Face it: you're a crazy person

I read the post differently – the point of the exercise is not that you need to know the answers to the questions. It's to gauge your emotional reaction to the question itself.

By examining the types of tasks you will be consistently faced with, you can ask yourself, "Do I actually want to do that?"

My friend in college was worried she would fall into trap that she eventually fell into: She wanted to be a writer, and she felt that Comparative Lit put you in danger of knowing your writing was crap before you had the motivation and discipline to do something about it.

I tend to give junior devs as much rope as I can because they're just going to be awful until they get about 1000 hours in, and no amount of me scaring them is going to make that any better. And once in a while they surprise me by doing something they shouldn't have been able to do. We all have our preconceptions and nobody's are right all the time.

This is the basis of "The E-Myth". A book I didn't read a long time ago because the title made me think it was about Scientology, but a consultant encouraged me to read it and I did. Essentially, the book is about this:

Person A likes to bake and has creative recipes that people like. Person B likes to develop companies and knows a baker who can make a recipe. Person A struggles to keep a bakery open and could really live to never see another pie in their life. Person B creates Cinnabon.

Yep, agree. I got into info sec because I found info sec fascinating. The actual reality of working in info sec is like many other jobs: lots of tedious shit with moments where you get close to what you actually found interesting.

If I had sat down and "unpacked" what the actual job was like I doubt I'd have bothered. But that doesn't make it a bad choice for me. I'm still glad I work in the field, I get a lot of value from knowing I'm helping keep things motoring and sometimes it can be fun too.

Unpacking does not sound like a good way to figure out what you want to do. It sounds like a good way to argue yourself out of doing anything.

This is problem with the places like 90% of the Kitchen Nightmares, Bar Rescue, etc., type shows. An owner retires with a huge nest egg and decides that, as a dive bar regular, they'd really like to think of themselves as the owner of the neighborhood bar. The "unpacking" that they never did would have involved cleaning up vomit regularly, violently drunk patrons, just having to do a shit ton of work yourself because labor is expensive, etc.

I would agree with the post, in this case your dad knew a lot about his trade, so it wasn't a new industry for him.

The coffeeshop example is great, i've seen that a couple times, where people that like drinking coffee, open a coffeeshop, and since they don't know a lot about beans, or equipment, they end up doing bad purchases, choosing bad providers, and the result is just bad.

i think youre right that unpacking could get in the way of enthusiasm. speaking for myself i simply enjoy the challenges of software development and enjoy most new challenges the deeper i go

on the other hand i think unpacking is good because most people dont really know what they want to do coming out of high school, at least in the USA. in america adult jobs are a nebulous concept: i did well at accounting in DECA because i could do mental math better than peers. i assumed id be an accountant because i had to get some job. i assumed id wear a suit and do some math. its a good thing to tell adults because they approve. i took one database class and bailed on accounting to teach myself to code

maybe unpack a career path if there isnt passion and enthusiasm for the process

The article says that you should at least find those questions interesting, not necessarily have everything already planned out.

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.

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."

There's a short video of two guys parodying what Brandon Sanderson's writing problem is like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcZVAPGE-YE

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

> I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.

I think you're misusing the analogy completely. In the analogy, the cartoon version of the professor doesn't actually _do_ anything. I don't see how you could compare that to your real life, where you were actually doing something (teaching students). Unless you're dismissing the act of teaching students as a lecturer as a completely empty pursuit.

> Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.

This is awesome, I love the way you phrase this and having that mindset.

+1, I loved office hours, and felt _ok_ about giving demos/lectures. I honestly didn’t care much for research though lol, it’s very lonely. I wish “teaching professor” was a more viable career, my impression is that it pays poorly

> Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.

You sound like one of those rare souls who might both enjoy and be good at people management.

(Line management, at least. The higher up you go, the less fun it gets, unless you're a psychopath whose primary motivation is Number Go Up.)

I found that example weird, probably because it's the one I had the most experience with, having been a grad student at two different universities. (I don't have enough familiarity with the other examples to know if they're weird or not.)

I don't know any grad student (outside perhaps a first-semester master's student) who has delusions about what a professor does. First off, they know academia is publish-or-perish, they've been told it every day, and they're prepping for it right from the get-go, with qualifying papers that are going to turn into their dissertation which is going to turn into their first academic book -- the first of many they know they're going to need to write. And they know that it also involves a lot of face time with the students, since as grad students they spend a lot of face time with the professor. And they know about the teaching because they're having to do it too now, as barely-paid lecturers.

> "Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan"

Did those students not have advisors?

Sorry, I got the point of the article, and it was fine, but this whole anecdote felt off.

>I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, but as a grad student I hated walking around at the front of class going “I’m a lecturer here” and having the students say “hi lecturer!” It was the least satisfying part of the job. Maybe it feels better if you have the real title.

You didn't like teaching like that. Some people really do, some people don't. Nothing wrong with individual preferences.

Two things that the article neglects:

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.

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.

> people don't talk about it socially either

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

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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 ...

> people don't talk about it socially either

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 was still in middle school in the early 2010’s and I remember thinking how lucky I am to want to be a computer programmer for a career AND it happens to pay a lot of money.

Unfortunately many people today got into for the money and not the passion (or at least the passion and the money). Those people look for shortcuts and are generally unpleasant to work with, in my opinion.

Right - there are two types of people working as developers.

1) People who love programming, do it as a hobby, and love being in front of a computer all day.

2) People who doing it because it's a decent paying job, but have no passion (and probably therefore not much skill) for it, and the last thing they want when they clock off their job is to be back on a computer.

If you are from group 1) - getting paid to do your hobby, then being a developer is a great job, but if you are from group 2) I imagine it can be pretty miserable, especially if trying to debug complex problems, or faced with tasks pushing your capability.

“if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.”

Heh. And then they go become a "real" engineer (mechanical, electrical, whatever), and end up sitting in front of a computer all day, dealing with poor UI and poorly designed SW because a lot of CAD tools are either built in-house or owned by monopolies who have no incentive to improve the experience.

I've lived both worlds.

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2016/Jan/code-monkey-or-cad-mon...

> I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers.

I went to college in the late 1990s at the height of the dotcom boom. Saw a bunch of people who had this same feeling.

Which made no sense to me b/c I loved programming so much that I would do my homework assignments ahead of time!

> I think the “get rich easy” reputation that software engineering gained somewhere around the 2010s really hurt the industry and a lot of people who are chasing the dollar.

Yup.

Also, "The Company is the Product," where the goal is to sell the company, and the end-users are just food for the prize hog.

Just start talking about improving software quality, or giving end-users more agency, privacy, and freedom, around here, and see the response.

I am a mechanical engineer who browses hackernews, if you want to get up and move around get a mechanical engineering degree

This is me too! Everything about writing code, running it, messing with Github, tinkering with my dotfiles, automations... even as a preschooler, I was always dissatisfied that my drawings didn't do anything. I feel astoundingly lucky to have a job I was born to do.

Same. Maybe this AI text generator trend will bring salaries back down, the opportunists will leave for greener pastures and us mega-nerds will have the software-writing all to ourselves.

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!

talk about a strange loop!

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.

No, those aren’t the follow on questions.

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.

> Surely there must be other difficult things?

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.

> 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.