While the concept of atomic blogposts is a nice one, I think this characterisation is a bit unfair in this case.
In my view he put four separate but related and logically linked nice thoughts together, and tried to link them all thematically by restating the pie analogy briefly each time.
And the post was otherwise quite short and punchy.
I read this comment before the post itself and I expected to read some sort of lengthy AI slop repeating the same idea ad nauseam, but it was nothing of the sort.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/