
Do What You Love? Screw That - giis
http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/worst-career-advice-do-what-you-love.html
======
mdkess
Passion leads to hours of practice, and hours of practice leads to success.
While you can't force yourself to be passionate about your current job, if you
follow your passions - sincerely - I think that more often than not, it'll
lead to a successful existence. I can think of very few passions where people
can't at least maintain their existences. Maybe not get rich, I think in
general that takes luck, but feed themselves and I think live happier as a
result.

And honestly, what's the point of doing anything else? Be someone else's
servant, because you want ... money? Recognition? You are going to die one
day, and that's it. The purpose of life, as best I can tell, is self
actualization.

It's stupid. You want money? Why? So your kids can follow in your footsteps
and chase money so that their kids can follow in your footsteps and chase
money so their kids can...

And then are you just blaming your children for your lack of ambition and risk
taking? Would you say to your kids "I would have figured out what I loved, but
then you were born". Would you think it, though?

If you want money, go work in finance. Otherwise you're not sincere in even
chasing money, you're just treading water.

~~~
larsberg
> If you want money, go work in finance.

This (and its converse) are exactly the advice I give to undergrads who, here
at the University of Chicago, are heavily recruited by both local and NY
finance firms. I like to point out that if you love money, you will be among
others who do and will probably enjoy your job and especially the pay. And if
you don't, hearing about a trader's addition to his Rolex collection or
figuring out "opportunities" in an exchange's rules or implementation will
destroy your soul.

BTW, I don't give this advice in a loaded way - my wife and many of my friends
work in finance.

~~~
dxbydt
As a recent uchicago grad, let me say your advice, while well intentioned,
isn't quite sound. Work in finance is not as lucrative as work with finance. I
was in finance for about a decade....at gs, bofa etc...the thing is, firms
don't let you daytrade, or buy/sell naked calls, or short sell equities, or
flout 90 day holding period rules, or trade stocks in the restricted
blacklist, or...I could give you an dozen ways ib's ringfence you. Otoh, if
you work in the valley and you know your shit, you can pull in 200k and wear
shorts and torn tshirts to work, not be subject to any bureaucracy, and get
your tradestation account and go nuts. Sell naked calls all day and nobody
will bug you.

~~~
larsberg
Certainly! If you want to trade on your _own_, then being in a financial firm
- particularly a market maker - is a bad choice.

But if you just want to work 9-5, pull in your 200k (which goes pretty far in
Chicago!), and enjoy your money, it's a pretty risk-free path.

I should caveat that my advice is given to CS undergrads looking to do tech-
related work. I have more limited experience with people in other roles who
want to be, say, traders on a desk.

~~~
dxbydt
Ah! In that case, professor, a couple more caveats. Chicago prop shops
notoriously underpay. The IB's pay higher, but still less than
google/fb/twitter. All of my uchicago classmates are in finance with roughly
50% in chicago, rest in nyc. With graduate degrees they don't pull in
200k...atleast as per the reported stats on the career counsel pages. So cs
undergrads pulling in 200k in chicagob while working 9-5 in the finance
industry....very unlikely. But if there is such a person out there, he/she is
amazingly lucky. 200k goes _very_ far in chicago. You could buy a nice 3 bdrm
house with acreage about half hour from the loop and still have money to
spare.

~~~
larsberg
Not a prof, sadly - last year of my PhD, though! Thanks for the additional
info on your peers.

I don't know what the undergraduate pay is like for 20-somethings. All of my
friends (and wife) are > 30 and were experienced developers before entering
the field. Most of them have bases above 200, but _all_ have total comps well
over 200.

I'd be surprised if you make more at Google Chicago than at, say, Getco or
Citadel as a new college hire developer. I'll ask around.

Certainly, though, if you accept with one of the butcher shops you should not
be surprised to be treated like raw meat. The last time my wife was
transitioning, she certainly experienced some offers that were just insulting.
But these were also places just barely scraping by, so it shouldn't be a big
surprise.

Of course, many of the top shops won't even hire new college grads in CS. They
don't have or want to build the infrastructure required to take someone from
barely pulling together a few thousands of lines of code to writing realtime
software.

------
mixmax
_According to research, what is the strongest predictor of a person seeing her
work as a calling?

The number of years spent on the job. The more experience you have the more
likely you are to love your work._

Or it could be that people that don't like what they do change jobs...

~~~
Cl4rity
I don't believe it's that easy for most people.

~~~
kposehn
I think it is easier to do, but harder to muster up the commitment. People
will come up with all manner of reasons to remain in a job where they are
unhappy.

------
sethbannon
I feel like this entire article can be boiled down to this quote: "A passion
people won't pay you for is hardly the basis for a career. It's a hobby. You
can still love your hobbies--just love them in your spare time.

The key as an entrepreneur is to identify a relevant passion."

Not saying much.

~~~
javert
Actually, I think the most important point that may be non-obvious (and is
also probably controversial) is:

Get good at doing something and making money from it, and you will become
passionate about it.

------
karterk
_Think about something you're passionate about. Or were passionate about when
you were in high school. Write it down._

Programming.

 _Then apply this test: Will people pay you for it? Will they pay you a lot
for it?_

YES.

Okay, perhaps this post is not for me, but the post comes across as highly
anecdotal. E.g:

 _That advice has probably resulted in more failed businesses than all the
recessions combined..._

I hate to ask it, but source?

~~~
yen223
I suspect that if your passion was 'playing video games', you might find
yourself agreeing with the article.

~~~
imgabe
Tell that to the guys who run Penny Arcade.

~~~
astine
How about the thousands of guys who tried to imitate Penny Arcade's success
with their own comic strips? Most webcomics aren't that profitable and gamer
oriented comics are probably the most saturated market. It's like acting, some
hit it big, most struggle in obscurity for years.

------
jasonkester
Well said. I'm gonna go ahead and quote me from four years ago. Skip on if
you've read this before:

Not all passions monetize.

At the moment, I'm passionate about rock climbing, travel, surfing and
computer programming. If it weren't for that 4th one, I'd be screwed.

I currently run maybe the 3rd most popular Travel Blogging site out there.
It's had a good 5 years of passion poured in now, off and on, and if I were to
slap ads on it today I'd pull in a buck thirtyfive a day.

I also run a little service that processes the draconian logfiles that Amazon
provides for its webservices and spits out pretty analytics. It's a subject
that no human being could ever be passionate about and it pays my rent.

Sometimes it's better to monetize something boring that people are willing to
pay for.

[<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1324610>]

~~~
kordless
$135/day or $1.35/day?

~~~
Cl4rity
I was wondering the same myself, but at any rate, neither would pay his rent.
However, I am curious because I know a few travel bloggers out there who make
a decent amount of money on their blogs, as well as getting lots of trips paid
for by companies like Expedia and Orbitz and other travel companies and
agencies.

~~~
jonathlee
If $4000/month won't pay his rent, he's (or maybe you) are living in the wrong
country/region.

------
Nursie
Meh.

I enjoyed programming when I knew nothing about it, and I still enjoy it and
do it in my spare time now that I'm over a decade into a software career.

Does it qualify as a passion? I'm not sure. But a hobby I've always enjoyed
and a career that pays me well, yup.

\--edit-- This is not to say every day at work is an unmitigated pleasure! But
I am lucky enough that I get to enjoy what I do for a living from time to time
:)

~~~
DigitalJack
Do you stick to the same languages as work?

~~~
Nursie
Mostly, yes. I find myself using C and python at home, most of my work has
been in C and C++ with various other bits and pieces thrown in.

At work it's about getting the job done in a stable and quality way, and the
language is not usually my choice. After 12(ish) years I'm mostly asked to
work on things I already have experience in.

At home it's about achieving whatever I'm trying to achieve in the fastest way
possible, which usually means I stick to languages I know inside out from
using them at work. I suppose this isn't a pure passion for programming as an
artform, it's more that I get great pleasure from making the machines do what
I want them to.

------
bjhoops1
Anyone who thinks about it critically knows that "Follow Your Passion" just
won't work for the vast majority of people. What I have found, though, is that
expertise _breeds_ passion. Anything can become enjoyable once you become
really, really good at it! Most people do not enjoy the early stages of
learning something new.

My advice: pick something you find reasonably interesting, is potentially
profitable, and that you have a good aptitude for, then aggressively pursue
mastery of it.

~~~
jacques_chester
Is the satisfaction of exercising mastery the same as passion?

Serious question.

~~~
bjhoops1
Perhaps a suitable-enough replacement? :)

~~~
jpwagner
I think Stephen Stills (of Crosby Stills and Nash) would agree.

------
DanielBMarkham
Weird little factoid from the cognitive behavior folks -- action comes first,
then motivation. So it's impossible to be excited about something that you
have not spent some time with. And the more time you spend, the more likely
you'll feel excited by it. People think it's the other way around, that you
feel motivated and then go do stuff, but it's not.

So everything you've ever gotten excited about started off with you not being
very interested at all, but giving something a shot, whether it was a book, a
lecture, a website, or so forth.

~~~
wumpushunter
Daniel, I'm interested in reading more about this. Where did you discover this
factoid?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
A self-help book I read a long time ago -- <http://amzn.to/VXjT8j>

------
orangethirty
I think the better point to make is to not build a business doing something
that you are absolutely in love with. It clouds your judgement and could drive
you to build something people don't want. You can definitely love what you do.
I love programming and marketing, and those are my businesses. But I don't let
the love cloud my judgement (well, not _anymore_ ).

Its like when we fall in love for the first time with a new person. They are
perfect in our eyes, There is no way anything they do is seen as negative. But
little by little, as time passes, we start seeing the real person and not the
fantasy. Sometimes that makes the love grow stronger, and sometimes it drives
us to break the relationship. Same with business. What you need to realize
that the reason business failures hurt so much is because we fall in love with
it. And then get our heart broken when it doesn't work. Don't fall in love
with it.

~~~
ansgri
I think this is the most important point (I remember coming to a similar
conclusion some years ago), but now I think there are a couple of ways around
this caveat (mostly applicable to business, but also of some use in personal
relationships).

So, the problem with loving your work passionately you stop caring about what
other people think of it, what is its (monetary) value to them.

First way: use your love as a hook to which all youd business is tied. E.g.
you are eventually aiming at completing some big thing, and in reaching it you
could make use of such-and-such services which a lot of people also would pay
for.

Second way (now I think it's just a variation of the above one): use your
_career_ as a _carrier_ that carries you to your goal. E.g. use your job to
accumulate wealth to finance your work later and as a learning experience (you
don't want to fail your beloved project, better fail 'with the cats' and be
prepared).

Frankly, I have some experience strictly following these advice in personal
relationships, the result is weird (unfinished story yet), so use at your own
risk :) But in getting satisfaction from work, they do work.

~~~
orangethirty
Great points. Though my post only applied to businesses. Personal relations
are still voodoo to me. Its a miracle I got married, more so that I'm happily
married. :)

------
speeder
Interesting article.

Too bad it does not apply to me :P

In fact, during my childhood everyone tried to convince me to do stuff that I
did NOT loved, because what I loved (making games) was "useless."

Here I am now being CTO of a game company. ;)

~~~
yen223
I'm glad it's working out for you :)

It's not for me. Programming has been a passion of mine all my life. I
practically learnt Python all by myself, in my own time.

Thing was, people have been telling me that I shouldn't do this, that nobody
values tech skills, that I should focus on my 'soft' skills, that programmers
in my country are doomed to be lowly-paid wage slaves.

Turns out, they were right.

~~~
speeder
I never said people where I live are wrong ;)

The professions they wanted me to take still pay 3, 4 times what I am getting.

That is, not counting lawyers (that is also a profession much suggested to
me), then the multiplier is up to 20x or something like that.

But I can pay my bills (barely... but I can).

------
lis
I started my career because I love programming. That was a big mistake for me.
Not because it didn't pay well, but because I lost the passion.

When I spend 8 hours a day programming, I don't want to do it at home. It's
probably because I don't want to sit in front of a computer all day, or I am
lacking social interaction at work. That's why I am currently trying to change
my position. While I still love IT and everything tech-related, I want
programming to become a hobby again.

I admire everyone who is programming after work, tinkering around, building
stuff. I promised my nephew to build a quadrocopter with him, but I haven't
done so, just because I am already programming and doing techy things each day
again and again.

~~~
Nursie
I seem to have managed a mental separation between 'programming I have to do'
and 'programming I want to do'.

The latter category only happens sporadically because, like you, I don't often
have the energy to code all evening when I've coded all day. But I do find
some time for it. Social interaction definitely takes precedence though.

------
wpietri
Holy shit do I hate straw-man pseudo-contrarian articles like this.

Nobody who says "do what you love" means "do what you love without
consideration for your needing food and a roof over your head". Nobody.

Everybody I know who is really good at what they do is doing something they
loved. I have never met a great developer who said, "Yeah, I just went into
this because it paid well." They loved something about it and made a career
out of it. And thinking about my various successful friends, it's true about
all of them, no matter the career.

------
toddmorey
This article is flawed. The author sees the right problem but draws the wrong
conclusions.

I agree that great passions rarely make great businesses. Doing what you love
is absolutely not a guaranteed path to profit. But I feel the answer offered
is to work hard and the passion will follow with the success. Except it
doesn't. Not always. There are some things you can have complete mastery of
and still not enjoy. (The best contract negotiator I've ever met in my life
came to me for personal advice. He hates negotiating. But he's mastered it, so
everyone asks him to do it.)

To make sure you'll enjoy your work, don't focus on the end product at all--
focus on exactly what you'll be doing in the day to day to create it. For
example, you may love food, but a catering business is much more about
customer service, management, and logistics. Do you love that? Do you love
making the trains run on time? Then you'll enjoy a successful catering
business--even if you don't love food.

Meanwhile, if you love building products, but pick something that requires a
bunch of contract negotiations with a ton of suppliers, you'll likely not
enjoy your work, even when it results in a successful product. Maybe the
reason you love building things is because you feel control over the process.
Perhaps it's better to pick something you can create in a very hands on
environment with a small team.

------
samspot
I'm not sure who this article is for. I think most reasonable people silently
add "that can make money" to "do something you are passionate about." After
all, we don't see many businesses trying to make money with the idea "Watch
the owner eat delicious chocolate!"

~~~
adamkiss
Even then would work (on youtube, for instance) if the owner was entertaining
enough, while eating delicious chocolate.

~~~
Evbn
You could even give this hypothetical show a name like Good Eats.

~~~
samspot
Not having cable, I had completely forgotten about the food network.

------
pcote
Doing what you love may well be good for your career. However, that doesn't
mean the thing you love will BE your career. You could spend your teen years
pursuing your passion of music for example. Maybe it leads you to think about
how the brain responds to music. Maybe from there, that ends up turning you on
to neuroscience. Maybe from there, you end up in a career as a brain surgeon.
It happens.

So chasing your passion can lead you to a very good place in the world so long
as your keeping your eyes and mind open while doing so. Pursuing or NOT
pursuing your dreams with a closed mind will probably not get you far
regardless.

------
jstalin
A friend who has risen to the top of his area of expertise in the world, and
who does it on the side, recently told me, "there's nothing like doing what
you love and not having to rely on it for a pay check."

------
Communitivity
This guy has some good thoughts, but his main points are way off (from 20+
years in sw engineering). Here's why.

Passion might follow mastery sometimes, but usually it is the other way
around. My advice is to figure out what you're passionate about-then figure
out if there is a way to monetize that passion that makes sense for the
lifestyle you want.

He has a good description when he says "Roughly speaking, work can be broken
down into a job, a career, or a calling. A job pays the bills; a career is a
path towards increasingly better work; a calling is work that is an important
part of your life and a vital part of your identity.". Then he adds"(Clearly
most people want their work to be a calling.)". Nope. There are lots of people
for whom their work is not even in their top two priorities. There's nothing
wrong with them or the folks for whom their work is a calling.

However, food for thought...as a founder in the tech business, do you really
want to hire anyone in a tech or marketing position who's work is not their
calling?

That said, people who's work is their calling are rare, and they tend to be
very good, which makes them expensive. However, I don't think that 10 bad devs
are not better than one really good one - so the old saying 'you get what you
pay for holds true', they're worth it.

In short...find your calling, and follow it - just realize it might not be
your work.

------
randomsearch
A relative of mine has experience advising hundreds of small business start-
ups. She would definitely tell people that they have to be passionate about
what they do. It's the passion that keeps you going when things are really
tough.

If you're working as part of a larger company, maybe passion doesn't matter as
much, but personally if I were doing a job I didn't love or feel passionate
about then I'd leave that job and try something different (and I have done
just that in the past).

RS

------
jenius
I think where this article falls flat is in it's assumption that there are
many hobby passions with which you can't make money. I don't believe this for
a second - if you are good enough, you can make money off anything. And being
really good at something, in addition to genetics, talent, etc, is a result of
being passionate - since you like something you naturally put in a lot of work
and get better.

I challenge someone to come up with any hobby you can't make money from if
you're good at it. Even the most ridiculous ones, playing video games,
watching movies, etc. all have associated careers in which you can make plenty
of money if you are good and put in work. And if you aren't putting in work or
don't think you can be good enough, it's probably not a _passion_.

Then on top of that is the whole part where making money is just not as
important to you when you're doing something you enjoy for most of your waking
hours. How much money is your happiness for ~40 hours a week worth? For me, it
would be pretty steep.

~~~
the_gastropod
What percentage of video game players make a living from it? Skateboarders?
Gardeners? Musicians? Poker players? Actresses? Hobbies are rarely viable
career paths.

What separates SOME hobbies (computer programming, for instance) is that
they're still relatively obscure. Out of 1,000 random people, maybe 3 can
program, and all of them likely suck. So if you're passionate about
programming, it's not difficult to make a career out of it.

This article doesn't seem to be targeted at STEM-type careers. It's more
targeted at the lofty ideas. Roughly 6 degree programs account for over 50% of
the Bachelor degrees earned these days. These students are creating an
extremely competitive environment for themselves by chasing their very popular
ideal careers.

If you're able to get a good-paying job doing what you enjoyed as a hobby,
you're lucky. Not everyone has such obscure hobbies as you and I.

------
greghinch
I think the phrase should be "love what you do". In my experience,
professional happiness comes from excelling at something that is valuable to
others, and hence you'll be paid well for it. The only way you're going to
manage to put in the ten thousand hours to a skill required to get to that
level is if you love it

------
uptown
There's no single right-way to lead any life or approach any career. I wish
writers would stop pretending otherwise.

------
thenomad
Hmm. Fails the anecdata test for me. I know a lot of people who do things
they're passionate about - linguists, filmmakers (including me) and novelists.
Nearly all of them struggled for years to get to the point where they're full-
time at their passion, taking various other jobs of varying degrees of
crappiness. All of them are very happy with what they're doing now, and -
crucially - also loved pursuing their passion when it wasn't bringing in the
bacon.

There's _a_ good idea here - "If you're passionate about something, consider
doing something else that pays better to bring money in, at least whilst
you're getting good at your passion" - but the "if you want to do something
that is hard to achieve full-time status in, abandon it and do something
easier" message is, from my experience, a massive overreach.

------
Ingaz
>> "If you practice hard, soon you might find you're the best in your group of
students,"

I strongly disagree.

When I was young I wanted to became a great guitarist. I've practiced a lot,
but when I was near 18 I understood a simple thing: "I will never be Freep,
Clapton or Hendrix, no matter how I will try harder".

I put aside my guitar for years. I'd thought that time: "I will never became
great musician, but I can be a good engineer".

My wife was amazed that I can play guitar after two years of our marriage.

Hard work is not definitive factor in all cases. Sometimes you just must have
inherent ability to do the work.

For example: everybody could be trained to run marathon. But it's not possible
to be trained as good marathon runner. One must have genetic ability for this.

------
ef4
The real question is: at what level of abstraction are you passionate about
your work?

If you're passionate about writing great software that people love, the world
is your oyster and there are lots of ways to make money.

But if you insist on writing software that solves _problems you are passionate
about_ , you're going to have a much harder time. Because problems that
programmers are passionate about are exactly the problems that programmers
solve for free with open-source.

To take another example, don't open a coffee shop because you're passionate
about coffee. That's a very small part of what you'll actually be doing. Open
a coffee shop because you're passionate about building a great local business.

------
arbuge
My gut instinct is that both following one's passion and having one's passion
follow oneself could work. There are clearly documented cases of the former -
Warren Buffet for instance, as he is fond of repeating.
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/warren-buffett-
care...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/warren-buffett-career-
advice-independently-wealthy_n_2158317.html)

On the other hand there's the Koch brothers who simply carried on with their
father's rather mundane raw materials business and made it into a mega-empire.
When asked about that I remember one of them saying in an interview "That's
just the hand we were dealt."

------
roc
It seems to me the relevant advice buried in this is: most people need to
_try_ before they _know_. So get a job to pay the bills, so you can afford to
try out your passions part time and have some professional experience to help
you along/fall back on. Then pursue whatever sticks.

Because expecting people to be able to accurately weigh which of their
passions is the "relevant" one, before they have any experience at _anything_
is going to fail just as much as telling them to pick a passion at random.

Unless you're just saying "relevant" as code for "pick a white collar career
path that -- if you squint real hard -- looks kinda/sorta like your passion."

------
mimiflynn
I remember one of my co-workers (a developer or engineer or whatever we are
called these days) on a particularly frustrating day, smiling broadly and
saying "I'm a guitarist. Programming was my HOBBY. I went to school for music.
This was supposed to be fun."

What made the comment even funnier is that we all know he loves his work as a
developer / engineer. Its almost all he talks about. He followed one passion
(music), but the other, more lucrative passion (development) is the one that
caught him as a career. As frustrating as that day was, the funny part is that
we live for the kinds of problem solving we were facing.

------
wellpast
I've spent many years developing skills that pay well, that I'm good at, that
offer an easy flow and easy productivity. But at the end of the day I don't
want this to be what my life is about. I wish I'd started earlier following my
passions; I've been dragged to date in golden handcuffs.

This is the advice I'd give to myself ten years ago: If you know what you want
to do, what you want your life to be about, and you believe you can develop
the talents to do it, pursue that goal aggressively and immediately, don't
waste time.

------
figurify
There is a subtle line there between what you actually love, and what is
practical to be worked on. I am not saying they cannot coincide, but they are
rarely so.

What one can try to achieve is a transition from one to another. That's why
hackers are in big advantage these days. They can build stuff which can make
money to fund the stuff they love doing... Struggling is always bad, but
struggling on stuff you love would make it even worse. Don't let that
happen...

------
Dirlewanger
Great article. Reassures me that there's nothing wrong with me thinking that,
at the beginning of my career in programming, I'm not going to be as
"successful" as others out there who claim to "love" it or that it's their
"passion". I know I'm good at it (hence why I'm getting paid for it), but I
also don't dream in Ruby. Good to see another person saying that passion from
work will come with you're good at.

------
tunesmith
It's probably worth considering...

p(able-to-make-money-at-passion | general-public) = x p(able-to-make-money-at-
passion | hn-reading public) = y

y is probably greater than x, so that might color the general conclusion of
people reading the article, on this board anyway.

In other words, "In my experience, having a lifelong passion of
hacking/programming computers to do valuable functional things, this article
is wrong!" might be based on a faulty premise.

------
marknutter
An apt analogy might be arranged marriages. In Western culture, the idea of an
arranged marriage seems absurd and backwards, and the common belief is that a
good marriage is based on love and mutual attraction. In arranged marriages,
however, love grows with time and these types of marriages end up in divorce
at a far lower rate.

~~~
mdkess
And this has nothing to do with cultural biases against divorce, and
subjugation of women, right?

There was a far lower attrition with slave labor as well.

------
lubujackson
The mistake people make is to work on a TOPIC they love, when what they should
do instead is find WORK that they love, regardless of topic. So if you enjoy
programming, maybe you can do that writing bank software and still have fun,
but if you love chemistry you might not like the day-to-day of a normal
chemist.

------
saddino
Fucking nonsense. If you are passionate enough you will apply yourself and
master your love until you (and perhaps only you) can figure out how to
succeed from it. Contrary to the article, abandoning one's passion is what
sucks the fun out of people's lives and careers. Everybody does it. Don't fall
for it.

------
JonSkeptic
apply this test: Will people pay you for it? Will they pay you a lot for it?

I answered "yes." I'm off to be happily self employed doing what I
love....great article, btw, but the logic needs some work and the wetware
could use a tuneup.

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hudell
It's not about doing something you love, it's about not doing something you
hate.

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michaelochurch
The biggest problem with "follow your passion" is that, in truth, if you're
passionate about something, you'll absolutely fucking hate doing it _as a
subordinate_. This means you'll probably never reach the level of autonomy at
which work becomes fun, and your "passion" will die.

Occasionally you're lucky and fall into a mentor/protege relationship where
you don't feel like a subordinate, but that's not common. You shouldn't count
on that, especially in the "cool" careers that are spam-clogged with
incompetent wannabes and in which it's hard to distinguish oneself.

~~~
ansgri
Today we've had an interesting discussion at our startup about subordination,
and stumbled into a question where do good technical leaders come from.

Our CTO's thesis was that no sane technical person wants to be a boss; rather,
he'd be doing "real interesting stuff", real science and technology, but
someone needs to take responsibility for the project, and it also pays well.

My answer to this was that yes, being chief is not much fun, but if you really
care about "real interesting stuff", you'll want to do it in the best possible
way, and you quickly realize that you could make use of some subordinates,
then teach some engineers... Eventually you find yourself in director's seat.

To which our CTO replied, this was his case ^)

~~~
michaelochurch
In the top-down management context, being a manager is almost as bad as being
managed. You're still a subordinate in truth, but you are now responsible for
motivating other people to do things they don't want to do. You don't get to
set priorities, but your career has been bet on the work of other people (your
subordinates). So it's the worst of both worlds.

Additionally, managers in a top-down world are constantly struggling to
establish themselves as legitimate leaders of the group (without resorting to,
"Fuck you, I can fire you.") They're puppet leaders picked from above, and
often not the leaders the group would pick. This often creates a lot of
tension.

There's good and bad in management. The good aspect is mentoring others,
coordinating efforts, building teams, and solving large-scale problems. The
bad is the extortionate kind, which is the "if I don't like you, no one here
does" idiocy (seen in high-stakes performance review games) that causes so
many people to hate management. But when the boss has a bad boss there are no
other options for him.

~~~
ansgri
I'm not talking about 'traditional' strict hierarchies, but rather about
~3-storey organically evolved scheme where leadership is quite informal and
firing is really not an option: our company is quite young and people are the
most valuable asset. Also, some of us would gladly accept firing but will keep
working otherwise.

Thus we have no way other than reaching mutually satisfactory state.

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LatvjuAvs
I live my life, you live your life, what works for you do not work for others
and vice verse.

Finding ultimate grail that works for everyone, good luck on that.

But deeeem, the opinions, I have dem!

