I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it comes down to feelings... Life choices? Business decisions? Who gets promoted? It's all vibes and feelings. People will deliberate and argue over facts but ultimately there will be some "weighting" factor which is feelings and will make or break the outcome. You can have a perfectly argued decision that fails some vibe check and is hence discarded. Or a terrible argument that plays to some emotional point so is accepted. It's all feelings. Rare is the opposite.
QuantumGood · 39m ago
You can analyze in different ways by choosing different frames of reference, etc., but choosing how to feel isn't the same. For most, "choosing to how feel" is difficult to attempt.
kingkawn · 25m ago
This distinction is an absurdity first written to provide a rational for why everything being done in the name of Reason felt so bad.
sarreph · 2h ago
Smart move by Mitchell to omit (in his opinion) _why_ you have to feel it, as evidenced by the spread interpretation in the comments.
In my opinion, you have to “feel it” in order to do your best work.
However(!), and also in my opinion, you shouldn’t always strive to be in a position where you “feel it”. While it is important to spend most of one’s life feeling it / doing their best work in order to be fulfilled, the hazard of insatiably “feeling it” is that you can much more quickly burn out.
Working with passion fuels a level of intensity and emotional involvement that can take a while to recover from if you don’t get the result (read: success) you desired.
But yes, you do indeed mostly have to feel it.
nine_k · 2h ago
Feeling some moderate positive emotion as a result of your work is not incompatible with 9 to 5 work.
The bigger problem is usually the opposite: nagging negative emotions, feeling annoyed, feeling contempt towards some parts of the work that one is bound to do. These emotions are unbecoming, so the psychological defenses hide them, as if there's no feeling at all. This is what "mind-numbing" work often is.
godelski · 57m ago
There's a related problem I see in academic review, but I think it applies far more broadly. The easy part of review is recognizing flaws. One should always acknowledge the flaws, but the authors tend to already be aware of them[0]. The difficult part is determining if the flaws undermine the research or if despite the limitations that the work pushes progress forward. (All but a few works are incremental)
I think this applies much more broadly because even in conversations people are quick to latch onto a subtle inconsequential detail and then dismiss the rest. Being able to read the words does not make one literate, it is the interpretation of them that does. I think this example is quite prolific with internet conversations, enough that we can circle back to sarreph's mention of this in their first sentence. But I think another great example was from this post from a week ago[1]. Most comments are responding to the headline, but many even looked at the post and missed the entire point (which isn't about work being interrupted).
[0] Authors may not acknowledge them in the work because the review process is too adversarial and such acknowledgements can be used as ammunition against them (thanks lazy reviewers ;), because solving those flaws is a good followup and they don't want to get scooped, or many other reasons.
Yeah, do not disagree with either of those statements.
godelski · 1h ago
> Working with passion fuels a level of intensity and emotional involvement that can take a while to recover from if you don’t get the result (read: success) you desired.
I'm reminded of a phrase: Passion is worth 10 IQ points.
The number of IQ points doesn't really matter but this is about feel. With passion you're much more likely to dig in. By digging in you're more likely to see subtle issues that can result in drastically different outcomes (the more complex something is, the more likely such issues exist). You care about the thing working and so you care about finding out when it doesn't work.
On the other hand, if you have no passion you just go through the motions. You spend less time thinking. It passes the tests? Okay great, let's move on, "it works, so who cares?" In this situation you care less about the thing working and more about getting the task done.
I feel like the second attitude is becoming much more common. I'm sure there are a ton of reasons why but I feel like one of these is that complexity has just exploded. An unfortunate fact is that you can make things too simple. Little errors compound to become big errors that are difficult to wrangle. I think we've gotten to a point where there's so much (often hidden) complexity that we are constantly being overwhelmed, making it harder to care, creating a dangerous feedback loop.
Every good problem solver knows that the best way to tackle a problem is to break it down into bite sized and simpler pieces. But the flip side of this is that every big problem is caused by the accumulation of many little problems. For some reason we have a much harder time thinking in this direction. For this reason I think we need to stress the importance of the little things[0]. It is also important to remember that when solving the big problem that solving each little problem is not enough. That only works if they are independent. You may want to start out treating them as such but that's why this tends to become an iterative process, because as you converge to solving the larger problem these hidden complexities start to reveal themselves. So solving small problems is a defensive strategy.
[0] This can easily be misread. I am not insisting that everyone be a perfectionist. What I've said is far easier said than done. Perfection does not exist, there is always something wrong. The question is much more about bounding that error and keeping it small. It is about recognizing these issues and keeping track of them. More important than solving problems is the recognition of them. After all, it is incredibly difficult to solve problems you don't know exist. By keeping track of these things you can better triage tasks. Even a few comments in the code stating what assumptions are made or stating the conditions that the code is expected to run on will save you tons of headaches in the future. A trivial amount of work in the moment can pay enormous dividends when given enough time.
kookamamie · 5h ago
> You have to feel it.
The corporate machine does not feel it.
It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead.
arnvald · 4h ago
This is why small companies still stand a chance. They can build something that would fail the corpo test of metrics and surveys.
johnfn · 4h ago
Plenty of people work at large corporations and enjoy their work.
cpursley · 2h ago
“Enjoy their paycheck”, there - fixed it for you
fuzzfactor · 49m ago
When you do the math, it looks like most jobs have never actually had an enjoyable paycheck though, just the fortunate few.
In that case some peole are bound to find more enjoyment from something else, or why would the paycheck even be worth it?
Sometimes that can occur within the very work they do, maybe even their life's work, which can take long enough to proceed through phases of education, underemployment, business ownership, retirement and back again.
Surely there are other kinds of enjoyment continuity, which can function in parallel to a certain extent, that those concentrating on the paycheck alone may not come close to achieving.
From my experience it consists of Excel spreadsheets. What I mean is that when a wave of layoffs hits, there's no humanity to it, you're just above or below a line.
leoh · 2h ago
... who do not feel alive in many basic ways that mean a lot
bbminner · 4h ago
Oh, i thought it was a satirical critique of how arbitrary promotion criteria can be. Turns out someone is seriously claiming that someone else "doesn't not feel the right way" about the work they do, and THAT is their core problem. Ha. Well, at least the author feels that they are feeling the right way, good for them I guess.
404mm · 3h ago
Too bad he didn’t feel like Hashicorp anymore. F#ing IBM.
apgwoz · 16m ago
He left before IBM. Also, based on public filings, long before IBM was even a suitor.
mouse_ · 2h ago
When you follow a cult/religion's instructions to the letter and still fail, this is the excuse every time. It's manipulative and unverifiable.
sigotirandolas · 4h ago
For as much as the author may get roasted for stating the obvious, I've often seen this "measure everything" mindset, coming from those you'd think should know better than that.
I've even seen this stupidity in myself sometimes. In a way it's funny how you can get so lost on the numbers that you forget about the thing.
mosselman · 3h ago
Measuring and feeling are not mutually exclusive.
This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.
I wouldn’t normally even comment something like this about someone’s article, but I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me and I am worried that if we don’t point it out, we will lose our ability to spot nonsense like this and side step our critical thinking.
The “trick” is contrasting or relating something completely irrelevant to some sort of nonsensical or obvious “thought piece”.
I am sure this is some sort of named fallacy and someone else can explain it a lot more eloquently, but this is my attempt.
mitchellh · 2h ago
(Author of the linked blog post).
Look at my other posts and you'll see I'm not like an "influencer content" person. I purposely made this piece shallow to encourage more people to read it and discuss the core idea, rather than get distracted by specific examples or points.
I've blogged long enough on a personal level, done corporate PR long enough at a professional level, to know that the more words there are, the more people get bogged down in the details.
I plan to follow up this post with specific callouts and associating it directly with my work (both positively and negatively). But, for example, if I used Terraform as an example of something in this (hypothetically), people would focus in on arguing the merits of "feeling" Terraform. That's not the point.
The point is to think about what we're shipping.
sigotirandolas · 1h ago
> Measuring and feeling are not mutually exclusive.
They are not mutually exclusive, but they compete to a degree. If someone's time is mostly spent on what can be measured, they can't spend time on "common sense" or investigative work that is less easily tracked. At the end of they day, trying to measure everything makes as much sense as trying to document every line of code. (Most of this, naturally, also applies the other way around).
> This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.
> I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me
I think a lot of the shallowness is from blogs or HN being a public, persistent, broadcast written media. In a face to face conversation, you can generally follow up and share more specifics and nuance without fear of getting a bad reputation.
If anything I think the bias is the other way around, on the Internet whatever you write can get cherry-picked and framed to make you appear terrible, in person it's much easier to get a fair sample.
This is one of the things that I’ve tried really hard to impress upon engineers new and old while working on various projects, and IMO it applies to just about every layer of the stack; ultimately everything flows up into the UX.
This vibe was pervasive at Apple and could be taken more or less for granted, but elsewhere it’s all over the place.
And, like, sure, there are projects and industries where this doesn’t matter. But giving a shit and feeling it can be a major differentiator.
neuralkoi · 2h ago
The vibe WAS pervasive at Apple during Steve's time. He understood the importance of asking "what is this?"[0].
The current vibe at Apple is "we want you to be an obedient worker".
I dunno. A good demo is all about the feeling it gives. One thing I got out of my adventures in startup land is how to go up on stage and demo some software that barely works and make it look like a million bucks.
At the last hackathon I went to I was sitting in the audience at the presentation at the end with one teammate while the other one was upstairs pounding away at last minute revisions. We were scheduled last but I still had to make excuses to the organizers.
He showed up with something that basically worked but I kept cool under pressure, made sure I didn't commit to anything until I was sure about it, and used good showmanship. We were all shocked when we won the 'player's choice' award. Mind you, it helped that he was experienced at writing platformers in Unity and the other student could draw, but thanks to my showmanship people saw everything that didn't worked and didn't notice the bugs and people were left with the impression that 'wow that looked like a polished game' whereas the main author said 'I don't think I'd want to play it' afterwards. My continuous push towards a 'minimum viable product' combined with their push to make something that looked polish really helped that showmanship work.
No comments yet
ChrisMarshallNY · 4h ago
Good thought, but corporations don't care, and a whole lot of folks that play the corporate game won't, either. Money will still be made. Careers will still be advanced.
It think it was Theodore Sturgeon that said "90% of everything is crap."
For myself, I enjoy what I do. I write software that I want to use, in a way that makes me feel good.
I have no illusions that I would be allowed to work like this, if I were still in the workforce, though.
temp0826 · 6h ago
Feels like a linkedin post
dkdcio · 5h ago
feels like a self-help book in the tiktok era
ivape · 5h ago
Feels like someone is still trying to copy and re-sell Steve Jobs. No one else gets what it takes maaaan.
nextworddev · 4h ago
Think most people are too numb / desensitized to feel anything (which is by design)
atak1 · 3h ago
I love this point. It's also one of the hardest things to do as a product person if you're not the typical user.
It's hard to feel the feelings of many types of users.
shermantanktop · 2h ago
That difficulty is quite obvious, which is why ineffective product people only seem have a single customer in mind: themselves. They slip in conversation easily to “I” language without realizing it.
Devs who work on customer-reported tickets end up knowing a lot more about customer needs than some of the pms I have worked with.
underdeserver · 3h ago
I feel it when using Ghostty. So nice.
WesolyKubeczek · 3h ago
I went through a longer quest, called "getting naturalized in another country".
Went through the grind of getting visa, then the work permit, then the different visa, then the short-term residence permit.
Changed jobs, had to go to the immigration department again, because these residence permits are tied to the employer.
Kept a spreadsheet with dates of each exit and entry.
Had to keep all my paperwork ducks in a row.
To be able to get married, I had to get a permit from a judge.
Got married and had to go through the immigration office again, as this changed the primary purpose of my stay yet again. The queue to the immigration office was so long that I had to come there at 2am (yes, 2 in the morning) to even have a chance to file my paperwork.
Still had to keep the spreadsheet with exit/entry dates, the printout was attached to each application.
Went to another city to pass the language exam to be able to get the long-term residence permit.
In a couple of years, applied for citizenship. Had to go visit my birth country and gather some more paperwork from there, get it translated.
All the while it all felt as if I was a student again and this was an important exam each and every time. Stressed. Constantly afraid that a document would be missing and I would need to start over.
Then finally they texted me. I went to collect the papers that certified that I now was the citizen of my new country, almost ten years after starting the quest. I could apply for my new shiny national ID. I now wasn't a second-class person anymore.
Upon leaving the government building, I felt nothing. I had expected that with all that stress and buildup, some kind of relief would come. But it never came. No relief, no joy, not a sausage.
I remember that the weather was miserable on that day.
As sure as fuck don't. Just keep the paychecks coming.
fuckaj · 4h ago
But I feel depressed every time I use Terraform. I see why it is useful, good etc. But I just enjoy it least of all the programming activities.
Pulumi isn't much better. I feel IaC done that way isn't the way we will settle on long term.
losvedir · 4h ago
To connect the dots, Mitchell is the creator of terraform. And honestly, I kind of feel the same. I think it points out that even if you "feel" it as the creator, that doesn't mean others will feel the same way, necessarily.
They left the role of CTO many years ago, then became an IC again, and then left, safe to assume he wasn’t feeling it either.
invertedohm · 1h ago
I get the feeing you're looking at this through the specific lens of a programmer. Terraform isn't made for programmers - you'll miss all the flexibility a real language gives you. It's made for ops people who deal with wrangling a whole bunch of different types of systems with different API's and languages and just need some way to standardize the management of disparate systems, whatever counts as "infrastructure".
The state file thing gets a relatively large part of the hate but it's that and the limitations of the DSL that make the DAG possible and useful. Pulumi and all the other wrappers don't solve this, though they can plausibly solve the "closer to programming" problem and I'm sure that has a valid audience.
I guess what I'm saying is, I think it'll stick around and we will in fact settle on it for a large part of operational work. I'll add that I also think k8s should die a quiet death and _that_ will be seen in retrospect as a necessary step to something better.
danw1979 · 3h ago
Not a popular opinion I know, but I really like writing Terraform in HCL2. Like, if I’d invented this, it’d give me the feels and I’d want to share it.
theteapot · 2h ago
Please try some Cloudformation then reflect and reevaluate.
In my opinion, you have to “feel it” in order to do your best work.
However(!), and also in my opinion, you shouldn’t always strive to be in a position where you “feel it”. While it is important to spend most of one’s life feeling it / doing their best work in order to be fulfilled, the hazard of insatiably “feeling it” is that you can much more quickly burn out.
Working with passion fuels a level of intensity and emotional involvement that can take a while to recover from if you don’t get the result (read: success) you desired.
But yes, you do indeed mostly have to feel it.
The bigger problem is usually the opposite: nagging negative emotions, feeling annoyed, feeling contempt towards some parts of the work that one is bound to do. These emotions are unbecoming, so the psychological defenses hide them, as if there's no feeling at all. This is what "mind-numbing" work often is.
I think this applies much more broadly because even in conversations people are quick to latch onto a subtle inconsequential detail and then dismiss the rest. Being able to read the words does not make one literate, it is the interpretation of them that does. I think this example is quite prolific with internet conversations, enough that we can circle back to sarreph's mention of this in their first sentence. But I think another great example was from this post from a week ago[1]. Most comments are responding to the headline, but many even looked at the post and missed the entire point (which isn't about work being interrupted).
[0] Authors may not acknowledge them in the work because the review process is too adversarial and such acknowledgements can be used as ammunition against them (thanks lazy reviewers ;), because solving those flaws is a good followup and they don't want to get scooped, or many other reasons.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44999373
The number of IQ points doesn't really matter but this is about feel. With passion you're much more likely to dig in. By digging in you're more likely to see subtle issues that can result in drastically different outcomes (the more complex something is, the more likely such issues exist). You care about the thing working and so you care about finding out when it doesn't work.
On the other hand, if you have no passion you just go through the motions. You spend less time thinking. It passes the tests? Okay great, let's move on, "it works, so who cares?" In this situation you care less about the thing working and more about getting the task done.
I feel like the second attitude is becoming much more common. I'm sure there are a ton of reasons why but I feel like one of these is that complexity has just exploded. An unfortunate fact is that you can make things too simple. Little errors compound to become big errors that are difficult to wrangle. I think we've gotten to a point where there's so much (often hidden) complexity that we are constantly being overwhelmed, making it harder to care, creating a dangerous feedback loop.
Every good problem solver knows that the best way to tackle a problem is to break it down into bite sized and simpler pieces. But the flip side of this is that every big problem is caused by the accumulation of many little problems. For some reason we have a much harder time thinking in this direction. For this reason I think we need to stress the importance of the little things[0]. It is also important to remember that when solving the big problem that solving each little problem is not enough. That only works if they are independent. You may want to start out treating them as such but that's why this tends to become an iterative process, because as you converge to solving the larger problem these hidden complexities start to reveal themselves. So solving small problems is a defensive strategy.
[0] This can easily be misread. I am not insisting that everyone be a perfectionist. What I've said is far easier said than done. Perfection does not exist, there is always something wrong. The question is much more about bounding that error and keeping it small. It is about recognizing these issues and keeping track of them. More important than solving problems is the recognition of them. After all, it is incredibly difficult to solve problems you don't know exist. By keeping track of these things you can better triage tasks. Even a few comments in the code stating what assumptions are made or stating the conditions that the code is expected to run on will save you tons of headaches in the future. A trivial amount of work in the moment can pay enormous dividends when given enough time.
The corporate machine does not feel it.
It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead.
In that case some peole are bound to find more enjoyment from something else, or why would the paycheck even be worth it?
Sometimes that can occur within the very work they do, maybe even their life's work, which can take long enough to proceed through phases of education, underemployment, business ownership, retirement and back again.
Surely there are other kinds of enjoyment continuity, which can function in parallel to a certain extent, that those concentrating on the paycheck alone may not come close to achieving.
I've even seen this stupidity in myself sometimes. In a way it's funny how you can get so lost on the numbers that you forget about the thing.
This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.
I wouldn’t normally even comment something like this about someone’s article, but I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me and I am worried that if we don’t point it out, we will lose our ability to spot nonsense like this and side step our critical thinking.
The “trick” is contrasting or relating something completely irrelevant to some sort of nonsensical or obvious “thought piece”.
I am sure this is some sort of named fallacy and someone else can explain it a lot more eloquently, but this is my attempt.
Look at my other posts and you'll see I'm not like an "influencer content" person. I purposely made this piece shallow to encourage more people to read it and discuss the core idea, rather than get distracted by specific examples or points.
I've blogged long enough on a personal level, done corporate PR long enough at a professional level, to know that the more words there are, the more people get bogged down in the details.
I plan to follow up this post with specific callouts and associating it directly with my work (both positively and negatively). But, for example, if I used Terraform as an example of something in this (hypothetically), people would focus in on arguing the merits of "feeling" Terraform. That's not the point.
The point is to think about what we're shipping.
They are not mutually exclusive, but they compete to a degree. If someone's time is mostly spent on what can be measured, they can't spend time on "common sense" or investigative work that is less easily tracked. At the end of they day, trying to measure everything makes as much sense as trying to document every line of code. (Most of this, naturally, also applies the other way around).
> This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.
> I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me
I think a lot of the shallowness is from blogs or HN being a public, persistent, broadcast written media. In a face to face conversation, you can generally follow up and share more specifics and nuance without fear of getting a bad reputation.
If anything I think the bias is the other way around, on the Internet whatever you write can get cherry-picked and framed to make you appear terrible, in person it's much easier to get a fair sample.
This vibe was pervasive at Apple and could be taken more or less for granted, but elsewhere it’s all over the place.
And, like, sure, there are projects and industries where this doesn’t matter. But giving a shit and feeling it can be a major differentiator.
The current vibe at Apple is "we want you to be an obedient worker".
[0] https://systems-souls-society.com/what-is-this-the-case-for-...
At the last hackathon I went to I was sitting in the audience at the presentation at the end with one teammate while the other one was upstairs pounding away at last minute revisions. We were scheduled last but I still had to make excuses to the organizers.
He showed up with something that basically worked but I kept cool under pressure, made sure I didn't commit to anything until I was sure about it, and used good showmanship. We were all shocked when we won the 'player's choice' award. Mind you, it helped that he was experienced at writing platformers in Unity and the other student could draw, but thanks to my showmanship people saw everything that didn't worked and didn't notice the bugs and people were left with the impression that 'wow that looked like a polished game' whereas the main author said 'I don't think I'd want to play it' afterwards. My continuous push towards a 'minimum viable product' combined with their push to make something that looked polish really helped that showmanship work.
No comments yet
It think it was Theodore Sturgeon that said "90% of everything is crap."
For myself, I enjoy what I do. I write software that I want to use, in a way that makes me feel good.
I have no illusions that I would be allowed to work like this, if I were still in the workforce, though.
It's hard to feel the feelings of many types of users.
Devs who work on customer-reported tickets end up knowing a lot more about customer needs than some of the pms I have worked with.
Went through the grind of getting visa, then the work permit, then the different visa, then the short-term residence permit.
Changed jobs, had to go to the immigration department again, because these residence permits are tied to the employer.
Kept a spreadsheet with dates of each exit and entry.
Had to keep all my paperwork ducks in a row.
To be able to get married, I had to get a permit from a judge.
Got married and had to go through the immigration office again, as this changed the primary purpose of my stay yet again. The queue to the immigration office was so long that I had to come there at 2am (yes, 2 in the morning) to even have a chance to file my paperwork.
Still had to keep the spreadsheet with exit/entry dates, the printout was attached to each application.
Went to another city to pass the language exam to be able to get the long-term residence permit.
In a couple of years, applied for citizenship. Had to go visit my birth country and gather some more paperwork from there, get it translated.
All the while it all felt as if I was a student again and this was an important exam each and every time. Stressed. Constantly afraid that a document would be missing and I would need to start over.
Then finally they texted me. I went to collect the papers that certified that I now was the citizen of my new country, almost ten years after starting the quest. I could apply for my new shiny national ID. I now wasn't a second-class person anymore.
Upon leaving the government building, I felt nothing. I had expected that with all that stress and buildup, some kind of relief would come. But it never came. No relief, no joy, not a sausage.
I remember that the weather was miserable on that day.
Pulumi isn't much better. I feel IaC done that way isn't the way we will settle on long term.
https://peace.mk/blog/checkpoint/
(old blog post, but I'm slow in making progress)
The state file thing gets a relatively large part of the hate but it's that and the limitations of the DSL that make the DAG possible and useful. Pulumi and all the other wrappers don't solve this, though they can plausibly solve the "closer to programming" problem and I'm sure that has a valid audience.
I guess what I'm saying is, I think it'll stick around and we will in fact settle on it for a large part of operational work. I'll add that I also think k8s should die a quiet death and _that_ will be seen in retrospect as a necessary step to something better.