Craftsmanship – The Alternative to the Four Hour Work Week Mindset (2018)

Well capitalism is about arbitrage, so yeah you can buy low and sell high somewhere else. Problem with that is everyone does it and there's no market differentiation.

I absolutely think you need craftsmanship. If you don't have it you have to pay for it or find someone who does. If you open a restaurant you need a chef if you release music you need a singer if you write code you need some developer to give you an edge.

You can be some generalist who's good at raising money and coding at the same time to save some pennies or you can be really good at raising money and hire someone to deal with the coding. The second is way more likely to succeed. Not to mention you can usually tell what startups will succeed by one simple test. Walk around their shop after hours and on the weekend, the ones that will succeed have people (persons) working after hours. At least, that's one way of telling.

So there is no avoiding your craft if you build a product. Yes you can be generalist in your approach and solve general problems but to build a big enough box to catch everyone you have to be very, very good at building boxes.

The alternative is to constantly raise as much money as possible and hire everyone under the sun but eventually you will run up against a wall. If you can raise Series A B C D E F H ad infinitum rounds and become the next Uber sure you can hire "generalist" programmers who only know algorithms and nothing domain specific or technology specific but then you are just shifting the problem... Instead of guy who has 30 years of C++ you hire guy (or girl) who can raise so many money bags your company takes over the world.

So you always need craftsmanship of some kind and the less you have the more money you need (which is a craft itself).

If you want authentic and high quality you need craft.

If you're not building a lifestyle business you need craft to operate as a business.

Who do you really think has a chance at success the guy who works 4 hours a week or the guy who puts time in their work?

You need more but you need different kinds. There's no way to avoid the work, and you got to be good at the work to get anywhere. Marketing is a craft so is sales so is raising money so is writing. There's no way around it and "4 week work week" is probably more applicable to the time of dropshipping, blogging, affiliate marketing and other lifestyle business than anything concerned with "time to market".

Ignore craft at your own peril (cannot go anywhere without a very experienced CTO).

A question to HN: reading this and other discussions, it seems to me that "craftsmen" are being rated by how good a business they run (or are contributing to). Similarly with the word "professional". I'd like to ask, what then would be the word for a "craftsmen" by rated how good the work is at its purpose (and without the usual cop-out of redefining "good" as value in dollars)?

Optimization for "good work" is only partially aligned with "good business"; frequently, the two are at odds. A good product, in my view, is one that lets the user achieve their goals as efficiently as possible, endures for as long these goals need to be achieved (often lifetime or more), and - after meeting these constraints - is also optimized to minimize the price and use of materials. It's the kind of product that you buy once, are happy about it, and when you no longer need it, give or sell to someone else. It's your grandfather's watch, passed on to you by your parents, and who you'll one day pass on to your kid. It's the furniture you've inherited with the house that remembers World War II, but is still almost as good as new. It's the forever repairable Soviet-era sound amplifiers or irons for clothes. It's the web page your bank had three redesigns and two SPA frameworks ago.

A good "professional" would take a look at one of such products and declare them bad. Overengineered. Because what's "professional", what's good for business, are products that break fast (ensuring recurring revenue) and are as cheap as possible to make. Do they solve 100% of the problems it was supposed to? Doesn't have to, customers don't know that when buying, and when they figure it out, it'll be easier for them to learn to deal with missing part of functionality, or learn to be extra careful around the product, than it'll be for them to spend money on something else. Whatever other defects there may be, we can cheaply cover for with sales&marketing. What a "professional" does is ensures their work makes them (or their employer) maximum amount of money for minimum amount of effort.

So, HN, I'm looking for a word that describes the person, the art, of doing good work and good products, as defined above, in contrast to being a "professional", which I increasingly despise of.

Perhaps "artisan", although in practice I don't think there is a single word. Instead, people tend to use the domain-specific term for whatever type of true craftsman they are referring to. "Welder" "Machinist" "Watchmaker" "Tailor" "Woodworker" etc.

Also as an aside, I think the whole "craft" term was co-opted by people who wanted to cash in on the perception of quality and care when really they just wanted better small business margins. It used to mean something more.

You've built a false dichotomy between over-engineering and planned obsolescence. Outside of a few cases you can still buy the watch that will last 60 years or the amp that will last 20.

The problem is that most people don't want to pay $2k for an amp when it's only benefit over a $400 one is that it'll work 16 more years. Most folks don't care to buy a $400 watch when you can get a nice one for $40. And, a lot more folks can afford watches and amps these days as a result.