People forget that in the long history of human civilization, the idea of working as an employee of a big company only goes back about 150 years, the idea of white collar office work in that context only goes back about 75 years, and the idea of a "career" (as opposed to just doing the same job forever) is even newer.
People who point this out tend to forget that's because for most of that long history the alternative options were pretty much: 1. be born to the right parents, 2. peasant farm laborer. We're not going back to that, so might as well forget it for purposes of analysis.
TLDR: Holy shit, so much infant mortality, penicillin and vaccination are god-sends, holy shit. Also, your fields were all over the place and everything extra gets eaten up by taxes from Big Man.
I can't find the link, but I think Bret also had an article on how nomadic cultures had generally worse lives than settled ones, from what little we can know. If I recall correctly, it's hard to tell, as nomadic cultures don't really record things. But from the burial sites and little other evidence we have, it seems (again via mostly their bones) that their lives were much harder, shorter, more disease ridden, and more violent than what we see in agricultural remains. But also, trying to say for certain that any one set of bones was from a nomad, a settler, or something of a mix, was very difficult. Like, such categories aren't really all that 'real' when you have to sit down and fit a particular femur into a category.
But, again, I want to stress that I'm trying to recall something here, and that the thing I'm recalling also stressed that the physical evidence is quite scant as is and very hard to discern when you have it.
Sounds like you've been reading stuff that has the opposite views on this than what I have. I thought about linking book and journal article sources but i'm sure you can look up the scientific consensus yourself and it'll be more credible that way.
You need to read Samuel Pepys. In 1662 he definitely had a white collar job. He describes his office politics and his accumulation of wealth and his working his way up the organisation.
Shhh, or you are going to ruin some lives of folks who have excellent corporate careers in some lets say questionable companies, and very little achievement to show in their actual lives.
There are a couple of reasons to do well on the job: it might be a joyful activity, it leads to better opportunities, it teaches a lesson that can be used starting something, or it ensures employment.
If none of these things have appeal, then one should carefully think about being in that job.
There's something that makes me sad about the thought of an engineer, sitting at a desk, thinking "I can't fix the fifteen second frobnizzle page load time because otherwise they'll make me fix the performance of everything."
That's not how work is meant to be. In this metaphor, one should like pie. If the pie eating contest is offering free pie then it's perfectly legitimate to walk in, eat a normal amount of pie, accept your prize, and be happy with it.
I don't see the problem with more work as long as it displaces other work that I can now either not do or do at a later time. I'm not going to do more work in the same time just because I have a talent.
Personally, I find this attitude pretty derivative.
Why should a worker feel empathy for a customer if that empathy doesn't have any meaningful impact on them?
It's a good thing to say to a founder of a company, such as the owner of a small business.
It's a pretty useless thing to say to an overworked support staff... Answering more calls or putting out more fires very rarely benefits that role. Hell, I've seen support staff get told attempting to help a customer too long is a negative, and they're doing a bad job. Even in the best cases, I've often seen drive met with a management that just makes that effort the new baseline... "Great job, guys! Our ticket wait time is down 30% , now let's keep it there!"
So sure - have empathy for your customers. Don't have it blindly at bad jobs.
For those books, I realised that a much better use of time is to search YouTube for a talk by the author. They’ll explain everything that’s remotely interesting about the book’s thesis. Everything else in the book is typically anecdote after anecdote.
I'm a bit surprised that people are complaining so much about this. I have read many a blog post which stretched one or two fairly obvious thoughts out at great length. By comparison this post is just a few sentences and it manages to say something sensible, if not stunningly insightful, about the title. (The banner art and so on is a bit extra, yes, but ... meh.) The thing most worth complaining about here is that the title isn't original: 'academia', 'law school' and 'making partner' are all older and more common substitutions for 'a career'. 'Law school' seems to be particularly popular and appropriate, since (IIUC; IANAL) the best-performing US law-school students are rewarded with the coveted opportunity to move from cramming law for exams to working 996 pressure-cooker jobs as juniors at BigLaw firms.
People who use the term "class consciousness" are almost entirely people in the upper middle class who paid too much attention in school and not enough in the real world and are capable of deluding themselves into thinking their lives of luxury are actually something to be complained about.
Worker Leverage Bad, Company Criticism Bad, Questioning Management Bad, Deliberate Equality Bad, Regulation Bad, Labor Expenses Bad, AI Good, Max Productivity Good, Business Good, Leadership Good, Shareholder Good is just as frequently the vibe here. Whichever one you disagree with most looks more prevalent.
Evidently this post is excellent in its brevity, redundancy and effectiveness in getting its point across.
And flawed for the same reasons, if not for my suspicion that this is a fragment of a greater point that the author is trying to make that can be further contextualized against the posts adjacent to this one, except that there is no date on this individual post nor are they any on the main “blog” index that would allow me to orientate myself thereby.
So I’m loving the mixed reactions that this is getting. And I reckon that the author could elaborate better through either a change of format (like a book) or UX revisions.
Another, less colorful, way to put this is "don't put anything on your resume you don't want to do more of".
I know folks who have taken old technologies (perl, ASP.NET) off their resume so that they don't get approached by employers looking to hire for technologies they don't want to work in.
Yeah my rule when considering taking on a freelance project is ‘do I want to become an expert in this, and do I thus want my phone to ring for this for the next 2 years?’
I'm reminded of the episode of the Strange Planet television series in which a "flying machine comfort supervisor" (flight attendant) is called before Being Resources, where she is promoted to comfort supervisor supervisor. "Our data show you handled your responsibilities well. Your reward is more responsibility."
Obviously, there are no fixed rules. There is just the economy and how you position yourself to participate in it. That positioning is called your career.
I haven’t gotten a job by applying for one since 1986. I haven’t been recruited to a full-time job since 1998. So far this century, I have subsisted as an independent consultant, participating in the economy on somewhat creative terms.
Surprisingly little actual long term quality of life, happiness or life satisfaction can be bought with money, any money. They are important if you properly don't have them but as soon as you leave that category they are at best secondary.
So people boasting about their 'successful careers' are pretty boring empty bunch, rather tell me how you spend your evenings, weekends or vacations, how good parent you are (aka how much you suffer for your kids and don't outsource hard but important parts to grandparents or nannies), what you do for your community and so on.
Long term QoL definitely needs money: healthy food, means to exercise, enough time and freedom for work-life balance, travel, and so on. So yes, money are necessary for it. But the amount has a certain cap, let's say somewhere between $1-30M depending on the place where you live and the size of your family.
It depends what lifestyle your children want to live. My son wants to be a fiction author. I want to give him that opportunity. So I have to work. Maybe YOU would throw your child out on his own, I will not.
Look, I know you are trying to focus on the humanity part of humanity, instead of the nuts and bolts of economic life. I get it.
I support four adults with my work, including myself. My son writes fiction that I suspect will never earn him a dime. His wife suffers from disabling social anxiety. My wife is 65 and not able to work. We all live together in a gentle and loving cooperative existence.
Meanwhile, my career keeps a roof over our head. Now, why shouldn’t I see meaning in my struggle to keep the wheels turning? I have built something important in the course of my career. Not world shattering, but also not nothing.
The whole post is the same short thought repeated over and over.
My recommendation to the author is to read and reflect on “Atomic blog posts”¹, by Mike Crittenden. I’ll reproduce it here in its entirety:
> There’s no law that says a blog post needs more than one idea or more than one sentence.
¹ https://critter.blog/2021/01/06/atomic-blog-posts/
I love that and strongly agree with it. I should probably start practicing that.
How many times did I read "a pie-eating contest where the prize for winning is more pie" before clicking away?
1. The hacker news title.
2. The tab title.
3. The image at the top left.
4. The text section to the right of the image.
5. The second sentence.
6. Different crop of the same image from before, but now below the second sentence.
I know that this isn't a curious comment, but holy shit dude.
The post was a contest and the prize was more post.
Maybe they wanted you to see how much pie you are willing to eat.
People forget that in the long history of human civilization, the idea of working as an employee of a big company only goes back about 150 years, the idea of white collar office work in that context only goes back about 75 years, and the idea of a "career" (as opposed to just doing the same job forever) is even newer.
People who point this out tend to forget that's because for most of that long history the alternative options were pretty much: 1. be born to the right parents, 2. peasant farm laborer. We're not going back to that, so might as well forget it for purposes of analysis.
> We're not going back to that
I think future holds couple of surprises for you.
Aside: Bret Devereaux has a series on the remarkably similar lives of a peasant farm laborers throughout time and space here:
https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...
TLDR: Holy shit, so much infant mortality, penicillin and vaccination are god-sends, holy shit. Also, your fields were all over the place and everything extra gets eaten up by taxes from Big Man.
Things really went downhill when people started farming. Wars, disease, hard labor, etc.
Probably not?
I can't find the link, but I think Bret also had an article on how nomadic cultures had generally worse lives than settled ones, from what little we can know. If I recall correctly, it's hard to tell, as nomadic cultures don't really record things. But from the burial sites and little other evidence we have, it seems (again via mostly their bones) that their lives were much harder, shorter, more disease ridden, and more violent than what we see in agricultural remains. But also, trying to say for certain that any one set of bones was from a nomad, a settler, or something of a mix, was very difficult. Like, such categories aren't really all that 'real' when you have to sit down and fit a particular femur into a category.
But, again, I want to stress that I'm trying to recall something here, and that the thing I'm recalling also stressed that the physical evidence is quite scant as is and very hard to discern when you have it.
Sounds like you've been reading stuff that has the opposite views on this than what I have. I thought about linking book and journal article sources but i'm sure you can look up the scientific consensus yourself and it'll be more credible that way.
I long for the romantic life of rolling into town, offering fair work for fair wages, having a fling with one or two maidens, and then moving on
It might have only been possible for a small handful of people who were, unlike me, strapping, young, men, and fictional
I don’t know, kinda feel like this is the modern digital nomad life.
In the 1920s poem, Desiderata, I was always surprised that Max makes a reference to career:
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
You need to read Samuel Pepys. In 1662 he definitely had a white collar job. He describes his office politics and his accumulation of wealth and his working his way up the organisation.
Don’t forget Thursday 28 September 1665
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1665/09/28/
Shhh, or you are going to ruin some lives of folks who have excellent corporate careers in some lets say questionable companies, and very little achievement to show in their actual lives.
"Maybe if I sacrifice enough of my body to the grinder, they'll let me crank the handle someday" https://bsky.app/profile/dasharez0ne.bsky.social/post/3ly75c...
There are a couple of reasons to do well on the job: it might be a joyful activity, it leads to better opportunities, it teaches a lesson that can be used starting something, or it ensures employment.
If none of these things have appeal, then one should carefully think about being in that job.
There's something that makes me sad about the thought of an engineer, sitting at a desk, thinking "I can't fix the fifteen second frobnizzle page load time because otherwise they'll make me fix the performance of everything."
That's not how work is meant to be. In this metaphor, one should like pie. If the pie eating contest is offering free pie then it's perfectly legitimate to walk in, eat a normal amount of pie, accept your prize, and be happy with it.
If you derive personal satisfaction from the acitivity of fixing these performance issues, then I don't see the issue?
I don't see the problem with more work as long as it displaces other work that I can now either not do or do at a later time. I'm not going to do more work in the same time just because I have a talent.
The most important reason to do a good job is empathy for your customers. Everything else is secondary.
Personally, I find this attitude pretty derivative.
Why should a worker feel empathy for a customer if that empathy doesn't have any meaningful impact on them?
It's a good thing to say to a founder of a company, such as the owner of a small business.
It's a pretty useless thing to say to an overworked support staff... Answering more calls or putting out more fires very rarely benefits that role. Hell, I've seen support staff get told attempting to help a customer too long is a negative, and they're doing a bad job. Even in the best cases, I've often seen drive met with a management that just makes that effort the new baseline... "Great job, guys! Our ticket wait time is down 30% , now let's keep it there!"
So sure - have empathy for your customers. Don't have it blindly at bad jobs.
The most important reason to do a good job is the slightly higher likelihood of being able to feed and house your family.
This blog post is interesting in that it could be a tweet. The title is the whole thing.
I think it did start out as a tweet. Here it is in 2022: https://x.com/jlengstorf/status/1483803682206466049
I also think that he digs in a bit more:
> Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on whether or not you enjoy the work.
But I agree, he could have does a lot more analysis.
The metaphor is striking, though.
A good proportion of nonfiction books could be their blurbs. This is pretty common. We use too many words in a lot of contexts.
For those books, I realised that a much better use of time is to search YouTube for a talk by the author. They’ll explain everything that’s remotely interesting about the book’s thesis. Everything else in the book is typically anecdote after anecdote.
Nobody would pay 10-20$ for a blurb. So let’s somehow make it to about 200 pages and we’re good.
If we were rational we would pay more for the blurb if it’s insight was original and high quality.
I hate this so much, I made a website against it: https://www.thesummarist.net
Thanks. That’s in my bookmark list now.
I'm glad you like it, I'm not updating it much these days, since nobody reads it, but I can take requests!
I'm a bit surprised that people are complaining so much about this. I have read many a blog post which stretched one or two fairly obvious thoughts out at great length. By comparison this post is just a few sentences and it manages to say something sensible, if not stunningly insightful, about the title. (The banner art and so on is a bit extra, yes, but ... meh.) The thing most worth complaining about here is that the title isn't original: 'academia', 'law school' and 'making partner' are all older and more common substitutions for 'a career'. 'Law school' seems to be particularly popular and appropriate, since (IIUC; IANAL) the best-performing US law-school students are rewarded with the coveted opportunity to move from cramming law for exams to working 996 pressure-cooker jobs as juniors at BigLaw firms.
Vibes seem off with some of the stuff doing well on hn today
You call it bad vibes, I call it people gaining class consciousness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIw3INYRNmY
Sorry for lazy comment, but I had to
Class consciousness mfs when they reach Next Stage Of Humanity tm but they are forced to pick berries in a farm
Status quo megafaunas when they're watching the robots farm berries while they starve.
Flag it. Flag it immediately.
People who use the term "class consciousness" are almost entirely people in the upper middle class who paid too much attention in school and not enough in the real world and are capable of deluding themselves into thinking their lives of luxury are actually something to be complained about.
Can’t really disagree with TFA.
No, Company Bad, Boss Bad, Marketing Bad, AI Bad, Engineer Good is the vibe here.
Worker Leverage Bad, Company Criticism Bad, Questioning Management Bad, Deliberate Equality Bad, Regulation Bad, Labor Expenses Bad, AI Good, Max Productivity Good, Business Good, Leadership Good, Shareholder Good is just as frequently the vibe here. Whichever one you disagree with most looks more prevalent.
Lol I see you didn’t list “Marketing Good” or “Engineer Bad” as things you might see around here
Engineer can sub in for worker with most people around here, and the business bros do love marketing.
engineer unsure if pie good or bad. sample more pie.
"ooh I think I have a way to improve pie production"
That sound you just heard was sixteen disruptive AI blockchain pie subscription services submitting applications to YC
The prize for winning is two people who both want you to eat their particular pie and you say you’ll eat for the one who pays you the most.
Life is like that. The reward of a successful marriage is staying married.
Evidently this post is excellent in its brevity, redundancy and effectiveness in getting its point across.
And flawed for the same reasons, if not for my suspicion that this is a fragment of a greater point that the author is trying to make that can be further contextualized against the posts adjacent to this one, except that there is no date on this individual post nor are they any on the main “blog” index that would allow me to orientate myself thereby.
So I’m loving the mixed reactions that this is getting. And I reckon that the author could elaborate better through either a change of format (like a book) or UX revisions.
Another, less colorful, way to put this is "don't put anything on your resume you don't want to do more of".
I know folks who have taken old technologies (perl, ASP.NET) off their resume so that they don't get approached by employers looking to hire for technologies they don't want to work in.
Yes, one such example here.
A golden rule is to fit your resume into one or two pages max.
Have the private copy as big as one wants, however take the effort to sell oneself to the actual position.
HR is looking for reasons to throw away resumes out from the pile, anything that makes their work harder will contribute for that.
Yeah my rule when considering taking on a freelance project is ‘do I want to become an expert in this, and do I thus want my phone to ring for this for the next 2 years?’
Or you get to stay employed. If you don't like it, start a company or become a contractor/consultant. I've only been contracting for the last decade.
A company just gave me more work. It nearly doubled my income.
This is just a phrase repeated 3 times in a page?
A career is a pie eating contest where the prize for winning is money you invest so you never have to work again.
"The reward for good work is more work."
- timm chiusano
And the reward for a job badly done... is less work.
I'm reminded of the episode of the Strange Planet television series in which a "flying machine comfort supervisor" (flight attendant) is called before Being Resources, where she is promoted to comfort supervisor supervisor. "Our data show you handled your responsibilities well. Your reward is more responsibility."
I don't understand. Pie = money. Yeah and we go around the sun?
This is the sort of thing that sounds like insight to a creative 12 year-old who swears he will never settle for a “desk job.”
A career is actually a contest where the prize is money that you can buy things with, including pie.
Only if you learn to play the game by the actual rules, not if you play the game by what they tell you the rules are.
Who is “they?” There is no they.
Obviously, there are no fixed rules. There is just the economy and how you position yourself to participate in it. That positioning is called your career.
I haven’t gotten a job by applying for one since 1986. I haven’t been recruited to a full-time job since 1998. So far this century, I have subsisted as an independent consultant, participating in the economy on somewhat creative terms.
Surprisingly little actual long term quality of life, happiness or life satisfaction can be bought with money, any money. They are important if you properly don't have them but as soon as you leave that category they are at best secondary.
So people boasting about their 'successful careers' are pretty boring empty bunch, rather tell me how you spend your evenings, weekends or vacations, how good parent you are (aka how much you suffer for your kids and don't outsource hard but important parts to grandparents or nannies), what you do for your community and so on.
Long term QoL definitely needs money: healthy food, means to exercise, enough time and freedom for work-life balance, travel, and so on. So yes, money are necessary for it. But the amount has a certain cap, let's say somewhere between $1-30M depending on the place where you live and the size of your family.
The idea that being a good parent requires extensive suffering and work is the worst that our current society has created.
It depends what lifestyle your children want to live. My son wants to be a fiction author. I want to give him that opportunity. So I have to work. Maybe YOU would throw your child out on his own, I will not.
he's got the talent or he doesn't. You can't put in the work for him, so make your life worse trying.
Look, I know you are trying to focus on the humanity part of humanity, instead of the nuts and bolts of economic life. I get it.
I support four adults with my work, including myself. My son writes fiction that I suspect will never earn him a dime. His wife suffers from disabling social anxiety. My wife is 65 and not able to work. We all live together in a gentle and loving cooperative existence.
Meanwhile, my career keeps a roof over our head. Now, why shouldn’t I see meaning in my struggle to keep the wheels turning? I have built something important in the course of my career. Not world shattering, but also not nothing.
A career is an honorable thing.
More like 16 year old, but the rest is spot on.
"If you want to get something done, give it to the busy person"
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