Hacker News Reader

Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea what you mean, could you be more specific?

I believe the point is that while the current generation whines about any sort of adversity, earlier generations sucked it up and enjoyed the challenge.

"Back in my day we built our heat equation solvers on punched cards, and had to manually draw the resulting graph based on the output. Nowadays you whippersnappers complain when scipy doesn't have a built in heat equation solver, and you are forced to manually write conjugate gradient."

while the current generation whines about any sort of adversity, earlier generations sucked it up and enjoyed the challenge.

Or... we could reverse which side we're being charitable to:

while the current generation more often demands appropriate behavior, earlier generations just "sucked it up" because they wouldn't have had establishment support if they had spoken up. Millions of female/minority employees with tremendous potential (and the companies that could have employed/promoted them) lost out.

The principle of charity means applying a charitable interpretation to whoever's argument you are attempting to understand, which is what I did.

As a result, I correctly interpreted his argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6096457

You did not.

I wasn't taking exception with your interpretation but with the argument itself.

Maybe that was the point but it is a pretty lousy one. The ones that stayed and thrived may have 'sucked it up and enjoyed the challenge' but how many bright capable people hated it and were made miserable or left (perhaps the whole industry or even the workforce).

Calling it a "challenge" is charitable. A "challenge" is a complex engineering problem that yields rewards for solving it. What is described in the article is a "roadblock" or "meaningless bullshit"--stuff that doesn't make you better for having dealt with it and stuff you shouldn't have to deal with as an employee.

E.g. if you've got a boss you dumps his or her marital problems on you, dealing with that isn't a "challenge."

I was on my mobile, but yes this is what I meant

Reply on news.ycombinator.com