I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it comes down to feelings... Life choices? Business decisions? Who gets promoted? It's all vibes and feelings. People will deliberate and argue over facts but ultimately there will be some "weighting" factor which is feelings and will make or break the outcome. You can have a perfectly argued decision that fails some vibe check and is hence discarded. Or a terrible argument that plays to some emotional point so is accepted. It's all feelings. Rare is the opposite.
Another way to look at it is parallel processing vs sequential processing.. our brains can make a judgement call about a thousand subtle variables and data points that we can't exactly put our fingers on unless we really dig into it, which we usually label as 'feelings', using the parallel part of our brain. The sequential (logical) part can only consider a limited number of variables at a time. I don't think either mode of thinking is inherently worse (we need both), but in our society the feelings part has traditionally been discounted as being 'illogical' by academics.. I think AI has shown us that parallel processing is actually incredibly important to thinking.
But back to the original post, I think 'having good taste' and knowing when something feels like the right solution is one of those hard to define qualities that can make the difference between average and great products (and has far reaching effects in any business).
I always like to say we aren’t rational, we _rationalize_. Much of our decision making process is subconscious / vibes / “system 2”, but we also have a strong need for a sensible narrative structure to our lives. So what hack did nature come up with? Let us make the gut decision based on a bunch of soft heuristics, then rationalize it and wrap it into a sensible narrative before it reaches our conscious mind. Lets us use our efficient system 2 thinking most of the time while avoiding all that messy cognitive dissonance that would arise from a conscious awareness of how chaotic such a system would be at the scale of… oh, say, a global civilization of such creatures ;)
I grew to believe that feelings have hard-to-recognize rationales that can be explained if you dig deep enough. Very few people ever do however. Recognizing the rationale is a great skill to have in many circumstances where you give feedback, like code reviews for example. It's also a skill that makes you a better teacher.
Various studies have shown that trying to explain the reasons for a decision can often cause people to make worse decisions. I remember there was one where lay people were able to taste and rate jams with a high degree of correlation to the ratings of expert tasters; but when asked to explain _why_ they rate one jam better than another, their ratings suddenly drastically disagreed with experts'.
> You can have a perfectly argued decision that fails some vibe check and is hence discarded
One of the worst hires I ever worked with was excellent on paper, came with good credentials, had an impressive resume, and did objectively well on the interview questions.
However, everyone who interviewed him felt uneasy about him. He failed the vibe check, even though he checked all of the boxes and knew all the right things to say. At the time there was a big push for eliminating bias and being and as objective as possible in hiring, so we were lightly admonished for raising questions based on vibes.
When he was hired, it turned out our vibes were justified. He was someone who played games and manipulated his way through his career. He could say the right things and navigate his way through office politics unscathed while causing damage to everything he touched.
Since then I’ve observed a number of situations where decisions that seemed objectively good but came with weird vibes were later revealed to be bad. Some of the most skilled grifters I’ve encountered were brilliant at appearing objectively good but couldn’t pass vibe checks of experienced business people. Some of the most objectively good deals on paper that came with weird vibes later turned out to be hugely problematic.
I think the trap is thinking that vibes and feelings are wrong and should be ignored in favor of pre-selected objective measures. This is good practice when doing a scientific study, but it’s not a good practice when you’re entering a real world situation where an adversarial party can root out those criteria, fake them, and use your objectivity against you.
It's all very well when it works to your advantage but "vibes" also do the opposite.
People who instantly take against you tend to see every mistake and interpret every event the worst possible way and eventually decide that their initial feelings were right. Once again intuition triumphs. You don't get a chance to prove you're no worse than anyone else - there's just a period of time where they look for evidence to confirm their vibe.
I remember going to work in a country where my apparent origin was seen in a positive way and realising that if I'd been from somewhere in Eastern Europe I'd have been automatically disrespected. I remember going to an interview for a flat share and the moment I said I was from Zimbabwe one guy said that "South Africans" (sic) "drink and party too much." Since I'm white I'd never been on the opposite side of prejudice before and it was highly interesting.
Oh yes, I agree, it is information that's telling you something but because one doesn't usually have a way of putting it into words it's not clear what the message is. People who are different from you are sometimes just nervous and not sure how to present themselves.
I have, however, had to fix the terrible work of grifters (e.g. no unit tests, every minor change breaks something silently) and nobody ever cottoned onto them even though they were quite obvious. The feelings they gave management were "good ones" despite them being terrible for the business. I, as the person fixing stuff after said grifter left suddenly, was blamed for everything that was wrong.
This exact same phenomenon bit me at a previous job. We hired a couple of really smooth-talking grifters, and it took a tremendous amount of time to get rid of them. Vibes matter.
This is why recruitment as it exists now is a farce. If everything is ultimately vibes-based, there's no point in portraying the process as objective. I'd say that it's even a sort of fraud to do so.
Set base credentials, lottery of everyone who passes the post, full hire or fire after a short (1 month, at most) probationary period where vibes are considered. There's no reason to go through rounds and rounds of interviews over months. It's a waste of everyone's time. Unless your criteria are completely compromised, you'll find someone within a few tries.
My theory of life is that Everything is Vibes. I work in the financial industry with individuals who think very highly of their fact driven decision making when it always boils down to vibes. Facts be dammed
I also worked in finance and couldn't agree more. The whole corporate thing is a farce. Spend a year "gathering data" or "planning" only for everything to boil down to one guy making an arbitrary decision which no one goes against because "that's just how it works". That industry exists no matter how you decision-make because it's slurping off an endless money fountain.
Even expressions of rationality comes from a feeling we must do so.
Rationalists cannot get away from empiricism. There's nothing to rationalize about without observation of the empirical.
Western philosophy has always tried to carve out very precise lanes of thought like empiricism and rationalism, but one requires the other.
There's no nature or nurture debate. It's all emergent aspects of nature.
Humanoids went centuries learning to adjust to internal feelings of enough water and food. Strived to find balance.
Language came along and agrarian warlords focused effort on made up balancing acts of gods; He will be mad if we don't do things right. Lame projection
You can analyze in different ways by choosing different frames of reference, etc., but choosing how to feel isn't the same. For most, "choosing to how feel" is difficult to attempt.
This can apply on the personal level too. Almost everything we want is less about the thing, and more about the feeling we think the thing will give us.
There is something to this. I believe that if you cannot feel, you also cannot reason. It’s almost as if intellectual ability is an application of emotionality rather than something separate. For example, when something makes sense to you, what does that really mean? In my experience, when something “clicks”, that is not intellect. The intellect kicks in to retroactively explain the feeling. The “clicking” itself- that’s the feeling.
Rationale. Is it, though? It would be ironic if anyone found it necessary to construct an argument for why argument is unnecessary. (Though that sounds familiar - classical cynicism maybe?)
Well, acting without reason is unreasonable, for sure. But since I don't think knowledge is (mostly) hierarchical, I don't think chains of reasoning are the main part of how we arrive at preferences. To the extent that knowledge does have foundations, the foundations are beliefs, and they're built in no particular order, and survive by merit of seeming to chime with other beliefs, fitting together in a paradigm. That effect where they seem to chime is an impression, a hunch, which is a feeling.
What reasoning can do is tell you "these two beliefs definitely can't go together, because they're logically incompatible", and then you have to jettison one of them (or attack the argument), even if it feels like they both belong. Somewhat disconcerting.
People want different things. Even if two perfectly rational people agree on a shared model of reality, they still might not agree on what actions to take as a matter of aesthetic preference.
That said, it's true that few are rational and honest. Everyone wants their ideals to be reality, but most people confuse their ideals with reality itself. Even those who can tell the difference may choose to trick others into delusion, so that they may use them for their own benefit.
I used to do that, but not so much now. Being honest with myself and the world is a more interesting way to live.
I think a lot of the dysfunction we see in the world can be attributed to people feeling positive emotions towards deeply problematic logical decisions, so they favor them for whatever perceived benefit they'll get from that decision, often overlooking the long-term impacts or how it affects others around them.
We walk a dangerous line when feelings are the executive decision maker, even when we know what we should do (what's right) doesn't give us the same emotional response.
It's like working out. Nobody really wants to do it, but it only stands to benefit the body in the most logical, tangible sense.
It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead.
I think there is some survival bias in the analysis, and that something like the iPhone was inevitable given all the experimentation going on in the market.
Apple also made the Newton. But folks don't call back to it or praise its makers very often.
It comes and goes in seasons. There is always a tension between the needs of the many and the pathological acquisitiveness of the few, but this is the worst in the West in living memory.
The last remotely compatible situation was the late USSR, and a dysfunctional Soviet corpse plundering by middling oligarchs to even more pathic notional leadership is precisely what it is.
Be of good cheer, it collapses under its own weight in this neighborhood of dysfunction. Its almost over.
There will be a mess to clean up, then it'll be summer again until we get lax again.
Always been this way, always will be. Empires grow in power, then corruption, then only corruption, and then they're done.
A lot of people suffer greatly and die to cause that mess.
A perfect example is the terrible mismanagement of the epidemic in the USA; over a million people dead, many (most?) of them unnecessarily for the active rejection of basic infection control measures. A perfect example of the corruption of which you speak: many countries got €1-2 rapid tests (I bought a 50 pack) where the US only approved the $30 two-pack. Thousands died unnecessarily so the state could funnel money to their buddies.
This is just one of a million examples. The rate of degeneration seems to be increasing further.
You’re right about it getting close, but unfortunately “almost over” in this context usually means a generation or two. Children born today might only know a lifetime of suffering only for their own adult children to finally emerge in the spring.
This is why I don’t like takes like this. It is impossible to be in good cheer when there will be millions of preventable and utterly unnecessary deaths and hundreds of millions of lives and bodies damaged and stunted irreparably due to lack of access to medicine and education and equal protection of law. Preventable diseases not being prevented, treatable conditions going intreated. Forced and unnecessary poverty costs lives. It is no different than any other genocide or intentional mass murder.
From my experience it consists of Excel spreadsheets. What I mean is that when a wave of layoffs hits, there's no humanity to it, you're just above or below a line.
Smart move by Mitchell to omit (in his opinion) _why_ you have to feel it, as evidenced by the spread interpretation in the comments.
In my opinion, you have to “feel it” in order to do your best work.
However(!), and also in my opinion, you shouldn’t always strive to be in a position where you “feel it”. While it is important to spend most of one’s life feeling it / doing their best work in order to be fulfilled, the hazard of insatiably “feeling it” is that you can much more quickly burn out.
Working with passion fuels a level of intensity and emotional involvement that can take a while to recover from if you don’t get the result (read: success) you desired.
Feeling some moderate positive emotion as a result of your work is not incompatible with 9 to 5 work.
The bigger problem is usually the opposite: nagging negative emotions, feeling annoyed, feeling contempt towards some parts of the work that one is bound to do. These emotions are unbecoming, so the psychological defenses hide them, as if there's no feeling at all. This is what "mind-numbing" work often is.
There's a related problem I see in academic review, but I think it applies far more broadly. The easy part of review is recognizing flaws. One should always acknowledge the flaws, but the authors tend to already be aware of them[0]. The difficult part is determining if the flaws undermine the research or if despite the limitations that the work pushes progress forward. (All but a few works are incremental)
I think this applies much more broadly because even in conversations people are quick to latch onto a subtle inconsequential detail and then dismiss the rest. Being able to read the words does not make one literate, it is the interpretation of them that does. I think this example is quite prolific with internet conversations, enough that we can circle back to sarreph's mention of this in their first sentence. But I think another great example was from this post from a week ago[1]. Most comments are responding to the headline, but many even looked at the post and missed the entire point (which isn't about work being interrupted).
[0] Authors may not acknowledge them in the work because the review process is too adversarial and such acknowledgements can be used as ammunition against them (thanks lazy reviewers ;), because solving those flaws is a good followup and they don't want to get scooped, or many other reasons.
> Working with passion fuels a level of intensity and emotional involvement that can take a while to recover from if you don’t get the result (read: success) you desired.
I'm reminded of a phrase: Passion is worth 10 IQ points.
The number of IQ points doesn't really matter but this is about feel. With passion you're much more likely to dig in. By digging in you're more likely to see subtle issues that can result in drastically different outcomes (the more complex something is, the more likely such issues exist). You care about the thing working and so you care about finding out when it doesn't work.
On the other hand, if you have no passion you just go through the motions. You spend less time thinking. It passes the tests? Okay great, let's move on, "it works, so who cares?" In this situation you care less about the thing working and more about getting the task done.
I feel like the second attitude is becoming much more common. I'm sure there are a ton of reasons why but I feel like one of these is that complexity has just exploded. An unfortunate fact is that you can make things too simple. Little errors compound to become big errors that are difficult to wrangle. I think we've gotten to a point where there's so much (often hidden) complexity that we are constantly being overwhelmed, making it harder to care, creating a dangerous feedback loop.
Every good problem solver knows that the best way to tackle a problem is to break it down into bite sized and simpler pieces. But the flip side of this is that every big problem is caused by the accumulation of many little problems. For some reason we have a much harder time thinking in this direction. For this reason I think we need to stress the importance of the little things[0]. It is also important to remember that when solving the big problem that solving each little problem is not enough. That only works if they are independent. You may want to start out treating them as such but that's why this tends to become an iterative process, because as you converge to solving the larger problem these hidden complexities start to reveal themselves. So solving small problems is a defensive strategy.
[0] This can easily be misread. I am not insisting that everyone be a perfectionist. What I've said is far easier said than done. Perfection does not exist, there is always something wrong. The question is much more about bounding that error and keeping it small. It is about recognizing these issues and keeping track of them. More important than solving problems is the recognition of them. After all, it is incredibly difficult to solve problems you don't know exist. By keeping track of these things you can better triage tasks. Even a few comments in the code stating what assumptions are made or stating the conditions that the code is expected to run on will save you tons of headaches in the future. A trivial amount of work in the moment can pay enormous dividends when given enough time.
I went through a longer quest, called "getting naturalized in another country".
Went through the grind of getting visa, then the work permit, then the different visa, then the short-term residence permit.
Changed jobs, had to go to the immigration department again, because these residence permits are tied to the employer.
Kept a spreadsheet with dates of each exit and entry.
Had to keep all my paperwork ducks in a row.
To be able to get married, I had to get a permit from a judge.
Got married and had to go through the immigration office again, as this changed the primary purpose of my stay yet again. The queue to the immigration office was so long that I had to come there at 2am (yes, 2 in the morning) to even have a chance to file my paperwork.
Still had to keep the spreadsheet with exit/entry dates, the printout was attached to each application.
Went to another city to pass the language exam to be able to get the long-term residence permit.
In a couple of years, applied for citizenship. Had to go visit my birth country and gather some more paperwork from there, get it translated.
All the while it all felt as if I was a student again and this was an important exam each and every time. Stressed. Constantly afraid that a document would be missing and I would need to start over.
Then finally they texted me. I went to collect the papers that certified that I now was the citizen of my new country, almost ten years after starting the quest. I could apply for my new shiny national ID. I now wasn't a second-class person anymore.
Upon leaving the government building, I felt nothing. I had expected that with all that stress and buildup, some kind of relief would come. But it never came. No relief, no joy, not a sausage.
I remember that the weather was miserable on that day.
It would help to know what your reason was to go through with that. Relief and joy can be more expected if it changes your life circumstances in a way that you were looking forward to. Something related to family etc. Easier travel to some places that you couldn't go before etc.
For me it's what I call the 'weekend test': Do I like tinkering with this thing enough that I'd want to play around with it on a weekend / in my own time, just for fun.
This needs to check a lot of boxes: is it easy and quick to setup, do I need some hard to obtain 'license key', does everything work out of box or at least is easy enough to fix, and most importantly: is it a joy to use (which is entirely subjective though).
If something doesn't pass this test then I also don't want to waste time with it at work. In a nutshell this is also why wheels should be reinvented over and over again, and if it's just for the sole reason that the new wheel feels better to just the person who reinvented it. Chances are other people will feel the same after trying the new wheel (on a weekend, hah) and start using it (or not and that's fine too), but in the end this is how innovation happens.
For as much as the author may get roasted for stating the obvious, I've often seen this "measure everything" mindset, coming from those you'd think should know better than that.
I've even seen this stupidity in myself sometimes. In a way it's funny how you can get so lost on the numbers that you forget about the thing.
This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.
I wouldn’t normally even comment something like this about someone’s article, but I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me and I am worried that if we don’t point it out, we will lose our ability to spot nonsense like this and side step our critical thinking.
The “trick” is contrasting or relating something completely irrelevant to some sort of nonsensical or obvious “thought piece”.
I am sure this is some sort of named fallacy and someone else can explain it a lot more eloquently, but this is my attempt.
Look at my other posts and you'll see I'm not like an "influencer content" person. I purposely made this piece shallow to encourage more people to read it and discuss the core idea, rather than get distracted by specific examples or points.
I've blogged long enough on a personal level, done corporate PR long enough at a professional level, to know that the more words there are, the more people get bogged down in the details.
I plan to follow up this post with specific callouts and associating it directly with my work (both positively and negatively). But, for example, if I used Terraform as an example of something in this (hypothetically), people would focus in on arguing the merits of "feeling" Terraform. That's not the point.
We have a recent hire who comes from a background where a) the user base was much larger and b) metrics were the best way to understand outcomes.
Our company is smaller and earlier than that. I enjoy the focus on metrics, it's a good push for us, but sometimes you just have to do the obviously good thing for users without trying to build a metrics framework around it.
> Measuring and feeling are not mutually exclusive.
They are not mutually exclusive, but they compete to a degree. If someone's time is mostly spent on what can be measured, they can't spend time on "common sense" or investigative work that is less easily tracked. At the end of they day, trying to measure everything makes as much sense as trying to document every line of code. (Most of this, naturally, also applies the other way around).
> This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.
> I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me
I think a lot of the shallowness is from blogs or HN being a public, persistent, broadcast written media. In a face to face conversation, you can generally follow up and share more specifics and nuance without fear of getting a bad reputation.
If anything I think the bias is the other way around, on the Internet whatever you write can get cherry-picked and framed to make you appear terrible, in person it's much easier to get a fair sample.
Oh, i thought it was a satirical critique of how arbitrary promotion criteria can be. Turns out someone is seriously claiming that someone else "doesn't not feel the right way" about the work they do, and THAT is their core problem. Ha. Well, at least the author feels that they are feeling the right way, good for them I guess.
That's the negative side. The opposite is, which anyone who ran some kind of group activity or forum should have experience with, is when someone obnoxious plays rules lawyering to slip out of everything. In the end you just have to leave it at a vibes-based reasoning. Yes, it can be abused. The explicit, written rules variant can be abused in opposite ways. It's all tradeoffs.
I land on the point of the tradeoff spectrum where you have some "instructions" and rules, but it's also a "spirit of the rules" kind of thing, and someone has the means to exercise subjective judgment, instead of trying to fully eliminate subjectivity in favor of ever growing rules with ever growing exceptions that become a maze to navigate, and can become its own form of tyranny, especially if someone has the power to arbitrarily decide which set of rules to choose to apply for each case.
You can have the best processes and rules, if the people are bad. You can't compensate for that. And if you have good people, you can and should allow them some range of judgment.
This is one of the things that I’ve tried really hard to impress upon engineers new and old while working on various projects, and IMO it applies to just about every layer of the stack; ultimately everything flows up into the UX.
This vibe was pervasive at Apple and could be taken more or less for granted, but elsewhere it’s all over the place.
And, like, sure, there are projects and industries where this doesn’t matter. But giving a shit and feeling it can be a major differentiator.
Readit News
But back to the original post, I think 'having good taste' and knowing when something feels like the right solution is one of those hard to define qualities that can make the difference between average and great products (and has far reaching effects in any business).
Is this different from rationalizing? Or are we saying that rationalizing is okay if you are sufficiently attuned to your feelings?
One of the worst hires I ever worked with was excellent on paper, came with good credentials, had an impressive resume, and did objectively well on the interview questions.
However, everyone who interviewed him felt uneasy about him. He failed the vibe check, even though he checked all of the boxes and knew all the right things to say. At the time there was a big push for eliminating bias and being and as objective as possible in hiring, so we were lightly admonished for raising questions based on vibes.
When he was hired, it turned out our vibes were justified. He was someone who played games and manipulated his way through his career. He could say the right things and navigate his way through office politics unscathed while causing damage to everything he touched.
Since then I’ve observed a number of situations where decisions that seemed objectively good but came with weird vibes were later revealed to be bad. Some of the most skilled grifters I’ve encountered were brilliant at appearing objectively good but couldn’t pass vibe checks of experienced business people. Some of the most objectively good deals on paper that came with weird vibes later turned out to be hugely problematic.
I think the trap is thinking that vibes and feelings are wrong and should be ignored in favor of pre-selected objective measures. This is good practice when doing a scientific study, but it’s not a good practice when you’re entering a real world situation where an adversarial party can root out those criteria, fake them, and use your objectivity against you.
People who instantly take against you tend to see every mistake and interpret every event the worst possible way and eventually decide that their initial feelings were right. Once again intuition triumphs. You don't get a chance to prove you're no worse than anyone else - there's just a period of time where they look for evidence to confirm their vibe.
I remember going to work in a country where my apparent origin was seen in a positive way and realising that if I'd been from somewhere in Eastern Europe I'd have been automatically disrespected. I remember going to an interview for a flat share and the moment I said I was from Zimbabwe one guy said that "South Africans" (sic) "drink and party too much." Since I'm white I'd never been on the opposite side of prejudice before and it was highly interesting.
Oh yes, I agree, it is information that's telling you something but because one doesn't usually have a way of putting it into words it's not clear what the message is. People who are different from you are sometimes just nervous and not sure how to present themselves.
I have, however, had to fix the terrible work of grifters (e.g. no unit tests, every minor change breaks something silently) and nobody ever cottoned onto them even though they were quite obvious. The feelings they gave management were "good ones" despite them being terrible for the business. I, as the person fixing stuff after said grifter left suddenly, was blamed for everything that was wrong.
- not answering questions (e.g. by asking counterquestions or giving long-winded non-answers)
- not taking responsibility in bad outcomes (when asked about problems they were facing)
- not saying "I don't know"
- using "we" for bad outcomes and "I" for good outcomes (socialising loss, privatising profit)
...
Set base credentials, lottery of everyone who passes the post, full hire or fire after a short (1 month, at most) probationary period where vibes are considered. There's no reason to go through rounds and rounds of interviews over months. It's a waste of everyone's time. Unless your criteria are completely compromised, you'll find someone within a few tries.
Rationalists cannot get away from empiricism. There's nothing to rationalize about without observation of the empirical.
Western philosophy has always tried to carve out very precise lanes of thought like empiricism and rationalism, but one requires the other.
There's no nature or nurture debate. It's all emergent aspects of nature.
Humanoids went centuries learning to adjust to internal feelings of enough water and food. Strived to find balance.
Language came along and agrarian warlords focused effort on made up balancing acts of gods; He will be mad if we don't do things right. Lame projection
Well, acting without reason is unreasonable, for sure. But since I don't think knowledge is (mostly) hierarchical, I don't think chains of reasoning are the main part of how we arrive at preferences. To the extent that knowledge does have foundations, the foundations are beliefs, and they're built in no particular order, and survive by merit of seeming to chime with other beliefs, fitting together in a paradigm. That effect where they seem to chime is an impression, a hunch, which is a feeling.
What reasoning can do is tell you "these two beliefs definitely can't go together, because they're logically incompatible", and then you have to jettison one of them (or attack the argument), even if it feels like they both belong. Somewhat disconcerting.
That said, it's true that few are rational and honest. Everyone wants their ideals to be reality, but most people confuse their ideals with reality itself. Even those who can tell the difference may choose to trick others into delusion, so that they may use them for their own benefit.
I used to do that, but not so much now. Being honest with myself and the world is a more interesting way to live.
If you didn't know about the case, Damasio's Eliott is the personification of this observation : you have to feel first.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250614042654/https://www.thecu...
We walk a dangerous line when feelings are the executive decision maker, even when we know what we should do (what's right) doesn't give us the same emotional response.
It's like working out. Nobody really wants to do it, but it only stands to benefit the body in the most logical, tangible sense.
Dead Comment
The corporate machine does not feel it.
It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead.
Perhaps that was just the magic of Jobs, who definitely felt things. But he didn't make the iPhone single handedly.
Apple also made the Newton. But folks don't call back to it or praise its makers very often.
The last remotely compatible situation was the late USSR, and a dysfunctional Soviet corpse plundering by middling oligarchs to even more pathic notional leadership is precisely what it is.
Be of good cheer, it collapses under its own weight in this neighborhood of dysfunction. Its almost over.
There will be a mess to clean up, then it'll be summer again until we get lax again.
Always been this way, always will be. Empires grow in power, then corruption, then only corruption, and then they're done.
A perfect example is the terrible mismanagement of the epidemic in the USA; over a million people dead, many (most?) of them unnecessarily for the active rejection of basic infection control measures. A perfect example of the corruption of which you speak: many countries got €1-2 rapid tests (I bought a 50 pack) where the US only approved the $30 two-pack. Thousands died unnecessarily so the state could funnel money to their buddies.
This is just one of a million examples. The rate of degeneration seems to be increasing further.
You’re right about it getting close, but unfortunately “almost over” in this context usually means a generation or two. Children born today might only know a lifetime of suffering only for their own adult children to finally emerge in the spring.
This is why I don’t like takes like this. It is impossible to be in good cheer when there will be millions of preventable and utterly unnecessary deaths and hundreds of millions of lives and bodies damaged and stunted irreparably due to lack of access to medicine and education and equal protection of law. Preventable diseases not being prevented, treatable conditions going intreated. Forced and unnecessary poverty costs lives. It is no different than any other genocide or intentional mass murder.
In my opinion, you have to “feel it” in order to do your best work.
However(!), and also in my opinion, you shouldn’t always strive to be in a position where you “feel it”. While it is important to spend most of one’s life feeling it / doing their best work in order to be fulfilled, the hazard of insatiably “feeling it” is that you can much more quickly burn out.
Working with passion fuels a level of intensity and emotional involvement that can take a while to recover from if you don’t get the result (read: success) you desired.
But yes, you do indeed mostly have to feel it.
The bigger problem is usually the opposite: nagging negative emotions, feeling annoyed, feeling contempt towards some parts of the work that one is bound to do. These emotions are unbecoming, so the psychological defenses hide them, as if there's no feeling at all. This is what "mind-numbing" work often is.
I think this applies much more broadly because even in conversations people are quick to latch onto a subtle inconsequential detail and then dismiss the rest. Being able to read the words does not make one literate, it is the interpretation of them that does. I think this example is quite prolific with internet conversations, enough that we can circle back to sarreph's mention of this in their first sentence. But I think another great example was from this post from a week ago[1]. Most comments are responding to the headline, but many even looked at the post and missed the entire point (which isn't about work being interrupted).
[0] Authors may not acknowledge them in the work because the review process is too adversarial and such acknowledgements can be used as ammunition against them (thanks lazy reviewers ;), because solving those flaws is a good followup and they don't want to get scooped, or many other reasons.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44999373
The number of IQ points doesn't really matter but this is about feel. With passion you're much more likely to dig in. By digging in you're more likely to see subtle issues that can result in drastically different outcomes (the more complex something is, the more likely such issues exist). You care about the thing working and so you care about finding out when it doesn't work.
On the other hand, if you have no passion you just go through the motions. You spend less time thinking. It passes the tests? Okay great, let's move on, "it works, so who cares?" In this situation you care less about the thing working and more about getting the task done.
I feel like the second attitude is becoming much more common. I'm sure there are a ton of reasons why but I feel like one of these is that complexity has just exploded. An unfortunate fact is that you can make things too simple. Little errors compound to become big errors that are difficult to wrangle. I think we've gotten to a point where there's so much (often hidden) complexity that we are constantly being overwhelmed, making it harder to care, creating a dangerous feedback loop.
Every good problem solver knows that the best way to tackle a problem is to break it down into bite sized and simpler pieces. But the flip side of this is that every big problem is caused by the accumulation of many little problems. For some reason we have a much harder time thinking in this direction. For this reason I think we need to stress the importance of the little things[0]. It is also important to remember that when solving the big problem that solving each little problem is not enough. That only works if they are independent. You may want to start out treating them as such but that's why this tends to become an iterative process, because as you converge to solving the larger problem these hidden complexities start to reveal themselves. So solving small problems is a defensive strategy.
[0] This can easily be misread. I am not insisting that everyone be a perfectionist. What I've said is far easier said than done. Perfection does not exist, there is always something wrong. The question is much more about bounding that error and keeping it small. It is about recognizing these issues and keeping track of them. More important than solving problems is the recognition of them. After all, it is incredibly difficult to solve problems you don't know exist. By keeping track of these things you can better triage tasks. Even a few comments in the code stating what assumptions are made or stating the conditions that the code is expected to run on will save you tons of headaches in the future. A trivial amount of work in the moment can pay enormous dividends when given enough time.
Went through the grind of getting visa, then the work permit, then the different visa, then the short-term residence permit.
Changed jobs, had to go to the immigration department again, because these residence permits are tied to the employer.
Kept a spreadsheet with dates of each exit and entry.
Had to keep all my paperwork ducks in a row.
To be able to get married, I had to get a permit from a judge.
Got married and had to go through the immigration office again, as this changed the primary purpose of my stay yet again. The queue to the immigration office was so long that I had to come there at 2am (yes, 2 in the morning) to even have a chance to file my paperwork.
Still had to keep the spreadsheet with exit/entry dates, the printout was attached to each application.
Went to another city to pass the language exam to be able to get the long-term residence permit.
In a couple of years, applied for citizenship. Had to go visit my birth country and gather some more paperwork from there, get it translated.
All the while it all felt as if I was a student again and this was an important exam each and every time. Stressed. Constantly afraid that a document would be missing and I would need to start over.
Then finally they texted me. I went to collect the papers that certified that I now was the citizen of my new country, almost ten years after starting the quest. I could apply for my new shiny national ID. I now wasn't a second-class person anymore.
Upon leaving the government building, I felt nothing. I had expected that with all that stress and buildup, some kind of relief would come. But it never came. No relief, no joy, not a sausage.
I remember that the weather was miserable on that day.
However, I would say that when a battle lasts long enough, one might have no emotional resources left to feel the victory.
That also applies to TFA.
This needs to check a lot of boxes: is it easy and quick to setup, do I need some hard to obtain 'license key', does everything work out of box or at least is easy enough to fix, and most importantly: is it a joy to use (which is entirely subjective though).
If something doesn't pass this test then I also don't want to waste time with it at work. In a nutshell this is also why wheels should be reinvented over and over again, and if it's just for the sole reason that the new wheel feels better to just the person who reinvented it. Chances are other people will feel the same after trying the new wheel (on a weekend, hah) and start using it (or not and that's fine too), but in the end this is how innovation happens.
I've even seen this stupidity in myself sometimes. In a way it's funny how you can get so lost on the numbers that you forget about the thing.
This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.
I wouldn’t normally even comment something like this about someone’s article, but I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me and I am worried that if we don’t point it out, we will lose our ability to spot nonsense like this and side step our critical thinking.
The “trick” is contrasting or relating something completely irrelevant to some sort of nonsensical or obvious “thought piece”.
I am sure this is some sort of named fallacy and someone else can explain it a lot more eloquently, but this is my attempt.
Look at my other posts and you'll see I'm not like an "influencer content" person. I purposely made this piece shallow to encourage more people to read it and discuss the core idea, rather than get distracted by specific examples or points.
I've blogged long enough on a personal level, done corporate PR long enough at a professional level, to know that the more words there are, the more people get bogged down in the details.
I plan to follow up this post with specific callouts and associating it directly with my work (both positively and negatively). But, for example, if I used Terraform as an example of something in this (hypothetically), people would focus in on arguing the merits of "feeling" Terraform. That's not the point.
The point is to think about what we're shipping.
Our company is smaller and earlier than that. I enjoy the focus on metrics, it's a good push for us, but sometimes you just have to do the obviously good thing for users without trying to build a metrics framework around it.
They are not mutually exclusive, but they compete to a degree. If someone's time is mostly spent on what can be measured, they can't spend time on "common sense" or investigative work that is less easily tracked. At the end of they day, trying to measure everything makes as much sense as trying to document every line of code. (Most of this, naturally, also applies the other way around).
> This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.
> I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me
I think a lot of the shallowness is from blogs or HN being a public, persistent, broadcast written media. In a face to face conversation, you can generally follow up and share more specifics and nuance without fear of getting a bad reputation.
If anything I think the bias is the other way around, on the Internet whatever you write can get cherry-picked and framed to make you appear terrible, in person it's much easier to get a fair sample.
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I land on the point of the tradeoff spectrum where you have some "instructions" and rules, but it's also a "spirit of the rules" kind of thing, and someone has the means to exercise subjective judgment, instead of trying to fully eliminate subjectivity in favor of ever growing rules with ever growing exceptions that become a maze to navigate, and can become its own form of tyranny, especially if someone has the power to arbitrarily decide which set of rules to choose to apply for each case.
You can have the best processes and rules, if the people are bad. You can't compensate for that. And if you have good people, you can and should allow them some range of judgment.
This vibe was pervasive at Apple and could be taken more or less for granted, but elsewhere it’s all over the place.
And, like, sure, there are projects and industries where this doesn’t matter. But giving a shit and feeling it can be a major differentiator.
The current vibe at Apple is "we want you to be an obedient worker".
[0] https://systems-souls-society.com/what-is-this-the-case-for-...
I know there are still a ton of good people there, but it's a way, way different company now.