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.
> 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
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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’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 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!
Funny quirk of the website: it says it needs JavaScript to work, but I can read everything and see everything just fine, and the formatting isn't even broken. Then I look at uBlock and 195 trackers are blocked. Yikes
I got into game engine development knowing full well that it’s “applied linear algebra” and not at all like playing a game… except when you need to test something a hundred times in a row.
Lots of my colleagues dropped out of the industry in their first year because they didn’t like maths at all.
What really drove the point home for me though was that a decade later I got more satisfaction out of developing ETL pipelines for multidimensional analytics.
Think about how “nuts” that is! Everyone likes playing games but nobody installs SQL Server Analysis Services on their home PC for “fun”! Yet… it is, for a certain very select subset of the population…
When I was told to do this when I was like 14, and asked "waht did I want to do", I ran into all the exact traps that the article said in the form of overintellecutalization.
It takes a certain kind of maturity to just sit down and really try and observe, non-judgementally. Just what happened.
(then the intellectuals among y'all will say stuff like, "well perception isn't objective truth yada yada" this is also a big thought loop trap I had to get rid of. Just like, put it on hold, just say your thought, even if you think it's stupid, or it's some kind of "self strawman" and you want to elaborate more and justify etc.
Just say it.)
I've been able to do it for things I've really cared about, but often times I don't get into this state.
I should practice. I only even observed this thought pattern when I got good at math, and the whole thing was just sitting down, contemplating honestly pretty dumb thoughts, but if you thought loop yourself you get nowhere. Gotta say seemingly stupid stuff and just contemplate. Words are both the thing you should observe but not treat as truth, just... try to observe. idk.
The first few questions almost have me convinced I should open my own business. Surely there must be other difficult things?
I assume the main difficulty isn't that -- I assume it's the lack of comparative advantage, so competition eats into your margins until you're fighting a race to the bottom, not only making your customers happy, but doing it cheaper than someone else could, and I assume the stress from that makes it hard?
And also not being in control of your suppliers, so unpredictable events can affect your profit.
The main difficulty is that most people do not like running a business, especially a small business. For most of these businesses, you are buying yourself a job. Let's say you take out $1.5MM loan to open a shop, and you net $70,000 per year on a good year after expenses and debt service. After a few years, you have $1MM left to pay and there's no way you could sell the business for that. You have a personal guarantee on the loan.
Your vendors are always coming up with new ways to tack on extra charges. You have to deal with training, HR, bookkeeping, payroll, handyman tasks, cleaning, working shifts when your employees flake out, annoying customers, dangerous people, destructive customers, employee drama, the list goes on. If that is not what you enjoy, you will have a lot of your life doing things you do not enjoy. Sipping tasty coffee and chatting with your happy customers is a small part of the whole.
I also daydream about opening a business, like in the opening paragraph of the post. But I also know that I never will; it's a daydream, not a retirement plan. I know I would hate 95% of the process, without even fully unpacking it. That's why it's a daydream, and that's why when I'm frustrated at work I say "I wish I could quit and become a woodworker" or "I want to walk out of this job and open a D&D cafe."
But to your point, yep. There's a coffee shop in town - one of the only ones! - that we go to because we like it. But two more just opened up, both in better locations for both foot & car traffic, which might genuinely kill the other place. And there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.
The follow questions are to establish if you are crazy about this, not sane about this.
Anecdote - Incredible introversion, if not social anxiety - and at one point I just up and drove to meet strangers at a cyber cafe to play video games, because I was obsessive about video games at that point. Same for cooking, writing papers, reaching out to people, and so on.
You overcome yourself, when it’s something that resonates with you.
Going back to your question - the lack of advantage, or bad margins etc - this is the “problem” vs “Challenge” view point issue.
IF you are crazy about this, then you will figure out ways to overcome those challenges - pivot business, learn to be lean, or find sustainable ways to build runway etc.
There are different businesses to be in. Some businesses are like arbitrage chasing the smallest margin you can find on the biggest scales. Some businesses are like chasing excellence doing the best you can do. There are many types. You can't impose the kind of business you want to succeed in on the industry you want to be in, you have to find opportunities.
It's not that any of the things in that list are intrinsically difficult. But if you're a small business owner, imagine an endless series of those challenges and with each one, you've got only a few minutes to resolve it before the next one shows up.
I’ve now been self-employed for 25 years and have owned several businesses, one of which is a YC funded startup but most of which were very different.
None of them competed on price. Price competition is real I’m sure, but most businesses don’t succeed that way. Most of us have more in common with Apple than Wal-Mart (though of course several orders of magnitude smaller).
I’m not necessarily saying I wouldn’t ever consider such a business, but you better have some edge if you do. If you invented some way to manufacture a widget for 25% less than anyone else, sure, go eat that market. That’s not most of us though.
Coffee shops (his example and one really close to what I know) for instance don’t. You don’t win in that game by being cheaper than Starbucks and most don’t try.
For an independent coffee shop specifically, the important question left out is "How are you going to create a welcoming environment that will attract customers without 1) aggressively kicking out the guy who bought one $5 espresso and then sat on his laptop occupying a 4-top table for 5 hours and 2) aggressively kicking out homeless people who try to use your establishment as a substitute for social services not provided by the local government?"
It's not that it's difficult, it's that most people don't realize what the day-to-day job is.
They assume they'll be hanging out in a coffee shop all day, chatting with regulars, but in fact the tasks and problems they'll have to solve is very different from what they imagine.
Yes, besides the mundane day to day details, which are actually up the alley of many people, the other thing that prevents people from being a small business owner is the amount of money they need to invest in it, and the fact that they are effectively assuming all of the risk; whether it be competition, changes to supply, changes to demand, etc. Insurance can blunt a few types of rare risk, but not the fundamental business risks.
So you have to be willing to take those risks, and want to be handling those mundane day to day details.
> people who like Hawaiian pizza probably think their opinion is more common than it is (false consensus)
I supposed I just got called out -- is this actually a rare thing? I thought it was like, a meme to hate pineapple on pizza? Obviously some people do, but I have never thought of my opinion (liking the combination) as especially rare.
If I had one piece of advice for someone trying to pick a career, it would be to require that they shadow someone actually in the professions they're considering.
Doctors: you may spend many many hours in front of a mobile computer entering notes, medications, etc. You may also spend a good deal of time fighting insurance companies via email and/or phone. It's likely you feel you are rarely "helping people"; sometimes you have to help people in spite of themselves. Also patients rarely do what you tell them to, contrary to what you judge to be in their best interests.
Lawyers: you may never see the inside of a courtroom or even a client. You likely will spend the mass majority of your time using Microsoft Word redlining documents. Trial drama is the exception of the exception.
Musician: you may never make it “big.” You might be making close to nothing in bars and other venues and only during later hours. People love covers even if you love your originals. Travel is brutal. Irregular hours make it harder to interact in the regular hour parts of life.
You have to love what you're serving. I produced over 70 public events for people wanting to learn voiceover. We had a feature roadmap and wishlist, and we worked our way through it over the years. Many (talent, recording, and advertising) studio owners came and coached at minimal cost because we had such a great reputation for doing it right at low cost to attendees. The great people who wanted to be associated with it, and the enthusiasm of everyone involved was incredibly fulfilling.
We expanded to the point that we recorded 350 sessions in a single day, each with a coach with decades of experience, a professional studio engineer (usually), a studio room, and short lectures throughout the day. We had to move to bigger and bigger conference hotels to get enough rooms until Covid shut everything down. There were tons of "unknown unknowns" that had to be solved over time.
We were focused initally on protecting the people who probably shouldn't be spending money on training (very frustrating to watch them be ripped off), and produced the event both as a place they could learn a bit at low cost, as well as serving the mission of providing bite-size workshops for people who didn't want weeks or months (or years) or training.
I didn't want to be an "event provider". I wanted to figure out how to do something for people I saw being served poorly in an industry I loved, and then to find ways to give more and more to the people who were showing up.
I received both the worst and the best pieces of career advice when I was an undergraduate.
The worst advice was that writing software, after the dotcom bust, was dead as a career. This taught me a lot about the value of "conventional wisdom" vs looking at the underlying supply and demand dynamics of a career. Sort of adjacent to the theme of the essay, I think the best careers are those that you can tolerate and those that have favorable supply-demand curves.
The best advice was from a pre-med advisor, who asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life surrounded by people who were old, sick, dying, and - not in so many words - decrepit. At that moment I realized I was not a healer, I found most bodies to be gross, and I had no business considering a medical career.
> The best advice was from a pre-med advisor, who asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life surrounded by people who were old, sick, dying, and - not in so many words - decrepit. At that moment I realized I was not a healer, I found most bodies to be gross, and I had no business considering a medical career.
Ah yes, I came to the same realisation - my family were pressuring me to be a doctor because my marks were there - but spending all day touching sick people was not for me. Building machines is so much more fun and someone will pay me to do it! - crazy. I do this for free in my spare time.
People aren't bad at "unpacking". They haven't made any effort to think about things.
I had a coworker ask a nephew in high school to sit with me at work to show them a software job. They said they wanted to be a game developer. It turned out they had never seen software code in any form, and had no idea what programing was generally. I asked them if they had any art skills, and they were baffled why that was relevant.
They had no concept of the job at all. They just liked video games. Apparently, I crushed their dreams.
> This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one
Does everyone (or even most people) have a "right" career? I actually think this framing itself is harmful. If comparison is the thief of joy, then what could be worse than believing that there is some yet to be discovered perfect-for-you career out that you are missing.
> Well, you know how when you move to a new place and all of your unpacked boxes confront you every time you come home? And you know how, if you just leave them there for a few weeks, the boxes stop being boxes and start being furniture, just part of the layout of your apartment, almost impossible to perceive?
No, I do not know this. I've moved ~29 times in my life. I've never once had a problem unpacking. I packed up shelves and drawers and dressers and closets. When I get to the new place I open a box, see what's in it, "oh, this was the stuff in bedroom drawers" so I go put the stuff in there in just a few seconds. In a few hours I'm 100% unpacked.
I've never really understood why it would be any different for anyone else except if maybe if they moved to a much smaller place.
Is it really that common of an experience?
More to the point of the article though - I'm not entirely sure I want to unpack my job - I feel like lots of people would not "do the thing" if they knew how hard it would be. But, looking back, they're proud they "did the thing". I know for me, I started some companies and projects years ago. I was able to do this because I didn't know how much work it would be. Now that I know, I find it extremely hard to get started again. I wish I could go back to my old naive self.
Maybe a better example, all though one I have unfortunately not experienced, would anyone have kids if you "unpacked" what having kids is actually like? I think you could list 100s or 1000s of "unpleasant on paper" things but I don't really think you could write the positives in a compelling way against that list of negatives. And, yet I believe the majority of parents would tell you having children was the most fulfilling thing in their lives. I think many of the things mentioned in the post might also have a similar issue.
> But luckily, success indexes less on IQ and more on consistency. The willingness to doggedly show up every single day can take you to some really suprising and amazing places.
[+] [-] ossner|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|8 months ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] brooke2k|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] svachalek|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ashton314|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwawayoldie|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 827a|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Talanes|8 months ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] bawolff|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sandspar|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] closetkantian|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wolvesechoes|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bee_rider|8 months ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] dcre|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] chubot|8 months ago|reply
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 ...
[+] [-] WA|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] koyote|7 months ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] n8cpdx|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shortrounddev2|8 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] metalrain|7 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yunusabd|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tetha|8 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] funkman|8 months ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] mvieira38|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggawatts|8 months ago|reply
Lots of my colleagues dropped out of the industry in their first year because they didn’t like maths at all.
What really drove the point home for me though was that a decade later I got more satisfaction out of developing ETL pipelines for multidimensional analytics.
Think about how “nuts” that is! Everyone likes playing games but nobody installs SQL Server Analysis Services on their home PC for “fun”! Yet… it is, for a certain very select subset of the population…
[+] [-] sigbottle|8 months ago|reply
When I was told to do this when I was like 14, and asked "waht did I want to do", I ran into all the exact traps that the article said in the form of overintellecutalization.
It takes a certain kind of maturity to just sit down and really try and observe, non-judgementally. Just what happened.
(then the intellectuals among y'all will say stuff like, "well perception isn't objective truth yada yada" this is also a big thought loop trap I had to get rid of. Just like, put it on hold, just say your thought, even if you think it's stupid, or it's some kind of "self strawman" and you want to elaborate more and justify etc.
Just say it.)
I've been able to do it for things I've really cared about, but often times I don't get into this state.
I should practice. I only even observed this thought pattern when I got good at math, and the whole thing was just sitting down, contemplating honestly pretty dumb thoughts, but if you thought loop yourself you get nowhere. Gotta say seemingly stupid stuff and just contemplate. Words are both the thing you should observe but not treat as truth, just... try to observe. idk.
[+] [-] ebcode|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] frahs|8 months ago|reply
I assume the main difficulty isn't that -- I assume it's the lack of comparative advantage, so competition eats into your margins until you're fighting a race to the bottom, not only making your customers happy, but doing it cheaper than someone else could, and I assume the stress from that makes it hard?
And also not being in control of your suppliers, so unpredictable events can affect your profit.
[+] [-] projektfu|8 months ago|reply
Your vendors are always coming up with new ways to tack on extra charges. You have to deal with training, HR, bookkeeping, payroll, handyman tasks, cleaning, working shifts when your employees flake out, annoying customers, dangerous people, destructive customers, employee drama, the list goes on. If that is not what you enjoy, you will have a lot of your life doing things you do not enjoy. Sipping tasty coffee and chatting with your happy customers is a small part of the whole.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|8 months ago|reply
But to your point, yep. There's a coffee shop in town - one of the only ones! - that we go to because we like it. But two more just opened up, both in better locations for both foot & car traffic, which might genuinely kill the other place. And there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.
[+] [-] intended|8 months ago|reply
The follow questions are to establish if you are crazy about this, not sane about this.
Anecdote - Incredible introversion, if not social anxiety - and at one point I just up and drove to meet strangers at a cyber cafe to play video games, because I was obsessive about video games at that point. Same for cooking, writing papers, reaching out to people, and so on.
You overcome yourself, when it’s something that resonates with you.
Going back to your question - the lack of advantage, or bad margins etc - this is the “problem” vs “Challenge” view point issue.
IF you are crazy about this, then you will figure out ways to overcome those challenges - pivot business, learn to be lean, or find sustainable ways to build runway etc.
[+] [-] colechristensen|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] munificent|8 months ago|reply
It's not that any of the things in that list are intrinsically difficult. But if you're a small business owner, imagine an endless series of those challenges and with each one, you've got only a few minutes to resolve it before the next one shows up.
[+] [-] mattmaroon|8 months ago|reply
None of them competed on price. Price competition is real I’m sure, but most businesses don’t succeed that way. Most of us have more in common with Apple than Wal-Mart (though of course several orders of magnitude smaller).
I’m not necessarily saying I wouldn’t ever consider such a business, but you better have some edge if you do. If you invented some way to manufacture a widget for 25% less than anyone else, sure, go eat that market. That’s not most of us though.
Coffee shops (his example and one really close to what I know) for instance don’t. You don’t win in that game by being cheaper than Starbucks and most don’t try.
[+] [-] _--__--__|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] eloisant|8 months ago|reply
They assume they'll be hanging out in a coffee shop all day, chatting with regulars, but in fact the tasks and problems they'll have to solve is very different from what they imagine.
[+] [-] lambda|8 months ago|reply
So you have to be willing to take those risks, and want to be handling those mundane day to day details.
[+] [-] pinkmuffinere|8 months ago|reply
I supposed I just got called out -- is this actually a rare thing? I thought it was like, a meme to hate pineapple on pizza? Obviously some people do, but I have never thought of my opinion (liking the combination) as especially rare.
[+] [-] djoldman|8 months ago|reply
Doctors: you may spend many many hours in front of a mobile computer entering notes, medications, etc. You may also spend a good deal of time fighting insurance companies via email and/or phone. It's likely you feel you are rarely "helping people"; sometimes you have to help people in spite of themselves. Also patients rarely do what you tell them to, contrary to what you judge to be in their best interests.
Lawyers: you may never see the inside of a courtroom or even a client. You likely will spend the mass majority of your time using Microsoft Word redlining documents. Trial drama is the exception of the exception.
Many jobs are not what people think they are.
[+] [-] grvdrm|8 months ago|reply
Musician: you may never make it “big.” You might be making close to nothing in bars and other venues and only during later hours. People love covers even if you love your originals. Travel is brutal. Irregular hours make it harder to interact in the regular hour parts of life.
[+] [-] ThinkingGuy|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] QuantumGood|8 months ago|reply
We expanded to the point that we recorded 350 sessions in a single day, each with a coach with decades of experience, a professional studio engineer (usually), a studio room, and short lectures throughout the day. We had to move to bigger and bigger conference hotels to get enough rooms until Covid shut everything down. There were tons of "unknown unknowns" that had to be solved over time.
We were focused initally on protecting the people who probably shouldn't be spending money on training (very frustrating to watch them be ripped off), and produced the event both as a place they could learn a bit at low cost, as well as serving the mission of providing bite-size workshops for people who didn't want weeks or months (or years) or training.
I didn't want to be an "event provider". I wanted to figure out how to do something for people I saw being served poorly in an industry I loved, and then to find ways to give more and more to the people who were showing up.
[+] [-] jackcosgrove|8 months ago|reply
The worst advice was that writing software, after the dotcom bust, was dead as a career. This taught me a lot about the value of "conventional wisdom" vs looking at the underlying supply and demand dynamics of a career. Sort of adjacent to the theme of the essay, I think the best careers are those that you can tolerate and those that have favorable supply-demand curves.
The best advice was from a pre-med advisor, who asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life surrounded by people who were old, sick, dying, and - not in so many words - decrepit. At that moment I realized I was not a healer, I found most bodies to be gross, and I had no business considering a medical career.
[+] [-] chadcmulligan|7 months ago|reply
Ah yes, I came to the same realisation - my family were pressuring me to be a doctor because my marks were there - but spending all day touching sick people was not for me. Building machines is so much more fun and someone will pay me to do it! - crazy. I do this for free in my spare time.
[+] [-] nitwit005|8 months ago|reply
I had a coworker ask a nephew in high school to sit with me at work to show them a software job. They said they wanted to be a game developer. It turned out they had never seen software code in any form, and had no idea what programing was generally. I asked them if they had any art skills, and they were baffled why that was relevant.
They had no concept of the job at all. They just liked video games. Apparently, I crushed their dreams.
[+] [-] tqi|8 months ago|reply
Does everyone (or even most people) have a "right" career? I actually think this framing itself is harmful. If comparison is the thief of joy, then what could be worse than believing that there is some yet to be discovered perfect-for-you career out that you are missing.
[+] [-] socalgal2|8 months ago|reply
No, I do not know this. I've moved ~29 times in my life. I've never once had a problem unpacking. I packed up shelves and drawers and dressers and closets. When I get to the new place I open a box, see what's in it, "oh, this was the stuff in bedroom drawers" so I go put the stuff in there in just a few seconds. In a few hours I'm 100% unpacked.
I've never really understood why it would be any different for anyone else except if maybe if they moved to a much smaller place.
Is it really that common of an experience?
More to the point of the article though - I'm not entirely sure I want to unpack my job - I feel like lots of people would not "do the thing" if they knew how hard it would be. But, looking back, they're proud they "did the thing". I know for me, I started some companies and projects years ago. I was able to do this because I didn't know how much work it would be. Now that I know, I find it extremely hard to get started again. I wish I could go back to my old naive self.
Maybe a better example, all though one I have unfortunately not experienced, would anyone have kids if you "unpacked" what having kids is actually like? I think you could list 100s or 1000s of "unpleasant on paper" things but I don't really think you could write the positives in a compelling way against that list of negatives. And, yet I believe the majority of parents would tell you having children was the most fulfilling thing in their lives. I think many of the things mentioned in the post might also have a similar issue.
[+] [-] mieubrisse|8 months ago|reply
> But luckily, success indexes less on IQ and more on consistency. The willingness to doggedly show up every single day can take you to some really suprising and amazing places.