alt Hacker NewsWhen you break down anything into its subtasks there's basically nothing that anyone wants to do. Sometimes the ends help justify the means too.
Replies
brazzy • 08/01/2025
You're claiming that any subtask that is unappealing automatically makes you not want to do the whole thing. Which is silly.
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missingdays • 08/01/2025
What makes you think that?
Do you think nobody wants to write and debug code, or tend to plants, or write books, day in day out?
I always wanted to program games. I programmed games as a hobby. When I graduated university there were no gamedev jobs in my region, so I went to work at Boring B2B java company.
After a while I moved to a bigger city and I started having friends who work in gamedev. They told me about crunch, bad salaries etc. I decided to keep doing Boring B2B stuff. But I went to a few job interviews in gamedev companies.
Every time the questions on the interviews were FUN. Like doing 3d math, some low level C, writing a collision detection function or simple pathfinding.
Just solving these problems made me giddy.
Maybe it's the nostalgia for the time I've learned these things as a teenager with no stress, or maybe it's just that it's something completely different to what I'm doing normally - but I felt great during these interviews.
But I'd have to get a huge salary cut and abandon work-life balance and I'm too old for this.
TL;DR: I think there's a lot of value actually looking at day-to-day problems you need to solve in your dream job, even if you decide it's not for you for different reasons.