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Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

I've held for a long time that you must know the rules quite well before you're "allowed" to break them, and I think this reinforces my opinion on that.

Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general. It absolutely helps, and it compounds, to be smart, but a person who "works hard" is infinitely more valuable to their colleagues than a smart person who doesn't, and tries to rely on raw intellect.

My problem, and I wonder if others have this issue as well, is how hard it is to know these things intellectually, and also apply them to my life. I just cannot, for the life of me, maintain a "work hard" mindset. I'm still trying, but I very often fail at this, and its frustrating because I know how valuable it is to being good at what I do.

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It's kind of a double edged sword- I've worked with a few people that "work hard" and "get things done", only to find out once they leave (or go on vacation) that now we have to untangle a 600 line bash script that's integral to production.

I'm being a bit hyperbolic here, but the gist of my point is: not everyone who works hard is worth keeping around, especially if their hard work leads to an un-managable mess in the future.

I used to think like this too, but now-a-days, it's more like "What a luxury to be in a position where you get paid to untangle a 600 line bash script"

That is, usually these few hard workers are typically the ones responsible for getting a company to profitability precisely because of their GSD attitude. Now that the company has some runway, the architecture and refactoring can proceed.

I never felt luxury when our service didn’t scale to meet the goals of higher-ups because the code was over engineered with hacks piled on top. It doesn’t matter how good of an MVP you built if it is so inflexible that it has to be thrown away and rebuilt to meet tomorrow’s needs.

Managers tend to reward those who complete tasks today as minimally as possible at the expense of the product tomorrow.

I think scrappy MVPs have their place,it's just knowing when to use one. If you're a very early stage start-up and you're trying to validate your idea, the quicker you can see if that idea is valuable is better than risking time building a clean code architecture.

I can assure you, when shit is broken in production and customers are knocking at the door threatening to cancel it is not a luxury to find out these types of things...let alone start untangling the web.

You can always leave if you're not happy. Parent's point is that without that 600 line bash script person, your company/job might not even exist.

I'll remind you that, for every failing 600 line bash script you debug, there are probably 20 others that are sitting there, just working.

Yes because those other 20 have been debugged...

He means that those customers wouldn't exist in the first place if it weren't for the messy code.

And window repair customers wouldn't exist if it weren't for broken windows! If Bastiat were alive, he'd have a field day with the computing industry and its Freakanomics-like underpinnings.

When things eventually break, its possible that those customers and more would leave also because of that same code.

Anything is possible. Better to focus on what is likely. Did you stop using google over any of their outages? Most people didn't. These things matter, but people in software overstate them.

Depends on what's on the line.

Software for automatic trading, dosing radiotherapy, controller for moonshot etc will have different requirements on correctness than ordering of search results.

Ignoring these things can have people killed/ruined and they have.

What perverted sense of luxury is this?

There is no shortage of software jobs. There are plenty of opportunities to work with a relatively clean codebase, capable and experiences colleagues, unencumbered by the VC runway bullshit.

Every company begins somewhere. If you want new companies to make it, allowing for there to continue to be 'plenty of opportunities' in the future, then accepting that there are times when repairing the ~sins~ necessities of the past is reasonable.

600 line bash scripts are not always necessary for new companies to make it. Sometimes, sure. Often, even, on the way to understand what is actually needed.

Many new companies spend too much time perfecting the wrong thing.

But messy code is NOT a requirement to make it.

Messy code, in and of itself, does not help.

Messy code might be a sort of inevitable step on the path to product/market fit. However, it is most certainly not a goal, and dealing with messy code is not a luxury. It is more likely a sign that the early tech people weren't very good.

Yeah, this is probably a different kind of "hard work" than what the author is talking about. There's some people who work hard for the sake of results (hitting certain numbers, clearing tickets/stories, etc).

There's a different sort of hard work involved in achieving deep mastery over something. Reading, researching, building and testing ideas... it takes hard work to become an expert at something, but I guess you're far more likely to see the former type of hard work than this.

Why not rotate their assignments as a matter of policy. They might do a deep dive and fix something no one bothers to fix on a similar assignment. But then it is due dilligence to have another look at their work. I know this sounds theoretical compared to practice, but it seems to be on the level of separating conceptual or design breakthoughs from production-izing code.

How is that hyperbolic? 600 lines is pretty short for a (longest-involved-in-this-project) un-managable mess of a production-critical bash script. I've seen several well upwards of 6000 lines.

and in hardcore level Perl

Well, I was talking about 6000-line bash scripts, but yes, perl does come up fairly often as well.

The obvious question is why this wasn’t caught and rectified in code review? This seems to be as much a failure due to lack of oversight as opposed to the failure of the person who created the mess.

There are no code reviews when we have to keep churning features quickly and continuously, with always changing requirements in the next meeting with the client.

Because code review is mostly a delusional fantasy?

I've been learning to draw lately. It's amazing how much of what we presume to be natural ability is "just" the product of endless work. During my day job, I do math and it's the same. People say "I'm not a math person," but that's as stupid as "I can't draw." It's self fulfilling.

Personally, I prefer "work diligently" over "work hard" because the most useful mental model for me is that it's a marathon, not a sprint. The idea is to go far, not fast.

This is spot on. How many people who believe they do not have the ability to draw have ever actually put deliberate practice into it?

I can't sit down at a piano and play a song, not because I'm incapable of it, but because I've never put any effort into learning how.

Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general. It absolutely helps, and it compounds, to be smart, but a person who "works hard" is infinitely more valuable to their colleagues than a smart person who doesn't, and tries to rely on raw intellect.

That may be true for something like digging a ditch, but IQ is needed to make those necessary logical leaps for more abstract matters. Only hard work is like adding 1+2+3....n. Having a high IQ is knowing the shortcut to sum it instantly.

So, so little of most people’s work is deep abstract thought like that. I used to have this research assistant - she was from an entirely unrelated arts major, and was a bit… well, let’s say not terribly book-smart (which she was very upfront about). We ended up with her due to some last minute issues with other candidates. But holy smokes could she ever focus. She could sit down for hours and hours and process way more material (reviewing data, publications, participant communications) than anybody else because she didn’t get sidetracked. What she didn’t know she knew to ask and get clarification on. She would work circles around many “smarter” RAs because of her amazing work ethic. And this isn’t digging ditches, this is honest-to-goodness academic research.

Outlier strengths in one area can make up for weaknesses in others. She had extreme focus, which pushed her past where her intelligence would normally go. Imagine if she had great focus and great intelligence.

I'd argue that 'focus' is at least part of what we consider as intelligence.

They're related, but you can isolate them. Raising stakes and immediacy will bring up focus more than intelligence. (but it also might bring up anxiety!)

The whole point of the submission is that even when high IQ is required, you also need to "work hard" to do anything substantial.

The common thread is "work hard", not "be smart", but people obsess over intelligence/natural gifts, and consistently underestimate the "ditch diggers".

Jobs was a ditch digger.

Gates was a ditch digger.

Musk is a ditch digger.

PG is a ditch digger.

Tao is a ditch digger.

Jordan was a ditch digger.

Woods was a ditch digger.

Carlsen is a ditch digger.

Some (all) of them also are naturally gifted, but their success is due to their ability to "work hard", or at least that's what I've read them say over and over again. Maybe I and they are all wrong about it, I'm open to that possibility, but theres a consistent theme that every successful person I can think of repeats when asked, and it's some variation on "work hard".

You do need both, and therein lies the problem.

If you don't have the IQ, your hard work is meaningless.

Yes, you need both to be the best in the world in a given field, but why is that a problem?

That is not a problem. The problem I see is touting the value of hard work to people who may not have the requisite IQ to go along with it for their desired outcome (Best in the world in their field, for example).

You said, Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general".

I think it's actually understated in general. Telling people who don't have the mental horse power to, "work harder", is cruel.

Would you tell someone with an IQ of 100 to "work harder" if they wanted to be a Software Engineer/Lawyer/etc?

While I agree there is a certain threshold of skills below which one can't really function as a lawyer/software dev, after passing that threshold your IQ matters less. There is the top 1% or even 0.01% of performers out there and then there is the rest of us. The difference between a software dev with an IQ of 115 or 125 doesn't sound that big to me. A lot in their careers will depend on their people skills and work ethics more so than on their IQ. This is especially true for jobs like lawyers or even doctors, but if we go back to software development - a lot of it is quite repititive and actually favors well people with strong work ethic. Unless you work on cutting edge algorithmic computer science stuff (which isn't really software development), we all keep building classes and models and glueing libraries together; or we gain some deep knowledge in some mobile platform or even some embedded programming. Even stuff that sounds super complex to a web developer like Kernel development probably gets repititive after awhile.

Yes, I agree. If we're talking about a normal career then having 115 vs 125 IQ probably won't make much of a difference compared to being diligent.

However, I think that if you want to be a very high performer IQ might be a hindrance. For someone like Musk or Jobs I think it definitely is.

Wow, I expected broken money systems to twist people's minds but not to this extent.

Of course, in a broken money and work system there is a cutoff point for IQ at which corporations decide who to hire.

The inverse position is that money isn't wealth. It's work and the product of our work that is wealth. Therefore willingness to work should be proportionally rewarded with work. Of course, since corporations hire whole individuals no such thing happens. Instead, work that could have been allocated to two people fairly is allocated to one person.

Now employers have to think of hard to cheat measures to determine the person who the work will be allocated to. The IQ cutoff point is the result. The chosen one then gets to feel superior because he both has the intellectual, moral and financial upper hand while he simultaneously gets to chastise the lazy, stupid, poor hobo. It is so easy to rebrand this process as "personal responsibility".

This is not really what I meant or how I view this, though I completely agree with this:

> The chosen one then gets to feel superior because he both has the intellectual, moral and financial upper hand while he simultaneously gets to chastise the lazy, stupid, poor hobo. It is so easy to rebrand this process as "personal responsibility".

Regardless of whether companies have their own cutoff point, competition amongst people will create a natural cutoff point.

If there are a limited number of jobs, people will have to compete for those jobs. Sought after jobs will attract more people and have fiercer competition. More intelligent people will generally outcompete less intelligent people for these jobs, and so a natural IQ cutoff will form.

There is no requisite IQ, and I absolutely would tell someone with a definitionally average 100 IQ to "work hard" to become a software engineer/lawyer, as they could be in the absolute top of their field if they did.

You really believe that? Do you think there is any threshold then? Could it be done by an 80-90 IQ person?

There's probably a limit to how much "work hard" can make someone competent/successful in any field, and it'd guess it's around 85, or 1 standard deviation lower than average.

If IQ is important to you, I think you'd be quite alarmed by the number of successful doctors and lawyers who don't meet the 100 IQ bar you're setting here.

IQ range by occupation: https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx

The 10th percentile of MDs is still above 100.

The 10th percent of legal occupations is 100.

Also: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-IQ-of-a-medical-do...

Sources + people's estimates place the average IQ of a doctor well above 100.

You seem very out of touch if you think that there's a large proportion of doctors and lawyers who have an IQ below 100.

IQ isn't important to me, it's just reality. The difference between 100 IQ and 120 IQ (For instance) is palpable and you can't overcome that with hard work.

Who said anything about 10th percentile?

There is no universal ranking of doctors, you can't really claim "percentile of success" for doctors or lawyers, and it's weird you're trying to do so.

Why is it so important to you that you have to be "smart" to be a doctor/lawyer?

You said: "I think you'd be quite alarmed by the number of successful doctors and lawyers who don't meet the 100 IQ bar you're setting here".

The number of doctors and lawyers who do not meet that bar appears to be slim to none, so I'm not at all alarmed...

> There is no universal ranking of doctors, you can't really claim "percentile of success" for doctors or lawyers, and it's weird you're trying to do so

I'm not claiming percentiles of success, it's IQ percentiles across all doctors and lawyers.

Regardless of how you define success, a very small proportion of doctors and lawyers don't meet the 100 IQ bar. And if you define success as anything other than having the job, that proportion gets smaller.

There are way more than "slim to none" doctors/lawyers who are at or below 100 IQ.

Your citation is not accepted (it's from nearly 30 years ago, is a sample of men over 30 in Wisconsin, cites research from many years even older [50s and 60s], there's no accounting for correlation -- maybe doing harder work makes you better at taking IQ tests).

It's only doctors, who happened to be the folks who ran the study, that are substantially higher than every other group listed. I wonder why.

IQ is a predictor of success, but it is not an exclusive predictor. Unless you have a mental disability, you can be literally anything you want to be, and even if you have a mental disability, you can still be nearly anything you want to be.

Hard work is astronomically more important than IQ. The literal article you're commenting on is written by someone with one of the highest IQs in the world.

You're in disagreement with all these "high IQ" people you think are worthy of studying other humans, and given the option, I'm going to listen to them over you.

I see no reason to downvote, I agree,

>You do need both

This has been proven to me over and over.

>therein lies the problem.

But I see no problem.

>If you don't have the IQ, your hard work is meaningless.

I don't think meaningless if it's well guided, it can still get each person further if they do go there.

> I don't think meaningless if it's well guided, it can still get each person further if they do go there

Sure, I don't think hard work is a bad thing as long as people temper their expectations.

The issue I have is that hard work often seems to be touted as a magic pill for success.

That’s absurd. Discoveries are rarely made by lone scientists, progress is made by tens or hundreds of people, each exploiting their comparable advantage, even if that is digging ditches.

>Discoveries are rarely made by lone scientists

Any more.

Because they are not in the mainstream.

To overcome this you better not be intimidated by however hard the work is.

Having high IQ is not knowing the shortcuts but being able to identify them.

Fact of the matter is that we make progress when collective effort is put onto something. Not everyone of us is a Terry Tao, or John von Neumann, but we can at least exploit our comparable advantage and help those better than us. Sucking your ego sucks but coming to terms with our inherent limits is freeing.

Knowing a preemptive shortcut is also "working hard".

1) Knowing when to apply previous experience is a skill that requires work and practice. 2) Someone else knowing a shortcut that I don't know means they worked hard when I was not observing them.

i doubt it. he was winning math competitions at a young age. I doubt he knew all the shortcuts in advance but just intuited them. He was probably smart enough to be given a hard problem and upon pondering for a minutes figure out the shortcut.

Hardwork exposes and primes you to the techniques needed to make those big creative,logical leaps. Nothing is ever discovered truly independently.

Do you mean discovering the formula independently (i.e. as Gauss did as a child) or simply knowing that the formula exists?

independently

It really depends on what you define as natural abilities. The ability to work hard for 12 hours without break every day IMHO is as "natural" as having a good IQ.

One attribute of having "high IQ" is being able to understand the vanity of working "hard".

There is a line between IQ and wisdom, and wisdom is learned through experience and time.

I prefer reading.

> I've held for a long time that you must know the rules quite well before you're "allowed" to break them, and I think this reinforces my opinion on that.

I had an art teacher that pointed this out about Picasso. He got famous for his Cubist/Abstract work, but he was actually an excellent realist.

I saw this in university. You passed the physics exam by studying hard and practicing. People who put in the work got the results. There was no just getting it.

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