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How to Work Hard
781–790 of 1001 posts
Re: How to Work Hard
#782Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's fair at all. We are on Hacker News, the whole point of this website is intellectual curiosity. People here understand the value of what doesn't impact their field/industry, isn't marketable and profitable. Look at how much open source code is produced just for the sake of it, because people believe it's the right thing. Look at how much cool projects with detailed instructions on how to do them y…
I'm not sure you're being fair. I don't like the "STEM arrogance" bit (I wouldn't go so far as to say there is anything inherently arrogant about those in STEM), but I also don't think you can ever fairly judge the value of someone else's field. You don't know why they went into the field -- I promise it's because they saw more value in it for themselves than other fields. You don't why the school offers such program…
I'm not proclaiming that I'm an authority on whatever field has value. We're actually saying pretty much the same thing: don't judge other people too quickly. I replied to someone that talked about "STEM arrogance" and implied that we can't understand that things can have a value without being marketable or profitable. This idea is wrong, and the action of the STEM field prove it.
> By the way, not sure if this was intentional on your part, but "maybe you should take some time to analyze where your feelings come from" is very much an idea that came from the humanities. So there's a certain amount of irony in your comments.
There's no irony except the one I was highlighting: someone is saying that humanities are important and have lots of value, while not applying that really fundamental concept.
Re: How to Work Hard
#783> It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win. I can assure you, there are many kids that practice harder than Messi did when he was young. He is not a great player because of hard work, he is a great player because of luck. I know the VC thing about the importance of hard work.…
Your comment about VCs makes no sense. If a VC wants you to work hard because that’s how a VC gets rich, that means that working hard leads to building a successful company. If it were purely luck, why would the VC care if you worked hard or not?
Because most VC founded companies are not about results. They are about virtue signaling to attract even more capital. Profitability has been thrown out of the window long time ago. Success is measured in the stupidest KPIs you can imagine. That's why 9 out of 10 VC founded companies fail. So you need to indoctrinate your minions to make them act accordingly.
Re: How to Work Hard
#784> It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win. I can assure you, there are many kids that practice harder than Messi did when he was young. He is not a great player because of hard work, he is a great player because of luck. I know the VC thing about the importance of hard work.…
Okay, but nobody is going to become anywhere close to Messi without working hard. That's the point. Do you think someone could become Messi by putting in barely any practice or effort? You might get into a team, but you won't be a Messi lol. Be honest with yourself. Obviously luck plays a role, but most people (>90% I'll bet) who are successful in the end get there due to hard work. I could sit on my butt and do noth…
Correlation vs causation.
Just because they "worked hard to this day", doesn't mean that's what caused them to be mega rich.
People just don't like to think that maybe they didn't do anything special to deserve their success.
Re: How to Work Hard
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Are there people in their 40s who've kept their skills up and still aren't getting hired? Those are my people and the answer, at least for my cohort, is an emphatic no. They are extremely mobile and move from job to job with relative ease.
Ok but how common is this? Can the average old developer expect to have "kept their skills up" to some arbitrary standard even though we know humans tend to calcify in their thinking, have lower risk appetite and worse memory as they get older? If my cohort consisted of John Carmack and Jeff Dean type outliers, I could also claim that they have no trouble getting jobs in their older age but it wouldn't be a particula…
I guess you’ll find out.
Re: How to Work Hard
#786When I was an undergrad at CMU, I learned how to work hard. Really hard. After having coasted through too-easy high school, I spent all day every day at CMU either programming, doing mathematics, or thinking about one of those things (to great effect: often the trick to prove a theorem would pop into my head while showering or while taking a walk). I would fall asleep while programming in the middle of the night, dre…
Every personality has its problematic characteristics. I think that one of the more problematic, even toxic, ones shared by many Type A personalities is a need to try and make other people feel bad for not themselves being sufficiently neurotic. (I realize the Type A/Type B personality theory is largely crap. I'm just using it here as a useful shorthand that many people will recognize.) That paragraph the quote came…
I saw PG speak once. He didn’t strike me as the anxious type. And I do not think it was polish: he is a good speaker, but he also seems like the type of speaker who would be exactly the same after the speech.
It felt more like he was….excited. Like in a childlike way, in a positive sense. That’s how I’ve interpreted stuff like the paragraph you cited: he is like a big kid excited about his work and does not want to waste time getting distracted from it. The same way a kid might acutely have a sense of boredom if not doing what they thought was important. The key here is PG really seems to find meaningful work fun.
I’ve known anxious types and they’re all rather different. Beset by doubts among other things.
Re: How to Work Hard
#787I admire pg; I don't admire his essays, even though in broad strokes I agree with them. I feel his choice of style works against him; that's where I disagree. Write like you talk, but if you talk like pg writes you lose your audience. His essays check out line by line, paragraph by paragraph, but they fail to drive at some deeper, more subtle point that can capture the imagination of an audience. I'm sure pg is nothi…
In the past I read a lot of his essays but I can no longer stomach his obsession with (high) school. He overanalyzes it and relates almost every essay to how things are in school and I'm certain someone has made it into a drinking game by now. Sadly, my tolerance for that kind of game is quite low these days. Due to having enjoyed his essays 5+ years ago, I still open the new ones and start reading them but I can't h…
if you or your parents dedicated a large chunk of resources on said asset (education) it's hard to be detached from it... Ancient China achieved relative stability by pretending thus coercing intellects of the society that the only way out is by studying and become part of government. So yeah, it's quite a sound crowd control mechanism.
Re: How to Work Hard
#788Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, I've been burnt out too many times now, for too long. Every job now ends in burn out and takes 6+ months to recover from before I can start looking for another job. This time, however, feels different - it never felt insurmountable like this before. I can't work on my own stuff, can't level up my skills, not sure how to get back to that. I suspect that my situation is likely common among aging coders a…
So stop coding, or put yourself out to pasture at a low intensity coding gig. I came from a family of engineers and I watched my dad work himself to death at the expense of virtually everything else in life. One day he up and died, and that was the end of it. Most of his projects are no longer applicable or noteworthy. Life is the process of taking a daily step towards death every day. In 100 years, no one is going t…
As someone who's considered this idea, the problem I wind up with is "but people still want 8 hours of my time per day".
If people are laying claim to that, then I want to be compensated as highly as possible for it. Try as you might, it's very hard to get rid of one of those 8 hour blocks, and make time for yourself, while retaining that daily/hourly rate.
Re: How to Work Hard
#789Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn’t, obviously, because look at the example of Bill Gates: starting a business as a 20-year-old college dropout puts you at a big disadvantage compared to people with more life experience.
Take a look at the faces on the Forbes list and get back to me. Just how white, male and western are they exactly? It's not that Gates wasn't smart or hardworking. It's just that it's easy to be hardworking and ambitious when you had books growing up, proper nutrition, when your parents stayed together, when you're in good health, when you got tutors and went to great schools, when you were engaged in extracurricular…
Having good health, proper nutrition, and extracurriculars in an affluent society, i.e. having two parents who don’t suck, is a regular American baseline that public school kids experience. Gates’s particular advantages were being smart and having access to computers in high school in his day, which countered the bad luck of not being born a few years earlier such that he’d encounter computing in college with the same lead time before the 8086. Of course he found some great luck in business, too, well after the company was established and had employees on the payroll.
Re: How to Work Hard
#790Earlier quoted context omitted.
Take a look at the faces on the Forbes list and get back to me. Just how white, male and western are they exactly? It's not that Gates wasn't smart or hardworking. It's just that it's easy to be hardworking and ambitious when you had books growing up, proper nutrition, when your parents stayed together, when you're in good health, when you got tutors and went to great schools, when you were engaged in extracurricular…
Having good health, proper nutrition, and extracurriculars in an affluent society, i.e. having two parents who don’t suck, is a regular American baseline that public school kids experience. Gates’s particular advantages were being smart and having access to computers in high school in his day, which countered the bad luck of not being born a few years earlier such that he’d encounter computing in college with the sam…
> Gates’s particular advantages were being smart and having access to computers in high school in his day
That's a rather inaccurate description of his advantages.