alt Hacker NewsFace it: you're a crazy person
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I think this is substantively correct, if misguided: people are going to stick metaphorical fingers in their ears and go LA LA LA LA LA when you explain what doing <x> actually involved, rather than wake up to how being an <x> is different to their dreams.
And very probably, it's a good thing. Otherwise, we'd still be banging the rocks together.
If you enter this comments section without having read most of the article: I advise to read it till the end, no regrets.
My wife sees what I do as "sitting in a chair all day" and tells me all the time she could not do what I do.
A succinct way to put this as career advice is: do the job with the tedium you love. Doing what you love is nice and all but most jobs aren’t just the top line work so finding a job where you love the tedious parts and might not even consider them tedious is what you want.
Oh damn, it turns out I don't like anything. Maybe it's time to get my meds adjusted.
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.)
Not sure how much unpacking most founders do beforehand. "We do these things not because they're easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy."
This is a great piece. My biggest takeaway is that next time if you find someone's job fascinating -- ask them how do you spend their day doing it?
LOTS of thoughts here:
> 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.
I love this podcast and substack. He is an artist in many ways : revealing from common observations into something revelatory, curious, and funny
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/weird-4
> The goal in life isn't to find something you love, it's to find something you can get realllll weird about.
That's... why I'm here.
I want the same thing I've always wanted. To be a software engineer in the 1990's.
I want to come to work and see pyramids of Jolt Cola on the desks.
And for lunch, we'll go out as a team in our Honda Civics to get some $3 Chinese food.
In the lobby, we'll have back issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal stacked up on the side tables.
We'll merge our code by copying it onto floppies and handing it to that one dude.
At some point we might setup a machine with a modem so you could dial in, telnet to a machine and check your email with pine.
When you leave work at 5:30pm, you're done for the day.
Two things:
> In my experience, whenever you unpack somebody, you inevitably discover something extremely weird about them. [...]
I've spoken to ca. 300 people through the Say Hi page on my site. All of them, without a single exception, and I am not exaggerating, were beautifully weird people.
(When a random person calls me, I usually start the call with "So, who/why the fuck are you?". It's cheesy, even for my standards, but it works really well for what I'm getting out of these calls.) God, I wish I had the ease of photographers like Mary Ellen Mark, being able to approach people like that more often, being able to tap into that weirdness with even more people.
> 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?” [...] > These questions sound so stupid that it’s no wonder no one asks them, and yet, somehow, the answers often surprise us.
In my experience (including the calls I've had in the past), that's not necessarily true -- I ask those questions myself all the time, sometimes to the point of overthinking instead of just trying things out. For me, a better question is: what is the specific thing that attracts me to the idea of doing x/becoming x. What is the feeling I'm looking for/getting when thinking about this? It's not that much different from the question mentioned by the author, but (to me) it feels more productive and leads to more actionable results.
OP is asking questions related to opening a coffeehouse, an establishment that focuses on coffee and where you can order a wide range of coffee drinks.
OP's friend might very well want to open a coffee shop, a small diner where you can perhaps order two kinds of coffee - caf or decaf. Nobody cares where the beans come from.
I'm somewhat disappointed that the article did not describe how you must be crazy to enjoy programming.
Ctrl-F "Profit"
Face it: you've missed the point of business.
This article presents FOMO as a decision making strategy. Completely bizarre.
> The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner.
If we spent time overthinking everything, nothing would get done because circumstances are seldom perfect. A lot of it is about making stuff up as you go. Of course, reality almost never matches our imaginations either and there unpacking might help. At the same time, not everyone is passionate about the details of every job and as long as it puts food on the table (or something in the retirement account), it's good enough.
> High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack because the upsides are obvious and appealing, while the downsides are often deliberately hidden and tolerable only to a tiny minority. For instance, shortly after college, I thought I would post a few funny videos on YouTube and, you know, become instantly famous.
Most people who try at anything won't see much success, especially when that depends on standing out from others.
Most actors won't be in box office hits. Most content creators will be relatively obscure. Most software devs will write boring CRUD apps in sub-optimal environments and it will sometimes be a bit scrappy. Most employees won't be employee of the month or whatever. Same for trying to run your own business, it being profitable in any sense is already more of a success than one might think. Actually same for various creative pursuits, e.g. when people spend months working on a video game of their own, release it... and realize that they've spent thousands of dollars worth of time and won't even make that back... while something seemingly simplistic like Vampire Survivors blow up and inspire an entire genre overnight. It's the same with having a YouTube channel - you might do ten uploads and see no success. Hundred uploads and see no success. Even a thousand videos and no success yet. Meanwhile, there's someone else who seems to get 10x-100x more views or whatever, after starting building a channel at a similar time to you. You might be able to learn from them... or it might just be some inherent characteristics that you don't have and that's that.
Long story short, maybe there is something you excel at and you just have to find it. Statistically (for a general population), probably not. I think a big problem of our time is being exposed to the very best wherever you look - from the highlights of the lives of attractive people on social media, to YouTube videos produced to a crazy high degree of quality, to completely mismatched expectations of what the mediocrity of real life will look like for most folks.
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>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.