Sounds like this author has some angst against those that are willing to go above and beyond in pursuit of a goal or accomplishment. This generation has been forced to be very entrepreneurial because of a lack of jobs. We learn fast, test our assumptions and make adjustments. This is a big contrast to the way AlexeyBrin thinks the world works. From his cushy and comfortable desk job, he thinks the same avenues available to him are available to everyone now. Not true. We have to be smarter, faster and willing to work for less. It's hard for the generation of plenty to realize how the world has changed around them. I suggest you stop hating and catch up.
This hasn't been my experience. For me and my classmates graduating college all have jobs in traditional companies much like my parents and (some) of their parents had. In fact many of us are going to make more inflation adjusted dollars out of college than our parents did.
It may be true in certain parts of the country but mobility for young people should be high anyways. For those around me it's not whether or not we will get a job but whether or not we will be prepared to work hard and smart for 40+ hour workweeks. In Texas in any major city a college degree and some experience is highly valued and job opportunities are plentiful.
I am part of the generation, but actually agree with what he's saying. The article on HN he was critiquing, I also read, and felt "really, mate, you're complaining about this?"
Hard work sucks, it often involves things you don't want to do, but you must push on... I don't like paying back technical debt, but I have to. It's the most boring work, unglamorous work I can do, but among the most necessary.
As well, often times in start ups, in the beginning you're forced to do work outside of your "role" for better or worse. As a business matures, the need for this reduces and you're left with what you were hired for... this is part of growing a business. It can be viewed as boring, but is sort of the goal. Being over worked, and forced to do tasks outside of your description isn't something people should be fighting for...
They are afraid of droning, not work. Fine with me as the droning pays my mortgage.
edit: and it is pretty applicable to any generation - Gates or Zuckerberg (saying with all my distaste for FB or its creator) could have continue droning in Harvard and beyond, yet they declined, and as far as i know they are very far from being slackers.
There might be a point here, but the whole "just suck it up and keep going for years and years" attitude that I'm getting from this post feels, well, misguided.
If you think you can improve your life, work better, with more fun, with more meaning, with better challenges, then by all means go for it. There's no need to stay put at a place that sucks for you and that slowly boils your brain to pulp just because some old guy on HN did his time, too. Sure, there are plenty places where you're valued based on the amount of years to "put in for the business", but thank god there are also plenty places that got past that.
The other side is, of course, that if you give up too soon, you'll never get anywhere. But my impression is that most programmers stick around places too long, rather than too short. They just don't blog about it as much.
Taking advantage of an opportunity while somewhere someone doesn't have as many opportunities as yesterday does not necessarily translate to "you took their opportunity".
In what sense is getting yours "at the expense of others" unless you have achieved it by deceit, fraud, or force? If you're referring to general technologically driven unemployment, then yes in a very broad sense programmers do profit at the expense of others. Should companies ease off increasing market share if a competitor is on the verge of collapse in order to save the jobs of those at whom's expense they were profiting?
They'd be doing everyone in the other company a favor by killing it, the other company is inefficient and the population as a whole suffers for it wasting the resources it does instead of those resources being freed up to do something more productive.
Well yes. I agree with you. That last question was supposed to come across as exasperated and irritated, not as an endorsement of preserving failing companies out of short sighted compassion. There are serious questions that need to be solved regarding the likelihood that double-digit percentages of the US workforce will be economically unviable, but those are separate from issues of even aggregate microeconomic competitive questions.
Uh, the Nietzsche quote has a slightly different connotation when you give it a wider context:
When seeking work for the sake of the pay, almost all men are alike at present in civilized countries. To all of them work is a means, and not itself the end; on which account they are not very select in the choice of the work, provided it yields an abundant profit. But there are rarer men who would rather die than work without enjoyment in their work: the fastidious people, difficult to satisfy, whose object is not served by an abundant profit, unless the work itself be the reward of all rewards.
And then:
It doesn’t matter how brilliant you started out or how much faster you exited the gates than everyone else, those who consistently get up every morning and direct their energies along a single path, no matter how boring it may be, will eventually pass you on each of the many roads you haphazardly travel.
That's not how life works. You can direct all your efforts to bending cutlery, but you're not going to make a good living out of it. You're just not. And some people have it easy. Sorry, life is unfair.
But then I read that:
Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early.
The author may be a great programmer (I suspect him of being a robot), but he doesn't understand psychology. Not worth a read.
I suggest that you research the idiom, "he may be X, but Y."
If I say "He may be tall, but he's ugly"[1] his height is not in question. Semantically, it means that one of his features may make him effective at something, but another feature (or aspect of the situation) offsets that effectiveness.
> If I say "He may be tall, but he's ugly"[1] his height is not in question.
The idiom may, depending on context, imply acceptance of the proposition that is preceded by "may", but more generally (whether or not that is the case) it means that that proposition's truth is irrelevant, and that the important thing is the subsequent proposition.
If you have not noticed, most (90%) of programmers do not work on open-source projects or toy projects hosted on Github. There are great programmers who have never published a single line of code.
Of course I've noticed. One need not be an open-source hacker to have shipped a product, nor, perhaps, need one have shipped a product in order to be worthwhile as a teacher of programmers. One does, however, need to have done something.
His website presents him as a teacher and a motivational speaker. It also includes his claim to be a programmer, substantiation of which is rather thin on the ground. I haven't watched his videos, but if they're anything like his articles, they rarely include code, talk in bland generalities without offering much in implementation detail, and overall read as if written by someone with neither the experience he implicitly claims as a working programmer, nor anything like the level of intellectual capability and flexibility to which he aspires.
Contrast, for example, the whip-smart Steve Yegge on Agile consultants [1] -- which, not coincidentally, is how this Sonmez item appears to make his living, in collaboration with some kind of software-engineering equivalent of Kaplan, Inc. [2]. Pick whatever example you like of Sonmez's writing, and place it alongside whatever example you like of Yegge's, and perhaps you'll find it easier to see why Sonmez forces to my mind the old cliche contrasting do-ers and teachers.
His claim to be a programmer underlies his supposed authority, and his failure to demonstrate any accomplishment in the field undermines his claim; more to the point, if he were any good at it, he'd probably be earning a living by some means less distantly related to the field than selling snake oil to people who don't know any better.
Yes, and not because he directed all his efforts to bending cutlery. His efforts were directed at creating the illusion of bending cutlery and marketing himself (and mostly the latter). Quite a difference.
Do you know which translation/edition the article's version of the quote is from? I've looked through 3 so far, can't find it in this exact wording. Not trying to nitpick, just annoyed I can't find it. The tone and meaning of the English translations changed a couple of times drastically.
If I'm unhappy with work conditions -- be it bad management, burden of unmanageable technical debt, incompatible culture or the mundane problem of low pay -- I am expected to `vote with my feet'. It's market self-regulation, it's feedback for the organization and it just works. If I refrain, for any misguided reason, it only makes market suboptimal. Does OP really advocate skewing the job market for some fuzzy reasons?
> (...) others are hard at work ever so humbly providing real value through their—at times—loveless toil.
Hard work alone is not enough for humanity to benefit; it must also be well-focused, well-tooled and well-managed. If the clueless middle-management wastes 90% of your effort, there's more benefit to humanity when you move.
Similarily, if 100h workweek and 24/7 stress wreck your family / relationship / friendships and derails your life for several years to come, there's more benefit to humanity if you move.
>If the clueless middle-management wastes 90% of your effort, there's more benefit to humanity when you move
Yes, thank you for this statement. I don't think many people yet realize how much more detrimental to society so much bureaucratic bullshit in everything we do(are) is over a few hackers getting fed up with that same bureaucratic bullshit and moving on.
In fact, put that way it really does not seem logical to get mad at a few young programmers choices to change course. Maybe it's societies framework you should be getting mad at.
There is no relationship between these three things, but the author keeps saying "hard, boring work."
I don't feel particularly bad about insisting that hard work doesn't have to be boring, and that boring, easy work is not hard.
"The HN Generation doesn't want to put in their time doing boring, unfulfilling work" doesn't sound nearly as damning as "The HN Generation doesn't want to put in their time doing hard work."
Anecdotally, programmers tend to work pretty damn hard.
I am one of the people this article talks about, and I agree heartily. Fortunately I've long since identified this personal issue and have been working to improve myself. In all those years I spent watching peers working hard and struggling with things I did not, I had a nagging suspicion there were hidden benefits to their struggle.
Now I know. Today they are better at getting shit done. They can grind through the menial day to day minutiae real world projects are burdened with whereas I tend to obsess over the pockets that are "interesting". Working on it though...
> nothing of any worth is obtained by any means except for good old honest hard work
This sounds nice as a slogan on a motivational poster, but is it actually true? On the one hand, I sort of understand what he's trying to say: many things in life require significant effort. But the phrase "nothing of any worth" is a little extreme... worth is pretty subjective, after all.
I feel sorry for the author of this post - he actually believes hard, boring work is the only way to accomplish anything. I've done both hard, boring work, and easy, efficient and enjoyable work. The easy work was both more enjoyable, more profitable and far better for my life as a whole.
Life is not fair, there are no points awarded for working harder or being more diligent - there are only 'points' awarded for accomplishing things. Make sure you accomplish the right things in the right way. Nobody is interesting that you slaved away coding for 6 months to develop something when someone launches something with 6 hours of work that solves the right problem.
>...there are only 'points' awarded for accomplishing things.Make sure you accomplish the right things in the right way.
Exactly, and I find a complete bias towards hard work for the sake of "feeling good" about your hard work is actually ... lazy. Feeling good about tediously slaving away at manually inserting data into a database rather than coding a handler to automate that is actually working hard to avoid doing things the way they SHOULD be done.
An older generation getting mad at a younger generation for wanting fulfilling and meaningful work is exactly this laziness. It's code for: "look I know we should have made things be this way but we can't do anything about it so you(plural) just do this boring stuff that we want you to do right now b/c we are too lazy to find a better way to work meaningfully... "
My two cents: don't work hard. Work Smart. And then work hard AT working smart. ;)
I largely agree with you and am usually the first to start automating things. However, I'll also say that sometimes doing it the boring, hard way really is the smart way to handle it. I've seen the pressure to work smarter used to spend weeks automating a system that could be performed by hand in hours. Using an hour to write a program that saves a month of work is smart. Using a month to write a program that saves a night of tedious manual labor is lazy.
But it's not always that clear-cut a difference in time. And the manual way has more problems. Quite often you are asked to do the same task again a bit later. At which point you wish you had automated the first time.
The manual way also tends to be error-prone and unreproducible.
Don't feel sorry for the dude, hate him. What kind of philosophy praises work over enjoyment? Fuck that! Take it easy, enjoy the sun, smoke weed, isn't that what California was all about?
Good ol' puritanical work ethic. I do my best to work smarter. One of the reasons I try to stay current with the latest technology is to see what benefits it would have on my work efficiency.
Likewise, I have done every permutation of hard/easy->fun/boring work - I've found that many jobs are "as hard as you want them to be." 99 percent of the time there is a preexisting solution or library, which ironically many people are either too lazy to integrate, or think they can invent a better wheel.
I've actually found that some of the most successful people are the people who attack "easy" problems and do it well. If you look at games like Minecraft, Spelunky, Hotline Miami, Super Meat Boy - they were all relatively simple to implement (at least their initial implementations).
That said, the author has plenty of valid points if you dig around the article. The majority of young people do fail because they have not yet failed enough (i.e. "put in the hard work"). I think that most inexperienced people fail because they have not learned the right problems to attack, or how to attack the right problems properly (I've been guilty of both, multiple times over).
Ironic that this is the most voted comment, because it validates the post's view. Despite you feeling sorry for him (adding entitlement to injury), he seems to have a good assessment of the HN crowd.
It's not ironic in the slightest. He's correct - the HN crowd is definitely afraid of slaving away for hours working on our own or other people's ideas that are simply not useful to the world around us. We're the guys who can dedicate our lives to the right cause and actually change human civilization in some small way (eg. searching Google for recipes, booking your holiday with some taps on a screen, paying your bills without going to the post office). However, if we're not watching where we're going, we end up spending 6 years (of 15 hour days) making a cat simulator that even cat lovers ignore after two minutes.
So he's got the right assessment - we're deadly afraid of slaving away at pointless work. If you follow the posts on HN, you'll see it's a constant reinforcement of people trying to determine if they're doing something worthwhile - how to test the waters, which ideas are working well, how to efficiently accomplish tasks. He's completely off the wall in believing this is a bad thing though. I pity that he believes spending an extra two hours each day digging his own grave deeper is in any way a good thing. His message is simply incorrect - work itself has no meaning. Only outcomes have meaning.
Answer the following. In a generation raised to believe that "how I feel" is the metric to be optimized, who will do work that does not provide "a positive amount of feels". Not all work is sexy work. And loads of people are inheriting this prima donna attitude of, well, I'm above unsexy work.
You're assuming that people have been raised a certain way, and will act a certain way. Both are suppositions.
Regardless, if enough people don't do "unsexy" work, "unsexy" work will start paying enough that people who are more mercenary about their jobs start doing it.
Seriously. This article is just useless flamebait, unworthy even of the slightest praise.
It fails to comprehend any of the complexities of circumstance, time, or humanity, yet claims to have a point above them all. This is the mark of a single-minded spoiled child without worldly experience, who has fallen into some success after a short stint of hard work and doesn't understand his place in the stochastic processes which led to his creation, upbringing, and situation.
This bullshit is to be shredded; not lightly but intently and with prejudice. It should be put down for its failure as a perspective. For its disservice to the betterment of our profession.
I find as I've gotten older that it's tempting to write off the next generation as lazy, having bad taste in music, bad sense of style, etc. We all heard our grandparents saying these things to us, yet we don't recognize the annoying, condescending attitude coming from our own mouths as we get older!
That being said, I do think that hard work will almost always take you places, unless you are working "dumb" (as opposed to working smart). You might create something in 6 hours and then sell that idea to google for a billion dollars. The problem comes into play if you actually bank your future on that. Most 6-hour creations, when you look at the history, is the 100th idea or the 100th variation of an idea. So it is somewhat of a false perception that you can create a billion dollar product in an afternoon without putting in any labor before or after.
I agree with what the author is saying, however, I think that the overall message of sticking with something, and not leaving when you encounter the first sign of monotony is applicable to software engineering more specifically than the author describes. I will provide an anecdote from my career to illustrate what I mean.
I have been working at the same company for almost 4 years. During those 4 years I have worked on the same project and haven't really switched teams. I've seen employees come and go, architecture decisions made and debated ad nauseam, and so forth. I am currently in the processing of re-implementing some functionality and architecture decisions that I made when I first started (~4 years ago).
When I made these implementation decisions I thought they were the best approach based on my experience at the time. However, having stuck around all these years and seen the product and business evolve, these decisions have turned out to be either poor choices or not the most optimal. As a consequence I've derived a lot of experience and wisdom from revisiting these past decisions, as I am now able to go back with production data and performance characteristics and see how they work or do not work. This software that I wrote way back when functioned in production and worked flawlessly without ceremony for approximately 3.5 years. Only recently and under a changing production environment has this code started to become a pain point.
Had I been part of the new every two crowd I would have never been able to see how my designs and solutions would hold up, or fall down, over the years of their life span. Furthermore, I never would have gained the wisdom and experience that comes from implementing something and having to come back and re-visit it years later.
This is really the takeaway message I understand from the author. Basically, when you only do what strikes your fancy and change your priorities with the weather, you lose out on the sort of experience and opportunity for growth that I have had in the past few weeks.
Agreed. The guy is railing against the emerging twitterati culture of folks who bounce from one gig to the next, blurting about the trendiest new Javascript library and spewing garbage code that someone else then gets to maintain.
I don't know. I've had a "new every two" experience over the last decade, and I still use "old" languages (C, C++, Fortran, even some Ada).
I'm in my mid-30s, and my view is that the kind of person you're talking about isn't restricted to any "emerging twitterati" culture. "Fad followers" exist in every age demographic.
Also, my "new every two" experiences give me a lot more breadth of experience than some poor "lifer's" years slogging away maintaining his project. It also gives me more depth in each area--because I haven't been fossilizing over the same code, in the same language, for the same project, day in and day out.
As an edit, I'll add: the (relative) ease with which (some) of the "youth" in our profession are able to switch things up so regularly ought to be viewed as a virtue. I can't stand the culture of sharing all the intimate personal details of their lives on the internet, but this is one thing which in my view they do right.
I think the definition of value is important, and I believe there is a large disconnect between generations and even individuals on this. Many in the younger generations value experience far more highly than tangible assets and career trajectory. That is why they are so fickle and likely to move from one thing to the next. While older generations say 34 years older, are interested in career trajectories, legacy building, and building a family home/unit.
The method in which you choose to carry out your professional duties is much more closely tied to the type value you wish to create, than some vacant concept of lazyness or not understanding hard-work.
I think a more pertinent argument is whether the younger generation is mistaken in their goal to gain experiences as opposed to building longterm tangible capital and careers.
Yeah, at the start of the article I was already in disagreement after the equating of "grinding it out", "boring work", and "working hard". Sounds a little too self-justifying.
I'm in my 30s but quit the startup and bigcorp stuff to work less and be happier. I put in plenty of time busting ass for people way over my pay grade for 8 years. Honestly, a lot of the higher-ups in technology really don't care about those extra hours you put in, because often it's basically free to them.
Now I can work in a billable hours business and do pretty well with respect all around. I enjoy it, can explore new technologies, without being a full time drone.
Sorry to the author, but I don't think that makes me someone who needs to be talked down to. He doesn't seem to understand the concept that you can love what you do for a paycheck but placing more importance in other things is not a personality defect.
I'm rarely massively critical of HN posters, because on the whole they seem pretty solid. So when in doubt I ere on the side of caution & assume I'm missing something instead of them missing something. On this particular article I can't help myself though - the author seems utterly oblivious to the real world.
>The big problem is that “kids today” don’t understand the value of hard, boring work.
Hard work & kids...yeah...remember the news article 3 weeks ago about an intern in London dying from working 3 days straight. An intern for fck sake...not even an employee. Dead. Now tell me again that kids today don't know about hard work. I dare you.
It does matter what passion you pursue. The right passion will drive you to get better. The passion for just getting along with people who don't give a toss will leave you utterly dissatisfied, physically tense, and miserable.
It takes some experience in experiencing how poorly dispassionate and, inevitably, disappointed, people can be to be sunk in this.
tBlind, religious following. Your daemon dying... You being disconnected from your daemon. Yes, tenuous, but existing... OP is a man without a daemon. Tenuous, but existing. Read it again...
I'm not sure what you mean with the Pullman. Could you elaborate on this?
It seemed like you were relating His Dark Materials to the content of the strikemag article, but are you just suggesting that we should read a good book?
If this were a post worthy of the front page of Hacker News, it wouldn't read like this:
"Unfortunately this kind of thinking and mentality seems to accurately embody much of the general ignorance and blatant stupidity of the next generation of software developers."
It's trash if it has to make its point by going to such great and obvious lengths to insult the topic audience, rather than just explaining why without relying on said insult as an introduction.
It's hard work to determine the answer. The author seems to think it's an obvious life lesson. So it's easy for him to understand, and probably enjoyable to write. Maybe boring to keep clicking on the 'bold html' button?
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadIt may be true in certain parts of the country but mobility for young people should be high anyways. For those around me it's not whether or not we will get a job but whether or not we will be prepared to work hard and smart for 40+ hour workweeks. In Texas in any major city a college degree and some experience is highly valued and job opportunities are plentiful.
Hard work sucks, it often involves things you don't want to do, but you must push on... I don't like paying back technical debt, but I have to. It's the most boring work, unglamorous work I can do, but among the most necessary.
As well, often times in start ups, in the beginning you're forced to do work outside of your "role" for better or worse. As a business matures, the need for this reduces and you're left with what you were hired for... this is part of growing a business. It can be viewed as boring, but is sort of the goal. Being over worked, and forced to do tasks outside of your description isn't something people should be fighting for...
edit: and it is pretty applicable to any generation - Gates or Zuckerberg (saying with all my distaste for FB or its creator) could have continue droning in Harvard and beyond, yet they declined, and as far as i know they are very far from being slackers.
If you think you can improve your life, work better, with more fun, with more meaning, with better challenges, then by all means go for it. There's no need to stay put at a place that sucks for you and that slowly boils your brain to pulp just because some old guy on HN did his time, too. Sure, there are plenty places where you're valued based on the amount of years to "put in for the business", but thank god there are also plenty places that got past that.
The other side is, of course, that if you give up too soon, you'll never get anywhere. But my impression is that most programmers stick around places too long, rather than too short. They just don't blog about it as much.
Sure, but what if that is to the expense of others? The widening wealth gap seems to suggest so.
When seeking work for the sake of the pay, almost all men are alike at present in civilized countries. To all of them work is a means, and not itself the end; on which account they are not very select in the choice of the work, provided it yields an abundant profit. But there are rarer men who would rather die than work without enjoyment in their work: the fastidious people, difficult to satisfy, whose object is not served by an abundant profit, unless the work itself be the reward of all rewards.
And then: It doesn’t matter how brilliant you started out or how much faster you exited the gates than everyone else, those who consistently get up every morning and direct their energies along a single path, no matter how boring it may be, will eventually pass you on each of the many roads you haphazardly travel.
That's not how life works. You can direct all your efforts to bending cutlery, but you're not going to make a good living out of it. You're just not. And some people have it easy. Sorry, life is unfair.
But then I read that: Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early.
The author may be a great programmer (I suspect him of being a robot), but he doesn't understand psychology. Not worth a read.
Really? He reads like a motivational speaker. What's he shipped? Where's his repo?
If I say "He may be tall, but he's ugly"[1] his height is not in question. Semantically, it means that one of his features may make him effective at something, but another feature (or aspect of the situation) offsets that effectiveness.
[1] ...read in the voice of Redd Foxx.
The idiom may, depending on context, imply acceptance of the proposition that is preceded by "may", but more generally (whether or not that is the case) it means that that proposition's truth is irrelevant, and that the important thing is the subsequent proposition.
If you have not noticed, most (90%) of programmers do not work on open-source projects or toy projects hosted on Github. There are great programmers who have never published a single line of code.
His website presents him as a teacher and a motivational speaker. It also includes his claim to be a programmer, substantiation of which is rather thin on the ground. I haven't watched his videos, but if they're anything like his articles, they rarely include code, talk in bland generalities without offering much in implementation detail, and overall read as if written by someone with neither the experience he implicitly claims as a working programmer, nor anything like the level of intellectual capability and flexibility to which he aspires.
Contrast, for example, the whip-smart Steve Yegge on Agile consultants [1] -- which, not coincidentally, is how this Sonmez item appears to make his living, in collaboration with some kind of software-engineering equivalent of Kaplan, Inc. [2]. Pick whatever example you like of Sonmez's writing, and place it alongside whatever example you like of Yegge's, and perhaps you'll find it easier to see why Sonmez forces to my mind the old cliche contrasting do-ers and teachers.
His claim to be a programmer underlies his supposed authority, and his failure to demonstrate any accomplishment in the field undermines his claim; more to the point, if he were any good at it, he'd probably be earning a living by some means less distantly related to the field than selling snake oil to people who don't know any better.
[1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/10/egomania-itself.html
[2] http://www.pluralsight.com
It's like you're specifically trying to undermine yourself. You never heard of Uri Geller?
> (...) others are hard at work ever so humbly providing real value through their—at times—loveless toil.
Hard work alone is not enough for humanity to benefit; it must also be well-focused, well-tooled and well-managed. If the clueless middle-management wastes 90% of your effort, there's more benefit to humanity when you move. Similarily, if 100h workweek and 24/7 stress wreck your family / relationship / friendships and derails your life for several years to come, there's more benefit to humanity if you move.
Yes, thank you for this statement. I don't think many people yet realize how much more detrimental to society so much bureaucratic bullshit in everything we do(are) is over a few hackers getting fed up with that same bureaucratic bullshit and moving on.
In fact, put that way it really does not seem logical to get mad at a few young programmers choices to change course. Maybe it's societies framework you should be getting mad at.
There is no relationship between these three things, but the author keeps saying "hard, boring work."
I don't feel particularly bad about insisting that hard work doesn't have to be boring, and that boring, easy work is not hard.
"The HN Generation doesn't want to put in their time doing boring, unfulfilling work" doesn't sound nearly as damning as "The HN Generation doesn't want to put in their time doing hard work."
Anecdotally, programmers tend to work pretty damn hard.
Now I know. Today they are better at getting shit done. They can grind through the menial day to day minutiae real world projects are burdened with whereas I tend to obsess over the pockets that are "interesting". Working on it though...
Not a helpful post.
This sounds nice as a slogan on a motivational poster, but is it actually true? On the one hand, I sort of understand what he's trying to say: many things in life require significant effort. But the phrase "nothing of any worth" is a little extreme... worth is pretty subjective, after all.
Life is not fair, there are no points awarded for working harder or being more diligent - there are only 'points' awarded for accomplishing things. Make sure you accomplish the right things in the right way. Nobody is interesting that you slaved away coding for 6 months to develop something when someone launches something with 6 hours of work that solves the right problem.
Exactly, and I find a complete bias towards hard work for the sake of "feeling good" about your hard work is actually ... lazy. Feeling good about tediously slaving away at manually inserting data into a database rather than coding a handler to automate that is actually working hard to avoid doing things the way they SHOULD be done.
An older generation getting mad at a younger generation for wanting fulfilling and meaningful work is exactly this laziness. It's code for: "look I know we should have made things be this way but we can't do anything about it so you(plural) just do this boring stuff that we want you to do right now b/c we are too lazy to find a better way to work meaningfully... "
My two cents: don't work hard. Work Smart. And then work hard AT working smart. ;)
The manual way also tends to be error-prone and unreproducible.
You can work hard. You can work smart. You can also do both.
I've actually found that some of the most successful people are the people who attack "easy" problems and do it well. If you look at games like Minecraft, Spelunky, Hotline Miami, Super Meat Boy - they were all relatively simple to implement (at least their initial implementations).
That said, the author has plenty of valid points if you dig around the article. The majority of young people do fail because they have not yet failed enough (i.e. "put in the hard work"). I think that most inexperienced people fail because they have not learned the right problems to attack, or how to attack the right problems properly (I've been guilty of both, multiple times over).
So he's got the right assessment - we're deadly afraid of slaving away at pointless work. If you follow the posts on HN, you'll see it's a constant reinforcement of people trying to determine if they're doing something worthwhile - how to test the waters, which ideas are working well, how to efficiently accomplish tasks. He's completely off the wall in believing this is a bad thing though. I pity that he believes spending an extra two hours each day digging his own grave deeper is in any way a good thing. His message is simply incorrect - work itself has no meaning. Only outcomes have meaning.
Answer the following. In a generation raised to believe that "how I feel" is the metric to be optimized, who will do work that does not provide "a positive amount of feels". Not all work is sexy work. And loads of people are inheriting this prima donna attitude of, well, I'm above unsexy work.
How do you reconcile this?
Let people who are OK with doing boring work do the work (and get paid well) and let people who are more about the "feels" pursue their interests.
That way everyone wins and no one needs to do something he/she doesn't want to do.
Regardless, if enough people don't do "unsexy" work, "unsexy" work will start paying enough that people who are more mercenary about their jobs start doing it.
It fails to comprehend any of the complexities of circumstance, time, or humanity, yet claims to have a point above them all. This is the mark of a single-minded spoiled child without worldly experience, who has fallen into some success after a short stint of hard work and doesn't understand his place in the stochastic processes which led to his creation, upbringing, and situation.
This bullshit is to be shredded; not lightly but intently and with prejudice. It should be put down for its failure as a perspective. For its disservice to the betterment of our profession.
and its always comforting to see former co-workers. shout-out ;)
That being said, I do think that hard work will almost always take you places, unless you are working "dumb" (as opposed to working smart). You might create something in 6 hours and then sell that idea to google for a billion dollars. The problem comes into play if you actually bank your future on that. Most 6-hour creations, when you look at the history, is the 100th idea or the 100th variation of an idea. So it is somewhat of a false perception that you can create a billion dollar product in an afternoon without putting in any labor before or after.
I have been working at the same company for almost 4 years. During those 4 years I have worked on the same project and haven't really switched teams. I've seen employees come and go, architecture decisions made and debated ad nauseam, and so forth. I am currently in the processing of re-implementing some functionality and architecture decisions that I made when I first started (~4 years ago).
When I made these implementation decisions I thought they were the best approach based on my experience at the time. However, having stuck around all these years and seen the product and business evolve, these decisions have turned out to be either poor choices or not the most optimal. As a consequence I've derived a lot of experience and wisdom from revisiting these past decisions, as I am now able to go back with production data and performance characteristics and see how they work or do not work. This software that I wrote way back when functioned in production and worked flawlessly without ceremony for approximately 3.5 years. Only recently and under a changing production environment has this code started to become a pain point.
Had I been part of the new every two crowd I would have never been able to see how my designs and solutions would hold up, or fall down, over the years of their life span. Furthermore, I never would have gained the wisdom and experience that comes from implementing something and having to come back and re-visit it years later.
This is really the takeaway message I understand from the author. Basically, when you only do what strikes your fancy and change your priorities with the weather, you lose out on the sort of experience and opportunity for growth that I have had in the past few weeks.
I'm in my mid-30s, and my view is that the kind of person you're talking about isn't restricted to any "emerging twitterati" culture. "Fad followers" exist in every age demographic.
Also, my "new every two" experiences give me a lot more breadth of experience than some poor "lifer's" years slogging away maintaining his project. It also gives me more depth in each area--because I haven't been fossilizing over the same code, in the same language, for the same project, day in and day out.
As an edit, I'll add: the (relative) ease with which (some) of the "youth" in our profession are able to switch things up so regularly ought to be viewed as a virtue. I can't stand the culture of sharing all the intimate personal details of their lives on the internet, but this is one thing which in my view they do right.
The method in which you choose to carry out your professional duties is much more closely tied to the type value you wish to create, than some vacant concept of lazyness or not understanding hard-work.
I think a more pertinent argument is whether the younger generation is mistaken in their goal to gain experiences as opposed to building longterm tangible capital and careers.
I'm in my 30s but quit the startup and bigcorp stuff to work less and be happier. I put in plenty of time busting ass for people way over my pay grade for 8 years. Honestly, a lot of the higher-ups in technology really don't care about those extra hours you put in, because often it's basically free to them.
Now I can work in a billable hours business and do pretty well with respect all around. I enjoy it, can explore new technologies, without being a full time drone.
Sorry to the author, but I don't think that makes me someone who needs to be talked down to. He doesn't seem to understand the concept that you can love what you do for a paycheck but placing more importance in other things is not a personality defect.
>The big problem is that “kids today” don’t understand the value of hard, boring work.
Hard work & kids...yeah...remember the news article 3 weeks ago about an intern in London dying from working 3 days straight. An intern for fck sake...not even an employee. Dead. Now tell me again that kids today don't know about hard work. I dare you.
It takes some experience in experiencing how poorly dispassionate and, inevitably, disappointed, people can be to be sunk in this.
You may want to read this - http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/.
If you have more time, read His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman.
I read them couple of times when I was a teenager, but I can't make the connection here.
It seemed like you were relating His Dark Materials to the content of the strikemag article, but are you just suggesting that we should read a good book?
"Unfortunately this kind of thinking and mentality seems to accurately embody much of the general ignorance and blatant stupidity of the next generation of software developers."
It's trash if it has to make its point by going to such great and obvious lengths to insult the topic audience, rather than just explaining why without relying on said insult as an introduction.
> Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early
I wonder what this guy thinks about the "myth of depression". Is it just rationalization for laziness?
I'm so confused!
--Alan Turing