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Comment by lordleft | Hacker News Reader

I think Americans extol work for its own sake in a rather unhealthy way. I also think "hard work" is presented as a panacea for a host of problems, including poverty, despite the fact that many poor people break their backs toiling all their lives without meaningfully climbing the social ladder. "Just work hard" is actually profoundly unhelpful advice, without specific strategies and acknowledgements of all the systemic forces that give some people a leg up (and hold many others back).

Contrary to the rhetoric of the anti-work movement, I think work is bound up in self-expression, and to meaningfully contribute to the creation of something beneficial to others or to yourself is a deep human longing. I just think that we speak of work in a very crude and superficial way here in the US.

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Two thoughts: 1) is that hard work is not the solution but rather largely a prerequisite to solving host of problems (I.e. getting out of poverty is dependent on a host of factors but if one isn’t willing to work hard, your chances are much slimmer)

2) your points about self identity being intertwined with work is an important one, and something I struggle with quite a bit.

It's never work hard, it's work smart.

This is because it's about working effectively, i.e. getting things done. Working hard doing things that have little to no value is a waste of effort.

I feel the trick with this heuristic is that it is only measurable post hoc. It could be argued that things don't have value until they exist[0], which takes work. And plenty of things aren't valuable, until they are.

So in that light, it's about oracle, or luck, directing your hard work towards efficacy.

"Work Hard" is the only advice you can give without perfect knowledge of the future. We usually just leave out the depressing second half of the aphorism: "but sometimes it won't matter."

[0] I can hear the entire finance industry starting to interject all at once

I believe the word you're looking for is "risk". Nothing is guaranteed.

I believe I choose my words carefully.

You are correct that nothing is guaranteed. Now reconcile that with your position. What is "smart work" in light of risk?

> What is "smart work" in light of risk?

Just what I said. Do things that create value.

And if the work you did is not "valuable", at the end of it, it is by definition not smart? Or does some smart work go unrewarded?

And by complement then, does some un-smart work get rewarded?

If I flip a coin and say, "it will come up heads", was the act of flipping "working smart", when it does? Is it feckless hard work when I get tails instead?

I think your view doesn’t consider that we can make informed estimates for the future, with plans specifically for if we’re wrong.

I can choose which programming languages and other technical skills I learn based on current use, as well as estimates for their future. I could become an expert in the wrong JavaScript framework, but learning Typescript and React is far more likely to be valuable than learning to be a telegraph repairman.

You're not wrong! There's plenty of ways to constrain the hypothesis-space of the future. They do tend to be very bad at accounting for rapidly changing contexts.

But beyond that, I think the conversation here is around output being sacred. By the definition of "value" I think we're all sort of taking as implicit here, Facebook would be just as valuable over telegram as it is over the internet.

Obviously that's ludicrous in its particulars, but I just mean to say that the "value" doesn't necessarily correlate with the tools used to produce it in this context. It's not the craftsmanship that's "rewarded", it's the sale.

Maybe sometimes you can sell better if you're invested in better tools, but I could work for a decade on a completely novel and beautifully crafted and executed widget that absolutely no one wants.

My point is that working smart involves predicting and then frequently validating that what you’re producing has value.

The upstream conversation centers on individual workers and how much they get paid for their labor. Learning in demand skills likely to stand the test of time will get a worker higher pay, due to employers needing those skills to produce value for their customers. This also means the worker keeps track of what skills are desired, and acts accordingly if things change.

In the case of someone working for a decade on something novel, but ultimately unwanted, there are still many ways to work smart. Did they try to validate their idea with a test audience? Could they have built a lesser featured minimal viable product in half the time, to test if it has value? Did they properly plan resource allocation, in both time and money? Or did they burn everything they had, well past their original plan?

I agree that “working smart” is not a foolproof way to achieve success, but the conversation up the thread focused solely on luck.

> This is because it's about working effectively, i.e. getting things done.

It's about getting things done if you're a business. If you're an employee, and your goal is to have money to afford a nice life, it's about extracting money from the business - which, strangely, is often maximized in ways that don't involve "getting things done" i.e. delivering the business any actual value.

If you want to get ahead in your career or financially - the WORST thing you can do is mindlessly do a good job at what you're told to do or what you think (after spending much effort) is the best use of your time.

It's about very specifically checking the boxes that get your more pay or moving up in your career or whatever it is you're after.

Selling your labor for money is just another kind of business.

> it's about extracting money from the business - which, strangely, is often maximized in ways that don't involve "getting things done" i.e. delivering the business any actual value.

Businesses that pay people who don't provide value are soon to go out of business.

> Businesses that pay people who don't provide value are soon to go out of business.

Beg to differ. Nobody does this better than Fortune 500 companies.

Fortune 500 companies can and do go bankrupt.

They will keep making new ones

But not really since they will be acquired by some other company and their ghost will keep haunting.

Isn't working smart somewhat implied?

Tossing a five gallon jug on your shoulder and running up and down a flight of stairs for hours is REALLY hard work. And yet you don't see people take this on as a job and then complain about it.

So instead someone goes out and gets an entry-level position. The options are limited, because they have no skills. The problem now is they never invest in building skills, so they are stuck in shit-tier jobs forever.

I want to have some empathy for this. But if I go to a convenience store and somehow it takes the cashier 10 minutes to checkout 3 people, that empathy becomes hard to find.

At the end of the day, every person getting a paycheck needs to produce more value to the business than they get paid. The only other way is to tax people who DO actually contribute and spread the money around. There are some serious concerns of fairness about that.

> Isn't working smart somewhat implied?

Too many people believe in the labor theory of value, meaning one should get paid according to how hard and long one works. This theory is a false god, because employers do not care how long or hard you work, they only care about the value produced.

Being smart means applying your efforts at producing value, and finding ways to produce more value.

They're all false gods. Chicago economics are just as much of a demiurge as any model that includes "just" or distributional reward. It mostly comes down to whom god favors.

Do you believe that most hard workers don't believe they are applying their efforts towards producing value? Do you believe that everyone who receives reward for producing value , did?

Free markets are about enabling people to produce value and reap the benefits of that value. That works, as history very amply shows.

I fully understand the narrative of the Free Market. The question isn't what it does; the question is how, and at what cost.

It works to what end? For whom? Certainly for some individuals, but does it work for them by the rules of its own narrative? For some concept of "Humanity"? Maybe, but I'm not sure the apparent demographic distributions at play here resemble "Humanity" in any meaningful statistical sense.

> This theory is a false god, because employers do not care how long or hard you work, they only care about the value produced.

But they don't pay for "value produced" either and instead pocket as much of the surplus value as possible. The game is rigged.

In fact, any surplus value from labor you are not pocketing/delivering to your shareholders is value left on the table and makes you a bad exec. Thus, the proper way to do it is to minimize the information your workers get, keep them hungry/afraid/without fallback medical care, and make sure they have no other option but to break their back for you.

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