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Working Hard Is A Virtue; Difficult Work Is A Vice

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A fundamental mistake I see a lot of people in tech making (especially young people; especially marginalized people ( i.e. women); especially people with impostor syndrome) is the belief that work that is easy for them is without value, and they should be working on things that are hard for them.

This is almost always the exact opposite of what they should be doing.

I’m sure there are some people for whom difficult work (that is: work that is genuinely difficult to do for that person, or work that is actively unpleasant to them in some way) is the correct life choice. Probably this is frequently true, even. But it’s almost never true for someone who has made it past the interview process at a modern tech company onto a reasonably competent technical team.

The reason is that if you are talented and capable enough to get that far, there is almost certainly something that is enjoyable and easy for you that is valuable to your employer.

Your beliefs about whether work “feels” valuable or “seems” important are irrelevant, and you need to get over them.

The question you need to ask about the work available to you to do is not “does this feel important?” but “does my employer, and other future employers, think this is important?”, and to answer that question you’re pretty much just going to have to ask people in the industry. “Is this the sort of work people need done, will pay me to do, and are short on people to do it?” is basically the question you want to be asking.

Let’s pause briefly for a mathematical parable. For this parable, it is worth remembering that money is time. That is: the real value of money is that it lets you get things that otherwise you’d have to spend time building/making/whatever yourself. In this parable, we’ll therefore treat time as the relevant currency.

Let’s say that on an island there is the coastal tribe and the inland tribe. Both tribes need axes and canoes for various purposes.

The coastal tribe takes 4 days to make a canoe, and 2 days to make an exe.

The inland tribe takes 3 days to make a canoe, and 1 day to make an axe. Note that the inland tribe is faster at both things.

Both tribes have 20 people.

If each tribe splits their people up and makes their own stuff, then after 10 days:

The coastal tribe will have 25 canoes and 50 axes.

THe insland tribe will have 33 canoes, and 100 axes.

However, if the coastal tribe devotes all of their people to making canoes, and the inland tribe devotes all of their people to making axes, then:

The coastal tribe will have made 66 canoes.

The inland tribe will have made 200 axes.

If they then each trade a third of their goods with the other:

The coastal tribe will have 44 canoes and 67 axes.

The inland tribe will have 33 canoes, and 133 axes.

Note that despite the inland tribe being better at both things, by specializing and trading, both tribes are richer. (We’ll ignore why a tribe of 20 people wants 133 axes, please).

This is called Ricardo’s Law Of Comparative Advantage, and it is an extremely important thing to be aware of: given no external resource constraints, specializing literally creates wealth out of thin air.

Your job, as a worker, is to trade whatever you are good enough at to maximize your income and enjoyment.

If you are competent enough to have made it into a tech job, it is almost certainly the case that there is work that you enjoy find easy that other people do not enjoy and do not find easy.

People have this feeling like everyone in tech has the same basic personality with respect to technical work, but it’s simply not true. Know yourself, and use it.

In my culture (white US/Canada), the value of hard work is often harped upon. The problem is that people get it wrong. People get this instinctive aversion to anything they enjoy, anything they find fun. They believe that it’s not work because it’s not hard, and they avoid it.

Such people have confused “working hard”, which is good and important, with “work that is difficult”, which is bad.

It’s definitely possible that you might make more money on work that is difficult for you, but it’s very unlikely because in tech, because unlike physical labour, in tech the speed and quality of your work is directly affected by your mood!

Happy tech workers do better work, which simply compounds the effect of your comparative advantage.

Make a point of noticing things that you do that are fun and easy for you, but that are not fun and easy for at least some of the people around you. There’s a very good chance that someone will be willing to pay you to do that thing for them, because it’s not fun or easy for them and so they don’t want to do it, and they will be bad and slow and they might rather give you money instead and get their time back.

Find the place where your enjoyment and your income are maximized, instead of deciding that fun work must mean you aren’t really working, and deliberately going out of your way to minimize your enjoyment. You’ll almost certainly end up making less in the end, and you’ll be miserable doing it.