
The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals (2017) - skilled
https://fs.blog/2017/08/amateurs-professionals/
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ohduran
Don't you find that fs.blog is increasingly clickbaity? I mean, this article
is just a listicle that could have appeared in Business Insider or HuffPost or
the likes. Does someone agree?

By the way wasn't Einstein an amateur physicist?

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Traster
Einstein got a Bachelors in 1900, a PhD in 1905 and was a lecturer at Bern by
1908, he held a series of prestigious positions over the following 20 years.
After he emmigrated to America in '30s he worked at Princeton. I don't know
how anyone could assert that Einstein wasn't a professional physicist.

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ohduran
a PhD in 1905 means that he got it around the time he published his 4 articles
in Annalen der Physik. I understand your point, but by the time he wrote the
relativity theory he was, by the standards of this article, an amateur.

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kstenerud
It's a good comparison, but the use of the words "amateur" and "professional"
to contrast the negative and positive points is unfortunate. Amateur is
historically a positive word, describing people who pursue a particular field
that is not their primary source of income (for the love of the field itself,
thus the word "amateur"). For example, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton were
amateurs.

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mongol
What was their primary income?

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kstenerud
Francis Bacon was a statesman, and Isaac Newton was a mathematician by
profession.

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mongol
Is it fair to say that Newton was a professional mathematician and an amateur
physicist?

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kstenerud
Amateur physicist, astronomer, author, and theologian.

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ChainOfFools
and alchemist, which commanded the majority of his curiosity and written
output.

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kstenerud
... at a time when alchemy (chymistry) and science were not yet fully
distinct. Also, only a tenth of his written works deal with alchemy.

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moksly
What a ridiculous list. Amateurs are people without formal training who
contribute as a hobby, professionals are trained and get paid for what they
do. There isn’t any correlation between the things on that list and
amateurs/professionals at all in my opinion. It simply reads as a list of
good/bad traits that you want or want to avoid in the people in your network
and yourself.

People who do things as a hobby don’t just stop once they reach some goal, at
least not in my experience. In stead they set new goals, and I really don’t
think people give up easily either. I mean, most people who do an Ironman are
technically amateurs who self-train and participate because they think it’s
fun.

Likewise, when we operate open source projects we evaluate your contributions
not your personal status. If your code is solid, no one is going to care if
you’re a 89 year old retired truck driver who codes for fun.

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jomohke
Looking at Collins dictionary, I think the author is using the third
definition of amateur: “a person unskilled in or having only a superficial
knowledge of a subject”

And the second definition of professional “a personal who engages in an
activity with great competence”

These are implied by the question that begins the article: “Why is it that
some people seem to be hugely successful and do so much, while the vast
majority of us struggle to tread water?”

The author could have chosen better words, but I feel you’re missing most of
the article by focusing exclusively on them.

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GuB-42
That list is not the difference between amateurs and professionals, it is
about being good at the job.

In reality there is only one difference between professional and amateurs:
money.

Professionals know how to turn their skill into a regular income. It doesn't
mean they are really good at their job, more that they know how to deal with
customers, work on a schedule, budget, advertise,...

There may be one skill that professionals have more than amateurs and that's
the ability to finish the job. That's because people usually pay for a
finished product, and if you don't finish, you don't get paid.

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Traster
These points aren't about amateurs and professionals and most of them don't
stand up on their own merits.

>Amateurs have a goal. Professionals have a process.

I'll tell my boss this the next time we set my goals for the year.

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water42
There's valid points here, but the impact is lost in the disjoint laundry list
communication style.

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eesmith
I think most of the points are invalid.

Amateur means something more like "doesn't get paid". Professional means "gets
paid."

Consider amateur marathoners. Some indeed "stop when they achieve" their first
marathon. Others dedicate years to participating in marathons, and running
culture. But they are all amateurs.

Some amateur marathoners "have a goal" \- do a marathon. Some "have a
process."

Most amateurs runners _do not_ "think they are good at everything".

Many amateur runners have coaches, and join running clubs, and read advice
books, all to get feedback and coaching.

Go down the list, and pretty none of it applies to dedicated amateur marathon
runners.

Nor does it apply to other fields, like dedicated amateur birdwatching.

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mongol
I think the list is more relevant for how it describes professionals, and less
relevant for how it applies to amateurs. From professionals we expect a
certain level of efficiency and proficiency. From amateurs we generally don't
but that does not mean there are no skilled amateurs in a field.

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atoav
E.g. Sir Isaac Newton who was a professional mathematician but an amateur
physicist.

Professionalism to me means a few things: \- you earn money with the thing you
do \- given a outline of the project you can judge how long it will take \-
you also care about communicating your work \- once you agree to do something,
you do it unless you can’t

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raxxorrax
> Amateurs think in absolutes.

So amateurs are Sith. Sorry for this comment, but I cannot really take this
post too seriously (yes, yes, this is probably just an amateur comment and I
take the blog too personally).

The difference is probably just that professionals earn their money in the
domain in question. That often has a positive influence on experience of
course.

Having worked at least a few years in industry it quickly becomes apparent
that magic formulas are quite rare.

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nirse
It seems to me that whoever wrote that article thinks in absolutes...

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rikroots
I dislike articles that attempt to turn people into binary groups such as
"amateur" vs "professional" \- there's some parts of my life where I'm
amateur, others where I'm professional - and a lot of areas where I count
myself as "clueless"

I was happier with the list after I replaced all instances of "amateurs" with
"happy people" and all instances of "professionals" with "INTJ personality
types"

(Disclosure: I'll admit to testing as an INTJ personality type, though I find
the whole Myers-Briggs thing only slightly more convincing that astrology)

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carrozo
Amateurs write clickbaity listicles to bolster their own fragile self-
importance.

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lincpa
Albert Einstein is an amateur physicist, a professional patent office clerk.

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martin-adams
It's interesting to see how people interpret the word amateur in this.

There are two definitions:

1\. a person who engages in a pursuit, especially a sport, on an unpaid rather
than a professional basis.

2\. a person who is incompetent or inept at a particular activity.

My interpretation is that it's only referring to 2 and isn't referring to
those who engage in a pursuit without payment. Or more specifically, being an
ameteur is a product of those actions.

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themdonuts
I've interpreted "amateurs" as people that are not good at what they do.
People that have a job or a main activity but don't try enough and don't have
the mindset to give the best of them. The whole list made sense from that
point of view and less from "amateur" as a person that has a hobby.

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jnbiche
Try not to focus in the exact terminology used (I agree that "amateur" and
"professional" are used incorrectly here).

Instead, understand those terms to mean good workers and bad workers, and
there's actually some good advice in here, even though it comes across as
trite in this format.

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kthejoker2
If you replace the words "amateur" and "professional" with "Goofus" and
"Gallant" you get a much more accurate article.

About that level of sophistication too.

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ivanhoe
This is not about amateurs but people acting "professionally" vs. those acting
"unprofessionally"...

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s188
Agreed. I think the professional/unprofessional distinction would have been
much better. In this article the term 'amateur is used in a derogatory way, a
sort of 'put down', such as one professional referring to another professional
colleague as an 'amateur'. It's used in a sense that amateur is bad and
professional is good. However it's not unusual for amateurs to be as good as
professionals. For instance, major golf tournaments will often invite an
amateur as a guest competitor. And so, in this case, the amateur/professional
distinction isn't how good they are at playing golf (they're all equally good)
- instead it's in the sense of 'is it a full-time career' and 'are earnings
derived therefrom'.

Our industry (software dev specifically) is inclined to use put downs in this
way. I've often thought the phrase 'code smell' is used as a 'put down', a way
of diminishing someone's work in order to make them change what they do (i.e.
to be more like some perceived standard). I think the use of that (and other
similar derogatory phrases) is unprofessional - which is a tad ironic.

~~~
ivanhoe
Depends on the area of expertise we're talking about. In sport amateurs
absolutely can be as good or better than professional athletes. Musician or
painter or programmer, same thing. But a skilled worker in jobs that are all
about practice and experience? For instance I can manage to lay a brick wall
or put tiles on the wall, but I did it only a few times in my life and I doubt
that anyone not doing it professionally can have a significantly more
experience than that - you just don't get a chance to do a lot of DIY projects
like that - while someone who does that professionally is doing it for many
hours a day, every day. That makes a HUGE difference in experience and that
translates into the quality and speed. As DIY amateur, even if you come close
in the quality, it will certainly take you 10x more time than professional.

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brainzap
one do it for love and curiosity, the others for money?

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nubero
Why is this drivel on Hacker News? What’s next? “See how these 20 celebrities
have changed over the years”?

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ojhughes
Have you seen the Olsen twins lately?? The years have not been kind..

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cannonedhamster
And yet, if you take the Olsen twins at face value, they've had successful
primary careers, have managed to hold on to their money, generally stay out of
the spotlight, and have had numerous business ventures with varying levels of
success. I don't think that the Olsen twins can be judged too harshly, in fact
they really deserve quite a bit of credit for taking a single acting role and
turning it into a lifelong empire. If they were in tech they'd be HN rock
stars.

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nubero
They would be Apple under Tim Cook: existing on old momentum…

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ztjio
There is one and only one difference between professionals and amateurs.
Professional make the majority of their income doing the thing they are
professional at, amateurs are doing the thing on an unpaid basis.

That's it. End of story.

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atoav
Exactly, although some use “amateur” as a way to tell you you are not good at
something, it doesn’t actually follow from it’s definition.

It is perfectly possible e.g. that an amateur artist makes better art than a
professional one. Amateurs can be better than professionals especially in
fields where the market forces you to do the same cheap stuff over and over
again without any need to create something truly beautiful.

That beeing said: probably most of the best software out there has been
created in an non-professional environment.

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lordnacho
Another example: amateur investors can beat professionals quite easily.
Sometimes by doing nothing at all.

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coldtea
Amateurs write trite blog posts about professionalism for free.

Professionals don't sum up being professional in a few sound bites.

And of course the main difference, missing from the article, is getting paid
for what you do vs doing it purely for the love/fun of it.

If you have a market you can drop all or most of the points in the post, and
still be "hugely successful and do so much". If you don't you can do all of
the above and still "struggle to tread water". And of course you could do all
of the above while being an amateur as well (amateur != low quality output).

The post is more "how to be a better person / colleague / more efficient
worker" than pro vs amateur.

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foobar_
Most project managers are amateurs.

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iainmerrick
Wow, you should try working somewhere where project managers actually get
paid.

