I've seen this software used on a couple different video lesson platforms (I am currently subscribed to Open Studio). It works really well. Occasional browser funniness, but otherwise a really solid tool for learning music. Great work!
> Getting a different job in a startup or an agency sounds like the last thing I want right now. From what I’ve heard big tech is not all that much different, and a non-tech programming job sounds like it’d be boring/horrible in a different way.
Here's the thing. Every job is a job. Even "doing what you love" comes with days when you really don't feel like doing it. There is no perfect job that will contain all the things you like about work and none of the things you don't like about work.
Furthermore, you will never ever get the first years of your kid(s) life back. You should be present for those years. Being burnt out and hating your job does not leave you the mental bandwidth to be present.
Taking a less glamorous job to make space in your life for other pursuits is not bad. Even if it's just for little while to reset. And have some perspective: you can enjoy some aspects of a job without enjoying all aspects. Pick what is most important for you and optimize for that. And the most important aspect is not fixed; it will change depending on your season in life.
I don't think I've ever been actually burnt out, but I have experienced the gamut of job satisfaction. You break out of it through self-reflection and understanding what you actually like and dislike about a job, and what really matters to you in life and how to build around that.
> Taking a less glamorous job to make space in your life for other pursuits is not bad. Even if it's just for little while to reset.
Agree. Quit the startup grind and find a middle-of-the-road position at a big company where you can take it easy, then work the minimum you need to feel OK with yourself. For example, 4-6 honest hours a day; if you're coming from an overwork startup culture, you'll still be out-working most of your peers even at that rate. If it's not done by 4 PM, then tough shit, it'll still be there tomorrow and someone else should've planned the project better. Then find other things to do with your newfound free time.
We used to have unlimited PTO, and even in my interview I chided them that it's obviously not "unlimited".
For a small, organically growing firm like my employer, unlimited PTO is just shorthand for "we don't have the back office staff to track this, so just don't abuse it". Yes, totally subjective, but the point is when you're scrappy you don't have time to make Policy all the livelong day.
As we've grown and evolved we ditched the messaging of unlimited PTO because of the negative connotation it has that everyone here has rightfully pointed out. "Does unlimited mean none?" is a verbatim question I've fielded in an interview.
Anyway, I explain OP's question as what I call the career trifecta:
1. You are working on things that have meaning to you
2. You enjoy working with the people around you
3. The pay and benefits give you space to pursue life's other interests
Most people in the world don't get one of those, much less all three. I have all three and now I'm a spoiled brat and don't want to give up one of them to get more of the other (i.e., more salary doesn't make life better if you lose one of the other pillars).
> a rational person will blame the repairer, not Apple
Assumes facts not in evidence. My experience has been people tend to blame the platform supplier first and foremost.
1990s OEM computer maker loads a bunch of crapware on your PC? You're likely to blame Microsoft Windows.
SimCity doesn't run on Windows 95 because of a bug in SimCity? You're likely to blame Windows 95. Microsoft at least understood that dynamic.
iPhone acting weird? Apple's fault, obviously, no questions asked. It's the default position of consumers.
I agree with your assertion that this is a knock on the Apple brand for a certain subset of their audience. I don't think it matters to the lay user as much as it does to the power user.
While I don't think that your conclusion is 100% wrong, your argument does not support it. The first two examples are actually the way I would bet.
For the first, MS knew what was happening, and worked to make it easier. The computer manufacturers were the MS customers, not us. MS didn't do the actual loading, but they did point to how easy it was to load up, and say "Gee it would be terrible if you did this, this, and this, to load up the machine with profitable junk the user doesn't want.".
For the second, MS had somewhere between zero and negative interest in non-MS software continuing to work. We have sworn statements in court that they actively worked to make sure that 1-2-3 wouldn't run.
Your third is the statement you're trying to prove using the first two.
Again, I don't _completely_ disagree with your third statement. But the first two do _not_ support it.
Because I have known people to buy repaired cars and blame the manufacturer for issues that might be related to the repair, not the repair place. But usually IME when people buy a car out of warranty, that's been repaired a few times, they realize what they're getting into.
For phones there would, at a minimum, be a few years for most people to adjust from "it's an iPhone, no one else even _can_ repair it" to "it's used, who knows what's inside anymore". But I'm willing to bet we'd get there. But it's just a gut feeling.
Rather than looking at titles, I would focus on what you want to do.
"Software dev" encompasses a wide variety of work. As a simplified example, if you were a senior frontend JS dev who wanted to get into writing kernel modules, you might have to take a job title and/or pay cut since you're less senior in that niche than your current one. But if you really want to be a kernel dev, it might be worthwhile.
So, what do you want to do? What kind of dev do you want to be? Will the new gig get you closer to that, regardless of title? Thinking beyond just tech stack to how you want this arc of your career to progress, will new job be better?
Also look at non-tech stack things. Do you like your team? Do you like your industry? Has your boss treated you well? Do you have equity opportunities at current or new gig? Which stack/niche has a higher ceiling of potential opportunity?
Did you tell them you could build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem?
Mostly HN comments about this kind of thing should be ignored. It’s easy to be critical and negative about anything new, it’s a lot harder to be right.
>HN is famous for knee-jerk dismissals of tech and companies that then go on to become wildly successful:
It is extra funny to find this comment considering the top comment in this thread. Someone makes a good looking, simple, and useful app and the top comment is nothing about the work put in, the quality of the app, potential improvements, or anything like that. Instead it is a knee-jerk dismissal of "you’re going to get sued" and "hope you’ve got a lawyer." The more things change...
What they built isn't illegal. The naming and branding of what they built likely infringes on a trademark. Either way, the point was more this communities urge to knee-jerkingly dismiss a project for whatever reason. There is often a default of "this is why it won't work" or "this is why you are wrong".
>For “greatest comment” I was thinking of cmdrtaco’s comment about the iPod
In fairness, it probably wasn't obvious that Apple had a hit until the 4th generation iPod in 2004. (iTunes didn't even run on Windows to support earlier models when they were released.)
I’d argue it was - maybe not obvious, but I knew it was a big deal.
The nomad and other players at the time sucked (I wanted to get one for my dad). Plastic, poor build quality, software would often freeze up and crash.
The nomad looked like a cd player, why? Just bad design and not thinking about it.
You’re right though that 2004 it started to really take off.
I wasn't really into digital music at the time and only had a Windows system in any case. I definitely viewed Apple through the lens of a computer company. I even wrote a research note in 2003 (as an IT industry analyst) suggesting that Apple should perhaps view itself more as a home entertainment company [1]. I noted that they had the iPod and iTunes music download service but I pretty much mentioned that in passing, perhaps because I was really thinking of home entertainment in the context of a living room home theater system.
I did buy a 4G the following year. (It also took me a few years to get an iPhone after initial release.)
Flyertalk wasn't keen on the next big thing either
"ever since i semi-retired a little over a year ago, i been traveling A LOT and i hated it when people tried to reach me when i am on the plane or out of the country. so i asked myself -- wouldn't it be cool if i just set a status for my iPhone, similar to how you can set a status on yahoo messenger or skype."
Only response was
" It appears that this requires the other party to also have the app installed, right? "
At least with that one whatsapp's original idea switched from statuses to messaging because they saw the users using their ability to set statuses to message each other. That paired with awful SMS in most of the world let them dominate.
That's quite a different thing from what (I'm guessing Jan Koum?) is pitching here. So it'd be easier to not make the jump I think.
This one never gets too old. Even with the no-jokes policy here, I can't resist upvoting "you could build such a system yourself quite trivially" posts.
You can make changes today that will pay dividends in 10 years, so maybe focus on that instead.
I was widowed pretty young (as widowers go), so I have done my share of playing the what-if game with the past. Ultimately it is not a productive exercise, and I try not to do it. If I catch myself dwelling in unlived lives, I try to refocus on the one still in front of me.
> You can make changes today that will pay dividends in 10 years, so maybe focus on that instead.
Exactly this. No matter what your imagined and real futures turn out to be, the good ones all require effort and investment in the present. You can’t go wrong with making investments in your life now.
Technically I think the second best time would be 20 years ago less one Planck time. Which is to say, now would be the 11,700,454,120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th best time. :)
It's tempting to lay in bed after a bad life event, thinking about turning back the clock, but that never ever leads to anything productive or positive.
Best case scenario is you can't fall asleep until 4AM and screw up your sleep schedule for a week. Worst case is you start exhibiting learned helplessness and go into depression for a year or several.
I always try to refocus and think about what I can do for the people who were there for me during bad times, and how I can learn from my misfortune. (Sometimes, there's nothing to learn and it's just a bad stroke of luck. Even then - it's not going to help playing the what-if game)
Ultimately we are the people we are both because of good and bad things that happened to us.
I tell any young adult who will listen the mistakes I made. It's nice when they stop by with stories and whiskey the days before Christmas and see them come up strong, happy, and on a solid path towards success. It's only through the stories of our mistakes that we can escape the clutches of time.
I agree, partially, I'm adamant about the fact that it's even more important to talk about successes, than failures.
"Vicarious learning from the experiences of others saves making errors yourself, but I regard the study of successes as being basically more important than the studyof failures. As I will several times say, there are so many ways of being wrong and so few of being right, studying successes is more efficient, and furthermore when your turn comes you will know how to succeed rather than how to fail!"
I've gotten a lot more out of studying failures. Especially other people's failures. People who are honest with themselves can warn you around the mistakes they made, but people who succeed rarely have much luck identifying which selection of choices got them there.
I think the reason is that success is usually cumulative: each little win builds on the last until it's obvious you're going in the right direction. Those wins often depend on random or temporary things you have little control over. For example: CED was the perfect format for the decade RCA started developing it in, but it took until VHS redefined the market to finish it.[0]
Meanwhile one mistake can send everything tumbling down. Study enough mistakes and you might know enough of what to avoid to stay afloat long enough to find the right chain of wins.
In principle, I agree with the fact that studying failures teaches one more, whether more is better when it comes to learning stands to be discussed, however.
What I mean by this is that, although you may profit from your parents sharing a plethora of don't-dos such as avoiding drugs, staying away from toxic relationships, not dwelling on your insecurities, et cetera, having regular abstract conversations about how "thinking deeply about my predicament, my objectives and how to reach them despite the former" might be much more useful to you.
In short, the first approach teaches you, potentially, numerous, isolated lessons about specific circumstances you will likely never face. Yes, you certainly learned more things, but whether those things will be useful to you, particularly, is unclear and only time can tell.
If you and your parents, however, have a thorough discussion about what allowed them to lead a happy life, as in the second scenario, both pushing and pulling, trying to discover what it really was and looking to find consensus regarding attitudes, processes, ideas, roadblocks, etc, you might learn a framework what will be useful forever, regardless of the concrete circumstances you are faced with.
Nevertheless, this comment of yours is spot on:
> people who succeed rarely have much luck identifying which selection of choices got them there.
Therefore, I really emphasize that not only the mentor should share the reasons and methods behind their success, the listener must be able to understand why and whether they were as useful as the mentor portrays them.
Maybe. Trying to emulate other people's success always ended in failure for me whether in life or opinionated coding frameworks. Americas Test Kitchen approach to recipes when they first explain all the ways they failed is infinitely more valuable to me than just the one successful recipe.
I did give a considerable amount of time to thinking about the what-if scenarios one day and when I looked down those other paths of what might have been I realized I would have to give up something I had come to love to pursue those.
Who I am may not be the best but I made these choices. I can't travel to past to berate that version of me. If I'm dissatisfied it's up to me to change that for future me.
Any alternative choices I could have made in my youth would have prevented me from having the children I have now, so there’s no significant decision I would ever like to change.
> Meanwhile, everything interesting/challenging I might have liked to work on is already being worked on by someone else, who is probably doing a better job than I would have
You may be surprised to learn how false and limiting this belief is. Turns out most of those people are also just winging it, so if you wing it too, hey, you may actually reach a better outcome.
Exactly, defeatism can be pathologic to individuals and society. It's frustrating that doing anything involves the extra effort of countering this attitude.
Wanted to +1 this, if you’re talking about technical problems that aren’t prohibitively expensive to work on, I garuntee you the world has room for your work. I swear, once you enter a tech company it’s like any given task suddenly takes 10x longer than it would if you pursued it as a personal project.
The catch is you have to develop the experience. You may well be able to reach a better outcome! But you do also have to commit to developing the depth, which can be a process of years.
> You don't have to love every day of a job to love the job.
You shouldn't love your job. A job isn't a person. You should love your friends and family. A job is what you do for money. Like a trick, michael.
I would love to know when the idea of "loving your job" came into the culture. It feels so manufactured like "I (heart)/love NY". Similar to "productivity" today. "Have you been productive today"? When did "productivity" sneak into the culture.
Edit: The replies indicate what I am talking about. People are so conditioned into thinking that you should "love" your job that they get defensive when you point out that a job isn't something that you should "love". You can enjoy your job, you can get fulfillment from your job, but a job isn't a person. It isn't something that you should "love". Words matter. I don't like how love has been hijacked into a meaningless term now. I love my job, my hobby, my football team, etc. Someone wrote they spent decades with a job they loved. If you did, then you wasted your life. Do other countries/languages also "love their job" or is this an american thing? It's such a strange thing to "love". Strangely enough, only on hacker news would you people so religious defend their love of their job.
You seem to have a very narrow definition of what "love" is and want to deny people the ability to love in whatever way makes them happy, which is a bit uncharitable of you.
I think maybe I get the root of your complaint; there are some people who drink the kool aid and get stuck in what amounts to an abusive relationship with their job, and stay there out of some sort of warped "love". That is genuinely bad. That is also not what anyone in this thread is talking about when they say they love their job.
I have at times loved my job. I have at times only liked it. And sometimes actively disliked or hated it. I've also loved romantic partners, family, and friends. My love for a job is different than my love for a romantic partner, which is a different love than the love I have for family, which is also a different love than the love I have for friends. That doesn't cheapen the value of any of these kinds of love, and neither does broadening your horizons to accept other kinds of love that you perhaps don't feel yourself.
There are many different kinds of love, and no person has any business telling others how to love or how not to love. This has nothing to do with "conditioning" or "defensiveness". You just don't get to decide this for anyone but yourself, and complaining about how other people love is as meaningless as complaining that the sky is blue.
> My love for a job is different than my love for a romantic partner, which is a different love than the love I have for family, which is also a different love than the love I have for friends.
Interestingly, languages other than english have different words for those different forms of what English all lumps in as "love".
In Greek (at least ancient Greek, anyway), "romantic love" is eros, "family love" is philia or storge, and "friend love" is xenia or philia. (I don't understand the subtleties of those last two where they cross over...)
It seems the ancient Greeks did not have a work for "job love", which is interesting to me in terms of the upthread discussion.
I wonder if the paucity of English language around different types of
"love" is a cause of the kind of misuse of the concept to apply to things like "I love my job", or if it's a symptom of it - with language shaping and forcing our understanding and deep deep thought structures?
Are there any Greek speakers reading here who could tell me if those multiple differing words for love still exists in modern Greek, and if so how the concept of "I love my job" would be expressed in Greek, and what the word and definition/connotations of the version of "love" that'd be used in that context are?
I have loved most of my jobs over my 27 year professional career.
I love my family even more...by a large margin.
Team members at every organization I've worked with have heard me say, when asked to join them for drinks after work, "Hey, I like you guys and that sounds fun, but I like my family even more. Have a great time!"
> You shouldn't love your job.
Why not? I consider myself exceedingly fortunate and lucky to be in the tiny minority of people who has had the high privilege of really enjoying/loving the work I get to do.
> A job is what you do for money.
Yup! It can be more than that, but that's the baseline. What's wrong with really enjoying/loving that which you do to make money?
> Team members at every organization I've worked with have heard me say, when asked to join them for drinks after work, "Hey, I like you guys and that sounds fun, but I like my family even more. Have a great time!"
How are drinks with friends / corworkers related with loving your family?
Slightly off topic, but all this talk assumes the person has good relationship with their immediate family, and/or is having a successful romantic relationship. Something that I, as a fresh graduate single dude who's not on great terms with family, would argue is also a privileged position. You really shouldn't judge what people choose to enjoy in their lives without knowing their circumstances.
Frankly it baffles me how people can go through life wasting away most of their prime waking hours on a job they don't love.
Maybe I'm privileged to have had this option, but I've always avoided better paying jobs that didn't feel good to go for the ones that I enjoy every single day.
Meanwhile I see mates slog through their weeks, burning themselves out on neverending meaningless work, which pays well but basically means they are living mostly for the weekend. How did accepting that as the norm sneak into our culture?
A lot of people don't have much opportunity to land a job that they love. If I could find a job I love I would hop right on that, instead I work in a warehouse for $15 an hour. I think "the norm" is closer to this than the high paying soul-sucking jobs (see: 2019 US median personal income of $36K).
Though I too am baffled by the people in highly skilled professions who willingly take jobs they hate to make more money when they could probably easily find a somewhat lower paying (but still quite decent) job that they enjoy a lot more.
You are privileged, and I definitely am too. But a simple, extreme, counterfactual works to demonstrate that many do not get this option: Picture a working mother with three children to feed and lives week-to-week with no opportunity to gain new skills. Her only option is going to be to work literally whatever appears. I suspect similar applies to most people who appear to be middle class as well.
Also, consider all those jobs you choose not to do. _Somebody_ does them, and rarely because they have differently wired brains and they actively enjoy the work you've rejected. People who clean toilets, or collect trash, or any of those other unskilled menial jobs that absolutely need doing in society aren't "enjoying this jobs every single day".
>> How did accepting that as the norm sneak into our culture?
I think you've got that totally back to front. The typical HN reader is _super privileged_ to even be able to think about choosing "a job that I love" over a less fulfilling job. 99% of the humans on the planet are doing whatever job they can just to survive. "A job that you love" has never been "the norm in our culture". Pretending most people don't just "go through life wasting away most of their prime waking hours on a job they don't love" is ignoring the lived existence of practically everybody you see each day that's not in a FAANG Michelin-starred cafeteria or double-digit equity incentivised at a swing-for-the-fences startup.
Apologies for not being more clear about this in my original comment, but I was not talking about the unfortunate people who don't have a choice. I had the HN crowd in mind when I mentioned my mates, who definitely DO have other options that would drastically improve their quality of life, but STILL choose to stick with the job that makes them miserable.
The jobs I passed on were not bad in any way, but would often require me to sell my soul in one way or another.
Besides that, if for some reason all I could do was an "unskilled menial job", I would still find the one that had at least some element which I could enjoy. I would grow into it and eventually learn to love my job or find another one.
This was all in response to the person who made the claim that "you should not love your job", which I simply don't agree with. But in his edit it appears that it's mostly an issue of semantics. "Love" has a lot of ambiguous meanings in the English language.
You can love your job in the same way that you can love a hobby that you're passionate about, where you look forward to Mondays, and get genuine excitement and pleasure from the work.
I think that's what people mean when they say they love their job.
Why the heck shouldn't you love your job if you want to? Love isn't something you have a finite supply of that you have to dole out sparingly. Loving your job or your city or your dog or whatever else doesn't "use up" love that you then no longer have available to give to your friends or family or devalue it or whatever. Love is something that you generate more of as you give it away.
My wife is a musician, I used to be a musician, I have a lot of friends in the arts of one kind or another. You can be damn sure they love their jobs (because basically noone goes into most kinds of artistic careers thinking they will make any sort of living over and above the barest kind of subsistance).
TL;DR: I have decided that a word with multiple definitions[1] has only one that I accept. Anyone who does not accept my definition is wrong, and I will double down on pushing my singular definition of a word, because someone is wrong on the internet![2]
