back
213 comments
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.

+1 on the burnout piece.

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?

I just got bored."

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.

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."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc&t=1064

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury

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.

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.

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.

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.

" ... 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.

Hard work. Boring work. Unfulfilling work.

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.

[1] http://madebyloren.com/i-quit-my-job

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...

What we haven’t told them is that nothing of any worth is obtained by any means except for good old honest hard work.

This is just false. Dishonest corner-cutters do pretty well on average. I bet the author believes "crime never pays" as well. Get real.

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.
> The myth of burn out

> Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early

I wonder what this guy thinks about the "myth of depression". Is it just rationalization for laziness?

The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Not a helpful post.

It's rare I've been so ticked of at an article.

First off, this guy has no conception of burn out.

I work as a consultant. Just the last 12 months in my tiny part of the woods, I've seen several people break down at work and go home crying, two under-30 founders getting hospitalized for heart conditions(!) and the worst: A 40 year-old managing director falling dead from a simple flu infection. Family said the doctors explanation was a severely compromised immune system, most likely due to overwork.

This is not isolated cases, I'd bet most people with just a modicum of perception and commercial experience, will have seen this time and time again.

This guy says that when he wastes 2-3 hours on surfing the net, he feels more burnt out. And it's really just a mental attitude. Your little ups and downs during the working day/week, has nothing what so ever to do with stress and burn out.

If it weren't for his extremely condescending tone and know-it-all attitude, I'd have given him a pass as some young, social media wannabe.

But to go out and exclaim "just power through, it's all in your head" is not just uninformed or stupid advice. It's downright dangerous, and it has to be addressed. I hope anybody, especially young, reading this piece of garbage, thinks twice before they adapt the "rah rah" attitude of this strongly opinionated but completely narrow minded programmer.

For his other point about the "hard workers" toiling away at the same things for years on end, always surpassing more fickle personalities in the end. Well, I think anybody who's worked at big corp will know a whole bunch of lifers, soon-to-be-retired greybeards / middle managers who, despite 40 years at the helm, still only have a third of the influence, autonomy and income of the young and driven business consultant.

Yeah hard work is a requirement to go somewhere. But unless you just want to climb a ladder that others have put in front of you, don't let anybody call you a lazy, entitled brat for not buckling down for 5-10 years at a time.

"What we haven’t told them is that nothing of any worth is obtained by any means except for good old honest hard work."

This is such crap when the real estate market was good I made more money per year watching my apartment appreciate than by working my ass off. Perhaps in some existential sense of 'worth' this is true, but in terms of making piles of cash, definitely not.

Sometimes people conflate passion with interest, and they miss out on the notion of agenda.

Basically, if you are passionate about something you can set goals based on that, and the hard and boring work that is part of getting to the goal is overcome by the passion of getting to the goal. As an interesting example, look at people who play storyline video games to the end, versus ones that stop before finishing. People who are invested (a form of passion) in how the game ends, slog through the boring parts to get there. People who aren't invested get turned off by the boring part and stop. The same thing is true with movies and books. If you care about how they are going to turn out, you sit through the 'slow' parts, if you don't care, you don't.

I found the call to action at the end "Sign up for info on my super secret project that will turn you from Lazy Bum to Execution Machine!" really jarring as well. If you conflate passion and lazyness and rationalization then how can you make something effective?

When people tell me they can't stick to a project they just wander off into other things. I try to figure out if there are things where that doesn't occur. You know, the kind of person who says "I've got ADHD that is why I just played this video game for 4 hours straight." And you ask the obvious question, "Were you giving it your full attention?"

I don't doubt for a moment that folks will rationalize their drop in productivity as burn out sometimes, but it is dangerous to go from there to saying something like "burn out is a myth." One does not imply the other.

That guy put a lot of hard, boring work into bolding random pieces of text and interspersing tangentially related pictures throughout his article. It's ironic that he disparages the "sly and witty comments" on Hacker News while going out of his way to doll up a fluff piece about fluff comments on HN.
Nearly everyone I've ever spoke with thinks:

- they are a hard worker

- they deserve more money than they are making

- they are stronger and/or smarter than the majority of their peers

- they are a good driver

It takes quite a bit to convince someone of the opposite. Once you have someone's back against the wall with a pile of evidence that they are dumb or lazy, they will start at you with every excuse in the book, mostly I think they are trying to convince themselves.

Of course I believe I am a hard worker, deserve more money, am smarter/stronger than my peers and am a good driver too. Someboday has to be.

Oh please, change the record. Your generation has a money money money aesthetic (no, I don't actually think this, but if we're caricaturing each other...) a boundless greed. But I don't really care that much if I earn more than £30k a year for the rest of my life. I've got enough. Heck, I'm considering taking a couple of years off to read books and build a house.

There's a limit to how greedy I can be.

It's fine to work hard if it's a work of passion, something that you really want to accomplish. And there's certainly something to be said for working through downspots, we all have bad days and quitting just because of some minor irritant that may well pass will scupper your chances of greater happiness in the long run. But working hard just to get money to buy stuff you don't need, or even draw a commensurate pleasure from? Spend less and save more, don't fritter your life away suffering to make someone else's dream.

I'm happy living a life that entertains me, I've sufficient money to provide security - beyond that what benefit am I going to get by doing things that bore me?

You think that it's a race? That we won't get as far? I honestly have to wonder: So what?

You don't get points for finishing life before the other person.

"The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris." - Larry Wall, not exactly a member of 'The Hacker News Generation' ...
Previous discussion on this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199446
Every generation (and employers who want to hire young people for cheap) considers the next one "lazy and arrogant" while the fact is that life really is becoming easier across the board. In my opinion, the author is confusing "boring work".

There is two kinds of boring work. One is where you are still committed to the end goal but some things just have to be done in order to achieve it. There's no arguing about this and I think even the new generation recognizes the value of it and the value of going through the "dip" and finishing things.

The other is when you become disinterested in the end goal itself. Leaving this kind of boring work is a good thing. It's a shame to continue working on uninspiring projects especially when there are so many other opportunities. Life is too short for that. Adding some whitespace to one's life is how you move on to better opportunities.

This article comes out as attacking the second category as well. For example, he compares this to "the vapid life of a vagabond merrily traveling from pleasure to pleasure in life ever thirsting, but never being quenched, every tasting, but never consuming.".

Vagabonds have vapid lives? That's a bit presumptuous. "Not all who wander are lost."

TL;DR: In the society we live in, you are expected to spend a good chunk of your waking hours wading in shit. We have gotten together and decided that wading in shit is virtuous and builds character, and if you don't like wading through shit and try to avoid it or do less of it, you are objectively a bad person. Wanting to spend more time with your family and friends or pursuing hobbies and interests (other than wading in shit) is a sign of laziness and malformed character; so are outlandish malingerer's claims like "burnout" or "clinical depression". Your entire educational curriculum is designed by people who enjoy wading in shit and expect that you will too. If, upon graduation into the real world, you find that you do not enjoy wading in shit, we will shake our heads sadly and wonder how we failed to inculcate you with a seemly affection for shit-wading. If you are lucky enough to enjoy wading in shit, you are a superior species of human and deserve to be smug about it.

(Not addressed: The unthinkably heretical notion that we, in the first stirrings of post-scarcity, might perhaps look to and work toward a future where people don't have to wade in shit if they don't want to.)

If this were a post worthy of the front page of Hacker News, it wouldn't read like this:

"Unfortunately this kind of thinking and mentality seems to accurately embody much of the general ignorance and blatant stupidity of the next generation of software developers."

It's trash if it has to make its point by going to such great and obvious lengths to insult the topic audience, rather than just explaining why without relying on said insult as an introduction.

Rertrand Russell acknowledged that only a fraction of people need to do real work. As we move towards a more efficient society we will see this manifested, in that the only people working will be doing it `for the fun of it`. I'd take a burnt out hacker over the business major whose only interest is playing xbox any day. I think we forget how lazy 90% of our generation really is.
Yeah, at the start of the article I was already in disagreement after the equating of "grinding it out", "boring work", and "working hard". Sounds a little too self-justifying.

I'm in my 30s but quit the startup and bigcorp stuff to work less and be happier. I put in plenty of time busting ass for people way over my pay grade for 8 years. Honestly, a lot of the higher-ups in technology really don't care about those extra hours you put in, because often it's basically free to them.

Now I can work in a billable hours business and do pretty well with respect all around. I enjoy it, can explore new technologies, without being a full time drone.

Sorry to the author, but I don't think that makes me someone who needs to be talked down to. He doesn't seem to understand the concept that you can love what you do for a paycheck but placing more importance in other things is not a personality defect.

>Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early.

No. Fuck that noise.

Has the author ever seen someone who's burnt out? It is not a pretty sight, it is though the person is but an empty shell of what he once was (I know this sounds incredibly corny, but it really is the shortest way in which I can describe "being burnt out").

"There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself."

--Alan Turing

I agree 100% with the author about the spoiled brat mentality of this generation of developers. I personally prefer to hire older developers because a) they tend to be steady producers, and b) they have the maturity to understand that sometimes work sucks and c) provided managers don't treat them like shit, they tend to stick around. The flip side of the deal is I am not going to work them to death or make unreasonable demands unless we're in a do or die situation.

Guess what kids. Work can be boring. If you're writing reporting software for a utility grid monitoring company, it's probably not your "passion", but it'll pay for your mortgage, your kids school, and time off.

I am one of the people this article talks about, and I agree heartily. Fortunately I've long since identified this personal issue and have been working to improve myself. In all those years I spent watching peers working hard and struggling with things I did not, I had a nagging suspicion there were hidden benefits to their struggle.

Now I know. Today they are better at getting shit done. They can grind through the menial day to day minutiae real world projects are burdened with whereas I tend to obsess over the pockets that are "interesting". Working on it though...

I have to say, I agree with real moderate amount of this. There is sort of an echo chamber and a bit of a crazy echo chamber where people are cheered living in their cars like crazy people and think that says something about their entrepreneurial spirit.

But there's another side to this post that is a bit unfair to HN and generalizes us too much and the "these kids today" language ... I don't know, it's like he has a very good point and I agree with to such a large degree but he almost goes too far with the insults.

However, I do agree the initial blog post he is referencing raises so many flags for me. The first paragraph is like "I worked their two months" and then he got bored.

If I was the simpleprogrammer.com author, I would probably would have written this very same blog post in reaction to the other one. It is just outlandish crazy-talk ... But then I would have tried to calm down and not quite go after all of HN with such vitriol.

But I agree, the crazy he is responding to does kind of come out of an echo chamber in our community; down the whole "I'm going to make a publicity ploy by making a website dedicated to company X hiring me" stuff.

I think the language could be toned down a little but I think we can all learn from this as well. Perhaps if the language had been less acidic, we wouldn't have paid attention though.