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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)

#201

Post by solistice »

moistgorilla wrote: post #188
solistice wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still a student, but I pulled through something similar (trying to get into college), and I thought harder work would get me there. After a couple of months of sleeping 4 hours a day, and way too much coffee and ramen (some cram nights, I'd down 4 cans of nescafé,2 starbucks mocha's and 4 redbulls just to stay working, along with a bowl of cheap ramen to top it off), I started getting frequent colds, eye infectio…

This is happening to me right now. I struggle to find amid ground from working too hard and staying up till 4 am and working too little. Can you spare some advice?

Ok, the knack really seems to be work smarter, not harder. I haven't got it down to pat entirely, but I'm getting there.

If you have to work hard till 4 am to get school work done, you have a problem. You can group the problems though.

1. Wrong work Odds are you do some work that feels like you're working hard but won't get you anywhere. I had a knack for finding those and working myself stupid over them. "Biology poster? Museum Exhibit it is". Whilst that kind of work can teach you something, don't fret it, and prioritize.

2.Too much work. Don't follow in my footsteps and become an academic masochist. As said above, prioritize and cut things that aren't means to an end/enjoyable. Working on an important academic project you enjoy? Bullseye, it stays. Studying for a major exam that you require for graduation but hate? Dispatch it cleanly and quickly. There's techniques for that. Jamming on the guitar with friends? Sure, you have to relax after all. Working on a worthless elective class you hate? Do yourself a favor and chop it.

3. Handling work the wrong way I'm down to 2 hours study for a 1 hour lecture (I think you can go lower), but I have friends who spend 5 on the same thing and grasp less. Is it because my friends are stupid? Hopefully not. But they tackle it the wrong way. Efficiency whilst studying will help you cut a lot of time off.

Also, understand that we run on cycles. Sleep/Wake, Work/Rest, etc. Every project I did where I tried fighting that fact (Staying up all the time, working all the time) turned into a burning wreck. So learn how you cycle, and work with it, not against it. Trust me, it makes your life easier.

Of course, I could rant on, but most of my mental images of dealing with these issues are really strange (So studying is like a multi-stage conversion-funnel where I try to optimize for x?), so I'll just recommend you the blogs of Cal Newport and Scott H Young. http://calnewport.com/blog/ http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/

PS: You can get to little done for your taste, but working too little is mistaking the means for the end.

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

#202

Post by aaronem »

sz4kerto wrote: post #156
aaronem wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author may be a great programmer Really? He reads like a motivational speaker. What's he shipped? Where's his repo?

> What's he shipped? Where's his repo? If you have not noticed, most (90%) of programmers do not work on open-source projects or toy projects hosted on Github. There are great programmers who have never published a single line of code.

Of course I've noticed. One need not be an open-source hacker to have shipped a product, nor, perhaps, need one have shipped a product in order to be worthwhile as a teacher of programmers. One does, however, need to have done something.

His website presents him as a teacher and a motivational speaker. It also includes his claim to be a programmer, substantiation of which is rather thin on the ground. I haven't watched his videos, but if they're anything like his articles, they rarely include code, talk in bland generalities without offering much in implementation detail, and overall read as if written by someone with neither the experience he implicitly claims as a working programmer, nor anything like the level of intellectual capability and flexibility to which he aspires.

Contrast, for example, the whip-smart Steve Yegge on Agile consultants [1] -- which, not coincidentally, is how this Sonmez item appears to make his living, in collaboration with some kind of software-engineering equivalent of Kaplan, Inc. [2]. Pick whatever example you like of Sonmez's writing, and place it alongside whatever example you like of Yegge's, and perhaps you'll find it easier to see why Sonmez forces to my mind the old cliche contrasting do-ers and teachers.

His claim to be a programmer underlies his supposed authority, and his failure to demonstrate any accomplishment in the field undermines his claim; more to the point, if he were any good at it, he'd probably be earning a living by some means less distantly related to the field than selling snake oil to people who don't know any better.

[1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/10/egomania-itself.html

[2] http://www.pluralsight.com

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

#203

Post by jasonlotito »

DennisP wrote: post #185
ludicast wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this a lot. Seems genuinely useful. A simple version might be something that beeps like a seatbelt-detector if there is weight in back seat but not in front.

You'd have to calibrate it to ignore the weight of the car seat, since people leave them in place. Seems like great idea though.

Put it in the padding of the car seat, so even if it's moved, it's not forgotten.

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

#204

Post by GrinningFool »

georgemcbay wrote: post #155
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…

That's pretty terrifying. Seems like a good candidate for an "internet of things" solution in the future, eg. a baby seat with a weight sensor, thermometer and 3G data connection (or optionally, some tie in to OnStar, Sync or just the alarm system on a modern bluetooth-capable car) that could alert you and/or automatically pull down the electric windows in a panic mode. Granted, you'd have to be careful to ensure you…

From the article above:

---

or years, Fennell has been lobbying for a law requiring back-seat sensors in new cars, sensors that would sound an alarm if a child's weight remained in the seat after the ignition is turned off. Last year, she almost succeeded. The 2008 Cameron Gulbransen Kids' Transportation Safety Act -- which requires safety improvements in power windows and in rear visibility, and protections against a child accidentally setting a car in motion -- originally had a rear seat-sensor requirement, too. It never made the final bill; sponsors withdrew it, fearing they couldn't get it past a powerful auto manufacturers' lobby.

There are a few aftermarket products that alert a parent if a child remains in a car that has been turned off. These products are not huge sellers. They have likely run up against the same marketing problem that confronted three NASA engineers a few years ago.

In 2000, Chris Edwards, Terry Mack and Edward Modlin began to work on just such a product after one of their colleagues, Kevin Shelton, accidentally left his 9-month-old son to die in the parking lot of NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. The inventors patented a device with weight sensors and a keychain alarm. Based on aerospace technology, it was easy to use; it was relatively cheap, and it worked.

That was five years ago. The device still isn't on the shelves. The inventors could not find a commercial partner willing to manufacture it. One big problem was liability. If you made it, you could face enormous lawsuits if it malfunctioned and a child died. But another big problem was psychological: Marketing studies suggested it wouldn't sell well.

The problem is this simple: People think this could never happen to them

---

And it's true. When you hear these stories, what's your first thought beyond "oh that poor kid". Usually: "how could her parent have done that to her? What kind of parent could possibly forget his/her child in the car?"

Maybe that's not your initial response, but it's very likely somewhere in the chain unless you've read up on it or know someone it's happened to. And that response demonstrates why this wouldn't sell: if you don't think yo could make such a mistake you also don't see a need to protect against it.

Might work if it were accompanied by a public awareness campaign, kind f like was done to get parents to put their kids on their backs. But the actual technology - hell, the products themselves - already exist. People just don't see it as a useful technology without that additional push.

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

#205

Post by BWStearns »

fleitz wrote: post #128
BWStearns wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking advantage of an opportunity while somewhere someone doesn't have as many opportunities as yesterday does not necessarily translate to "you took their opportunity". In what sense is getting yours "at the expense of others" unless you have achieved it by deceit, fraud, or force? If you're referring to general technologically driven unemployment, then yes in a very broad sense programmers do profit at the expense…

They'd be doing everyone in the other company a favor by killing it, the other company is inefficient and the population as a whole suffers for it wasting the resources it does instead of those resources being freed up to do something more productive.

Well yes. I agree with you. That last question was supposed to come across as exasperated and irritated, not as an endorsement of preserving failing companies out of short sighted compassion. There are serious questions that need to be solved regarding the likelihood that double-digit percentages of the US workforce will be economically unviable, but those are separate from issues of even aggregate microeconomic competitive questions.

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

#206

Post by crucini »

rprospero wrote: post #117
StandardFuture wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...there are only 'points' awarded for accomplishing things.Make sure you accomplish the right things in the right way. Exactly, and I find a complete bias towards hard work for the sake of "feeling good" about your hard work is actually ... lazy. Feeling good about tediously slaving away at manually inserting data into a database rather than coding a handler to automate that is actually working hard to avoid doing…

I largely agree with you and am usually the first to start automating things. However, I'll also say that sometimes doing it the boring, hard way really is the smart way to handle it. I've seen the pressure to work smarter used to spend weeks automating a system that could be performed by hand in hours. Using an hour to write a program that saves a month of work is smart. Using a month to write a program that saves a…

But it's not always that clear-cut a difference in time. And the manual way has more problems. Quite often you are asked to do the same task again a bit later. At which point you wish you had automated the first time.

The manual way also tends to be error-prone and unreproducible.

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

#207

Post by Helianthus »

moistgorilla wrote: post #188
solistice wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still a student, but I pulled through something similar (trying to get into college), and I thought harder work would get me there. After a couple of months of sleeping 4 hours a day, and way too much coffee and ramen (some cram nights, I'd down 4 cans of nescafé,2 starbucks mocha's and 4 redbulls just to stay working, along with a bowl of cheap ramen to top it off), I started getting frequent colds, eye infectio…

This is happening to me right now. I struggle to find amid ground from working too hard and staying up till 4 am and working too little. Can you spare some advice?

solistice gave you advice that runs the danger of telling you to work harder at burning yourself out. Given that I'm also giving advice, take that with a grain of salt.

"Make small changes," he suggests.

If you're really on the burnout train, your life is out of control because of your internal pressure to work. You want to be overworking yourself.

Some of that internal pressure is because of external pressure that you've accepted. You want the grades--do you want them, or are you running on others' expectations, and accepting them into your life?

My advice is, be prepared to make big changes. That's not even right: be prepared for big changes to happen to you. Burnout means you lose something.

And so what I should say is, be ready to give it up. You might be really happy if you didn't have all this internal pressure driving you to work all the time.

Are you doing it for them? Or are you doing it for you?

Don't be afraid to quit.

---

That said, you'll do your best work when you're under pressure you're not sure you can handle.

My impression is that you're a student. Apparently you're not under so much pressure that you don't have time to spare asking for advice.

I don't know if you're working too hard. There is always something to be said for keeping a little voice in your mind telling you to "Work harder."

But if it comes crashing down, you have a right to quit and to drastically change your life.

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

#208

Post by ErikAugust »

dkoch wrote: post #195
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…

I'm the parent of two toddlers and I can see how it happens. It's not quite as serious as leaving them in a hot car, but I've been in a rush and so distracted by work or life that I've put them in the car and driven away without remembering to fully buckle them into their carseats. Realizing that you've potentially endangered them is an awful feeling, and a stark reminder to slow down and remember what's important in…

Smart kids.

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

#209

Post by [deleted] »

solistice wrote: post #180
klt0825 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm still a student, but I pulled through something similar (trying to get into college), and I thought harder work would get me there. After a couple of months of sleeping 4 hours a day, and way too much coffee and ramen (some cram nights, I'd down 4 cans of nescafé,2 starbucks mocha's and 4 redbulls just to stay working, along with a bowl of cheap ramen to top it off), I started getting frequent colds, eye infectio…

[deleted]

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

#210

Post by beachstartup »

klt0825 wrote: post #170
fennecfoxen wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> developed a slew of transient (but terrifying) neurological problems.

well don't stop there - what were they? this is important information for the HN crowd.

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