The Case For Working With Your Hands | Hacker News Reader

The Case For Working With Your Hands

nytimes.com

101 pointsmattyb38 comments

I started growing a garden and only afterward realized that the reason I did it was to work with my hands. I honestly believe that there's a fundamental (perhaps evolutionary) drive to build things and which originates from these meaty paws. We may see and hear the world, but through touch we shape it.

"I once accidentally dropped a feeler gauge down into the crankcase of a Kawasaki Ninja that was practically brand new, while performing its first scheduled valve adjustment. I escaped a complete tear-down of the motor only through an operation that involved the use of a stethoscope, another pair of trusted hands and the sort of concentration we associate with a bomb squad. When finally I laid my fingers on that feeler gauge, I felt as if I had cheated death. I don’t remember ever feeling so alive as in the hours that followed."

Was I the only who smiled when they read this?

Labor has become so specialized that individual workers are too often disconnected from the final product or outcome. It's hard to remain motivated and engaged under such conditions.

I'm not an entrepreneurial hacker like so many on this site (wish I was). My job offers great opportunities to craft creative solutions to interesting technical problems, but I am far too disconnected from those who will ultimately benefit from my efforts. This disconnectedness really takes the interestingness out of solving interesting problems.

By the way, if anyone knows of a list of manual trades well suited to hackers, please post it here.

Recommended reading: Wendell Berry: _What Are People For?_

Second the book recommendation. Great title to read for HN denizens, I think.

It's good to know that I'm not the only geek who occassionally dreams of being a carpenter or mechanic.

Before computers came about, the geeks were carpenters and mechanics. I find I get along well with both types of people and we usually have lots to talk about.

Carpenters, mechanics, electricians, ham radio enthusiasts... hackers have a long and distinguished heritage. Makers and doers.

You forgot the land surveyors and cartographers ;-) Great article, BTW. If only I had a hundred upvotes to give...

Hackers: makers, doers... and painters ;-)

Yup. No point in limiting yourself to just one set of tools ;).

I own a cleantech company, mainly small utility photovoltaics, in Australia a tradesman (a tradie) working with solar energy earns a minimum of $70Kpa (US$ 54K) and if he owns a company which employs 6 other tradies, he will earn over $1 million a year.

In Australia, the marketer even have a term CABs (cashed up bogans) a bogan is similar to a urban redneck.

I have often heard complaints from very high level government officials, that every time they increase the government funding of solar energy, all that happens is the tradies increase their prices.

In Australia, similar to many European pays up to 75% of the cost of installing solar energy equipment.

Richard Hayes Carbon Free Solutions

I find it interesting to see these memes questioning basic assumptions about the economic structure of our society. I think many of us just assumed someone else had figured it out, that all of those economists and politicians calling for more "knowledge workers" knew more than we did. Or assumed that Wall Street knew things we didn't, which explained why they could offer credit to people who used to be bad risks but now, suddenly, were not. Or that salaries for people with a college degree could continue to increase even as the number of college graduates exploded.

Nobody trusts any of those institutions any more. It will be interesting to see how people's behavior will change with this changed outlook.

Having said that, I think I am one of the few people actually happier with abstractions than actual things. Shop class projects generally ended in tears for me. So, I am fine with many people leaving to engage in more hands-on professions, leaving more "knowledge work" for me. :)

It's not as simple as "knowledge work" tho'. E.g. a doctor has a lot of knowledge, but his services have to be performed in person, he's not a knowledge worker like a programmer is. Similarly an artist is primarily a symbol manipulator too - her job can be done from anywhere, but there's no easily quantifiable body of knowledge or "hard skills" behind it.

I would put the doctors with the mechanics. Same kind of real world diagnostics and problem solving, where criteria for success or failure are clear and easily observable.

The scare-quotes-knowledge-worker is someone who never gets that kind of clear, observable criteria to know if she really did a good job, or just played the office politics well.

My friend sent me this article this afternoon because I work with my hands. I dropped out of comp sci/engineering before I finished college because I decided I wanted to make 'real' things not just stare at a screen all day, or draft (on paper) as new engineering grads were expected to do back then.

Since then I use a computer as much as anyone running a business does, but the scope of what you can do with a computer these days is so much larger now.

I am programming now so I can hack on my homemade CNC machines which are in my opinion just magical.

> This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning

Now that's a very eloquent description of bullshit-artistry.

The title is a little off. From the article: "The work is sometimes frustrating . . . And it frequently requires complex thinking." Sound familiar?

What is really being discussed is the line where work becomes about craftsmanship. As software hackers, this is the space where I'll bet most of us prefer to operate. Not mindlessly churning out code to some spec, but rather building that piece of code that elegantly solves the problem presented to us by the user.

That preference is one of the reasons I think many hackers feel a lack of satisfaction from standard IT cubicle jobs. I'm not saying you can't find that challenge and reward (dare I say the flow of code) working as a corporate IT person, but surely corporate IT doesn't do much to encourage that experience.

I suspect that's why (at least in this forum), so many of us are interested in startups or extracting a living from software away from the cubicle (or, maybe I should say, from a cubicle not owned by us).

I found myself thinking of the ways in which programmers have tried to make programming more like working with real world, erm, objects, over the years.

I think that anybody who resonates with what this author talks about should consider volunteering with Habitat for Humanity. As a software developer by day and a volunteer on the weekends, I find that doing manual labor building a house for a family that needs one is a great way to work off stress. You also get a sense of accomplishment not only in the work that has been done but in the fact that you've helped the less fortunate with your skills and labor.

When I was in high school and college I worked for a local construction supply company unloading railroad cars of bulk and bagged stone 'by hand.' It was back breaking work to put it lightly.

But it contributed to my education in more ways than one.

Last summer I was asked by the same company to consult, advise and implement a complete conversion of their accounting and information management systems. I did and it went well. They paid me more for that work than I ever made working in the yard.

As much as I like working with my hands, I'd rather get paid for using my mind than for using my back.

This is definitely a well-written essay. I also have a favorite passage:

"There probably aren’t many jobs that can be reduced to rule-following and still be done well. But in many jobs there is an attempt to do just this, and the perversity of it may go unnoticed by those who design the work process. ... you put the manual away and consider the facts before you. You do this because ultimately you are responsible to the motorcycle and its owner, not to some procedure."

There lies the crux of the problem. Here is a man dedicated to good work. The people who design the work flow processes know that they do not always fit the actual world. The point is to get it right enough of the time to keep enough customers happy so that growth targets for the quarter or year are met. When you have tens of thousands or millions of customers, you can do very well by getting it right 80% of the time. The underlying capital serves as a cushion for the rest of the cases.

The lone mechanic has to prioritize keeping his customers happy if he wants to stay in business for long. And that's exactly how the author likes it.

I code all day. I highly recommend chopping wood and demolition work.

I agree. If you buy a fixer-upper house, you have an opportunity to get your fill of demolition work and wood chopping through sweat equity. I swear our house helps keeps me in shape.

[Edit] : From my home improvement work, I started practicing carpentry using both power and hand tools. A bench plane can be a lot of fun to use.

Totally agree! I just remodeled our kitchen; tore walls down, built news ones up, and installed new cabinets and countertops. It was oddly fun and exhilarating and I never thought it would be. I felt a sense of accomplishment that I had not experienced in quite a while at my day job as a software developer. I don't know, I think I did a pretty good job at the remodeling and I keep thinking about doing it for other people and going into business for myself. Then I wake up and realize I've only done it once and that doesn't make me a master carpenter/installer. But I probably will continue down this path and see where it leads me.

A few years ago, after my grandfather passed, my grandmother asked myself and a few other men in the family to chop wood for her heater for winter.

Got up an early fall Sunday morning and we got to it. We were done before noon and walked into her kitchen where she homemade pancakes, biscuits, and omelets at the ready. I'll never forget the satisfied exhaustion and sweet smell and taste of breakfast that morning.

Thing is, it doesn’t even have to be something intensely physical like chopping wood or landing crabs. I code all day, but I come home and enjoy cooking. Not only do I get healthier food out of it, but there’s the satisfaction of producing something deliberately physical that my friends and I can enjoy for what it is.

Or washing up and cleaning.

Having grown up working on a wheat farm as a youngster, a significant fraction of my emotional energy was devoted to getting out of that. However, this is all relative. While we worked with our hands in the sense that the author means, we did it with machinery. My grandfather farmed using horses. I know he thought that working with horses was "closer to truth" than driving a tractor. I am sure that my Dad would not want to go back.

So we no longer gap our own spark plugs, fix our own broken rear springs, replace our own tires, weld our own truck beds. Has something gone out of the world? Yes. Is the answer to teach every city kid how to use a pair of pliers? Can't hurt, but that does not lead to an appreciation of the fullness of a life based manual labor.

"Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?"

Maybe this is why Obama was so fond of Rahm Emanuel (who famously lost a middle finger to a meat slicer).

I copied this exact sentence out while reading, intending to post it here. Something about this and the notion of a fundamental thoughtfulness tied to real perception and physical habit struck me as the most interesting and compelling aspect of the article. I grew up in a DIY household, and now that I've lived on my own for 10+ years, I still do all of my own mechanical work: cars, bikes, guitars, electrical, plumbing, you name it; I'll fix it until it's really broke and then fix it until it's fixed. I don't do yard work or menial manual labor, though, as I find that tedious and soul-sucking. Anyway, I've always assumed my slow, and careful, habits and thought process were merely genetic. But now I wonder if maybe having gotten a few crushed fingers over the years, and had a few jobs that ended up taking far longer than they should have been due to early mistakes in the process, don't have some share of the responsibility for the way I think.

What a wonderful, well-written article. Thanks for the submission. Peace.

Also, the article vividly describes the moral dilemma common in corporate institutions of being forced to say or do one thing, while acting otherwise for survival.

Just one of the great passages in the article:

"I was actually told this by the trainer, Monica, as she stood before a whiteboard, diagramming an abstract. Monica seemed a perfectly sensible person and gave no outward signs of suffering delusions. She didn’t insist too much on what she was telling us, and it became clear she was in a position similar to that of a veteran Soviet bureaucrat who must work on two levels at once: reality and official ideology."

I'm pretty terrible at working with my hands in the manner described, but this was one of the most enjoyable, well-written and rhetorically adroit articles I have ever seen linked on HN.

It's been a long while since I read it, but Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance hits on some of the same issues.

It looks like the author is aware of the similarity. His book this was adapted from is titled "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work", no doubt a reference to the latter part of the title of Pirsig's novel "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values".

complimentary video to add to this article:

http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...

(video is more than about "working with hands", but reminiscence of repeated manual work that many people enjoy)

Nice! Thanks.

Finds like this keep me coming to HN. Thank you. I found an amazon link for the book it is extracted from:

http://www.amazon.com/Shop-Class-Soulcraft-Inquiry-Value/dp/...

I also recommend de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work to those who enjoyed it. I read it in a single sitting.

http://www.amazon.com/Pleasures-Sorrows-Work-Alain-Botton/dp...

And blessedly, I didn't have to negotiate any subscribe forms at nytimes.com.

I completely agree. That is why I started sewing handbags. It was really refreshing to do this kind of work after working in front of a computer all day. I have not used the sewing machine in almost a year, and I am really feeling the need to sew again.

You can see the bags here: http://lucasrockwell.etsy.com

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