andkon

I’m a philosophy grad who learned to code a couple years out of school.

Philosophy gives you a set of meta cognitive skills that help everywhere. It teaches you how to think. It shows you what class of problems are soluble, and which are things where we just have to accept tradeoffs. And it’s really focused, in a funny way, on economy: does your argument actually do something? Does this theory offer clarity and bring us closer to truth? If not, well, why are you wasting your breath on it? Philosophy teaches you to see that some avenues are fruitless or just kinda not worth the effort.

Also, non-practically, it shows you the full depth of wonder in the world. Wherever there is capacity for thinking to be done, philosophy says, you can elucidate something important to our human condition.

As an engineering manager, I read and agree with this guy's critique. Coding is creative, uncertain, and vulnerable work, and if engineering managers are responsible for whatever leads to results (as he reads Drucker as saying, and which I agree is really our job), then yeah, everything he describes as hampering us in doing that job (tools like OKRs, the need to quantify results, etc. etc.) are all indeed real issues!

And if you look at how engineering management happens, at really any org big enough to have even one manager of engineers, I think you'll see this stuff really is a problem. But it's a problem because, well, organizations need to find some way to scale accountability over all of their members, which, when it faces the really tricky vulnerable and weird work of engineering, runs into these problems because of how incommensurate that work is with the tools it has to understand how it's going at scale.

When EMing is a bullshit job, it's because the engineering manager is so constrained by the bureaucratic needs of the organization that she cannot actually do the work that matters between the lines. Like when you've gotta manage up so much that you cannot find the room to support an engineer grappling with a novel and uncertain task? Well, the engineer suffers, rightfully blaming engineering management -- we were responsible for supporting them, and failed to do so.

As EMs, we have to ask ourselves what we wanna do. Do we wanna fit with what the org asks of us, or do we wanna do what we're responsible for: delivering results by supporting engineers as they do the scary, vulnerable work they do? When those things diverge, I think good managers discover ways to keep the people above them happy, while delivering on their responsibilities to their team. But they often do it despite, not because of, the organization they're serving.

I'd like to say it's as easy as just always focusing on results, as when they are delivered, the rest of the org will see that you know what's up! But no. If you just do that as an EM, you'll be fired, or passed over for promotions, or have your team cut from underneath you, or be told you're a better engineer than manager and demoted. Ultimately, your job is to do both: to deliver what the people above you say they need, and to help those who report to you.

The coda to this is that the people above you are also human, and also probably realize what they're asking of you is bullshit (if you're lucky). So if you're capable of dealing as humanely and vulnerably with those above you as much as your direct reports, you'll also win them over, and you'll win the cover from them to be able to do what matters with your team.

This was like five years ago that I had one, but as far as I remember, OP-1 isn't grid-based (though maybe some of the instruments are?). It's basically like a four track tape mixer. You can loop bar-by-bar, and then copy from bar to bar. And you can stretch time in the same way that you would with a reel-to-reel tape deck. But as far as I remember it won't transpose / warp the sounds along with the change in BPM.

From wikipedia:

> A logic gate is an idealized or physical device implementing a Boolean function, a logical operation performed on one or more binary inputs that produces a single binary output. Depending on the context, the term may refer to an ideal logic gate, one that has for instance zero rise time and unlimited fan-out, or it may refer to a non-ideal physical device

As long as it implements a boolean function, which this clearly does, it sure sounds like a logic gate. What difference does it make whether the control and output have the same form of energy when the real thing that matters is the information it captures?

One thing that can make it fun, speaking as a former kid who grew up playing fiddle, is to get to play with other kids and connect with other kids through music. Maybe that's tough with piano, but youth orchestra, band, fiddle circles, all sorts of things offer them the chance to find other people with whom they can make their instrument their own thing, and not just yours. Though there is always a helpful role for parental encouragement in practicing – because damn is that part not fun.

Oh man, you gotta charge more! This is insanely cheap. The average substack charges $5 a month, and you usually get an email a week at best.

I think you're right that the services themselves break, but more often than not, the failure mode is that what page you're monitoring changes its structure, and then every refresh gives you data that is incommensurate with what came before. It's why we version APIs, but there's no such versioning we expose on websites.

I think that also points to why what you propose would be very hard to do: in HTML pages, even if the page structure (a new div level) changes, it's hard to say if that's actually a fundamental change to how they've architected the information hierarchy you're trying to get notified out, or if that is indeed the information itself. It's ambiguous.

Maybe that's okay? Like, if all you want is a notification about every time a thing changes, regardless of the meaning of the change, then what you're describing is possible. But I think the meaning of the change is important, and that's ultimately what shifts over time in ways computers cannot grok.

Contra the above dude, I don't think it's all that strange for Facebook employees to profit directly off of their access to these systems. See this article about how employees charge for verifications: https://mashable.com/article/instagram-verification-paid-bla...

I will give you one breadstick (real)

Also it would be nice if this book could do all the deploying for me.

You've never put a number of elements together in a div, and added a class and styles to that div rather than each individual element? You should try it out.

I was just making a funny joke about how it was developed originally for cruise missiles. Though it turns out I was misremembering: it was made for guided missile destroyers. And it makes sense! What a great use case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQLite#History

Don’t forget to count all the cruise missiles, too!

This is really helpful. I love the idea of reaching out on long-running and getting feedback directly - that seems a great qualitative way to get a sense of what's going on, and fits well with my own experience about how to talk to early-stage customers who seem to have some value from a product I've made, but which probably isn't quite meeting people's needs yet. Turns out that's often enough to figure out the biggest, most helpful changes. Thank you!

Wowwww this is lovely! Have you written anywhere about what you've done on the projects you've maintained along these lines? I think we'd all benefit from hearing more about what you can do in a project to make contributors more capable and helpful.

After all, it seems like their incentives should align? Like, why wouldn't they want to make a contribution that actually helps? Making that easier to actually do seems like time well spent for everyone.

Y'know, bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder both are things that are hard to handle. The latter is usually connected to having had a childhood that was so chaotic and confusing that it was hard to tell good from bad.

That's likely gonna give you all sorts of feelings about the stuff you're interested in for your own reasons. The truth is – knowing that your own dreams do exist is the biggest step anyone can take. And unlearning all the things you learned that insisted that your dreams are superficial and worthless compared to what other people are doing… that's something you owe it to yourself to do, so that you can live your own life.

The neat thing is that when you learn how to allow yourself to live your own life, the things other people are great at aren't such a threat anymore. It's actually really neat that the guy wrote Rollercoaster Tycoon in assembly, by himself. Wild! And that also says nothing about you, or what matters to you, or whether you're deserving of your own wants and interests.

The trick is learning why you came to believe that these things are reflections of your own perceived incapacity and unworthiness. The only way I know to do that is in therapy, and it's tough, but it's worth it. You get to unlock your own self, that way. Good luck!

Hmmm, what parts feel harder or not described above? In my experience it really is just about learning the scales and the chords, like the author mentions. Then you just have to let yourself make the connection. That can be really hard. But it’s kinda about trusting that you know the necessary parts - which notes are playable.

I was very grateful to see this disclaimer:

> I've spent months working on this program

Dumb question, but is there an equivalent concern for Vue? Or a reason why this kinda checking isn't necessary there?

It's not just that he has to sort winners from the losers. It's that he has to be the first most important seeming VC in their minds. And he accomplishes that with these blog posts. That, and by using these posts to posit that people like him really are the best, he has a big hand in getting people to self-sort into venture-seeking types in the first place.

If you think of his posts as self-serving, that's true. But they're also propaganda meant to influence what we think of as being a worthy pursuit, and meant to define who should pursue such things. The more people believe his worldview – one where smarts dominate and make one powerful – then the more status he has, and the more easily he can do his job. People come to him whereas before he would've had to go to them!

I think he really believes what he writes. And I think it is true that smarts as defined by him are helpful to the kinds of entrepreneurs who see themselves in pg - like, the people he describes really are a type of person, and they should lean on their strengths. But I think it's not at all clear that pg-measured smarts matter more than other qualities for entrepreneurship, or that people like him are remotely close to the best sort of startup founder.

Maybe he's just found a way to seem high status to a subset of a population, and his success flows from that: he gets his pick of that subset, even though it is a tiny chunk of the world. Sure, he gets notoriety and status in a big chunk in status-seeking coders! But that needn't mean that he's actually cracked the code on entrepreneurialism. He has ABSOLUTELY cracked the code on how to speak to young men who feel like they can use what they're good at to achieve power and status.

Here's a scary thought: it's possible that by so completely dominating the conversation about what a startup founder should be, and by making the ideal startup founder seem like a reflection of his image, he's caused far greater numbers of more capable entrepreneurs to self-select out of entrepreneurial pursuits, because they aren't pg-like enough. Not saying that's true, or provable (though I have many many anecdotes that lead me to feel something's going on there). Just that it's important to consider that in making a hagiographic ideal the epitome of a startup founder, that you're necessarily excluding so so many other people for reasons that boil down to... pg got there first.

HN likes to point out just-so stories, and I think the stories he tells us are that. When we read posts like this and they seem to speak spookily clearly to something in us, it's probably because he's doing fanservice to people who serve to give him a tremendous amount of influence and power by believing him when he says we're special.

Somehow I’d always end up doing this most right in the middle of finals.

Learning to play an instrument is usually about learning many many tiny discrete skills that build on one another and can be combined in creative ways to express what's most important and vital at that moment.

You can play an instrument knowing just to pluck a single note. But it's a lot more fun to play if you know a ton of different skills: you can say so much more.

I think the same holds true for coding. You can learn more skills all the time, all of which broaden the realm of what you can create when you sit down at a keyboard again (aka the playing the instrument part).

Hey, I’m in the midst of that - of going from full-time tech work after nearly a decade, to a career as an artist (in film and music, mainly).

I wonder what you mean by “working in the arts.” The examples you offer are pretty diverse! Literature, writing and journalism: on one hand, literature is pretty much only an artistic, creative venture. At the other end, journalism isn’t going to feel very creatively engaging by contrast. But it is working in the arts in the same way being an arts administrator might be.

Your job is to figure out what you need. What’s driving this desire to switch careers? I suspect that you don’t really wanna be a journalist - but that the same pragmatism that makes you worry that you’d be transitioning too late already is also making you pick something that sounds more practical, rather than picking something that you actually want.

In short, you need to find out what you actually need. And it might be that you need to try on the artist label for size. It might not fit, but if you start to feel like you are motivated by expressing yourself, then it might be the thing for you. Also, I’ve learned that there are tons of other creative people who make great things who do not need to do it every day. Find out if you just need this as a hobby, or if you really need to do it once a day.

Working as an artist is tough, but so is anything. I couldn’t really make my career in tech feel okay. It’s been far easier for me to be what I always should have been.

But it took me a decade to realize I needed to make that transition because it also took me that long to accept I was an artist. Therapy helped. Also, actually doing artistic work helped. I learned how to write songs, I picked up other instruments. I started screenwriting, and got accepted to a writing lab.

That last bit happened last year - it’s where I met many other awesome folks who were making their careers work. But again, that happened because it built on this long journey I had to accepting my own self. I was always this creative, but for my own “personal reasons,” I wasn’t allowed to have that as a kid.

The advice I have is that a lot of the cliches are true.

Per Bukowski, you shouldn’t make any sort of leap unless it comes bursting out of you like a rocket, but if you’ve learned all sorts of reasons to abandon this part of yourself, well, it can take a long time for the rocket ship to take off.

That’s when you take the leap. The transition involves so much more work that gets you to that point, by allowing yourself to open yourself up and feel who your really are, and by learning your tools. But one day you’ll know you’ve got to jump. And that’ll be terrifying! But hey, you’ll know it’s time.

As an indigenous guy getting into film and trying to get indigenous stories made, I really love this. Hope it comes together.

Is the licensing you do for content that's already been made? I guess I was curious how the "original" stuff works for you, like if you produce it more directly or if it's more about buying the distribution rights.

Also super curious how you feel you fit into the existing ecosystems – festivals, production companies, etc. Do you have/want connections in specific parts of the film and content world that would help?

lolll I feel you. It's really hard to tell the difference between the Guy Raz kinda story you describe, and stories where someone really did find a better life for themselves where things really are better. They all just sound like hagiography. And often, the story has the role of persuading the person telling it that they made a good call, because... change is scary.

Anyway, I think you're right or at least fair to be skeptical. Chances are, there's more to the story than this. Just like there's probably gonna be a point where being a barback or a bartender is going to be frustrating and dumb for me. But if there's a single lesson I really do believe in, and which this guy's thread echoed to me, it's that you'd be surprised what kinda job you actually enjoy and can survive in. It doesn't just have to be tech work. It might not be in an office at all.

Are you skeptical because it seems too good to be true that he might actually enjoy it? Honestly, i think I understand what he’s saying. I started doing some barback work - basically keeping the bar moving - after being in tech for a decade. It’s way more fun. The bartender I’ve worked with also used to work in tech. And honestly, the money can be good, too. Turns out you don’t need to spend as much just to get yourself unburnt out.

A lot of replies here, like in most conversations about burnout, are offering advice about what you can specifically do.

A more important question, I think, is to ask why you build a life where you worked so much that you burned yourself out. Burnout just means you depleted the stock of energy you have, and you did it persistently over time to the point where all the neat tricks you can use for motivation no longer work.

And you did that, like we all do, for good reasons. It'll probably rhyme with all the reasons we get given socially – like how work is perceived as good, and you want to advance in your career. But there are also deeply personal reasons that you learned that make burnout a consequence you accept, even as you watch yourself deplete yourself.

If you ask yourself where and how you learned to work so hard that you deplete yourself, then you can actually give yourself good answers about how to overcome burnout. Burnout, again, is just the end state of a life you learned you had to live. Fixing burnout means listening to what compels you to do that, so that you can stop doing it. And maybe more importantly, you'll also have to notice what on earth you would do other than following the path that leads you to burnout.

It's those two things together that help stop burnout: stopping the things that burn you out, and finding out what actually gives you energy and makes your life fuller and more vibrant, alive. You don't have to just spend the rest of your life managing the former, where you may not end up in acute burnout but where you're still constantly managing an always shrinking reserve of energy in the service of things that always shrink it. You have to dream a little bigger, and ask: who am I, and what do I need that makes me and my life fuller?

As others have pointed out, a good therapist is a great person to help you navigate this. Burnout is pernicious. It's a self-harming thing that you learned to do because it gave you good things, so you build up all sorts of protections that prevent you from noticing it's bad for you. A therapist is a person who helps you get to a more honest view of what is going on in that dynamic, and where it is rooted in you.

One of their iOS devs who left has been incredibly vocal about how he no longer felt like this was somewhere he could work because of this policy and its effects, so I think you're plainly wrong (or insisting that there's no way we could take a person at their word). https://twitter.com/georgeclaghorn

It's a lot more likely that the 1/3rd that left both left because they were unhappy with the policy, and because they thought they could get jobs elsewhere. I would bet there are some people who stayed behind who didn't believe they could find a job this good soon but who also disagreed with the policy. Which, I get it.

6 months free money is not as much as you'd think; a new job hunt takes 3, even for talented, in-demand people.

By default, say no!

Say: oh wow, I'm motivated by this thing on HN. How exciting! Let me make a note about what I think is cool about this, take a while to reflect on whether it's worth kicking other things out of my life to do, then decide if I will.

I've started doing that in the last year or so. I stopped renewing about a dozen domains that had half-finished apps behind them, and decided I wouldn't do anything for a while. Then I kept saying no to more startup ideas.

The one thing I kept doing was this songwriting course. I more-or-less finished it, and found myself writing a song a week. Then I started trying to arrange and produce full songs with lyrics, which I'd done either half of (producing, and writing) separately. That took a while. Now I finished one of those!

It just kept coming back, every time I tried to say it wasn't important. If the thing you want to do isn't like that, then go do something nice for yourself instead, like seeing friends, or buying a record.