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Work Hard (2007)

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Re: Work Hard (2007)

#101

Post by breck »

spenczar5 wrote: post #95
TrackerFF wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL Bode, Hamming, Shannon, Tukey, et. al all worked at Bell Labs around the same time. Wonder what the culture must've been like, those are all household names in signal processing, control, information theory.

Richard Hamming wrote a book, "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering", which - despite its name - is more or less a memoir of his own scientific career. It's a fun read if you're interested in that culture.

Best book I've read in a long while. I hope to reread every few years.

Re: Work Hard (2007)

#102

Post by philosopher1234 »

srean wrote: post #90
reidjs wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He means that those customers wouldn't exist in the first place if it weren't for the messy code.

When things eventually break, its possible that those customers and more would leave also because of that same code.

Anything is possible. Better to focus on what is likely. Did you stop using google over any of their outages? Most people didn't. These things matter, but people in software overstate them.

Re: Work Hard (2007)

#103

Post by spoonjim »

didibus wrote: post #67
spoonjim wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His advice isn’t for how to get rich in crypto, it’s for how to succeed in academic mathematics. I can’t imagine that anyone has ever “lucked” their way into that.

Nowadays people extend luck to include: - Your genetics - Your intrinsic abilities - Your intrinsic tastes - Your parents - The teachers you had - The time you were born in - The environment you were born in - Etc. So for example for mathematics you'd assume you need some predisposed genetics, you need some good education towards it, access to books and material, you need to be someone who loves doing math, you need…

Well if you take that all as “luck” then certainly your predisposition to hard work is also “luck,” at which point you’ve denied free will, which might actually be true but isn’t very actionable.

Re: Work Hard (2007)

#104

Post by m0zg »

Same thing in a lot fewer words, for "visual thinkers" among us: https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

This holds up really well, in any STEM field, not just mathematics. Celebrate those dimples on the surface of human knowledge, if you can, in fact, even make them. Very few people can, and our future depends on them.

Re: Work Hard (2007)

#105

Post by TameAntelope »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #93
TameAntelope wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of the submission is that even when high IQ is required, you also need to "work hard" to do anything substantial. The common thread is "work hard", not "be smart", but people obsess over intelligence/natural gifts, and consistently underestimate the "ditch diggers". Jobs was a ditch digger. Gates was a ditch digger. Musk is a ditch digger. PG is a ditch digger. Tao is a ditch digger. Jordan was a ditc…

You do need both, and therein lies the problem. If you don't have the IQ, your hard work is meaningless.

Yes, you need both to be the best in the world in a given field, but why is that a problem?

Re: Work Hard (2007)

#106

Post by darkerside »

albatross13 wrote: post #71
dimitrios1 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think like this too, but now-a-days, it's more like "What a luxury to be in a position where you get paid to untangle a 600 line bash script" That is, usually these few hard workers are typically the ones responsible for getting a company to profitability precisely because of their GSD attitude. Now that the company has some runway, the architecture and refactoring can proceed.

I can assure you, when shit is broken in production and customers are knocking at the door threatening to cancel it is not a luxury to find out these types of things...let alone start untangling the web.

You can always leave if you're not happy. Parent's point is that without that 600 line bash script person, your company/job might not even exist.

I'll remind you that, for every failing 600 line bash script you debug, there are probably 20 others that are sitting there, just working.

Re: Work Hard (2007)

#107

Post by rednerrus »

themacguffinman wrote: post #78
paulpauper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if you work hard and derive meaning from your work

I can certainly understand how one can derive meaning from a trade or profession, but I would find it difficult to believe that anyone could really do that for menial jobs like a cashier or warehouse packer. These jobs are dead ends, they don't have a meaningful spectrum of quality and you're little more than a warm body. A comedian (David Mitchell) once joked that he's proud of the UK's terrible service reputation.…

The only way to make those jobs manageable is to create some sense of meaning and mastery out of them. You're always striving to do a little bit better job. You remind yourself of the importance of what you're doing. If you have a good manager, they're trying to find ways to give you autonomy in what you're doing.

Re: Work Hard (2007)

#108

Post by MaysonL »

bserge wrote: post #31

On a related note, this always trickles down to low level managers who then proceed to tell it to the floor workers. Trying to motivate a cleaner, assembly operative, driver, cashier, warehouse operative, packer and other low level workers with it is like telling them to go fuck themselves. It sounds like bullshit. It is bullshit. No one fucking loves these jobs. There's nothing to aspire to. Working hard means just…

I used to work at a company where the janitor, by working hard, and being willing to step up to opportunities he was offered, became a shift supervisor. Not every company is like that, true, maybe almost none are, but it can happen. Reminds me of the concept "return on luck" to go along with "return on investment".

Re: Work Hard (2007)

#109

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

gfodor wrote: post #23
herodoturtle wrote: post #4

> there is an important distinction between “working hard” and “maximising the number of hours during which one works”. In particular, forcing oneself to work even when one is tired, unmotivated, unprepared, or distracted with other tasks can end up being counterproductive to one’s long-term work productivity, and there is a saturation point beyond which pushing oneself to work even longer will actually reduce the to…

I think there's an important point here too that cuts against a lot of memes: it's important to keep working hard right up until this point. A lot of people presume that if they put in a solid day's work they're going to do just as well as someone who is a "work-a-holic." That's not a great mental model, if the work-a-holic is working more but not so much they are hitting these problems mentioned. There's a fairly wi…

> it's important to keep working hard right up until this point

I'm not sure there's any real empirical evidence for this in the absolute way you stated it.

There are plenty of highly productive creative people who do 4 hours of highly focused work a day and then spend the rest of their time walking around a garden. If your goal is to produce great lasting work that seems to be a formula that works a lot.

Working up to your limit is useful for other scenarios, like where you want to crank out much more routine work. If you want to get promoted in a structured environment like a big tech company, then this strategy works well.

There are definitely cultures that value working long hours. You see it both in business and in academia, and I'm not aware of any evidence that it's better than the system where you empower workers to focus on as they need to and then take the time they need to recharge.

Re: Work Hard (2007)

#110

Post by yesenadam »

spenczar5 wrote: post #95
TrackerFF wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL Bode, Hamming, Shannon, Tukey, et. al all worked at Bell Labs around the same time. Wonder what the culture must've been like, those are all household names in signal processing, control, information theory.

Richard Hamming wrote a book, "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering", which - despite its name - is more or less a memoir of his own scientific career. It's a fun read if you're interested in that culture.

From the preface, "After many years of pressure and encouragement from friends, I decided to write up the graduate course in engineering I teach at the U.S.Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. ...In this series of lectures I try to communicate to students what cannot be said in words—the essence of style in science and engineering. ...I have found that the personal story is far, far more effective than the impersonal one; hence there is necessarily an aura of “bragging” in the book that is unavoidable."

You can watch him giving that 31-lecture course in 1995 here

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30

Enjoy! It's wonderful. (The last lecture is the famous "You and Your Research" that he gave many times.)

I've really enjoyed his books too, from Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers to Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics. They're all drenched with experience.

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