Much to the chagrin of many of my fellow career programmers, I’ve always tried to operate slightly against the grain to keep things interesting. I do so not gratuitously, but because I know I’m in this profession for the marathon, and so I need to compromise instantaneous velocity to maintain {energy, sanity, motivation, ...}. I get made fun of and occasionally lambasted for it, but I also frequently outpace my organ…
I would love to have these coding challenges. But if I have to commit a Sunday evening just for it, I really don't think it's worth it.
> I remember discovering HN around 2008 when I was a teenager. > Now, it's rare for me to come across something I don't understand And here I was, reading you thinking you were Donald Knuth, I think you vastly overestimate the breadth and depth of your knowledge.
I agree with his point though, and I could have written that post myself. Its not that you fully understand everything on here, its that you are familiar enough that it removes the magic of it. I have been grappling with the same issue, in the past I could read manuals on distributed databases, but now I know enough about how those distributed systems work under the hood, its boring for me
If everything is boring to you I am pretty sure it is because it is trivial to you so it's possible you may come up with more interesting applications. I think a better explanation is that you are not as enthusiastic about CS as you think you are. When I see guys like Brian Kernighan, David Paterson or Andrew Tanenbaum still excited about stuff I cannot share your POV.
Are you going to lend him $500,000 to start this business? After all, banks and investors want to make sure they invest in the right people . Wouldn't want to throw your money away at a "risky investment". Also where are their initial customers going to come from? If you don't attend the right schools or network with the right people from early on in life, why would people go out of their way to attach themselves soc…
This is bullshit because (a) there are many VC funds now explicitly earmarked for minority founders and run by minority partners, and (b) an enormous number of successful startups are started by first generation immigrants who didn't go to fancy schools here.
The perception of first generation immigrants is a bit different than the perception of black people in the United States, generally speaking.
In addition, being a minority founder doesn't mean funding is automatic. Investors still like seeing the right credentials, even for minorities.
Maybe people are failing to understand that work is often uninteresting. The expectation that it will be and must be can itself be a cause of despair. From the economic perspective, no one cares whether you find your work interesting. You don't either when you buy a product or a service. Someone is paying you for some product or service, not to make your life fun. That's your problem. You think everyone else is havin…
This reminds me of the psychologist Daniel Nettle's assertion that there are 3 levels of happiness. The most basic is the immediate feeling of pleasure, like what you get from having sex or watching a sunset. I think you're right that some people naively think work should be like that day to day and their own intellectual stimulation is a primary concern for anyone else.
But there are also other forms of happiness. One is a generalized sense of well-being. Another is a sense of growth or flourishing and fulfilling one's potential. I think it's sort of natural that people associate these things with their careers (especially the latter). And I understand why it's disheartening to feel that at the end of the day you're a cog in a machine, that your work may actually be damaging to your well-being and distracting or sucking away time and energy from things that would allow you to flourish. Worst of all for many people in tech, you may feel that the work you do is actually net harmful to not just yourself but to your coworkers and your users.
I think you're right to call out people to take responsibility for themselves and to realize the world doesn't owe them anything, but I also think it's a more nuanced issue and there are some easy traps to fall into out there.
Much to the chagrin of many of my fellow career programmers, I’ve always tried to operate slightly against the grain to keep things interesting. I do so not gratuitously, but because I know I’m in this profession for the marathon, and so I need to compromise instantaneous velocity to maintain {energy, sanity, motivation, ...}. I get made fun of and occasionally lambasted for it, but I also frequently outpace my organ…
I would love to have these coding challenges. But if I have to commit a Sunday evening just for it, I really don't think it's worth it.
Nothing preventing you from coming up with a good problem on Friday afternoon instead :)
Much to the chagrin of many of my fellow career programmers, I’ve always tried to operate slightly against the grain to keep things interesting. I do so not gratuitously, but because I know I’m in this profession for the marathon, and so I need to compromise instantaneous velocity to maintain {energy, sanity, motivation, ...}. I get made fun of and occasionally lambasted for it, but I also frequently outpace my organ…
I used to run a "recreational computer programming" meetup once a month, (back when I lived in a large city with a nice hackerspace attended by people who weren't laser-focused on some sort of "startup mania") which was quite rewarding. I tried to steer away from the sort of "computer science" aspects and more towards the "art project" aspects, as this suited my own interests more, and I think the audience as well (a more computer-science-centric approach was tried before with poorer results, ymmv). Once this COVID nightmare is past, or managed, I may try to start something like this again, for now, it seems impossible, or at best pointless, as the best part of it was meeting with people.
A doctor gets to see the smiles that are the fruit of his labor. The engineer gets to see some metric move by a tenth of a percent.
That is a pretty optimistic view of the medical world. Almost all doctors also have to deal with massive bureaucracy, endless budget shortages, 16 hour workdays, night shifts and people under their care dying despite their best efforts.
> people under their care dying despite their best efforts
It’s like projects under my care dying despite my best efforts.
Except that, you know, nobody dies and the only thing wasted was my life.
The reason I got into tech/coding as a teen was the diy punk rock ethos. I remember spending weeks trying to figuring out if I could break drm in the latest video game ('tricking' starforce in splinter cell 3 was such a cool thing). Then I moved on to academia where I felt the ethos extended. Academia was life consuming and by the end I just had to leave. Now that I'm job hunting post-phd, I'm trying to rekindle that…
You loved being a maker. Being creative and making thinfs you care about. Jobs want you to be a machine. Reliably and mechanically creating things they care about. It’s not tech, it’s that your motivation is internal and not something they provid
> It really sucks to find out that the whole idea of it just being about the code, meritocracy blah blah blah ... isn't really true. Have you considered starting your own company so you have control of how employees are treated? More generally, this seems to me to be a potential solution to the disillusionment problem described in the article that is not often considered. Bad management and bad treatment of employees…
Are you going to lend him $500,000 to start this business? After all, banks and investors want to make sure they invest in the right people . Wouldn't want to throw your money away at a "risky investment". Also where are their initial customers going to come from? If you don't attend the right schools or network with the right people from early on in life, why would people go out of their way to attach themselves soc…
If it is true that the game is rigged, which is basically what you're saying, the only way to stop it from being rigged is to out-compete it. Just shrugging your shoulders and saying, well, there's no point in trying because the game is rigged, just means the game stays rigged forever.