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Comment by wnolens | Hacker News Reader

> Too many of our smartest minds are working on trivial tasks

I find this a bit condescending.

Too many people act like entrepreneurship is something everyone has the stomach/personality/capacity for.

Too many people write blog articles about how if you're not building the next big thing, you're not contributing to society.

Most people I've met in my professional and personal life are supporting their families, trying to raise kids well, making time/$ for their passions, or just generally trying to live a decent life despite the difficult circumstances that life throws at you.

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> I find this a bit condescending.

Is it?

I moved from ML and Physics research to optimising the sale of imaginary currencies in mobile games, because the pay and stability is so much better.

It's a great shame that academia is terribly paid and an unstable career path in the West.

I'd much rather be working on Fusion research or genetic engineering, but that won't pay the mortgage.

>It's a great shame that academia is terribly paid and an unstable career path in the West.

Is it better in the East? No loaded question, I genuinely want to know your answer

In my experience, much worse.

Weirdly enough, Australia pays researchers, including PhDs and post-docs really well.

Must be all that coal money

Postdocs are payed well, but PhDs get around 30k AUD per year, which is quite low.

I can't imagine ML research getting paid less than fake currencies in mobile games... I mean unless you're making more than $400k?

Research in Academia... in Europe. I was paid ~30k.

A former housemate is Mexican-American and was looking for a post doc and considering both the US and Mexico. He said salaries in Mexico are like 6,000 usd - not that relevant but just another data point. Presumably this is a liveable wage in that area fwiw (he wound up at a Bay Area university instead)

If you really seek to contribute can be comforted by knowing that many people would prefer you contributing to bullshit than to advancing the automation that will take their job.

>> I find this a bit condescending.

>Is it?

Yes, actually. It is.

Personally, I've been reading for 25 years about how "why are people wasting their time on $NICHE instead of contributing to $MAJORPROJECT" -specifically in the open source world. It becomes more and more grating and offensive every year.

If you have the ability to choose what you want to work on, then that is what you ought to work on. If you (generic "you") don't have a choice, then you have to do what you have to do and your limitations ought to not limit those who aren't limited or aren't in your situation.

> If you (generic "you") don't have a choice

There’s always a choice

People choose money, comfort or certainty all the time

I don’t think I’ve ever chosen a problem to solve professionally my whole life

And you know what? Given the choice, not sure what I’d pick

> There's always a choice

Given that you are in a developed country this may seem so of course...for most people they are just trying to survive

https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...

Especially this first quote:

"People aren’t deliberate enough about choosing what to work on."

Hold up. What is this based on? Is it based on a feeling of the author's inflated sense of worth compared to others? Or is this really some objective and measurable metric?

Is it possible the author doesn't actually know or has taken the effort to deliberate on this statement themselves? Playing devil's advocate with your own ideas is probably the greatest service you can do for yourself but it seems that's not practised here. I can come up with many examples of how people ARE very deliberate in what they work on. Like you said, raising a family, enjoying time outside of work, just straight up trying to survive. These all seem pretty deliberate.

> Is it possible the author doesn't actually know

It’s a very HN mindset to reject articles not backed up by objective facts.

This is an inherently subjective post, pointing out the lack of hard data shouldn’t be an indictment of the author’s thesis.

He is projecting himself. Everything he is saying is a reflection of himself

Precisely. He likely had a revelation about himself, and writes about it with the language, "people are mostly xyz." What a joke.

Oof. Been there, done that.

In my opinion, a major facet of maturity is figuring out that all the negative shit you think about other people is often just the things you don't like about yourself projected onto other people.

Everyone generalizes from a sample size of one.

Well, at least I do.

It's also a Maslow's hierarchy of needs sort of thing.

I'm about 33 and finally I feel secure enough to think about things beyond survival.

This right here.

Depending on how someone’s life goes and the circumstances they were born into they may either start at this point or never get there at all.

The naïveté to different people’s situations is really prevalent here sometimes.

Completely agree, Blind has the same mentality

https://www.teamblind.com/post/UyGsEdyC?cid=24327137

Author might be a bit off in the reason but there's a lot of people not working where they'd like because the job market is weird and at one point you need money.

It would make the article at least 10x better if it included a section where the author describes why he isn't following his own advice and writes a weekly newsletter instead.

Strong vibes - https://youtube.com/shorts/2rYV681lSGg?feature=share (Charlie Munger - People on TV selling Books) and all the people selling courses about how to sell courses.

Is it really condescending on it's own? It's not exactly a big secret many of us choose to work on relatively boring and useless things for the sake of comfort. That's more on society for aligning the benefits that way.

Instead of blog posts, people who are advocating for others to work on "more important work" should be spending their time improving various systems to enable people to work on more important work. Universal healthcare, improved child care accessibility, affordable housing, anything you can think of that is an enabler of talent to do more than survive vs thrive (in some quantified effectiveness to cost sequencing). People are just trying to get by because there is no alternative considering resourcing.

Otherwise, these come off as "your risk appetite and budget is too low try harder." The cost of failure is simply too damn high unless you're young and have zero responsibility and obligations or wealthy family/connections to fall back on [1].

(imho it is condescending on its own; treat the root cause, not the symptom, but that's hard and takes years to accomplish with little payoff to the person pontificating, so it's easier to complain on social/public media instead)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 (credit to u/notacoward)

I mean I'm just reading this and thinking of the "I got a PhD in math, now I earn fat cash by.. increasing advertisement clickrates by 0.001%" meme. Wouldn't call consumption increase a net positive in today's society, but you bet I'm not going to fight an uphill battle for lower rewards out of some good will.

It's only placing it in the context (first sentence) where it becomes condescending to me. Like, dude, you joking? Of course I'm thinking of what I'm doing with my life writing boring CRUD code. But it's lucrative.

You are acting rationally, I don't blame you. My comment is an indictment of the concept as a whole of the post, in the same way people tell younger cohorts to skip the coffee and avocado toast to afford a house. If you want people to work on more meaningful work, fix the socioeconomics to make that work enticing (which I think we agree on?).

I agree. There needs to be a new mode of work that pays for people to solve all the really difficult problems in the world instead of building widgets. Everyone in the world getting a college degree and working on it would probably still take thousands of years to fix the world. Get started!

should be spending their time improving various systems to enable people to work on more important work. Universal healthcare, improved child care accessibility, affordable housing, anything you can think of that is an enabler of talent to do more than survive vs thrive

exactly that. when i see a call for people to do more important work, this is the kind of stuff i think of. things that society actually needs.

And unfortunately in North America teachers and nurses are leaving their professions. I don't see any migration of "apparent altruists" like OP filling in those vacancies!

one of the important areas of work is education, and i don't mean STEM, but teaching people how to talk to each other and learn what their community needs, so that they are going to be willing to invest in that area and enable these jobs with actually sufficient pay and acceptable working conditions.

This kind of thinking leads to a dystopian future where all of us are slaves to one giant almighty company. We already got surprisingly close to it with the power Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon have. Imagine the founders of these companies would have thought like this. How big would Microsoft be today?

Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together? Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters?

> Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together?

Because most people are not capable of that, or they would not want to.

> Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters?

Because only they have sufficient capital and expectation of return and intimate knowledge of the space to scratch their own itch.

> Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together?

Because most people are not capable of that

i find that extremely condescending. some may not want to, fine, but many also live in an environment where building your own business is being discouraged and made difficult. but for most, it is probably just that it takes more effort to build a business than to get a job.

how come that the countries with the most entrepreneurs are all in 2nd or 3rd world countries? uganda having the highest with 28% of the population having their own business.

i very much doubt that capacity has anything to do with it, only willingness and need. many people in uganda probably have their own business because they have no other alternatives. but still, the idea of a society where everyone is building their own business is totally possible. all it takes is the right attitude and willingness.

>Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together? Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters?

Some of us are not interested in having our own business, we just want to enjoy life in other ways such as raising a family, hobbies, relaxing, etc.

> Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together?

How do you achieve anything that requires multiple people to collaborate?

What's the ultimate goal of these companies? Of any company?

I find that it's very difficult to know, truly, what these mega corporations want. What does apple want? For everyone to use apple? Probably not, if this was the case they would be releasing much cheaper products.

So I think companies have a market segment they want to dominate, and of course there are some areas of conflict. Say, twitch is owned by Amazon and Google with YouTube also feels part of that space is owned to them. In this sense, they are no different to another form of social organisation we are fairly acquainted with: empires.

Now, why couldn't everyone just form their own society back in the day and live chill and not submit themselves to the rule of the empire? Well, the answer to that is that if the empire felt you belonged to them then they would simply swallow you.

So, to answer your question, people are building their own businesses but as soon as these become threatening in any way to the empires that rule these lands then these businesses are squashed. But that's exactly what is supposed to happen, if you can't take on the pressure then such is life.

I guess the sad news is that, even today, we still have empires ruling over us. But I would argue that quality of life, inequality, social liberties have all gotten better with every passing empire. What does the future of business look like? I'm not sure.

I wish I had the ability to work on something that was the slightest bit meaningful. I know I could if I just had the opportunity. But I don't.

If I'd been overcome a compulsion to become a deadbeat when I was 20 years old and my professional career was erased from history, I don't think that reality would be worse than one in which my career existed, not even by the tiniest amount. My entire working life has basically been building nonsense to enable rich people to get even richer with less inconvenience.

It's frustrating because everyone knows it's pointless bullshit. I know it's pointless bullshit. My coworkers know it's pointless bullshit. My boss knows it's pointless bullshit. Everyone is just kinda going through the whole charade because it keeps the paychecks coming.

I feel you. The good news is, if you look for it hard enough there are opportunities to make a living while NOT producing pointless/meaningless output. It took me 20+ years to accomplish that, but the reason is somewhat like the author of the post describes (even if this might be projection of his own situation upon others) : we don't try hard enough to use our knowledge, skills and talent productively -- towards improving housing, healthcare, education, charity, energy,... stuff that really matters.

> if you're not building the next big thing, you're not contributing to society.

I think we can all agree that any book written about the Fall of Google is going to focus pretty strongly on their lack of a maintenance culture. Building bridges is great, but if the opening of the bridge was a major event for a town, the subsequent closure of said bridge will be an even bigger event.

When work is going smoothly, the story I'm working on this week is often of a lower priority than the one I worked on two months ago. The major exception being when the current story was blocked by dependencies. A lot of invention comes down to people noticing that ideas have been unblocked. But while the new gadget or surgery can have life altering effects, so can the collapse of infrastructure for food, water, and shelter. Those always need minders or society would unravel.

> Too many people act like entrepreneurship is something everyone has the stomach/personality/capacity for.

Entrepreneurship and making things do not need to be intrinsically linked. It's ok to work on things for the sake of making things. If you release yourself from the impulse of thinking you need to make cash from something, you can often feel more comfortable doing your best work on bigger, harder problems.

This, of course, doesn't work for everybody.

Also, if everyone would be an entrepreneur, no-one would work together on the same thing, right? So working on _stuff that matters_ does not have to imply being an entrepreneur. It is perfectly fine to leave that to the people who are talented with or have a strong passion for entrepreneurship.

Condescending doesn’t mean inaccurate.

Agreed. People don't have to define themselves and/or their worth by their day job.

Especially when you look at the majority of startups getting funded or posting in "Who's Hiring" and the descriptions of what they do boils down to.. trying to solve some trivial problem.

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