
What Doesn't Seem Like Work? - achariam
http://paulgraham.com/work.html
======
dxbydt
This excerpt -

"what he really liked was solving problems. The text of each chapter was just
some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook
he'd immediately work out all the problems—to the slight annoyance of his
teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually."

is literally me. I did that. Every year at my school I did exactly that. Once
I actually turned in my solutions and my math teacher was quite upset because
she didn't know what I'd do for the rest of the year in her class. She thought
I was being arrogant and I should take in the material slowly, not swallow it
all like a whale. But I wasn't arrogant or anything, because unfortunately
this skill didn't transfer to the rest of my classes. I wasn't particularly
good at history or physics or anything else, only math. Even now, I have tons
of Schaums at my home. Like this one -
[http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-000-Solved-Problems-
Calculus/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-000-Solved-Problems-
Calculus/dp/0071635343) I work problems in it just because it is a craving - I
simply have to solve it. Sadly, society doesn't pay for this sort of
addiction. I have been a professional programmer for the past 2 decades to pay
the bills, but I secretly hate programming, debugging, programmers, git, the
whole enterprise - just seems so stupid & futile. But hey, atleast I can spend
my salary on Schaums.

~~~
ta75757
As (failed) physics major, it sounds so strange to hear someone claim to be
good at math but not physics. To me physics is 98% math. It's a few empirical
facts from experiments and then bucketloads of math.

~~~
dxbydt
True, but a lot of chemistry is mostly math too, and I flunked organic
chemistry the first time. I think its because there is some domain knowledge
involved in these subjects, which you have to actually care about. I don't
particularly care which element has how many isotopes and what the valency is
and how many other elements it can bond with, though I did memorize the atomic
weights of all the elements in the periodic table and Avogardo number and few
such stats. Those things helped a little, because I was ultimately able to
pass my chemistry exams just by solving the numerical stuff and ignoring the
chemical stuff. I handled physics in same fashion . There's something called
the distance equation, where you can express the distance travelled by
particle in terms of velocity and acceleration. We had to simply memorize that
and use it in problems. I forgot what it was in the exam. So I just derived it
from definitions. The teacher was quite surprised, because at that stage we
hadn't been taught calculus, so how did I derive it ? Well, I had solved
calculus problems by myself, so I just did this -
[http://pastebin.com/T6PrePh8](http://pastebin.com/T6PrePh8)

These things helped me get by.

~~~
nnq
Organic chemistry and biochemistry are very different from physics, but
chemistry is a very large field and these are just a small part of it.

You should have been exposed to _physical chemistry_ or _computational
chemistry_ or maybe even _quantum chemistry_ or _analytical chemistry_ , if
your are mathematically inclined.

...but unfortunately they are considered very advanced topics in most learning
institutions, even if one could start with them from the very beginning,
instead of "classical chemistry". And more unfortunately, after the tedium of
"classical chemistry", what you are presented with next are very boring
aspects of "organic chemistry" or "biochemistry".

~~~
bostik
Aiieee, physical chemistry. That thing approaches pure evil.

The chemistry department in the university I studied at required 4 courses of
physical chemistry. The introductory course was bad enough - the course had
mandatory practice sessions, where assistants were at hand to aid with the
supposedly trickier bits. Each session was 1h45m straight.

5 weeks in, there was a supposedly simple exercise. When nobody at the class
got even past the initial hurdles in the first 15 minutes, the assistant
decided to show how it's done. He failed to finish the calculations in the
remaining 90 minutes ... and he knew how the steps went.

Eventually I changed my major from chemistry to CS.

EDIT: btw, the assistant in question was a post-grad so lack of domain
knowledge was not the reason.

------
delluminatus
Personally, I experienced this with programming. When I learned to program in
high school, it never struck me as a chore; it was always just _interesting_
and I enjoyed it.

However, I think the only reason I was able to enjoy learning programming was
because of how adept I already was with computers as a "power user", because
it gave me the physical skills and conceptual underpinnings required to
appreciate the field.

To me, this raises an important question.

If you lack the physical skills or are a novice in a field, it can be
frustrating or intimidating to learn even if you would otherwise enjoy being
competent. For example, learning to draw: should one accept their dislike of
basic beginning drawing practice to imply that drawing is not an appropriate
vocation for them? Difficult question; probably depends on the person. The
only way to know if you love drawing at a competent level is to reach that
level. In a sense it begs the question: how can you tell if you will enjoy
doing something until you have the ability to actually do it?

I don't think there is an easy way to solve this problem; you simply have to
put the effort into practicing new things even if you don't enjoy the
practice. That's where you get into willpower, commitment, etc. My experience
of the world is that you simply cannot expect to be successful by only doing
things that don't feel like work; sometimes, you have to actually _do the
work_.

~~~
tswartz
Ira Glass has some advice on the issue of when you start something you enjoy,
but your skill doesn't match your taste. Push through and keep practicing
until your skill matches your taste.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbC4gqZGPSY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbC4gqZGPSY)

~~~
dragonwriter
I don't think the problem is things you enjoy but don't have skill to match
your taste, the issue is identifying things you _would enjoy_ if you had more
skill, so you know where it is worth investing the effort to get over the lack
of current skill.

~~~
newtonapple
I'd argue that sometimes you don't really know what good taste is or whether
or not you would enjoy something until you've acquired a certain level of
competency for it. Sports, programming and math are all like this. The more
you work on them the more enjoyable they become, and you'd become a lot more
"tasteful".

~~~
dingaling
> The more you work on them the more enjoyable they become

Hmmm. After a decade of running, swimming and circuits I still detest them
every day just as much as when I started.

The key might be that one can only enjoy activities that are done purely for
whimsical reasons.

------
stegosaurus
What if the idea of work itself is what you dislike?

There are plenty of activities I can enjoy, and some, quite a few of them in
fact, are profitable.

Once you shoe-horn them into the power dynamic situation of a traditional job
(with the bureaucracy that entails unless you're dealing with Actual People as
opposed to corporations), suddenly a lot of the luster disappears.

As a ridiculous example - I enjoy reading. It's not really work at all, right?

Ask me to read 9am-5pm and I'd start to find it frustrating. Or add in a
commute, or very low pay.

The actual job itself is very rarely the issue for me. It's what you miss out
on, and also the fact that it invariably involves submission, acceptance of
being subordinate, etc.

edit: To be clear here; I'm not talking about work ethic in the sense of
'pushing through something you find difficult'.

More the general idea of not wanting to be a part of a machine, a construct
that you don't agree with. Large corporations and their 'policy documents',
for example. I don't want to work for a company in which my boss doesn't have
the autonomy to speak to me as a human being - this stands regardless of
whether my job is backbreaking labour or eating chocolate bars.

~~~
stegosaurus
As an addition to this, I've struggled a lot with the concept of working for
pay and only recently could I really begin to explain why.

Some people would probably call it 'entitlement', but I'm not really sure
that's an accurate description.

As an employee, your role is essentially a permanent state of brown nosing.
First of all you must convince a rich person/company that you are worthy. Then
you must convince them that you want to work for them, that they're special,
and so on. And then later, you must defer, every single day. Ill? According to
policy document AED, page 5, section b, one of your eight sick days will be
deducted, worker drone!

It's not enough to simply perform a valuable function for society. You need to
be subservient and defer to authority - you are worth less than your betters
(those with wealth) and must please them in order to eat, in order to shelter.

There are a few ways left in which you can directly serve other humans and
profit via such - private entrepreneurial services such as window cleaning,
antique dealing, etcetera - but these make up a small portion of the
employment market today and are often subject to ridiculously overbearing
regulation. The vast majority of 'jobs' in the Western world involve being
directly, by rank, inferior to another human being.

Other people seem much more capable of dealing with this than I do. Often I
find myself resenting others for putting up with the more ridiculous aspects -
it feels like a betrayal, that if only people were better human beings and
less likely to defer to authority we could all have a better experience.

This is the struggle I face, really. Physical trauma I find very simple - the
emotional aspect of actively taking part in a system that I despise is much
more difficult.

~~~
cgag
I feel this way so strongly. "Why do you want to work for us?" Because I have
to sell my labor to pay my landlord for a place to sleep.

I'm passionate about a few things, but none of them include being told what to
do, then having someone take a large cut out of the value I produce.

Edit: I'm currently researching alternatives to traditional corporations, like
worker owned cooperatives. If you or anyone reading this have ideas or want to
talk, my emails in my profile.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _I feel this way so strongly. "Why do you want to work for us?" Because I
> have to sell my labor to pay my landlord for a place to sleep._

Yes, exactly. I personally don't have a problem with being subordinate and
receive tasks to do. But if asked that question, my answer would be just like
yours. "No, I'm not coming to your place because I care about things you do (I
probably won't even know what you do until day 1 of my employment anyway). I
need to slave my life away somewhere to provide food and shelter for myself
and people dependent on me, and your company just happened to ask me to accept
you as my slave master. I have tons of my own projects and ideas that are
million time more interesting than what you want me to do here, but money
doesn't grow on trees.".

But of course I can't tell that to a potential boss. I need to dodge the
question with "I'm a passionate programmer who loves spending time coding
stuff, and I'm looking for interesting projects, which your company seems to
have". Or something.

I'm increasingly thinking that maybe I should find some mundane computer work,
automate the hell out of it without telling anyone, and use all the free time
I gained by this to do my own projects. That way company gets the service it
wants, I get paid for it and don't feel sick all the time. Win-win.

------
ritchiea
Ugh I hate stuff like this. Sometimes programming feels like work, sometimes
it doesn't. I write, I make art. A lot of people wouldn't consider either of
those real work. Yet sometimes each activity feels like work, other times the
activity feels great and feels like something I could do forever uninterupted.
Virtually all of the time you find something you enjoy, even if someone else
thinks it's work, there will be parts of making it a career that will
definitely be work (e.g. programming is always fun but maybe corresponding
with your boss isn't).

I have a friend who will program all day. He spends all his time on Project
Euler. He loves studying algorithms to understand them completely and trying
to devise better algorithms. This is what he does in his free time. He does it
all the time because he hasn't had a job in years. My friend is probably a
much better programmer than I am but I have steady well paying work because
sometimes I like programming and sometimes I like talking to people and the
second part helps me work with clients and co-workers. My friend the obsessive
programmer for whom it is always a hobby can't hold down a job for the life of
him. I hope for his sake he finds something that can support him as well as
fulfill him. But the advice pg presents in this article is so trite as to be
useless.

~~~
NhanH
It seems to me that the essay tried to answer the question "What is it that
you want to have as your career". Now, whether you can actually make that your
career is an entirely different question. I might love playing tennis, but if
I'm 30 years old. There is no chance I could start now and become a
professional player.

------
chubot
I'm surprised that Paul Graham likes debugging. I tend to stereotype
programmers into two camps: one that likes debugging, one that doesn't. I
thought he was part of the latter group.

Some programmers are engineers: they deal with the world as it is -- messy,
inconsistent, evolved. They are good at debugging, because they are in tune
with how things actually work (not how people SAY they work.) They like trying
things before reading about them.

Some programmers are philosophers and mathematicians: they like to consider
things from first principles, read a lot, and build up systems in their head.
They make huge breakthroughs because they question fundamental assumptions.
But sometimes they over-model things and ignore how the world actually works,
in favor of "elegant" ideas. They may not like debugging because it is often
dealing with other people's broken assumptions (i.e. legacy code), and not any
real fundamental idea.

So PG clearly seems to have the philosophical bent and has made breakthroughs.
But if he really likes debugging, then that means he comes at programming from
BOTH the engineering and philosophical traditions, which probably explains why
he's a great programmer. (I just stumbled across a copy of ANSI Common Lisp at
work -- looking forward to seeing his style more closely.)

I think to be really good at something, you have to understand it in two
different ways. Same goes for being able to write code from scratch (maker
perspective) and being able to hack into it (breaker perspective).

Although, I have to say, there is a big difference between debugging your OWN
code and other people's code. Not sure if anyone likes debugging typical
enterprise code. :)

~~~
Retra
Perhaps your two camps are just not a very good representation of how
programmers actually think?

~~~
staunch
Some Joe Kraus wisdom i picked up is to always be suspicious of anyone who
divides the world into two groups.

~~~
chubot
That's why I used the word "stereotyped" at the beginning. And why I said it's
possible to have both ways (and multiple ways) of looking at things -- and
indeed the best programmers do have both.

I do think that most people have an natural disposition toward one way of
thinking, and trying the "opposite" way of thinking is a great way to improve.

~~~
Retra
You could console yourself in the knowledge that, if one is to divide the
world at all, one must first divide it in two. The really trick is to keep
dividing, and not get stuck at the first thought you have.

~~~
chubot
I think it would be more helpful if you actually said what you think, rather
than making vague objections to something I didn't say. It would make for a
much better conversation.

~~~
Retra
I'm not objecting to anything you've said. I'm just reflecting on it. I don't
think I'm being vague either, just a bit abstract.

------
zippergz
I found something that didn't feel like work, turned it into my career, and
then realized that when there are real business outcomes riding on it,
suddenly it feels like work. To the point that I now don't even like doing it
as a hobby.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Totally. I'm a very productive programmer as long as I do my hobby projects,
random hacks, fun things, hackatons or work that I have no personal stake in.
But whenever I have to work, my productivity drops to literally 1/10 - 1/100th
of the normal level and I often feel axious and sick. This is completely
absurd - sometimes I get more done in one hour on a bus for a side project
than through entire week for work.

------
blahedo
I am surprised at how casually he dropped this in there:

"When I was in college I used to write papers for my friends. It was quite
interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking. Plus they were
always so relieved."

Yikes. Really?

~~~
imjk
Actually, I appreciate the way he candidly writes things like that. I get that
you're pointing out the moral implications of doing other people's school
work, but that'd be another essay all its own. In this context, it's an
example that proves his point very well as it's a context almost everyone can
relate to.

------
spike021
I've noticed somewhat similar issues with my peers in school studying to
become programmers. They don't enjoy the long hours of debugging or coding.
They seem to have come into the CS program expecting it to be a lot easier and
less boring.

For me, I can get frustrated when I'm coding and can't figure out a bug right
away. But on the other hand there's nothing I enjoy more than spending N time
trying to understand what's going on, solving the problem, and feeling a spurt
of elation at succeeding at my task. I'm not sure how people who don't see it
the same way could handle that kind of work.

With that said, I do think there are areas where even if you don't initially
enjoy the activity, you can come to appreciate it and eventually enjoy it.

------
rabbyte
Is it common for programmers to dislike debugging? I'm stunned. I never
considered the possibility, it's always been something I enjoyed. I don't
believe it impacts you either way in terms of capability but I imagine it
impacts your desire to continue.

~~~
dm8
If you are working on support/maintenance roles (in engineering) at big
enterprise product company then debugging is major part of your job. I enjoy
debugging as it is another way to solve problem. But for some people it gets
repetitive (and boring) since you have to do that day in day out as a part of
support roles.

~~~
sounds
Another part of what makes debugging painful for a lot of people working in
big enterprise ("small cog in a big machine") stems from bad management.

Bad management -> bad design decision and poor resource allocation -> blame
those lower on the org chart than you -> pressure to "just get this fixed and
out the door" -> high levels of technical debt and programmer "burn-out"

------
erikig
Reading HN never seems like work. I feel like I could do it all day.

~~~
abstractbill
You're supposed to come up with something that _feels like work to other
people_.

~~~
ferrari8608
I know plenty of people who consider reading, in any form, work.

~~~
erikig
My point exactly. I showed this to a couple of my non-tech friends and they
couldn't quite understand why we'd spend hours looking at what seemed like
"work stuff"

------
im3w1l
I love reading (and finding flaws in) proofs. Solving math problems is ok I
guess but feels like work. The moment of insight is nice, but staring at the
wall with a blank mind, mumbling "come forth, ideas" not so much.

Oh, and trading I love trading. All kinds of trading. I've spent many many
nights trading items in various games. Oh, and programming a bitcoin arbitrage
trading bot was super fun.

Hmm, it was good thinking these things over I guess.

------
Htsthbjig
The question is : Is that hardwired or is programmable?

I discovered early in my life that by changing the perspective of a problem
you could transform something dull and tedious into something exciting and
highly interesting.

For example , when I learned to visualize mathematical problems I become much
better at solving them.

Mindmaps, and memory tools can make someone who struggle(and suffers as for
example when he does not pass an exam) in something to fly around it.

I had a history teacher that went to wars in his youth as a news reporter,
learned languages and traveled the world, studied history by
correspondence(from a distance University), went back and settled with a young
lady as a teacher.

History for us (the class he teached) changed forever. It was not about words
on paper, but about real people, real places, interest and fights, and winners
and losses, consequences. We saw photographs of the victims of the wars, some
of them taked by him,the stories on how politics and decisions affected their
lives and their families', other pics taken by his friends.

After that course, even with completely different teachers History was so easy
to study, to remember.

About debugging. I believe the best programmer is the one who hates so much
debugging that is able to work terribly hard in automating it and not have to
debug EVER again.

People who loves debugging is a problem for me. I want things so well
documented and well designed that debugging becomes almost non necessary.

The fact that people believe it is ok to have crappy documentation, crappy
design, and spend months trying to catch problems(because they enjoy it) is a
misfortune.

~~~
sbov
I enjoy debugging, and don't believe anything you claim. Anyone I know that
enjoys it doesn't believe it either. What you write is pretty offensive
actually. Its like me saying you liking programming means you run around
deleting everyone's software because it would let you program more.

------
TrysterosEmp
Well this line of reasoning works beautifully for engineers, because solving
the types of problems engineers love also HAPPENS to be extremely lucrative.

What if acting doesn't feel like work? Playing soccer? Hiking? It's extremely
difficult to make money doing these things. "Follow your folly" career advice
can work, or it can just make people feel terrible because they realize
they're doing things they don't love because they can't make money doing the
things they do love.

~~~
frevd
Besides the finding something that you enjoy part (and given that that makes
you good at it) there was this second part - something that is work for
somebody else. He probably should have mentioned that there is an implicit
third part - finding and convincing somebody to actually pay you for doing
this work, plus a fourth issue - the competition. However, there are careers
in soccer, not sure about hiking though, that's more recreational, you might
make a teaching business out of it though.

~~~
ar_turnbull
It may not be the most lucrative business for the person who loves hiking, but
somebody has to write the guidebook.

------
dm8
How important is it to do something you love that helps you in live
comfortable life?

For example, I always loved theatre and plays but I was told in young age that
it's very hard to support comfortable life as a thespian (unless you are
breakout success); so best not to take that as a career even though it may
really work out for you.

~~~
allendoerfer
I am glad you successfully rebelled against your parents, as you are now here,
writing this on the community website of a startup incubator.

------
CurtMonash
I've made a similar argument for a long time. About my fifth choice job coming
out of academia was from an interview in which I was told that 90% of my job
would be drudgery, but the same was true for everybody, even the CEO. So I
decided that careers were not just about passions, but also about what you
didn't hate.

I don't mind writing. I don't mind public speaking. I don't mind grappling
with tough problems. I don't mind working alone. I don't mind being indoors.

I do mind physical labor. I do mind cold calling. I do mind having to worry a
lot about people's feelings.

If you have different preferences from mine, then you probably should also be
in a different line work.

------
arbuge
One wrinkle to this is that it is quite possible to become passionate about
something which is initially a grind, at which point the state described in
the article of it not feeling like work would kick in. In fact there are
several successful entrepreneurs out there (eg. Mark Cuban) who openly
advocate passion following work rather than the other way round.

If you do know of something which doesn't feel like work to you, but does feel
like work to everybody else, there's indeed probably something there. But if
you don't, it may be possible to create such a something...

------
pw
I'm very glad to see that PG's departure from YC has led to a significant
uptick in his essay output.

~~~
ProAm
Eh, it's just a more verbose "If you love what you do, you'll never work a day
in your life."

~~~
FLUX-YOU
If there's one thing I could change, it's to know of something that I could do
and not feel like I was working.

If there's one thing I regret, it's not knowing about that something at a
young age and letting it mold my life, decisions, and motivation. At 30 I've
got nothing but a track record of jobs I hate.

~~~
Retra
You could be in my situation: I know exactly what I love to do and nobody
wants to pay me to do it. I have a track record of jobs I never had.

------
yason
For me, programming is to build mechanisms. There's something similar there as
in building mechanical constructs. That's the juicy bit for me.

Building mechanisms of course implies some core problem (i.e. how to model
what you need to solve and how to compute the result) and interfacing (how to
run that thing at all in a physical computing environment and how to talk to
all the other), but those don't raise up as major appeals. One or both can
even be trivial and I don't get bored yet.

The play of ideas and experience and using those to build something that works
is highly enticing. So, the more I gain experience, the more rewarding
programming has become, which in turn gives me more ideas that I try out or
problems that I try to solve, which accumulates the experience, and so on.

The most boring part of programming is often interfacing. This means anything
from negotiating with other people/teams to learning obscure one-off APIs just
to get the juicy bits running.

The actual problem (think in terms of maths or CS) can sometimes be
interesting but not necessarily per se. Rather, a tricky problem can serve as
an excuse to build a very complex or advanced mechanism.

Debugging is just pure fun. It's like trying to find out that slightly loose
part in the transmission of a car that sometimes makes the 2nd gear a bit
difficult to engage. Debugging happens when the mechanism is mostly built but
not yet completed. You can almost see it working, sans a few problems that you
know are there. It's hard to imagine sources of greater motivation and mental
satisfaction than debugging.

------
q845712
i enjoy chopping vegetables much more than most people, and i'm told i'm quite
good at e.g. making sauerkraut - an activity i truly enjoy. but i get paid a
lot more to write software, which is also reasonably fun.

to be honest i think i only enjoy writing software about as much as the next
person! can we be honest that it's an absurdly good job currently?

[https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-
love/](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/)

~~~
bshimmin
Would you enjoy chopping vegetables if you had to do it for 40 hours a week?
Would it become a little less pleasurable, perhaps, if someone were sending
you emails asking why you haven't updated the carrots ticket with your current
progress, or moved the potatoes card on the Kanban board?

(I have a bit of a thing for grating cheese - I find it strangely
therapeutic.)

~~~
q845712
agreed!

------
emptytheory
I had a lot of experience programming in high school. When I practiced on my
own, it never seemed like work because it was fun and I had experience telling
me that I could accomplish something meaningful. Something made me feel
confident in my ability to produce and discover.

When I was an undergraduate, a lot of my peers who didn't have a similar CS
background struggled. I experienced this myself when I transferred into the
mathematics program. I never had a serious engagement with mathematics until I
was in university.

I think reaching the stage where an activity becomes natural requires a
serious personal engagement. That is, you have understand the questions which
guide the activity (your interests have to align) and you have to have the
freedom to ask and answer your own questions (being able to solve your own
problems). The activity has to become personal in some sense.

------
heurist
I like figuring out what other people are thinking. They'll give me a bunch of
requirements and I can look at them and their situation and crunch the
requirements down into a tight, beautiful solution that addresses the needs
they didn't know they had.

I also really enjoy the process of understanding things in general - figuring
out the important/disparate parts, determining how they link together,
exploring connections, etc. Once I understand something all of the
possibilities hidden in that topic are open to me and my creativity.

But I'm terrible at taking time to create things. Once I have the solution it
is very difficult to find the drive to actually continue and build on it. It's
always a slog, as if I were a kid being forced to eat vegetables. I think I'm
slowly improving, though.

------
smoyer
@pg

I built electronic parts for Westinghouse's Nuclear Reactor Simulators (near
Monroeville PA) in the mid 1980's. There were a ton of intelligent people
working there and since every reactor built had to have an identical training
simulator, there was quite a bit of knowledge required to make the systems
realistic. Sometimes simulating the required behavior of a nuclear reactor was
more complex than what occurred in the real reactor (simulating the pulse
shape and randomness of a Geiger counter or driving a synchroscope with hopped
up audio amplifiers).

In any case, those guys provided a lot of on-the-job education for a young
engineer ... thank your dad for me as I might not have interacted with him,
but surely some other "youngster" did.

------
duderific
Funny he used the example of popping zits as something that most people don't
enjoy. I rather enjoy popping a nice juicy zit on the occasion that I get one
- it's quite cathartic. I wonder if I can make a career of it.

~~~
nhayden
I think you misread it, it sounds like he's saying people like popping zips
but they don't volunteer that information.

------
davros
If you do something and get that 'doesn't seem like work' feeling - great!
Like all the best heuristics it seems obvious once you say it clearly. My
question, though, is about the case where something does feel like work - does
this imply you should not pursue it? Or are there cases where sticking with it
and over time you find the vocation? For example I hated people management at
first, but its a huge component of the 'doesn't seem like work' vocation I'm
following now. Are there signals to look for that would indicate there is the
prospect for this transition?

------
dkrich
I think a lot of what makes something that seems like it is work to one person
actually enjoyable to another is purely environmental.

For example- I knew from an early age that I liked tinkering around on
computers. However when I got to college, I found programming monotonous and
boring. When I worked as a software engineer for a large boring company I
hated it even more. To the point that I actually quit and switched careers.

Then, a few years later I discovered Ruby on Rails and development on a new
Mac. These seemingly small changes to a new environment rekindled my love of
computers to a point that I spent nearly every weekend for three years
teaching myself Rails. I remember one weekend I flew to a bachelor party in
New Orleans and all the way there I read a book on Rails. It wasn't work
anymore, but a hobby that I truly loved.

This is not to say that everyone is cut out to be or will enjoy being a
programmer with just the right tools. However I think a lot of people take a
first glance at something and give up on it without having a comprehensive
understanding of the reality of doing the work in an ideal environment. To
this day it annoys the hell out of me when non-technical friends ask me
questions about coding as if it is some awful task that has to be done- "Why
would you ever want to do that?" These people never actually have tried it so
they don't know what is actually involved or whether they might actually enjoy
it.

~~~
episteme
Out of curiosity, what was your new career? Have you ever returned to software
engineering or considered it?

------
teekert
I like playing with Linux and sometimes other OSs. I regularly set up servers,
at home or on digital ocean. For fun I recently wrote a Dockerfile that would
setup a Drupal install, it worked well on CoreOS. Doing this felt like
relaxing, meditating. I like that feeling of having a fresh, secure system
running smoothly. I can get pretty distracted and annoying if my systems are
not running smoothly (when I was younger I'd skip a night getting Beryl to
work on Gentoo with the beta Nvidia driver but those times are over now).

Recently I thought, I have to do something with this and I started a Drupal
system for searching locally cultured vegetables for sale. It was fun in the
beginning but my wife is a designer and pretty soon I was editing CSS all the
time and I completely lost interest. It felt like work. I left it in an ugly,
unusable state.

Still, I keep setting up servers with the occasional blog with some articles
if my attention span allows it. Who knows what I might do with it some time. I
have this vague vision of setting up a web services company with CMSs for
sportsclubs but that will come with paper work and I know I will regret it. I
have a nice job as a biophysicist by the way and I get to play with large
Linux clusters from time to time and I try to take those chances as much as
possible.

Some things just start feeling like work as soon as they become work, as soon
as there are any milestones to catch or things to finish. To me things feel
like work if I can't just quite half way into a "project".

------
stuff4ben
I'm a little late to the conversation, but I need to say this just for myself.
But yeah I totally get this. As a rising fifth grader in the mid-80's,
"somehow" I heard of or got invited to some summer school computer class.
Basically for 4 weeks I went back to school and learned about computers on an
Apple IIe. We played some lemonadestand game and even wrote BASIC on some
Trash80's. That was my watershed moment. Ever since then I knew I was going to
be a programmer. I remember as a senior in high school, the only computer
class they had was on BASIC programming. Since I had literally been doing it
for 7 years, I aced it. The teacher would hand out exams (yes on paper) and I
would be done before she finished handing them out to the rest of the class. I
hated that I was out in the sticks in highschool though. If only I had someone
I could have been mentored from, there's no telling where I'd be now. But hey,
I still enjoy programming (debugging MY code, creating code, etc). I'm
attending way too many meetings now and I rarely open my IDE at work. But the
thrill of creation and making the computer do what I tell it to do is pretty
awesome after 30+ years. I need a side project...

------
mkagenius
It can be about the crave to be "different". People want to do things that
make them _different_ than others.

People hate programming when they do it with 1000 other colleagues. The same
programming is rewarding when they do it alone - since, that lets them do
things that no one in the world is doing.

That may be true for startups in general. Doing startups seem cool since only
a handful (<10%) of total population is doing it. If everyone starts doing it,
it may not be as cool.

------
genericone
Dell's origin story follows this idea. Many consumers don't enjoy building
their own computer, Dell enjoyed building your computer for you at a fair
price.

------
kabdib
The only time that programming seems like work are when I'm under an
artificial deadline, or when I have to use something that is just
irretrievably fucked-up (like this morning, an issue with SOAP and WSDL, which
I loathe).

Even the artificial deadlines can be fun, though there is a definite cost to
working an 80 hour week.

Most days are like playing, really. Sometimes you have to come into work and
push a pencil, but hopefully those are rare.

------
paulvs
I spent the first 12 years of my life living onboard a boat with my family,
and then on and off throughout my teenage years. My father wanted to give us
kids an environment conducive to learning, so I grew up surrounded by his
Shaums Outlines, IC pinout reference manuals (thankfully the Internet age has
replaced those), dos and qbasic books, etc. and lots of old computers running
windows and dos. While I don't think he ever excelled at these subjects, they
were his hobby and he was always trying to get us interested in them, too. I
remember after some of us kids displayed an interest in tearing out the
cardboard subscription forms from his vast collection of Scientific American,
he actively encouraged us to do so in the hope that the articles would catch
our eye and we might also develop an interest in science at a young age. My
siblings and I were rushed through the high school curriculum in a home
schooled environment and at around the age of 13 started taking some long
distance first-year math courses from universities (Monash University,
Australia). I, being the youngest, waded heavily through after my siblings,
but never was particularly interested. The temptation to move to a normal
home, go to a normal school and have friends was growing, so at the age of 13
I enrolled in ninth-grade at a public school. In the whole time I was at
school I never had an interest in maths or science and the library was
definitely a no-go zone for me (trying to fit in was a full time job). I
applied for uni with a score of 16 out of 25 (1 best and 25 worst). I scraped
into environmental engineering with a vague idea of changing to electronics or
it (which my score hadn't let me directly into, but it was possible to change
engineering majors once in). Uni seemed boring until about 3rd year of
electronics and computer engineering. Ever since then I have begun developing
a steadily growing interest in programming, science and maths, although I'm
not good at the latter two. I'm now two years out of uni, working as an iOS
developer. I hope that as my interest grows my learning keeps up. I think my
father gave me the spark, but now it's up to me to keep nurturing the interest
to get its full enjoyment.

------
smaccoun
Very refreshing to see this on HN. Often I feel bewildered and sometimes even
somewhat infuriated when I read about people demanding a new work week of X
days/hours. For me, as long as I'm programming - which is almost all the time
at my job - it never feels like I'm working. I often have to set timers to cap
myself for working on a programming problem for too long, else I'll never go
to the bathroom! So work is something I love to do and a huge part of my life
that I often don't want to cut out.

Further, working with others who are passionate about what they do produces
one of the most wonderful pleasures in life, as it blends deep
community/social bonds while plugging into life!

------
giis
>The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they
probably are of what you should do.

Completely agree. I came across similar thing 5 or 6 years back. When one-of
my co-worker called me to debug/show a problem with his website-download
module to export data as spreadsheet. The data came as some junk
characters,even though site-page shows proper data and db-records are fine
too.

I clearly remember the following conversion.When I tried, I also got
spreadsheet with unreadable chars, and I said, "nice,that's interesting!!" and
my co-worker laughed and responded "what? is this interesting???"

~~~
returnofdjedi
Maybe if the owner said it's intresting to his employee, the employee would
try to go deep into the problem and figure out the flaws.Henry Ford did that
too.

------
lokeshk
That's a fair advice, but I wonder what if we start working on something that
at first does not seem like work, but later we realize was merely a hobby? For
instance, I enjoy cooking. I love figuring out the recipes of intricate Indian
curries, and then I will cook them. I enjoy eating curries even more! :D
However, if I was to translate that to a full time job, I would probably hate
it. I love my job as a programmer, and cooking just does not have the same
breadth of intellectual stimulation, or excitement in it for me.

How do you separate hobby from a potential work/job?

~~~
imjk
I think you addressed your own question there. The answer is essentially, "I
enjoy doing this, but I would never want to do this as a full-time job." I
think deep down you realize it's a hobby that you enjoy in your free time but
it's not something that brings you true fulfillment and sense of achievement
you would doing something else as a profession.

------
sktrdie
I used to think this of software development. The problem is that when I
started doing it "because I had to" instead of "because I wanted to" it took
all the fun out of it.

------
drawkbox
I enjoy:

Creating useful things, or something that is fun to do.

Making something come to life, a product, a character, a moment, that people
use or enjoy experiencing.

It could be in programming, art, a system, a product, something digital,
something physical, anything useful that removes part of the monotony of life,
reduces drag, and improves the thrust of life.

To me a comic strip, a rocket ship, a new game, a system that takes away
boring tedious parts of life, quality of life improvements, and anything
helpful to make the day more of an adventure, are all on the same plane.

------
gregfjohnson
I am 60 and still cannot believe that people will actually pay you to play
with computers and robots all day long! The robots I play with know how to
breathe air, which involves a lot of interesting fluid dynamics in addition to
all of the other interesting things that go into building and playing with
robots. (The technical term for these robots is "intensive care unit
ventilator".) I love and am probably addicted to programming. RE debugging:
while the rush of relief and victory is satisfying when a problem is found and
fixed, I find these days that it is more fun to do technical things
differently. Consider a Venn diagram with two overlapping circles to describe
a given technical problem. Circle A is "have something working happily, but
may be overly simplistic." Circle B is "covers the real problem domain
adequately, but may be buggy." The intersection is where you want to be. The
question is, from which direction do you approach the intersection? I used to
start from Circle B and debug to the intersection. Now, I start from Circle A
and stay happy/working, expanding that state until it gets to the
intersection. Especially in pair programming I find this to be the best way to
go. If two pairing partners are "lost in the woods" trying to debug a problem,
they can start stepping on each others' toes and get really unhappy. On the
other hand, if they are collaboratively growing an ever-expanding
"working/happy" program, things usually go an awful lot better. Related topic:
I've come to realize that I am good at "really easy" mathematics, and bad at
"really hard" mathematics. So, in struggling with a math problem or new area,
my instinct is to massage and massage until the problem magically transforms
from "really hard" to "really easy". Just last week I had that huge sweet
"AHA" rush. In lambda calculus, there is a cute trick called Church numerals
that allows you to encode the non-negative integers as functions. The
functions to add, multiply, exponentiate, etc. are all easy, but the function
to take the predecessor of a Church numeral is really tricky. I knew the
predecessor formula and could mechanically apply it, but did not have any
clear insight at all as to how or why it worked. Finally, _KAPOW_! Came up
with a beautifully straightforward, satisfying, and intuitive way to derive
the predecessor function of Church numerals.

------
tegeek
I grew up in a remote rural area of a third world country. My mother & father
taught me to read. And I developed interest in reading books at the age of 6
or 7.

When I was 9 or 10 years old, someone (may be my cousin or my fathers' uncle)
gave me a book on simple electronics (it was in my native language). That was
the first time I read about P-Type & N-Type materials and some other physics.
It was so fascinated to me that I used to read it all the time to understand.
The book also included about very simple digital logic design and concepts
like NAND Gate etc.

I didn't understood at all what it is all about. But It developed my interest
in Physics and Electronics.

By the age of 13 or 14 I learned myself about soldering, creating very simple
chips and some LEDs on-off work. I never learned any math or could develop any
mental model about true electronics but all that work created an infinite
desire to know about the nature of "materials" & physics behind everything.

My parents put me in school which was 12 KM from my village, I used to bike
every day 24 KM two way with some other friends no matter if it was summer
with 43 degrees or winter with -2 degrees. And I was just 9 years old young
kid. I started skipping school and start searching more books like that great
Electronics books. I bought many but couldn't understand the foundations at
all.

That same book had chapters how you can create a sequence of LEDs which keep
going on & off one after other and make some interesting visual. I opened
every electronic device at home and tried to understand its chips but couldn't
get at all what is going on.

None of my friends studies beyond class 8 but I kept going. I started studying
physics at the age of 15 at school but it was all so bookish and memorisation
that I never liked school at all.

But I studied Physics, Biology & Chemistry myself and enjoyed every single
moment of that time. That was the only time I studied Sciences and developed
an intuition about the scientific world.

My parents took loan and sent me to a bigger city for my Bachelors degree. But
the education was so artificial that I couldn't learn anything more at all.
Every single book was in English (which is not my native or national language)
I feel so empty & everything useless. At the same time my parents were sending
me more money than they could afford.

I went into depression & at some point in my Bachelors' degree I found out
about Internet & "Software". I started learning about Web Site development. I
learned HTML, Adobe Dreamweaver & Fireworks. Then I learned a bit of C++ & C#.
(I remember I started learning about C# in April 2002).

I got a job as a programmer in an off-shore office of a USA company. I then
saved some money and escaped from that country and came to Sweden because of
free education.

I studied Computer Science & developed an intense love with Mathematics (even
though I'm not good in maths) & Programming Languages. Now I'm working as a
Software Engineer but I have deep love with Electronics & Physics. And that
all goes back to the days when I was reading that simple electronics book.

~~~
throwaway1979
Thanks for sharing. I didn't discover electronics until I was much older. I
did, however, discover a passion for software at a young age and that has been
one of my true loves.

In software, I have deep interest and am decent at it. I can't say that for my
electronics pursuits. I've been at it as a hobbyist for a few years now and am
probably equivalent to someone 6 months into a Bachelors program. In the past,
I tried to justify my electronics activities as something productive but a few
weeks ago I had a minor Eureka - I just accepted I love electronics for the
happiness that it gives me. I don't really care to invent something new or be
productive with it.

------
AnonJ
Well the usage of the word "work" here is peculiar. Has "work" in our society
already become a word equal to "travail, toil", "something done with the
explicit intent of earning one's living but uninteresting"? Isn't "work"
supposed to be fun, challenging and rewarding in itself? The article surely
reads a little bit weird to me in this sense, though I get the idea.

------
DenisM
>But you may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the
degree to which programming consists of it.

Odd. I barely do any debugging at all. If it compiles, it's usually right, and
when it's not, I just kick back and think. Thinking takes a lot more of my
time than writing or debugging. Perhaps that's because I work largely by
myself on those components - there is no one else's intent to grasp.

------
dluan
I wonder if it's possible to do things that others don't like, but doesn't pay
- that then ends up becoming something that does pay. I wonder why PG didn't
charge his friends for writing papers.

Not sure where this is going, but imagine something like the first public
musician. Or the first ever commissioned artist. It must've been valuable,
because someone funded them to make it happen.

------
amelius
The problem with programming is: in the beginning it seems like fun; but then
the system gets bigger, and suddenly it seems like work...

------
flipside
Edge cases, I love exploring edge cases and even better, the intersection of
edge cases (corner cases?). The more edge cases there are, the more
interesting something is and sometimes they lead to discovering entire new
spaces. I consider myself lucky to have stumbled into an opportunity with my
startup that I find endlessly fascinating.

~~~
DenisM
I see a pen-testing career in your future.

------
stickhandle
Lesson learned from having 3 kids in hockey: Until you reach a level of "good
enough" to participate in "the game", its not much fun. Once there, the better
you get, the more fun it becomes and turns into a virtuous circle of
try_harder->get_better->more_fun->try_harder->get_better ...

------
rjammala
This reminded me of the time when I solved most of the problems in this book
just for the _fun_ of it:

[http://books.google.com/books/about/Problem_book_in_high_sch...](http://books.google.com/books/about/Problem_book_in_high_school_mathematics.html?id=NdJUAAAAYAAJ)

------
karlb
Jerry Seinfeld says[1]: “Your blessing in life is when you find the torture
you’re comfortable with.” Jerry describes writing comedy as “The torture I
love.”

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2GW2JS_A4g&t=32m20s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2GW2JS_A4g&t=32m20s)

------
nnd
Finding to do what you love is easy. I mean anyone can do that by iterating
through different activities to find "what doesn't feel like work".

Getting paid for it is difficult. Arguably one has to become extremely good at
a particular skill which is in demand and be able to promote himself.

------
alexholehouse
Sadly, I think this is perhaps the only (?) reason to stay in academia any
more (albeit a very good one).

------
ribs
Paul talks about this subject like it's a breaking of the code or something,
but it's just economics. If there's a commodity you can get for cheaper than
other people, you stand to gain. In this case the commodity is pleasure, which
you can buy for negative money.

------
noonespecial
This is also why it's difficult for some of us around here to charge customers
what our work is worth. It doesn't seem like work to us at all. It feels just
like reading comics and playing WoW. It's hard to _feel_ like we should be
paid for such things.

------
callesgg
I have always had the image that debugging is like this thing that one has to
do when one has fucked up.

But thinking of it after reading the last part of the article i realized that
i actually find that debugging is quite fun, i have never really thought of it
until now.

------
dogweather
I'm like this, and other successful programmers I know are like this. But I
wonder how applicable this is to people in other industries. Does everyone
have something they like to do for which the market will reward them?

------
fisheuler
I just misunderstand the meaning of the word "work".I intepreted it as a verb
meaning dosn't operate normally. After reread other people's comment. I
realized it's meaning : similar to the job.

------
capex
Does entrepreneurship feel like work to anyone?

~~~
gdulli
As an engineer I love working for entrepreneurial companies and with
entrepreneurial people because they're ambitious and innovative and fast-
moving. I would absolutely hate to be an entrepreneur myself and be
responsible for selling a product, figuring out which product would sell,
figuring out how to monetize or advertise, and so on.

------
lisper
Ron's second law: the hardest part of getting what you want is figuring out
what it is.

------
elwell
I enjoyed the short length and poetry of this 'essay'; kind of different from
PG.

------
BrainInAJar
What if you don't have anything like this?

~~~
afarrell
Then you are in the position of most people on earth and should pick something
that has some enjoyable parts, few infuriating parts, and is reasonably
financially rewarding.

~~~
BrainInAJar
And that, for me, is software engineering. I don't love tech, I like it well
enough, I'm good at it, and it pays the bills.

------
known
You are a product of your environment.

------
thisjustin2015
This just in: do what you love

~~~
returnofdjedi
Read the full article by pg to understand the intricacies of it :)

One of the best articles for understanding how loving your work is possible.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html)

~~~
thisjustin2015
Thanks, I appreciate the link. Unfortunately none of this is all that deep.

As others have pointed out, the advice is trite and often short sighted. There
are many things that one may love to do that simply aren't rewarded monetarily
by our current economic system.

------
timetraveller
What the hell Paul? Why you're using image for the title. I can send it to my
Kindle.

~~~
frevd
Times have changed in the web (nowadays you can embed fonts and CSS-style menu
items), but not on this site.

------
meigwilym
OT: siarad Cymraeg Paul?

------
CmonDev
Being a VC.

------
cryptoz
This dichotomy, and the realization that it can fuel smart people to use their
abilities to do amazing things in the world, is what upsets me most about the
startup ecosystem. I'm a programmer. Writing weather software doesn't seem
like work to me. However, since going through a startup accelerator, I'm
supposed to all these things that are very much "work" \- and it gets me down.
Things that are important, for sure, like pitch decks, financial modelling,
market research, _raising capital in general_. They're distracting me from the
things I like doing but I do them because they're necessary for the business.
My "fun work" quickly became "work that I don't like doing", and it's hard to
stay in love with your startup after a lot of that.

I wish there were a way for startup founders to do what they love doing, and
not what the VC/fundraising cycle tells them they should do.

If someone can solve that problem I'd be really really happy.

~~~
nostrademons
I knew some folks at Google who were very content to stay an engineer at the
bottom of the org chart and watch the people they mentored get promoted above
them, because they understood that what made them happy was writing code and
solving tough technical problems, not managing people or playing political
games. I always respected them for that. Same reason that Steve Wozniak was
always far more of a hero to me than Steve Jobs. It both takes more courage
and provides more satisfaction to know what you like to do and figure out how
to spend your life doing it than it does to become really good at what _other_
people think they wish they were doing.

That said, I think startups will always be hard, for _everybody_ , because no
matter what you're good at, you will have to do a lot of other stuff to make
them succeed. That's probably why the financial rewards for them are so high.
Good partners can help at this, but maybe the sort of person who's naturally
suited for a startup is simply "someone who likes to get good at a lot of
different tasks".

~~~
_Robbie
_To this day I will stay at the bottom of the org chart being an engineer
cause that 's where I want to be._ -Steve Wozniak

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJif4i9NRdI#t=290](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJif4i9NRdI#t=290)

~~~
jodrellblank
\- multi millionaire and Fusion IO Chief Scientist and touring speech giver,
Steve Wozniak,

------
jsprogrammer
>When I was in college I used to write papers for my friends. It was quite
interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking.

Sorry, did Paul just say that he helped people cheat in their college classes?
Or did the professors know he was writing others' papers?

------
hasenj
There are many activities that I enjoy doing as a hobby, but can't imagine
doing them as a profession or for a living.

One of them for example: if I like a song in a foreign language I'm learning,
I will look up the lyrics and try to translate it by carefully analyzing each
sentence and using lots of dictionaries and Google searches (sometimes asking
on Forums or asking native speakers in person). It takes anywhere from hours
to days. It might seem to most people that this requires discipline and
tenacity, but when I do it I just do it for fun.

I'm not so sure though that I would enjoy it the same way if I had to do that
kind of work for a living.

------
dreamdu5t
You can get paid to do that kind of math. But what about stuff that doesn't
pay? The things that don't seem like work to me aren't profitable or even
monetizable. And please don't tell me something to the effect of "I'm not
trying hard enough".

~~~
tomasien
I think if that's the case holistically, that what you like to do that other
people think is "work" literally can not be monetized in the current economy,
then that's just a tragedy. If the economy hasn't developed a model for what
you uniquely like to do then I think that's just a very unfortunate reality.
However, I wonder if perhaps you're taking it too literally. It's quite
possible that what you like to do has manifested itself in economically
unpalatable ways generally, but if you thought creatively you MAY find that
there are economically beneficial places that aren't so obvious where you fit
perfectly.

~~~
dreamdu5t
It is a tragedy, and that's why I find this essay naive, arrogant, and simply
dishonest. Passions don't all have the same economic viability. "Do what you
love" is trite and useless advice.

I think part of it was growing up with a thesbian mother and painter father
and seeing first hand how doing what you love isn't enough to feed yourself.
It stings a little for other people to claim that you don't need to "work" if
you just do what you love. I don't bemoan Paul Graham for his success... but
its insulting.

~~~
tomasien
Interestingly enough, PG also loves painting almost more than anything. He
wrote a book about it called "Hackers and Painters". Extrapolate whatever
you'd like from that fact.

------
nnq
So if I _absolutely hate debugging_ , it means _I 'm not meant to be a
programmer_ after all (even if I otherwise love everything about
programming)?!

I hate debugging (and more generally "diagnostic reasoning" in general... also
went through med school long time ago), that I've actually become a "language
geek", researching language after language and programming pattern after
pattern in order to find strategies to reduce as much as possible the
debugging work that I have to do. I've learned Lisp. I've started learning
Haskell. Rust is on my "to learn" list now too. And my _absolute hate for
debugging work_ makes me research new things every day in the search for that
nirvana where code that compiles always works and where you don't have to work
5x as hard to please the compiler either...

