Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's not about working hard or getting rich. It's about working until you've put your health in danger. It's about coding until you're hallucinating. It might be necessary. But it's not laudable.

Likewise, with your dad, what's laudable is the result. What's not laudable is the process. I'm sure that your dad would have jumped at the opportunity to make the same amount of money for fewer hours worked every day.

In life, you don't get credit for trying. You get credits for results. Yes, working hard is necessary. It's not sufficient, though. You need a lot of luck to strike it rich like jwz did. That's the point he's trying to make. Sometimes, you work 16, 20 hour days, and you just go home bankrupt because the market just isn't there, the investors aren't willing to believe, and the customers don't give a damn. Then what do you have? You've ruined your health, you've alienated your family, you've isolated yourself for what? A dream. An illusion.

I'm not trying to take anything away from your dad. Those 16 hour days had value. But let's not pretend that there was zero luck involved. What if the travel agency hadn't given him rentals? What if his taxi had broken down and he'd been forced into debt in order to secure repairs? What if he'd come down with diabetes, heart disease, cancer, or any number of ailments that could have ended his career? All those things (and many many more) would have prevented him from being able to provide you with that college education.

So yeah, definitely celebrate hard work. But don't pretend that pure hard work and saving money gives you the ability to stand on your own two legs. Those are the prerequisites, but there's a whole lot of other things that have to go right for everything to turn out well.

My dad has hypertension. He has a weak digestion(Because of stress). His legs are weak. He wears glasses(Because he battled the glare from vehicles all this life). He also has bad moods all the time(Because of the frustration battling traffic all day).

Yet he doesn't give up. That's what it really boils down to. Diseases are a part of life. You have to learn to live beyond and with them. He was lucky that every time he got an opportunity he used it, which opened up more opportunities. And he worked on those opportunities.

And by the way, No one that truly got rich and sustained his riches for a long time ever did it without working hard. The fact that not every body can work hard. The fact that most consider hard work 'not worth it'. The fact that most don't work hard is what has what has given hardworking people edge throughout history. And makes them a minority.

But I agree, Hard work may not always lead to results. But it increases your chances of success.

I consider my dad a personal hero because he demonstrated what focus and true hard work can achieve over time. Had he settled down for mediocrity like everybody else, he would be nothing more than a cab driver to me.

EDIT: Common folks why would you downvote this? Is not giving up beyond all odds, so bad?

You're being downvoted because you don't seem to be discussing anything remotely relevant to JWZ's or Arrington's posts. Your father's driving a taxi has absolutely nothing to do with VCs and the startup lottery, the economics aren't even remotely similar. Your father's compensation is tied to the results of his work in a very direct and inseparable way, and it does little to create long-term value for another person -- the cab company (if there really is one, often it's just a dispatch service) can't keep packaging up and selling your father's trips to the airport after he's quit/retired/died/etc..

No one is getting rich off your father's efforts to a massively disproportionate degree. That is not the case for the people JWZ is speaking to.

Because our dad was paid for every hour of work he put in. He invested his time by the hour and his risk was minimal. For a startup coder he or she is investing by the month or year, and to walk away from that with not much to show for it can be awful.

These coders arent paid extra for all nighters, they aren't compensated for losing relationships, they aren't covered when they burnout, all for a realistically very slim chance of striking it rich.

I already mentioned in one of the threads below. Our work as software professionals today is more dependent on productivity not intelligence.

We are quickly assimilating in to normal crowd. We may even be judged by the same metrics they are.

For all those people who are not getting it. Today success of most software shops is about business innovation not technology innovation. Yes there are instances of Google and other big web giants innovating greatly in the technology area. But they amount to less than 1% of the software crowd.

We are all writing software to solve business problems. We are not writing software for Software innovation.

Unless you are doing something special. Most software today is written in IDE's. You don't have to remember syntax at all these days. The IDE will do it for you. It knows what libraries you want, it knows how many exceptions your code can run into. It knows how to compile, build and package your code. I can give you your code coverage. It can even do documentation for you. There is hardly anything IDE's can't do these days.

All you need is a little semantic awareness. And there are solutions to nearly every problem you are likely to run into a software shop. There are libraries, API's and frameworks that have understood and defined your problems as a generic case and solved them. There are forums to help you out on edge cases.

All you do these days is know a solution to a generic pattern of problems. You fundamentally pull out those logical solutions from your brain and parameterize them for the solution need at hand. And remaining is simply IDE play.

Very little or really a non quantifiable of highly intellectual work is happening in business based software shops today. Google, Facebook are exceptions, not the normal.

And this isn't surprising. We need armies of programmers to do all the bulk of the business job out there. If you are still thinking that as a software guy you are going to work with math theorems, then you have got it wrong.

Given all these, my success depends on only two things. How much aware of the reusable solutions. How quickly and how many problems can I solve using them. Which is productivity.

This is drag and drop programming demystified.

I am not sure whether you have ever worked at a startup or not. Your understanding of current software development is what big software service companies do with mediocre programmers. Startups never have army of programmers but few intelligent programmers. And there is nothing bad in using IDE, innovation does not mean to write a solution from scratch. There will always be need of abstraction based on current libraries and programming environment.

> All you need is a little semantic awareness. And there are solutions to nearly every problem you are likely to run into a software shop. There are libraries, API's and frameworks that have understood and defined your problems as a generic case and solved them. There are forums to help you out on edge cases.

Wow, I'm glad I do more interesting work than that drek.

"But let's not pretend that there was zero luck involved"

What in his comment gives you the impression that he is claiming that luck did not play a role?

He talks only about how hard his dad worked and draws a direct line from his dad's hard work to the results. I'm trying to make the point that the line isn't so direct. There are a lot of things that could have happened to upset that trajectory and I don't think the OP is acknowledging them.

In other words, I've got the impression that OP thinks that life is fair - that if you work hard, you're guaranteed to get ahead. I'm arguing the opposite. Sometimes you do everything right and it all goes to hell anyway, due to forces outside your control.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com