When I was a dev working with my business-oriented business partner, I had to get used to sitting in meetings where we promised the client the world having no idea if I could accomplish it or not.
Made a lot more money than I could have on my own.
"Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say 'YES'!!"
They did this to me when I was a technical director of a mid-sized engineering consultancy (aka, a sweat shop). I learned it on the fly when they had me go to a client meeting. They showed the slide deck of all of our credentials, and I was astonished that the sales engineer took the slide I sent them and increased all my years of experience by 25%. I asked them about it later, and they said don't worry about it, everybody does it.
It's unethical and it's wrong and I won't participate in it. I stopped working there.
This is often the advice given by senior folks and I think it is somewhat similar to say that you have to "lie a bit on your CV". Still, I always wonder what would I do if I make these big promises to clients/bosses/management and I fail to deliver. Wouldn't that be worse than having said "no, I won't be able to make it in time" from the beginning?
For context, I'm early in my career (3 YOE) and I don't deal with management that much yet (I'm still shielded by my tech lead and PM), so I'm always looking for advice on how to navigate these things. I really can't just say "YES, YES, YES" when I know *very well* that something won't be possible.
Exactly this. I'm in a situation where I have to tell a customer that we won't be able to do the thing that I've spent a long time investigating.
My answer won't be "no, we can't do it." It'll be a form of "we have to use this alternate method to get to the goal, how does that affect your budget?"
Well said, and on the flip side the strongest signal that your management sucks is their absurd sense of entitlement and inability to handle "no" correctly. Their lack of curiosity and ambition will cause the business to miss out on so many opportunities.
A naive junior shouldn't stump them, but it really does happen all the time. If all they have to do is ask what it takes to flip it to a "yes", the same information is communicated. The only thing ever truly at stake was someone's ego.
While there are certainly people who are rich enough and spoiled enough that they have probably never been meaningfully refused anything in their lives, that produces terrible people, and absolutely everyone needs to learn how to accept being told "no" when "no" is the correct answer (or a reasonable one).
> and I think it is somewhat similar to say that you have to "lie a bit on your CV". [...] For context, I'm early in my career (3 YOE)
Please consider this input from my YOE battle scars:
1. Don't contradict your team while in a meeting with outsiders, but then you're obligated to follow up with your team offline, to try to mitigate any damage, and try to make sure it doesn't keep happening. For one example of why, I've seen one person consciously "mis-promise" things to customer, and when I talked with them offline about we couldn't be saying that, that because it wasn't true, their response was "they won't remember". Narrator: "They did remember." And that's possibly why that person and a few others aren't very wealthy today.
2. Not everyone believes in "lie a bit on your CV" nor similar dishonesty. You'll probably meet colleagues, who you respect, who react to that with surprise and disappointment. You could also get fired for it, with cause. Especially if you're calling yourself an engineer, since determining and telling the truth is much of your job.
3. Though, on the other side of CV honesty, be careful about always using team-speak/think when in an interview context. Out of habit, you might naturally say "we" when talking about something you were instrumental in. But some people who think lots of people lie on their CV are going to hear that "we" as you generously including yourself in the accomplishments of others. I've started switching modes a little more for interviews, expressly claiming more credit, such as by saying unambiguously when I was the sole designer and implementer of something.
When everyone in a game is cheating, you will lose by playing fairly. And like other commenters have suggested - everyone expects similar behavior.
> For context, I'm early in my career (3 YOE) and I don't deal with management that much yet (I'm still shielded by my tech lead and PM), so I'm always looking for advice on how to navigate these things. I really can't just say "YES, YES, YES" when I know very well that something won't be possible.
It depends on a lot of things, like how big the company is, how critical the project, culture, management style, etc. - but you'd be surprised at what is actually possible that may sound impossible. I've had those "this is impossible" thoughts a lot early in my career and more often than not I was wrong. The few times I wasn't wrong, I made sure to highlight risks I saw at the outset, and when the risks materialized, point them out at the retrospective or whatever for CYA purposes.
The things you do want to avoid at all costs are death marches, impossible deadlines with consequences at the end of it, maintenance slogs which will tie you to a very annoying treadmill for your entire tenure - it's hard without experience to know where these things lie, but if all else fails, you can do what everyone else does, try the impossible thing, and either surprise yourself, or when it becomes clear it won't happen, toss it to some overly ambitious sucker (I don't condone this, I just have seen it happen far too often).
One trick I learned: If you have the type of manager who doesn't like "No", then say "Yes", but continually keep him in the loop as the project progresses to failure.
If you're up front honest, they'll think you're being lazy - even if you have good reasons.
If you say "Yes", and then fail for all those reasons while providing regular reports, the manager views you as "Someone who is willing to do things".
They often don't care about your actual success/failure rate, but instead use your attitude as a proxy for the actual success/failure rate.
Also, as the project is moving to failure, he'll usually intercept with "OK, how about we changed the requirements to ...?"
If you asked for that change in the beginning, the same rationale as the above applies.
Internally, it’s important to understand that every ask should have a business goal associated with it. The thing being asked for is rarely (never?) the only way to accomplish that goal.
Great engineers focus on the customer or business need and find/propose alternatives that are possible.
It took me years to notice that folks who confidently made stuff up or provided incorrect info in meetings were looked upon favorably. No one ever knew or cared that the thing the person said was incorrect. Just the confident way they said it.
Aside: start getting that exposure to management people now. You can book regular skip levels with your bosses boss and the PMs boss. Better than waiting until you get promoted and having to learn how to do it with a weight of expectation.
That's what I experienced early in my career, and then I independently discovered Rule 3: "Tell the truth to people who want to be lied to, and you'll go broke."
The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it. Deliver the lies that will make them happy and only those lies. The lies themselves are usually reasonably realistic; it's only when you combine them with your common-sense notions of truth that they become stressfully unrealistic. So give up your common sense and just deliver the lies the customer is asking for.
A less cynical way of putting this is to adopt the customer's frame of mind. The stress comes from the tension of your internal beliefs vs. the customer's internal beliefs; because they are coming from two different people, they are frequently incompatible. When you are working for a customer, you are working for a customer.
> The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it.
This is exactly it!
Like you might think "the promised features are not feasible." No, the features you will soon deliver are feasible, on account of you're about to go build them! If you fail, that is still very bad. But the point of rule 1 is you don't have to act like you signed up to deliver exactly X feature on exactly Y date. Instead you can think a little bit, and then you calmly set off on a process that should reasonably end up with the customer being happy. To many people this strategy feels like lying.
Yup, my breakdown was that I couldn't understand that the client doesn't actually care, they actually prefer to be lied to. Personally, I decided not to live in any system where either side is acting like this. Knowing the rules probably wouldn't have helped me, because I would've found the whole thing (and still do) disgusting and idiotic.
For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear.
Yeah, but even when it was a new quote, it was inaccurate: People have always wanted to follow their own desires, always wanted to be told what they want to hear, and always disliked listening to harsh truths. Even in 64CE.
It's not really a rule of thumb that "Tell others the truth, tell yourself the truth" means you have to barely scrape by. Plenty of people make good money that way.
What does mapping your externalities have to do with honesty? Is this a poor attempt to suggest that no one can actually be honest because no one has a full understanding of the entire universe? Because that's just a lazy excuse for not trying to be honest and not really worth being in the debate.
Having externalities does not mean you are dishonest. Hell, you can even ignore your externalities and still be honest. You can even outright steal from people and still be honest.
The missing quadrant on that one is interesting too:
> "there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know."
The fourth corner is unknown knowns, things that we don't know that we know. Bureaucracies have that one in spades.
It sounds like another way to put it: tell people what they want to hear and you'll go far. Most people want their beliefs confirmed, whether what they believe is true or fiction. Unfortunately it can lead to an echo chamber-y world where people only associate themselves with others who have the same core beliefs, which is even easier when communities are online.
The wisdom from my Mom was “it’s better to be paid for what you know than what you do”. I’ve found it’s a bit more subtle than that, and enjoyed and learned a lot from piece work labor. But the sweet spot seems to be getting paid for what you do that uses what you know.
When I worked at BigCo [1], we were interviewing a candidate for a position. He was pretty good, and we were in the process of making him an offer, but he was asking for more money and trying to negotiate his salary higher.
I don't have an issue with this, BigCo has plenty of money, but other people, including a manager, were complaining. They felt that this is a good job and he shouldn't be doing this for the money.
I, not realizing that this was controversial, said "yeah, but come on, we all do this for the money."
Some people got defensive, explaining that they love the job. I responded "sure, it's good to like your job and your coworkers, I'm not trying to discourage that, but if BigCo stopped paying you then you'd probably stop showing up for work. At least I would hope so."
They kind of begrudgingly agreed, and the day went on as normal. The next day, I have an impromptu meeting scheduled with my manager's manager, explaining that I have a "bad attitude" and he mentioned that specific comment as a reason that this meeting was being called.
Now, to be fair, at the time I did have a bad attitude (in no small part due to at-the-time-undiagnosed sleep apnea), but the fact that I got in trouble for mentioning something that is objectively true really confused me. We weren't working for a charity, we weren't trying to cure cancer, we were working for a for-profit corporation. Of course we were doing it for the money, just like the corporation hired us so that they could make more money.
But I guess people just like to believe a collective lie.
[1] I'm sure you might be able to go through history and find the specific BigCo, and that is fine, but I politely ask that you don't post it here in relation to this comment.
I've been at BigCos in times past where there was some plausibility to this, but in the current BigCo workplace climate, anybody who tries to claim it's not about the money has a long row to hoe!
They don't have to be as cynical as the internets are these days. It's perfectly normal to take pride that half the phones in the world run software you wrote or that you've solved whatever problem for people.
That's completely fine. I have no issue with people working hard on a product they are proud of at a big for-profit company. It's good to like your job, it's good to like your coworkers, it's good to be happy that your software is being used by lots of people, or if you built something that you think is really cool. I've certainly take pride in such things and I certainly do not mean to diminish that by saying "we all do this for the money".
I just think it's important to be honest with yourself, and realize that a job is transactional. When I work for BigCo, I am selling my time and/or expertise for money and/or benefits (e.g. health insurance). If the company doesn't feel like they're getting their money's worth out of me they might fire me. If I feel like I'm getting a reasonable enough compensation then I might go to another company.
Such is the way with capitalism; I don't love it, but until we change to a different system that's just how it is. I absolutely hate when companies say "we're a family here", because that's simply not true. I don't get cut from being my parents' son because I'm not meeting some bottom line this quarter.
Yeah, this tendency of people to believe a collective lie, to try very hard to believe it, or at least make it look like they believe it, even when everybody knows its a lie, astounds me to no end.
Some examples:
- Russians (or insert any other dictatorship trying to appear otherwise) faking "democratic" elections. Who are you kidding, yourselves? No one believes it. Just tell the west: to hell with your democracy. Like, I just don't see why they need to go though that charade that everybody can see through.
- A country where pretty everybody is stealing from each other, and they all know it, and are still trying to fake uprightness to each other. I guess most countries fit this scenario. Like, we all know what's going on. The world does not end if you come right out and say to the effect of, yeah, we steal from each other (if not in so direct a fashion). But for some weird reason, people seem to feel it is important that the elephant in the room remain unacknowledged.
- The world is a very shitty and harsh place, especially to those with seemingly little status. Injustice abounds. Stupidity and absurdity reigns. And yet, almost all of us are expected to put on a happy, confident, optimistic face. Those unable to keep all the horror in are labeled freaks, anti-social, maladjusted, etc. People that fail are labeled lazy, not driven, etc. And yet, we pretty much all know the truth, but we like to lie to each other.
I find it kind of sadly amusing how many conspiracy theories exist about rich elites exist and then they go off about Jews or lizard people or something else ridiculous.
Because there is a conspiracy of rich elites who are trying keep you down. They don't even hide it, and they've been so successful at it that they have bought their way into the highest levels of government. They actively campaign to ensure regular peoples' taxes subsidize their lavish lifestyles and then actively try and turn us against each other instead of us collectively realizing that we need the people who actually do the work much more than we need the people who leach off of it.
My father, who died in 1981, was an inexhaustible font of wisdom and wit. I don’t know when he told me this particular three-part rule, but I’ve never forgotten it. I tweeted it three years ago, but people keep asking for it in one place, so here it is.
There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
The rest is commentary.
---
That last line is undoubtedly a reference to:
> When someone challenged Hillel the Elder (b. 110 BCE) to teach the entire Torah while his listener stood on one foot, he famously replied, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
Aside, I've always seen it spelled "fount of wisdom", but either spelling is acceptable and this seems to mostly be an American/British spelling difference:
I like the Hebrew syntax of the golden rule! I've never seen it before.
I've always like the idea of taking it a step further and trying to do unto others as they would like done unto them. However, the current state of the world has made me realize that lying to people that want to be lied to creates a flywheel of negative outcomes.
I guess the better way to improve the golden rule is to use empathy to internalize and understand the things other people are looking for, that way you can keep the golden rule simple, while not assuming that others want the same as you.
...we find that we may misjudge a man's attitude, his background knowledge, his aims, his standards ; and we may learn from our mistakes and take care even beyond the golden rule. (Karl Popper)
Watching our (newly hired) CTO lie to the entire company regarding the capabilities of a new feature I was hired to build was a brutal education in money-politics.
This hits home. I started my career in market research after someone told me that it was the only part of the business world where you’re paid to tell the unvarnished truth, which I thought was cool.
It wasn’t until many years later that I realized the clients actually wanted to be lied to, and that if you weren’t willing to do that you wouldn’t succeed.
I had often thought about how far I could get in life if I had no scruples or morals. And I think I could get really, really far.... But alas I don't like to lie, cheat or any of that jazz. I actually do care. Honestly it feels like a form of brainwashing. As a kid you are taught all of these things that cripples your growth in adulthood while the other guy uses that as an opportunity to enrich himself.
He's done some absolutely god-tier moderation around here over the years and it wouldn't surprise me at all if he actually possessed the power to grant that kind of wish.
No, there is something intellectual gratifying about short pieces that contain so much depth and layers the more you think about them.
It is not the length of a price of writing that determines how good it is, the same way lines of code does not an effective program make. To be able to say a lot with fewer words is impressive
'Font' and 'fount' are synonyms, although they tend to be used in different contexts nowadays. Even in the sense of a font for setting text, there are older works that discuss 'founts of type'.
There are very rich/powerful people that do #1 shocking well and I kind of wish I had figured it out sooner. Having a moral compass apparently set me back irreparably. I could've been somebody!
I was offered a project to develop a game for this sweet old lady once.
She'd heard that if you made a video game and sold it, you would make a lot of money, so she'd decided to take her life savings, $200k, and hire someone to make a game. She didn't know what kind of game or anything, just "make a game".
I was really worried about her and spent two hours on the phone with her trying to educate her and help her protect herself and her savings.
At the end, she just got sort of mad at me and I could tell she was just going to get someone else to do it.
Heh, well I was kind of thinking, this sounds like something someone in sales or content management or marketing might think is pithy and thoughtful. And we are (or just were) in the "Information Age", so that's what has value. But also, there are lots of other ways to um... make money. Unless you try to twist your brain around "well selling kids' toys to parents is selling lies to someone who wants lied to" or something perverse like that. shrug Maybe the big article does a great job of exploring these ideas, but I don't think they stand up to much scrutiny.
That earns you a special position as one of a pair of guards in a labyrinth with two doors, one of which leads to freedom and the other to... ba-ba-ba-bum - certain death.
Apparently if you're a YC alum you can get to the top of the front page of HN posting an advertisement to go read someone's paywalled Wall Street Journal op ed, with a broken link when you click "read the rest".
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.
These are "ways to get paid", but "jobs" implicitly may or may not be relevant to the topic. If there's no game, politics, or sales aspect whatsoever, which is rarely but not never the case, then it's kind of irrelevant.
- Day traders: Usually get rich "lying" — as influencers. As I hear, very few successful traders have day trading as their only income (and very few are successful), so they supplement it with other income streams. And those income streams, when relevant to daytrading, tend not to inform audiences that they'll best earn maybe 20% per year, and maybe only be able to live off capital above $100-500k.
- Garbage collector, zoo keeper, lifeguard: As honest jobs, you can hopefully make a living doing these. To leverage these skills to become rich.. I don't know, but would imagine there might be some big lies along the way.
- Tennis player: How do they become rich, endorsements? Does associating yourself with a racket, shoe or energy drink count as telling truth or lying? Since ads aren't an analysis of the racket's technical properties, nor its contribution to your playing... I'd say it's lying.
When I was a dev working with my business-oriented business partner, I had to get used to sitting in meetings where we promised the client the world having no idea if I could accomplish it or not.
Made a lot more money than I could have on my own.
"Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say 'YES'!!"
They did this to me when I was a technical director of a mid-sized engineering consultancy (aka, a sweat shop). I learned it on the fly when they had me go to a client meeting. They showed the slide deck of all of our credentials, and I was astonished that the sales engineer took the slide I sent them and increased all my years of experience by 25%. I asked them about it later, and they said don't worry about it, everybody does it.
It's unethical and it's wrong and I won't participate in it. I stopped working there.
This is often the advice given by senior folks and I think it is somewhat similar to say that you have to "lie a bit on your CV". Still, I always wonder what would I do if I make these big promises to clients/bosses/management and I fail to deliver. Wouldn't that be worse than having said "no, I won't be able to make it in time" from the beginning?
For context, I'm early in my career (3 YOE) and I don't deal with management that much yet (I'm still shielded by my tech lead and PM), so I'm always looking for advice on how to navigate these things. I really can't just say "YES, YES, YES" when I know *very well* that something won't be possible.
Maybe it is just a sign of being too junior?
Nobody wants to hear "no". The way you say "no" without saying it is by turning "no" into an option, and attaching costs to options.
"no, I won't be able to make it in time" would be "I can confidently deliver in time if I have X, and we save Y and Z for later."
Exactly this. I'm in a situation where I have to tell a customer that we won't be able to do the thing that I've spent a long time investigating.
My answer won't be "no, we can't do it." It'll be a form of "we have to use this alternate method to get to the goal, how does that affect your budget?"
Well said, and on the flip side the strongest signal that your management sucks is their absurd sense of entitlement and inability to handle "no" correctly. Their lack of curiosity and ambition will cause the business to miss out on so many opportunities.
A naive junior shouldn't stump them, but it really does happen all the time. If all they have to do is ask what it takes to flip it to a "yes", the same information is communicated. The only thing ever truly at stake was someone's ego.
> Nobody ever, ever, wants to hear "no".
Frankly, that's toddler level thinking.
While there are certainly people who are rich enough and spoiled enough that they have probably never been meaningfully refused anything in their lives, that produces terrible people, and absolutely everyone needs to learn how to accept being told "no" when "no" is the correct answer (or a reasonable one).
> and I think it is somewhat similar to say that you have to "lie a bit on your CV". [...] For context, I'm early in my career (3 YOE)
Please consider this input from my YOE battle scars:
1. Don't contradict your team while in a meeting with outsiders, but then you're obligated to follow up with your team offline, to try to mitigate any damage, and try to make sure it doesn't keep happening. For one example of why, I've seen one person consciously "mis-promise" things to customer, and when I talked with them offline about we couldn't be saying that, that because it wasn't true, their response was "they won't remember". Narrator: "They did remember." And that's possibly why that person and a few others aren't very wealthy today.
2. Not everyone believes in "lie a bit on your CV" nor similar dishonesty. You'll probably meet colleagues, who you respect, who react to that with surprise and disappointment. You could also get fired for it, with cause. Especially if you're calling yourself an engineer, since determining and telling the truth is much of your job.
3. Though, on the other side of CV honesty, be careful about always using team-speak/think when in an interview context. Out of habit, you might naturally say "we" when talking about something you were instrumental in. But some people who think lots of people lie on their CV are going to hear that "we" as you generously including yourself in the accomplishments of others. I've started switching modes a little more for interviews, expressly claiming more credit, such as by saying unambiguously when I was the sole designer and implementer of something.
When everyone in a game is cheating, you will lose by playing fairly. And like other commenters have suggested - everyone expects similar behavior.
> For context, I'm early in my career (3 YOE) and I don't deal with management that much yet (I'm still shielded by my tech lead and PM), so I'm always looking for advice on how to navigate these things. I really can't just say "YES, YES, YES" when I know very well that something won't be possible.
It depends on a lot of things, like how big the company is, how critical the project, culture, management style, etc. - but you'd be surprised at what is actually possible that may sound impossible. I've had those "this is impossible" thoughts a lot early in my career and more often than not I was wrong. The few times I wasn't wrong, I made sure to highlight risks I saw at the outset, and when the risks materialized, point them out at the retrospective or whatever for CYA purposes.
The things you do want to avoid at all costs are death marches, impossible deadlines with consequences at the end of it, maintenance slogs which will tie you to a very annoying treadmill for your entire tenure - it's hard without experience to know where these things lie, but if all else fails, you can do what everyone else does, try the impossible thing, and either surprise yourself, or when it becomes clear it won't happen, toss it to some overly ambitious sucker (I don't condone this, I just have seen it happen far too often).
One trick I learned: If you have the type of manager who doesn't like "No", then say "Yes", but continually keep him in the loop as the project progresses to failure.
If you're up front honest, they'll think you're being lazy - even if you have good reasons.
If you say "Yes", and then fail for all those reasons while providing regular reports, the manager views you as "Someone who is willing to do things".
They often don't care about your actual success/failure rate, but instead use your attitude as a proxy for the actual success/failure rate.
Also, as the project is moving to failure, he'll usually intercept with "OK, how about we changed the requirements to ...?"
If you asked for that change in the beginning, the same rationale as the above applies.
Internally, it’s important to understand that every ask should have a business goal associated with it. The thing being asked for is rarely (never?) the only way to accomplish that goal.
Great engineers focus on the customer or business need and find/propose alternatives that are possible.
Great management also helps that engineer understand what the various stakeholders want without siloing off their teams.
It took me years to notice that folks who confidently made stuff up or provided incorrect info in meetings were looked upon favorably. No one ever knew or cared that the thing the person said was incorrect. Just the confident way they said it.
Aside: start getting that exposure to management people now. You can book regular skip levels with your bosses boss and the PMs boss. Better than waiting until you get promoted and having to learn how to do it with a weight of expectation.
the corporate world is a lot of kayfabe and bullshit. Welcome. :)
The downside is all the stress from unrealistic objectives
That's what I experienced early in my career, and then I independently discovered Rule 3: "Tell the truth to people who want to be lied to, and you'll go broke."
The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it. Deliver the lies that will make them happy and only those lies. The lies themselves are usually reasonably realistic; it's only when you combine them with your common-sense notions of truth that they become stressfully unrealistic. So give up your common sense and just deliver the lies the customer is asking for.
A less cynical way of putting this is to adopt the customer's frame of mind. The stress comes from the tension of your internal beliefs vs. the customer's internal beliefs; because they are coming from two different people, they are frequently incompatible. When you are working for a customer, you are working for a customer.
You don't have to lie!
You do need to understand the customer's perspective so you can reframe the reality in a way that they will agree with.
> The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it.
This is exactly it!
Like you might think "the promised features are not feasible." No, the features you will soon deliver are feasible, on account of you're about to go build them! If you fail, that is still very bad. But the point of rule 1 is you don't have to act like you signed up to deliver exactly X feature on exactly Y date. Instead you can think a little bit, and then you calmly set off on a process that should reasonably end up with the customer being happy. To many people this strategy feels like lying.
Yup, my breakdown was that I couldn't understand that the client doesn't actually care, they actually prefer to be lied to. Personally, I decided not to live in any system where either side is acting like this. Knowing the rules probably wouldn't have helped me, because I would've found the whole thing (and still do) disgusting and idiotic.
What? Me worry?
This is also how trillion-dollar megacorps get contracts signed.
For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear.
2 Timothy 4 (NLT), circa 65 Anno Domini
"Time is coming"? Pretty sure this always happened
It’s a pretty old quote
Yeah, but even when it was a new quote, it was inaccurate: People have always wanted to follow their own desires, always wanted to be told what they want to hear, and always disliked listening to harsh truths. Even in 64CE.
It's relatively not
There's got to be a variant that is a 2x2 matrix of this:
Lie to others, lie to yourself (spiral together; either fantastically poor or spectacularly rich)
Lie to others, tell yourself the truth (manipulation, morally broke, but materially rich)
Tell others the truth, tell yourself the truth (integrity, barely scrape by)
Tell others the truth, lie to yourself (be used by the system, usually end up poorly)
I think the fourth would be "lie to those who want you to tell the truth".
His father's saying may have been: "There are three honest ways to make a living".
The fourth option is where scams and fraud live.
Some might argue that lying to those who want to be lied to is still usually dishonest.
It's not really a rule of thumb that "Tell others the truth, tell yourself the truth" means you have to barely scrape by. Plenty of people make good money that way.
It pays to be suspicious of those who tell you you can’t make an honest living.
Huh, I've always been suspicious of folks claiming the opposite.
For the downvoters, have you ever tried to explicitly map your externalities?
What does mapping your externalities have to do with honesty? Is this a poor attempt to suggest that no one can actually be honest because no one has a full understanding of the entire universe? Because that's just a lazy excuse for not trying to be honest and not really worth being in the debate.
Having externalities does not mean you are dishonest. Hell, you can even ignore your externalities and still be honest. You can even outright steal from people and still be honest.
Love it! https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/c85ca76f-bff7-4ff4-87e7-3...
oh god it's the Rumsfeld quadrants for truth....
The missing quadrant on that one is interesting too:
> "there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know."
The fourth corner is unknown knowns, things that we don't know that we know. Bureaucracies have that one in spades.
There's also good money to be made telling people what they already know, usually in the form of a report and/or powerpoint deck
> report and/or powerpoint deck
if you can sell someone on a second report to verify the first you can make a lot of money too.
"a man with one watch always knows what time it is, a man with two watches is never quite sure"
That implies the existence of reports 3 through N, so we should probably automate the process...
Ah, but you only tell them the things they already know and want to hear.
That filter is crucial in any kind of advisory/consulting work. You're there to confirm biases, in 95% of the cases.
It depends on who is paying you. Sometimes, people pay you to tell OTHER people things they know but don't want to hear.
these are what self help books are.
It sounds like another way to put it: tell people what they want to hear and you'll go far. Most people want their beliefs confirmed, whether what they believe is true or fiction. Unfortunately it can lead to an echo chamber-y world where people only associate themselves with others who have the same core beliefs, which is even easier when communities are online.
The wisdom from my Mom was “it’s better to be paid for what you know than what you do”. I’ve found it’s a bit more subtle than that, and enjoyed and learned a lot from piece work labor. But the sweet spot seems to be getting paid for what you do that uses what you know.
AI notwithstanding, of course.
My Mamma says that alligators are so ornery because they got all them teeth but no toothbrush
I've told this story before, but it's relevant.
When I worked at BigCo [1], we were interviewing a candidate for a position. He was pretty good, and we were in the process of making him an offer, but he was asking for more money and trying to negotiate his salary higher.
I don't have an issue with this, BigCo has plenty of money, but other people, including a manager, were complaining. They felt that this is a good job and he shouldn't be doing this for the money.
I, not realizing that this was controversial, said "yeah, but come on, we all do this for the money."
Some people got defensive, explaining that they love the job. I responded "sure, it's good to like your job and your coworkers, I'm not trying to discourage that, but if BigCo stopped paying you then you'd probably stop showing up for work. At least I would hope so."
They kind of begrudgingly agreed, and the day went on as normal. The next day, I have an impromptu meeting scheduled with my manager's manager, explaining that I have a "bad attitude" and he mentioned that specific comment as a reason that this meeting was being called.
Now, to be fair, at the time I did have a bad attitude (in no small part due to at-the-time-undiagnosed sleep apnea), but the fact that I got in trouble for mentioning something that is objectively true really confused me. We weren't working for a charity, we weren't trying to cure cancer, we were working for a for-profit corporation. Of course we were doing it for the money, just like the corporation hired us so that they could make more money.
But I guess people just like to believe a collective lie.
[1] I'm sure you might be able to go through history and find the specific BigCo, and that is fine, but I politely ask that you don't post it here in relation to this comment.
I've been at BigCos in times past where there was some plausibility to this, but in the current BigCo workplace climate, anybody who tries to claim it's not about the money has a long row to hoe!
This would have been 2019. Even then, I feel like anyone who had been in the industry long enough should have developed some level of cynicism.
They don't have to be as cynical as the internets are these days. It's perfectly normal to take pride that half the phones in the world run software you wrote or that you've solved whatever problem for people.
That's completely fine. I have no issue with people working hard on a product they are proud of at a big for-profit company. It's good to like your job, it's good to like your coworkers, it's good to be happy that your software is being used by lots of people, or if you built something that you think is really cool. I've certainly take pride in such things and I certainly do not mean to diminish that by saying "we all do this for the money".
I just think it's important to be honest with yourself, and realize that a job is transactional. When I work for BigCo, I am selling my time and/or expertise for money and/or benefits (e.g. health insurance). If the company doesn't feel like they're getting their money's worth out of me they might fire me. If I feel like I'm getting a reasonable enough compensation then I might go to another company.
Such is the way with capitalism; I don't love it, but until we change to a different system that's just how it is. I absolutely hate when companies say "we're a family here", because that's simply not true. I don't get cut from being my parents' son because I'm not meeting some bottom line this quarter.
Yeah, this tendency of people to believe a collective lie, to try very hard to believe it, or at least make it look like they believe it, even when everybody knows its a lie, astounds me to no end.
Some examples:
- Russians (or insert any other dictatorship trying to appear otherwise) faking "democratic" elections. Who are you kidding, yourselves? No one believes it. Just tell the west: to hell with your democracy. Like, I just don't see why they need to go though that charade that everybody can see through.
- A country where pretty everybody is stealing from each other, and they all know it, and are still trying to fake uprightness to each other. I guess most countries fit this scenario. Like, we all know what's going on. The world does not end if you come right out and say to the effect of, yeah, we steal from each other (if not in so direct a fashion). But for some weird reason, people seem to feel it is important that the elephant in the room remain unacknowledged.
- The world is a very shitty and harsh place, especially to those with seemingly little status. Injustice abounds. Stupidity and absurdity reigns. And yet, almost all of us are expected to put on a happy, confident, optimistic face. Those unable to keep all the horror in are labeled freaks, anti-social, maladjusted, etc. People that fail are labeled lazy, not driven, etc. And yet, we pretty much all know the truth, but we like to lie to each other.
It's hard to understand.
I find it kind of sadly amusing how many conspiracy theories exist about rich elites exist and then they go off about Jews or lizard people or something else ridiculous.
Because there is a conspiracy of rich elites who are trying keep you down. They don't even hide it, and they've been so successful at it that they have bought their way into the highest levels of government. They actively campaign to ensure regular peoples' taxes subsidize their lavish lifestyles and then actively try and turn us against each other instead of us collectively realizing that we need the people who actually do the work much more than we need the people who leach off of it.
We're all a big family here Tom, and beating you hurts us more than it hurts you, but it is good for your morale.
Copy/pasta of the entire post:
My father, who died in 1981, was an inexhaustible font of wisdom and wit. I don’t know when he told me this particular three-part rule, but I’ve never forgotten it. I tweeted it three years ago, but people keep asking for it in one place, so here it is. There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
The rest is commentary.
---
That last line is undoubtedly a reference to:
> When someone challenged Hillel the Elder (b. 110 BCE) to teach the entire Torah while his listener stood on one foot, he famously replied, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/5410546/jewis...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder
Aside, I've always seen it spelled "fount of wisdom", but either spelling is acceptable and this seems to mostly be an American/British spelling difference:
https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/font-knowledge-fount-wis...
I like the Hebrew syntax of the golden rule! I've never seen it before.
I've always like the idea of taking it a step further and trying to do unto others as they would like done unto them. However, the current state of the world has made me realize that lying to people that want to be lied to creates a flywheel of negative outcomes.
I guess the better way to improve the golden rule is to use empathy to internalize and understand the things other people are looking for, that way you can keep the golden rule simple, while not assuming that others want the same as you.
...we find that we may misjudge a man's attitude, his background knowledge, his aims, his standards ; and we may learn from our mistakes and take care even beyond the golden rule. (Karl Popper)
Watching our (newly hired) CTO lie to the entire company regarding the capabilities of a new feature I was hired to build was a brutal education in money-politics.
Its also very telling who takes the blame when things fail.
Thanks. I keep doing 3. I needed this.
This hits home. I started my career in market research after someone told me that it was the only part of the business world where you’re paid to tell the unvarnished truth, which I thought was cool.
It wasn’t until many years later that I realized the clients actually wanted to be lied to, and that if you weren’t willing to do that you wouldn’t succeed.
In this thread: dang, I wish I was evil too!
I had often thought about how far I could get in life if I had no scruples or morals. And I think I could get really, really far.... But alas I don't like to lie, cheat or any of that jazz. I actually do care. Honestly it feels like a form of brainwashing. As a kid you are taught all of these things that cripples your growth in adulthood while the other guy uses that as an opportunity to enrich himself.
He's done some absolutely god-tier moderation around here over the years and it wouldn't surprise me at all if he actually possessed the power to grant that kind of wish.
So there are two ways? xD
My first thought was "cash, grass, or ass" but this works as well.
Might not get you far in life...but it'll get you to the next town.
Is it me, or have HN submissions gotten shorter and shorter recently? At this rate, top-scoring articles will consist of a single word in a few years.
Let me LLM-expand that for you…
No, there is something intellectual gratifying about short pieces that contain so much depth and layers the more you think about them.
It is not the length of a price of writing that determines how good it is, the same way lines of code does not an effective program make. To be able to say a lot with fewer words is impressive
Could be worse. They could have padded this out a ton with emojis and dashes.
This title makes you want to click the article. Other titles that give away the lede influence people to just directly hit the comments section
I'd rather have a short article than a short article that was fed into an LLM to be expanded into a long one that says very little.
But yeah, when I seek truly "intellectually gratifying" material I usually log off of HN and read a book.
It's already about 85%: (Look at) me - with charts. We can replace those with TikTok dances instead.
Yes.
To wit:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368059
There’s basically no content in that one
At least this one has reasonable content
What little content is in that one is a quote by a fraudster.
I think they meant "fount" of wisdom
'Font' and 'fount' are synonyms, although they tend to be used in different contexts nowadays. Even in the sense of a font for setting text, there are older works that discuss 'founts of type'.
There are very rich/powerful people that do #1 shocking well and I kind of wish I had figured it out sooner. Having a moral compass apparently set me back irreparably. I could've been somebody!
I wish I didn't have any scruples, I'd be so rich.
I was offered a project to develop a game for this sweet old lady once.
She'd heard that if you made a video game and sold it, you would make a lot of money, so she'd decided to take her life savings, $200k, and hire someone to make a game. She didn't know what kind of game or anything, just "make a game".
I was really worried about her and spent two hours on the phone with her trying to educate her and help her protect herself and her savings.
At the end, she just got sort of mad at me and I could tell she was just going to get someone else to do it.
Was so sad. Wish I could have helped her more.
"A fool and his money are easily parted."
The scruple-to-dollar exchange rate is just the worst. Or the best. Whichever makes more sense in this analogy.
I have a running tally of job offers that paid crazy money but I did not do because they were unethical
Every spiritual tradition on the planet rejects material wealth as undignified and immoral
https://genius.com/Wayne-wade-poor-and-humble-lyrics
What a bunch of complete sociopathic crap this is
Ooooooooh, so that's how sociopathic CEOs and directors of big companies get rich!
The "read the rest" button seems broken in Firefox on Windows... so that makes for a very short post.
I’m interpreting the submission as just what can be read on the page, but I still liked it. Brief and to the point.
That's only two ways to get paid, so it's either title is wrong or there's a missing part.
Getting paid is entirely consistent with going broke. Gross income doesn't have to be zero to be less than expenses.
I appreciate brief and to the point. It's a world that's rapidly going away thanks to LLMs' love of over-explaining everything.
Ha I reached that and thought to myself "do I need to read any more?"
Heh, well I was kind of thinking, this sounds like something someone in sales or content management or marketing might think is pithy and thoughtful. And we are (or just were) in the "Information Age", so that's what has value. But also, there are lots of other ways to um... make money. Unless you try to twist your brain around "well selling kids' toys to parents is selling lies to someone who wants lied to" or something perverse like that. shrug Maybe the big article does a great job of exploring these ideas, but I don't think they stand up to much scrutiny.
The URL: #replace-with-the-found-url
From searching the text, it seems it hasn't been published on the WSJ.
So the author lied and they are trying to get rich?
If they're a writer there, I would assume it's simply still in the pipeline.
Author never told us what happens when one lies to those who seek the truth... is that on a different plane of reference?
That earns you a special position as one of a pair of guards in a labyrinth with two doors, one of which leads to freedom and the other to... ba-ba-ba-bum - certain death.
> … ba-ba-ba-bum - certain death
ftfy
You get paid, but it does not last
Then you become a poletician, though I guess that could also apply to lying to people who want to be lied to.
It's also broken for Safari (on Mac).
And Brave
Same in Firefox on Mac. Links are hard, I guess.
He is obviously lying to us and becoming rich in SEO from our clicks to his page.
Took me a second. The reference "replace with found url" is a lie if the URL is not found.
Apparently if you're a YC alum you can get to the top of the front page of HN posting an advertisement to go read someone's paywalled Wall Street Journal op ed, with a broken link when you click "read the rest".
This is spelled out on the FAQ page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Can you please spell out the spell out? You're linking 1300 words.
Cmd +F "Paywall"
> Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.
Thanks
It’s Jason Zweig, the Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist, not a YC alum.
I can already think of 5 jobs this doesn't apply to in the slightest.
These are "ways to get paid", but "jobs" implicitly may or may not be relevant to the topic. If there's no game, politics, or sales aspect whatsoever, which is rarely but not never the case, then it's kind of irrelevant.
>These are "ways to get paid"
The link literally says "There are three ways to make a living."
There are slightly more than three ways to make a living.
and they are?
Day trader Garbage collector Zoo keeper Tennis player Lifeguard
They're all making a living by telling people the truth that want the truth. The more money they make the more they deviate being solidly in camp #2.
It's an aphorism. I enjoyed it. It's not a proof of the Universe.
I didn't realise this was Facebook
- Day traders: Usually get rich "lying" — as influencers. As I hear, very few successful traders have day trading as their only income (and very few are successful), so they supplement it with other income streams. And those income streams, when relevant to daytrading, tend not to inform audiences that they'll best earn maybe 20% per year, and maybe only be able to live off capital above $100-500k.
- Garbage collector, zoo keeper, lifeguard: As honest jobs, you can hopefully make a living doing these. To leverage these skills to become rich.. I don't know, but would imagine there might be some big lies along the way.
- Tennis player: How do they become rich, endorsements? Does associating yourself with a racket, shoe or energy drink count as telling truth or lying? Since ads aren't an analysis of the racket's technical properties, nor its contribution to your playing... I'd say it's lying.
Fruit picker.