> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream.
I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too.
I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career.
I like the Integrity part, too. That seems to be something that's missing (from most vocations), these days. One of the reasons that I stuck with my last job for so long, was because the people I worked with, and for, had Integrity, and that's pretty important to me.
steve_adams_86 1 minutes ago [-]
> and that's pretty important to me
The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble.
I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject misery because of this. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but a large part of the problem was working with people who had very little integrity. They were great at masking it and presenting a different persona, but ultimately, we did bad things to people and made filthy money. I don't miss anything about it.
an0malous 5 minutes ago [-]
This is conflated by the fact that most people start to enjoy things that give them a lot of money and prestige. Otherwise everyone would be in playing sports and making art, the things kids do before they care about money and prestige
UncleOxidant 40 minutes ago [-]
> I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career.
Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have anymore. There's a certain kind of integrity in that as well.
draftsman 24 minutes ago [-]
Do you find joy in using LLMs to write software? I tried using Claude/Cursor/CodeX/etc. for personal projects and experimentation, and I found no joy in it. I learned nothing, and when my MVPs were complete, I only had a shallow understanding of how the code that powered them worked.
skinfaxi 2 minutes ago [-]
I'm curious of the places you've found joy while writing software traditionally. For me, it has been in reasoning about the system, debugging issues, and discovering what works. The iterative process of eventually coming to a more complete understanding, as you stand on and build off of your prior understanding.
All of those elements are present for me while using AI to augment my output. I have started using voice to interact with my coding harness though and I think that has maybe influenced my opinion. I also don't let things go fully autonomously and look at the diffs along the way.
weinzierl 1 hours ago [-]
This is from 1880 and reminds me of something Dostoyevsky had written 14 years before. His quip in The Gambler was even more extreme because he spoke about working hard and saving every penny for generations with the subtext being that it makes everyone miserable.
Michelangelo11 1 hours ago [-]
> Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.
Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do."
Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.
ahartmetz 59 minutes ago [-]
For all non-Dijkstra-level people, I guess that means "Do only what you are particularly good at".
fellowniusmonk 41 minutes ago [-]
I could never do anything, I could talk fancy and bullshit and could come up with all kinds of great ideas as an ideas guy.
Nothing useful.
So I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it even though, like the protagonist in Gattica (with whom I share other similarities), I had to work twice as hard and spend all my off hours obsessed with it because my nature worked against me.
While others with this natural prediliction could spend all their time in type 1 thinking I had to live in type 2.
But it was a success, and I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really, outside of maybe some complex CFO roles, executive roles are by far the easiest roles at existing profitable companies. I suspect csuite positions are actually the roles most secretly replaced by Ai already.
The hardest thing is to know what's your best fit. Any advice?
adrianwaj 56 seconds ago [-]
[delayed]
doug_durham 36 minutes ago [-]
What do you find yourself gravitating to? What part of your job comes easiest? That things are easy to you that other’s find difficult? What do you spend time learning more about even when you don’t have to? Those are directional. For me the first time I started writing code I knew that’s what I’d need to do for a living.
anonym29 2 hours ago [-]
A lot of pop-psychology doesn't hold up when subject to empirical review, but OCEAN / "Big 5" does, and it's probably a decent starting point.
E.g. if you are low in extraversion and agreeableness, you probably wouldn't make a good nurse or waiter, but you might not make a bad lawyer or engineer.
whiplash451 2 hours ago [-]
> low in extraversion and agreeableness
I don’t know that these are awesome features for an engineer. There’s a big unsaid cost to this in my experience
derektank 1 hours ago [-]
If we’re being honest, highly agreeable, extroverted, conscientious, and non-neurotic people are simply going to be better suited to all forms of employment than the inverse. But, since personality is pretty durable, it’s easier to try and find a career where your weak spots are detriments, but not crippling.
roughly 21 minutes ago [-]
I'm highly agreeable, and I've had to learn not to be. Knowing when to challenge people - "strategic non-agreeableness" - is extremely valuable. I've also made most of my career off being somewhat neurotic - I've described the core of my job as "finding things to panic about before they happen" (I went on Prozac a while back and caused an incident in the first couple weeks during uptake because my anxiety didn't trigger about something during a deploy). As far as extroversion - friends of mine who are genuine extroverts about went crazy during the pandemic, while I and a few other introvert friends got some of our best work ever done during that period. There's a spectrum - you can't be a misanthrope, but being able to take (and stand) quiet time to focus on a problem is absolutely an asset. With regards to conscientiousness, this often manifests in the workplace as an unwillingness to deviate from the plan when circumstances demand it and a preference for adding process as a kind of panacea for any kind of failure or delay, and at risk of offending the more conscientious among us, I have not found that a recipe for success.
rizzom5000 48 minutes ago [-]
There is research that suggests highly agreeable people do not do as well e.g. negotiation tactics. What is probably true is that is good to 'appear' agreeable. The same research suggests you are correct about the other 3 traits.
sporadicism 43 minutes ago [-]
I agree with this if what you mean is that employment generally requires conformity, passivity, accepting low autonomy, low creativity, etc. Otherwise, this isn't my experience.
anonym29 44 minutes ago [-]
A highly agreeable housing inspector isn't going to be better at their job than a disagreeable housing inspector. I want my housing inspector to be harsh, unforgiving, and not grant the benefit of the doubt.
A highly extroverted person isn't going to make for a better overnight custodial worker than someone who prefers a more solitary lifestyle.
An actor who can tap into the emotional currents of high neuroticism in their work can offer a more sincere and authentic performance than an emotionally flat one.
Low conscientiousness correlates with risk taking and can be an asset in roles where over-planning to the detriment of acting can be costly - think firefighters.
ahartmetz 56 minutes ago [-]
Low agreeableness can be a positive up to a point. As a technical person, you shouldn't agree to do things that you know will not work. The technical facts have no agreeableness at all and need to be handled as such.
1 hours ago [-]
grebc 1 hours ago [-]
Might mean civil engineer.
portly 1 hours ago [-]
More like an uncivil engineer
n0on3 43 minutes ago [-]
Oh boy, this did not age well. Most cases of “extremely successful” people I can think of exhibit the opposite of these core principles: have no “knack” whatsoever, except not giving a shit about whatever they pretend to be their focus while only focusing on personal return; they contract clusterfucks of debts, just usually never end up having to repay them personally; very few of them even know what “going all in” means, they usually live easy while exploiting others to actually do anything; they have no integrity whatsoever, and they do not have to, since apparently demonstrating lack of it is no longer cause for being told by everyone to fuck off into oblivion anymore.
And yes, yes, of course there are good people out there too that just want (/need) money to get by, but it’s funny to read this and think about those with _lots_ of money
an0malous 2 minutes ago [-]
Yes Jeff Bezos was famously passionate about retail and Marc Benioff would build customer relationship management solutions using paper and glue as a young lad
I love this book, but its authority is somewhat undermined by the infamous Steve Jobs passage...
sporadicism 26 minutes ago [-]
How's that? I am not familiar.
Michelangelo11 1 hours ago [-]
What a good book! I was expecting some "follow your dreams and lean into the hustle" pablum, but no. He talks pretty frankly about how the pursuit of extreme wealth, (100s of millions) which he'd succeeded at, isn't worth it even then because a single-digit amount of millions is quite enough to enjoy life, but adds that he expects readers will ignore that part and attempt to get filthy rich anyway.
Also, he later became a poet (a very good one, too, if I remember right) and early on in his life tried to be a pop singer. Feels a bit like that whole multi-decade career as founder and owner of a massive publishing empire was an odd detour for him.
Very fascinating person, and the book's definitely worth reading.
zulux 1 hours ago [-]
I appreciated Felix going over what he had to give up to get where he was. It let me be content with a bit less money and a bit more family.
evantahler 1 hours ago [-]
That guy looks nothing like Hugh Jackman
wiseowise 29 minutes ago [-]
Nobody is going to seriously discuss moneymaking tips from 1880, right? …right?
idiotsecant 26 minutes ago [-]
Because people now are so wildly different from people 150 years ago? We are exactly the same, with slightly shinier toys.
photochemsyn 7 minutes ago [-]
The publication date of this pamphlet (1880) lies squarely between the Panic of 1873 and the Panic of 1893, both of which lead to spikes in unemployment and destroyed many businesses, leading to labor protests and populist anger. See the 1877 Great Railroad Strike, put down by federal troops. Financial operators with access to capital used the chaos caused by these panics to consolidate power and extend their monopolies - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan, etc.
What if Barnum had written rules for the Robber Barons instead?
1. Control the Vocation of Others: Ensure you own the system in which others work. Vertical and horizontal integration of your businesses is the mechanism by which you ensure all the value created by labor ends up in your pocket.
2. Use Other People's Debt as a Weapon: Strategic debt is your friend, and you can generate corporate debt so vast it becomes a systemic threat. Ensure you have access to pools of capital, so that during a a panic you can buy assets for pennies on the dollar. Inflate the stock price of your holding company far beyond its actual assets, and become a giant creditor. If your debt-financed bet fails, ensure the bag is held by the public. Privatize the gains, socialize the risks.
3. Whatever You Own, Defend With All Your Political Might: You need the ability to shape legislation, control the courts, and deploy state violence to protect your assets and destroy competition. Bribery, lobbying and blackmail are your tools. Those political expenditures are your real insurance policy when your assets are threatened by populist anger or economic chaos, and will also grease expansion into new markets and help you capture foreign resources (oil, bananas, etc.).
4. Control the Definition of Integrity: Never break the law and steal from business partners; instead, change the laws to make your actions legally defensible in court. Claim that the only integrity that matters is the confidence of the capital markets. Stock manipulation, bribery of politicians, and crushing competition with frivolous patent lawsuits are just enterprise, public service, and fairness. Your integrity is your public image as a builder and a captain of industry. Hire biographers and buy newspapers to tell this story.
Finally, blame the victim. Tell the destitute it’s their own fault that they hadn’t figured out how to successfully navigate a system designed to strip their wealth from them and hand it over to the monopolists. This same self-help message of ‘individual responsibility for your economic condition’ is constantly pumped out to the American public today by an endless stream of self-help books in the Robber Baron 2.0 era, and for the same reasons.
atoav 2 hours ago [-]
Another one I'd like to add is: fuck prestige. Everybody wants to run a Café or a Bar, nobody wants to run a gutter cleaning service. Of the former ones most go out of business within a year. Transfer that to other things as well.
Things looking good is not necessarily the same as things working out financially.
Rendered at 17:40:37 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too.
I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career.
I like the Integrity part, too. That seems to be something that's missing (from most vocations), these days. One of the reasons that I stuck with my last job for so long, was because the people I worked with, and for, had Integrity, and that's pretty important to me.
The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble.
I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject misery because of this. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but a large part of the problem was working with people who had very little integrity. They were great at masking it and presenting a different persona, but ultimately, we did bad things to people and made filthy money. I don't miss anything about it.
Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have anymore. There's a certain kind of integrity in that as well.
All of those elements are present for me while using AI to augment my output. I have started using voice to interact with my coding harness though and I think that has maybe influenced my opinion. I also don't let things go fully autonomously and look at the diffs along the way.
Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do."
Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.
Nothing useful.
So I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it even though, like the protagonist in Gattica (with whom I share other similarities), I had to work twice as hard and spend all my off hours obsessed with it because my nature worked against me.
While others with this natural prediliction could spend all their time in type 1 thinking I had to live in type 2.
But it was a success, and I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really, outside of maybe some complex CFO roles, executive roles are by far the easiest roles at existing profitable companies. I suspect csuite positions are actually the roles most secretly replaced by Ai already.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm
Previous discussion (2023-01-20, 69 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447945
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581
E.g. if you are low in extraversion and agreeableness, you probably wouldn't make a good nurse or waiter, but you might not make a bad lawyer or engineer.
I don’t know that these are awesome features for an engineer. There’s a big unsaid cost to this in my experience
A highly extroverted person isn't going to make for a better overnight custodial worker than someone who prefers a more solitary lifestyle.
An actor who can tap into the emotional currents of high neuroticism in their work can offer a more sincere and authentic performance than an emotionally flat one.
Low conscientiousness correlates with risk taking and can be an asset in roles where over-planning to the detriment of acting can be costly - think firefighters.
And yes, yes, of course there are good people out there too that just want (/need) money to get by, but it’s funny to read this and think about those with _lots_ of money
Also, he later became a poet (a very good one, too, if I remember right) and early on in his life tried to be a pop singer. Feels a bit like that whole multi-decade career as founder and owner of a massive publishing empire was an odd detour for him.
Very fascinating person, and the book's definitely worth reading.
What if Barnum had written rules for the Robber Barons instead?
1. Control the Vocation of Others: Ensure you own the system in which others work. Vertical and horizontal integration of your businesses is the mechanism by which you ensure all the value created by labor ends up in your pocket.
2. Use Other People's Debt as a Weapon: Strategic debt is your friend, and you can generate corporate debt so vast it becomes a systemic threat. Ensure you have access to pools of capital, so that during a a panic you can buy assets for pennies on the dollar. Inflate the stock price of your holding company far beyond its actual assets, and become a giant creditor. If your debt-financed bet fails, ensure the bag is held by the public. Privatize the gains, socialize the risks.
3. Whatever You Own, Defend With All Your Political Might: You need the ability to shape legislation, control the courts, and deploy state violence to protect your assets and destroy competition. Bribery, lobbying and blackmail are your tools. Those political expenditures are your real insurance policy when your assets are threatened by populist anger or economic chaos, and will also grease expansion into new markets and help you capture foreign resources (oil, bananas, etc.).
4. Control the Definition of Integrity: Never break the law and steal from business partners; instead, change the laws to make your actions legally defensible in court. Claim that the only integrity that matters is the confidence of the capital markets. Stock manipulation, bribery of politicians, and crushing competition with frivolous patent lawsuits are just enterprise, public service, and fairness. Your integrity is your public image as a builder and a captain of industry. Hire biographers and buy newspapers to tell this story.
Finally, blame the victim. Tell the destitute it’s their own fault that they hadn’t figured out how to successfully navigate a system designed to strip their wealth from them and hand it over to the monopolists. This same self-help message of ‘individual responsibility for your economic condition’ is constantly pumped out to the American public today by an endless stream of self-help books in the Robber Baron 2.0 era, and for the same reasons.
Things looking good is not necessarily the same as things working out financially.