You Have to Feel It | Hacker News Reader

You Have to Feel It

mitchellh.com

381 pointstosh156 comments

I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it comes down to feelings... Life choices? Business decisions? Who gets promoted? It's all vibes and feelings. People will deliberate and argue over facts but ultimately there will be some "weighting" factor which is feelings and will make or break the outcome. You can have a perfectly argued decision that fails some vibe check and is hence discarded. Or a terrible argument that plays to some emotional point so is accepted. It's all feelings. Rare is the opposite.

Another way to look at it is parallel processing vs sequential processing.. our brains can make a judgement call about a thousand subtle variables and data points that we can't exactly put our fingers on unless we really dig into it, which we usually label as 'feelings', using the parallel part of our brain. The sequential (logical) part can only consider a limited number of variables at a time. I don't think either mode of thinking is inherently worse (we need both), but in our society the feelings part has traditionally been discounted as being 'illogical' by academics.. I think AI has shown us that parallel processing is actually incredibly important to thinking.

But back to the original post, I think 'having good taste' and knowing when something feels like the right solution is one of those hard to define qualities that can make the difference between average and great products (and has far reaching effects in any business).

I always like to say we aren’t rational, we _rationalize_. Much of our decision making process is subconscious / vibes / “system 2”, but we also have a strong need for a sensible narrative structure to our lives. So what hack did nature come up with? Let us make the gut decision based on a bunch of soft heuristics, then rationalize it and wrap it into a sensible narrative before it reaches our conscious mind. Lets us use our efficient system 2 thinking most of the time while avoiding all that messy cognitive dissonance that would arise from a conscious awareness of how chaotic such a system would be at the scale of… oh, say, a global civilization of such creatures ;)

Rationalism is overrated anyway.

All rational thought depends on its axioms/premises, and there's no rational way to define a new axiom - by definition they are asserted from scratch, so you need to depend on gut feeling to choose a good axiom over a bad one.

Rationalism "only" works to discard or modify some subset of your axioms when you discover that they lead to incompatible conclusions; which is a good outcome if you want to achieve a consistent theory, of course; but it doesn't help in selecting one consistent theory over a competing one. Again, those preferences are led by emotions.

I grew to believe that feelings have hard-to-recognize rationales that can be explained if you dig deep enough. Very few people ever do however. Recognizing the rationale is a great skill to have in many circumstances where you give feedback, like code reviews for example. It's also a skill that makes you a better teacher.

Various studies have shown that trying to explain the reasons for a decision can often cause people to make worse decisions. I remember there was one where lay people were able to taste and rate jams with a high degree of correlation to the ratings of expert tasters; but when asked to explain _why_ they rate one jam better than another, their ratings suddenly drastically disagreed with experts'.

Interesting that you’d count disagreeing with an expert as a ‘worse’ decision, particularly in such a subjective space as the taste of jam.

If I taste something, and carefully critically consider my experience, I would count that as a better decision, and the opinion of experts don’t really factor into it, because they’re not me.

> Interesting that you’d count disagreeing with an expert as a ‘worse’ decision

"Less correct" is perhaps more what I mean. Disagreeing with the opinions of experts is, generally, the same thing as being less correct.

> If I taste something, and carefully critically consider my experience, I would count that as a better decision, and the opinion of experts don’t really factor into it, because they’re not me.

A different way to test this would be to make two judgements — one snap decision based on vibes, and another based on a thoughtful chain of reasoning that you explain or write down — and then see which judgement was actually more correct _for you_ (perhaps after some time has elapsed).

For fun a few years ago I went through the process of deciding what my favorite song was. I had a gut feeling but wanted to take a scientific approach, I listened to my top listened songs from the last decade over and over as part of a bracket system, where I was trying to explain logically why one was better than the other.

Anyway at the end of it I chose a song that I later realized was definitely not my favorite despite me being unable to explain logically why my favorite song is my favorite song. Basically having to explain things made my ratings worse.

Fascinating. What a fun experiment for one thing - makes me want to try - and what an unexpected outcome. It seems so paradoxical that it’s hard for me to even think about what might have caused that.

I’m on board with the idea here, but the way you worded it makes it sound like “rationalizing” which is generally considered harmful.

Is this different from rationalizing? Or are we saying that rationalizing is okay if you are sufficiently attuned to your feelings?

I get the impression you're using 'rationalizing' to mean finding a reason for an emotion that doesn't necessarily match the true source of the emotion. This is different from recognizing the existing rationale, which is exactly why it's generally considered harmful. If one gets in the habit of finding new rationales for their emotions that sound more favorable, they can also get in the habit of no longer keeping their true rationales in check, which I would assume tends to result in sociopathic behavior.

> You can have a perfectly argued decision that fails some vibe check and is hence discarded

One of the worst hires I ever worked with was excellent on paper, came with good credentials, had an impressive resume, and did objectively well on the interview questions.

However, everyone who interviewed him felt uneasy about him. He failed the vibe check, even though he checked all of the boxes and knew all the right things to say. At the time there was a big push for eliminating bias and being and as objective as possible in hiring, so we were lightly admonished for raising questions based on vibes.

When he was hired, it turned out our vibes were justified. He was someone who played games and manipulated his way through his career. He could say the right things and navigate his way through office politics unscathed while causing damage to everything he touched.

Since then I’ve observed a number of situations where decisions that seemed objectively good but came with weird vibes were later revealed to be bad. Some of the most skilled grifters I’ve encountered were brilliant at appearing objectively good but couldn’t pass vibe checks of experienced business people. Some of the most objectively good deals on paper that came with weird vibes later turned out to be hugely problematic.

I think the trap is thinking that vibes and feelings are wrong and should be ignored in favor of pre-selected objective measures. This is good practice when doing a scientific study, but it’s not a good practice when you’re entering a real world situation where an adversarial party can root out those criteria, fake them, and use your objectivity against you.

It's all very well when it works to your advantage but "vibes" also do the opposite.

People who instantly take against you tend to see every mistake and interpret every event the worst possible way and eventually decide that their initial feelings were right. Once again intuition triumphs. You don't get a chance to prove you're no worse than anyone else - there's just a period of time where they look for evidence to confirm their vibe.

I remember going to work in a country where my apparent origin was seen in a positive way and realising that if I'd been from somewhere in Eastern Europe I'd have been automatically disrespected. I remember going to an interview for a flat share and the moment I said I was from Zimbabwe one guy said that "South Africans" (sic) "drink and party too much." Since I'm white I'd never been on the opposite side of prejudice before and it was highly interesting.

Oh yes, I agree, it is information that's telling you something but because one doesn't usually have a way of putting it into words it's not clear what the message is. People who are different from you are sometimes just nervous and not sure how to present themselves.

I have, however, had to fix the terrible work of grifters (e.g. no unit tests, every minor change breaks something silently) and nobody ever cottoned onto them even though they were quite obvious. The feelings they gave management were "good ones" despite them being terrible for the business. I, as the person fixing stuff after said grifter left suddenly, was blamed for everything that was wrong.

This is why recruitment as it exists now is a farce. If everything is ultimately vibes-based, there's no point in portraying the process as objective. I'd say that it's even a sort of fraud to do so.

Set base credentials, lottery of everyone who passes the post, full hire or fire after a short (1 month, at most) probationary period where vibes are considered. There's no reason to go through rounds and rounds of interviews over months. It's a waste of everyone's time. Unless your criteria are completely compromised, you'll find someone within a few tries.

The problem with probationary periods is that, especially if relocation is involved, it's really expensive/disruptive to the employee. I'm reasonably confident that I'd have cleared the bar but I probably wouldn't have taken a job when there was a clear short-term probationary period that required me moving across the country. Just too much risk unless it's an incredible opportunity.

I'm of two minds on this.

1) If such a short probationary period is involved, there's no reason to permanently move during it. A short-term rental will do. If the position works out, then move. (I have done this, it is doable.)

2) Then maybe the job isn't right for you.

The point is to strip the desperation to find The One True Candidate/Job On The First Try, from both sides. Companies are already hiring based on vibes, so this just formalizes it. Employees are already subject to swift termination, based on their employers' whims; this just makes that expectation transparent. From both sides: if it isn't going to work out, we get there quickly and move on. Little is worse than being on a job for half a year, only to get sacked because it took that long for the company to decide that it doesn't like you.

>Employees are already subject to swift termination, based on their employers' whims

Except in practice, they mostly aren't because onboarding takes time and cost and relocating employees (if applicable) has costs.

Of course, if you're a pro football player, here today/gone tomorrow is the norm. But I'm not sure that is or should be the expectation for an engineer. In part, because I doubt there is a "One True Candidate" for the the most part.

Yes, roles shift/requirements shift and both companies and employees move on but there's generally some value to stability on both sides. Even if an employee can get an employer-paid rental for a month, thy've still presumably left their prior job and will have to scramble in various ways.

You're talking about a social contract. That's something that barely exists, these days. The problem here is as much timing as expectations. It is difficult to tell if you're signing on with a chop shop until you're suddenly on the block. I would rather we dispense with the games and people be upfront. Companies don't want that, because they can market it as stability while reserving an edge over both their employees and competitors (the same with many benefits). If what I described becomes the norm, employees lose that sense of stability, but they gain an edge in that businesses can no longer hold it over their heads.

Let's be clear, though, that it's not actual stability: it's a sense of stability, and it's often false.

How desperate would a person have to be to accept a one-month probationary job?

Are those people the ones you really want to hire?

Maybe your bar is low and your confidence is high, but I'd certainly never come work for you under those terms.

What made them bad, could you give more specifics? I don't quite understand what they did that was a mis-hire in your current description.

> He was someone who played games and manipulated his way through his career. He could say the right things and navigate his way through office politics unscathed while causing damage to everything he touched.

Not the one you're replying to, but is the above quote not enough to explain why they were a mis-hire?

Not really, the parent was asking for specifics while these are generalities.

I see. I thought it was quite specific.

This exact same phenomenon bit me at a previous job. We hired a couple of really smooth-talking grifters, and it took a tremendous amount of time to get rid of them. Vibes matter.

The problem with this sort of hiring over time (we hired grifetrs because vibes) is that you never get to compare your vibe failure rate with those who had bad vibes but would have been better hires.

If you go with vibes too much you only ever accumulate data saying that vibes matter.

You call it "vibes" but I believe this is due to your not recognising the manipulative behaviours as they occur:

- not answering questions (e.g. by asking counterquestions or giving long-winded non-answers)

- not taking responsibility in bad outcomes (when asked about problems they were facing)

- not saying "I don't know"

- using "we" for bad outcomes and "I" for good outcomes (socialising loss, privatising profit)

...

That person sounds exactly like a sociopath (someone who lacks empathy).

My theory of life is that Everything is Vibes. I work in the financial industry with individuals who think very highly of their fact driven decision making when it always boils down to vibes. Facts be dammed

I also worked in finance and couldn't agree more. The whole corporate thing is a farce. Spend a year "gathering data" or "planning" only for everything to boil down to one guy making an arbitrary decision which no one goes against because "that's just how it works". That industry exists no matter how you decision-make because it's slurping off an endless money fountain.

Even expressions of rationality comes from a feeling we must do so.

Rationalists cannot get away from empiricism. There's nothing to rationalize about without observation of the empirical.

Western philosophy has always tried to carve out very precise lanes of thought like empiricism and rationalism, but one requires the other.

There's no nature or nurture debate. It's all emergent aspects of nature.

Humanoids went centuries learning to adjust to internal feelings of enough water and food. Strived to find balance.

Language came along and agrarian warlords focused effort on made up balancing acts of gods; He will be mad if we don't do things right. Lame projection

I think a lot of the dysfunction we see in the world can be attributed to people feeling positive emotions towards deeply problematic logical decisions, so they favor them for whatever perceived benefit they'll get from that decision, often overlooking the long-term impacts or how it affects others around them.

We walk a dangerous line when feelings are the executive decision maker, even when we know what we should do (what's right) doesn't give us the same emotional response.

It's like working out. Nobody really wants to do it, but it only stands to benefit the body in the most logical, tangible sense.

You can analyze in different ways by choosing different frames of reference, etc., but choosing how to feel isn't the same. For most, "choosing to how feel" is difficult to attempt.

This can apply on the personal level too. Almost everything we want is less about the thing, and more about the feeling we think the thing will give us.

This distinction is an absurdity first written to provide a rational for why everything being done in the name of Reason felt so bad.

There is something to this. I believe that if you cannot feel, you also cannot reason. It’s almost as if intellectual ability is an application of emotionality rather than something separate. For example, when something makes sense to you, what does that really mean? In my experience, when something “clicks”, that is not intellect. The intellect kicks in to retroactively explain the feeling. The “clicking” itself- that’s the feeling.

Rationale. Is it, though? It would be ironic if anyone found it necessary to construct an argument for why argument is unnecessary. (Though that sounds familiar - classical cynicism maybe?)

Well, acting without reason is unreasonable, for sure. But since I don't think knowledge is (mostly) hierarchical, I don't think chains of reasoning are the main part of how we arrive at preferences. To the extent that knowledge does have foundations, the foundations are beliefs, and they're built in no particular order, and survive by merit of seeming to chime with other beliefs, fitting together in a paradigm. That effect where they seem to chime is an impression, a hunch, which is a feeling.

What reasoning can do is tell you "these two beliefs definitely can't go together, because they're logically incompatible", and then you have to jettison one of them (or attack the argument), even if it feels like they both belong. Somewhat disconcerting.

Pedantry disqualified all subsequent value of your thinking

People want different things. Even if two perfectly rational people agree on a shared model of reality, they still might not agree on what actions to take as a matter of aesthetic preference.

That said, it's true that few are rational and honest. Everyone wants their ideals to be reality, but most people confuse their ideals with reality itself. Even those who can tell the difference may choose to trick others into delusion, so that they may use them for their own benefit.

I used to do that, but not so much now. Being honest with myself and the world is a more interesting way to live.

Yes.

If you didn't know about the case, Damasio's Eliott is the personification of this observation : you have to feel first.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250614042654/https://www.thecu...

> You have to feel it.

The corporate machine does not feel it.

It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead.

This is why small companies still stand a chance. They can build something that would fail the corpo test of metrics and surveys.

Then they get acquired.

Whatever you think about Apple, I find it hard to believe that the team that developed the original iPhone could have done so without feeling it.

Perhaps that was just the magic of Jobs, who definitely felt things. But he didn't make the iPhone single handedly.

I think there is some survival bias in the analysis, and that something like the iPhone was inevitable given all the experimentation going on in the market.

Apple also made the Newton. But folks don't call back to it or praise its makers very often.

Actually, I’ve found people often do praise the Newton. They lament it as being ahead of its time, but in terms of feeling it actually did have the right vibe. The tech just wasn’t there yet at the time.

> the Newton

I found the idea fascinating, but it was too clunky and heavy for the features it offered. I think the concept was too far ahead of its time, it couldn’t be implemented well in available tech.

For that matter, the Palm Pilot was beloved of a lot of techies at the time but neither the input nor synchronization technology/infrastructure were really there. I won one at a trade show and even upgraded it later but, honestly, it wasn't all that useful.

> something like the iPhone was inevitable given all the experimentation going on in the market.

I agree, but I don't think it would have been as polished as the iPhone out of the gate.

> Apple also made the Newton. But folks don't call back to it or praise its makers very often.

As a sibling comment mentioned, I think the Newton was perhaps better than you're giving it credit for, but my point isn't that Apple makes great products, it's that it's possible at certain times for certain teams within large companies to "feel it".

Perhaps entertainment could be another example. Do you think the team that made Wall-E didn't "feel it"? What about Zelda Breath of the Wild?

> as polished as the iPhone out of the gate

I think people are forgetting how extremely unpolished the iPhone was out of the gate. No app store. Even something as fundamental as copy/paste took until years later.

You’re talking about features. It didn’t have that many, sure.

But the features it did have were extremely well polished.

Part of the reason it took them forever to add copy/paste is because Android phones had 12 different ways to do it and it was unintuitive as a result. I’m not suggesting Apple’s solution is better; but it’s definitely intentional and thought-through.

At the time, Apple was one of the very few companies with really intentional design. Now many companies have adopted that philosophy.

There's a difference between polished and feature-rich. I'd actually argue the iPhone was more "polished" before they introduced the app store—their vision was pure.

On the other hand, it was really the third-party apps that arguably distinguished the iPhone from the manufacturer-centric phones previously.

Plenty of people work at large corporations and enjoy their work.

“Enjoy their paycheck”, there - fixed it for you

It seems like you're trying to tell me that I don't actually enjoy my work? That seems observably untrue from my perspective? If you don't enjoy your work, that's fine, but trying to tell people who do that they actually don't doesn't make any sense to me.

Whenever someone claims to enjoy or love their job, I'm extremely suspicious. Usually it's some form of cope, because without it how could you stand having to work 8+ hours a day for 40 years? Easier to tell yourself you actually love it. I'm sure you enjoy aspects of your work. But I would guess if you won $100m you wouldn't keep going. If you truly enjoyed it, you would do it for free.

Dismissing anyone who isn't already aligned with your world view as "just cope" seems an unproductive strategy to having a discussion.

If I won 100M, I wouldn't work the exact same job - I'd probably move into an adjacent role that was more ambitious and took on a lot more risk, because I would be a lot less concerned if the company I was working for crashed and burned. The outlines of my role would stay the same.

I feel I've been clear-headed about my feelings about work. It took a lot of thinking to get to a place I enjoy. I haven't always enjoyed my work; I've worked at places that I hated and places that were just meh. But yeah, my current work is awesome, I happily do it nights and weekends just for fun (much to the chagrin of my girlfriend). Most people I work with, and most friends I have outside of work, feel similarly. I'm sorry you don't feel the same, but I encourage you to think before telling other people they feel a different way than they actually do.

Truly, to each their own.

I couldn't bear to pour all my energy in something that, ultimately, is not mine. But I could feel your enthusiasm through your post, which made me a bit jealouse.

So, yeah.

I guess there is a type of personality that don't need autonomy and are totally fine being a small cog in a giant machine, and only get a sliver of the benefit. I knew day one I started working that I'm not like that, and it's difficult for me to comprehend that people truly enjoy it.

> Whenever someone claims to enjoy or love their job, I'm extremely suspicious. Usually it's some form of cope, because without it how could you stand having to work 8+ hours a day for 40 years?

But you are not doing the exact same thing for 40 years. Since I started my career, there have been so many new projects, new ideas, new things to create and so many new ways to do it. But underneath it all is the common denominator of enjoyment and love of programming.

I'm not sure why that is so unfathomable. Sure, I have plenty of not-so-great days when nothing works or the project I'm working on is uninspiring. But that is just the nature of life. I would wager that your beloved partner isn't an enjoyable company 100% of the time. But you enjoy being with them most of the time because they make you feel great - that's sort of an important requirement. Programming makes me feel great most of the time I'm doing it.

> I'm sure you enjoy aspects of your work. But I would guess if you won $100m you wouldn't keep going. If you truly enjoyed it, you would do it for free.

I'll be able to set the balance of when I want to program and when I want to go watch a movie - we are not one dimensional creatures after all. Of course all of us need to eat but I don't see what getting paid for it has to do with my love for it. Plenty of people love stuff that doesn't pay at all.

Programming makes me feel good too, but there are very few programming jobs I would do for no pay, if any. I would work on my own projects though. But that's what I'm saying, I'm sure you can enjoy or even love some aspects of a job, but the totality of it? That's probably very rare, and most who say they love their job are doing it as a form of cope or because it's provides some sort of social status to love your job.

> I'm sure you can enjoy or even love some aspects of a job, but the totality of it?

Sure, it isn't/can't be 100% peachy 100% of the time but then I'm not sure if anyone is asserting that. I don't think anything is that way.

When you do the math, it looks like most jobs have never actually had an enjoyable paycheck though, just the fortunate few.

In that case some peole are bound to find more enjoyment from something else, or why would the paycheck even be worth it?

Sometimes that can occur within the very work they do, maybe even their life's work, which can take long enough to proceed through phases of education, underemployment, business ownership, retirement and back again.

Surely there are other kinds of enjoyment continuity, which can function in parallel to a certain extent, that those concentrating on the paycheck alone may not come close to achieving.

Nope. Sure scale comes with lots of communication and coordination overhead that many people don't enjoy, but middle management exists to provide a place to dump all that annoying stuff.

And to create even more of it, as they often revel in this, as it makes them seem more important, indispensable.

Plenty of people are certifiable

Surely we can have a better discussion on this topic than "everyone who disagrees with me is insane".

Sorry, thought we were doing platitudes

And how

It comes and goes in seasons. There is always a tension between the needs of the many and the pathological acquisitiveness of the few, but this is the worst in the West in living memory.

The last remotely compatible situation was the late USSR, and a dysfunctional Soviet corpse plundering by middling oligarchs to even more pathic notional leadership is precisely what it is.

Be of good cheer, it collapses under its own weight in this neighborhood of dysfunction. Its almost over.

There will be a mess to clean up, then it'll be summer again until we get lax again.

Always been this way, always will be. Empires grow in power, then corruption, then only corruption, and then they're done.

A lot of people suffer greatly and die to cause that mess.

A perfect example is the terrible mismanagement of the epidemic in the USA; over a million people dead, many (most?) of them unnecessarily for the active rejection of basic infection control measures. A perfect example of the corruption of which you speak: many countries got €1-2 rapid tests (I bought a 50 pack) where the US only approved the $30 two-pack. Thousands died unnecessarily so the state could funnel money to their buddies.

This is just one of a million examples. The rate of degeneration seems to be increasing further.

You’re right about it getting close, but unfortunately “almost over” in this context usually means a generation or two. Children born today might only know a lifetime of suffering only for their own adult children to finally emerge in the spring.

This is why I don’t like takes like this. It is impossible to be in good cheer when there will be millions of preventable and utterly unnecessary deaths and hundreds of millions of lives and bodies damaged and stunted irreparably due to lack of access to medicine and education and equal protection of law. Preventable diseases not being prevented, treatable conditions going intreated. Forced and unnecessary poverty costs lives. It is no different than any other genocide or intentional mass murder.

Take it up with the people who could easily prevent it by instituting reforms, not with me, that's shooting the messenger because I'm easier to get to. But I'm fighting those people tooth and nail precisely because every small victory however symbolic is one pebble in the scale and there are degrees of "mess": plenty of corrupt elites make a deal, let's pray these do.

If there's a genocide level event it won't have my endorsement, I'm still mourning a kid brother who would still be here if it weren't for a lot of the factors killing men his age in stupendous numbers. That genocide? It's been happening for a minimum of 5 years, more like ten.

I appreciate the merits and gravity of your complaint (to put it mildly) but mine is the wrong complaint box for it.

I'm not taking it up with you and I'm not shooting the messenger. The only issue I have is takes like this:

> Be of good cheer, it collapses under its own weight in this neighborhood of dysfunction. Its almost over.

There's nothing remotely cheerful about how bad it's going to have to get first before it gets better. The fact that a genocide eventually ends is not a reason to be happy about being in the beginning of a huge one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlLQ2qJmy8c

That was great share. Thank you.

Kyle Reese?

The corporate machine consists of people.

From my experience it consists of Excel spreadsheets. What I mean is that when a wave of layoffs hits, there's no humanity to it, you're just above or below a line.

People forget this. People are determined to forget this, because acknowledging it is painful. But it's so important that we do.

... who do not feel alive in many basic ways that mean a lot

That’s Austrian economics for you.

Smart move by Mitchell to omit (in his opinion) _why_ you have to feel it, as evidenced by the spread interpretation in the comments.

In my opinion, you have to “feel it” in order to do your best work.

However(!), and also in my opinion, you shouldn’t always strive to be in a position where you “feel it”. While it is important to spend most of one’s life feeling it / doing their best work in order to be fulfilled, the hazard of insatiably “feeling it” is that you can much more quickly burn out.

Working with passion fuels a level of intensity and emotional involvement that can take a while to recover from if you don’t get the result (read: success) you desired.

But yes, you do indeed mostly have to feel it.

Feeling some moderate positive emotion as a result of your work is not incompatible with 9 to 5 work.

The bigger problem is usually the opposite: nagging negative emotions, feeling annoyed, feeling contempt towards some parts of the work that one is bound to do. These emotions are unbecoming, so the psychological defenses hide them, as if there's no feeling at all. This is what "mind-numbing" work often is.

There's a related problem I see in academic review, but I think it applies far more broadly. The easy part of review is recognizing flaws. One should always acknowledge the flaws, but the authors tend to already be aware of them[0]. The difficult part is determining if the flaws undermine the research or if despite the limitations that the work pushes progress forward. (All but a few works are incremental)

I think this applies much more broadly because even in conversations people are quick to latch onto a subtle inconsequential detail and then dismiss the rest. Being able to read the words does not make one literate, it is the interpretation of them that does. I think this example is quite prolific with internet conversations, enough that we can circle back to sarreph's mention of this in their first sentence. But I think another great example was from this post from a week ago[1]. Most comments are responding to the headline, but many even looked at the post and missed the entire point (which isn't about work being interrupted).

[0] Authors may not acknowledge them in the work because the review process is too adversarial and such acknowledgements can be used as ammunition against them (thanks lazy reviewers ;), because solving those flaws is a good followup and they don't want to get scooped, or many other reasons.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44999373

Reviewing is also becoming an utter mess in hyped areas such as AI. It's unpaid, thankless work, where most of what you must evaluate is increasingly some gamed, partially AI-generated paper with strategically hidden aspects, rampant cherry picking, etc. Conference sizes are exploding. AAAI went from 15k submissions last year to 30k submissions, with 75k unique authors. There are close to 30k reviewers. It's becoming an assembly line factory with people not knowing each other any more (even in an anonymous review process, if you value the community, you behave differently). It's similar to what old professors lament when referring back to university 50 years ago. When groups were so small, profs knew individually the students. Then came the sausage factory model with 10x the students, students becoming just an ID number, reduction of oral exams in favor or written, gaming the rules more, increased cheating etc.

The academic conference situation will implode under its own weight. As more and more people enter, the quality of reviews suffers, there is less and less illusions about any form of duty, responsibility, honor etc. and it's all a game of turf wars, citations rings, just slipping through the cracks by submitting enormous numbers of papers and resubmitting in a few months those that get rejected, without even fixing the typos that the first reviewers pointed out. And observing this just makes the few who did care also become jaded and put in less energy. Just as you have people in college who want to put in the absolute minimum work in order to get the piece of paper, you have the same happening in academia. Pump out the most papers with the least works, and the reviewers are just an obstacle in that view.

Tell me about it... I almost didn't graduate because of this stupidity... I can say that the review process wasn't great when I started but there was a quick decline after GPT 3 came out. Everything became so short sighted and I've (and many others) even been screaming about this wall we were going to hit for years. We absolutely could have avoided this slowdown if we just understood you can put your eggs in more than one basket and stopped saying "fuck theorists". In betting on "scale is all you need" they destroyed the upstream research pipeline that got us to where we are today... And then we can't figure out that there'll be an exponential increase in papers if we keep adding more people, publish 5 papers a year, and reject 80% of them. How do you expect this to be sustainable?

I think at a minimum academia needs to start tracking abuse. Because right now, when we find plagiarism we hide it, usually just disappearing during blind review. These people should get a one year ban on first offense and a 5 year ban for every subsequent occurrence. Make it a citation network, and everyone you've co-authored with in the last year gets flagged for extra review. And FFS, let's not give best fucking paper of the year at the number one ML conference to a fucking intern who hacked the company you interned at. Not only is that just encouraging more highly unethical behavior, but how the fuck can you even trust the results of that paper? I love this field, but how did we get infiltrated by a cult?

Yeah, do not disagree with either of those statements.

you're not my supervisor

  > Working with passion fuels a level of intensity and emotional involvement that can take a while to recover from if you don’t get the result (read: success) you desired.

I'm reminded of a phrase: Passion is worth 10 IQ points.

The number of IQ points doesn't really matter but this is about feel. With passion you're much more likely to dig in. By digging in you're more likely to see subtle issues that can result in drastically different outcomes (the more complex something is, the more likely such issues exist). You care about the thing working and so you care about finding out when it doesn't work.

On the other hand, if you have no passion you just go through the motions. You spend less time thinking. It passes the tests? Okay great, let's move on, "it works, so who cares?" In this situation you care less about the thing working and more about getting the task done.

I feel like the second attitude is becoming much more common. I'm sure there are a ton of reasons why but I feel like one of these is that complexity has just exploded. An unfortunate fact is that you can make things too simple. Little errors compound to become big errors that are difficult to wrangle. I think we've gotten to a point where there's so much (often hidden) complexity that we are constantly being overwhelmed, making it harder to care, creating a dangerous feedback loop.

Every good problem solver knows that the best way to tackle a problem is to break it down into bite sized and simpler pieces. But the flip side of this is that every big problem is caused by the accumulation of many little problems. For some reason we have a much harder time thinking in this direction. For this reason I think we need to stress the importance of the little things[0]. It is also important to remember that when solving the big problem that solving each little problem is not enough. That only works if they are independent. You may want to start out treating them as such but that's why this tends to become an iterative process, because as you converge to solving the larger problem these hidden complexities start to reveal themselves. So solving small problems is a defensive strategy.

[0] This can easily be misread. I am not insisting that everyone be a perfectionist. What I've said is far easier said than done. Perfection does not exist, there is always something wrong. The question is much more about bounding that error and keeping it small. It is about recognizing these issues and keeping track of them. More important than solving problems is the recognition of them. After all, it is incredibly difficult to solve problems you don't know exist. By keeping track of these things you can better triage tasks. Even a few comments in the code stating what assumptions are made or stating the conditions that the code is expected to run on will save you tons of headaches in the future. A trivial amount of work in the moment can pay enormous dividends when given enough time.

I went through a longer quest, called "getting naturalized in another country".

Went through the grind of getting visa, then the work permit, then the different visa, then the short-term residence permit.

Changed jobs, had to go to the immigration department again, because these residence permits are tied to the employer.

Kept a spreadsheet with dates of each exit and entry.

Had to keep all my paperwork ducks in a row.

To be able to get married, I had to get a permit from a judge.

Got married and had to go through the immigration office again, as this changed the primary purpose of my stay yet again. The queue to the immigration office was so long that I had to come there at 2am (yes, 2 in the morning) to even have a chance to file my paperwork.

Still had to keep the spreadsheet with exit/entry dates, the printout was attached to each application.

Went to another city to pass the language exam to be able to get the long-term residence permit.

In a couple of years, applied for citizenship. Had to go visit my birth country and gather some more paperwork from there, get it translated.

All the while it all felt as if I was a student again and this was an important exam each and every time. Stressed. Constantly afraid that a document would be missing and I would need to start over.

Then finally they texted me. I went to collect the papers that certified that I now was the citizen of my new country, almost ten years after starting the quest. I could apply for my new shiny national ID. I now wasn't a second-class person anymore.

Upon leaving the government building, I felt nothing. I had expected that with all that stress and buildup, some kind of relief would come. But it never came. No relief, no joy, not a sausage.

I remember that the weather was miserable on that day.

It would help to know what your reason was to go through with that. Relief and joy can be more expected if it changes your life circumstances in a way that you were looking forward to. Something related to family etc. Easier travel to some places that you couldn't go before etc.

It did all of that and more.

However, I would say that when a battle lasts long enough, one might have no emotional resources left to feel the victory.

That also applies to TFA.

For me it's what I call the 'weekend test': Do I like tinkering with this thing enough that I'd want to play around with it on a weekend / in my own time, just for fun.

This needs to check a lot of boxes: is it easy and quick to setup, do I need some hard to obtain 'license key', does everything work out of box or at least is easy enough to fix, and most importantly: is it a joy to use (which is entirely subjective though).

If something doesn't pass this test then I also don't want to waste time with it at work. In a nutshell this is also why wheels should be reinvented over and over again, and if it's just for the sole reason that the new wheel feels better to just the person who reinvented it. Chances are other people will feel the same after trying the new wheel (on a weekend, hah) and start using it (or not and that's fine too), but in the end this is how innovation happens.

For as much as the author may get roasted for stating the obvious, I've often seen this "measure everything" mindset, coming from those you'd think should know better than that.

I've even seen this stupidity in myself sometimes. In a way it's funny how you can get so lost on the numbers that you forget about the thing.

Measuring and feeling are not mutually exclusive.

This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.

I wouldn’t normally even comment something like this about someone’s article, but I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me and I am worried that if we don’t point it out, we will lose our ability to spot nonsense like this and side step our critical thinking.

The “trick” is contrasting or relating something completely irrelevant to some sort of nonsensical or obvious “thought piece”.

I am sure this is some sort of named fallacy and someone else can explain it a lot more eloquently, but this is my attempt.

(Author of the linked blog post).

Look at my other posts and you'll see I'm not like an "influencer content" person. I purposely made this piece shallow to encourage more people to read it and discuss the core idea, rather than get distracted by specific examples or points.

I've blogged long enough on a personal level, done corporate PR long enough at a professional level, to know that the more words there are, the more people get bogged down in the details.

I plan to follow up this post with specific callouts and associating it directly with my work (both positively and negatively). But, for example, if I used Terraform as an example of something in this (hypothetically), people would focus in on arguing the merits of "feeling" Terraform. That's not the point.

The point is to think about what we're shipping.

I couldn't help but laugh when reading this, knowing that 80% of this thread would be picking apart any specific example if you provided one - completely missing any kind of "reading between the lines" message.

Thanks for your response.

My point isn't that you can't write whatever you want because of course you can.

The audience of my comment is the consumer of any online content to be careful about projecting too much into it.

We have a recent hire who comes from a background where a) the user base was much larger and b) metrics were the best way to understand outcomes.

Our company is smaller and earlier than that. I enjoy the focus on metrics, it's a good push for us, but sometimes you just have to do the obviously good thing for users without trying to build a metrics framework around it.

I totally agree, I wasn't trying to push the merits of metrics. I meant that feeling and metrics are not mutually exclusive and that is what the author was trying to claim.

> Measuring and feeling are not mutually exclusive.

They are not mutually exclusive, but they compete to a degree. If someone's time is mostly spent on what can be measured, they can't spend time on "common sense" or investigative work that is less easily tracked. At the end of they day, trying to measure everything makes as much sense as trying to document every line of code. (Most of this, naturally, also applies the other way around).

> This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.

> I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me

I think a lot of the shallowness is from blogs or HN being a public, persistent, broadcast written media. In a face to face conversation, you can generally follow up and share more specifics and nuance without fear of getting a bad reputation.

If anything I think the bias is the other way around, on the Internet whatever you write can get cherry-picked and framed to make you appear terrible, in person it's much easier to get a fair sample.

And here I was expecting a roast about how “A feeling.” is not a complete sentence.

Oh, i thought it was a satirical critique of how arbitrary promotion criteria can be. Turns out someone is seriously claiming that someone else "doesn't not feel the right way" about the work they do, and THAT is their core problem. Ha. Well, at least the author feels that they are feeling the right way, good for them I guess.

Too bad he didn’t feel like Hashicorp anymore. F#ing IBM.

He left before IBM. Also, based on public filings, long before IBM was even a suitor.

When you follow a cult/religion's instructions to the letter and still fail, this is the excuse every time. It's manipulative and unverifiable.

That's the negative side. The opposite is, which anyone who ran some kind of group activity or forum should have experience with, is when someone obnoxious plays rules lawyering to slip out of everything. In the end you just have to leave it at a vibes-based reasoning. Yes, it can be abused. The explicit, written rules variant can be abused in opposite ways. It's all tradeoffs.

I land on the point of the tradeoff spectrum where you have some "instructions" and rules, but it's also a "spirit of the rules" kind of thing, and someone has the means to exercise subjective judgment, instead of trying to fully eliminate subjectivity in favor of ever growing rules with ever growing exceptions that become a maze to navigate, and can become its own form of tyranny, especially if someone has the power to arbitrarily decide which set of rules to choose to apply for each case.

You can have the best processes and rules, if the people are bad. You can't compensate for that. And if you have good people, you can and should allow them some range of judgment.

This is one of the things that I’ve tried really hard to impress upon engineers new and old while working on various projects, and IMO it applies to just about every layer of the stack; ultimately everything flows up into the UX.

This vibe was pervasive at Apple and could be taken more or less for granted, but elsewhere it’s all over the place.

And, like, sure, there are projects and industries where this doesn’t matter. But giving a shit and feeling it can be a major differentiator.

The vibe WAS pervasive at Apple during Steve's time. He understood the importance of asking "what is this?"[0].

The current vibe at Apple is "we want you to be an obedient worker".

[0] https://systems-souls-society.com/what-is-this-the-case-for-...

I believe it. It had started to wane even by the time I left in 2015.

I know there are still a ton of good people there, but it's a way, way different company now.

The only thing you have to do is pay taxes and die. It does help to feel good about the project and the work, but it is not a requirement for a fulfilling life.

Looking back at most times I have felt horrible in the depth of adversity, resistance or burnout I realize those were the times of greatest potential for achievement, learning and growth. Those are the memorable chapters, the things that define my character. The times when I continued to grind, continued to push through and didn't give up because of feelings were the times when I actually accomplished something: raised a kid, bought a house, switched continents.

I think you are using different concepts of "feel good". "Feeling good" doesn't exclude adversity or resistance. But it should be resistance where you have reasonable grip on it, with some traction, and it's aiming towards something that you value. Neither trivial, nor so hard that you have no way of getting traction with it, being stuck on zero progress.

Happiness is basically equivalent to feeling steady (even if slow) progress in response to one's own effort towards valued goals.

I have often felt bad (or "didn't feel it" to quote this article) and it still turned out OK because I showed up and stuck with it.

I have delivered value, but at what cost? https://youtu.be/DYvhC_RdIwQ

So glad someone posted this. Their videos hit so close to home on the reality of the soul sucking drone work that is tech. Like a modern day office space sketch comedy.

Good thought, but corporations don't care, and a whole lot of folks that play the corporate game won't, either. Money will still be made. Careers will still be advanced.

It think it was Theodore Sturgeon that said "90% of everything is crap."

For myself, I enjoy what I do. I write software that I want to use, in a way that makes me feel good.

I have no illusions that I would be allowed to work like this, if I were still in the workforce, though.

there are pockets even in the corporate world where people are able to feel what they are doing

in my experience, those times have been with the most talented and productive people. perhaps they don't need the crutch of process

it is rare, and does not last forever. as teams scale up, this is gradually lost. regression to the mean?

leading with feeling is vulnerable. it can be very rewarding when met with like or very damaging when crushed under the corporate wheel

It's the same in other aspects of life too. Like where the cool bars are with the cool people. Over time it gets popular, overrun with average people and tourists. Then the cool people move their cool parties to some new, more obscure place and the cycle repeats. Same with online platforms.

The people in those pockets will have to use their discernment to figure out where the next pocket is located. But it can't be something that everyone can easily do.

Feels like a linkedin post

feels like a self-help book in the tiktok era

Feels like someone is still trying to copy and re-sell Steve Jobs. No one else gets what it takes maaaan.

Yes, and no.

Yes in the sense Kano refered to as 'delight' [1]. An unexpected or tacit feeling of quality in an interaction with a product.

No, because for whatever reason we sadly have become prone to spurious and unbridled emotion, making mountains out of molehills at the slightest friction. I sometimes feel what now passes as acceptable is what used to be borderline bipolar disorders.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model

I dunno. A good demo is all about the feeling it gives. One thing I got out of my adventures in startup land is how to go up on stage and demo some software that barely works and make it look like a million bucks.

At the last hackathon I went to I was sitting in the audience at the presentation at the end with one teammate while the other one was upstairs pounding away at last minute revisions. We were scheduled last but I still had to make excuses to the organizers.

He showed up with something that basically worked but I kept cool under pressure, made sure I didn't commit to anything until I was sure about it, and used good showmanship. We were all shocked when we won the 'player's choice' award. Mind you, it helped that he was experienced at writing platformers in Unity and the other student could draw, but thanks to my showmanship people saw everything that didn't worked and didn't notice the bugs and people were left with the impression that 'wow that looked like a polished game' whereas the main author said 'I don't think I'd want to play it' afterwards. My continuous push towards a 'minimum viable product' combined with their push to make something that looked polish really helped that showmanship work.

I love this point. It's also one of the hardest things to do as a product person if you're not the typical user.

It's hard to feel the feelings of many types of users.

That difficulty is quite obvious, which is why ineffective product people only seem have a single customer in mind: themselves. They slip in conversation easily to “I” language without realizing it.

Devs who work on customer-reported tickets end up knowing a lot more about customer needs than some of the pms I have worked with.

Think most people are too numb / desensitized to feel anything (which is by design)

Unfortunately, the tech industry has completely lost touch with anything resembling this. It's a cold machine now; I'd call it soulless but I think that gives it too much animation.

Really, I think we’re all talking around some notion of beauty here. Not in the sense of personal vanity, but more of a sense of internal cohesiveness.

Also, the feeling he’s referring to is what sold me on Ghostty. It was clear that he’d thought quite a bit about good defaults. Performance is great without having to tweak anything. In a way, I love that this sort of thing cannot be qualified, because it means that it cannot be commoditized or democratized. It either connects with someone, or it doesn’t.

I feel it when using Ghostty. So nice.

As a neuro divergent person, I usually only feel relieved when I can mark a task as complete.

Doing my taxes felt the same as getting a degree and publishing a book.

> Our work evokes a feeling. The feeling matters. The feeling is part of the work. The desired feeling is part of the requirements.

I do share this ambition. In my own metric, I was as successful as it gets when “the desired feeling” is achieved. But I often have the impression that others around me don’t share this, or do so to a lesser degree. However, that doesn’t stop me one bit.

I think that shows if you are a product person. And product people are a rare breed. Within them, you will need to find someone who could do or understand business, operation, sales and marketing. Something every successful entrepreneur will eventually acquired.

TFW a developer discovers UX.

Haven’t felt it in so long, but it’s what keeps the bills paid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy4mXZN1Zzk

I wish we could turn off the self help twitter hybrid posts that we're getting more and more often in HACKER news.

I wouldn't get anything done.

nuf said :) https://open.spotify.com/track/3cbV252akVZInSvJk7jAYX?si=86a...

feeling is something developed by evolution, not by accident

my best guess is that it is far easier to deeply feel complex concepts rather than to arrive to similar conclusions purely based on reason/logic

> When you feel it, you know. The feature makes you smile when you use it. It fits right in, like it was always meant to be there. You want to use it again. You want to tell people about it. This is the difference. This is what metrics, specifications, and demos miss.

Totally absurd! The metrics and specifications are what make all of that possible.

This feels like it was written for execs and managers who bury their heads in the sand when they're overwhelmed.

As sure as fuck don't. Just keep the paychecks coming.

Whenever my logic said one thing and my gut feeling told me different, I used to ignore my gut. This would more often than not cause some sort of backlash I could not possibly have foreseen. Sometimes immediately, sometimes several days later.

A year or so ago I got tired of this, started doing the opposite, and I will never go back.

Feelings overall are underrated.

Vibe coding

Yes, absolutely true. And this fact will be used against you.

Two sides of the same coin. Humans have an internal need to see that their work output is valuable and they are useful to society/community. This is not some unrealistic expectation. For most of history, it was fairly easy to see how one's work directly results in value. Farming, butchering animals, making clothes and shoes, paving roads or building houses or whatever it may be. People could feel satisfaction of jobs well done, applying their experience and being valued for it. It is normal. Pointless drudgery eats away at one's soul and leads to burnout, much more than simply being "overworked". If much of your work-related mental energy goes towards timing when to jump ship before it sinks, that won't be sustainable. Working on some pointless project that you know will get axed, but for some internal politics reason it has to remain up and running for a few more months to get someone promoted before killing it, etc.

When people say that a job is a job, and you wouldn't get paid for it if it was enjoyable, it's just not right. If you produce value, you do deserve the pay, it's not supposed to be compensation for being miserable.

On the flipside, when MBAs internalize this message, what they take away is that "passion" and "motivation" makes employees more productive and prone to put in extra effort. So they come up with the genius idea to test whether you are "passionate" before hiring you. Resulting in a dreaded and ugly song and dance ritual where you have to exaggerate your passion and talk in unrealistic language, and grifters and smoothtalkers win in that.

That's not the kind of passion that is needed, the outwardly, enthusiastic-glowing passion. Just something where you feel that it's neat, it's a net positive for the world even if small, and you left the world a bit better when you go to sleep at night compared to when you woke up in the morning. Even extra money can't compensate for that in the long term (short term yes).

But I feel depressed every time I use Terraform. I see why it is useful, good etc. But I just enjoy it least of all the programming activities.

Pulumi isn't much better. I feel IaC done that way isn't the way we will settle on long term.

To connect the dots, Mitchell is the creator of terraform. And honestly, I kind of feel the same. I think it points out that even if you "feel" it as the creator, that doesn't mean others will feel the same way, necessarily.

Does my side project provide any hope?

https://peace.mk/blog/checkpoint/

(old blog post, but I'm slow in making progress)

FWIW: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1938066378185183279

With Terraform I have felt I'm fighting it at times but I also understand the reasons.

They left the role of CTO many years ago, then became an IC again, and then left, safe to assume he wasn’t feeling it either.

I get the feeing you're looking at this through the specific lens of a programmer. Terraform isn't made for programmers - you'll miss all the flexibility a real language gives you. It's made for ops people who deal with wrangling a whole bunch of different types of systems with different API's and languages and just need some way to standardize the management of disparate systems, whatever counts as "infrastructure".

The state file thing gets a relatively large part of the hate but it's that and the limitations of the DSL that make the DAG possible and useful. Pulumi and all the other wrappers don't solve this, though they can plausibly solve the "closer to programming" problem and I'm sure that has a valid audience.

I guess what I'm saying is, I think it'll stick around and we will in fact settle on it for a large part of operational work. I'll add that I also think k8s should die a quiet death and _that_ will be seen in retrospect as a necessary step to something better.

Is there anybody who enjoys any form of configuration management? It feels like the most joyless of all technical activities, like filling a tax form.

Please try some Cloudformation then reflect and reevaluate.

Not a popular opinion I know, but I really like writing Terraform in HCL2. Like, if I’d invented this, it’d give me the feels and I’d want to share it.

When you eventually understand the constraints and learn to work with it. A zen moment :D

I quit a $400k+ job to get away from IaC. I loath yaml. More and more, my day was filled with "you have an error on line 1, good luck." It was more k8s than tf, but I get the same sneer on my face when messing with tf.

I refuse to let such a shitty experience be what defines my day.

I was hoping pulumi would help. Haven't used it yet, but it is sad to hear it doesn't live up to the hype.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com