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Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

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Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#21

Post by umvi »

war1025 wrote: post #15

I like this, but also on some level I feel like it's nothing more than inspirational "rah-rah" garbage. 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 bigg…

There was an MMO game called "Kingdom of Loathing" I played back in 2006.

The right way to get more money in the game is to improve your skills/equipment and gain access to the higher level areas that have bigger monsters/better loot. (hard work)

What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open market (long work).

Eventually I figured out how to create an "autoit" script that automated the process of creating a new account, completing the tutorial, and then sending the goods over to the main account. The main account was getting very wealthy, but I should have known I needed to launder the ill-gotten gains somehow because an admin (Multi Czar) eventually caught on and all the accounts (including the main one) got banned.

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#23

Post by ericmcer »

devmunchies wrote: post #19

This makes me think of war time vs peace time. During a war, the govt will put engineers and architects into an R&D incubator with all the resources they need. To the engineers, the fact that there is a war is irrelevant, they aren't paying attention to that, they're just focussing on innovation because it's their job. Couldn't this scenario be simulated, even without war? I think of bell labs. It strange that innova…

Money is how we measure the worth of time spent. In that mindset doing hard, innovative work and failing is worse than doing nothing at all, because you lose both your time and money.

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#24

Post by njarboe »

devmunchies wrote: post #19

This makes me think of war time vs peace time. During a war, the govt will put engineers and architects into an R&D incubator with all the resources they need. To the engineers, the fact that there is a war is irrelevant, they aren't paying attention to that, they're just focussing on innovation because it's their job. Couldn't this scenario be simulated, even without war? I think of bell labs. It strange that innova…

In war time patents are suspended or the government forces everyone to cross license. Along with the hard focused work, I think this is a big reason why tech advanced so much during WWI and WWII.

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#25

Post by jl2718 »

devmunchies wrote: post #19

This makes me think of war time vs peace time. During a war, the govt will put engineers and architects into an R&D incubator with all the resources they need. To the engineers, the fact that there is a war is irrelevant, they aren't paying attention to that, they're just focussing on innovation because it's their job. Couldn't this scenario be simulated, even without war? I think of bell labs. It strange that innova…

Not in my experience (JIEDDO/Paladin in OIF/OEF). The R&D lab seems like a peacetime concept. All the ideas, all the experimentation, all the hacks that turned into programs, came from the field, often lab guys that got sent forward. The labs had their part for sending new toys, but the pace was so much faster for hacking things together at the front lines.

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#26

Post by wolco »

Alex3917 wrote: post #12
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or emotional labor. But yeah, setting up k8s would not qualify. I thought there was an older version of the same general riff in Fast Company, which I can't find right now, but here is a blog post about a version that appeared in Free Prize Inside: https://educationinnovation.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/06/ed...

It could be for someone who doesn't know what k8s is.

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#27

Post by datameta »

bullen wrote: post #13

What about "deep" work? The kind of work that requires you to understand the fundamentals of a complex system to be able to simplify/modify it for the better.

I think understanding a system enough to modify/extend/repair it would be "wide" work. If one is dipping in thoroughly enough to truly understand all components and be able to build such a system that is also open to later modification - that is "deep" work.

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#29

Post by hpoe »

devmunchies wrote: post #19

This makes me think of war time vs peace time. During a war, the govt will put engineers and architects into an R&D incubator with all the resources they need. To the engineers, the fact that there is a war is irrelevant, they aren't paying attention to that, they're just focussing on innovation because it's their job. Couldn't this scenario be simulated, even without war? I think of bell labs. It strange that innova…

Point of correction on Bell Labs. There was a war going on not a shooting shooty war, but a cold war that was motivating a lot of the research.

In war time the reason there is so much focus and emphasis is because a country is fighting for its survival, it forces efficiency and results in a brutal manner, because if you don't succeeded and out think and out maneuver the enemy people die.

In the Cold War the same tension and feeling of fighting for survival was present.

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#30

Post by highfrequency »

GCA10 wrote: post #20

This is a useful distinction, but it this misses what's actually hard about "hard work." The risk of failure is only 20% of the issue. 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…

Sounds like some interesting experiences! Would be curious to hear more details about the project and the discomforts along the way
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