The Hacker News Generation (Afraid of Hard Work)

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 bills without going to the post office). However, if we're not watching where we're going, we end up spending 6 years (of 15 hour days) making a cat simulator that even cat lovers ignore after two minutes.

So he's got the right assessment - we're deadly afraid of slaving away at pointless work. If you follow the posts on HN, you'll see it's a constant reinforcement of people trying to determine if they're doing something worthwhile - how to test the waters, which ideas are working well, how to efficiently accomplish tasks. He's completely off the wall in believing this is a bad thing though. I pity that he believes spending an extra two hours each day digging his own grave deeper is in any way a good thing. His message is simply incorrect - work itself has no meaning. Only outcomes have meaning.

I was once freelancing reporting in a convention about "Y Generation"[1] and the best presentation I attended as themed on how much bullshit is said about this generation.

The grand finale of this presentation was a quote just like this, saying something in the lines of "this generation is lazy, and arrogant, and think life is easy".

Everything people say about Millenials, except this was taken from a 60's newspaper, focused on the baby-boomers. Moreover, it clearly was a reinforcing piece, not a proposing one, and there were other smaller excerpts to confirm this was the standard thinking at the time.

[1] Funny thing, I take "Generation Y" as the way people who doesn't really care about generational studies talk about Millenials. I can't stop thinking they heard "Generation X", called this way at their time because they were unknown, and extrapolated the meaning without further thinking.

EDIT: too many "about"s.

My take on what is negative about the HN subculture -

Basically, startups probably don't work out. But if you bet on a lot of them, and do it well, you will make money from the few that do.

To found a startup is to make a bet that isn't favorable to you. You would do better to shoot for a lifestyle business. You are spending 1-5 years on a lottery ticket, when you could be buying an annuity with it instead.

The VC/incubator crowd, inciting young people who don't know how much 5 years out of your 20s is worth, to spend it making a bad bet that the VC ultimately wins.

(Your 20s set the tone for your future career, your first paycheck sets the subsequent ones, and they are the best time to find a good life partner.)

Once a startup gets funding, and pays the founders 100k a year, they are on the good side of the bet. There is an invisible mass of unfunded quit and bootstrap attempts out there, or people at minor incubators eating noodles and living for 3 years in a shared one room flat. Those are the guys that lost the bet.

Anyway, that's just my view as an outside observer. Maybe it is wildly wrong.

+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 seriousness of it. The difference between someone feeling down and someone suffering from depression is stark. Hell it's pretty scary.

The same thing is true of "burning out". I've met several developers who have talked about burnout and cited it as a reason they just had to quit their job and backpack around Europe. Fair enough, you were clearly just tired of working and wanted to do something that's a bit more fun.

Then I met one (and thus far only one) person who truly burned out. That person became, much like someone suffering from depression, a shell of their former self. They became not just unresponsive but completely unable to respond. It was terrifying. They came to work and attempted to function, but they simply couldn't. The company simply rode them to the point that their brain seemed to turn off.

When you see it, you know it. That guy wasn't rationalizing anything. He had simply been pushed too hard for too long for his mind to keep up.

The company in question was from a VERY high-profile accelerator (not naming names!). The culture of pushing kids at maximum pace over long distances ended costing this company not only key employee but the bulk of their development team as well. After seeing it, no one wanted to be next.

I'm not sure what you mean with the Pullman. Could you elaborate on this?

It seemed like you were relating His Dark Materials to the content of the strikemag article, but are you just suggesting that we should read a good book?