My father wanted to open a butcher shop when he was 25, he was given a large loan by my grandfather to do so. He was already a master of his trade at this point and I am sure he had a deep insight into the industry and the practices of the time. However, I think that if my granddad had used the "Coffee Beans Procedure", there would have been a lot of questions that he would not have been able to answer.
My father is no longer a butcher, he sold the shop after ~25 years, working every day to afford our family a comfortable life and having enough money to pay for a restaurant that he wanted to run. Again, no one asked about where the coffee beans would come from, and after ~10 years he closed the restaurant after again working tirelessly to support himself, his children and his new grandchildren. He had the money to buy kitchen equipment for a newly built restaurant that he has now been running for 5 years.
To make a long story short, he is certainly crazy and he is doing what he wants and, on some level, is meant to do. But if your takeaway from this article is that you need to unpack everything and know everything to the smallest detail, you might get lost or discouraged by the complexity. You can't plan it all out.
My friend in college was worried she would fall into trap that she eventually fell into: She wanted to be a writer, and she felt that Comparative Lit put you in danger of knowing your writing was crap before you had the motivation and discipline to do something about it.
I tend to give junior devs as much rope as I can because they're just going to be awful until they get about 1000 hours in, and no amount of me scaring them is going to make that any better. And once in a while they surprise me by doing something they shouldn't have been able to do. We all have our preconceptions and nobody's are right all the time.
One way out of this trap is to set yourself ridiculous constrained writing challenges. "Write a story about a duck, but each paragraph has to invoke or subvert the corresponding item of this list of 30 random TVTropes articles; also the prime-numbered sentences have to each introduce a new character, and the even square-numbered sentences have to each kill one off." You can't compare that to a Franz Kafka Prizewinner.
And then once you've built up a small nest egg, you can set yourself ridiculous editing challenges: "salvage the story I wrote this time last month, in two 20-minute editing sessions".
I read the post differently – the point of the exercise is not that you need to know the answers to the questions. It's to gauge your emotional reaction to the question itself.
By examining the types of tasks you will be consistently faced with, you can ask yourself, "Do I actually want to do that?"
There's no reason to believe you can be any more confident about your answer to this then the person in the article is about their hazy idea about what something is like.
If people "unpacked" marriage or childbirth to the extent suggested in the article everyone would be frozen in dread. That's not because they're smart and have just disovered what those things are truly like, it's because they overestimate their current emotional state and underestimate what they can grow into.
In fact the article I think is far removed from how people live. We don't chose professions because of our secret "true" interests, we make decisions based on circumstance, luck, financial security and then we adapt our emotional state. And that's a good thing, the emotional state of a young person isn't a good yardstick for anything.
This is the basis of "The E-Myth". A book I didn't read a long time ago because the title made me think it was about Scientology, but a consultant encouraged me to read it and I did. Essentially, the book is about this:
Person A likes to bake and has creative recipes that people like. Person B likes to develop companies and knows a baker who can make a recipe. Person A struggles to keep a bakery open and could really live to never see another pie in their life. Person B creates Cinnabon.
Where is the person B exploits person A to the max stealing all their recipes and pays them as little as possible where they can barely afford to live within 30 minutes drive to the underpayed job
The Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths article strikes again. In this telling, Person A is a geek (creator), Person B is a sociopath, and "regular customer at the bakery" is a MOP.
This is problem with the places like 90% of the Kitchen Nightmares, Bar Rescue, etc., type shows. An owner retires with a huge nest egg and decides that, as a dive bar regular, they'd really like to think of themselves as the owner of the neighborhood bar. The "unpacking" that they never did would have involved cleaning up vomit regularly, violently drunk patrons, just having to do a shit ton of work yourself because labor is expensive, etc.
Yep, agree. I got into info sec because I found info sec fascinating. The actual reality of working in info sec is like many other jobs: lots of tedious shit with moments where you get close to what you actually found interesting.
If I had sat down and "unpacked" what the actual job was like I doubt I'd have bothered. But that doesn't make it a bad choice for me. I'm still glad I work in the field, I get a lot of value from knowing I'm helping keep things motoring and sometimes it can be fun too.
Unpacking does not sound like a good way to figure out what you want to do. It sounds like a good way to argue yourself out of doing anything.
I feel the same thing as you but that’s just a default choice : I did that (programming) because I know I liked it when I was a teenager.
Unfortunately, you know pretty much nothing about what you really like when it’s time to start choosing what you’ll study or to start your career.
About two decades later, I still like programming but having the knowledge I have now about life, I don’t think I’d still make a career in programming, let alone in computer science.
Honestly I still think that I’m pretty lucky because most people don’t even know one thing they would like to do when they have to take those great early in life decisions.
At the end of the day, it really looks like enjoying your career has more to do with luck than anything else.
It’s unfortunate that most societies are built on the same schema of specializing early and doing more or less the same thing for your whole life.
I would agree with the post, in this case your dad knew a lot about his trade, so it wasn't a new industry for him.
The coffeeshop example is great, i've seen that a couple times, where people that like drinking coffee, open a coffeeshop, and since they don't know a lot about beans, or equipment, they end up doing bad purchases, choosing bad providers, and the result is just bad.
my neighbor is a coffee roaster and started with production in his garage
when i visited he showed me the setup and i had a bunch of questions to unpack the production situation. he told me id been more interested than anyone who had visited which surprised me because hes very popular with many local lifelong friends frequently parking in the cul-de-sac
its an engineers nature to want to take things apart
i think youre right that unpacking could get in the way of enthusiasm. speaking for myself i simply enjoy the challenges of software development and enjoy most new challenges the deeper i go
on the other hand i think unpacking is good because most people dont really know what they want to do coming out of high school, at least in the USA. in america adult jobs are a nebulous concept: i did well at accounting in DECA because i could do mental math better than peers. i assumed id be an accountant because i had to get some job. i assumed id wear a suit and do some math. its a good thing to tell adults because they approve. i took one database class and bailed on accounting to teach myself to code
maybe unpack a career path if there isnt passion and enthusiasm for the process
There is the anti discussion, about where to know is to be ruined in some way, which is valid, the inference I get is that there is merit in engineering your approach to a career in engineering, and for some fickle few that clearly works, everybody else has to self decieve or seek help in that, or the world would grind to a halt.
The game is stacked for those who can chanell there primal urges into abstractions and other disiplined outlets, the rest end up represed , acting out or some combination that is less "efficient"
my daughter loves chemistry and says she wants to be a chemist. she does great ai it at school. so mom and dad helped her find an unpaid spot in an actual lab. so far she loves it but has also learned that it means working all day at 18 degrees c and constantly smelling her colleagues’ lab animal feed. we’ll find out soon if that was too much reality too soon. i hope it will lead her to double-down with the full reality in sight.
Like many things in life (including those we end up succeeding at), if we knew what it would entail (and already had the experience), we wouldn’t go at it with the same vigor - and might fail outright. Or maybe it would be easier.
I suspect there is a strong evolutionary reason why Mom’s tend to forget the really tough part/pain in having kids though.
I think the point of that procedure is more to illustrate when someone hasn't thought about the logistics _at all_. The problems aren't when you can't answer one random question, but when you can't answer any, even the basic ones like what kind of espresso machine you want to buy.
Even there I'd say that "Yeah, I'll have to do some research on that" is fine as an answer at least at a very early stage. It's when the honest answer is "I don't care, and I don't want to care" that you have a strong indicator that you shouldn't go beyond daydreaming when it comes to this goal.
I didn't become a physician, because my teenage-self unpacked being a physician as telling fat people to eat better food and start exercising -- for 50 years. Turns out there are other specialties... Despite thinking the human body is fascinating, I'm largely happy I don't have to tell unhealthy people to do what they probably already know they should do and then give them a bandaid for their gaping lifestyle problems.
They’re not even allowed to do that any more despite it being a legitimate medical risk (top 5 reasons for death according to the CDC are related to obesity).
My dad bought a burnt down pub for a dollar. He spent 15 years working on the place and now its worth quite a lot. He is always telling me to find something that requires hard work, but in the end leaves you with a significant asset. He put a cafe in the pub, and a coffee machine. He worked out the beans at some point. I think he had like 6 different POS systems.
This resonates. The article has some interesting points, and get where they're coming from. Unpacking can be helpful to think about the next smallest step, but I agree, thinking of all the things ends up creating a mountain that looks too hard to climb, nevermind that many of the questions and challenges you ask may not even materialise. My main takeaway is just to ask the question of why you want to do this thing you've said you want to do, and what the next smallest step is to do it. If you find yourself enjoying it, carry on.
For example, when people say they want to write a book or be a novelist, what they really mean is, they want to have written a book and been a writer. They're looking at the finished product. This is likely true of most people who want to do X, because they see it as a solution to their current situation.
The better thing is just sit down and write stuff. Poems, diaries, letters, very short stories and vignettes. See where it takes you.
The professor thing made me laugh, because some people like helping others grow and learn and blossom, despite all the day to day stuff. That was my step father's motivation for it. He found he enjoyed it.
There is value in just throwing yourself into something and seeing if you enjoy it. For example, I have a friend who started brewing his own beer. He loved everything about it, and enjoyed it. He connected with other home brewers, and gradually he ended up becoming a master brewer. He didn't start with the end in mind, he threw himself into what he was doing and carried on because he enjoyed it. Funnily enough, another friend started roasting his own coffee beans because he liked drinking coffee, and today he sells his own beans, and has just opened his own coffee shop. He carried on doing it, because he enjoyed it.
I've always liked Tim Minchen's advice on this: "And so I advocate passionate dedication to the pursuit of short-term goals. Be micro-ambitious. Put your head down and work with pride on whatever is in front of you… you never know where you might end up. Just be aware that the next worthy pursuit will probably appear in your periphery. Which is why you should be careful of long-term dreams. If you focus too far in front of you, you won’t see the shiny thing out the corner of your eye."
> There is value in just throwing yourself into something and seeing if you enjoy it.
Absolutely, when the stakes are low and the timelines short. Then it's a very good option for "not knowing what to do".
It's a really bad idea when you have to start by taking on six-figure student loans, or when it will take years of your life to get to the point where you're confronted with the unappealing aspects, which will dominate your time thereafter.
Sounds to me that your dad would have been interested by the question and engaged with the interview.
The article was about "I hate my job people" and finding the difference between someone with enough interest to really change his life.
As an analogy, I'm sure car salesman know from experimental evidence that there's a difference between an interested buyer and a tire-kicker. ... that a few questions can discern with high probability.
> Wolff wrote “more than sixty” books between 2007 and 2018. That’s 5.5 novels per year, every year, for 11 years, before she hit it big.
> Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” but when you were actually doing them, did you want to stop, or did you want to continue?
I think people like Wolff like writing. Brandon Sanderson is another example. He can't stop. I think they'd do it even if they weren't able to make it as novelists. That's what separates a lot of those people from most others. Sure, some people have a goal and the grit to reach for it, to do that dribbling & shooting practice for six hours a day even if it's not actually fun. But some people have this sort of mania for their work. It's not really sensible to talk about being like them, unless you already are.
That's the point of the article though. They're saying that instead of trying to grit your teeth and push through something you hate to satisfy an arbitrary goal, you should find the thing that you're crazy for enjoying so much and pursue that, because doing it is what the vast majority of your life will actually be spent on
I get the point, but this is fantasy thinking. The vast majority of people will actually never find that thing despite trying their entire life to find it, and for those that do find it, it will likely be a thing society doesn't care about. Obsession is a gift in my opinion, many people don't have it, and im envious of the clarity of purpose those that do have it seem to enjoy.
The primary reason Bill Gates is a billionaire is because he was born at the perfect time for someone to be obsessed with how computers work. What would he have done if he was born 100 years earlier?
That reminds me of another wolf, Gene Wolfe. He wrote some of the most complex and critically praised science fiction to date, and most of his famous works were done in his free time while working as an industrial engineer. Or for that matter, a certain patent clerk who wrote some really fine physics papers.
Other examples: Baruch Spinoza, lensmaker by day, philosopher by night. Philip Glass: moving man, plumber, cab driver, and avant-garde composer. E. E. "Doc" Smith: food engineer and science fiction writer. Franz Kafka: administrator in an insurance company, and writer of history's weirdest books. Wallace Stevens: insurance company executive and poet. William Carlos Williams: doctor and poet. And these are just off the top of my head.
I think there are plenty of successful authors who don't have the same obsession as Sanderson and Wolff, but they are obsessed in different ways. And I think that's the key: if there's something that you enjoy doing and can find some aspect that you can really obsess over—it doesn't have to be the same as everyone else (probably better if not)—then you might be able to make that work as a fulfilling career.
The best advice about writing for a living I ever got was in a book I read as a young aspiring writer. It was to the effect of "Most people who say they want to write actually want to 'be a writer'. If you can be happy doing anything else for a living, do that instead. Only write if you feel like you'll go crazy if you don't."
I'm not a writer, but I do write, and I also read this advice when younger then promptly ignored it. I think it was from Bukowski.
It sounded, and still sounds, like "Only run if running bursts from the soles of your feet and you feel like you'll go crazy if you don't." Well, no. It might be good advice for a professional athlete -- I wouldn't know -- but you can run whenever you damn well feel like it as an amateur. So too for writing.
The vast majority of the most-successful people in any field, by whatever definition of "success" that field has, are people who would do it even if they weren't successful. You can't fake it. The old saying that "hard work trumps anything else" is an almost-cruel thing to say to kids who don't know any better: A person swimming downstream will exert the same calories as one swimming upstream, do the same work, but end up swimming ten times further.
This may be a place where writing for magazines for instance is a good thing.
Standup comics try out new material on tour, and then save up the bits that work for big gigs and specials. Creative writing isn't that different from joke writing. Write yourself a bunch of short stories, try things out, see what sticks, novelize the good ones. Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik was a short story. There are some famous books out there that were originally done as serials.
Do more, but find ways to shed the unsuccessful attempts, or otherwise give yourself permission to fail. If you're not failing occasionally you aren't reaching far enough.
Writing is interesting, though, because there's also a steady stream of writers regurgitating the "I don't like writing, I like having written" line too.
I think this applies to many creative activities, or even general problem-solving tasks as well. I don't like going through the frustrations of the puzzle-solving process in programming, but it sure increases the accomplishment of having debugged the issue and finished the program, later on.
Interestingly enough, i know some people who love programming. They make side projects, contribute to open source etc. But they kind of hate it as a job.
One problem with programming as a job is that you have to work on the project (and with the tools) that your employer or customer wants you to.
On side projects, open source etc, you get to work on projects (and with tools) that you care about and/or want to use or work on.
This kind of thing probably applies in some other jobs, but not all. Music, writing, visual arts and design, and construction at least seem like something where the particular target or process may be a vital part of the interest and satisfaction.
In my life, I knew a guy who was obsessed with the Beatles. You couldn't get him to shut up about it. People hated listening to him but he didn't care, he just wanted to talk about the Beatles. Now imagine if he was obsessed with software development - he could change the world.
My first thought when I read this, and it may very well be misinformed, was that she is probably using a team of ghostwriters. Many novelists at that level are. Your name just becomes a brand at a certain point.
And then you have guys like Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who wrote a single, and quite short, book, and it is vastly better than all the crap those writing multiple books per year can produce.
The appeal of short form names like these is clear considering his full formal name and title is
Don Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa, 12th Duke of Palma, Baron of Montechiaro, Baron of La Torretta, and Grandee of Spain of the first class.
it is so exhausting to talk to some people who obviously don't like what they have to do for a living and then expect others to also hate what they do.
I get that it must suck to do some bullshit job you don't want to just so you don't starve, but I studied for the thing I wanted to do, found a job doing what I wanted to, and now someone is paying me relatively well to do the thing I would do on my own time. Then I get called wage slave and capitalism boot licker just because I found someone to pay for my hobby.
> Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”
> Most of those students would go, “Oh, no I would not like to do those things.” The actual content of a professor’s life had never occurred to them. If you could pop the tops of their skulls and see what they thought being a professor was like, you’d probably find some low-res cartoon version of themselves walking around campus in a tweed jacket going, “I’m a professor, that’s me! Professor here!” and everyone waving back to them going, “Hi professor!”
I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.
Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.
Also, grading was fun, just because you can be an unusually good grader by doing the barest-minimum and including, like, any notes at all (the students just want to know that you actually understood why you took their points away).
It strikes me that those are two spots that seem hardest to automate away, and involve satisfying the customer the most. But they don’t really seem to be central to the professor’ actual identities, or to the general perception of them.
> I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.
I think you're misusing the analogy completely. In the analogy, the cartoon version of the professor doesn't actually _do_ anything. I don't see how you could compare that to your real life, where you were actually doing something (teaching students). Unless you're dismissing the act of teaching students as a lecturer as a completely empty pursuit.
FWIW I wasn’t trying to contradict the analogy or argue against it, just had some reflections based on it. In the story, the students have an entirely imagined idea of professoring. I think if most people put a little more thought into it, they’d come up with lecturing as a major job of a professor.
I didn’t go all the way down that path, but got one step closer to the job, so I’m reflecting on the bits that were surprisingly rewarding and what wasn’t (for me).
> Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.
This is awesome, I love the way you phrase this and having that mindset.
+1, I loved office hours, and felt _ok_ about giving demos/lectures. I honestly didn’t care much for research though lol, it’s very lonely. I wish “teaching professor” was a more viable career, my impression is that it pays poorly
The college I went to explicitly billed itself as for teaching, and most of our professors were just that. They might do research with the upperclassmen, but their priority was teaching.
That is, until we got a new president who set a new strategic goal for being a top research school and adjusted all hiring and tenure standards for that.
>I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.
You didn't like teaching like that. Some people really do, some people don't. Nothing wrong with individual preferences.
> Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.
You sound like one of those rare souls who might both enjoy and be good at people management.
(Line management, at least. The higher up you go, the less fun it gets, unless you're a psychopath whose primary motivation is Number Go Up.)
I once knew a manager who told a group of us engineers that they love getting contacted by customers. The angrier the better.
This was baffling, of course. But the explanation was that every time it was an opportunity to listen to their problems and ask questions and figure out what the problem was and try to work out a solution. Might be their expectations or their situation or it might be the company product or service. Either way, they could usually find a way to make things better and the customer would end up being happier than they were before the talk.
It's still pretty far down the list of jobs that I'd ever want to do, but I can really relate to the motivation. Made a lot of sense.
I found that example weird, probably because it's the one I had the most experience with, having been a grad student at two different universities. (I don't have enough familiarity with the other examples to know if they're weird or not.)
I don't know any grad student (outside perhaps a first-semester master's student) who has delusions about what a professor does. First off, they know academia is publish-or-perish, they've been told it every day, and they're prepping for it right from the get-go, with qualifying papers that are going to turn into their dissertation which is going to turn into their first academic book -- the first of many they know they're going to need to write. And they know that it also involves a lot of face time with the students, since as grad students they spend a lot of face time with the professor. And they know about the teaching because they're having to do it too now, as barely-paid lecturers.
> "Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan"
Did those students not have advisors?
Sorry, I got the point of the article, and it was fine, but this whole anecdote felt off.
Love the opening. I have always been interested in what people actually do hour-to-hour at their jobs and have always found it frustrating that a) they don't teach you about this in school AT ALL, b) people don't talk about it socially either. Even with social media I don't think we have a very good public repository of information of this kind. It would be a very interesting project to interview a few hundred people about what they actually do at work.
Alain de Botton wrote a book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work where he describes ten different people and their jobs in detail. I enjoyed the book because I like de Botton's writing, but it turns out most jobs sound a little dull.
1. People grow into jobs and start to like stuff they didn't expect to like when they imagined doing them before.
2. The hour-to-hour things at a job like going to a meeting depends heavily on the people you're with. The same person might hate meetings at company 1, but like them at company 2, just because of other people and the atmosphere. The people-aspect is probably very important and impossible to unpack before you tried the job.
I've noticed this as well; especially with the more abstract professions that have words like consultant or strategy in them.
Even from friends you'll often get a surprisingly 'corporate-BS' answer.
The best answers I've gotten is by asking people to take me through their last work day hour by hour.
Then again, I've had plenty of people not understand my job either: "I build software applications" sounds obvious to us but I've had people ask the follow up "So how do you actually do that?". The answer they're expecting is something like "I sit in front of a computer and type text into something equivalent to notepad".
I’ve worked in technology roles for 20 years. If you told me 20 years ago that my career was going to evolve the way it did, I never would have believed it. I’ve worked at 8 companies in that time, had 12 different roles, and managed people for the last 7 years. Every role I’ve had has been wildly different than the one before it. Passion and interest comes and goes, and the biggest factor is usually other people. In the last decade or so, most of my disinterest in my career has stemmed from collective shiny object syndrome from everyone I work with. People who want to adopt and build new things no matter the cost (or need). People trying desperately to pad their resumes, rather than truly improve things. Some of the more successful people I’ve seen in my career have been those that are truly curious, make sound decisions, constantly dig into solving difficult problems, teach others around them effectively, and can manage their own ego (not an exhaustive list by any means). What I do on a daily basis changes with every different team I’ve managed. Every team has been at a different stage, has different dynamics and challenges, needs different input and oversight, and needs more or less hands on leadership. I’ve played the role of a thought leader, salesman, mediator, therapist, project manager, etc. If you’re hands off (no technical contributions), it can be boring. You need to find a balance of being prepared for meetings (meaningful ones, with actual decisions and team driven outcomes), for your team members (1-1’s, performance management, mentorship, venting, etc.), following up on their asks (servant leader), keeping a backlog of work, addressing HR tasks, digging into PRs, planning execution around people possibly disappearing for a week or 12, etc, etc. Think about and answer the questions “What does the next month look like? What about 3? 12?” Hire, coach, fire, and everything that goes into all 3. Oh, and surprise Prod is down - now you’re behind on something, and you’re interrupting the business. Oh, the adult toddlers who are all the smartest person in the room are angry at each other? That was expectedly unexpected. The thing someone asked to work on suddenly isn’t as fun as they thought it would be? Couldn’t have predicted that since the last time it happened. If you’re working people too hard and they can’t self-regulate, you’re burning them out. If you’re not working them hard enough, they’re not growing and they’re bored. But everyone has different thresholds and skills and interests, and you need to figure these all out to make sure you can put them on tasks that keep them engaged, and challenge them, otherwise supplement with other work that will. What does this all look like at the end of the day? Click. Type, type. Click. Talk. Write (yes, on paper). Type type. Click. Talk talk talk.
I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.
I think the “get rich easy” reputation that software engineering gained somewhere around the 2010s really hurt the industry and a lot of people who are chasing the dollar.
I’m an unhinged lunatic who loves productivity software and user experiences. The type of kid who was setting up Outlook betas in 6th grade to try the new features. Watching videos about how the Ribbon was designed. Reading C++ for dummies even though I had untreated ADHD and couldn’t sit still long enough to get much past std::cout. Eventually daydreaming about walking into the office, tired from a hard sprint, getting coffee in corporate-sponsored coffee cups.
I wake up and reflect how profoundly lucky I am to have my dream job. Not just having the career I have, but having a dream at all and having a dream I could love in practice.
I was still in middle school in the early 2010’s and I remember thinking how lucky I am to want to be a computer programmer for a career AND it happens to pay a lot of money.
Unfortunately many people today got into for the money and not the passion (or at least the passion and the money). Those people look for shortcuts and are generally unpleasant to work with, in my opinion.
Those are the exact people who are most excited about AI today.
They just want the code but they don't enjoy the coding, so they're trying to find something that will give them the former while sparing them the latter.
I've taken to having a hobby car, and I'm pretty sure I could have been solving automotive problems for a living rather than computer problems; these days, automotive problems are computer problems, but my hobby car is my age and only has one computer in it, but it's not servicable ... it just works and runs the fuel injectors, or it stops working and I'll get a used replacement or a megasquirt. Computer problems are nicer, cause I don't smell like car for 2 days afterwards, but if there was no money in computer problems, I might have been redirected into car problems or other similar things.
Right - there are two types of people working as developers.
1) People who love programming, do it as a hobby, and love being in front of a computer all day.
2) People who doing it because it's a decent paying job, but have no passion (and probably therefore not much skill) for it, and the last thing they want when they clock off their job is to be back on a computer.
If you are from group 1) - getting paid to do your hobby, then being a developer is a great job, but if you are from group 2) I imagine it can be pretty miserable, especially if trying to debug complex problems, or faced with tasks pushing your capability.
As someone who does this because it's a decent paying job, I don't think this comment is fair. I think I'm quite skilled, and I've been told so consistently. I don't have passion; I have discipline and professionalism. I take my job seriously. It pays well, and I make sure that I deserve that paycheck.
Passion for me is a nasty world, in the mouth of bosses. It's almost always a way to ask people to work unhealthy hours, and it results in bad work being done, which I have to fix later. If people talk live their own passion, it's fine, but whenever I hear someone appeal to the passion of someone else, it's to sell them into doing something that's not in their best interest.
I guess it's those two same groups arguing about vibe coding. How many of group 1 say LLMs are too low quality when they really mean that it's diminishing their love of coding? And how many of group 2 say LLMs are the best thing ever when they really mean that they are diminishing their pain of coding?
I'm a hard group 1, and I don't really mind if LLMs take my job, just please don't take my passion.
I want to challenge the statement that a sw dev is "sitting in front of a computer all day". It's like saying a professor is writing on the blackboard all day. If think about what I did today, several hours was spent talking to my manager and peers about work as well as personal stuff.
I was person 1, then I spent 13 years as an engineer, experience severe burnout, and became person 2. I am /very/ skilled, but I no longer enjoy things in the same ways I once did when it comes to computing. I don't despise it, but it no longer fuels me. I prefer to spend my time away from work indulging in other hobbies, like hiking in nature with a camera or playing board games with friends. My experience has been that turning your hobby into a job can kill all the enjoyment of the hobby.
I love(d) programming when I was a hobbyist and still get the itch to hack around with stuff now and then.
But even then, I was never interested in doing it as a career. I knew I’d hate it. And lo and behold here we are. I just don’t care about most of the crap products people pay me to work on.
But I was also young and way too broke to go to school so it was really the best financial option at the time. In retrospect, I’d have wasted my time doing something else.
“if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.”
Heh. And then they go become a "real" engineer (mechanical, electrical, whatever), and end up sitting in front of a computer all day, dealing with poor UI and poorly designed SW because a lot of CAD tools are either built in-house or owned by monopolies who have no incentive to improve the experience.
I imagine the people who say that would like a more people-facing job (like, I dunno, maybe a DJ) rather than a computer-facing one. They don't necessarily imagine being a "real" engineer as an alternative to being a programmer, they put them both in the same category.
> I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.
I went to college in the late 1990s at the height of the dotcom boom. Saw a bunch of people who had this same feeling.
Which made no sense to me b/c I loved programming so much that I would do my homework assignments ahead of time!
> I think the “get rich easy” reputation that software engineering gained somewhere around the 2010s really hurt the industry and a lot of people who are chasing the dollar.
Yup.
Also, "The Company is the Product," where the goal is to sell the company, and the end-users are just food for the prize hog.
Just start talking about improving software quality, or giving end-users more agency, privacy, and freedom, around here, and see the response.
OP is a decent article which just becomes fodder for the usual
1. I love my job because (1) CRUD apps are so immensely satisfying (2) turns out that optimizing ad metrics at FAANG was my innately-sought destiny (3) being acquired by GOOG is bitter-sweet because now my wife will complain that I am not retiring even though I can
2. As opposed to the normies that just have this job because they need a job
Same. Maybe this AI text generator trend will bring salaries back down, the opportunists will leave for greener pastures and us mega-nerds will have the software-writing all to ourselves.
This is me too! Everything about writing code, running it, messing with Github, tinkering with my dotfiles, automations... even as a preschooler, I was always dissatisfied that my drawings didn't do anything. I feel astoundingly lucky to have a job I was born to do.
> I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.
This was a discussion that came up a few times in College. I argued that with hyper-specialization, you can't satisfy a desirable balance of cerebral and manual work, socializing, and being outdoors. Pick your poison. I didn't want to do shift work at the bottom of a mine pit so here I am.
You can have flexibility in your free time to do something else. My father was always tired from shift-work and did basically nothing at leisure even as we grew up.
It depends on your ideal balance. There are jobs that involve field work, thinking, and socializing, but there are always trade offs. I find that being indoors from dawn to dusk with a 30 minute walking commute and a hike once or twice a year is my ideal balance.
Police officer actually has a really good balance of physical exertion, mental/social challenge, and indoor/outdoor exposure. And you get to write A LOT. But there are lots of adjacent roles, and many more not so close; e.g. I know someone who used to do field data collection and data analysis for some conservation nonprofit; lots of nature, physical exercise, and mental stimulation.
But sitting in front of computers isn't what computer science is about, and some of those students might have aspirations to change the HCI status quo.
Software engineering and computer science seem to have two strict criteria to consider and neither of them is the same sort of continuous, analog suffering as wearing large shoes or practicing shooting a basketball. These criteria are
1) can you solve hard problems?
2) do you want to continue solving hard problems?
At least to me it seems that those two things take more effort and willpower than anything else in software. So I don't think challenging a person about whether they would love to sit in front a computer all day is the right approach.
> The type of kid who was setting up Outlook betas in 6th grade to try the new features.
Oh man, this brings up memories of me being inordinately excited about Office 2007 when it was in beta. I was in elementary school.
And memories of staying up late reading my collection of outdated tech books (Borland C++, UNIX SVR4, HTML 4, and the MS-DOS 6.22 manual were the big ones). Initially learning about programming and UNIX from those books were extremely formative for how I view programming today, and I suspect that's given me quite a different perspective on a lot of things (especially things like HTML & CGI) than a lot of other folks in my age cohort.
Far less prominently. I'll never forget when a programmer I worked with in 2001 or so said that he had decided to study CS in college for the money, having never written a line of code beforehand. The rest of us looked at him like he had squeezed a second head out of his neck. We had first gotten into it as a hobby and were later surprised to find that we could get paid for it. Only a few of us had CS degrees or had even taken CS coursework in college.
2) I really love certain aspects of being a software engineer.
3) I have definutely said Ill kill myself if I have to sit in front of a computer for my entire life
4) this job will afford me a future where I can retire at a reasonable age. Whereas a non-computer oriented alternative (the other career available to me was house painting) will not.
Therefore I will bear the monotony of sitting in front of a computer all day for a few decades
> Reading C++ for dummies even though I had untreated ADHD and couldn’t sit still long enough to get much past std::cout.
You may have lucked out. I also didn't get terribly far in that book, but I thought it was fairly weird when I tried to read it, and after majoring in CS in college and eventually reading some very good books on programming, I believe I was entirely justified in not liking that one.
I think I relate with most of the things you've said, even with the ADHD part (not officially diagnosed, however) but what annoys me these days is the amount of work we have to do. The work is rewarding but very often just * too much *. Maybe I'm unlucky or maybe it is the companies I worked for...
> Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.
Well, people who do real computer science don't program a lot, it's all theoretical math. Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy does with telescopes.
I actually find i tend to dislike non-programming computer activity. Love programming, but if someone suggests taking notes with a laptop instead of paper, my reaction is ewww computers.
I think most people (especially software engineers) who fantasize about leaving their office jobs and running a small retail or restaurant business are not upset with having to write code all day - they're upset with the people they work with/for and fantasize about independence, even if that means a more difficult day to day job. Or, they're unhappy with the sterile environment they work in and are disillusioned with the abstract nature of B2B products (what am I selling? Whose life am I improving by selling it?) and want to work with something whose value is more easily demonstrated.
I think that when someone tells you they fantasize about starting a small local retail business, that we shouldn't just shit on their naivite; we should listen to what they're really trying to say and help them find something that checks the boxes for them:
1. Something in the real world, preferably with physical products/services on physical products
2. Something with a larger degree of independence
3. Something whose value to the customer is obvious
4. Something which improves the world or their community in some way, and is not just extracting value from others.
Personally, I love writing software, but I hate Software companies
I have found that cooking for family, friends or small communities can scratch that itch.
Results are tangible, you are doing something with your hands, it only takes few hours (often much less) and you get to give something to people you love.
One of those articles that you'd love to share with certain people but it seems awkward when they receive a message from you with the link preview saying "Face it: you're a crazy person".
This is something I've started to notice as I've talked with artists on tour.
Like, I'm a hobby metal musician, and I do have a certain dream of being on stage with a band. Even if it's just a dive bar with 20 people. Gotta be realistic. And I have 15 - 20 years available for that, or even more if you look at Grave Digger or - rest in peace old chap - Ozzy. But I'm not certain if I have the passion to be a touring musician even if that happened (which most likely wont). Like what these people take on is entirely insane.
Brittney Slayes from Unleash the Archers had tours during which she worked full-time remote. 8 full hours of work, out of the hotel, soundcheck, gig, meet and greet, back into the bus, sleep, back to work. And from what I've heard they've also done that with a kid on top. That is just nuts.
And even without that, big tours are hell from what I've heard. The first one or two tours are an absolute test for bands because it's all a huge rush of adrenaline, excitement, nonsense, strange locations all at once without a second to breathe.
If you hear that, a 9-5ish tech job isn't that bad.
creating an account just to respond to you, because i just got to the end of a 8 ish year journey playing with a local band and the reason i stopped has a lot to do with this unpacking. we never toured, and i would have loved to do exactly one, but i realized that i am not crazy about music in the sense of the article. even weekend gigs mean many hours of driving and spending most of your time with the band, who are cool guys but not nearly as cool as your SO.
don't get me wrong, i LOVE playing live, and i hope you find a way to do so, because it really is great, but going to that next level really does take being a little nuts. stories about people shedding on their instrument for 8 hours, and then going out and jamming for 6 more hours until 4 am, every day. music is really important to my life, but when push comes to shove i don't care about it that much!
Readit News
My father is no longer a butcher, he sold the shop after ~25 years, working every day to afford our family a comfortable life and having enough money to pay for a restaurant that he wanted to run. Again, no one asked about where the coffee beans would come from, and after ~10 years he closed the restaurant after again working tirelessly to support himself, his children and his new grandchildren. He had the money to buy kitchen equipment for a newly built restaurant that he has now been running for 5 years.
To make a long story short, he is certainly crazy and he is doing what he wants and, on some level, is meant to do. But if your takeaway from this article is that you need to unpack everything and know everything to the smallest detail, you might get lost or discouraged by the complexity. You can't plan it all out.
I tend to give junior devs as much rope as I can because they're just going to be awful until they get about 1000 hours in, and no amount of me scaring them is going to make that any better. And once in a while they surprise me by doing something they shouldn't have been able to do. We all have our preconceptions and nobody's are right all the time.
And then once you've built up a small nest egg, you can set yourself ridiculous editing challenges: "salvage the story I wrote this time last month, in two 20-minute editing sessions".
By examining the types of tasks you will be consistently faced with, you can ask yourself, "Do I actually want to do that?"
There's no reason to believe you can be any more confident about your answer to this then the person in the article is about their hazy idea about what something is like.
If people "unpacked" marriage or childbirth to the extent suggested in the article everyone would be frozen in dread. That's not because they're smart and have just disovered what those things are truly like, it's because they overestimate their current emotional state and underestimate what they can grow into.
In fact the article I think is far removed from how people live. We don't chose professions because of our secret "true" interests, we make decisions based on circumstance, luck, financial security and then we adapt our emotional state. And that's a good thing, the emotional state of a young person isn't a good yardstick for anything.
Person A likes to bake and has creative recipes that people like. Person B likes to develop companies and knows a baker who can make a recipe. Person A struggles to keep a bakery open and could really live to never see another pie in their life. Person B creates Cinnabon.
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https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
If I had sat down and "unpacked" what the actual job was like I doubt I'd have bothered. But that doesn't make it a bad choice for me. I'm still glad I work in the field, I get a lot of value from knowing I'm helping keep things motoring and sometimes it can be fun too.
Unpacking does not sound like a good way to figure out what you want to do. It sounds like a good way to argue yourself out of doing anything.
Unfortunately, you know pretty much nothing about what you really like when it’s time to start choosing what you’ll study or to start your career.
About two decades later, I still like programming but having the knowledge I have now about life, I don’t think I’d still make a career in programming, let alone in computer science.
Honestly I still think that I’m pretty lucky because most people don’t even know one thing they would like to do when they have to take those great early in life decisions.
At the end of the day, it really looks like enjoying your career has more to do with luck than anything else.
It’s unfortunate that most societies are built on the same schema of specializing early and doing more or less the same thing for your whole life.
The coffeeshop example is great, i've seen that a couple times, where people that like drinking coffee, open a coffeeshop, and since they don't know a lot about beans, or equipment, they end up doing bad purchases, choosing bad providers, and the result is just bad.
when i visited he showed me the setup and i had a bunch of questions to unpack the production situation. he told me id been more interested than anyone who had visited which surprised me because hes very popular with many local lifelong friends frequently parking in the cul-de-sac
its an engineers nature to want to take things apart
on the other hand i think unpacking is good because most people dont really know what they want to do coming out of high school, at least in the USA. in america adult jobs are a nebulous concept: i did well at accounting in DECA because i could do mental math better than peers. i assumed id be an accountant because i had to get some job. i assumed id wear a suit and do some math. its a good thing to tell adults because they approve. i took one database class and bailed on accounting to teach myself to code
maybe unpack a career path if there isnt passion and enthusiasm for the process
I suspect there is a strong evolutionary reason why Mom’s tend to forget the really tough part/pain in having kids though.
For example, when people say they want to write a book or be a novelist, what they really mean is, they want to have written a book and been a writer. They're looking at the finished product. This is likely true of most people who want to do X, because they see it as a solution to their current situation.
The better thing is just sit down and write stuff. Poems, diaries, letters, very short stories and vignettes. See where it takes you.
The professor thing made me laugh, because some people like helping others grow and learn and blossom, despite all the day to day stuff. That was my step father's motivation for it. He found he enjoyed it.
There is value in just throwing yourself into something and seeing if you enjoy it. For example, I have a friend who started brewing his own beer. He loved everything about it, and enjoyed it. He connected with other home brewers, and gradually he ended up becoming a master brewer. He didn't start with the end in mind, he threw himself into what he was doing and carried on because he enjoyed it. Funnily enough, another friend started roasting his own coffee beans because he liked drinking coffee, and today he sells his own beans, and has just opened his own coffee shop. He carried on doing it, because he enjoyed it.
I've always liked Tim Minchen's advice on this: "And so I advocate passionate dedication to the pursuit of short-term goals. Be micro-ambitious. Put your head down and work with pride on whatever is in front of you… you never know where you might end up. Just be aware that the next worthy pursuit will probably appear in your periphery. Which is why you should be careful of long-term dreams. If you focus too far in front of you, you won’t see the shiny thing out the corner of your eye."
Absolutely, when the stakes are low and the timelines short. Then it's a very good option for "not knowing what to do".
It's a really bad idea when you have to start by taking on six-figure student loans, or when it will take years of your life to get to the point where you're confronted with the unappealing aspects, which will dominate your time thereafter.
The article was about "I hate my job people" and finding the difference between someone with enough interest to really change his life.
As an analogy, I'm sure car salesman know from experimental evidence that there's a difference between an interested buyer and a tire-kicker. ... that a few questions can discern with high probability.
This is exactly what the article is saying is needed in order to predict whether you will enjoy a job or not.
I think you missed the second part of the sentence, it's one thing to not know the answers, but you should have a personal interest in finding them
> Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” but when you were actually doing them, did you want to stop, or did you want to continue?
I think people like Wolff like writing. Brandon Sanderson is another example. He can't stop. I think they'd do it even if they weren't able to make it as novelists. That's what separates a lot of those people from most others. Sure, some people have a goal and the grit to reach for it, to do that dribbling & shooting practice for six hours a day even if it's not actually fun. But some people have this sort of mania for their work. It's not really sensible to talk about being like them, unless you already are.
The primary reason Bill Gates is a billionaire is because he was born at the perfect time for someone to be obsessed with how computers work. What would he have done if he was born 100 years earlier?
I think there are plenty of successful authors who don't have the same obsession as Sanderson and Wolff, but they are obsessed in different ways. And I think that's the key: if there's something that you enjoy doing and can find some aspect that you can really obsess over—it doesn't have to be the same as everyone else (probably better if not)—then you might be able to make that work as a fulfilling career.
It sounded, and still sounds, like "Only run if running bursts from the soles of your feet and you feel like you'll go crazy if you don't." Well, no. It might be good advice for a professional athlete -- I wouldn't know -- but you can run whenever you damn well feel like it as an amateur. So too for writing.
Standup comics try out new material on tour, and then save up the bits that work for big gigs and specials. Creative writing isn't that different from joke writing. Write yourself a bunch of short stories, try things out, see what sticks, novelize the good ones. Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik was a short story. There are some famous books out there that were originally done as serials.
Do more, but find ways to shed the unsuccessful attempts, or otherwise give yourself permission to fail. If you're not failing occasionally you aren't reaching far enough.
George RR Martin possibly the most famous/contemporary example, but here's a page tracing back recorded instances of it. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/10/18/on-writing/
On side projects, open source etc, you get to work on projects (and with tools) that you care about and/or want to use or work on.
This kind of thing probably applies in some other jobs, but not all. Music, writing, visual arts and design, and construction at least seem like something where the particular target or process may be a vital part of the interest and satisfaction.
https://www.paulgraham.com/genius.html
In my life, I knew a guy who was obsessed with the Beatles. You couldn't get him to shut up about it. People hated listening to him but he didn't care, he just wanted to talk about the Beatles. Now imagine if he was obsessed with software development - he could change the world.
The appeal of short form names like these is clear considering his full formal name and title is
Don Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa, 12th Duke of Palma, Baron of Montechiaro, Baron of La Torretta, and Grandee of Spain of the first class.
I get that it must suck to do some bullshit job you don't want to just so you don't starve, but I studied for the thing I wanted to do, found a job doing what I wanted to, and now someone is paying me relatively well to do the thing I would do on my own time. Then I get called wage slave and capitalism boot licker just because I found someone to pay for my hobby.
> Most of those students would go, “Oh, no I would not like to do those things.” The actual content of a professor’s life had never occurred to them. If you could pop the tops of their skulls and see what they thought being a professor was like, you’d probably find some low-res cartoon version of themselves walking around campus in a tweed jacket going, “I’m a professor, that’s me! Professor here!” and everyone waving back to them going, “Hi professor!”
I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.
Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.
Also, grading was fun, just because you can be an unusually good grader by doing the barest-minimum and including, like, any notes at all (the students just want to know that you actually understood why you took their points away).
It strikes me that those are two spots that seem hardest to automate away, and involve satisfying the customer the most. But they don’t really seem to be central to the professor’ actual identities, or to the general perception of them.
I think you're misusing the analogy completely. In the analogy, the cartoon version of the professor doesn't actually _do_ anything. I don't see how you could compare that to your real life, where you were actually doing something (teaching students). Unless you're dismissing the act of teaching students as a lecturer as a completely empty pursuit.
I didn’t go all the way down that path, but got one step closer to the job, so I’m reflecting on the bits that were surprisingly rewarding and what wasn’t (for me).
This is awesome, I love the way you phrase this and having that mindset.
That is, until we got a new president who set a new strategic goal for being a top research school and adjusted all hiring and tenure standards for that.
You didn't like teaching like that. Some people really do, some people don't. Nothing wrong with individual preferences.
You sound like one of those rare souls who might both enjoy and be good at people management.
(Line management, at least. The higher up you go, the less fun it gets, unless you're a psychopath whose primary motivation is Number Go Up.)
This was baffling, of course. But the explanation was that every time it was an opportunity to listen to their problems and ask questions and figure out what the problem was and try to work out a solution. Might be their expectations or their situation or it might be the company product or service. Either way, they could usually find a way to make things better and the customer would end up being happier than they were before the talk.
It's still pretty far down the list of jobs that I'd ever want to do, but I can really relate to the motivation. Made a lot of sense.
I don't know any grad student (outside perhaps a first-semester master's student) who has delusions about what a professor does. First off, they know academia is publish-or-perish, they've been told it every day, and they're prepping for it right from the get-go, with qualifying papers that are going to turn into their dissertation which is going to turn into their first academic book -- the first of many they know they're going to need to write. And they know that it also involves a lot of face time with the students, since as grad students they spend a lot of face time with the professor. And they know about the teaching because they're having to do it too now, as barely-paid lecturers.
> "Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan"
Did those students not have advisors?
Sorry, I got the point of the article, and it was fine, but this whole anecdote felt off.
Yeah totally, and I'd say that's exactly because of "status", which is mentioned:
High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack
Status is the thing people tend to communicate socially, not what they actually do day to day
---
I remember a pg line that cuts to the core of this:
It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
How To Do What You Love - https://paulgraham.com/love.html
It seems like a good rule to me ...
1. People grow into jobs and start to like stuff they didn't expect to like when they imagined doing them before.
2. The hour-to-hour things at a job like going to a meeting depends heavily on the people you're with. The same person might hate meetings at company 1, but like them at company 2, just because of other people and the atmosphere. The people-aspect is probably very important and impossible to unpack before you tried the job.
I've noticed this as well; especially with the more abstract professions that have words like consultant or strategy in them. Even from friends you'll often get a surprisingly 'corporate-BS' answer.
The best answers I've gotten is by asking people to take me through their last work day hour by hour.
Then again, I've had plenty of people not understand my job either: "I build software applications" sounds obvious to us but I've had people ask the follow up "So how do you actually do that?". The answer they're expecting is something like "I sit in front of a computer and type text into something equivalent to notepad".
I think the “get rich easy” reputation that software engineering gained somewhere around the 2010s really hurt the industry and a lot of people who are chasing the dollar.
I’m an unhinged lunatic who loves productivity software and user experiences. The type of kid who was setting up Outlook betas in 6th grade to try the new features. Watching videos about how the Ribbon was designed. Reading C++ for dummies even though I had untreated ADHD and couldn’t sit still long enough to get much past std::cout. Eventually daydreaming about walking into the office, tired from a hard sprint, getting coffee in corporate-sponsored coffee cups.
I wake up and reflect how profoundly lucky I am to have my dream job. Not just having the career I have, but having a dream at all and having a dream I could love in practice.
Unfortunately many people today got into for the money and not the passion (or at least the passion and the money). Those people look for shortcuts and are generally unpleasant to work with, in my opinion.
They just want the code but they don't enjoy the coding, so they're trying to find something that will give them the former while sparing them the latter.
1) People who love programming, do it as a hobby, and love being in front of a computer all day.
2) People who doing it because it's a decent paying job, but have no passion (and probably therefore not much skill) for it, and the last thing they want when they clock off their job is to be back on a computer.
If you are from group 1) - getting paid to do your hobby, then being a developer is a great job, but if you are from group 2) I imagine it can be pretty miserable, especially if trying to debug complex problems, or faced with tasks pushing your capability.
Passion for me is a nasty world, in the mouth of bosses. It's almost always a way to ask people to work unhealthy hours, and it results in bad work being done, which I have to fix later. If people talk live their own passion, it's fine, but whenever I hear someone appeal to the passion of someone else, it's to sell them into doing something that's not in their best interest.
I'm a hard group 1, and I don't really mind if LLMs take my job, just please don't take my passion.
But even then, I was never interested in doing it as a career. I knew I’d hate it. And lo and behold here we are. I just don’t care about most of the crap products people pay me to work on.
But I was also young and way too broke to go to school so it was really the best financial option at the time. In retrospect, I’d have wasted my time doing something else.
Heh. And then they go become a "real" engineer (mechanical, electrical, whatever), and end up sitting in front of a computer all day, dealing with poor UI and poorly designed SW because a lot of CAD tools are either built in-house or owned by monopolies who have no incentive to improve the experience.
I've lived both worlds.
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2016/Jan/code-monkey-or-cad-mon...
I went to college in the late 1990s at the height of the dotcom boom. Saw a bunch of people who had this same feeling.
Which made no sense to me b/c I loved programming so much that I would do my homework assignments ahead of time!
Yup.
Also, "The Company is the Product," where the goal is to sell the company, and the end-users are just food for the prize hog.
Just start talking about improving software quality, or giving end-users more agency, privacy, and freedom, around here, and see the response.
1. I love my job because (1) CRUD apps are so immensely satisfying (2) turns out that optimizing ad metrics at FAANG was my innately-sought destiny (3) being acquired by GOOG is bitter-sweet because now my wife will complain that I am not retiring even though I can
2. As opposed to the normies that just have this job because they need a job
This was a discussion that came up a few times in College. I argued that with hyper-specialization, you can't satisfy a desirable balance of cerebral and manual work, socializing, and being outdoors. Pick your poison. I didn't want to do shift work at the bottom of a mine pit so here I am.
You can have flexibility in your free time to do something else. My father was always tired from shift-work and did basically nothing at leisure even as we grew up.
Police officer actually has a really good balance of physical exertion, mental/social challenge, and indoor/outdoor exposure. And you get to write A LOT. But there are lots of adjacent roles, and many more not so close; e.g. I know someone who used to do field data collection and data analysis for some conservation nonprofit; lots of nature, physical exercise, and mental stimulation.
Software engineering and computer science seem to have two strict criteria to consider and neither of them is the same sort of continuous, analog suffering as wearing large shoes or practicing shooting a basketball. These criteria are
1) can you solve hard problems? 2) do you want to continue solving hard problems?
At least to me it seems that those two things take more effort and willpower than anything else in software. So I don't think challenging a person about whether they would love to sit in front a computer all day is the right approach.
Oh man, this brings up memories of me being inordinately excited about Office 2007 when it was in beta. I was in elementary school.
And memories of staying up late reading my collection of outdated tech books (Borland C++, UNIX SVR4, HTML 4, and the MS-DOS 6.22 manual were the big ones). Initially learning about programming and UNIX from those books were extremely formative for how I view programming today, and I suspect that's given me quite a different perspective on a lot of things (especially things like HTML & CGI) than a lot of other folks in my age cohort.
It was there in the 90s
2) I really love certain aspects of being a software engineer.
3) I have definutely said Ill kill myself if I have to sit in front of a computer for my entire life
4) this job will afford me a future where I can retire at a reasonable age. Whereas a non-computer oriented alternative (the other career available to me was house painting) will not.
Therefore I will bear the monotony of sitting in front of a computer all day for a few decades
You may have lucked out. I also didn't get terribly far in that book, but I thought it was fairly weird when I tried to read it, and after majoring in CS in college and eventually reading some very good books on programming, I believe I was entirely justified in not liking that one.
Dijkstra famously wasn't exactly keen on computers.
Computer science as a branch of mathematics has a long and fruitful history
Or to be more pithy, nobody accomplishes what Dijkstra did without liking their work. I’d say it’s zero people
Well, people who do real computer science don't program a lot, it's all theoretical math. Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy does with telescopes.
What you really need in life is financial independence and then you can choose what you want to do.
Wish you all financial independence.
Sometimes the interest just fades. What stimulated me at age 14 no longer does at age 36.
I think that when someone tells you they fantasize about starting a small local retail business, that we shouldn't just shit on their naivite; we should listen to what they're really trying to say and help them find something that checks the boxes for them:
1. Something in the real world, preferably with physical products/services on physical products
2. Something with a larger degree of independence
3. Something whose value to the customer is obvious
4. Something which improves the world or their community in some way, and is not just extracting value from others.
Personally, I love writing software, but I hate Software companies
Results are tangible, you are doing something with your hands, it only takes few hours (often much less) and you get to give something to people you love.
Like, I'm a hobby metal musician, and I do have a certain dream of being on stage with a band. Even if it's just a dive bar with 20 people. Gotta be realistic. And I have 15 - 20 years available for that, or even more if you look at Grave Digger or - rest in peace old chap - Ozzy. But I'm not certain if I have the passion to be a touring musician even if that happened (which most likely wont). Like what these people take on is entirely insane.
Brittney Slayes from Unleash the Archers had tours during which she worked full-time remote. 8 full hours of work, out of the hotel, soundcheck, gig, meet and greet, back into the bus, sleep, back to work. And from what I've heard they've also done that with a kid on top. That is just nuts.
And even without that, big tours are hell from what I've heard. The first one or two tours are an absolute test for bands because it's all a huge rush of adrenaline, excitement, nonsense, strange locations all at once without a second to breathe.
If you hear that, a 9-5ish tech job isn't that bad.
don't get me wrong, i LOVE playing live, and i hope you find a way to do so, because it really is great, but going to that next level really does take being a little nuts. stories about people shedding on their instrument for 8 hours, and then going out and jamming for 6 more hours until 4 am, every day. music is really important to my life, but when push comes to shove i don't care about it that much!