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Comment by _6pvr | Hacker News Reader

This is just a really silly way to think of craftsmanship. Whoever you pay to redo your bathroom doesn't care at all, literally at all, about your motivations behind wanting to redo your bathroom and how you think it'll change your whole morning and evening routines. They don't care. It's their craft. They will redo your bathroom to the best of their abilities and will take pleasure in new or interesting units of work you've included in your bathroom design that they haven't been able to try.

What you're suggesting is just hustle culture nonsense. If you want someone to be invested in your company, give them _equity_. If you won't (and you won't), accept that you're paying for a transactional relationship, not "investment".

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This comment makes it seem like you've never worked with a contractor.

I come from a family of contractors (electricians and metalworkers mostly), and every experience I've ever had working with them tell me that they care about understanding. If you ask them to make you a bathroom without any waterproofing they'll ask you if you've gone mad and tell you that you NEED waterproofing, because they understand that you don't want your house to rot. If you say you want a metal frame and you have a drawing. The very first step they will take is to analyze your drawing to see if it makes any sense.

I have never worked with a contractor that just did whatever you told them to, without understanding what you're doing. If they chose to disengage with a problem, it's a conscious choice.

The big differentiator is the ease of understanding. Building a bathroom is relatable. You kinds of intuitively understand why you want a new bathroom, and people understand the sorts of issues a new bathroom can solve. People do NOT understand what new software can solve, and how it solves it. They think software is magic pixie dust that you sprinkle on problems to make them go away. That means we have to do more of the work of helping them map out the solution than a contractor would.

> If you ask them to make you a bathroom without any waterproofing they'll ask you if you've gone mad and tell you that you NEED waterproofing, because they understand that you don't want your house to rot.

Nowhere did I suggest otherwise.

> I've ever had working with them tell me that they care about understanding.

They care about understanding to complete the task at hand. I have never met a contractor that got emotionally invested in whether the cabinets you picked out were the cabinets of your dreams. I've met many contractors that were, in some ways, invested in the buyer being satisfied with their job, but that's not really the same thing.

The grandparent said

> I don't care about the project, I care about writing code

this is like the contractor saying they only care about installing cabinets, not helping you model your bathroom.

The point is that you want someone that's going to look at the plan and say "that's going to rot in 2 years", not just do the exact thing requested by the customer and leave

I guess I don't see how "caring about writing code" disqualifies one from caring about the future?

I would disagree. If they knew I was redoing my bathroom to sell the house and know my sink design choice is less saleable than another sink design choice, I would absolutely want this person to tell me as such and would pay extra money to hire a contractor who would say things like that. And then tell everyone I know to hire this contractor, they are worth the money.

That's not a contractor though....

This isn't really true IME. The best contractors will understand the goals and motivations for your project, and make suggestions based on their vastly greater experience of ways to improve upon the project.

This is correct. Also tends to be more expensive as well.

> This is just a really silly way to think of craftsmanship. Whoever you pay to redo your bathroom doesn't care at all, literally at all, about your motivations behind wanting to redo your bathroom and how you think it'll change your whole morning and evening routines.

This depends on who you hire. I recently built a home and dealt with lots of different contractors with different attitudes. Very often when they needed clarification they would come to me, and very often I would ask them "what would you do if it were your home?".

I worked with companies and workers who I would hire again in a heartbeat - they understood what I wanted from my home and how it would be used. They incorporated this into designs and decisions made on site (because I don't care how well you think you've planned, there are ALWAYS decisions to make one site).

The people I would never work with again were the ones who either never even asked for clarification and simply chose the easiest / cheapest solution to a problem (often surprising me - in a bad way) or when I asked them what they would do in their own home were not interested in engaging with that question - they would respond by asking me again what I wanted.

You may not care if your current employer considers you a bad hire or not, and that's fine. In our industry, in this market, you can get away with that. Some of us hold ourselves to a higher standard.

> You may not care if your current employer considers you a bad hire or not, and that's fine. In our industry, in this market, you can get away with that. Some of us hold ourselves to a higher standard.

This is just silly. Your argument is that you would care if your employer developed ridiculous and contrived metrics and then assessed your value based on them? I don't really think your holier-than-thou statement makes much sense in that capacity.

As I said, equity drives investment. If you don't own a percentage of the success, you're trading time for money. This is neither new nor controversial. Any suggestions otherwise are, again, hustle culture propaganda.

It's like you skipped over my entire post and only read the last sentence.

> Your argument is that you would care if your employer developed ridiculous and contrived metrics and then assessed your value based on them?

No. As I alluded to, I think that a developer who does not care about his or her end user is a worse developer in concrete ways.

> No. As I alluded to, I think that a developer who does not care about his or her end user is a worse developer in concrete ways.

Remove developer and answer again.

"I think that a who does not care about his or her end user is a worse in concrete ways"

> "I think that a who does not care about his or her end user is a worse in concrete ways"

You're just....saying things...? What does "Caring about the end user" have to do with "Believing in your product"?

You told them to remove "developer" from their sentence and they did, that's how the sentence now reads. I didn't get your point either above.

Dare to care. It may surprise you. If you take mercantile view of the world then that’s how the world will treat you.

More nonsense. I care hard about things that care about me, aka not businesses that I do not have a stake in.

Then ask for a stake? This is why so many people are paid part of their salary in stock options.

Yep, I do. But lots of employers don't offer any form of equity as compensation. The same employers that demand their employees to be "invested" in the company.

I remember hearing a story from a structural engineer who was disappointed with a builder on a commercial site. He took him around the site and showed him some of the sub-standard work and said to him, "This is not your best work, is it?" The builder responded with, "You should have told me you wanted my best."

I've seen this in software too. People push for cheaper and faster, but often that will only come at the cost of quality. There are good reasons to take on technical debt. For example, to get to market without the funds to avoid technical debt, in the hope you can pay down that debt with revenue flowing in. But there are seldom conversations with business people to negotiate on the quality, time, and cost trade-offs.

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