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Comment by throwdour | Hacker News Reader

I nearly got whiplash when the author moved the threshold from "giving a shit" to "deeply obsessed".

Yes! I completely agree with the need to hire people who “give a shit”, but to me this means e.g.

  - Dogfooding

  - Fixing a bug even if your manager doesn’t notice

  - Proactively noticing strange system behavior and investigating

  - Actively contributing to strategic discussions; showing genuine interest in the problem space

  - Jumping in to help when the server mysteriously starts crash looping, even if you’re not oncall

All but the last one have nothing to do with working more hours. Even the last one is intended as an exceptional event, not a baseline expectation.

You described a senior engineer.

The last one is especially telling, especially if the debugging ends up documented somewhere/explained to the junior on-call.

Nothing in that list is absent from a good junior dev who is going to be a great leader in the future.

This is what I was exactly thinking by reading the first two paragraphs. But then he jumped on "Just must need to work 80 hours per week to do something meaningful" bandwagon.

If is possible to be deeply obsessed yet maintain work-life balance, restricting that obsession to working hours.

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