The first few questions almost have me convinced I should open my own business. Surely there must be other difficult things?
I assume the main difficulty isn't that -- I assume it's the lack of comparative advantage, so competition eats into your margins until you're fighting a race to the bottom, not only making your customers happy, but doing it cheaper than someone else could, and I assume the stress from that makes it hard?
And also not being in control of your suppliers, so unpredictable events can affect your profit.
> For instance, shortly after college, I thought I would post a few funny videos on YouTube and, you know, become instantly famous2. I gave up basically right away. I didn’t have the madness necessary to post something every week, let alone every day, nor did it ever occur to me that I might have to fill an entire house with slime, or drive a train into a giant pit, or buy prosthetic legs for 2,000 people.
That's not the hard part.
The hard part is dealing with all the negative comments. My buddy posted a few videos on Tiktok a few weeks ago. Would any of you like to guess how many comments are straight up telling him to kill himself? Here's a hint: whatever you guess, it's likely much lower than the actual number.
> Wolff wrote “more than sixty” books between 2007 and 2018. That’s 5.5 novels per year, every year, for 11 years, before she hit it big.
> Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” but when you were actually doing them, did you want to stop, or did you want to continue?
I think people like Wolff like writing. Brandon Sanderson is another example. He can't stop. I think they'd do it even if they weren't able to make it as novelists. That's what separates a lot of those people from most others. Sure, some people have a goal and the grit to reach for it, to do that dribbling & shooting practice for six hours a day even if it's not actually fun. But some people have this sort of mania for their work. It's not really sensible to talk about being like them, unless you already are.
Interestingly enough, i know some people who love programming. They make side projects, contribute to open source etc. But they kind of hate it as a job.
In my life, I knew a guy who was obsessed with the Beatles. You couldn't get him to shut up about it. People hated listening to him but he didn't care, he just wanted to talk about the Beatles. Now imagine if he was obsessed with software development - he could change the world.
And then you have guys like Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who wrote a single, and quite short, book, and it is vastly better than all the crap those writing multiple books per year can produce.
My first thought when I read this, and it may very well be misinformed, was that she is probably using a team of ghostwriters. Many novelists at that level are. Your name just becomes a brand at a certain point.
it is so exhausting to talk to some people who obviously don't like what they have to do for a living and then expect others to also hate what they do.
I get that it must suck to do some bullshit job you don't want to just so you don't starve, but I studied for the thing I wanted to do, found a job doing what I wanted to, and now someone is paying me relatively well to do the thing I would do on my own time. Then I get called wage slave and capitalism boot licker just because I found someone to pay for my hobby.
>Otherwise you run into Borges’ map problem—if you want a map that contains all the details of the territory that it’s supposed to represent, then the map has to be the size of the territory itself.
Is this what everyone describes as “the map is not the territory”, or something else? I can imagine some other subtleties of being within a territory that an exact projection might not provide.
> Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”
> Most of those students would go, “Oh, no I would not like to do those things.” The actual content of a professor’s life had never occurred to them. If you could pop the tops of their skulls and see what they thought being a professor was like, you’d probably find some low-res cartoon version of themselves walking around campus in a tweed jacket going, “I’m a professor, that’s me! Professor here!” and everyone waving back to them going, “Hi professor!”
I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.
Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.
Also, grading was fun, just because you can be an unusually good grader by doing the barest-minimum and including, like, any notes at all (the students just want to know that you actually understood why you took their points away).
It strikes me that those are two spots that seem hardest to automate away, and involve satisfying the customer the most. But they don’t really seem to be central to the professor’ actual identities, or to the general perception of them.
I found that example weird, probably because it's the one I had the most experience with, having been a grad student at two different universities. (I don't have enough familiarity with the other examples to know if they're weird or not.)
I don't know any grad student (outside perhaps a first-semester master's student) who has delusions about what a professor does. First off, they know academia is publish-or-perish, they've been told it every day, and they're prepping for it right from the get-go, with qualifying papers that are going to turn into their dissertation which is going to turn into their first academic book -- the first of many they know they're going to need to write. And they know that it also involves a lot of face time with the students, since as grad students they spend a lot of face time with the professor. And they know about the teaching because they're having to do it too now, as barely-paid lecturers.
> "Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan"
Did those students not have advisors?
Sorry, I got the point of the article, and it was fine, but this whole anecdote felt off.
I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.
I think the “get rich easy” reputation that software engineering gained somewhere around the 2010s really hurt the industry and a lot of people who are chasing the dollar.
I’m an unhinged lunatic who loves productivity software and user experiences. The type of kid who was setting up Outlook betas in 6th grade to try the new features. Watching videos about how the Ribbon was designed. Reading C++ for dummies even though I had untreated ADHD and couldn’t sit still long enough to get much past std::cout. Eventually daydreaming about walking into the office, tired from a hard sprint, getting coffee in corporate-sponsored coffee cups.
I wake up and reflect how profoundly lucky I am to have my dream job. Not just having the career I have, but having a dream at all and having a dream I could love in practice.
I actually find i tend to dislike non-programming computer activity. Love programming, but if someone suggests taking notes with a laptop instead of paper, my reaction is ewww computers.
But sitting in front of computers isn't what computer science is about, and some of those students might have aspirations to change the HCI status quo.
Software engineering and computer science seem to have two strict criteria to consider and neither of them is the same sort of continuous, analog suffering as wearing large shoes or practicing shooting a basketball. These criteria are
1) can you solve hard problems?
2) do you want to continue solving hard problems?
At least to me it seems that those two things take more effort and willpower than anything else in software. So I don't think challenging a person about whether they would love to sit in front a computer all day is the right approach.
> Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.
Well, people who do real computer science don't program a lot, it's all theoretical math. Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy does with telescopes.
> The type of kid who was setting up Outlook betas in 6th grade to try the new features.
Oh man, this brings up memories of me being inordinately excited about Office 2007 when it was in beta. I was in elementary school.
And memories of staying up late reading my collection of outdated tech books (Borland C++, UNIX SVR4, HTML 4, and the MS-DOS 6.22 manual were the big ones). Initially learning about programming and UNIX from those books were extremely formative for how I view programming today, and I suspect that's given me quite a different perspective on a lot of things (especially things like HTML & CGI) than a lot of other folks in my age cohort.
> Reading C++ for dummies even though I had untreated ADHD and couldn’t sit still long enough to get much past std::cout.
You may have lucked out. I also didn't get terribly far in that book, but I thought it was fairly weird when I tried to read it, and after majoring in CS in college and eventually reading some very good books on programming, I believe I was entirely justified in not liking that one.
One of those articles that you'd love to share with certain people but it seems awkward when they receive a message from you with the link preview saying "Face it: you're a crazy person".
Love the opening. I have always been interested in what people actually do hour-to-hour at their jobs and have always found it frustrating that a) they don't teach you about this in school AT ALL, b) people don't talk about it socially either. Even with social media I don't think we have a very good public repository of information of this kind. It would be a very interesting project to interview a few hundred people about what they actually do at work.
I've noticed this as well; especially with the more abstract professions that have words like consultant or strategy in them.
Even from friends you'll often get a surprisingly 'corporate-BS' answer.
The best answers I've gotten is by asking people to take me through their last work day hour by hour.
Then again, I've had plenty of people not understand my job either: "I build software applications" sounds obvious to us but I've had people ask the follow up "So how do you actually do that?". The answer they're expecting is something like "I sit in front of a computer and type text into something equivalent to notepad".
1. People grow into jobs and start to like stuff they didn't expect to like when they imagined doing them before.
2. The hour-to-hour things at a job like going to a meeting depends heavily on the people you're with. The same person might hate meetings at company 1, but like them at company 2, just because of other people and the atmosphere. The people-aspect is probably very important and impossible to unpack before you tried the job.
What I’d like to do doesn’t pay money. What I do is the most buck for the effort that I have to put in.
I know I’d be extremely happy doing what I want to do. Unpacking that might be uncomfortable for the unpacker, because you’ll realize that you hate your economic activity too.
Add to that all the bullshit jobs that don’t make any difference whether they exist or not.
That’s the tragedy. The money is already being wasted. I could take it and be happy. But I can’t. I have to put my time in on the job.
Funny quirk of the website: it says it needs JavaScript to work, but I can read everything and see everything just fine, and the formatting isn't even broken. Then I look at uBlock and 195 trackers are blocked. Yikes
I feel like there is another angle to this which is largely glossed over in our modern world, which is: there are at least several viable reasons to pick a job or career. One, of course, is that you need the money. Two is that you enjoy it. The third is often left out, which is the moral angle: that it's the work you want to do in the world. You can do something everyday because it feels important to you, without enjoying it, per se, as long as it's not too stressful or abusive. It's a difference sense of "enjoyment", that it gives a deep satisfaction to do, even if the minute-to-minute experience isn't fun or entertaining or anything like that.
For instance (a bad example because I haven't done it yet, but it's illustrative:) I don't really think I'd enjoy the minutiae of running a coffee shop. But I do frequently imagine that I'm eventually going to quit everything else and try to open one. Not cause I fancy myself a cafe owner, but because I'm drawn to the project of creating a certain kind of space in the world, and having control over it so that it can stay close to my vision. Some of my favorite spaces in the world were cafes that have since disappeared or lost their charm and I'd like to try to bring some of that back. I suspect that I can survive and embrace the daily work if it is part of that overall vision.
This feels like a different angle than "you can do it because you're crazy". Actually you can do it because you really want to do it, no crazy required.
But this only works, I feel, if you're truly morally motivated by the thing you're trying to do. Very hard to pull off with modern jobs: corporate jobs seem to go as far out of their way as possible to destroy any sense of fulfillment; academic jobs (I'm told) subject you to torturous competition and bureaucracy as if to drain any inspiration you had left; menial jobs treat you as disposable and you're disempowered from effecting change. Probably this trend of making work unmeaningful is one of the great tragedies of our society. It is like the only acceptable way to be is for your meaning to come from "take your money and use it to do hobbies and buy things for your family", and it's much harder for the meaning in your life to come from the work itself, because there are so many things waiting to punish you if you try to live that way. But there are still certainly ways to do it.
In my opinion it should be a major goal of society to remove as many barriers to doing meaningful work as possible. Fulfillment ought to be seen as equally important to health. (As far as I am aware nobody has any idea how to fix this at a systemic level. The... cult? ... of capitalism opposes it too strongly.)
I think a major part of the reason is we like thinking about the packed thing. I'm sure that most people who fantasize about owning a coffee shop will never do so and probably deep down know they'll never do so. But the fantasizing itself is a pleasurable activity. Unpacking the job bursts that bubble and ends the enjoyable fantasy.
It takes a lot of self awareness to be mindful and deliberate about when you are planning (which requires unpacking and can be unpleasant but may be ultimately useful) and when you're fantasizing (which is deliberately low stakes and enjoyable but will not materially affect your life).
It's very easy to get stuck in the trap of fantasizing while falsely believing you are planning.
I've been dating recently and I think planning dates is mostly fantasizing.
I plan the time, place and activities, imagine things to discuss, how I feel, how other person might feel. Everything feels well thought out and detailed, unpacked.
But it never realizes quite like that, plans get cancelled, places are closed, feelings have changed, discussions are sidetracked or don't feel right. It's all revealed to be a fantasy.
I don't mean you shouldn't try to plan, but unpacking can also be fantasy as much as the packed thing is.
> people who like Hawaiian pizza probably think their opinion is more common than it is (false consensus)
I supposed I just got called out -- is this actually a rare thing? I thought it was like, a meme to hate pineapple on pizza? Obviously some people do, but I have never thought of my opinion (liking the combination) as especially rare.
"Do you want to be a surgeon? = Do you want to do the same procedure 15 times a week for the next 35 years?"
Compared to trying to implement vague feature requests with no clear solutions under arbitrary deadlines and for probably a lot more pay and respect in general? Yes.
Yeah the OP critique doesn't even sound bad. There are some types of surgery that are routine and easy after you get it and doing such a thing 15x a week to earn a top 1% salary sounds pretty good. The vast majority of jobs are routine and involve doing the same task at least 15x a week, probably many more times than that.
Just to unpack a bit more; Would you inevitably be willing to stand in front of the family of one of your patients and tell them there had been unforeseen complications and that their loved one has died?
Knowing a few people who work in surgery rooms, this kind of thing can happen with most surgeries. It is getting rare, but still possible.
Yes. One of the particular features of engineering and especially software is that you don't usually solve the same problem twice. You just use the previous solution. That kind of thing can make you dream of having a job where you can just do fairly routine and well understood tasks as well and as efficiently as possible instead of spending days going "WTF" and "how is that possible".
Jensen Huang has mentioned something like this similarly before: (iirc) When asked if he would change anything about his life if he could do it all over again, he says something like: if I had to do this all over again knowing what I know now, I wouldn't. If you actually knew the sacrifice and difficulty of that path upfront, deeply knew it and understood it fully in a way only having experienced it can create, essentially no one would walk that path, not even if it meant becoming one of the richest people in the world at the end.
The flip-side of that is a quote from DHH on a recent Lex Friedman podcast: "I wouldn't go back and say a thing to my younger self. I would not rob my younger self of all the life experiences I have been blessed with due to the ignorance of how the world works."
> This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one
Does everyone (or even most people) have a "right" career? I actually think this framing itself is harmful. If comparison is the thief of joy, then what could be worse than believing that there is some yet to be discovered perfect-for-you career out that you are missing.
I think I agree with you, it's harmful. If you sit down and unpack everything you're about to do you'll end up not doing anything, except what gives you the most pleasure.
There are many things I started in my life that all led to wonderful places, but if I would've sat down and prepared myself about all the horrible steps in the middle, I wouldn't have done them. Even now my work has 'bad' aspects that would've kept me away from taking up the work in the first place, if I'd known about them. I still do them because the work needs to be done.
> If you think no one would answer “yes” to those questions, you’ve missed the point: almost no one would answer “yes” to those questions, and those proud few are the ones who should be surgeons, actors, and wedding photographers.
In "What Should I Do With My Life", Po Bronson has a great quote:
"Everyone thinks their dream job will be smooth sailing. But let's face it: EVERY job has shitstorms. Thing is, in the jobs you love the shitstorm is part of the 'fun and excitement' of that dream job."
I can 100% attest to this with a personal example: having been an SRE for many years I LOVE managing outages. I don't love that there ARE outages but I do love running them. I can imagine a librarian or other similar field that loves peace and quiet and predictably recoiling in horror at this statement. But that's the point. People are different and have different preferences. As patio11 said "everyone's preference space is n-dimensional".
> This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one: they don’t understand the craziness that they have to offer, nor the craziness that will be demanded of them
This is why the advice of "pick the job that involves the thing you can't stop yourself from doing" is good advice. In my case, it's writing documentation. It's an urge I can not stop. And it's been great in my FinTech SRE career as it saves future me and other people lots of time during outages.
> You’ll discover all sorts of unexpected things when unpacking, like how firefighters mostly don’t fight fires,
My wife's cousin is a firefighter and he was mentioning that due to improvements in smoke detectors, fire alarms etc, it's becoming rarer and rarer to actually fight a fire. He seemed sad when he said it.
This is something I've started to notice as I've talked with artists on tour.
Like, I'm a hobby metal musician, and I do have a certain dream of being on stage with a band. Even if it's just a dive bar with 20 people. Gotta be realistic. And I have 15 - 20 years available for that, or even more if you look at Grave Digger or - rest in peace old chap - Ozzy. But I'm not certain if I have the passion to be a touring musician even if that happened (which most likely wont). Like what these people take on is entirely insane.
Brittney Slayes from Unleash the Archers had tours during which she worked full-time remote. 8 full hours of work, out of the hotel, soundcheck, gig, meet and greet, back into the bus, sleep, back to work. And from what I've heard they've also done that with a kid on top. That is just nuts.
And even without that, big tours are hell from what I've heard. The first one or two tours are an absolute test for bands because it's all a huge rush of adrenaline, excitement, nonsense, strange locations all at once without a second to breathe.
If you hear that, a 9-5ish tech job isn't that bad.
People should unpack what a software developer does before jumping in.
Do you enjoy reading tables of letters and numbers from some dusty ISO standard in order to displays strings to a user who literally doesn't care and will never look at it? Under time pressure? With threats of getting replaced every few years by the new technology that will replace you?
Enjoy getting paged at 9pm in the middle of your kids' school play to put out the massive... oh the login to the intranet portal that only the one sales guy uses... not a fire.
Do you want to sweat bullets solving algorithms puzzles on a whiteboard in front of a bored reviewer... algorithms and data structures you will never use and will get chastised for writing on the job?
Enjoy letting others take credit for your work and ingenuity (yay team!) then taking the blame when you don't meet their impossible deadlines that they made up (how could you)?
Like getting angry emails from corporate shills that use code you write in your free time to release a new version with their requested features yesterday or else!?
Want to be able to remember op-codes from the data sheet of some processor nobody even uses anymore instead of your mothers' birthday?
Sure the money is good but they don't tell you that you're going to get hemorrhoids, astigmatism, carpal tunnel, a bad back, type-2 diabetes and a life long partnership with a therapist.
Zachtronics has an excellent game(?) Shenzhen I/O which is such a good simulacrum of an embedded SDE; reading datasheets, coding, and sending emails, that I couldn't play it!
But I highly recommend it, if thats not your day job - or if you are curious about making it so!
Never even once thought that running a coffee shop would be fun, but then that example kind of made it seem interesting. I mean, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't actually want to do it, but also it does seem interesting to just sit there and explore different coffee beans and mess with the parameters and see what happens. There is an unloved page in my Obsidian notes somewhere where I have a table of grind size vs amount of water where I attempted to figure out the best trade-off for my drip coffee maker. (I have honestly been too lazy to actually do coffee at home for a little while now, but for a while I got sucked in.)
That said, unfortunately as much as it is depressing, the thing that I go Mr. Beast levels of obsession with is definitely software. I almost wish it could be drawing or something else that is a little more interesting, because while it is a great career that I probably would've been screwed without, it does feel pretty thankless at the end of the day. I don't think people who make software are really that valued by anyone but their own. You rarely hear people rave about software when it merely just works, even though sometimes it really is doing crazy things to make that happen. The ultimate end goal for software is to make it look and feel effortless, and if you truly win, the reward is that people will think it actually is.
That's also why I'm both terrified and excited by the prospect of machines writing competent code. I am not sure I will find the jobs left for me as interesting as actually writing the code itself. But also, if I really could have an army of even junior engineers running locally on a GPU cluster, the possibilities that would unlock feel pretty extensive. I'll just have to figure out how many GPUs I can afford while I'm waiting in the unemployment line. (Or that future may never actually come, if we're really hitting as hard of a wall as it looks like, but I'm not a believer in the meat brain being some sacred piece of matter whose functions can't possibly be replicated by logic gates. So I think it's probably a matter of time, it's just that maybe we're not actually sure how many, in part because people treat it as such an inevitability that they look at you funny if you suggest it might not be tomorrow.)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 92.4 ms ] threadI assume the main difficulty isn't that -- I assume it's the lack of comparative advantage, so competition eats into your margins until you're fighting a race to the bottom, not only making your customers happy, but doing it cheaper than someone else could, and I assume the stress from that makes it hard?
And also not being in control of your suppliers, so unpredictable events can affect your profit.
> For instance, shortly after college, I thought I would post a few funny videos on YouTube and, you know, become instantly famous2. I gave up basically right away. I didn’t have the madness necessary to post something every week, let alone every day, nor did it ever occur to me that I might have to fill an entire house with slime, or drive a train into a giant pit, or buy prosthetic legs for 2,000 people.
That's not the hard part.
The hard part is dealing with all the negative comments. My buddy posted a few videos on Tiktok a few weeks ago. Would any of you like to guess how many comments are straight up telling him to kill himself? Here's a hint: whatever you guess, it's likely much lower than the actual number.
> Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” but when you were actually doing them, did you want to stop, or did you want to continue?
I think people like Wolff like writing. Brandon Sanderson is another example. He can't stop. I think they'd do it even if they weren't able to make it as novelists. That's what separates a lot of those people from most others. Sure, some people have a goal and the grit to reach for it, to do that dribbling & shooting practice for six hours a day even if it's not actually fun. But some people have this sort of mania for their work. It's not really sensible to talk about being like them, unless you already are.
https://www.paulgraham.com/genius.html
In my life, I knew a guy who was obsessed with the Beatles. You couldn't get him to shut up about it. People hated listening to him but he didn't care, he just wanted to talk about the Beatles. Now imagine if he was obsessed with software development - he could change the world.
I get that it must suck to do some bullshit job you don't want to just so you don't starve, but I studied for the thing I wanted to do, found a job doing what I wanted to, and now someone is paying me relatively well to do the thing I would do on my own time. Then I get called wage slave and capitalism boot licker just because I found someone to pay for my hobby.
Is this what everyone describes as “the map is not the territory”, or something else? I can imagine some other subtleties of being within a territory that an exact projection might not provide.
> Most of those students would go, “Oh, no I would not like to do those things.” The actual content of a professor’s life had never occurred to them. If you could pop the tops of their skulls and see what they thought being a professor was like, you’d probably find some low-res cartoon version of themselves walking around campus in a tweed jacket going, “I’m a professor, that’s me! Professor here!” and everyone waving back to them going, “Hi professor!”
I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.
Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.
Also, grading was fun, just because you can be an unusually good grader by doing the barest-minimum and including, like, any notes at all (the students just want to know that you actually understood why you took their points away).
It strikes me that those are two spots that seem hardest to automate away, and involve satisfying the customer the most. But they don’t really seem to be central to the professor’ actual identities, or to the general perception of them.
I don't know any grad student (outside perhaps a first-semester master's student) who has delusions about what a professor does. First off, they know academia is publish-or-perish, they've been told it every day, and they're prepping for it right from the get-go, with qualifying papers that are going to turn into their dissertation which is going to turn into their first academic book -- the first of many they know they're going to need to write. And they know that it also involves a lot of face time with the students, since as grad students they spend a lot of face time with the professor. And they know about the teaching because they're having to do it too now, as barely-paid lecturers.
> "Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan"
Did those students not have advisors?
Sorry, I got the point of the article, and it was fine, but this whole anecdote felt off.
I think the “get rich easy” reputation that software engineering gained somewhere around the 2010s really hurt the industry and a lot of people who are chasing the dollar.
I’m an unhinged lunatic who loves productivity software and user experiences. The type of kid who was setting up Outlook betas in 6th grade to try the new features. Watching videos about how the Ribbon was designed. Reading C++ for dummies even though I had untreated ADHD and couldn’t sit still long enough to get much past std::cout. Eventually daydreaming about walking into the office, tired from a hard sprint, getting coffee in corporate-sponsored coffee cups.
I wake up and reflect how profoundly lucky I am to have my dream job. Not just having the career I have, but having a dream at all and having a dream I could love in practice.
Software engineering and computer science seem to have two strict criteria to consider and neither of them is the same sort of continuous, analog suffering as wearing large shoes or practicing shooting a basketball. These criteria are
1) can you solve hard problems? 2) do you want to continue solving hard problems?
At least to me it seems that those two things take more effort and willpower than anything else in software. So I don't think challenging a person about whether they would love to sit in front a computer all day is the right approach.
Well, people who do real computer science don't program a lot, it's all theoretical math. Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy does with telescopes.
Oh man, this brings up memories of me being inordinately excited about Office 2007 when it was in beta. I was in elementary school.
And memories of staying up late reading my collection of outdated tech books (Borland C++, UNIX SVR4, HTML 4, and the MS-DOS 6.22 manual were the big ones). Initially learning about programming and UNIX from those books were extremely formative for how I view programming today, and I suspect that's given me quite a different perspective on a lot of things (especially things like HTML & CGI) than a lot of other folks in my age cohort.
You may have lucked out. I also didn't get terribly far in that book, but I thought it was fairly weird when I tried to read it, and after majoring in CS in college and eventually reading some very good books on programming, I believe I was entirely justified in not liking that one.
I've noticed this as well; especially with the more abstract professions that have words like consultant or strategy in them. Even from friends you'll often get a surprisingly 'corporate-BS' answer.
The best answers I've gotten is by asking people to take me through their last work day hour by hour.
Then again, I've had plenty of people not understand my job either: "I build software applications" sounds obvious to us but I've had people ask the follow up "So how do you actually do that?". The answer they're expecting is something like "I sit in front of a computer and type text into something equivalent to notepad".
1. People grow into jobs and start to like stuff they didn't expect to like when they imagined doing them before.
2. The hour-to-hour things at a job like going to a meeting depends heavily on the people you're with. The same person might hate meetings at company 1, but like them at company 2, just because of other people and the atmosphere. The people-aspect is probably very important and impossible to unpack before you tried the job.
I know I’d be extremely happy doing what I want to do. Unpacking that might be uncomfortable for the unpacker, because you’ll realize that you hate your economic activity too.
Add to that all the bullshit jobs that don’t make any difference whether they exist or not.
That’s the tragedy. The money is already being wasted. I could take it and be happy. But I can’t. I have to put my time in on the job.
For instance (a bad example because I haven't done it yet, but it's illustrative:) I don't really think I'd enjoy the minutiae of running a coffee shop. But I do frequently imagine that I'm eventually going to quit everything else and try to open one. Not cause I fancy myself a cafe owner, but because I'm drawn to the project of creating a certain kind of space in the world, and having control over it so that it can stay close to my vision. Some of my favorite spaces in the world were cafes that have since disappeared or lost their charm and I'd like to try to bring some of that back. I suspect that I can survive and embrace the daily work if it is part of that overall vision.
This feels like a different angle than "you can do it because you're crazy". Actually you can do it because you really want to do it, no crazy required.
But this only works, I feel, if you're truly morally motivated by the thing you're trying to do. Very hard to pull off with modern jobs: corporate jobs seem to go as far out of their way as possible to destroy any sense of fulfillment; academic jobs (I'm told) subject you to torturous competition and bureaucracy as if to drain any inspiration you had left; menial jobs treat you as disposable and you're disempowered from effecting change. Probably this trend of making work unmeaningful is one of the great tragedies of our society. It is like the only acceptable way to be is for your meaning to come from "take your money and use it to do hobbies and buy things for your family", and it's much harder for the meaning in your life to come from the work itself, because there are so many things waiting to punish you if you try to live that way. But there are still certainly ways to do it.
In my opinion it should be a major goal of society to remove as many barriers to doing meaningful work as possible. Fulfillment ought to be seen as equally important to health. (As far as I am aware nobody has any idea how to fix this at a systemic level. The... cult? ... of capitalism opposes it too strongly.)
I think a major part of the reason is we like thinking about the packed thing. I'm sure that most people who fantasize about owning a coffee shop will never do so and probably deep down know they'll never do so. But the fantasizing itself is a pleasurable activity. Unpacking the job bursts that bubble and ends the enjoyable fantasy.
It takes a lot of self awareness to be mindful and deliberate about when you are planning (which requires unpacking and can be unpleasant but may be ultimately useful) and when you're fantasizing (which is deliberately low stakes and enjoyable but will not materially affect your life).
It's very easy to get stuck in the trap of fantasizing while falsely believing you are planning.
I plan the time, place and activities, imagine things to discuss, how I feel, how other person might feel. Everything feels well thought out and detailed, unpacked.
But it never realizes quite like that, plans get cancelled, places are closed, feelings have changed, discussions are sidetracked or don't feel right. It's all revealed to be a fantasy.
I don't mean you shouldn't try to plan, but unpacking can also be fantasy as much as the packed thing is.
I supposed I just got called out -- is this actually a rare thing? I thought it was like, a meme to hate pineapple on pizza? Obviously some people do, but I have never thought of my opinion (liking the combination) as especially rare.
Compared to trying to implement vague feature requests with no clear solutions under arbitrary deadlines and for probably a lot more pay and respect in general? Yes.
Knowing a few people who work in surgery rooms, this kind of thing can happen with most surgeries. It is getting rare, but still possible.
The flip-side of that is a quote from DHH on a recent Lex Friedman podcast: "I wouldn't go back and say a thing to my younger self. I would not rob my younger self of all the life experiences I have been blessed with due to the ignorance of how the world works."
Does everyone (or even most people) have a "right" career? I actually think this framing itself is harmful. If comparison is the thief of joy, then what could be worse than believing that there is some yet to be discovered perfect-for-you career out that you are missing.
There are many things I started in my life that all led to wonderful places, but if I would've sat down and prepared myself about all the horrible steps in the middle, I wouldn't have done them. Even now my work has 'bad' aspects that would've kept me away from taking up the work in the first place, if I'd known about them. I still do them because the work needs to be done.
> If you think no one would answer “yes” to those questions, you’ve missed the point: almost no one would answer “yes” to those questions, and those proud few are the ones who should be surgeons, actors, and wedding photographers.
In "What Should I Do With My Life", Po Bronson has a great quote:
"Everyone thinks their dream job will be smooth sailing. But let's face it: EVERY job has shitstorms. Thing is, in the jobs you love the shitstorm is part of the 'fun and excitement' of that dream job."
I can 100% attest to this with a personal example: having been an SRE for many years I LOVE managing outages. I don't love that there ARE outages but I do love running them. I can imagine a librarian or other similar field that loves peace and quiet and predictably recoiling in horror at this statement. But that's the point. People are different and have different preferences. As patio11 said "everyone's preference space is n-dimensional".
> This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one: they don’t understand the craziness that they have to offer, nor the craziness that will be demanded of them
This is why the advice of "pick the job that involves the thing you can't stop yourself from doing" is good advice. In my case, it's writing documentation. It's an urge I can not stop. And it's been great in my FinTech SRE career as it saves future me and other people lots of time during outages.
> You’ll discover all sorts of unexpected things when unpacking, like how firefighters mostly don’t fight fires,
My wife's cousin is a firefighter and he was mentioning that due to improvements in smoke detectors, fire alarms etc, it's becoming rarer and rarer to actually fight a fire. He seemed sad when he said it.
Like, I'm a hobby metal musician, and I do have a certain dream of being on stage with a band. Even if it's just a dive bar with 20 people. Gotta be realistic. And I have 15 - 20 years available for that, or even more if you look at Grave Digger or - rest in peace old chap - Ozzy. But I'm not certain if I have the passion to be a touring musician even if that happened (which most likely wont). Like what these people take on is entirely insane.
Brittney Slayes from Unleash the Archers had tours during which she worked full-time remote. 8 full hours of work, out of the hotel, soundcheck, gig, meet and greet, back into the bus, sleep, back to work. And from what I've heard they've also done that with a kid on top. That is just nuts.
And even without that, big tours are hell from what I've heard. The first one or two tours are an absolute test for bands because it's all a huge rush of adrenaline, excitement, nonsense, strange locations all at once without a second to breathe.
If you hear that, a 9-5ish tech job isn't that bad.
Do you enjoy reading tables of letters and numbers from some dusty ISO standard in order to displays strings to a user who literally doesn't care and will never look at it? Under time pressure? With threats of getting replaced every few years by the new technology that will replace you?
Enjoy getting paged at 9pm in the middle of your kids' school play to put out the massive... oh the login to the intranet portal that only the one sales guy uses... not a fire.
Do you want to sweat bullets solving algorithms puzzles on a whiteboard in front of a bored reviewer... algorithms and data structures you will never use and will get chastised for writing on the job?
Enjoy letting others take credit for your work and ingenuity (yay team!) then taking the blame when you don't meet their impossible deadlines that they made up (how could you)?
Like getting angry emails from corporate shills that use code you write in your free time to release a new version with their requested features yesterday or else!?
Want to be able to remember op-codes from the data sheet of some processor nobody even uses anymore instead of your mothers' birthday?
Sure the money is good but they don't tell you that you're going to get hemorrhoids, astigmatism, carpal tunnel, a bad back, type-2 diabetes and a life long partnership with a therapist.
... and yet I still can't stop programming.
But I highly recommend it, if thats not your day job - or if you are curious about making it so!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/SHENZHEN_IO/
That said, unfortunately as much as it is depressing, the thing that I go Mr. Beast levels of obsession with is definitely software. I almost wish it could be drawing or something else that is a little more interesting, because while it is a great career that I probably would've been screwed without, it does feel pretty thankless at the end of the day. I don't think people who make software are really that valued by anyone but their own. You rarely hear people rave about software when it merely just works, even though sometimes it really is doing crazy things to make that happen. The ultimate end goal for software is to make it look and feel effortless, and if you truly win, the reward is that people will think it actually is.
That's also why I'm both terrified and excited by the prospect of machines writing competent code. I am not sure I will find the jobs left for me as interesting as actually writing the code itself. But also, if I really could have an army of even junior engineers running locally on a GPU cluster, the possibilities that would unlock feel pretty extensive. I'll just have to figure out how many GPUs I can afford while I'm waiting in the unemployment line. (Or that future may never actually come, if we're really hitting as hard of a wall as it looks like, but I'm not a believer in the meat brain being some sacred piece of matter whose functions can't possibly be replicated by logic gates. So I think it's probably a matter of time, it's just that maybe we're not actually sure how many, in part because people treat it as such an inevitability that they look at you funny if you suggest it might not be tomorrow.)