People love to work hard | Hacker News Reader

People love to work hard

anildash.com

56 pointszdw52 comments

People love to work hard on goals they're excited about, when the work feels meaningful, when they know how to clearly make progress on the task, when there's a shape to the work and a clear criteria for completion, when some combination of the financial and psychological rewards of the work are better than they'd get doing something else in the same time.

People hate work that feels undervalued, that's not clearly defined, that feels like an endless churn with no end in sight, when harder work does not turn into better results for them.

AI it feels like is making the latter far more common than the former.

> “…feels like an endless churn with no end in sight…”

Ha! Like trying to get Claude to make an interactive Marimo notebook.

You have good timing. Earlier today we announced an agent skill that drops Claude into a running marimo notebook session, allowing it to run code in the marimo kernel (read variables, test logic, get feedback when errors like multiple definitions are hit, add and remove cells, manipulate UI elements ...):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47678844

I definitely was channeling my feelings when yelling at Cursor/Claude for the umpteenth time to do what I asked it to do or so help me...

Play. People love to play.

The culturally assigned meaning to work seems more like a social coercion.

If given the choice, including choice in mind, then people will likely choose community and play.

This. So many people are coerced to wear a straitjacket, run the treadmill, and do the rat race, conditioned that "hey work is life, life is work" and is divided into workweek and weekend. For some it may work well, if their job aligns with their interests and passions. Many others are in it with only half their heart. They may show better productivity metrics to the manager class, but what they gain there is lost in 'quality of service' to society. You get automatons at the desk, not interested to handle your edge case. But my, are they 'productive' for the bottom line.

Play is type 1 fun: fun in the moment.

People also love type 2 fun. It's not fun in the moment, but you're happy that you did it.

If your work is type 1, more power to you. A lot more falls under type 2's umbrella. I find writing to be type 2 more often than not. Making complicated designs is often not fun in the moment. I like exercise, but sprint workouts are type 2.

You're forgetting Type 3 Activities, which are neither fun at the time, nor afterwards on reflection.

League of Legends players are very familiar with type 3 activities.

A complete accounting of fun types has to include Type 0 fun as well: fun when it's happening, but not fun later. Drugs, gambling, crime, and most traditional vices fall in this category.

And yet they are a type of fun!

I don't necessarily disagree with the premise here, but the other makes the claim that people love to work hard based on their experience founding startups. People who gravitate towards that undoubtedly like to work hard, seems like sample bias.

Counter argument to that is that startups are the few (sole?) Type of modern corporation that set up the environment and incentives properly to foster hard, rewarding work.

Perhaps everyone would work just as hard but normal companies just dont foster that by, as the author says, "spending more time strategizing against their employees than their competitors".

Maybe your thinking is subject to a survivor bias, where you think only the people you see working hard are capable of hard work, when the rest were too but had it crushed by their employers

Yes, I like to work hard. But not for 8h a day, 365 days per year and for 40-50 years.

Yeah. And you could be extremely productive in less time than that if the environment and incentives were alligned in a healthy way. This is congruent with the point of the article

Agree. Work hard, but also family hard, “friend” hard, play hard, and in general just live hard.

Edit: and no one likes to work hard for peanuts or under threat of being fired

I think you might agree with the article if you read it.

“People” do not love to work hard. Some people love to work hard. There are enough people that love to work hard to fill your small startup. There are not enough people who love to work hard to fill the economy. Only someone who has had the privilege of working in well-paid technology companies could write this article. People work to survive.

If you’re a startup founder, and your employees aren’t working hard, it is a failing of the founder to pick the right people and create the right environment, but that covers less than 1% of the economy. The other 99% aren’t working hard because they just want to go home and be with the people they love instead of generating shareholder value. No amount of goal sharing will change that.

People love to say they are working hard. 9/10 times they are not.

It is culturally important (at this point in time) to be "working hard" and "busy".

Interesting callout. I've worked with people at the top of their organization who put substantial effort into the 'show' of working hard. To the point that their behavior basically was just rude to everyone under them. Blowing off emails and slack messages that would have been trivial to keep moving for days in order to maintain the illusion.

People don't love to work hard per se. Sisyphus works hard. A prisoner in a labor camp works hard. They don't love it.

What people love is purpose and agency. They love to do what they feel is right, and / or what they enjoy doing. They love to feel that they make a difference. This is why volunteers work hard. This is why the gamedev industry, known for low pay and long hours, never experiences a lack of applicants. This is why I prefer to work for startups.

It looks easy: just give your employees a purpose, and let them go on! But if your purpose, as a founder, or as a CxO, is to make the most money until it becomes clear that what you're doing is humbug, the people you will attract will likely be inspired by a similar purpose.

This is what the article says yes

> The simple reason for that shared trait is that all of those teams were comprised of groups of people with a few key things in common:

> A clearly understood goal > A common set of values in pursuit of that goal

The only time when i have seen this to be true is when people don't have to work for money and when they believe that their basic needs (maslow's hierarchy's bottom 2 layers) have been taken care of forever (FIRE). That's when they truly work for a shared set of goals/values

Which organizations had those shared goals and actions?

In the charity/non-profit space a lot of organizations are led and operated by retirees and others for whom money is a solved problem. And they are rife with infighting, politics and dispute.

this...

i work for a community-focused nonprofit, but the middle managers are ineffectual and problematic, and the c-levels aren't clueful enough to realize the toxicity being created below them (plus are too obsessed with bolstering their own careers to care).

i'm tired of it, despite truly believing in the org's mission.

AI written article that pushes twisted agenda.

I am pretty sure majority of people would not love to work hard if they didn't have to. There are exceptions for everything but don't confuse people who are doing something they like that others consider work. And I very much doubt most peoples' life passion is working on some tech startup.

Very much agreed. I’ve found most large companies so dysfunctional that there really is no way to or reason to work hard. At the end of the day everything that matters is controlled by other people somewhere else who make strange decisions. These large companies rarely let you use your own judgement to decide what to work on and often don’t have their own ideas sorted out enough for you to work uninterrupted on.

So while I find it significantly more satisfying to have actual work to work on, I don’t blame myself for being lasy when the real issue is the extreme amount of organisational dysfunction above that I have no control over.

> everything that matters is controlled by other people somewhere else who make strange decisions

This is a very interesting take and I think you're on to something. Might all this friction simply be a matter of not understanding or not agreeing with the decisions being made?

At least in my experience. Most large companies have something that's working quite well and brings in all the money, which means your particular product or feature doesn't really matter. Plenty of times I've spent up to 6 months building a feature only for some upper management or disagreement somewhere result in the whole thing never being released. But it doesn't matter because my 6 months of wages don't really matter much in the companies big picture which is still on track.

So I don't sweat about getting work out as fast as possible when immense waste happens that I don't have control over. If I was in a very small company where I had reason to care and control over things, I'd be far more incentivized to work harder.

> If I was in a very small company where I had reason to care and control over things, I'd be far more incentivized to work harder.

Exactly. This is the point being missed by the people saying that only some people want to work hard and they go to startups. Everyone would if they were closer to the stakes of their work (impact, decision making, accountability, authority etc)

Not being a stakeholder in them yeah. Which doesnt even necessitate power, but even just the right to be informed and kept abreast of them. The author makes this point in the article

This is very spot on in my experience.

People have different priorities, different purposes, and different passions. Maybe a success is as simple as to build a team that has some overlaps of these things.

I love to explore, I don't love to work, and I hate to work for someone dumber than me.

The work experience I've had was that CEO's/Founders are genuine retarded when it comes to knowing things about their own company, let alone the industry.

When there's a gap, they hire someone to do the work for them.

This doesn't apply to all leaders, but definitely to most.

...because they love to explore, and running a company is work. So they hire someone to relegate it to them!

I love to work hard on my projects. I don't love to work hard for someone who underpays me for things I don't care about.

Author should spend less time founding startups and more time working in government, then come back and post a retraction.

Takeaway from the comments is that "work hard" is ill-defined and there's no effort done to fix that

Working hard means lots of hours paid out of owners' pockets.

Working fast and avoiding work means short time-to-market.

I recommend reading about the concept of alienation in Marx and Marcuse. They argue that it’s systematically produced, which I can’t prove, but just the observation that it exists, is very insightful.

Nah, this is an advertisement for the toxic work culture in countries where people get pushed to live to work, make the workplace the reason of their existence, know noone outside work.

In most places around the planet, if given the option, most people will work to live, not live to work.

That purpose and passion will mean nothing when the time to lie down on the place of eternal rest comes.

Lack of imagination and vision? Maybe, I rather have it that way.

I struggle with the lack of possibility that others might exist who have different preferences and experiences.

I enjoy working hard on problems that most would label as miserable. Not just computer problems. The money is genuinely not that important to me. A Porsche would only get me into trouble faster. I don't desire that kind of status game energy in my life anymore. I used to but not anymore. I've been inside these fancy houses. It's not appealing to me at all. Infrasonic room modes are not my jam.

Solving problems in 2 days that an entire development team couldn't solve in 2 months is far more of an adrenaline rush for me. No amount of money can buy this. You have to bust your ass and live it every day to be able to do it. Disrupting an entire entrenched power hierarchy with one cheeky pull request is peak happiness for me. I enjoy getting management riled up regarding the apparent productivity disparity between their full-time W2 employment pool and the one cowboy 1099 who works barely 3 hours per week.

Nah, it's not that simple.

Work is an amazing place to bond with people, if you all enjoy the work and find value in it. I'm still friends with a bunch of folks I met in 2007 when we all managed the 3rd level infra for a bank. We meet for beers, we go to each other's houses, we're best men at each other's weddings. Just yesterday evening I inter-continentally called one of them for a catchup.

Can it be toxic? Of course! Is it always toxic? Don't be silly.

I often wonder if we should create company shuffling app, to improve coworker matching. Some of my colleagues hate me because "I work too much", I hate them because "they fake work".

I don't think it's is quite right. If you looked at two groups, one a group of office workers who earn a lot, but spend the day pretending to be busy in the office, and another group who earns less, works hard, but does something they find very meaningful and important to their ethics, I'm sure you would find the group doing meaningful work has higher satisfaction than the group clicking aimlessly around jira while watching the clock.

Don't look at two groups, it's not a duality.

Working hard becomes ... acceptable if you have some sort of individually desirable outcome. That can be results, values - it also can be money.

Working 100 hour weeks for minimum wage as a quasi-appliance? Very few outcomes are worth that. That's 'Factory worker, ca. 1890' territory.

Working 80 hours a week for little pay, but with a goal that supersedes your own ego? Sure, there are people like that. 'Médecins Sans Frontières' come to mind.

Working 60 hour weeks for a small wage, with own agency? Now we are looking at a different equation. That's every small business owner, ever, and most good team leads.

Working 40 hour weeks at a sensible rate, desirable outcomes, taking charge, with agency? People will kick in your door to work for you.

Now add relational positioning ('yeah, my job is bullshit, but I could earn less for more meaningful work'), and it gets chaotic pretty quickly. Humans often sacrifice 'meaning' for being 'ahead of that other guy'. That's why 100k Jira clicking jobs exist with people still being happy about it.

I kind of agree that its not eithet/or, but:

> and another group who earns less, works hard, but does something they find very meaningful and important to their ethics

It is very rare, in my experience, to find this in tech careers. I don't know why - perhaps its something structural about the uses to which technology is put, and the disconnect with personal values and/or work ethic.

1. In tech, large companies tend to pay much better, which means that people flock there. In a large company you have little control over your work and you simply have to do what your boss tells you to do whether you agree with it or not. This quickly demotivates anyone who has any creativity.

2. Tech work is very lonely while requiring communication skills. You sit there all day long staring at the screen, once in a while replying to official-sounding Slack messages from people you wouldn't recognize in real life. In contrast, there are jobs where you're in a small group, and while your hands are busy, there are endless opportunities for conversation.

3. Your effort has zero correlation with reward - the effects of your work are often extremely abstract, especially if you're doing background work that doesn't pump out features, and managers rarely reward effort with salary bumps.

every company with this culture invariably fucks their employees over, it’s inevitable if you think about it

Enron was lauded for its intense work culture and competitiveness.

"I’ve helped found six companies in my life, and been involved in the start of a handful of other startups and nonprofits, and literally every single one was full of people who love to work hard"

lol, no offense, but if you helped found the company this pretty much excludes any impartial view of what your employees actually might feel, and i say this as a founder myself.

it's a wonderful thing to have a team that is on board with you and the mission, but at the end of the day they just want to go home and relax and you want to work on your baby.

that's not to say people are lazy by any means, just don't drink the coolaid too hard. even if i'm working for someone else i'm using my hard work to optimize my free time not putting in extra work unless i'm getting paid for it.

Wow, fresh take. Not.

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