Hacker News Reader

Comment by corodra | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but that first paragraph was hilarious. Hates coding and realizes they don't want to be part of the pool that actually has to work 60+ hours a week... I want to be a team manager! I'd rather tell people to work 60 hours instead of being told to work 60 hours!

View on HN

I laughed at that point, too. Would have immediately showed the door to such an applicant. Reminded me a lot of little kids' job dreams: "I want to be a boss when I'm big..."

I think that is an excellent career goal.

Sure, management is a fine career goal, as good as any. But when many people say, "I wanna be the boss!" in the best case, it's some fantasy about control, and in the worst it turns out to be pathological. And those are the last people on the planet you want to be "the boss".

I actually mean it the other way: a "fantasy about control" sounds extremely sensible to me. Whether that manifests as

- being lord of your shack in the woods and its surrounding area

- being in management

- having your house paid off

- being in high demand

All of those sound pretty great to me.

I like being a developer. But I think I'd rather own Papa John's. (Not a Papa Johns, all of Papa John's).

I see what you're saying, and I'm on board with that. But isn't it sort of a tautology? I mean, these seems to be a pretty universal human value, to want some measure of positive, affirmative things to happen to us. Even to the point that some people drive themselves (and their families) into the dirt, killing themselves trying to achieve what they think will give them that kind of self-actualization.

I thought I was the only one who laughed at this inconvenient truth!

If you don't care for coding, and you have no artistic talent, maybe the games industry isn't the right place for you.

That's a bit unfair. The person in the article was obviously passionate about the industry. nearly every game dev studio has some combination of project managers, salespeople, marketers, hr -- aka non-artists and non-coders who are still incredible valuable.

But not uniquely qualified or special.

Reality hurts.

Not very many programmers are uniquely qualified or special either.

Reality does hurt.

No, but they are more unique than the positions mentioned by OP.

Reality doesn't hurt too much for them.

But at least they can code. They qualify for coding work.

Programmers aren't uniquely qualified or special either. Your job could be replaced by a cheap guy in India or Russia in seconds. Or even a cheaper recent grad. Eventually, AI will do your job.

I agree that machines will probably write most of the software one day. I disagree that this will cause all "programming" jobs to disappear. I disagree vehemently that all programmers are fungible with "cheap guys in India or Russia". Over the last twenty five years, I've watched this industry expand to become the highest-paid industry outside of doctoring, lawyering, and banking, and the whole time, people said the job market was balanced precariously on the edge of collapse because of this imagined (and completely untrue) programmer fungibility with "cheap guys in India or Russia".

The problem with that strategy in the real world is that as a manager, if your team is working 60hr weeks they're probably creating 60hr of work for you. Sure you can ignore it but then you'll be the bottleneck and 60hr workweeks will become 30hr of work and 30hr of shitposting on HN. It's rarely sustainable to work less than everyone who's work makes you work. If you want to be a slave driver you need to keep up with the slaves.

The difference between having a coding team manager that expects everyone should work 60+ hours and a non-coder who is against it, can be huge. I prefer the latter.

I always preferred to have a boss/manager that has some knowledge of what I do. Maybe not the best. But if I explain an issue or problem, they're not lost. Thus, when I say "this is going to take a while" they don't say "you need to do it faster". They let me do the work and on the backend try to find an extra hand, information or anything that might help me. Because they KNOW what I'm going through.

I've never met or heard of a manager whose only skill is managing and was actually helpful in the work process. Plus, the useless managers are typically the ones who think the peons should work at 60 hours, because they were never the peon.

Hey! I get to say this. I am triggered when I hear people only want to be managers because I know they're incredibly useless meat bags.

I had a good laugh about it,but the reality is that there are millions out there who couldn't be asked to move a finger but be more than happy to get a manager title and show others what to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com