
Craftsmanship – The alternative to the four-hour work week mindset - rpkoven
https://hackernoon.com/craftsmanship-the-alternative-to-the-four-hour-work-week-mindset-e464a2dd34f4
======
jasonkester
_To lounge on a beach or travel the world and not actively engage in building
your arsenal of expertise is professional malpractice._

I've seen this thought expressed before in writing about Startups. If you're
not burning your life down 24/7 in the struggle to make it Big, you're doing
it wrong.

But that's silly.

The entire _goal_ of building a business, in my mind, is to get the point
where you can lounge on a beach or travel the world and not need to actively
engage in anything except the pursuit of happiness.

I personally averaged out at a little less than four hours of work per week in
2017, running the sort of low maintenance, feature complete, Software-as-a-
Service business that the author spends a paragraph explaining is not in fact
a "serious company".

But look at the product and you'll see craftsmanship. Ten years of work, in
fact as of roughly today. But never at the author's pace. Always at mine.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

That's the great thing about building a business. You can do it any way you
like.

~~~
chrishynes
Did you _build_ the business on 4 hours a week over 10 years? That'd be maybe
one full time year worth of work over the period. Is it now fully supporting
you, i.e. more than 6 figures of profit? If you did that on four hours a week
over the duration, I salute you, and care to share your niche?

If not, and you did spend more time in the first few years getting the
business established, then how can you compare your relaxation on maintenance
mode of a business after it is running smoothly with the initial effort it
takes to get off the ground? That's pulling up the ladder after you succeeded,
not relevant advice.

~~~
jasonkester
Indeed, there were weeks early on where I would work upwards of 20 hours
building the product (though it was launched and signing up customers after
the first of those weeks.) The important thing is that it never consumed all
my time or focus.

It wasn't my main revenue stream during the early years, and didn't hit the
six figure, quit the day job level until maybe year five or six.

As to ladders, I spend most of my time here and on my blog [1] explaining in
detail how to climb it, and encouraging people to do so. Sadly, few choose to.
The VC route has a much better PR team, selling the benefits of rockets over
ladders.

[1]
[http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/](http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/)

------
cyberferret
I am probably in the age bracket that puts me in the 'old fashioned' end of
the spectrum of HN readers, but I fully agree with the premise of the article.
Craftsmanship is a lost art form these days.

While I admire, and respect the wishes of a lot of younger people in my
industry these days to want to travel a lot, and build a business that can be
operated anywhere, I think a lot of them don't yet have the realisation that
_anything_ you do day in day out, can become routine, boring and something
that you will yearn to be 'free' from after a while.

~~~
zapita
> _Craftsmanship is a lost art form these days._

In my experience, that is not equally true everywhere in the world.

It's certainly very true in the USA. In my opinion that's partly because
college and trade schools are so expensive. Unsurprinsingly, the result is
students with less years of experience practicing their craft.

I think this is mostly cultural. The original American craft is business.
Everything else is seen through the lens of business. Everything becomes a
hustle. Including things that really shouldn't, like teaching a craft, or
learning one. In other cultures, the craft itself - practicing it, preserving
it, transmitting it - is the priority, and business is a tool to achieve that
end. Not so in the US.

I don't know Australia (where I think you're from) but perhaps it's similar
there?

~~~
combatentropy
As a lifelong citizen on the USA, I agree, and so does Paul Graham ("Made in
the USA,"
[http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html)).

Most Americans are uninterested in craftsmanship. Actually, I think it's more
basic. Most Americans are unaware of craftsmanship. They just do not
understand what it is. They think it is a flourish that maybe adds 10%. A
knife is a knife. If one costs three times as much because of "better
craftsmanship," an American is likely to think that means it has some
decorative etchings.

A knife is a knife, so for most Americans, shopping is just about finding the
cheapest one. They are all knives, so only a fool would pay $100 when you can
get one for $10. They figure that the one that costs $100 is because its maker
hasn't put together the most efficient factory, or that it somehow became
fashionable, maybe because a movie star had one --- certainly not because it
lasts longer, will stay sharper longer, or anything practical like that.

Americans are sometimes okay with spending more on a particular manifestation
of a general item. For example, it's okay to have an expensive car. But even
then, they don't think Porsches are crafted better. It's that they look better
(but for no objective reason, it's just what you like) and that they go faster
(but not for any clever reason, they just have a big engine, what's so hard
about that?). Or if you're not into sports cars, you might spend a bunch of
money on a Jaguar. But the Jaguar is not a more comfortable ride because of
more craftsmanship. It's just a matter of adding more padding to the seats and
using bigger springs in the suspension. Anyone could do it. You just make
things bigger. Bigger is better. More is always better. "Less is more," is
some kind of Buddhist mantra by people who can't afford the nice things in
life, so they kid themselves.

There are many exceptions. For example, Steve Jobs. Also, I find that many
craftsmen appreciate craftsmanship: a plumber, mechanic, or carpenter. The
problem is that most Americans don't work in these blue-collar jobs. The goal
is white-collar jobs, and maybe that is the root of the problem. In America
there are so many ways to make money at a desk or through a clever deal, that
that has become the aspiration.

------
mch82
This author has either not read or not understood the 4-Hour Work Week.

At no point does the 4HWW talk about passively creating a business. What the
book does point out is that when you sell billable hours you only make money
at work, while if you sell product you make money anytime someone buys your
product. Making money from a product sale while asleep is referred to as
“passive income”. Any app developer selling an app or web subscription is
earning a passive income.

The criticism also ignores the 4HWW approach, which is to talk to experts &
run experiments in order to learn the best way to do things rather than flail
wildly without guidance.

Lastly, the criticism ignores the “Dreamlining” portion of the 4HWW where Tim
explores the difference between ownership of possessions and access to
experiences. While many of the methods in 4HWW are now obsolete due to changes
in how SEO works and saturation in web businesses, the section on Dreamlining
is still worth a read.

~~~
dtawfik1
Hi there. I am Daniel, the author. The post wasn't intended to be a slight at
Tim Ferriss or the 4 Hour Work Week. I think Tim, is an interesting guy and he
immerses himself in his craft, which underlies why he is as successful as he
is. As other comments have suggested and what the post tries to make explicit
is that the mindset of shortcuts and silver bullets is what is really what I
found objectionable.

~~~
mch82
Hi Daniel, thank you for taking the time to comment. I appreciate your view
that shortcuts and silver bullets aren’t a recipe for success, and probably
agree with you. However, I don’t recall anything in 4HWW promoting shortcuts
or silverbullets, and I would have found your essay on craftsmanship stronger
if you’d left 4HWW out of it.

Edit: Also, you sparked an interesting discussion & reached the front page of
HN, so that’s pretty cool!

------
rpkoven
"Startup graveyards are full of visionaries without expertise or the proper
skills to execute, for no other reason then ideas are not self executing, but
are rather made into being by intense engagement by skilled operators."

As an engineer who gets approached to build other people's ideas regularly, I
find this trait to be true.

~~~
oglowo3
I don't think Tim Ferriss is the issue, nor is the 4 Hour Work Week. I think
Tim Ferris chose the title for marketing purposes. I do however, agree that a
lot of his followers are looking for too many shortcuts.

~~~
Realist1337
>> a lot of his followers are looking for too many shortcuts.

In the old days, people devoted their careers to a company and companies
looked out for people. Continuous layoff cycles were rare and long-timers
earned pensions. These days there are layoffs in good times and bad. Sometimes
layoffs hit entire divisions and even top rated people are let go.

 _Why the heck would i trust some traditional system and not try to find
shortcuts?_

~~~
tonyedgecombe
_In the old days, people devoted their careers to a company and companies
looked out for people._

Really? I've been hearing that lament regularly for the last 35 years.

~~~
iagovar
Yes. IDK in the US, but it was common in Europe until the 80s-90s or so.

~~~
kbenson
That was the impression here too, but I think the truth has been shrouded in
nostalgia. I think the truth is that it was just a large growth period
(reconstruction, expansion, and population boom after Wii), and there was a
lot of demand for workers. When demand for workers is high, and work is
prevalent, workers get a really good deal. It was good until the economy
changed, but that's why romantacizing it isn't worthwhile. The companies
weren't any better, they were just behaving in their own self interest.

------
insickness
While I agree that it's bullshit that you can be successful working 4 hours
per week, there was a good point in the book: It's not worth making yourself
unhappy working relentlessly in an unfulfilling job in order to enjoy the
fruits of your labor in some distant future. Better to work less hours so you
can enjoy your life while you're young.

~~~
gingerlime
There's a pretty wide spectrum between 4 hours per week and working yourself
to death.

As a co-founder/technical person, I immensely enjoy what I do. Frankly, I'll
get bored pretty quickly sitting at the beach and staring at the ocean. It's
fun and relaxing, but I kinda "get the point" after some time. Whereas, there
are endless challenges to keep me motivated, curious, and ultimately satisfied
"at work".

It was more or less the same satisfaction and fulfillment I had as an
employee. I just enjoyed the challenges and still got compensated generously
back then.

Disclaimer: I didn't read the book. I'm sure it has some great points or it
won't resonate with so many people. Also I should mention that at our company
we instated a 45-days holidays per year policy (this includes personal and
public holidays, we're 100% remote, no VC, but no dreams of mega money). So we
do see a lot of value in _not_ working to death.

~~~
cimmanom
Sure, but you don't have to spend all that time staring at the ocean. You can
spend it exploring the cities of the world and all the history and culture
they have to offer. You can spend it learning new things. You can spend it
hiking or skiing or skeet shooting. You can spend it with friends and family.
You can spend it writing or painting or woodworking. You can spend it
volunteering or building an organization to make the world a better place. You
can spend it doing for fun what you used to do for work.

We spend so much of our lives working just to be able to feed and house
ourselves. There are so many things we could do with our lives if we didn't
have to, and lying on the beach is only one of thousands.

------
hyperpallium
Taking ownership of and responsibility for one's own work, taking pride in it,
and seeing the whole project through to completion (rather than being a cog on
an assembly line, to mix metaphors) are certainly craftsmanship values.

But for code, "craftsmanship" is problematic. Not just that it changes so
quickly (compared with traditional crafts), that ideal skills don't have time
to be defined, let alone mastered.

This is caused by the malleable, abstract thought-stuff of code, and it occurs
even within the work of the individual coder: as soon as you master something,
it should be abstracted into a library or framework - a product. This puts the
coder at a higher level, which is a different level, and therefore not yet
mastered. Such factoring opportunities are far rarer in traditional, physical
crafts.

Productization obsoletes craftsmanship.

Of course, not every task is sufficiently self-contained to be usefully
factored out - instead, the code itself is pretty much the best "abstraction"
you can do. But can these ad hoc tasks really be mastered either?

> ‘I didn’t know how to do x, so I just had to figure it out.’ This is what I
> regularly hear from successful founders, whereas ‘I couldn’t find someone to
> do X, so I had to reconsider whether to pursue it at all’ is a common
> refrain from unsuccessful founders.

Grit, resourcefulness, improvisation - great! But "figuring it out" is much
closer to hacking a solution than achieving craftsmanship-like mastery...

~~~
gurkendoktor
> This is caused by the malleable, abstract thought-stuff of code, and it
> occurs even within the work of the individual coder: as soon as you master
> something, it should be abstracted into a library or framework - a product.

You can also turn this around: Maybe software craftsmanship is not about
writing great code (for the reasons you mentioned; the article also doesn't
phrase it that way), but about skillfully using existing tools. Peek into the
open source libraries you use, disassemble the closed-source ones, take your
time to really understand that occasional bug.

There are many tools that rarely change (extreme examples: Unix, RDBMS,
programming languages), and grokking them is not something that can be
productized. Yet I see few people/businesses making that investment; it's
easier in the short term to treat everything as a black box and add more
abstraction glue, and that's what I see many people/businesses do.

~~~
hyperpallium
Yes, there are meta-skills of tool use. Another enduring eg: vi. Muscle-memory
investment is retained - very like tool-use in a physical craft. I think git
will last forever(!) too.

Still seems more like a journey man or handyman than craftsmanship, but maybe
that's not fair of me.

I agree there is deep craft in understanding tools. Hmmm, maybe
developing/maintaining those enduring tools is even closer to craftsmanship?
Unfortunately, enduring codebases get worse over time by conglomeration! The
antithesis of craftsmanship. People who have written the same kind of enduring
tool several times (from scratch) would probably be the epitome of software
craftsmanship. e.g. plan 9 and go.

But, gluing black-boxes is more productive.

------
dev1n
This guy has some great points. I can't get past the fact that he didn't
review his writing at all, nor did he have anyone else proof-read it. The
writing quality is poor.

" _... your way your way..._ ", " _... just a by standard..._ ", improper uses
of " _then_ ", " _this tasks_ " etc... all distract from the thesis.

~~~
dtawfik1
Thanks for pointing that out (quite embarrassing). I made those edits and I
appreciate you bringing them to my attention/

------
vinceguidry
The article states this as well, but I wanted to hammer on it. Tim's book is a
quite serviceable read on building a sustainable Internet business, and warns
against the kind of mentality that everyone seems to associate him with. He's
really up-front about the fact that it can take years of 60-hour work weeks
before you ever see a four-hour one.

He's also stated in a blog post that he chose the title for the book based on
market testing. It's far more of an indictment on society than it is on him
that people take the spirit of his book wrong.

~~~
Joeri
I felt the whole book to be a bit tongue in cheek anyway, as if no one was
expected to actually try it. The point of the book for me wasn’t to achieve
the four hour work week, it was to take control of your work week so you can
have a better life.

~~~
vinceguidry
For me the big win was the realization that if you are an excellent performer
at your job, you can negotiate perks. And a lot of that perk negotiation can
involve asking for forgiveness rather than permission.

Huge mental shift.

------
sneak
They are using different metrics of success. That kind of social hustling that
is devoid of any meaningful engineering is indeed a way to make a very decent
and respectable personal income, even if none of your businesses are ever that
useful or produce any good technology.

Whereas most hackers I think view success as “changing the world for the
better directly via the production of software or electronics”.

------
erikb
It's a nice fantasy, but sadly not correct. Delivering an important share of
the production value is valuable on the business side, that's true. But it's
not the major factor. It's one of multiple bargaining chips. Knowing the right
people is another. Building hype for the product is another. Being directly
involved in the sales process is yet another. And there are multiple more.

An enterprise is more than what it produces and therefore an enterpreneur also
needs to be more. Not more in the sense of "higher level" but more in the
sense of multi-tasking. Scale out, not scale up.

And being mediocre in each area is actually quite okay if one therefore is
able to understand which area is currently the most important. If you have an
exceptional product but nobody buys it, the hype building part is very well
the most important area at that time, as an example.

So yes, craftmanship is important. It will make you produce great things, and
the production of these things may make you a success as entrepreneur. But
it's by far not to be singled out as The Major Factor.

------
vadimberman
I agree with the central idea, but the "networking events" are not
representative of the industry. They attract professional b*itters by
definition.

There is nothing unique about running a startup, it's another business, but,
as of today, with great expectations and generally more money and higher risk
of quick failure than a mainstream business.

------
kendallpark
Every year devs debate over how to optimize the "X hour work week" function.

I personally don't care what X is, I care about variation. I chafe under a
steady X hours a week schedule. I'd rather go hard for a season, take a huge
break, then go back to working 50-80 hours a week. Is anyone else like this?

~~~
spraak
No, because even 40 is nearing too much for me. I'm happy and productive with
my 4 to 6 hour days of development.

------
BeetleB
>What is missed in all of this is the mindset of craftsmanship; that one’s
expertise and deliberate focus on one’s craft is actually the primary driver
for success and not some crapshoot of a series of hacks.

I'm all for craftsmanship for the sake of it, but this statement is naive.

You _need_ craftsmanship for some type of businesses. For the rest, you do
not. I have seen way too many people become successful financially with
spaghetti, and even more who never got off the ground because they felt honing
their craft would bring in more money.

If you're trying to run a business, be as good as you need to be. I suspect
many/most businesses will not benefit from becoming a master.

------
combatentropy
> people talk about having an amazing idea that they want to farm out

"Ideas are just a multiplier of execution," \---
[https://sivers.org/multiply](https://sivers.org/multiply)

------
andygcook
Anything worth doing takes a long time. Sure, you can get going relatively
fast to the person who’s doing nothing, but just like a software product, the
last 10% is the same amount of effort as the first 90%. There’s a trail of
hard work behind every founder that achieves outsized success.

Jay Acunzo has a really good podcast about this subject: Unthinkable.fm. It’s
focused on not embracing the hacks-culture and instead focusing on the craft.
It’s texhnically a podcast about marketing, but a lot of what he talks about
applies to other disciplines too. Most of the interviews are super interesting
too.

------
zerr
> 4-hour mindset

It is usually meant to work 4 hours for others (client/employer), i.e. what
you get paid for. And you spend the rest of the time honing your existing
skills, acquiring new skills, etc... among other things.

~~~
WJW
That is certainly not what Tim Ferris wrote about in the "4 hour workweek"
book, which is what the blog post referred to. The book is quite literally
about optimizing your life so that hours worked per week reduces to somewhere
very low (four came from an A/B test, as TF explains in one of the first
chapters).

~~~
zerr
I've not read Ferris, but e.g. I consider watching some CS lectures as the
part of a recreation and leisure instead of working.

------
danschumann
I've been writing animation software for 3 years, about 4-12 hours / day ( I
also freelance 4 hours a day for money ). Before I started, I was a guy so
obsessed, he was spending weekends and evenings writing painting apps, and 3d
programs for fun. I have always likened myself to a carpenter building a
house.

Anyway, I've re-written most sections of my app 5-10 times. I'm re-writing
much of the 50k lines right now (I'm adding in redux + immutable, but also
refactoring lots and cleaning up lots).

At this point, I'm fairly convinced you can't pay people to make an app like
I'm making(to the same quality). I'm also fairly convinced if I was on a team,
it wouldn't have worked either. Let me explain why...

Re-writing the same stuff to get better code, to help enable things to work a
different way, this feels bad, like wasted work, but it moves the project
forward. It feels bad even though I'm re-writing my own code. If I was on a
team, I think there would be more negativity around it.

If I was paid to do something, I would focus my time on adding features, but
not really on refactoring. I'd do enough to show results, but I'd paint myself
into a corner, at which point development would slow down. It would be hard to
get 'cleanup' projects approved. Management wouldn't understand.

So, back to general stuff on being a craftsman.. something I've been going
through was this constant sensation that "launch is coming", "launching next
month!", but it was always in the distance.

For a whole year, it felt like I'd launch was one month away.

I think the lesson I was supposed to learn from this, was that I need to be
hungry for the work I'm doing. The work is the reward, learning to enjoy the
process.

The work is my food, and I'm learning to be hungry.

Loving the work, getting to the point where if I'm allowed to work on it, I've
won, that's craftsmanship to me. Steve Wozniak is my hero in this sense. He
loved the work, he loved "getting close" to the work and the code. He
encouraged going over sections you already knew were pretty spiffy, just to
get that much closer to the code.

Anyway, I think all the "work less" movement is because people haven't
actually found work they actually like. I make animation software, and it's
been a hard school to learn to like it, which you would think would be easy.

When the definition of anything changes to "work", it almost innately becomes
harder to enjoy. I think the real lesson of the next decade is learning to
enjoy work, especially when it becomes very difficult and harder to enjoy. To
enjoy the unenjoyable is perhaps a secret to living.

When I release my software, I want to be standing beside it straight and tall,
beaming at the craftsmanship. Part of me hates sales, and in a way, it goes
with the craftsmanship part, knowing that only a truly great product is worth
selling, and that product does much of the selling itself, after the initial
people have used it.

~~~
postsantum
The last few years I too have been building a piece of animation software, but
the first crappy version of it was released after just six months of
development.

I hate dealing with the business part (ads, billing, etc), but moderately
spoiling the app with ads and in-apps allows me not to be distracted earning
money. Staying hungry just means taking freelance gigs for me.

Overall, adding new complex features turned out to be orthogonal to
monetization efficiency, but I continued to implement them. Two years ago I
discovered a tiny obscured fan community of the app and helped them grow.
Since then the most enjoyable part of my work is interacting with some of the
dedicated users and discovering the new ways of using content they create.

They cannot pay me, but the I am proud of making a great product for them. The
code is shit to be honest, but does it matter?

------
patrickg_zill
I can't help but think of Ezra Pound's Canto XLV, "Usura".
[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54319/canto-
xlv](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54319/canto-xlv) ;

a line from the poem, "no picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is
made to sell and sell quickly"

We have swapped real value for fake artifice in too many ways in our
economy...

------
senatorobama
TL;DR the Tim Ferris phenomenon? Isn't he just the original blogspammer?

------
Swizec
As long as you don't confuse being ineffective for craftsmanship. It's not
craft when something takes longer to build than it should. Or is of higher
quality than needs to be. It's craft when something is juuuuust perfectly
suited to its purpose.

Do more, work less.

~~~
adventured
> It's not craft when something takes longer to build than it should.

Who determines the should part of that?

The outside observer that claims they can build an Uber clone in a weekend?
(an intentionally absurd example, although not uncommon either)

Or the builder. And if it's the actual builder-owner, who else is there to
specify _to them_ , how long _their_ building & craftsmanship should take? I
say: nobody; period.

I'll take the old id Software mantra: it'll be done when it's done. It's
glorious in its go fuck yourself attitude toward artificially pressurized
deadlines.

Or Shigeru Miyamoto: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is
forever bad." Although I might change it to: a delayed game may eventually be
good, but a rushed game is forever bad. The spirit of it is correct.

~~~
Swizec
> Or the builder. And if it's the actual builder-owner, who else is there to
> specify to them, how long their building & craftsmanship should take? I say:
> nobody; period.

Exactly. The builder will know when they’re being effective and when they’re
just fucking around.

Deep down we all know even if we sometimes don’t want to admit it.

And a great game never finished because it ran out of budget or time or the
builder got distracted by a shiny new project is just that, a game never
finished.

