I Have No Idea What “Hard Work” Means | Hacker News Reader

I Have No Idea What “Hard Work” Means

currentaffairs.org

73 pointspaulpauper57 comments

What he means is "I have no idea what you mean when you say 'hard work'". Anyway it is probably not what he might mean, and even he means different things at different times.

The meaning he and we probably find most objectionable is that the speaker is really telling us that he or she has earned the state of privilege they enjoy, and that others who don't didn't. It is true that this is invariably BS -- they never work nearly so long or hard as any janitor you encounter. Working hard on your own behalf is nothing particularly admirable, anyway.

I have a half-sister who, with her husband, re-roofs houses in disaster areas every summer, unpaid. I would be happy to hear about how hard they worked, but they feel no need to tell me.

The author happens to be a woman.

Thank you for correction. There is no excuse for getting this wrong.

"they never work nearly so long or hard as any janitor you encounter"

I remember thinking when I was cleaning up construction sites that cleaning the inside of a finished office building must be a job you needed connections or experience to get.

Should I take this to mean it was light work? Lucky you.

But not the same as a janitor's.

I'm not sure what you are referring to as "it".

What is tolerable or enjoyable work depends on what you are accustomed to and other factors. Would you rather clean toilets, deal with an irate customer, be on a rooftop in the summer sun, be on an open platform ten stories in the air, or wade in some unknown sludge? Some people have issues with a different subset of those than others, so there isn't a strict ordering.

My point was that it's odd to me to hold being a janitor up as some kind of extreme end of a spectrum. It's not what you do when all else fails. It's not the thing that people with no skills and no experience are automatically assigned to.

However, if a day labor place sends someone to sweep up a warehouse, I wouldn't call that being a janitor. Maybe some would.

Realizing that diligence was a middle class status signaling value that did not apply in capital class circles was an interesting lesson. Elon Musk constantly talks about how you have to work twice as much as other people, where as Jeff Bezos is pretty open about going in for about 6-7 hours a day. Who is right? The answer is either one, they have different values, that hard work is subjective, and that you should just do what you want and what works. Hard work is the original virtue signaling in a growth economy. It says, I'm important, I'm needed, etc. But in practice it often means diligence which is often not correlated to effectiveness in most (not all) fields of knowledge work.

Surely a rational person would care about doing a solid day’s work while maintaining their health, sanity, relationships etc.

Why? A wise person, maybe. But a rational one? It all depends on what they're optimizing for.

Someone might "rationally" come to the conclusion that the output of their work is extremely important, so much so that they are willing to sacrifice everything else.

Why is that rational? If I go into the office and spend a day looking at cat pictures (which certainly makes me happier than attending the endless meetings) I get paid just as much.

I can’t imagine this is a good long-term career idea unless it’s something you do only on occasion when you’re mentally exhausted or something.

I think it’s just that I believe that in any company big enough to have endless meetings it’s fairly possible to put in (almost) no work and still fly under the radar.

I've seen the same thing at every large company I have worked for. Plenty of slacker employees watching Youtube, gaming, making coffee runs, you name it. Big companies carry people, big companies carried me, even. When you have an infant at home and you're running on no sleep for 5-8 mos. you will understand.

The hardest I ever worked was at a small company with only six developers. It was surprisingly unpleasant, not because I had to code all the time, but because I had been a tech lead and had people to collaborate with on solving problems. This new place was all heads down devs, like some kind of throwback to an earlier age, and those people didn't want to chitchat--at all. Weird culture. I don't mind going off and coding and testing for hours on end and I was the most "in the zone" I have ever been on that job. Yet something was disturbingly missing and it was that openness to discussing solutions. I think it was the matter of resource constraints at small shops that annoys me the most, though.

Only if you can stay awake in the meetings. For me, meetings where I don't participate and nothing concerns me are like a soporific.

I have never met a truly rational person. I have met lots of people who claim they are rational but clearly aren't.

> But in practice it often means diligence which is often not correlated to effectiveness in most (not all) fields of knowledge work.

How are you defining "effective" here? Anecdotally, all of the major bugs I've had to unfuck in the past years can be traced back to lack of due diligence. The "works on my machine" / "tested with N = 1" crowd.

Diligence in doing the job well, and diligence in putting in long hours, are two very different things.

Elon is running 3 companies while Bezos runs only 1. So, Yes Elon has to work 3X Bezos.

I dont know how he manages _THAT_ many Twitter accounts!

The author made some interesting arguments, but they lost me with their insistent jabbing at the upper management man cheating on his wife, the racist divorcee dad, the boring date, her friends cheating boyfriends, etc. The not-so-subtle political undertones distract from what I think is an interesting question.

I’m confused. How are these things related to political undertones? Prejudice maybe, but are these more common amongst certain groups?

I thought it added some wry smiles to the story anyway.

"I think the issue is that when people say they’ve “worked hard,” they’re implicitly suggesting superiority"

Yes, you compare it to others who do similar work. Who actually says "I worked hard... in comparison to anyone who has ever worked.". It's usually you work hard for that line of work. A software engineer can be changing links and sipping coffee or pulling 12 hours coding all day. One is doing hard work. Article seems to be arguing semantics.

When someone actually says they “worked hard” it’s usually bullshit, because people who actually work hard either don’t realize it or are too humble to admit it. So saying you worked hard is a justification for why you have something or why you have something and someone else doesn’t.

Most people who make a lot of money don’t actually work very hard by virtue of the fact that most individual wealth comes from capital, not labor. Maybe you did work hard at some point to get that capital, but that’s also unlikely. After all, if capital paid out the true value then it wouldn’t exist at all. So somewhere you either exploited people or natural resources to get that capital.

Hard work sucks. It almost by definition doesn’t pay well, with few exceptions.

But we need to justify to ourselves and others why we value different humans different, and hard work sounds really good. So we invoke it to justify to ourselves, mostly, why we are superior to others.

>people who actually work hard either don’t realize it or are too humble to admit it.

This is a completely arbitrary way to gatekeep the concept of "working hard".

It’s really not. It’s just how it is.

"it's just how it is" this is devilry, relative-truth. Not absolute.

"They don't think it be like it is, but it do.”

>So somewhere you either exploited people or natural resources to get that capital.

Boy are you at the wrong forum. Another possibility is that you actually created value and captured a part of it.

Possible, but unlikely. There are exceptions to everything.

The author's point is that the "hard work" line is a post-hoc rationalization for the differences between one's own social/material conditions and those considered beneath them. It's similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect — a worker reports their own relative performance without possibly knowing the performance of every other worker, yet believes it to be true based on outcome, despite the fact that things like familial wealth and outstanding debt are much better determining factors.

I just compare it to myself. Did I go in and goof off and take the easy jobs, or did I do things I didn't want to do where I had to take breaks to recover? I think the second is morally praiseworthy and I deserve credit for doing so. It's also beneficial to society so you deserve status for doing so. The upper limit on that status is the actual value of your job. But we want everyone to work hard at their job so when they do, we should give them the sense of superiority they deserve.

Would it be worse to say that I don’t consider myself to have ever worked particularly hard in life?

It comes easily, I’m just smart (enough) and lazy.

Then again, I’m writing this while walking home from work at 8:40pm, so there is some sort of disconnect here.

Do you feel dissatisfied though? I’ve felt lazy all my life, even when I’ve averaged 60 hour workweeks.

No, I’m (almost) perfectly happy with this.

I went back to Europe last week and I just cannot imagine people simply getting up and leaving at 17:00 anymore.

> Would it be worse to say that I don’t consider myself to have ever worked particularly hard in life?

> It comes easily, I’m just smart (enough) and lazy.

I think the key thing that people object to in the "hard work" arguments (which is also present in your "it comes easily, I'm just smart" assertion) is the (perhaps unintentional) implication that one has complete control of the outcomes one experiences. Diminishing the role of beneficial circumstances beyond one's control comes across as saying that people who are less fortunate must deserve it in some sense because there can't possibly be factors beyond their control that contributed to their misfortune.

None of this is to say that the hypothetical people who state the value of their "hard work" _didn't_ work hard, or that you're _not_ smart! It's just important to recognize that there likely were some beneficial factors along the way that if you hadn't encountered, you might be one of the less fortunate people yourself.

Oh, for sure. Had I been born somewhere else I’m not sure these traits would have resulted in the same outcome.

I guess people don’t feel the need to comment on circumstances beyond their control exactly because they can’t do anything about them though. Saying you worked hard is nice, appending “and I’m still only here because I started 2 leagues behind” is not.

Neither is “but I’m here mostly because I was born in the first world to a fairly well off family”.

For me "hard work" is when I'm doing something I don't enjoy for more time then I agreed to. That's an incredible privilege, but I still feel like shit when it happens.

The example of Brett Kavanaugh is curious. Yes, his high school is focused on getting its students into good colleges--that's why it is Georgetown Prep, not Georgetown Something Else. It is also focused on preparing them to get through those colleges creditably, and part of that is teaching them how to manage a workload. The husband of a sometime co-worker taught science at a well-thought-of state university, and said that more kids did poorly from lack of work habits than from lack of smarts.

Does getting your algebra homework done on time count as hard work on the same level as digging ditches? No. Does it count as work of a sort? Yes.

You're not in disagreement with the author.

> Any job that requires intense physical labor is on the list of “for sure, you worked hard,” as is anything that involves great emotional and psychological resilience, such as social work. But after that it gets tricky. How about someone who founded a trading company or a real estate agency in the 1980s, riding the wave of the business-friendly Reagan years? They’ve worked for decades, undoubtedly with some late nights or unusual hours. But is that the same as getting black lung? What about someone who just worked a fairly normal 40 hour week, from age 18 to 65? Is that “hard work?” What about someone whose job is creative and enjoyable? Is that also “hard work?” How do we measure this, exactly? Can it be done by number of hours? Intensity of work? Sacrifices made? Cubits of human suffering?

I was thinking about this topic earlier this week. I think it's really misleading to defend your accomplishments with "hard work", especially given not all "hard work" is the same. I "worked hard" but have gotten a fraction for it than many folks I know. I have also "struggled a lot less" than quite a few folks I know while getting better results. It's ultimately a meaningless dodge.

Maybe success shouldn't need to be defended. I'm not sure.

You can work hard by "banging your head against the door" every minute. That doesn't mean it was the right work. When you say you worked hard or I said I did, there is no context or absolute scale to see what we meant.

I think this whole idea of needing to defend your accomplishments is just bizarre.

This article just seems like someone who is obsessed about how hard other people work. I really don't get it. Why not do a job the best you can handle? Maybe that involves "hard work" however you yourself define it or maybe it doesn't. It really doesn't matter.

This is what hard work and success means to me:

To the extent that you are attempting to manifest your potential, and directing your aim such that you are successful in raising the bar through a meta-goal - i.e. attempting to orient yourself through a range set of goals with the overall meta-goal being life itself.

Once you have actually determined that you want things to be better, you can then proceed to direct your actions and judgements appropriately. Perform a regular evaluation period where you can determine whether: a) your goals are in fact what you should be aiming at, b) whether your actions are appropriately working in your favor, and c) whether you are making the correct judgements. This process of evaluation is truth telling in itself.

It doesn't matter how hard you worked, what matters is the results you produced.

For example, she talks about not understanding what "hard work" meant in college, but who cares? Did you get the grades you wanted? That's all that matters.

It's the same in the "real world", it doesn't matter how hard you work at something, what matters are the results. Did you get what you wanted?

I don't really understand what is the point of pontificating over the meaning of "hard work". Is this some echo of the protestant worldview?

I was agreeing with the author all the way to the end, when she wrote:

“And once we stop playing this pointless game of comparing how hard we all work, we can start asking the real question of when we’re going to start being compensated fairly for it.”

I don’t believe there is such a thing as fair compensation. No one ‘deserves’ anything, and work has no intrinsic value in and of itself. It’s just a market place full of people haggling.

> It’s just a market place full of people haggling.

then (to me) the question becomes: is this what we really want? and is there any alternative to this that works?

If the author worked just a tiny bit harder, he would've written a shorter essay.

I myself am a lazy guy, didn't finish reading it.

I wonder if hard work is zero sum ...

Clearly too lazy to figure out the he's a she...

I for one enjoy working hard from time to time. Like it back when finishing shrink-wrapped software to ship and at startups when iterating quickly to find product market for. Even in my office job we do have feature releases which are mini-marathons and fun in perhaps a similar way.

It's true that I probably don't work any harder than the subsistence farmer in India living on $2 a day. Does that imply I should start donating all my extra income to them? Until what point? Until I'm living on $2 per day as well?

The author seems to be saying that people who say they have worked hard deserve their privileges (of wealth or influence or both). I think the author hasn't thought it through enough. Virtually everybody believes they deserve what they have. Usually they believe they deserve more (and often they are angry that they don't have it). It doesn't matter how much they have or what they did to get it.

The rest is just justification. It's often not hard work that's the justification. Does the offspring of a rich parent "deserve" their parent's wealth? It will be a rare potential recipient that doesn't believe this.

Maybe "hard work" is a common justification, but I think it's probably the justification that is common in the author's circle. Saying, "You don't work hard compared to X" is such a terrible argument because the very next thing the person will say is, "But my work is more valuable". And if you say, "But your work is not as valuable as X" it will be rebuffed with, "But my work is more rare and therefore deserving of greater recognition". Or... You can go on forever.

The point is that people believe that they deserve what they have, even if they have orders of magnitude more than other people. People who are relatively well off still generally believe that they are worth more than what they receive. That's just how people are. You are not ever going to convince the average person otherwise because it is important to their self image.

How many times do you hear people expressing outrage or dismay that "at the very least I should have X", when in fact it's just an arbitrary line in the sand.

I even catch myself thinking that way. I'm a senior software developer with 30 years of experience. I should be able to afford a house and 2 cars and to raise a family with kids and have occasional vacations in exotic places. If I happen to go out to dinner and spend $250 on a single meal once in a while, I shouldn't have to think about whether I can afford it. I'm a senior developer with 30 years of experience for goodness sake. The world is pretty freaking broken if I can't have at least that!

Right?

And there hundreds (?)... thousands (?)... Well, I don't know, but probably more than I can count... people who will be looking to find some food tonight. Any food. It doesn't matter what. Probably they can't write computer programs. So I guess they don't deserve the food as much as me.... Is that what I'm saying?

But I'll tell you what. That line of reasoning isn't going to fool me! I refuse to feel bad for what I have, because I worked hard for it. I deserve it.

And that's the whole thing in a nutshell.

No, the author is saying the opposite.

> Virtually everybody believes they deserve what they have.

Yes, and they claim that they got there through "hard work", which is totally unrelated to how hard they worked and just short for "I deserve it more than *".

narcissistic millennial

Prime example of what the article is criticizing.

> I think the issue is that when people say they’ve “worked hard,” they’re implicitly suggesting superiority. I’m deserving of reward, not like those people who are lazy (“those” people being immigrants, poor people, liberal arts majors, whoever it is you seek to contrast yourself against).

I think we can add "narcissistic millenial" to "those".

Is it possible to be proud of your own hard work, without necessarily making a contrast to others who you perceive as "lazy'? So goes the old saying, "The true test of character is what you do when nobody is watching".

Sure there are plenty of people who wear their "hard work" as a badge. But that isn't everbody.

Sure, the article starts with those and then focuses on the "plenty of people".

The person I was replying to however is clearly among those making a contrast.

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