My father wanted to open a butcher shop when he was 25, he was given a large loan by my grandfather to do so. He was already a master of his trade at this point and I am sure he had a deep insight into the industry and the practices of the time. However, I think that if my granddad had used the "Coffee Beans Procedure", there would have been a lot of questions that he would not have been able to answer.
My father is no longer a butcher, he sold the shop after ~25 years, working every day to afford our family a comfortable life and having enough money to pay for a restaurant that he wanted to run. Again, no one asked about where the coffee beans would come from, and after ~10 years he closed the restaurant after again working tirelessly to support himself, his children and his new grandchildren. He had the money to buy kitchen equipment for a newly built restaurant that he has now been running for 5 years.
To make a long story short, he is certainly crazy and he is doing what he wants and, on some level, is meant to do. But if your takeaway from this article is that you need to unpack everything and know everything to the smallest detail, you might get lost or discouraged by the complexity. You can't plan it all out.
I read the post differently – the point of the exercise is not that you need to know the answers to the questions. It's to gauge your emotional reaction to the question itself.
By examining the types of tasks you will be consistently faced with, you can ask yourself, "Do I actually want to do that?"
When you break down anything into its subtasks there's basically nothing that anyone wants to do. Sometimes the ends help justify the means too.
I always wanted to program games. I programmed games as a hobby. When I graduated university there were no gamedev jobs in my region, so I went to work at Boring B2B java company.
After a while I moved to a bigger city and I started having friends who work in gamedev. They told me about crunch, bad salaries etc. I decided to keep doing Boring B2B stuff. But I went to a few job interviews in gamedev companies.
Every time the questions on the interviews were FUN. Like doing 3d math, some low level C, writing a collision detection function or simple pathfinding.
Just solving these problems made me giddy.
Maybe it's the nostalgia for the time I've learned these things as a teenager with no stress, or maybe it's just that it's something completely different to what I'm doing normally - but I felt great during these interviews.
But I'd have to get a huge salary cut and abandon work-life balance and I'm too old for this.
TL;DR: I think there's a lot of value actually looking at day-to-day problems you need to solve in your dream job, even if you decide it's not for you for different reasons.
I think your story is about a person who wouldn't take their dream job because they want more money and don't want to change.
Or perhaps someone who has learned that there is more to life than their job, and is making a prioritization decision accordingly.
Perhaps. There is also more to life than your job, family, friends, and finding love. There's things like grocery shopping, washing dishes, and going on vacation. That doesn't mean we should settle into occupations we don't like. Like it or not, your work is going to consume a lot of your time, and we should strive to do something we enjoy and find meaningful if possible. In the parent comment it sure sounds like it is possible for them to pivot, and that they might find much more happiness and meaning if they do.
What makes you think that?
Do you think nobody wants to write and debug code, or tend to plants, or write books, day in day out?
You're claiming that any subtask that is unappealing automatically makes you not want to do the whole thing. Which is silly.
I read their comment as saying that we shouldn't expect every subtask to be fun, but the overall task can still be fun. Do I want to sand wood? Not really. Do I want to grab sand paper from the drawer? No... Do I want to use a saw? A little bit. Do I want to build a chair? Yes! But if I break it down too much the overall big picture gets lost.
and the comment is saying that such emotional reaction might be to complexity and scale itself, rather than the specific individual details
I think the questions in the article did the article a disservice. It's not about whether you know the answer to business-related trivia right off the bat, but about whether finding out the answer to such trivia seems interesting to you, because that's going to be your life from now on.
I'd argue the questions are simply a tool to force a person to confront the reality of a profession vs. a fantasy they've built in their head.
I think the problem is that when confronting all future plans you might find out you don't like any of them.
But you have to do something, choose something. So it's almost better if you don't think too hard, just do it and find out, learn to become content with it.
I really don't think it's better to choose your life path based on lack of understanding of your plan's consequences, rather than choosing the least unappealing option.
So, now you need to study choosing so maybe a career in philosophy?
Yea, it's about confronting yourself. I'd agree. I think the whole thing about investing into a store isn't really what this article is about.
Exactly. I certainly recognized myself in the story. I wanted to be professor, until I learned what they do.
similarly i wanted to be an entrepreneur until i met the daily grind of it. no questionnaire would have dissuaded me. the highs were high and the lows were low; even in retrospect i’m not sure it was the wrong choice. but it would take abnormally high certainty for me to do it again now that i know the score first hand.
Had a similar experience.
It was what they DON’T do that put me off.
Silly me, I thought they spent most of their time doing research!!!
>"Do I actually want to do that?"
There's no reason to believe you can be any more confident about your answer to this then the person in the article is about their hazy idea about what something is like.
If people "unpacked" marriage or childbirth to the extent suggested in the article everyone would be frozen in dread. That's not because they're smart and have just disovered what those things are truly like, it's because they overestimate their current emotional state and underestimate what they can grow into.
In fact the article I think is far removed from how people live. We don't chose professions because of our secret "true" interests, we make decisions based on circumstance, luck, financial security and then we adapt our emotional state. And that's a good thing, the emotional state of a young person isn't a good yardstick for anything.
My friend in college was worried she would fall into trap that she eventually fell into: She wanted to be a writer, and she felt that Comparative Lit put you in danger of knowing your writing was crap before you had the motivation and discipline to do something about it.
I tend to give junior devs as much rope as I can because they're just going to be awful until they get about 1000 hours in, and no amount of me scaring them is going to make that any better. And once in a while they surprise me by doing something they shouldn't have been able to do. We all have our preconceptions and nobody's are right all the time.
One way out of this trap is to set yourself ridiculous constrained writing challenges. "Write a story about a duck, but each paragraph has to invoke or subvert the corresponding item of this list of 30 random TVTropes articles; also the prime-numbered sentences have to each introduce a new character, and the even square-numbered sentences have to each kill one off." You can't compare that to a Franz Kafka Prizewinner.
And then once you've built up a small nest egg, you can set yourself ridiculous editing challenges: "salvage the story I wrote this time last month, in two 20-minute editing sessions".
This is the basis of "The E-Myth". A book I didn't read a long time ago because the title made me think it was about Scientology, but a consultant encouraged me to read it and I did. Essentially, the book is about this:
Person A likes to bake and has creative recipes that people like. Person B likes to develop companies and knows a baker who can make a recipe. Person A struggles to keep a bakery open and could really live to never see another pie in their life. Person B creates Cinnabon.
And Person A would probably prefer to gouge out her eye with a cookie scoop than sit at a board room meeting discussing Cinnabon's quarterly revenues.
Person A was happy enough as a mid-level manager who baked for fun. But everyone said they should open a bakery and so they did, and now they're miserable and worn out.
Where is the person B exploits person A to the max stealing all their recipes and pays them as little as possible where they can barely afford to live within 30 minutes drive to the underpayed job
That person A wouldn't have the resources to open a business.
Not so sure person B didn't create rise in diabetes deaths at the national level big enough to show up visibly on the graph
[flagged]
The Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths article strikes again. In this telling, Person A is a geek (creator), Person B is a sociopath, and "regular customer at the bakery" is a MOP.
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Nope, it's not that. Baking wasn't a cool subculture in this story, it's just a the production of baked goods.
For me, I have a small business because I have a pathological aversion to bosses. Unfortunately, I would prefer to work on my own hobbies than make my business super great so it's stressful in its own way. But I do enjoy bookkeeping and some financial analysis.
Yep, agree. I got into info sec because I found info sec fascinating. The actual reality of working in info sec is like many other jobs: lots of tedious shit with moments where you get close to what you actually found interesting.
If I had sat down and "unpacked" what the actual job was like I doubt I'd have bothered. But that doesn't make it a bad choice for me. I'm still glad I work in the field, I get a lot of value from knowing I'm helping keep things motoring and sometimes it can be fun too.
Unpacking does not sound like a good way to figure out what you want to do. It sounds like a good way to argue yourself out of doing anything.
I feel the same thing as you but that’s just a default choice : I did that (programming) because I know I liked it when I was a teenager.
Unfortunately, you know pretty much nothing about what you really like when it’s time to start choosing what you’ll study or to start your career.
About two decades later, I still like programming but having the knowledge I have now about life, I don’t think I’d still make a career in programming, let alone in computer science.
Honestly I still think that I’m pretty lucky because most people don’t even know one thing they would like to do when they have to take those great early in life decisions.
At the end of the day, it really looks like enjoying your career has more to do with luck than anything else.
It’s unfortunate that most societies are built on the same schema of specializing early and doing more or less the same thing for your whole life.
I did actually try out quite a few things before settling on infosec.
Like you I programmed as a kid, but did a degree in music (could not get work though), moved back to IT and programming (could actually earn money!). But after a while decided I didn't want to do that either. Moved to info sec in my 30s.
So it is possible to change careers later on. By that time though I had already figured out I needed to earn enough money and I had IT and software skills and experience. Moving to info sec was more of a lateral move I guess.
This is problem with the places like 90% of the Kitchen Nightmares, Bar Rescue, etc., type shows. An owner retires with a huge nest egg and decides that, as a dive bar regular, they'd really like to think of themselves as the owner of the neighborhood bar. The "unpacking" that they never did would have involved cleaning up vomit regularly, violently drunk patrons, just having to do a shit ton of work yourself because labor is expensive, etc.
I would agree with the post, in this case your dad knew a lot about his trade, so it wasn't a new industry for him.
The coffeeshop example is great, i've seen that a couple times, where people that like drinking coffee, open a coffeeshop, and since they don't know a lot about beans, or equipment, they end up doing bad purchases, choosing bad providers, and the result is just bad.
my neighbor is a coffee roaster and started with production in his garage
when i visited he showed me the setup and i had a bunch of questions to unpack the production situation. he told me id been more interested than anyone who had visited which surprised me because hes very popular with many local lifelong friends frequently parking in the cul-de-sac
its an engineers nature to want to take things apart
i think youre right that unpacking could get in the way of enthusiasm. speaking for myself i simply enjoy the challenges of software development and enjoy most new challenges the deeper i go
on the other hand i think unpacking is good because most people dont really know what they want to do coming out of high school, at least in the USA. in america adult jobs are a nebulous concept: i did well at accounting in DECA because i could do mental math better than peers. i assumed id be an accountant because i had to get some job. i assumed id wear a suit and do some math. its a good thing to tell adults because they approve. i took one database class and bailed on accounting to teach myself to code
maybe unpack a career path if there isnt passion and enthusiasm for the process
my daughter loves chemistry and says she wants to be a chemist. she does great ai it at school. so mom and dad helped her find an unpaid spot in an actual lab. so far she loves it but has also learned that it means working all day at 18 degrees c and constantly smelling her colleagues’ lab animal feed. we’ll find out soon if that was too much reality too soon. i hope it will lead her to double-down with the full reality in sight.
> working all day at 18 degrees c and constantly smelling her colleagues’ lab animal feed
That sounds more like biomedical research than chemistry? At the risk of stating the overly obvious to you do keep in mind how great the differences are between subfields. Synthetic organic versus materials science labs will look like entirely different professions from the perspective of a layman glancing in the window (which they are I suppose).
fair point - yes this is a biochemistry lab but her part is specifically to do with analysis of lab data collected from someone’s specific experiment. so she’s learning practical things having to do with actually doing new science in a real environment though she’ll need to generalize a bit in her mind (hopefully correctly but then developing intuition and imagination matters too) to the pure chemistry aspect of it. she’s generally excited to meet actual professionals in their day-to-day work who have specific performance expectations of her and who really care that her part is done correctly and can be thoroughly audited and verified for accuracy. this time she’s not getting her hands on actual lab instruments and things like that (she does that at school and hopefully in next summer’s internship if she can can get one and is still interested by then); but she’s seeing how data comes from each of those physical world manipulations and what is done with it afterwards.
Weird, 18c is the sweet spot, like ideal perfect temperature for me.
that’s what my wood shop teacher used to say to the whole class who were wearing heavy sweaters.
is this also an early experience at a job whether paid or unpaid? if so there could be some noise in the signal from that.
yes first time in a work-like environment. she’s mostly excited about it though we realize in retrospect it might be a bit of a risk to a fledgling interest. fortunately it seems to be a supportive environment (got lucky).
in my opinion this is a high stakes combination with little grey area for outcomes, as in I predict based on the tiny shred of info I have that she'll come out of it knowing whether or not it is something that she wants to pursue. good luck
thanks! yes we sort of saw it as “if it’s not for her better that she know early on”. we don’t want to talk her out of it (quite the contrary), yet we know many others who pursued lab bench science for a decade+ before realizing it was not for them for one of many practical reasons and we thought it best to give her a preview… there are many fields she was happy to rule out after simple conversations but there is a small handful that she finds compelling as stories or narratives but don’t survive the first level of unpacking (math, software, cybersecurity). fortunately the central science has stood up to actual challenges so far…
I always thought it would be so much fun to work in a lab with monkeys until Chris Kattan unpacked that one for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV2kaJ5_8PU
There is the anti discussion, about where to know is to be ruined in some way, which is valid, the inference I get is that there is merit in engineering your approach to a career in engineering, and for some fickle few that clearly works, everybody else has to self decieve or seek help in that, or the world would grind to a halt. The game is stacked for those who can chanell there primal urges into abstractions and other disiplined outlets, the rest end up represed , acting out or some combination that is less "efficient"
if i understand your eloquence i think youre right that im lucky to apply my kind of "crazy" (tfa) for money
i recently spoke with an extended family member who works a secure 9-5 job for which they are paid well, requires little effort, is physically active but not taxing. they feel pressured by society or internal expectations to reach for something more challenging
they are young and asked if i have advice. i told them them are in an ideal situation and not to care so much about work. they can consider that box checked and seek satisfaction outside collecting paychecks
this is like a lifelong smoker telling their relative never to smoke. programming is my biggest hobby
I also picked my profession because it’s what I always liked and wanted to do.
I dreamt of going to college just to learn the things I wanted to know, not to make money. Even imagined learning them and then finding a job don g something else.
Was just very fortunate that it ended up in a lucrative field.
One relative tried to persuade me to go into medicine or law to make more. Put it as “you’re going to work the same hours so might as well be better paid.”
So glad I didn’t take their advice…
Like many things in life (including those we end up succeeding at), if we knew what it would entail (and already had the experience), we wouldn’t go at it with the same vigor - and might fail outright. Or maybe it would be easier.
I suspect there is a strong evolutionary reason why Mom’s tend to forget the really tough part/pain in having kids though.
The article says that you should at least find those questions interesting, not necessarily have everything already planned out.
I think the point of that procedure is more to illustrate when someone hasn't thought about the logistics _at all_. The problems aren't when you can't answer one random question, but when you can't answer any, even the basic ones like what kind of espresso machine you want to buy.
Even there I'd say that "Yeah, I'll have to do some research on that" is fine as an answer at least at a very early stage. It's when the honest answer is "I don't care, and I don't want to care" that you have a strong indicator that you shouldn't go beyond daydreaming when it comes to this goal.
My dad bought a burnt down pub for a dollar. He spent 15 years working on the place and now its worth quite a lot. He is always telling me to find something that requires hard work, but in the end leaves you with a significant asset. He put a cafe in the pub, and a coffee machine. He worked out the beans at some point. I think he had like 6 different POS systems.
I didn't become a physician, because my teenage-self unpacked being a physician as telling fat people to eat better food and start exercising -- for 50 years. Turns out there are other specialties... Despite thinking the human body is fascinating, I'm largely happy I don't have to tell unhealthy people to do what they probably already know they should do and then give them a bandaid for their gaping lifestyle problems.
They’re not even allowed to do that any more despite it being a legitimate medical risk (top 5 reasons for death according to the CDC are related to obesity).
Why not?
Patient reviews. So you can tell a patient they can lose weight, but if you do they might leave you a bad review. If you get enough of them, your practice might not keep you. Try few doctors own their own practice these days, so they have to care about patient satisfaction surveys.
This resonates. The article has some interesting points, and get where they're coming from. Unpacking can be helpful to think about the next smallest step, but I agree, thinking of all the things ends up creating a mountain that looks too hard to climb, nevermind that many of the questions and challenges you ask may not even materialise. My main takeaway is just to ask the question of why you want to do this thing you've said you want to do, and what the next smallest step is to do it. If you find yourself enjoying it, carry on.
For example, when people say they want to write a book or be a novelist, what they really mean is, they want to have written a book and been a writer. They're looking at the finished product. This is likely true of most people who want to do X, because they see it as a solution to their current situation.
The better thing is just sit down and write stuff. Poems, diaries, letters, very short stories and vignettes. See where it takes you.
The professor thing made me laugh, because some people like helping others grow and learn and blossom, despite all the day to day stuff. That was my step father's motivation for it. He found he enjoyed it.
There is value in just throwing yourself into something and seeing if you enjoy it. For example, I have a friend who started brewing his own beer. He loved everything about it, and enjoyed it. He connected with other home brewers, and gradually he ended up becoming a master brewer. He didn't start with the end in mind, he threw himself into what he was doing and carried on because he enjoyed it. Funnily enough, another friend started roasting his own coffee beans because he liked drinking coffee, and today he sells his own beans, and has just opened his own coffee shop. He carried on doing it, because he enjoyed it.
I've always liked Tim Minchen's advice on this: "And so I advocate passionate dedication to the pursuit of short-term goals. Be micro-ambitious. Put your head down and work with pride on whatever is in front of you… you never know where you might end up. Just be aware that the next worthy pursuit will probably appear in your periphery. Which is why you should be careful of long-term dreams. If you focus too far in front of you, you won’t see the shiny thing out the corner of your eye."
> There is value in just throwing yourself into something and seeing if you enjoy it.
Absolutely, when the stakes are low and the timelines short. Then it's a very good option for "not knowing what to do".
It's a really bad idea when you have to start by taking on six-figure student loans, or when it will take years of your life to get to the point where you're confronted with the unappealing aspects, which will dominate your time thereafter.
> He was already a master of his trade at this point and I am sure he had a deep insight into the industry and the practices of the time.
This is exactly what the article is saying is needed in order to predict whether you will enjoy a job or not.
Sounds to me that your dad would have been interested by the question and engaged with the interview.
The article was about "I hate my job people" and finding the difference between someone with enough interest to really change his life.
As an analogy, I'm sure car salesman know from experimental evidence that there's a difference between an interested buyer and a tire-kicker. ... that a few questions can discern with high probability.
> if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting
I think you missed the second part of the sentence, it's one thing to not know the answers, but you should have a personal interest in finding them