I love that and strongly agree with it. I should probably start practicing that.
MathMonkeyMan 16 minutes ago [-]
How many times did I read "a pie-eating contest where the prize for winning is more pie" before clicking away?
1. The hacker news title.
2. The tab title.
3. The image at the top left.
4. The text section to the right of the image.
5. The second sentence.
6. Different crop of the same image from before, but now below the second sentence.
I know that this isn't a curious comment, but holy shit dude.
stavros 7 minutes ago [-]
The post was a contest and the prize was more post.
kevindamm 13 minutes ago [-]
Maybe they wanted you to see how much pie you are willing to eat.
collinmcnulty 2 minutes ago [-]
The prize for winning is two people who both want you to eat their particular pie and you say you’ll eat for the one who pays you the most.
tolerance 9 minutes ago [-]
Evidently this post is excellent in its brevity, redundancy and effectiveness in getting its point across.
And flawed for the same reasons, if not for my suspicion that this is a fragment of a greater point that the author is trying to make that can be further contextualized against the posts adjacent to this one, except that there is no date on this individual post nor are they any on the main “blog” index that would allow me to orientate myself thereby.
So I’m loving the mixed reactions that this is getting. And I reckon that the author could elaborate better through either a change of format (like a book) or UX revisions.
DebtDeflation 27 minutes ago [-]
People forget that in the long history of human civilization, the idea of working as an employee of a big company only goes back about 150 years, the idea of white collar office work in that context only goes back about 75 years, and the idea of a "career" (as opposed to just doing the same job forever) is even newer.
terminalshort 2 minutes ago [-]
People who point this out tend to forget that's because for most of that long history, the alternative options were pretty much: 1. be born to the right parents, 2. peasant farm laborer. We're not going back to that, so might as well forget it for purposes of analysis.
jajko 19 minutes ago [-]
Shhh, or you are going to ruin some lives of folks who have excellent corporate careers in some lets say questionable companies, and very little achievement to show in their actual lives.
Havoc 48 minutes ago [-]
Vibes seem off with some of the stuff doing well on hn today
q3k 42 minutes ago [-]
You call it bad vibes, I call it people gaining class consciousness.
Class consciousness mfs when they reach Next Stage Of Humanity tm but they are forced to pick berries in a farm
kannanvijayan 41 seconds ago [-]
Status quo megafaunas when they're watching the robots farm berries while they starve.
Herring 31 minutes ago [-]
Flag it. Flag it immediately.
Sharlin 43 minutes ago [-]
Can’t really disagree with TFA.
paulcole 46 minutes ago [-]
No, Company Bad, Boss Bad, Marketing Bad, AI Bad, Engineer Good is the vibe here.
DrewADesign 21 minutes ago [-]
Worker Leverage Bad, Company Criticism Bad, Questioning Management Bad, Deliberate Equality Bad, Regulation Bad, AI Good, Productivity Good, Business Good, Leadership Good, Shareholder Good is just as frequently the vibe here. Whichever one you disagree with looks more prevalent.
shoo 41 minutes ago [-]
engineer unsure if pie good or bad. sample more pie.
kevindamm 8 minutes ago [-]
"ooh I think I have a way to improve pie production"
tossandthrow 41 minutes ago [-]
There are a couple of reasons to do well on the job: it might be a joyful activity, it leads to better opportunities, it teaches a lesson that can be used starting something, or it ensures employment.
If none of these things have appeal, then one should carefully think about being in that job.
strken 5 minutes ago [-]
There's something that makes me sad about the thought of an engineer, sitting at a desk, thinking "I can't fix the fifteen second frobnizzle page load time because otherwise they'll make me fix the performance of everything."
That's not how work is meant to be. In this metaphor, one should like pie. If the pie eating contest is offering free pie then it's perfectly legitimate to walk in, eat a normal amount of pie, accept your prize, and be happy with it.
simianwords 38 minutes ago [-]
The most important reason to do a good job is empathy for your customers. Everything else is secondary.
horsawlarway 22 minutes ago [-]
Personally, I find this attitude pretty derivative.
Why should a worker feel empathy for a customer if that empathy doesn't have any meaningful impact on them?
It's a good thing to say to a founder of a company, such as the owner of a small business.
It's a pretty useless thing to say to an overworked support staff... Answering more calls or putting out more fires very rarely benefits that role. Hell, I've seen support staff get told attempting to help a customer too long is a negative, and they're doing a bad job. Even in the best cases, I've often seen drive met with a management that just makes that effort the new baseline... "Great job, guys! Our ticket wait time is down 30% , now let's keep it there!"
So sure - have empathy for your customers. Don't have it blindly at bad jobs.
alistairSH 9 minutes ago [-]
The most important reason to do a good job is the slightly higher likelihood of being able to feed and house your family.
stavros 55 minutes ago [-]
This blog post is interesting in that it could be a tweet. The title is the whole thing.
> Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on whether or not you enjoy the work.
But I agree, he could have does a lot more analysis.
The metaphor is striking, though.
api 44 minutes ago [-]
A good proportion of nonfiction books could be their blurbs. This is pretty common. We use too many words in a lot of contexts.
latexr 32 minutes ago [-]
For those books, I realised that a much better use of time is to search YouTube for a talk by the author. They’ll explain everything that’s remotely interesting about the book’s thesis. Everything else in the book is typically anecdote after anecdote.
Nobody would pay 10-20$ for a blurb. So let’s somehow make it to about 200 pages and we’re good.
demarq 35 minutes ago [-]
This is just a phrase repeated 3 times in a page?
40 minutes ago [-]
satisfice 36 minutes ago [-]
This is the sort of thing that sounds like insight to a creative 12 year-old who swears he will never settle for a “desk job.”
A career is actually a contest where the prize is money that you can buy things with, including pie.
javcasas 19 minutes ago [-]
Only if you learn to play the game by the actual rules, not if you play the game by what they tell you the rules are.
jajko 13 minutes ago [-]
Surprisingly little actual long term quality of life, happiness or life satisfaction can be bought with money, any money. They are important if you properly don't have them but as soon as you leave that category they are at best secondary.
So people boasting about their 'successful careers' are pretty boring empty bunch, rather tell me how you spend your evenings, weekends or vacations, how good parent you are (aka how much you suffer for your kids and don't outsource hard but important parts to grandparents or nannies), what you do for your community and so on.
xvilka 24 seconds ago [-]
Long term QoL definitely needs money: healthy food, means to exercise, enough time and freedom for work-life balance, travel, and so on. So yes, money are necessary for it. But the amount has a certain cap, let's say somewhere between $1-30M depending on the place where you live and the size of your family .
mooreds 1 hours ago [-]
Another, less colorful, way to put this is "don't put anything on your resume you don't want to do more of".
I know folks who have taken old technologies (perl, ASP.NET) off their resume so that they don't get approached by employers looking to hire for technologies they don't want to work in.
pjmlp 53 minutes ago [-]
Yes, one such example here.
A golden rule is to fit your resume into one or two pages max.
Have the private copy as big as one wants, however take the effort to sell oneself to the actual position.
HR is looking for reasons to throw away resumes out from the pile, anything that makes their work harder will contribute for that.
37 minutes ago [-]
doctorhandshake 41 minutes ago [-]
Yeah my rule when considering taking on a freelance project is ‘do I want to become an expert in this, and do I thus want my phone to ring for this for the next 2 years?’
vlan0 37 minutes ago [-]
"The reward for good work is more work."
- timm chiusano
sigio 28 minutes ago [-]
And the reward for a job badly done... is less work.
redwood 12 minutes ago [-]
"If you want to get something done, give it to the busy person"
Deuter8 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 12:46:18 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
My recommendation to the author is to read and reflect on “Atomic blog posts”¹, by Mike Crittenden. I’ll reproduce it here in its entirety:
> There’s no law that says a blog post needs more than one idea or more than one sentence.
¹ https://critter.blog/2021/01/06/atomic-blog-posts/
1. The hacker news title.
2. The tab title.
3. The image at the top left.
4. The text section to the right of the image.
5. The second sentence.
6. Different crop of the same image from before, but now below the second sentence.
I know that this isn't a curious comment, but holy shit dude.
And flawed for the same reasons, if not for my suspicion that this is a fragment of a greater point that the author is trying to make that can be further contextualized against the posts adjacent to this one, except that there is no date on this individual post nor are they any on the main “blog” index that would allow me to orientate myself thereby.
So I’m loving the mixed reactions that this is getting. And I reckon that the author could elaborate better through either a change of format (like a book) or UX revisions.
Sorry for lazy comment, but I had to
If none of these things have appeal, then one should carefully think about being in that job.
That's not how work is meant to be. In this metaphor, one should like pie. If the pie eating contest is offering free pie then it's perfectly legitimate to walk in, eat a normal amount of pie, accept your prize, and be happy with it.
Why should a worker feel empathy for a customer if that empathy doesn't have any meaningful impact on them?
It's a good thing to say to a founder of a company, such as the owner of a small business.
It's a pretty useless thing to say to an overworked support staff... Answering more calls or putting out more fires very rarely benefits that role. Hell, I've seen support staff get told attempting to help a customer too long is a negative, and they're doing a bad job. Even in the best cases, I've often seen drive met with a management that just makes that effort the new baseline... "Great job, guys! Our ticket wait time is down 30% , now let's keep it there!"
So sure - have empathy for your customers. Don't have it blindly at bad jobs.
I also think that he digs in a bit more:
> Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on whether or not you enjoy the work.
But I agree, he could have does a lot more analysis.
The metaphor is striking, though.
A career is actually a contest where the prize is money that you can buy things with, including pie.
So people boasting about their 'successful careers' are pretty boring empty bunch, rather tell me how you spend your evenings, weekends or vacations, how good parent you are (aka how much you suffer for your kids and don't outsource hard but important parts to grandparents or nannies), what you do for your community and so on.
I know folks who have taken old technologies (perl, ASP.NET) off their resume so that they don't get approached by employers looking to hire for technologies they don't want to work in.
A golden rule is to fit your resume into one or two pages max.
Have the private copy as big as one wants, however take the effort to sell oneself to the actual position.
HR is looking for reasons to throw away resumes out from the pile, anything that makes their work harder will contribute for that.
- timm chiusano