How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

That is something that translates badly to bigger groups, no matter the reward. Us tech guys already get rewarded with great working conditions and good pay.

Lack of effort literally means people that show the level of effort your reply seems to suggest you are putting in. A normal level of effort, not just doing exactly as much as you need not to get fired is generally enough to stand out and have good results (output and pay wise). No overtime required.

A good level of organization helps in that regard because you aren't wasting any of the effort you are making. It cuts out the overtime by itself.

For a job where the "reward" (mainly salary) is fronted and somewhat fixed (no bonus or bonus isn't worth it), some (even most) people basically work as little as possible to not get themselves fired.

But it would also be challenging to change the rewarding structure to something similar to salesman.

I've worked at many different jobs, the really dysfunctional ones tend to punish rather than reward good work.

Also, be careful with the overtime. A really well organized company is able to pay its employees for every hour that they work. They also don't need overtime to make up for dysfunctional planning. Overtime is, after all, a lack of reward by definition. That is, I'm assuming unpaid overtime of course.

Its not always like this, though in my experience the really messy organizations put a lot of value on overtime, either because there was a crisis all the time or it was the 'look me being busy (with my career)' kind of politicised org.

Because they enjoy it. Because they want to create cool stuff. Intrinsic motivation!

Maybe they have to turn it into some kind of business in order to sustain it. Sometimes things have huge operational costs and people are unable to maintain their existence without making money. The ideal of creation for its own sake remains though.

Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. Bob Porter: Don't... don't care? Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation?

Big teams tend to struggle because people don’t know exactly what to do to move the whole shambling enterprise forward. It’s less about effort and more about coordination. Aside from the specific IC skills present, some understanding of the social dynamics and systemic outcomes of the teams ways of working needs to be sprinkled throughout the team to keep things on track. People tend to want to draw a box around their role so they have clarity in their work, but problems don’t conform to these boundaries, and often the hardest thing is framing challenges in the right way so that the team can make progress and avoid devolving into finger pointing or learned helplessness. Forget rewards for a second, just recognizing small actions and statements that have huge net negative impact on a team can be surprisingly difficult at scale.

Fear of punishment i.e., getting fired. That's why I do it most of the time. I know for a fact I won't get rewarded for it.

Having someone help do that, or ideally just do it all, vastly increases my cadence.

It does require someone who can understand and deliver clear objectives. And then wrangle lots of messy info from messy and random sources into a clear standardized form, so it's immediately usable.

Another area, is someone to put a new tool through a lot of sanity checks. This takes someone with some creativity, to come up with lots of interesting oddball toy problems, and ensure the new tools work smoothly for every crazy idea. Fast and prompt ad hoc testing can jumpstart an unusually thorough test suite (as well as catch problems very early).

I personally run out of steam a bit when it comes to testing all corner cases. When ever I run out of steam on some repetitive or exhaustive task, it is a good time for some secondary help.

I expect there are many such high time cost, repeatable, semi-regular tasks. You still need good worker fit.

As with any valuable work, we each should spend our time where our hours are most valuable. A tendency to do it all, may mask a poor ability to organize, communicate and delegate (or just a poor budget for getting help).

Source: I am a medium intelligence person.

I'm not quite sure what "intelligence" is - some people have strange personalities that make them hard to classify - but you don't need to be exceptionally good at anything to contribute to research (or R&D).

I think I've got suckered into a clickbait substack and a circular discussion on HN to cause various people to respond each in their own silos, asserting their own worth either as self-assigned intelligent or self-assigned stupid people.

I'm a stupid person (not least for falling for that) but I get paid to think uncommon things, which turns out to be not only marketable but productive. Some of what the substack invokes is perfectly true: I get by on determination and crunch, to the point that I have to watch it (right now I'm experiencing health issues which I think trace back to the amount of crunch I can't resist doing, out of fear.)

I daresay there's usefulness in reminding people not to just pursue the 'highest intelligence' path. From where I'm standing that's a ridiculous mistake. Higher intelligence can quite easily give rise to high rationalization and rigid thinking. This is probably why some tech folks go in for self-destructive behaviors like getting wacked out on ketamine in the belief that it will increase their brain plasticity. I don't get to do that stuff with drug abuse so I have to go about it in simpler, experiential ways.

It's a 'right tool for the right job' situation. It's not broadly useful to be hyper intelligent or hyper plastic. Willingness to try and ability to care about the situation go a long, long way, and that's very much the purview of this substack post. Not a bad summary, I'd say.

Anytime some good junior tries to put the brilliance into place it doesn't require it, its a sad story about literal technical debt down the line.

But good luck explaining this to most smart folks who are running around with big hammer trying as much new stuff as possible.

haha, I use to do it an hour before the test. I one time successfully "read" 5 books during a 20 min train ride.

I had this standard joke with a guy in my class where I would pretend the test was about the next chapter. He knew I was joking but freaked out completely ~ every time. He started working weeks in advance on things that should imho take 5 minutes then he would barely pass.

And then it suddenly involved actual work, something I was 100% unfamiliar with. The exotically untalented guy knew he had to start MONTHS in advance.

I ran into him 30 years later. He has a fabulous job that involves weekly courses. I ask him if he got any better at studying over all those years. He said he still starts studying all weekend, when he gets home and after dinner and still panics along the way and freaks out at 1 am on a daily basis - non of it makes any sense! After he barely passes the test he continues to study the material because he needs to know it but doesn't.

It's kinda sad as it sounds like he has no life, then again it is also extremely impressive and there must be something about the process that he really loves.

Others might think different, he is a legend to me.

Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.

Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.

Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts.

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

-- Ronald Reagan

I think the main tell of ADHD is if you feel you lack motivation to complete simple but tedious tasks that has high rewards that you really care about. In that case you don't lack motivation, you really care about the reward, you don't lack confidence since the task is simple, you just lack the ability to focus on simple tasks.

Having a hard time doing tasks you don't care about or tasks you are afraid of failing isn't ADHD, that is just normal. That includes schoolwork if you don't care about grades or feel you will fail anyway, and so on.

My job involves static analysis and I have an interest in PLT, so I've found some papers (Abstracting Abstract Machines) that I'll read through and get a rough idea. But to truly understand things I have to implement the ideas, but the scope of what I want to do expands so fast that I get demotivated and eventually move on.

Categories for the working mathematician, Software Foundations, contributing to mathlib are all things that I sort of start working towards and cannot force myself to get to any meaningful conclusion. At the same time starting so many things is how I slowly accumulated the foundations necessary to even approach these things.

It doesn't help that I also have PDA autism, which leads any sort of structure I try to impose on myself eventually becoming too stressful. I feel like I've reached the extent that modern medicine (I'm just short of max dosage of XR Ritalin) and therapy I can afford can help me.

No motivation to start cool new projects is not among them... Actually, reading all those symptoms really puts into the light the 'disorder' part in the ADHD.

And here's a philosophical question to ponder: should we change[1] to fit society's expectations or should society adjust itself to our needs? Should we take drugs so that we can be 100%, not even one percent less, productive 9-5 because that's what we're supposed to do?

[1] literally microdosing amphetamine

Well, in some organizations it's pretty easy to feel like you have no power. The org structure almost seems built for it.

Related to the OP here, I'm a huge fan of the phrase "it's easier to ask permission than forgiveness." The rules as you think you understand them are almost never the real limits of the possibility space.

Figuring out the right rules to break is a hell of a skill.

The hard part: getting mental health support as an adult requires good executive function! Unless you are lucky, you will encounter suspicion, gatekeeping, and just general bureaucracy. ADHD's symptoms make it hard to actually get treated.

My daughter has severe ADHD and is a disaster without medication. One of her current doctors asked which parent has similar traits, and my wife says it is me. My daughter's academic and behavioral track record is shamefully like mine.

So I've been to two psychologists and my GP, and all three say that ADHD doesn't exist in adults, it's something kids grow out of.

Only for a short time in my experience. Eventually, ADHD always wins in the end.

Not that I want to be too snarky about it: I used PHP a bit back in the LAMP stack days, and as bad as the language was it was easy to get stuff up and running. So perhaps Mr Lerdorf is right. (I hear PHP might be somewhat better now, though I can't vouch for that myself)

The thought of someone stupid turning out the most code in a team used to make me shudder. But then I got some not so bright people on my team.

It's true that stupid left to their own devices turns out terrible code. But they have their strengths. Janitors for example are often classed as stupid, but a stupid and hardworking janitor will do a far better job than of the other types.

The key insight (and this was pointed out to me by of all people someone in marketing, designing campaigns to make products appeal to certain crowds), is janitors like routine. I guess stupid doesn't like to be made to think, they like to do what they excel at, which is doing. So the key to making it work is the smart (and preferably lazy) people design the routine, and the stupid execute it. You can rely on stupid and hardworking to do it consistently and quickly.

In programming terms, this means you need strong coding rules, lots of examples, thorough reviews which takes enormous amount of patience. A smart programmer will cafe at the oversight required, as it prevents exploration of ideas. Give stupid that and something remarkable happens - they produce very good code. Why is it good? Because it's so simple. Anyone can understand it. It takes almost no effort to read.

An even more surprising thing happens when you get them to design UI's, as in "I want a form that takes in X and does Y with it". Again, what they come us with is so simple, my grandmother could use it. Stupid people don't design complex things. Give them anything more complex than a single form and you are asking for trouble of course, as they can't zoom out and pull in the big picture, then zoom back in and execute it.

So it's horses for courses. Stupid hardworking take a lot of investment in management time. They reward that in the long term by turning out a lot of code. But you need a cookie cutter task that lasts for years at least to make the investment pay back. They don't work in a consulting where novel short term tasks are the rule. But you'll find them happily toiling away in bureaucracies, and being paid stuff all for the privilege of being the backbone of the organisation. Which explains the why stupidest thinks we have to deal with in life are bureaucracy. The people you are dealing with aren't paid to think.

Sure many times that means doing nothing at all, But most of the times it means working with things in a way that things are so well designed you just flow with things instead of fighting through the system to make them happen.

Napoleon would more likely say something along the lines of.. "Know when to go for it and when to take it slow."

After all, he signalled his willingness to work hard with his bee emblem.

But be good at something is also good advice :)

I have not once felt that. I guess people just approach challenges differently.

Literally everyone with a somewhat weak self-esteem will shy away. Those friends of yours should maybe start programming as a hobby, for a small, defined project that scratches one of their itches, and then go from there.

I am structured like that and that's how I got into a well-paying job in software development.

When any obstacle arise to this magical solution, you just fold and flee any difficult task. Trying and failing would make them realize that you weren't so special to start with.

I thought all my life that I had no talent for video games. I recently installed Doom II (bought for around 2€ on the Microsoft Store) and two weeks later gzDoom.

I did play around a bit with Doom 30 years ago and thought the graphics was nice but I wasn't good at it, was never going to be good at it, and it also wasn't all that interesting.

About a month after the install I'm a fairly decent Doom player. I can complete all the three original Doom episodes (and the first one on Ultraviolence).

Turns out I just never practiced enough -- and I didn't even need much of it!

The bad news is that you may have been too early for that. Well, and also that I’m not sure how effective efforts to address it have actually been.

People mostly reads these and see themselves as the superior side, if it is an article about hard work beating talent people see themselves as the hard worker, if it is an article about smart people doing X then of course the reader is on the smart side etc.

So an article on how most hard work is wasted since it wasn't well thought out would also be popular since there the reader would view his hard work as fruitful and only dumber people than them are wasting their time.

It is only when you start to poke hole in that self image people have built up that the downvotes starts to come. Most people aren't significantly smarter than their peer, most peoples hard work isn't well directed, but they don't want to hear those things.

My guess is it's mostly feigned humility and midwit cope.