141–150 of 239 posts
> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too. I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. I like the Integrit…
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Why the need to insert this crypto spam ?
> " 2. Avoid Debt Like the Plague" Does anyone else feel like they overindex on this principle? I have on multiple occasions found myself too conservative to take advantage of the leverage available to me. (Example: doing a refinance in 2020 I could have taken out a 30-year mortgage at the rock-bottom rate, but chose to do 15. This is irrational given that I could have taken all the money I didn't have to pay toward…
Like alcohol or drugs, debt can easily be abused, and there is no shortage of people and corporations waiting to make a profit from selling you debt, alcohol and drugs in difficult or joyous circumstances.
Using debt as a tool requires a degree of "know thyself" wisdom and financial literacy that many people struggle to possess in their best times, let alone hold onto in their worst times. So the "overcorrecting" edicts ("avoid debt like the plague") probably do more harm than good, because most people don't care about the finer/nuanced details of these things and want simple rules to follow through good times and (especially) bad times.
The motivation behind the statement is all about avoiding ruin, not maximizing opportunities or even happiness. They're different goals but it's easy to confuse one for the other.
One of my thoughts is that it's not easy for people to discover what they're truly good at. The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. Just as no one thinks they're good at their heartbeat and breathing. Because you have the talent to be good at them from the beginning,…
As a prelude, I resonate somewhat with your approach to finding what we're good at. I don't look at how good we are at something, but more at a sort of quality of "effortlessness". Though, now that I am re-reading the pseudo-blog-post (it's from more than a year ago), I am not convinced this is the best word, as it sort of...makes it seem like people didn't put in work!
Anyway, my opinion:
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I recently caught myself thinking about how different people do and feel about certain kinds of work in different ways.
I think we often tend to think in two axes. We think about liking to do something and not liking — which is one axis (our enjoyment). And there’s also the axis of being bad or good at it, which is the axis of quality.
It seems to me that we think about work according to these two axes. However, I don't think this is the full picture. By which I mean that I think it's possible for you to like something, and for you to be able to be good at something (i.e. to produce good, even incredible quality work), while still having a third axis tied to this equation.
The Effort Axis.
The third axis, to me is, is the effort axis. We can be good at something and enjoy it, but it can still take us a lot of effort. People kind of think about passion, or being "born to do something" (some say it's a "calling"). I think that when you have a calling, you are deep into the third axis, and it is very likely you are also deep into the other axes.
The third axis essentially means that things should feel effortless.
You can be very good at something, but it can still take a while for you to produce good results. And especially if it doesn't feel effortless, it often means that you'll procrastinate more, and that you'll delay it. That it’ll weigh heavier on your mind. But if it feels effortless, you just want more and more and more of it.
This thought came to me when I thought about working on breaking down a project into user stories and, most of all, adding them and meticulously creating them in the appropriate task management software. This is something that I enjoy a lot. It's something that I actually believe I can produce quality results in. And if I really put my mind into it, I can actually do it fast.
But it doesn't feel effortless.
When I finalize it, I feel very drained. Again, I can feel that I've made good progress, that I've produced something very good, and I can genuinely think, "Yeah, I really liked doing this", but I feel very tired. Whereas I think I can code very effortlessly. I think I can effortlessly devise very complex solutions, or very simple solutions for complex problems. And I think it's clearly my "calling".
Today a colleague had the responsibility of handling this process of creating tasks and everything else. And I was marveled at how effortlessly he was doing it all. It's not that he has a lot of experience, or that his results were outrageously good (they were good, but not remarkable). It's just that it clearly felt effortless to him. And I thought: Now, this is something that we should focus this person on.
It's actually the first time they've done it. We gave him the challenge, like we have given other people, and it was amazing. It felt great to work with someone who was able to do things effortlessly.
People often say that you should surround yourself with the best quality workers, the ones who produce incredible results, the ones that have passion. Let's be clear: I have passion about working on those user stories, but it's not effortless.
So I think that you should actually surround yourself with people for whom the work feels effortless.
And at times, it may actually not be the best quality work, but it’ll drive them. They will have more energy. And you will marvel at the way in which it was not a problem for them. They looked at it, they started attacking the problem, and they imbued this wave of positivity — this unshakable belief that they were going to do it.
Even if the results weren't the best, you can feel that they will iterate over it, and they will do it quickly enough and with enough quality because it is effortless for them.
Do not underestimate the power of doing something effortlessly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>established respectable professions >Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism In America, in 2026, this is a particularly dark joke.
I think this is the comment that drives me off this site permanently. It’s been a good decade and a half.
I studied accounting in part because my father was an engineer at a public company that was rocked by an accounting scandal. It impacted my family in many ways for years and left deep impressions on me during my formative years.
There are many CPAs who believe strongly that part of their job is protecting the public interest. I have seen more than a handful go to the mat for things that were highly principled. Sometimes they did so knowing that they were risking their job / career / reputation. It's not a patient dying on the table sure, but I know many who take enormous pride in their responsibilities as accountants. I have seen lots of CPAs standing up for what is right, and I have watched executive teams yield to them almost as often.
It's easy to get cynical, but there's lots of good ones out there.
> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too. I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. I like the Integrit…
I am not. And I am really wary of retirees giving advice on skipping the grind, enjoy life and choose a warm feeling job. I don’t have a house and if next round of layoffs hits, it is a ticking clock for my family. I’ll take extra bucks please.
> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too. I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. I like the Integrit…
> and that's pretty important to me The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble. I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject miser…
> List your debts. Create a concrete plan to eliminate them, starting with the smallest. Avoid taking on any new debt this month. This could be surprisingly hard. You can't get income at some point, and you still have obligations, e.g. a family. You have some things which are hard to reduce (e.g. monthly telecom payments) or have significant upfront costs (you can move far enough to reduce rental costs, but the move…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do, but I also use LLMs in a manner that seems drastically different, from most folks here. I use the standard $20/ChatGPT Pro sub, and run Thinking 5.5 as a chat interface. I use it like a "trusted personal advisor," as opposed to a "black box employee." I'm intimately involved in almost every step of the development process. Most of what I ask from the LLM, is function-length snippets. It's made a huge difference…
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