11–20 of 62 posts
Important point: "Hard work" doesn't mean it has to be feel hard for you to do it. If you have fun setting up a K8s cluster, that's still hard work.
Producing the same exact thing can be thought as insufferable hell or unstoppable desired moment depending on the context.
I also think it's crucial for society and humans. Unless most of us are wired to seek sadomasochism.
Important point: "Hard work" doesn't mean it has to be feel hard for you to do it. If you have fun setting up a K8s cluster, that's still hard work.
Not sure setting up a k8s cluster qualifies as "hard work" the way the author describes it. It seems by "hard work" he means work requiring novelty, creativity or insight, not simply intellectual work.
https://educationinnovation.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/06/ed...
-- source unknown, common among programmers on usenet in the 1990s
I wish he would have expanded on it.
A great example of the distinction from my younger days:
We had the game GranTurismo2 back when I was 12 or so.
We wanted the really fancy "best" car in the game.
The right way to get the good cars is to improve your skill and gain access to the higher level races that have bigger prizes.
That's the "hard work" part.
What we did instead was do one of the easy races over and over and over again for a couple days until we had enough saved up in the game to buy the car.
That's "long work"
It's stupid and boring and no fun.
If you want a fulfilling life, go for the "hard work".
Which I guess is also just a stupid "rah-rah" inspirational quip.
I disagree with this, at least what the author classifies as risk. I'm more than happy to take on challenging work, work I am emotionally connected to and want to see succeed--then fail. I can deal with failure and progress on just fine because I have pretty iron clad motivation. I've worked in R&D environments most my life and I can assure you, research has a lot of failure if you're doing it correctly.
The risk that makes certain work "hard" vs others is that failure results in livelihood setbacks: not having food, not having a place to live, financial failure, health risks, not having any bit of job security, etc. Those to me are the real risks people shy away from when we talk about "hard" work.
Give me a difficult/creative problem or task and I can try for hours, days, weeks, months, years... to find a solution, but only if I know at the end of the day I'll have a reasonably comfortable life.
The way a lot of work is structured, I find "hard" work is that which has inherent livelihood risk to the person doing the work in some way, shape, or form. It could be health risk work (say a police officer), failed research resulting in lack of a job, or a poor new art collection that ruins the future career of an artist.
Our society needs to learn to be more accepting to to a few more degrees of failure than the hypercompetiveness currently allows. Less and less failure is being acceptable and it's completely unrealistic to hold all humans to these standards. Yes, we should reward high risk success but should we punish every form of failure as we often do? Sure, laziness can be masked under failure and abuse this leniency, but so can success.
Important point: "Hard work" doesn't mean it has to be feel hard for you to do it. If you have fun setting up a K8s cluster, that's still hard work.
One thing I've found interesting is that the first time I do something related to tech as long as it isn't mind boggling frustrating cough Oracle cough I enjoy learning it. The second and third times it's tolerable, but if I have to keep doing something repeatedly the only way I can enjoy it any longer is by listening to an audiobook while doing it or by automating it. As soon as I set myself to automating I realize…
Couldn't this scenario be simulated, even without war? I think of bell labs.
It strange that innovative environments, filled with hard work, aren't a priority until its a matter of life or death (of a company, nations, etc.)
Related movie by studio Ghibli (engineers innovating during war time): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises
What's central is the fact that do hard work well, you need to temporarily tear apart the solution-forming systems that have served you adequately so far -- and put them back together in a different way. In the midst of this, there's genuine discomfort and nausea. Even if you know you'll eventually get it right, having everything in pieces on the floor is very jarring.
Finding your way through a lot of missteps, near misses and roadblocks takes a special sort of perseverance. I've done this long enough in my work that I get mordant joy from tracking the misses. Versions 2, 2A, 2B and 2C were dead-ends. It's on to Versions 3, 3A, etc.
Usually version 4E or so gets the job done. And it's elegant and I'm happy again. I had one epic struggle that went into the 7s. I ended up cracking it in a borrowed lab in Arizona, because the usual settings in NYC and CT were not getting me there.
Being patient and persistent at times like that is hard.