought I was being arrogant and I should take in the material slowly, not swallow it all like a whale. But I wasn't arrogant or anything, because unfortunately this skill didn't transfer to the rest of my classes. I wasn't particularly good at history or physics or anything else, only math. Even now, I have tons of Schaums at my home. Like this one - http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-000-Solved-Problems-Calculus/dp/0071635343 http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-000-Solved-Problems-Calculus/d... I work problems in it just because it is a craving - I simply have to solve it. Sadly, society doesn't pay for this sort of addiction. I have been a professional programmer for the past 2 decades to pay the bills, but I secretly hate programming, debugging, programmers, git, the whole enterprise - just seems so stupid & futile. But hey, atleast I can spend my salary on Schaums.

ta75757 12y ago
As (failed) physics major, it sounds so strange to hear someone claim to be good at math but not physics. To me physics is 98% math. It's a few empirical facts from experiments and then bucketloads of math.
- MarkPNeyer 12y ago
  i was a physics major, too. the student in our year who was best at math had trouble with the "hand wavy" stuff we'd do. "well, this term is basically zero, so we'll just remove it" and then she'd pull her hair in frustration, like "how can you just do that? how is it still valid?" it wasn't enough to tell her "well it still gives us the valid results" - she had to be able to interpret every portion of an expression and then make intuitive sense of it. at first i was annoyed with this habit of hers, but eventually i started doing it to. for a lot of really math-minded people, hand waviness is anathema, and physics was full of "2 + 2 = 5 for sufficiently large values of 2, so we'll just assume that to make things easier"

spike021 12y ago

I've noticed somewhat similar issues with my peers in school studying to become programmers. They don't enjoy the long hours of debugging or coding. They seem to have come into the CS program expecting it to be a lot easier and less boring. For me, I can get frustrated when I'm coding and can't figure out a bug right away. But on the other hand there's nothing I enjoy more than spending N time trying to understand what's going on, solving the problem, and feeling a spurt of elation at succeeding at my task. I'm not sure how people who don't see it the same way could handle that kind of work. With that said, I do think there are areas where even if you don't initially enjoy the activity, you can come to appreciate it and eventually enjoy it.

BrainInAJar 12y ago

What if you don't have anything like this?

afarrell 12y ago
Then you are in the position of most people on earth and should pick something that has some enjoyable parts, few infuriating parts, and is reasonably financially rewarding.
- BrainInAJar 12y ago
  And that, for me, is software engineering. I don't love tech, I like it well enough, I'm good at it, and it pays the bills.

flipside 12y ago

Edge cases, I love exploring edge cases and even better, the intersection of edge cases (corner cases?). The more edge cases there are, the more interesting something is and sometimes they lead to discovering entire new spaces. I consider myself lucky to have stumbled into an opportunity with my startup that I find endlessly fascinating.

DenisM 12y ago
I see a pen-testing career in your future.

drawkbox 12y ago

I enjoy: Creating useful things, or something that is fun to do. Making something come to life, a product, a character, a moment, that people use or enjoy experiencing. It could be in programming, art, a system, a product, something digital, something physical, anything useful that removes part of the monotony of life, reduces drag, and improves the thrust of life. To me a comic strip, a rocket ship, a new game, a system that takes away boring tedious parts of life, quality of life improvements, and anything helpful to make the day more of an adventure, are all on the same plane.

chubot 12y ago

I'm surprised that Paul Graham likes debugging. I tend to stereotype programmers into two camps: one that likes debugging, one that doesn't. I thought he was part of the latter group. Some programmers are engineers: they deal with the world as it is -- messy, inconsistent, evolved. They are good at debugging, because they are in tune with how things actually work (not how people SAY they work.) They like trying things before reading about them. Some programmers are philosophers and mathematicians: they like to consider things from first principles, read a lot, and build up systems in their head. They make huge breakthroughs because they question fundamental assumptions. But sometimes they over-model things and ignore how the world actually works, in favor of "elegant" ideas. They may not like debugging because it is often dealing with other people's broken assumptions (i.e. legacy code), and not any real fundamental idea. So PG clearly seems to have the philosophical bent and has made breakthroughs. But if he really likes debugging, then that means he comes at programming from BOTH the engineering and philosophical traditions, which probably explains why he's a great programmer. (I just stumbled across a copy of ANSI Common Lisp at work -- looking forward to seeing his style more closely.) I think to be really good at something, you have to understand it in two different ways. Same goes for being able to write code from scratch (maker perspective) and being able to hack into it (breaker perspective). Although, I have to say, there is a big difference between debugging your OWN code and other people's code. Not sure if anyone likes debugging typical enterprise code. :)

Retra 12y ago
Perhaps your two camps are just not a very good representation of how programmers actually think?
- staunch 12y ago
  Some Joe Kraus wisdom i picked up is to always be suspicious of anyone who divides the world into two groups.
  - chubot 12y ago
    That's why I used the word "stereotyped" at the beginning. And why I said it's possible to have both ways (and multiple ways) of looking at things -- and indeed the best programmers do have both. I do think that most people have an natural disposition toward one way of thinking, and trying the "opposite" way of thinking is a great way to improve.

TrysterosEmp 12y ago

Well this line of reasoning works beautifully for engineers, because solving the types of problems engineers love also HAPPENS to be extremely lucrative. What if acting doesn't feel like work? Playing soccer? Hiking? It's extremely difficult to make money doing these things. "Follow your folly" career advice can work, or it can just make people feel terrible because they realize they're doing things they don't love because they can't make money doing the things they do love.

frevd 12y ago
Besides the finding something that you enjoy part (and given that that makes you good at it) there was this second part - something that is work for somebody else. He probably should have mentioned that there is an implicit third part - finding and convincing somebody to actually pay you for doing this work, plus a fourth issue - the competition. However, there are careers in soccer, not sure about hiking though, that's more recreational, you might make a teaching business out of it though.
- ar_turnbull 12y ago
  It may not be the most lucrative business for the person who loves hiking, but somebody has to write the guidebook.

tegeek 12y ago

I grew up in a remote rural area of a third world country. My mother & father taught me to read. And I developed interest in reading books at the age of 6 or 7. When I was 9 or 10 years old, someone (may be my cousin or my fathers' uncle) gave me a book on simple electronics (it was in my native language). That was the first time I read about P-Type & N-Type materials and some other physics. It was so fascinated to me that I used to read it all the time to understand. The book also included about very simple digital logic design and concepts like NAND Gate etc. I didn't understood at all what it is all about. But It developed my interest in Physics and Electronics. By the age of 13 or 14 I learned myself about soldering, creating very simple chips and some LEDs on-off work. I never learned any math or could develop any mental model about true electronics but all that work created an infinite desire to know about the nature of "materials" & physics behind everything. My parents put me in school which was 12 KM from my village, I used to bike every day 24 KM two way with some other friends no matter if it was summer with 43 degrees or winter with -2 degrees. And I was just 9 years old young kid. I started skipping school and start searching more books like that great Electronics books. I bought many but couldn't understand the foundations at all. That same book had chapters how you can create a sequence of LEDs which keep going on & off one after other and make some interesting visual. I opened every electronic device at home and tried to understand its chips but couldn't get at all what is going on. None of my friends studies beyond class 8 but I kept going. I started studying physics at the age of 15 at school but it was all so bookish and memorisation that I never liked school at all. But I studied Physics, Biology & Chemistry myself and enjoyed every single moment of that time. That was the only time I studied Sciences and developed an intuition about the scientific world. My parents took loan and sent me to a bigger city for my Bachelors degree. But the education was so artificial that I couldn't learn anything more at all. Every single book was in English (which is not my native or national language) I feel so empty & everything useless. At the same time my parents were sending me more money than they could afford. I went into depression & at some point in my Bachelors' degree I found out about Internet & "Software". I started learning about Web Site development. I learned HTML, Adobe Dreamweaver & Fireworks. Then I learned a bit of C++ & C#. (I remember I started learning about C# in April 2002). I got a job as a programmer in an off-shore office of a USA company. I then saved some money and escaped from that country and came to Sweden because of free education. I studied Computer Science & developed an intense love with Mathematics (even though I'm not good in maths) & Programming Languages. Now I'm working as a Software Engineer but I have deep love with Electronics & Physics. And that all goes back to the days when I was reading that simple electronics book.

DenisM 12y ago

>But you may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which programming consists of it. Odd. I barely do any debugging at all. If it compiles, it's usually right, and when it's not, I just kick back and think. Thinking takes a lot more of my time than writing or debugging. Perhaps that's because I work largely by myself on those components - there is no one else's intent to grasp.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

blahedo 12y ago

I am surprised at how casually he dropped this in there: "When I was in college I used to write papers for my friends. It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking. Plus they were always so relieved." Yikes. Really?

imjk 12y ago
Actually, I appreciate the way he candidly writes things like that. I get that you're pointing out the moral implications of doing other people's school work, but that'd be another essay all its own. In this context, it's an example that proves his point very well as it's a context almost everyone can relate to.
dmourati 12y ago
That jumped out at me to. I did the same a few times. Now, I realize, that runs afoul of the academic integrity most schools now require. Same is true for the writer (me) as the one who turned in the work.
mahmud 12y ago
I did it a few times for exchange students who struggled with English. I made sure they understood the concepts and could explain them to me in Arabic. It was a mix of editing, translation, and tutoring.
solve 12y ago
Most surprising thing I've ever seen him write. Gave me a bit of a laugh.

stegosaurus 12y ago

What if the idea of work itself is what you dislike? There are plenty of activities I can enjoy, and some, quite a few of them in fact, are profitable. Once you shoe-horn them into the power dynamic situation of a traditional job (with the bureaucracy that entails unless you're dealing with Actual People as opposed to corporations), suddenly a lot of the luster disappears. As a ridiculous example - I enjoy reading. It's not really work at all, right? Ask me to read 9am-5pm and I'd start to find it frustrating. Or add in a commute, or very low pay. The actual job itself is very rarely the issue for me. It's what you miss out on, and also the fact that it invariably involves submission, acceptance of being subordinate, etc. edit: To be clear here; I'm not talking about work ethic in the sense of 'pushing through something you find difficult'. More the general idea of not wanting to be a part of a machine, a construct that you don't agree with. Large corporations and their 'policy documents', for example. I don't want to work for a company in which my boss doesn't have the autonomy to speak to me as a human being - this stands regardless of whether my job is backbreaking labour or eating chocolate bars.

ashark 12y ago
Anytime I read one of those "just do what you're passionate about!" posts, or job postings that read like "we're looking for people who are passionate about [thing that literally no-one has ever been passionate about]" I try to think whether there's anything whatsoever that I'd enjoy (let alone stay passionate about) doing (at least) 40 hours a week, 49ish weeks a year. I haven't thought of anything yet. Left to my own devices, I'd probably spend 100 hours one week programming, then not touch a computer for two or three weeks, reading or building something or doing stuff outdoors instead. Lock me down to 40 hours every week, even weeks when I'm not in to it and would rather curl up on the couch for hours on end with some math books and a notebook or marathon-watch some Criterion movies or go camping with my family or whatever, and any fun I was having in those 40 hours will disappear fast. It doesn't matter if the thing I'm clocking in to do is play video games of my choice and in the way that I choose, even—I'll be ready to not look at a video game for the next year within a matter of weeks. That's not to say that I consider all work equally bad, but I'm probably not going to love anything at 40+ mandatory hours every week. The only way I can imagine enjoying that many hours on the clock is by splitting it between at least two very different things, like programming 4 hours/day then carrying heavy stuff at a construction site the next 4 hours, and even that might not do it over the long haul.

lokeshk 12y ago

That's a fair advice, but I wonder what if we start working on something that at first does not seem like work, but later we realize was merely a hobby? For instance, I enjoy cooking. I love figuring out the recipes of intricate Indian curries, and then I will cook them. I enjoy eating curries even more! :D However, if I was to translate that to a full time job, I would probably hate it. I love my job as a programmer, and cooking just does not have the same breadth of intellectual stimulation, or excitement in it for me. How do you separate hobby from a potential work/job?

imjk 12y ago
I think you addressed your own question there. The answer is essentially, "I enjoy doing this, but I would never want to do this as a full-time job." I think deep down you realize it's a hobby that you enjoy in your free time but it's not something that brings you true fulfillment and sense of achievement you would doing something else as a profession.

dkrich 12y ago

I think a lot of what makes something that seems like it is work to one person actually enjoyable to another is purely environmental. For example- I knew from an early age that I liked tinkering around on computers. However when I got to college, I found programming monotonous and boring. When I worked as a software engineer for a large boring company I hated it even more. To the point that I actually quit and switched careers. Then, a few years later I discovered Ruby on Rails and development on a new Mac. These seemingly small changes to a new environment rekindled my love of computers to a point that I spent nearly every weekend for three years teaching myself Rails. I remember one weekend I flew to a bachelor party in New Orleans and all the way there I read a book on Rails. It wasn't work anymore, but a hobby that I truly loved. This is not to say that everyone is cut out to be or will enjoy being a programmer with just the right tools. However I think a lot of people take a first glance at something and give up on it without having a comprehensive understanding of the reality of doing the work in an ideal environment. To this day it annoys the hell out of me when non-technical friends ask me questions about coding as if it is some awful task that has to be done- "Why would you ever want to do that?" These people never actually have tried it so they don't know what is actually involved or whether they might actually enjoy it.

episteme 12y ago
Out of curiosity, what was your new career? Have you ever returned to software engineering or considered it?

noonespecial 12y ago

This is also why it's difficult for some of us around here to charge customers what our work is worth. It doesn't seem like work to us at all. It feels just like reading comics and playing WoW. It's hard to feel like we should be paid for such things.

lisper 12y ago

Ron's second law: the hardest part of getting what you want is figuring out what it is.

timetraveller 12y ago

What the hell Paul? Why you're using image for the title. I can send it to my Kindle.

frevd 12y ago
Times have changed in the web (nowadays you can embed fonts and CSS-style menu items), but not on this site.

Htsthbjig 12y ago

The question is : Is that hardwired or is programmable? I discovered early in my life that by changing the perspective of a problem you could transform something dull and tedious into something exciting and highly interesting. For example , when I learned to visualize mathematical problems I become much better at solving them. Mindmaps, and memory tools can make someone who struggle(and suffers as for example when he does not pass an exam) in something to fly around it. I had a history teacher that went to wars in his youth as a news reporter, learned languages and traveled the world, studied history by correspondence(from a distance University), went back and settled with a young lady as a teacher. History for us (the class he teached) changed forever. It was not about words on paper, but about real people, real places, interest and fights, and winners and losses, consequences. We saw photographs of the victims of the wars, some of them taked by him,the stories on how politics and decisions affected their lives and their families', other pics taken by his friends. After that course, even with completely different teachers History was so easy to study, to remember. About debugging. I believe the best programmer is the one who hates so much debugging that is able to work terribly hard in automating it and not have to debug EVER again. People who loves debugging is a problem for me. I want things so well documented and well designed that debugging becomes almost non necessary. The fact that people believe it is ok to have crappy documentation, crappy design, and spend months trying to catch problems(because they enjoy it) is a misfortune.

sbov 12y ago
I enjoy debugging, and don't believe anything you claim. Anyone I know that enjoys it doesn't believe it either. What you write is pretty offensive actually. Its like me saying you liking programming means you run around deleting everyone's software because it would let you program more.
UrMomReadsHN 12y ago
What...? I like debugging, it can be incredibly satisfying.

CurtMonash 12y ago

I've made a similar argument for a long time. About my fifth choice job coming out of academia was from an interview in which I was told that 90% of my job would be drudgery, but the same was true for everybody, even the CEO. So I decided that careers were not just about passions, but also about what you didn't hate. I don't mind writing. I don't mind public speaking. I don't mind grappling with tough problems. I don't mind working alone. I don't mind being indoors. I do mind physical labor. I do mind cold calling. I do mind having to worry a lot about people's feelings. If you have different preferences from mine, then you probably should also be in a different line work.

kabdib 12y ago

The only time that programming seems like work are when I'm under an artificial deadline, or when I have to use something that is just irretrievably fucked-up (like this morning, an issue with SOAP and WSDL, which I loathe). Even the artificial deadlines can be fun, though there is a definite cost to working an 80 hour week. Most days are like playing, really. Sometimes you have to come into work and push a pencil, but hopefully those are rare.

arbuge 12y ago

One wrinkle to this is that it is quite possible to become passionate about something which is initially a grind, at which point the state described in the article of it not feeling like work would kick in. In fact there are several successful entrepreneurs out there (eg. Mark Cuban) who openly advocate passion following work rather than the other way round. If you do know of something which doesn't feel like work to you, but does feel like work to everybody else, there's indeed probably something there. But if you don't, it may be possible to create such a something...

heurist 12y ago

I like figuring out what other people are thinking. They'll give me a bunch of requirements and I can look at them and their situation and crunch the requirements down into a tight, beautiful solution that addresses the needs they didn't know they had. I also really enjoy the process of understanding things in general - figuring out the important/disparate parts, determining how they link together, exploring connections, etc. Once I understand something all of the possibilities hidden in that topic are open to me and my creativity. But I'm terrible at taking time to create things. Once I have the solution it is very difficult to find the drive to actually continue and build on it. It's always a slog, as if I were a kid being forced to eat vegetables. I think I'm slowly improving, though.

rjammala 12y ago

This reminded me of the time when I solved most of the problems in this book just for the fun of it: http://books.google.com/books/about/Problem_book_in_high_school_mathematics.html?id=NdJUAAAAYAAJ http://books.google.com/books/about/Problem_book_in_high_sch...

amelius 12y ago

The problem with programming is: in the beginning it seems like fun; but then the system gets bigger, and suddenly it seems like work...

capex 12y ago

Does entrepreneurship feel like work to anyone?

jacquesm 12y ago
The first 20 years or so: no. The last decade: definitely.
gdulli 12y ago
As an engineer I love working for entrepreneurial companies and with entrepreneurial people because they're ambitious and innovative and fast-moving. I would absolutely hate to be an entrepreneur myself and be responsible for selling a product, figuring out which product would sell, figuring out how to monetize or advertise, and so on.
LouisSayers 12y ago
No, and this is why I always scratch my head when people mention how many hours they 'worked' a day building their startup. People always mention things like "I was working 15 hours a day", and here I am thinking - you were counting?"

thisjustin2015 12y ago

This just in: do what you love

returnofdjedi 12y ago
Read the full article by pg to understand the intricacies of it :) One of the best articles for understanding how loving your work is possible. http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
- thisjustin2015 12y ago
  Thanks, I appreciate the link. Unfortunately none of this is all that deep. As others have pointed out, the advice is trite and often short sighted. There are many things that one may love to do that simply aren't rewarded monetarily by our current economic system.

iliasch 12y ago

video : Taylor Swift's AWKWARD Moment With Harry http://skyfoot1.blogspot.com/2015/01/taylor-swifts-awkward-moment-with-harry.html http://skyfoot1.blogspot.com/2015/01/taylor-swifts-awkward-m...

dreamdu5t 12y ago

You can get paid to do that kind of math. But what about stuff that doesn't pay? The things that don't seem like work to me aren't profitable or even monetizable. And please don't tell me something to the effect of "I'm not trying hard enough".

tomasien 12y ago
I think if that's the case holistically, that what you like to do that other people think is "work" literally can not be monetized in the current economy, then that's just a tragedy. If the economy hasn't developed a model for what you uniquely like to do then I think that's just a very unfortunate reality. However, I wonder if perhaps you're taking it too literally. It's quite possible that what you like to do has manifested itself in economically unpalatable ways generally, but if you thought creatively you MAY find that there are economically beneficial places that aren't so obvious where you fit perfectly.
- dreamdu5t 12y ago
  It is a tragedy, and that's why I find this essay naive, arrogant, and simply dishonest. Passions don't all have the same economic viability. "Do what you love" is trite and useless advice. I think part of it was growing up with a thesbian mother and painter father and seeing first hand how doing what you love isn't enough to feed yourself. It stings a little for other people to claim that you don't need to "work" if you just do what you love. I don't bemoan Paul Graham for his success... but its insulting.
  - tomasien 12y ago
    Interestingly enough, PG also loves painting almost more than anything. He wrote a book about it called "Hackers and Painters". Extrapolate whatever you'd like from that fact.

paulvs 12y ago

I spent the first 12 years of my life living onboard a boat with my family, and then on and off throughout my teenage years. My father wanted to give us kids an environment conducive to learning, so I grew up surrounded by his Shaums Outlines, IC pinout reference manuals (thankfully the Internet age has replaced those), dos and qbasic books, etc. and lots of old computers running windows and dos. While I don't think he ever excelled at these subjects, they were his hobby and he was always trying to get us interested in them, too. I remember after some of us kids displayed an interest in tearing out the cardboard subscription forms from his vast collection of Scientific American, he actively encouraged us to do so in the hope that the articles would catch our eye and we might also develop an interest in science at a young age. My siblings and I were rushed through the high school curriculum in a home schooled environment and at around the age of 13 started taking some long distance first-year math courses from universities (Monash University, Australia). I, being the youngest, waded heavily through after my siblings, but never was particularly interested. The temptation to move to a normal home, go to a normal school and have friends was growing, so at the age of 13 I enrolled in ninth-grade at a public school. In the whole time I was at school I never had an interest in maths or science and the library was definitely a no-go zone for me (trying to fit in was a full time job). I applied for uni with a score of 16 out of 25 (1 best and 25 worst). I scraped into environmental engineering with a vague idea of changing to electronics or it (which my score hadn't let me directly into, but it was possible to change engineering majors once in). Uni seemed boring until about 3rd year of electronics and computer engineering. Ever since then I have begun developing a steadily growing interest in programming, science and maths, although I'm not good at the latter two. I'm now two years out of uni, working as an iOS developer. I hope that as my interest grows my learning keeps up. I think my father gave me the spark, but now it's up to me to keep nurturing the interest to get its full enjoyment.

giis 12y ago

>The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do. Completely agree. I came across similar thing 5 or 6 years back. When one-of my co-worker called me to debug/show a problem with his website-download module to export data as spreadsheet. The data came as some junk characters,even though site-page shows proper data and db-records are fine too. I clearly remember the following conversion.When I tried, I also got spreadsheet with unreadable chars, and I said, "nice,that's interesting!!" and my co-worker laughed and responded "what? is this interesting???"

returnofdjedi 12y ago
Maybe if the owner said it's intresting to his employee, the employee would try to go deep into the problem and figure out the flaws.Henry Ford did that too.

smaccoun 12y ago

Very refreshing to see this on HN. Often I feel bewildered and sometimes even somewhat infuriated when I read about people demanding a new work week of X days/hours. For me, as long as I'm programming - which is almost all the time at my job - it never feels like I'm working. I often have to set timers to cap myself for working on a programming problem for too long, else I'll never go to the bathroom! So work is something I love to do and a huge part of my life that I often don't want to cut out. Further, working with others who are passionate about what they do produces one of the most wonderful pleasures in life, as it blends deep community/social bonds while plugging into life!

stickhandle 12y ago

Lesson learned from having 3 kids in hockey: Until you reach a level of "good enough" to participate in "the game", its not much fun. Once there, the better you get, the more fun it becomes and turns into a virtuous circle of try_harder->get_better->more_fun->try_harder->get_better ...

mkagenius 12y ago

It can be about the crave to be "different". People want to do things that make them _different_ than others. People hate programming when they do it with 1000 other colleagues. The same programming is rewarding when they do it alone - since, that lets them do things that no one in the world is doing. That may be true for startups in general. Doing startups seem cool since only a handful (<10%) of total population is doing it. If everyone starts doing it, it may not be as cool.

known 12y ago

You are a product of your environment.

nnd 12y ago

Finding to do what you love is easy. I mean anyone can do that by iterating through different activities to find "what doesn't feel like work". Getting paid for it is difficult. Arguably one has to become extremely good at a particular skill which is in demand and be able to promote himself.

deleted 12y ago

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elwell 12y ago

I enjoyed the short length and poetry of this 'essay'; kind of different from PG.

callesgg 12y ago

I have always had the image that debugging is like this thing that one has to do when one has fucked up. But thinking of it after reading the last part of the article i realized that i actually find that debugging is quite fun, i have never really thought of it until now.

nnq 12y ago

So if I absolutely hate debugging, it means I'm not meant to be a programmer after all (even if I otherwise love everything about programming)?! I hate debugging (and more generally "diagnostic reasoning" in general... also went through med school long time ago), that I've actually become a "language geek", researching language after language and programming pattern after pattern in order to find strategies to reduce as much as possible the debugging work that I have to do. I've learned Lisp. I've started learning Haskell. Rust is on my "to learn" list now too. And my absolute hate for debugging work makes me research new things every day in the search for that nirvana where code that compiles always works and where you don't have to work 5x as hard to please the compiler either...

dogweather 12y ago

I'm like this, and other successful programmers I know are like this. But I wonder how applicable this is to people in other industries. Does everyone have something they like to do for which the market will reward them?

yason 12y ago

For me, programming is to build mechanisms. There's something similar there as in building mechanical constructs. That's the juicy bit for me. Building mechanisms of course implies some core problem (i.e. how to model what you need to solve and how to compute the result) and interfacing (how to run that thing at all in a physical computing environment and how to talk to all the other), but those don't raise up as major appeals. One or both can even be trivial and I don't get bored yet. The play of ideas and experience and using those to build something that works is highly enticing. So, the more I gain experience, the more rewarding programming has become, which in turn gives me more ideas that I try out or problems that I try to solve, which accumulates the experience, and so on. The most boring part of programming is often interfacing. This means anything from negotiating with other people/teams to learning obscure one-off APIs just to get the juicy bits running. The actual problem (think in terms of maths or CS) can sometimes be interesting but not necessarily per se. Rather, a tricky problem can serve as an excuse to build a very complex or advanced mechanism. Debugging is just pure fun. It's like trying to find out that slightly loose part in the transmission of a car that sometimes makes the 2nd gear a bit difficult to engage. Debugging happens when the mechanism is mostly built but not yet completed. You can almost see it working, sans a few problems that you know are there. It's hard to imagine sources of greater motivation and mental satisfaction than debugging.

CmonDev 12y ago

Being a VC.

jsprogrammer 12y ago

>When I was in college I used to write papers for my friends. It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking. Sorry, did Paul just say that he helped people cheat in their college classes? Or did the professors know he was writing others' papers?

stuff4ben 12y ago

I'm a little late to the conversation, but I need to say this just for myself. But yeah I totally get this. As a rising fifth grader in the mid-80's, "somehow" I heard of or got invited to some summer school computer class. Basically for 4 weeks I went back to school and learned about computers on an Apple IIe. We played some lemonadestand game and even wrote BASIC on some Trash80's. That was my watershed moment. Ever since then I knew I was going to be a programmer. I remember as a senior in high school, the only computer class they had was on BASIC programming. Since I had literally been doing it for 7 years, I aced it. The teacher would hand out exams (yes on paper) and I would be done before she finished handing them out to the rest of the class. I hated that I was out in the sticks in highschool though. If only I had someone I could have been mentored from, there's no telling where I'd be now. But hey, I still enjoy programming (debugging MY code, creating code, etc). I'm attending way too many meetings now and I rarely open my IDE at work. But the thrill of creation and making the computer do what I tell it to do is pretty awesome after 30+ years. I need a side project...

stevenspins 12y ago

Some programmers are philosophers and mathematicians: they like to consider things from first principles, read a lot, and build up systems in their head. They make huge breakthroughs because they question fundamental assumptions. But sometimes they over-model things and ignore how the world actually works, in favor of "elegant" ideas. They may not like debugging because it is often dealing with other people's broken assumptions (i.e. legacy code), and not any real fundamental idea.

karlb 12y ago

Jerry Seinfeld says[1]: “Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with.” Jerry describes writing comedy as “The torture I love.” [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2GW2JS_A4g&t=32m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2GW2JS_A4g&t=32m20s

ribs 12y ago

Paul talks about this subject like it's a breaking of the code or something, but it's just economics. If there's a commodity you can get for cheaper than other people, you stand to gain. In this case the commodity is pleasure, which you can buy for negative money.

sktrdie 12y ago

I used to think this of software development. The problem is that when I started doing it "because I had to" instead of "because I wanted to" it took all the fun out of it.

smoyer 12y ago

@pg I built electronic parts for Westinghouse's Nuclear Reactor Simulators (near Monroeville PA) in the mid 1980's. There were a ton of intelligent people working there and since every reactor built had to have an identical training simulator, there was quite a bit of knowledge required to make the systems realistic. Sometimes simulating the required behavior of a nuclear reactor was more complex than what occurred in the real reactor (simulating the pulse shape and randomness of a Geiger counter or driving a synchroscope with hopped up audio amplifiers). In any case, those guys provided a lot of on-the-job education for a young engineer ... thank your dad for me as I might not have interacted with him, but surely some other "youngster" did.

gregfjohnson 12y ago

I am 60 and still cannot believe that people will actually pay you to play with computers and robots all day long! The robots I play with know how to breathe air, which involves a lot of interesting fluid dynamics in addition to all of the other interesting things that go into building and playing with robots. (The technical term for these robots is "intensive care unit ventilator".) I love and am probably addicted to programming. RE debugging: while the rush of relief and victory is satisfying when a problem is found and fixed, I find these days that it is more fun to do technical things differently. Consider a Venn diagram with two overlapping circles to describe a given technical problem. Circle A is "have something working happily, but may be overly simplistic." Circle B is "covers the real problem domain adequately, but may be buggy." The intersection is where you want to be. The question is, from which direction do you approach the intersection? I used to start from Circle B and debug to the intersection. Now, I start from Circle A and stay happy/working, expanding that state until it gets to the intersection. Especially in pair programming I find this to be the best way to go. If two pairing partners are "lost in the woods" trying to debug a problem, they can start stepping on each others' toes and get really unhappy. On the other hand, if they are collaboratively growing an ever-expanding "working/happy" program, things usually go an awful lot better. Related topic: I've come to realize that I am good at "really easy" mathematics, and bad at "really hard" mathematics. So, in struggling with a math problem or new area, my instinct is to massage and massage until the problem magically transforms from "really hard" to "really easy". Just last week I had that huge sweet "AHA" rush. In lambda calculus, there is a cute trick called Church numerals that allows you to encode the non-negative integers as functions. The functions to add, multiply, exponentiate, etc. are all easy, but the function to take the predecessor of a Church numeral is really tricky. I knew the predecessor formula and could mechanically apply it, but did not have any clear insight at all as to how or why it worked. Finally, KAPOW! Came up with a beautifully straightforward, satisfying, and intuitive way to derive the predecessor function of Church numerals.

hasenj 12y ago

There are many activities that I enjoy doing as a hobby, but can't imagine doing them as a profession or for a living. One of them for example: if I like a song in a foreign language I'm learning, I will look up the lyrics and try to translate it by carefully analyzing each sentence and using lots of dictionaries and Google searches (sometimes asking on Forums or asking native speakers in person). It takes anywhere from hours to days. It might seem to most people that this requires discipline and tenacity, but when I do it I just do it for fun. I'm not so sure though that I would enjoy it the same way if I had to do that kind of work for a living.

fisheuler 12y ago

I just misunderstand the meaning of the word "work".I intepreted it as a verb meaning dosn't operate normally. After reread other people's comment. I realized it's meaning : similar to the job.

meigwilym 12y ago

OT: siarad Cymraeg Paul?

AnonJ 12y ago

Well the usage of the word "work" here is peculiar. Has "work" in our society already become a word equal to "travail, toil", "something done with the explicit intent of earning one's living but uninteresting"? Isn't "work" supposed to be fun, challenging and rewarding in itself? The article surely reads a little bit weird to me in this sense, though I get the idea.