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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> The only way to learn how to do hard things, is to do hard things, so do the hardest things.

and i don't want to pay my employees to learn, i want to pay them to produce output i can sell.

Doing hard things are good, if this hard thing has never been done before - like going to the moon.

Doing hard things which has been done, but just not by you, is not good unless it's for "entertainment" and personal development purposes - which is fine and i encourage people to do it, on their own dime. Like climbing Mount Everest, or going to the south pole.

But if you are doing a project for someone else, you don't get to piggy back your personal wants and desires unrelated to the project on to it.

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Except making employers do only easy things will make them stagnate. People who do nothing but simple CRUD apps over and over won't even be particularly good at making CRUD apps... whereas the guy who builds an Unicode font renderer in his free time always seems to write better code for some reason.

Getting better at your job is not just a "personal want" but very much something that the employer appreciates aswell.

Of course reinventing the wheel isn't good in corporate because the reinvented wheel is buggier than the ready made npm package but employers should go out of their way to find hard problems to solve that they can pass to their employees. It's called a growth opportunity.

Unless you work for enterprise consulting where employers appreciate replaceable cogs that they randomly drop into any project, and nicely out project budget regardless of delivery quality.

You can’t convince an employer with that attitude. They’re gonna keep exploiting their employees and “encourage” them to do their “personal development” in their free time.

> and i don't want to pay my employees to learn, i want to pay them to produce output i can sell.

This can be a bad local optimum. It probably depends on what exactly your business does, but it can make sense to pay an employee to acquire knowledge and skills that are needed in the business. You can't buy this off the shelf in all circumstances. Of course, it also has to make economic sense and be viable for the company. Unfortunately, I often see employees doing things quite badly that they don't really understand because they are not given the opportunity to learn properly. I can't imagine that this burns less money in the medium and long term than giving paid employees adequate space to learn.

Also as an employee, this forces me to job hop to stay relevant.

Unless you happen to live in cultures where that is looked down upon as not able to keep a job.

Meaning you will job hop less, but you still have to weigh the advantage/disadvantage as always.

I am in a work environment where I actually get to do hard shit for fun, learn a ton, and also "get stuff done" and my employer is happy.

For some of the stuff that has been done already, it might still make sense to do your own implementation, for example if you want to be able to experiment without having to navigate and learn a huge codebase and then have to maintain a fork just to have your own stuff in.

Another project we are starting now involves replacing software which is outright crappy and wastes our time. Thankfully my employer was able to see and understand this after talking it through with them.

Your customers will pay more for things that are hard to do. Ask ASML.

> Your customers will pay more for things that are hard to do. Ask ASML.

What a silly example. ASML is valuable because it does something no one else does. It's not because it's hard, it's because they have the know-how and infrastructure to do it whereas others don't.

Juggling is hard. Do you know any millionaire jugglers?

> Juggling is hard.

You should try instead.

I brought jugglers balls for my team and in a few weeks we had 4 or 5 fluent.

No one else does it, because it is hard I thought? Hard to get all the steps and processes aligned to produce what they do. It is so hard, that there is no rich guy that wants to throw money in the hat and do it himself.

> i don't want to pay my employees to learn

Then how do you expect them to learn?

Good luck getting more blood out of that stone, smh.

Let's be a little charitable and assume they mean just learn. There are hard tasks you can learn from that also provide something you can't just get off the shelf, rather than just reimplementing the wheel.

Is quelsolaar your employee?

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