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The Hacker News Generation (Afraid of Hard Work)

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Re: The Hacker News Generation (Afraid of Hard Work)

#161

Post by kybernetyk »

ionforce wrote: post #135
RyanZAG wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not ironic in the slightest. He's correct - the HN crowd is definitely afraid of slaving away for hours working on our own or other people's ideas that are simply not useful to the world around us. We're the guys who can dedicate our lives to the right cause and actually change human civilization in some small way (eg. searching Google for recipes, booking your holiday with some taps on a screen, paying your bil…

I think you're misconstruing the linked article. Answer the following. In a generation raised to believe that "how I feel" is the metric to be optimized, who will do work that does not provide "a positive amount of feels". Not all work is sexy work. And loads of people are inheriting this prima donna attitude of, well, I'm above unsexy work. How do you reconcile this?

What's there to reconcile?

Let people who are OK with doing boring work do the work (and get paid well) and let people who are more about the "feels" pursue their interests.

That way everyone wins and no one needs to do something he/she doesn't want to do.

Re: The Hacker News Generation (Afraid of Hard Work)

#162

Post by scott_s »

rodgerd wrote: post #141
Amadou wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was in June, so it's summer, and the father was supposed to drop the baby off at daycare, but forgot; don't know why... but came and left the baby in the car, and came into work. As an aside... There was a Pulitzer Prize winning article about the phenomenon of parents forgetting their children in the backseat and leaving them to die in the heat. The main take-away is that it can happen to anyone. It isn't a matt…

Do not read that story, by the way, unless you want nightmares.

I read it a year or so ago, and yes, it is terrifying.

Re: The Hacker News Generation (Afraid of Hard Work)

#163

Post by Iftheshoefits »

smellf wrote: post #129
dclusin wrote: post #21

I agree with what the author is saying, however, I think that the overall message of sticking with something, and not leaving when you encounter the first sign of monotony is applicable to software engineering more specifically than the author describes. I will provide an anecdote from my career to illustrate what I mean. I have been working at the same company for almost 4 years. During those 4 years I have worked o…

Agreed. The guy is railing against the emerging twitterati culture of folks who bounce from one gig to the next, blurting about the trendiest new Javascript library and spewing garbage code that someone else then gets to maintain.

I don't know. I've had a "new every two" experience over the last decade, and I still use "old" languages (C, C++, Fortran, even some Ada).

I'm in my mid-30s, and my view is that the kind of person you're talking about isn't restricted to any "emerging twitterati" culture. "Fad followers" exist in every age demographic.

Also, my "new every two" experiences give me a lot more breadth of experience than some poor "lifer's" years slogging away maintaining his project. It also gives me more depth in each area--because I haven't been fossilizing over the same code, in the same language, for the same project, day in and day out.

As an edit, I'll add: the (relative) ease with which (some) of the "youth" in our profession are able to switch things up so regularly ought to be viewed as a virtue. I can't stand the culture of sharing all the intimate personal details of their lives on the internet, but this is one thing which in my view they do right.

Re: The Hacker News Generation (Afraid of Hard Work)

#164

Post by dragonwriter »

jsonmez wrote: post #81
Smudge wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

loren concluded his post with this: > I'm going to build whatever keeps me up at night. I have a long list, but there's one project that I'm particularly passionate about. It might turn into a startup. It might not. Who knows. So, sounds like it was exactly what he said in his post.

You are still missing it. Doing whatever you passionate about from a long list is not the same thing as committing to meaningful work over the long haul. You have to be able to make it through what I believe Seth Godin calls "the dip."

> You are still missing it. Doing whatever you passionate about from a long list is not the same thing as committing to meaningful work over the long haul.

Yeah, it is. Meaningful is subjective, and it is committing to do what is meaningful to the person doing the work.

> You have to be able to make it through what I believe Seth Godin calls "the dip."

"Have to"...why? So you can be a good cog in someone else's machine?

Re: The Hacker News Generation (Afraid of Hard Work)

#165

Post by scott_s »

ionforce wrote: post #135
RyanZAG wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not ironic in the slightest. He's correct - the HN crowd is definitely afraid of slaving away for hours working on our own or other people's ideas that are simply not useful to the world around us. We're the guys who can dedicate our lives to the right cause and actually change human civilization in some small way (eg. searching Google for recipes, booking your holiday with some taps on a screen, paying your bil…

I think you're misconstruing the linked article. Answer the following. In a generation raised to believe that "how I feel" is the metric to be optimized, who will do work that does not provide "a positive amount of feels". Not all work is sexy work. And loads of people are inheriting this prima donna attitude of, well, I'm above unsexy work. How do you reconcile this?

You're assuming that people have been raised a certain way, and will act a certain way. Both are suppositions.

Regardless, if enough people don't do "unsexy" work, "unsexy" work will start paying enough that people who are more mercenary about their jobs start doing it.

Re: The Hacker News Generation (Afraid of Hard Work)

#166

Post by dkuntz2 »

Smudge wrote: post #132
Arjuna wrote: post #89

Phrases like, "The myth of burn out" and "Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early" give me great pause. Burn out is real . It is dangerous, and even an overwhelming, driving passion for your work, your creation, can lead to disaster. Ed Catmull recounted this story about the production of Toy Story 2 [1]: "So we came back, John [Lasseter] told the story crew to take a good rest over the holidays, and c…

It's worth noting that the original "i quit" post never mentioned burnout. I didn't get the impression that it had anything to do with loren's reason for leaving, so it's strange for the reply post to bring it up like that.

This article wasn't solely a response to that one post, but to the general feeling perpetuated by HN. There are a good deal of other posts that show up on HN where someone misattributes boredom to burnout.

Re: The Hacker News Generation (Afraid of Hard Work)

#167

Post by jsonmez »

aragot wrote: post #158

Hi John Snmez, I am one of those you talk about: I've left my job at the most awesomest start up in the world to create my company. I believe I've failed, failed to stay in those companies, failed to get value out of my employments, even if my 6-years carrer got me into world class places, even though I was the last guy in the office every day and I never look at HN at work. I admit working hard isn't even enough, on…

Pick a direction, ride it out to see where it goes. If it doesn't work out, start again. All I am saying is don't get in the cab and pay the fair and them jump out of the window when the ride gets bumpy. Hang on a bit, ride through the bumps and get to your destination. Perhaps this takes a year or 2, but don't give up before you get there because you are bored or the work is hard.

Re: The Hacker News Generation (Afraid of Hard Work)

#168

Post by InclinedPlane »

AJ007 wrote: post #90
enjo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 on the burnout piece. It's a complicated thing. I'd liken it to depression. Lots and lots of people constantly fret about being "depressed". Over time it became easy to dismiss depression as a legitimate illness. Apparently every time you feel sad you're depressed, the whole thing just loses its meaning. It wasn't until I met someone who suffered from true clinical depression did I understand exactly the seriousne…

Whats the timeline for real burnout? I describe burnout is any time an individuals focus drops to the point that their work quality potentially becomes damaging rather than adding value.

Burnout isn't an intolerance for drudgery. Everyone has that to a certain degree and sometimes that intolerance can become elevated due to overwork, boredom, stress, etc.

Burnout, in my opinion, is the loss of ability to cope even with ordinary levels of difficulty and stress in the workplace. Someone who is burnt out no longer has any degree of confidence in their ability to achieve difficult objectives. And their ability to do productive work is diminished to a tiny fraction of what they were capable of before. It's not just that they are incapable of doing things that were at the limit of their ability before, it's also that tasks which were well within their grasp are now struggles, if they are able to do them at all.

It's fear, aversion, in some cases clinical depression, and loss of confidence. In many ways it bears a lot of similarity with PTSD or shell-shock: the most serious cases of burnout involve constantly reliving past failures or stresses at work, avoidance of triggers, anhedonia, increased irritability, lack of concentration, feelings of shame and hopelessness, etc. I'm not implying that PTSD and burnout are necessarily comparable life-events per se but it seems likely they share some cognitive pathways.

Re: The Hacker News Generation (Afraid of Hard Work)

#169

Post by aragot »

brianmcconnell wrote: post #88

I agree 100% with the author about the spoiled brat mentality of this generation of developers. I personally prefer to hire older developers because a) they tend to be steady producers, and b) they have the maturity to understand that sometimes work sucks and c) provided managers don't treat them like shit, they tend to stick around. The flip side of the deal is I am not going to work them to death or make unreasonab…

> b) they have the maturity to understand that sometimes work sucks and c) provided managers don't treat them like shit, they tend to stick around.

Flip it around: What happens when you pay non-seniors at a non-senior rate? They go get a better paid job. How surprising.

Re: The Hacker News Generation (Afraid of Hard Work)

#170

Post by klt0825 »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #107
Arjuna wrote: post #89

Phrases like, "The myth of burn out" and "Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early" give me great pause. Burn out is real . It is dangerous, and even an overwhelming, driving passion for your work, your creation, can lead to disaster. Ed Catmull recounted this story about the production of Toy Story 2 [1]: "So we came back, John [Lasseter] told the story crew to take a good rest over the holidays, and c…

Also, burn-out is NOT a rationalization for giving up early. Burn-out is when you should have given up a long time ago, but you keep pushing yourself too hard instead, and then you fall apart and have difficulty functioning as a human being (to say nothing of performing your job). The article author might have a point or two about a variety of young actors in the workforce, but they're masked by this and other bits o…

Burnout in tech circles is like Depression in the population in general. 90% of people who say they have it really don't and the people who say it doesn't exist have no idea what in the world they are talking about. But for those who have it, it is un-mistakenly terrible.

I put in 80+ hour work weeks for 4 years straight at my last job and it got to a point where I was physically breaking down and developed a slew of transient (but terrifying) neurological problems. It got so bad I actually saw a neurologist who basically said that I was seeing the manifestation of extreme stress and had to stop (He actually pushed me to find a new job, interestingly.)

To your point, it never dawned on me that I was working too much. I had various problems that needed solutions and I was much too engulfed in the pursuit of their solution to really see what was happening until it became impossible to ignore. I'd venture to say most people with burnout are not driven there by someone or something but by themselves.

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