Somehow this article manages to be both wise and presumptuous.
The points he makes speak from experience. It's a perspective that is too often ignored by younger generations: You can't always quit a job when the work gets boring -- sometimes you just have to push through the tedium if you want to be the best at what you do. This is a widely applicable bit of advice.
But the way this message is presented -- to chastise loren, the 20-something who quit AirBnB because he "got bored" -- is just plain arrogant.
In his post, loren went on to describe an environment where he was slowly pushed-out of the decision-making process. Where he went from being a passionately engaged team member to being a comfortably-paid code monkey. This was not just about getting bored -- his role in the company was changing, and his attempts to reverse the changes had little effect.
Sure, he could suck it up and adapt to the new role, becoming the best code monkey he could be. But maybe that didn't line up with his personal goals. Maybe loren quit because he wasn't being fulfilled.
Seems like a pretty smart reason to leave, if you ask me.
Lastly:
> "Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early."
No, no it's not. This is a very dangerous line of thinking. If burn out to you means getting tired of mind-numbing tedium, you haven't experienced burn out. Actual burn out can be a very valid reason to "give up", or at the very least take an extended vacation. You can't just push through the physical symptoms of extreme stress and exhaustion, at least not without causing even more harm.
It's a complicated thing. I'd liken it to depression. Lots and lots of people constantly fret about being "depressed". Over time it became easy to dismiss depression as a legitimate illness. Apparently every time you feel sad you're depressed, the whole thing just loses its meaning.
It wasn't until I met someone who suffered from true clinical depression did I understand exactly the seriousness of it. The difference between someone feeling down and someone suffering from depression is stark. Hell it's pretty scary.
The same thing is true of "burning out". I've met several developers who have talked about burnout and cited it as a reason they just had to quit their job and backpack around Europe. Fair enough, you were clearly just tired of working and wanted to do something that's a bit more fun.
Then I met one (and thus far only one) person who truly burned out. That person became, much like someone suffering from depression, a shell of their former self. They became not just unresponsive but completely unable to respond. It was terrifying. They came to work and attempted to function, but they simply couldn't. The company simply rode them to the point that their brain seemed to turn off.
When you see it, you know it. That guy wasn't rationalizing anything. He had simply been pushed too hard for too long for his mind to keep up.
The company in question was from a VERY high-profile accelerator (not naming names!). The culture of pushing kids at maximum pace over long distances ended costing this company not only key employee but the bulk of their development team as well. After seeing it, no one wanted to be next.
> "Maybe loren quit because he wasn't being fulfilled."
This is the thing that strikes me the most. I'm fairly young still and have begun working at a company as a programmer. I've been there for about five months and can already say that this isn't where my passion lies. There's nothing wrong with trying to figure out where you really want to go in life and trying to achieve it. Not everyone gets it right on the first try, so to try and admonish people who quit when they "get bored" isn't the best attitude in my opinion. I don't think that's what this article was trying to say, but the author comes across as thinking that the only reason people quit a job after a year or two is because of boredom/lack of dedication when in reality it could simply be a part of the trial and error that is life.
I find it incredibly presumptuous, people's circumstances are different, not every young person who quits his job is a spoiled brat who doesn't know hard work.
I might be biased, because I quit my stable but unfulfilling corporate job a few weeks ago; but after reading his post I have cancelled my Pluralsight $49/mo subscription. Maybe a pointless little rebellion, but I feel like the same message he directed at Loren could be directed at me :)
Having followed what Loren is doing now (Penflip), I think he made the right choice. It may go big, it may not, but it is a great execution of a nice concept, and has a lot of potential.
I don't think you can call the guy lazy. He just decided to work real hard on something else.
> In his post, loren went on to describe an environment where he was slowly pushed-out of the decision-making process. Where he went from being a passionately engaged team member to being a comfortably-paid code monkey. This was not just about getting bored -- his role in the company was changing, and his attempts to reverse the changes had little effect.
This is exactly what has just happened to me at my most recent startup. Great guys, but the fit I once had has no longer applied and I left. I'm pretty scared right now because I want to jump into consulting/freelance but I've never done it before, and I want to do that while I carefully evaluate the opportunities presented to me. I don't want to jump into another company quickly as a 27 yr old and ruin my future career by joining another mismatched company, but I also don't want to meander as a freelancer without developing a great reputation. I think it's time for me to put in that hard work, but I want to make sure I do it in the best manner possible. And I have no idea what I'm doing - I know code, I know design, but the politics of finding a great company and doing great work are a huge mystery to me.
I think much of the intellectual complexity surrounding the perception of the difficulty of knowledge work stems from comparisons to physical labor, especially factory work and field work.
The idea being that work is drudgery, and that basic fact is what justifies being paid for it. There's no doubt a bit of puritan ideology leaking into such concepts, the idea that benefit must be paid for in pain.
However, this comparison is inapt and leads to many erroneous conclusions. First of all, valuable work need not be synonymous with drudgery. Many skilled craftspersons and artisans are capable of doing incredibly valuable work with fairly small expenditures of hard labor or time due to their hard to acquire expertise and subject specific wisdom. That doesn't mean such people can't be or aren't typically hard workers, but sometimes they don't have to be in order to make a good living. And there's nothing particularly wrong with that. The work of, say, an optometrist is in some respects vastly "easier" than the work of a field hand in a sugar cane plantation, but that doesn't undervalue that work, optometry requires a lot of specialized knowledge that is difficult to acquire.
One of the biggest problems here is the notion that the basic conditions of knowledge work are less strenuous than manual labor. Sitting at a desk in a climate controlled office generally compares very favorably with, say, digging a ditch with a shovel in the hot sun. This leads people to the idea that in order to be worthwhile knowledge work should be strenuous in some way. And typically that involves working extra hours (60 or 80 hours weeks), sinking time into boring activities, or putting up with stress.
However, in reality these things don't translate into increased productivity, in fact they typically diminish productivity substantially. Moreover, long-term exposure to stress is extremely bad for an individual's physical and mental health, imposing a toll that can be significantly more damaging even than prolonged manual labor.
Again, there is the idea that stress is justified, that putting up with bullshit like office politics or death march conditions are the price that must be paid to allow people to make six figure incomes from just sitting at computers and typing all day.
But these things are just sideshows. The true, underlying value of knowledge work lies in the collaboration of many folks with extensive and specialized knowledge toward the goal of solving problems. "Hard work" may be required at times but it doesn't have to look anything like 80 hour weeks, or stress, or repetitive tasks, or backbreaking manual labor. It's possible for knowledge workers to work hard by only putting in 4 hours a week and going home to their lives and families happy, content, and unstressed.
Knowledge work isn't factory work. It's not linear, the way to increase output is not to increase input labor. Instead, the way to increase output is to stack as many compounding effects on top of each other as possible. Factory work is additive, knowledge work, when done correctly, is exponential. And it's finding the right conditions to enable knowledge workers to create and stack those exponential effects better which blows away any linear effects.
Imagine 3 software teams. The first team works 80 hrs/week building a product, every month they churn out another new feature. The second team works 40 hrs/week, every 2 months they produce a new feature. The third team works 40 hrs/week, and every month they make their product faster, more reliable, more usable, and ensure that the core systems are highly extensible; and every once in a while they will add a feature or change a feature with the criterion that it must be valuable to end-users, work extremely well, and not degrade performance, reliability, or usability. Which team would you bet on to win in the market? Which team "works harder"? Which team is more likely to be able to retain workers?
Also, did you actually read this part of Loren's post?
""Two weeks ago, I quit. I wasn't headhunted. I don't have another job lined up. I'm not moving away. I didn't start a company on the side. I didn't hate my coworkers, or my bosses, or my commute. So what happened?
My point is only that if you quit a thing, don't do it without something else lined up, it is just foolish. Doesn't matter if it is your own business or another job, but you don't just say, "I don't like this, so I'm not going to do it anymore."
I feel sorry for the author of this post - he actually believes hard, boring work is the only way to accomplish anything. I've done both hard, boring work, and easy, efficient and enjoyable work. The easy work was both more enjoyable, more profitable and far better for my life as a whole.
Life is not fair, there are no points awarded for working harder or being more diligent - there are only 'points' awarded for accomplishing things. Make sure you accomplish the right things in the right way. Nobody is interesting that you slaved away coding for 6 months to develop something when someone launches something with 6 hours of work that solves the right problem.
Seriously. This article is just useless flamebait, unworthy even of the slightest praise.
It fails to comprehend any of the complexities of circumstance, time, or humanity, yet claims to have a point above them all. This is the mark of a single-minded spoiled child without worldly experience, who has fallen into some success after a short stint of hard work and doesn't understand his place in the stochastic processes which led to his creation, upbringing, and situation.
This bullshit is to be shredded; not lightly but intently and with prejudice. It should be put down for its failure as a perspective. For its disservice to the betterment of our profession.
>...there are only 'points' awarded for accomplishing things.Make sure you accomplish the right things in the right way.
Exactly, and I find a complete bias towards hard work for the sake of "feeling good" about your hard work is actually ... lazy. Feeling good about tediously slaving away at manually inserting data into a database rather than coding a handler to automate that is actually working hard to avoid doing things the way they SHOULD be done.
An older generation getting mad at a younger generation for wanting fulfilling and meaningful work is exactly this laziness. It's code for: "look I know we should have made things be this way but we can't do anything about it so you(plural) just do this boring stuff that we want you to do right now b/c we are too lazy to find a better way to work meaningfully... "
My two cents: don't work hard. Work Smart. And then work hard AT working smart. ;)
Likewise, I have done every permutation of hard/easy->fun/boring work - I've found that many jobs are "as hard as you want them to be." 99 percent of the time there is a preexisting solution or library, which ironically many people are either too lazy to integrate, or think they can invent a better wheel.
I've actually found that some of the most successful people are the people who attack "easy" problems and do it well. If you look at games like Minecraft, Spelunky, Hotline Miami, Super Meat Boy - they were all relatively simple to implement (at least their initial implementations).
That said, the author has plenty of valid points if you dig around the article. The majority of young people do fail because they have not yet failed enough (i.e. "put in the hard work"). I think that most inexperienced people fail because they have not learned the right problems to attack, or how to attack the right problems properly (I've been guilty of both, multiple times over).
I find as I've gotten older that it's tempting to write off the next generation as lazy, having bad taste in music, bad sense of style, etc. We all heard our grandparents saying these things to us, yet we don't recognize the annoying, condescending attitude coming from our own mouths as we get older!
That being said, I do think that hard work will almost always take you places, unless you are working "dumb" (as opposed to working smart). You might create something in 6 hours and then sell that idea to google for a billion dollars. The problem comes into play if you actually bank your future on that. Most 6-hour creations, when you look at the history, is the 100th idea or the 100th variation of an idea. So it is somewhat of a false perception that you can create a billion dollar product in an afternoon without putting in any labor before or after.
Good ol' puritanical work ethic. I do my best to work smarter. One of the reasons I try to stay current with the latest technology is to see what benefits it would have on my work efficiency.
Ironic that this is the most voted comment, because it validates the post's view. Despite you feeling sorry for him (adding entitlement to injury), he seems to have a good assessment of the HN crowd.
Phrases like, "The myth of burn out" and "Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early" give me great pause.
Burn out is real. It is dangerous, and even an overwhelming, driving passion for your work, your creation, can lead to disaster.
Ed Catmull recounted this story about the production of Toy Story 2 [1]:
"So we came back, John [Lasseter] told the story crew to take a good rest over the holidays, and come back on January 2nd... we were re-boarding the movie.
We had 8 months left.
We then started this incredibly intense effort to get this movie out. It was boarded quickly, it was pitched to the company, it was an electrifying pitch.
We had a lot of over-achieving people working for over-achieving managers to get the movie out.
We worked brutal hours with this. When I say "brutal", we had a number of people that were injured with RSI [2], one of them permanently left the field.
We had, actually, a married couple that worked there. This was in June, so it's summer, and the father was supposed to drop the baby off at daycare, but forgot; don't know why... but came and left the baby in the car, and came into work. Again, as the heat was rising, the mother asked... they realized and they rushed out: the baby was unconscious. The right thing was done, they put ice-water on the baby. The baby ended up being fine in the end, but it was one of those traumatic things, like, 'Why did this happen, are they working too hard?'
So when I say it was intense, it really was intense."
This was in June, so it's summer, and the father was supposed to drop the baby off at daycare, but forgot; don't know why... but came and left the baby in the car, and came into work.
As an aside...
There was a Pulitzer Prize winning article about the phenomenon of parents forgetting their children in the backseat and leaving them to die in the heat. The main take-away is that it can happen to anyone. It isn't a matter of malicious or inattentive parents, it usually happens when there is a variation in routine that distracts the parent and pulls focus from the kid.
Also, burn-out is NOT a rationalization for giving up early. Burn-out is when you should have given up a long time ago, but you keep pushing yourself too hard instead, and then you fall apart and have difficulty functioning as a human being (to say nothing of performing your job).
The article author might have a point or two about a variety of young actors in the workforce, but they're masked by this and other bits of far-too-tidy preachiness. He's full of it.
> This was in June, so it's summer, and the father was supposed to drop the baby off at daycare, but forgot; don't know why... but came and left the baby in the car, and came into work.
Several years ago, I almost did the same thing with my infant daughter. Put her car seat in the back seat. Got in. Started driving. On auto-pilot started heading towards the office.
It was only when she happened to make a sound (she often slept on the way to daycare) that I remembered she was still in the truck. A combination of factors led to this:
1. I wasn't getting anywhere near enough sleep at night with feedings every few hours.
2. Carseats can't go in the front seat anymore. Good for safety, but bad for remembering a kid is in the car since they're out of sight.
I agree it's real, but I also agree people use it as a cop-out.
I definitely don't see it happening over a short timeframe at a normal job. Only time I got any real burnout, was for my capstone at Uni. I had been working around the clock (up to 80hr weeks) for three months solid.
Sidenote, It was actually kind of a cool experiment. I knew I would burn out; I also knew it was worth it (being my capstone). So I got the experience of attempting to forestall burnout just long enough to make our goals. Was a good experience learning about myself.
It's worth noting that the original "i quit" post never mentioned burnout. I didn't get the impression that it had anything to do with loren's reason for leaving, so it's strange for the reply post to bring it up like that.
Uh, the Nietzsche quote has a slightly different connotation when you give it a wider context:
When seeking work for the sake of the pay, almost all men are alike at present in civilized countries. To all of them work is a means, and not itself the end; on which account they are not very select in the choice of the work, provided it yields an abundant profit. But there are rarer men who would rather die than work without enjoyment in their work: the fastidious people, difficult to satisfy, whose object is not served by an abundant profit, unless the work itself be the reward of all rewards.
And then:
It doesn’t matter how brilliant you started out or how much faster you exited the gates than everyone else, those who consistently get up every morning and direct their energies along a single path, no matter how boring it may be, will eventually pass you on each of the many roads you haphazardly travel.
That's not how life works. You can direct all your efforts to bending cutlery, but you're not going to make a good living out of it. You're just not. And some people have it easy. Sorry, life is unfair.
But then I read that:
Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early.
The author may be a great programmer (I suspect him of being a robot), but he doesn't understand psychology. Not worth a read.
Do you know which translation/edition the article's version of the quote is from? I've looked through 3 so far, can't find it in this exact wording. Not trying to nitpick, just annoyed I can't find it. The tone and meaning of the English translations changed a couple of times drastically.
There might be a point here, but the whole "just suck it up and keep going for years and years" attitude that I'm getting from this post feels, well, misguided.
If you think you can improve your life, work better, with more fun, with more meaning, with better challenges, then by all means go for it. There's no need to stay put at a place that sucks for you and that slowly boils your brain to pulp just because some old guy on HN did his time, too. Sure, there are plenty places where you're valued based on the amount of years to "put in for the business", but thank god there are also plenty places that got past that.
The other side is, of course, that if you give up too soon, you'll never get anywhere. But my impression is that most programmers stick around places too long, rather than too short. They just don't blog about it as much.
I grow weary of people telling other people that they don't know what hard work is...especially as it contributes to the constant putting down of my generation. If you want to make a condescending, sweeping generalization about an entire generation of people, I have some advice: Don't.
As an aside...I watched the author's "Why You Need People Skills" video on his website. At 3 minutes in he talks about how rubbing people the wrong way won't get you good results. He has another video titled, "The Power of Positivity"...which I'm guessing would be the opposite of the disparaging post he just wrote? I don't know what my point is other than you really look like a jerk when you try to act like you're positive and good with people..and then act the complete opposite.
I was once freelancing reporting in a convention about "Y Generation"[1] and the best presentation I attended as themed on how much bullshit is said about this generation.
The grand finale of this presentation was a quote just like this, saying something in the lines of "this generation is lazy, and arrogant, and think life is easy".
Everything people say about Millenials, except this was taken from a 60's newspaper, focused on the baby-boomers. Moreover, it clearly was a reinforcing piece, not a proposing one, and there were other smaller excerpts to confirm this was the standard thinking at the time.
[1] Funny thing, I take "Generation Y" as the way people who doesn't really care about generational studies talk about Millenials. I can't stop thinking they heard "Generation X", called this way at their time because they were unknown, and extrapolated the meaning without further thinking.
If I'm unhappy with work conditions -- be it bad management, burden of unmanageable technical debt, incompatible culture or the mundane problem of low pay -- I am expected to `vote with my feet'. It's market self-regulation, it's feedback for the organization and it just works. If I refrain, for any misguided reason, it only makes market suboptimal. Does OP really advocate skewing the job market for some fuzzy reasons?
> (...) others are hard at work ever so humbly providing real value through their—at times—loveless toil.
Hard work alone is not enough for humanity to benefit; it must also be well-focused, well-tooled and well-managed. If the clueless middle-management wastes 90% of your effort, there's more benefit to humanity when you move.
Similarily, if 100h workweek and 24/7 stress wreck your family / relationship / friendships and derails your life for several years to come, there's more benefit to humanity if you move.
>If the clueless middle-management wastes 90% of your effort, there's more benefit to humanity when you move
Yes, thank you for this statement. I don't think many people yet realize how much more detrimental to society so much bureaucratic bullshit in everything we do(are) is over a few hackers getting fed up with that same bureaucratic bullshit and moving on.
In fact, put that way it really does not seem logical to get mad at a few young programmers choices to change course. Maybe it's societies framework you should be getting mad at.
I'm rarely massively critical of HN posters, because on the whole they seem pretty solid. So when in doubt I ere on the side of caution & assume I'm missing something instead of them missing something. On this particular article I can't help myself though - the author seems utterly oblivious to the real world.
>The big problem is that “kids today” don’t understand the value of hard, boring work.
Hard work & kids...yeah...remember the news article 3 weeks ago about an intern in London dying from working 3 days straight. An intern for fck sake...not even an employee. Dead. Now tell me again that kids today don't know about hard work. I dare you.
I agree with what the author is saying, however, I think that the overall message of sticking with something, and not leaving when you encounter the first sign of monotony is applicable to software engineering more specifically than the author describes. I will provide an anecdote from my career to illustrate what I mean.
I have been working at the same company for almost 4 years. During those 4 years I have worked on the same project and haven't really switched teams. I've seen employees come and go, architecture decisions made and debated ad nauseam, and so forth. I am currently in the processing of re-implementing some functionality and architecture decisions that I made when I first started (~4 years ago).
When I made these implementation decisions I thought they were the best approach based on my experience at the time. However, having stuck around all these years and seen the product and business evolve, these decisions have turned out to be either poor choices or not the most optimal. As a consequence I've derived a lot of experience and wisdom from revisiting these past decisions, as I am now able to go back with production data and performance characteristics and see how they work or do not work. This software that I wrote way back when functioned in production and worked flawlessly without ceremony for approximately 3.5 years. Only recently and under a changing production environment has this code started to become a pain point.
Had I been part of the new every two crowd I would have never been able to see how my designs and solutions would hold up, or fall down, over the years of their life span. Furthermore, I never would have gained the wisdom and experience that comes from implementing something and having to come back and re-visit it years later.
This is really the takeaway message I understand from the author. Basically, when you only do what strikes your fancy and change your priorities with the weather, you lose out on the sort of experience and opportunity for growth that I have had in the past few weeks.
Agreed. The guy is railing against the emerging twitterati culture of folks who bounce from one gig to the next, blurting about the trendiest new Javascript library and spewing garbage code that someone else then gets to maintain.
" ... others are hard at work ever so humbly providing real value through their—at times—loveless toil."
... and those people are suckers. Honestly. If you are working long hours, jeopardizing your personal relationships, and devoting most of your mental attention to achieving someone else's success over your own -- and you are doing this because your are told it is noble to work hard, and there might even be a slightly bigger piece of cheese waiting for you at the far end of the maze -- then you are a sucker. There is no end to the maze, and the cheese is a mirage.
If you enjoy your job out of passion for the art, you are paid fair, respected, and you enjoy the company of your coworkers then great, enjoy it, stick with it. Otherwise you've been hoodwinked.
There is no relationship between these three things, but the author keeps saying "hard, boring work."
I don't feel particularly bad about insisting that hard work doesn't have to be boring, and that boring, easy work is not hard.
"The HN Generation doesn't want to put in their time doing boring, unfulfilling work" doesn't sound nearly as damning as "The HN Generation doesn't want to put in their time doing hard work."
Anecdotally, programmers tend to work pretty damn hard.
The author really hasn't said what's actually wrong. He's hating against something he's not even done us the courtesy of defining (in any kind of a substantive way). Once again, we've got a classic "kids these days are so lazy" post without any real content.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority;
they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer
rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before
company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
I going to float an idea out there that might not be too popular ... I think companies caused the workforce to adopt this attitude, and I think the healthy spot is in the middle. We tend to oscillate around the optimums right?
Companies used to offer a good worker life-time employment and a pension, and they supported the idea of a reasonable workload as it would lead to longevity in their workforce. The combination of excess workers and the menialization of many jobs prompted the companies to minimize their commitment to the worker, both in salary and relationship.
Once the relationship was gone and it was obvious to the worker that they were valued for their effort on the hamster-wheel, is it any wonder so many of them were lacksidasical about how fast they spun that wheel? And when work because rote, is it any wonder that creative types that were in those positions were disenchanted?
The other interesting thing I've noticed is that you end up having both types of people in any given environment ... some of the people work hard because they don't want to get yelled at, want a step up the ladder, etc, but when you watch closely, you'll often see that the "lazier" employees (the ones the hard workers keep expecting to get laid off) actually garner about the same rewards for dramatically less effort.
Of course, these are my observations and your mileage may vary ... I've spent the majority of my working life doing work I enjoy, but I no longer identify my worth by what I accomplish on-the-job.
John is really good at getting eyeballs to his blog. His also the author of 'The demise of Javascript'.
Apparently, since he actually started using it, he thinks its not so bad now and will be around for a while.
John also likes to make very broad and just downright swiping generalizations like this below:
'We’ve sort of reached the place in the C# and Java space where just about everyone is doing “cargo cult programming.” What I mean by this is that a majority of developers are writing unit tests and using IoC containers without understanding what value those practices bring or even if those practices are actually bringing any value.'
I find this article along the same lines. I applaud him for his ability to generate views but I don't put too much weight in his "insights".
I really wanted to like this article ... but it seems to come from a place of emotion and it shows. The arguments are unsubstantiated and as a commenter below pointed out even the quote he used from Nietzsche is out of context
Its hard to read something like this ...
"It is really easy to sit at your desk when you are supposed to be working and browse hacker news, injecting in your sarcastic wit and sly comments, believing them to be of value, believing that somehow that in this false self-affirming reality that you are actually creating something of value, when indeed all you are doing is destroying and marring the work of others to your own detriment"
And not feel like this is a rant, but plenty of rants have a lot of hard truths in them, this one does not.
I take issue with this ...
"The big problem is that “kids today” don’t understand the value of hard, boring work"
This idea that you should be able to go to a job that bores you to tears, or even worse, actually hate just because it pays you money and thats just what people have to do really really upsets me. I've been a developer for 10 years now, and I can categorically tell you that your work can be challenging, your work can be tough but it should never be boring. Because I find that when I had autonomy at my job, whenever my opinion was respected by decision makers, and when I was surrounded by a team that I loved, I never had any boring moments.
And I think that goes for a lot of people too, because you see, it turns out that work is only really boring when you don't care. And if you don't care, you shouldn't be there.
PS: The part about burn out is abysmally wrong and doesn't even warrant comment.
Hi, I'm the one who wrote the 'saddest most uninformed blog post on hacker news' [1] that inspired this post.
Just want to chime in with a quick update: two months in, still 'funemployed'. Currently working harder than I ever did at my job, on so many different levels. Possibly working harder than I ever have in my life. To stay at the job I was at would have been a huge cop out. I'd basically be showing up and collecting a check without pushing myself forward, stunting my growth as a developer and as a person.
I am part of the generation, but actually agree with what he's saying. The article on HN he was critiquing, I also read, and felt "really, mate, you're complaining about this?"
Hard work sucks, it often involves things you don't want to do, but you must push on... I don't like paying back technical debt, but I have to. It's the most boring work, unglamorous work I can do, but among the most necessary.
As well, often times in start ups, in the beginning you're forced to do work outside of your "role" for better or worse. As a business matures, the need for this reduces and you're left with what you were hired for... this is part of growing a business. It can be viewed as boring, but is sort of the goal. Being over worked, and forced to do tasks outside of your description isn't something people should be fighting for...
They are afraid of droning, not work. Fine with me as the droning pays my mortgage.
edit: and it is pretty applicable to any generation - Gates or Zuckerberg (saying with all my distaste for FB or its creator) could have continue droning in Harvard and beyond, yet they declined, and as far as i know they are very far from being slackers.
Sounds like this author has some angst against those that are willing to go above and beyond in pursuit of a goal or accomplishment. This generation has been forced to be very entrepreneurial because of a lack of jobs. We learn fast, test our assumptions and make adjustments. This is a big contrast to the way AlexeyBrin thinks the world works. From his cushy and comfortable desk job, he thinks the same avenues available to him are available to everyone now. Not true. We have to be smarter, faster and willing to work for less. It's hard for the generation of plenty to realize how the world has changed around them. I suggest you stop hating and catch up.
[+] [-] Smudge|12 years ago|reply
The points he makes speak from experience. It's a perspective that is too often ignored by younger generations: You can't always quit a job when the work gets boring -- sometimes you just have to push through the tedium if you want to be the best at what you do. This is a widely applicable bit of advice.
But the way this message is presented -- to chastise loren, the 20-something who quit AirBnB because he "got bored" -- is just plain arrogant.
In his post, loren went on to describe an environment where he was slowly pushed-out of the decision-making process. Where he went from being a passionately engaged team member to being a comfortably-paid code monkey. This was not just about getting bored -- his role in the company was changing, and his attempts to reverse the changes had little effect.
Sure, he could suck it up and adapt to the new role, becoming the best code monkey he could be. But maybe that didn't line up with his personal goals. Maybe loren quit because he wasn't being fulfilled.
Seems like a pretty smart reason to leave, if you ask me.
Lastly:
> "Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early."
No, no it's not. This is a very dangerous line of thinking. If burn out to you means getting tired of mind-numbing tedium, you haven't experienced burn out. Actual burn out can be a very valid reason to "give up", or at the very least take an extended vacation. You can't just push through the physical symptoms of extreme stress and exhaustion, at least not without causing even more harm.
[+] [-] enjo|12 years ago|reply
It's a complicated thing. I'd liken it to depression. Lots and lots of people constantly fret about being "depressed". Over time it became easy to dismiss depression as a legitimate illness. Apparently every time you feel sad you're depressed, the whole thing just loses its meaning.
It wasn't until I met someone who suffered from true clinical depression did I understand exactly the seriousness of it. The difference between someone feeling down and someone suffering from depression is stark. Hell it's pretty scary.
The same thing is true of "burning out". I've met several developers who have talked about burnout and cited it as a reason they just had to quit their job and backpack around Europe. Fair enough, you were clearly just tired of working and wanted to do something that's a bit more fun.
Then I met one (and thus far only one) person who truly burned out. That person became, much like someone suffering from depression, a shell of their former self. They became not just unresponsive but completely unable to respond. It was terrifying. They came to work and attempted to function, but they simply couldn't. The company simply rode them to the point that their brain seemed to turn off.
When you see it, you know it. That guy wasn't rationalizing anything. He had simply been pushed too hard for too long for his mind to keep up.
The company in question was from a VERY high-profile accelerator (not naming names!). The culture of pushing kids at maximum pace over long distances ended costing this company not only key employee but the bulk of their development team as well. After seeing it, no one wanted to be next.
[+] [-] rturben|12 years ago|reply
This is the thing that strikes me the most. I'm fairly young still and have begun working at a company as a programmer. I've been there for about five months and can already say that this isn't where my passion lies. There's nothing wrong with trying to figure out where you really want to go in life and trying to achieve it. Not everyone gets it right on the first try, so to try and admonish people who quit when they "get bored" isn't the best attitude in my opinion. I don't think that's what this article was trying to say, but the author comes across as thinking that the only reason people quit a job after a year or two is because of boredom/lack of dedication when in reality it could simply be a part of the trial and error that is life.
[+] [-] mpeg|12 years ago|reply
I might be biased, because I quit my stable but unfulfilling corporate job a few weeks ago; but after reading his post I have cancelled my Pluralsight $49/mo subscription. Maybe a pointless little rebellion, but I feel like the same message he directed at Loren could be directed at me :)
[+] [-] shubb|12 years ago|reply
I don't think you can call the guy lazy. He just decided to work real hard on something else.
[+] [-] acconrad|12 years ago|reply
This is exactly what has just happened to me at my most recent startup. Great guys, but the fit I once had has no longer applied and I left. I'm pretty scared right now because I want to jump into consulting/freelance but I've never done it before, and I want to do that while I carefully evaluate the opportunities presented to me. I don't want to jump into another company quickly as a 27 yr old and ruin my future career by joining another mismatched company, but I also don't want to meander as a freelancer without developing a great reputation. I think it's time for me to put in that hard work, but I want to make sure I do it in the best manner possible. And I have no idea what I'm doing - I know code, I know design, but the politics of finding a great company and doing great work are a huge mystery to me.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|12 years ago|reply
The idea being that work is drudgery, and that basic fact is what justifies being paid for it. There's no doubt a bit of puritan ideology leaking into such concepts, the idea that benefit must be paid for in pain.
However, this comparison is inapt and leads to many erroneous conclusions. First of all, valuable work need not be synonymous with drudgery. Many skilled craftspersons and artisans are capable of doing incredibly valuable work with fairly small expenditures of hard labor or time due to their hard to acquire expertise and subject specific wisdom. That doesn't mean such people can't be or aren't typically hard workers, but sometimes they don't have to be in order to make a good living. And there's nothing particularly wrong with that. The work of, say, an optometrist is in some respects vastly "easier" than the work of a field hand in a sugar cane plantation, but that doesn't undervalue that work, optometry requires a lot of specialized knowledge that is difficult to acquire.
One of the biggest problems here is the notion that the basic conditions of knowledge work are less strenuous than manual labor. Sitting at a desk in a climate controlled office generally compares very favorably with, say, digging a ditch with a shovel in the hot sun. This leads people to the idea that in order to be worthwhile knowledge work should be strenuous in some way. And typically that involves working extra hours (60 or 80 hours weeks), sinking time into boring activities, or putting up with stress.
However, in reality these things don't translate into increased productivity, in fact they typically diminish productivity substantially. Moreover, long-term exposure to stress is extremely bad for an individual's physical and mental health, imposing a toll that can be significantly more damaging even than prolonged manual labor.
Again, there is the idea that stress is justified, that putting up with bullshit like office politics or death march conditions are the price that must be paid to allow people to make six figure incomes from just sitting at computers and typing all day.
But these things are just sideshows. The true, underlying value of knowledge work lies in the collaboration of many folks with extensive and specialized knowledge toward the goal of solving problems. "Hard work" may be required at times but it doesn't have to look anything like 80 hour weeks, or stress, or repetitive tasks, or backbreaking manual labor. It's possible for knowledge workers to work hard by only putting in 4 hours a week and going home to their lives and families happy, content, and unstressed.
Knowledge work isn't factory work. It's not linear, the way to increase output is not to increase input labor. Instead, the way to increase output is to stack as many compounding effects on top of each other as possible. Factory work is additive, knowledge work, when done correctly, is exponential. And it's finding the right conditions to enable knowledge workers to create and stack those exponential effects better which blows away any linear effects.
Imagine 3 software teams. The first team works 80 hrs/week building a product, every month they churn out another new feature. The second team works 40 hrs/week, every 2 months they produce a new feature. The third team works 40 hrs/week, and every month they make their product faster, more reliable, more usable, and ensure that the core systems are highly extensible; and every once in a while they will add a feature or change a feature with the criterion that it must be valuable to end-users, work extremely well, and not degrade performance, reliability, or usability. Which team would you bet on to win in the market? Which team "works harder"? Which team is more likely to be able to retain workers?
[+] [-] jsonmez|12 years ago|reply
I just got bored."
[+] [-] jsonmez|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyanZAG|12 years ago|reply
Life is not fair, there are no points awarded for working harder or being more diligent - there are only 'points' awarded for accomplishing things. Make sure you accomplish the right things in the right way. Nobody is interesting that you slaved away coding for 6 months to develop something when someone launches something with 6 hours of work that solves the right problem.
[+] [-] calinet6|12 years ago|reply
It fails to comprehend any of the complexities of circumstance, time, or humanity, yet claims to have a point above them all. This is the mark of a single-minded spoiled child without worldly experience, who has fallen into some success after a short stint of hard work and doesn't understand his place in the stochastic processes which led to his creation, upbringing, and situation.
This bullshit is to be shredded; not lightly but intently and with prejudice. It should be put down for its failure as a perspective. For its disservice to the betterment of our profession.
[+] [-] StandardFuture|12 years ago|reply
Exactly, and I find a complete bias towards hard work for the sake of "feeling good" about your hard work is actually ... lazy. Feeling good about tediously slaving away at manually inserting data into a database rather than coding a handler to automate that is actually working hard to avoid doing things the way they SHOULD be done.
An older generation getting mad at a younger generation for wanting fulfilling and meaningful work is exactly this laziness. It's code for: "look I know we should have made things be this way but we can't do anything about it so you(plural) just do this boring stuff that we want you to do right now b/c we are too lazy to find a better way to work meaningfully... "
My two cents: don't work hard. Work Smart. And then work hard AT working smart. ;)
[+] [-] gavanwoolery|12 years ago|reply
I've actually found that some of the most successful people are the people who attack "easy" problems and do it well. If you look at games like Minecraft, Spelunky, Hotline Miami, Super Meat Boy - they were all relatively simple to implement (at least their initial implementations).
That said, the author has plenty of valid points if you dig around the article. The majority of young people do fail because they have not yet failed enough (i.e. "put in the hard work"). I think that most inexperienced people fail because they have not learned the right problems to attack, or how to attack the right problems properly (I've been guilty of both, multiple times over).
[+] [-] jakejake|12 years ago|reply
That being said, I do think that hard work will almost always take you places, unless you are working "dumb" (as opposed to working smart). You might create something in 6 hours and then sell that idea to google for a billion dollars. The problem comes into play if you actually bank your future on that. Most 6-hour creations, when you look at the history, is the 100th idea or the 100th variation of an idea. So it is somewhat of a false perception that you can create a billion dollar product in an afternoon without putting in any labor before or after.
[+] [-] nostromo|12 years ago|reply
You can work hard. You can work smart. You can also do both.
[+] [-] mac1175|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d--b|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] return0|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Arjuna|12 years ago|reply
Burn out is real. It is dangerous, and even an overwhelming, driving passion for your work, your creation, can lead to disaster.
Ed Catmull recounted this story about the production of Toy Story 2 [1]:
"So we came back, John [Lasseter] told the story crew to take a good rest over the holidays, and come back on January 2nd... we were re-boarding the movie.
We had 8 months left.
We then started this incredibly intense effort to get this movie out. It was boarded quickly, it was pitched to the company, it was an electrifying pitch.
We had a lot of over-achieving people working for over-achieving managers to get the movie out.
We worked brutal hours with this. When I say "brutal", we had a number of people that were injured with RSI [2], one of them permanently left the field.
We had, actually, a married couple that worked there. This was in June, so it's summer, and the father was supposed to drop the baby off at daycare, but forgot; don't know why... but came and left the baby in the car, and came into work. Again, as the heat was rising, the mother asked... they realized and they rushed out: the baby was unconscious. The right thing was done, they put ice-water on the baby. The baby ended up being fine in the end, but it was one of those traumatic things, like, 'Why did this happen, are they working too hard?'
So when I say it was intense, it really was intense."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc&t=1064
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury
[+] [-] Amadou|12 years ago|reply
As an aside...
There was a Pulitzer Prize winning article about the phenomenon of parents forgetting their children in the backseat and leaving them to die in the heat. The main take-away is that it can happen to anyone. It isn't a matter of malicious or inattentive parents, it usually happens when there is a variation in routine that distracts the parent and pulls focus from the kid.
http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2010-Feature-Writing
[+] [-] fennecfoxen|12 years ago|reply
The article author might have a point or two about a variety of young actors in the workforce, but they're masked by this and other bits of far-too-tidy preachiness. He's full of it.
[+] [-] munificent|12 years ago|reply
Several years ago, I almost did the same thing with my infant daughter. Put her car seat in the back seat. Got in. Started driving. On auto-pilot started heading towards the office.
It was only when she happened to make a sound (she often slept on the way to daycare) that I remembered she was still in the truck. A combination of factors led to this:
1. I wasn't getting anywhere near enough sleep at night with feedings every few hours.
2. Carseats can't go in the front seat anymore. Good for safety, but bad for remembering a kid is in the car since they're out of sight.
3. Did I mention I wasn't getting enough sleep?
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
I definitely don't see it happening over a short timeframe at a normal job. Only time I got any real burnout, was for my capstone at Uni. I had been working around the clock (up to 80hr weeks) for three months solid.
Sidenote, It was actually kind of a cool experiment. I knew I would burn out; I also knew it was worth it (being my capstone). So I got the experience of attempting to forestall burnout just long enough to make our goals. Was a good experience learning about myself.
[+] [-] Smudge|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|12 years ago|reply
Similarly, "burn out" can be a rationalization for giving up early.
I think burn out and "stagnation" are very, very real, but I think they are much less common than is cited by people.
It is certainly not something that occurs over two months.
[+] [-] abofh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hhandoko|12 years ago|reply
[1] - http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/baby-boy-f...
[+] [-] jmduke|12 years ago|reply
When seeking work for the sake of the pay, almost all men are alike at present in civilized countries. To all of them work is a means, and not itself the end; on which account they are not very select in the choice of the work, provided it yields an abundant profit. But there are rarer men who would rather die than work without enjoyment in their work: the fastidious people, difficult to satisfy, whose object is not served by an abundant profit, unless the work itself be the reward of all rewards.
[+] [-] gboudrias|12 years ago|reply
And then: It doesn’t matter how brilliant you started out or how much faster you exited the gates than everyone else, those who consistently get up every morning and direct their energies along a single path, no matter how boring it may be, will eventually pass you on each of the many roads you haphazardly travel.
That's not how life works. You can direct all your efforts to bending cutlery, but you're not going to make a good living out of it. You're just not. And some people have it easy. Sorry, life is unfair.
But then I read that: Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early.
The author may be a great programmer (I suspect him of being a robot), but he doesn't understand psychology. Not worth a read.
[+] [-] e13tra|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrebbel|12 years ago|reply
If you think you can improve your life, work better, with more fun, with more meaning, with better challenges, then by all means go for it. There's no need to stay put at a place that sucks for you and that slowly boils your brain to pulp just because some old guy on HN did his time, too. Sure, there are plenty places where you're valued based on the amount of years to "put in for the business", but thank god there are also plenty places that got past that.
The other side is, of course, that if you give up too soon, you'll never get anywhere. But my impression is that most programmers stick around places too long, rather than too short. They just don't blog about it as much.
[+] [-] return0|12 years ago|reply
Sure, but what if that is to the expense of others? The widening wealth gap seems to suggest so.
[+] [-] jbail|12 years ago|reply
As an aside...I watched the author's "Why You Need People Skills" video on his website. At 3 minutes in he talks about how rubbing people the wrong way won't get you good results. He has another video titled, "The Power of Positivity"...which I'm guessing would be the opposite of the disparaging post he just wrote? I don't know what my point is other than you really look like a jerk when you try to act like you're positive and good with people..and then act the complete opposite.
[+] [-] aylons|12 years ago|reply
The grand finale of this presentation was a quote just like this, saying something in the lines of "this generation is lazy, and arrogant, and think life is easy".
Everything people say about Millenials, except this was taken from a 60's newspaper, focused on the baby-boomers. Moreover, it clearly was a reinforcing piece, not a proposing one, and there were other smaller excerpts to confirm this was the standard thinking at the time.
[1] Funny thing, I take "Generation Y" as the way people who doesn't really care about generational studies talk about Millenials. I can't stop thinking they heard "Generation X", called this way at their time because they were unknown, and extrapolated the meaning without further thinking.
EDIT: too many "about"s.
[+] [-] dexen|12 years ago|reply
> (...) others are hard at work ever so humbly providing real value through their—at times—loveless toil.
Hard work alone is not enough for humanity to benefit; it must also be well-focused, well-tooled and well-managed. If the clueless middle-management wastes 90% of your effort, there's more benefit to humanity when you move. Similarily, if 100h workweek and 24/7 stress wreck your family / relationship / friendships and derails your life for several years to come, there's more benefit to humanity if you move.
[+] [-] StandardFuture|12 years ago|reply
Yes, thank you for this statement. I don't think many people yet realize how much more detrimental to society so much bureaucratic bullshit in everything we do(are) is over a few hackers getting fed up with that same bureaucratic bullshit and moving on.
In fact, put that way it really does not seem logical to get mad at a few young programmers choices to change course. Maybe it's societies framework you should be getting mad at.
[+] [-] Havoc|12 years ago|reply
>The big problem is that “kids today” don’t understand the value of hard, boring work.
Hard work & kids...yeah...remember the news article 3 weeks ago about an intern in London dying from working 3 days straight. An intern for fck sake...not even an employee. Dead. Now tell me again that kids today don't know about hard work. I dare you.
[+] [-] dclusin|12 years ago|reply
I have been working at the same company for almost 4 years. During those 4 years I have worked on the same project and haven't really switched teams. I've seen employees come and go, architecture decisions made and debated ad nauseam, and so forth. I am currently in the processing of re-implementing some functionality and architecture decisions that I made when I first started (~4 years ago).
When I made these implementation decisions I thought they were the best approach based on my experience at the time. However, having stuck around all these years and seen the product and business evolve, these decisions have turned out to be either poor choices or not the most optimal. As a consequence I've derived a lot of experience and wisdom from revisiting these past decisions, as I am now able to go back with production data and performance characteristics and see how they work or do not work. This software that I wrote way back when functioned in production and worked flawlessly without ceremony for approximately 3.5 years. Only recently and under a changing production environment has this code started to become a pain point.
Had I been part of the new every two crowd I would have never been able to see how my designs and solutions would hold up, or fall down, over the years of their life span. Furthermore, I never would have gained the wisdom and experience that comes from implementing something and having to come back and re-visit it years later.
This is really the takeaway message I understand from the author. Basically, when you only do what strikes your fancy and change your priorities with the weather, you lose out on the sort of experience and opportunity for growth that I have had in the past few weeks.
[+] [-] smellf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snorkel|12 years ago|reply
... and those people are suckers. Honestly. If you are working long hours, jeopardizing your personal relationships, and devoting most of your mental attention to achieving someone else's success over your own -- and you are doing this because your are told it is noble to work hard, and there might even be a slightly bigger piece of cheese waiting for you at the far end of the maze -- then you are a sucker. There is no end to the maze, and the cheese is a mirage.
If you enjoy your job out of passion for the art, you are paid fair, respected, and you enjoy the company of your coworkers then great, enjoy it, stick with it. Otherwise you've been hoodwinked.
[+] [-] menssen|12 years ago|reply
There is no relationship between these three things, but the author keeps saying "hard, boring work."
I don't feel particularly bad about insisting that hard work doesn't have to be boring, and that boring, easy work is not hard.
"The HN Generation doesn't want to put in their time doing boring, unfulfilling work" doesn't sound nearly as damning as "The HN Generation doesn't want to put in their time doing hard work."
Anecdotally, programmers tend to work pretty damn hard.
[+] [-] lelandbatey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoyer|12 years ago|reply
Companies used to offer a good worker life-time employment and a pension, and they supported the idea of a reasonable workload as it would lead to longevity in their workforce. The combination of excess workers and the menialization of many jobs prompted the companies to minimize their commitment to the worker, both in salary and relationship.
Once the relationship was gone and it was obvious to the worker that they were valued for their effort on the hamster-wheel, is it any wonder so many of them were lacksidasical about how fast they spun that wheel? And when work because rote, is it any wonder that creative types that were in those positions were disenchanted?
The other interesting thing I've noticed is that you end up having both types of people in any given environment ... some of the people work hard because they don't want to get yelled at, want a step up the ladder, etc, but when you watch closely, you'll often see that the "lazier" employees (the ones the hard workers keep expecting to get laid off) actually garner about the same rewards for dramatically less effort.
Of course, these are my observations and your mileage may vary ... I've spent the majority of my working life doing work I enjoy, but I no longer identify my worth by what I accomplish on-the-job.
[+] [-] avenger123|12 years ago|reply
Apparently, since he actually started using it, he thinks its not so bad now and will be around for a while.
John also likes to make very broad and just downright swiping generalizations like this below:
'We’ve sort of reached the place in the C# and Java space where just about everyone is doing “cargo cult programming.” What I mean by this is that a majority of developers are writing unit tests and using IoC containers without understanding what value those practices bring or even if those practices are actually bringing any value.'
I find this article along the same lines. I applaud him for his ability to generate views but I don't put too much weight in his "insights".
[+] [-] trustfundbaby|12 years ago|reply
Its hard to read something like this ...
"It is really easy to sit at your desk when you are supposed to be working and browse hacker news, injecting in your sarcastic wit and sly comments, believing them to be of value, believing that somehow that in this false self-affirming reality that you are actually creating something of value, when indeed all you are doing is destroying and marring the work of others to your own detriment"
And not feel like this is a rant, but plenty of rants have a lot of hard truths in them, this one does not.
I take issue with this ...
"The big problem is that “kids today” don’t understand the value of hard, boring work"
This idea that you should be able to go to a job that bores you to tears, or even worse, actually hate just because it pays you money and thats just what people have to do really really upsets me. I've been a developer for 10 years now, and I can categorically tell you that your work can be challenging, your work can be tough but it should never be boring. Because I find that when I had autonomy at my job, whenever my opinion was respected by decision makers, and when I was surrounded by a team that I loved, I never had any boring moments.
And I think that goes for a lot of people too, because you see, it turns out that work is only really boring when you don't care. And if you don't care, you shouldn't be there.
PS: The part about burn out is abysmally wrong and doesn't even warrant comment.
[+] [-] guynamedloren|12 years ago|reply
Just want to chime in with a quick update: two months in, still 'funemployed'. Currently working harder than I ever did at my job, on so many different levels. Possibly working harder than I ever have in my life. To stay at the job I was at would have been a huge cop out. I'd basically be showing up and collecting a check without pushing myself forward, stunting my growth as a developer and as a person.
[1] http://madebyloren.com/i-quit-my-job
[+] [-] rubyn00bie|12 years ago|reply
Hard work sucks, it often involves things you don't want to do, but you must push on... I don't like paying back technical debt, but I have to. It's the most boring work, unglamorous work I can do, but among the most necessary.
As well, often times in start ups, in the beginning you're forced to do work outside of your "role" for better or worse. As a business matures, the need for this reduces and you're left with what you were hired for... this is part of growing a business. It can be viewed as boring, but is sort of the goal. Being over worked, and forced to do tasks outside of your description isn't something people should be fighting for...
[+] [-] vectorpush|12 years ago|reply
This is just false. Dishonest corner-cutters do pretty well on average. I bet the author believes "crime never pays" as well. Get real.
[+] [-] VladRussian2|12 years ago|reply
edit: and it is pretty applicable to any generation - Gates or Zuckerberg (saying with all my distaste for FB or its creator) could have continue droning in Harvard and beyond, yet they declined, and as far as i know they are very far from being slackers.
[+] [-] websitescenes|12 years ago|reply