School & Jobs are good SOLELY because people are lazy
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But if someone tells you he spends 8 hours at school or working you would think that to be the bare minimum which billions of people do daily.
If someone told me that he spends 8 hours a day work, I’d nod and say “yep, sounds like you have a job”.
If someone told me that he spends 8 hours a day working at work, I would be incredulous. Really, the full 8 hours, working the whole time?? Not slacking off, not browsing the web or sending emails or chatting idly with coworkers or spacing out—8 hours of actual work?! Shocking!
That is the analogous case to “spends 8 hours a day working on his business”—and not “spends 8 hours a day at work”!
If someone told me that he spends 8 hours a day working at work, I would be incredulous. Really, the full 8 hours, working the whole time??
I had a job like that once (and I hope it will never happen again); it was hell. Each Jira ticket was estimated by management how many hours it should take, usually between 1 and 4, so everyone did about 3-4 tickets a day. Everyone was tired, the code was a horrible mess... there was no time to refactor anything, no time to write unit tests, so people sometimes just copied several pages of code and added an "if-else" around it to make sure it doesn't break the existing functionality, and there were classes where this has happened more than 10 times already.
The job even didn't pay well; it was (adjusted for inflation) the worst paying programming job I ever had. Why didn't everyone quit? (I did, as soon as the circumstances allowed me.) Most people there thought like: "if I am unable to handle the workload in a company I am already familiar with, what chance do I have at a new company?" Which was quite absurd, as the work almost anywhere else would be much easier, but this was a well-designed sick system.
So essentially text-book example of what I was referring to when I said: "That's why "go to college and get a good job" is actually good advice for the majority, as the majority simply are too lazy to be productive unless otherwise pressured to be productive by school & work." & "the majority of people can't self motivate themselves and need pressure from their schools or their job to be productive."
This assumes that spending much of the day slacking off and browsing the web is the norm; that's only true in a small sector of specifically white-collar employment, which is disproportionately represented on LW due to the userbase of, mainly, well-educated programmers. Most people work jobs like customer service, where there's enough work to fill your time and you're expected to keep doing it for as long as your shift lasts.
Perhaps, but doing 8 hours of customer service work in a day says nothing whatsoever about one’s ability to do any amount of the kind of work where you have to make decisions, figure things out, etc. (I worked retail for years, so I speak from experience here.)
I try to understand, but I just can't understand this perspective which I consider to be quite elitist. This perspective that ordinary people who work ordinary jobs such as customer service, fast-food, etc are too stupid to be successful outside of the work field and shouldn't try to start businesses as no matter how hard they work they won't succeed.
If you are making the assumption that people do not differ at all in their capabilities, talents, aptitudes, etc., then I’m not sure what to say except “that’s very, very obviously wrong”.
If you are not making that assumption, then I can’t make sense of your comment.
In any case, even ignoring the above—as I said, I worked a retail job for some years. I know what kinds of skills that job required of me. I know what kinds of skills other jobs (e.g. writing software) have required of me. I can see that the former is not predictive of the latter, has almost no overlap with the latter, etc. These are simple observations from my own life, from which I am drawing straightforward conclusions.
Yeah lots of jobs suck and provide lifestyles which are equally bad.
The only reason people can put up with those jobs are because they're 'forced' to do so, and the only reason they work a job like that is because they can't self-motivate themselves to work hard like they do at job because their not 'forced' to do so. So in return they have to put up with that life.
Hence the title, "school-and-jobs-are-good-solely-because-people-are-lazy" because if they were to quit that job than likely due to their lack of self-motivation abilities they will live a even worser life. But if they had the adequate self-motivation they would certainly be able to create a successful business.
Valid point, I did understate the amount the average people slack off at school/job during those 8 hours. But despite, that the average person is still working a LOT at school/work minus the slacking.
Just in college, not in high school or anything extra. If you spend 40 hours a week on coursework, for 30 weeks a year (2 semesters a year - 15 weeks per semester) for 4 years. You dedicate (40 hours*30 weeks)(4 years) = 4800 hours just to college.
The number is substantially higher when you account for high school, SAT, working on obtaining great extracurricular activities that look good on an application, doing things to get a job like solving leetcode questions, internships, taking advanced classes, etc.
it’s clear that if you can spend the same amount of time people spend on school/work on a business, you’d make substantially more than you would otherwise
Is this clear? Why? Business fail quite often. I have no business-running skills. If I tried to start a business, I’d expect to lose money.
I really dislike general stats as they're irrelevant.
A high school basketball player asks "What are the odds of me being in the NBA" and gets discouraged when hearing that only .03% of people on the high school team make it. When the stats should mean nothing to him as he's 6'7, ranked, and has the work-ethic of a maniac (in a good way).
- Large majority in that extremely general stat you mentioned aren't working 8 hours like they would be 'forced' to work at school/work
"The majority of people can't self motivate themselves and need pressure from their schools or their job to be productive."
This sounds like you are trying to say that there are no specific business-running skills, it is all just a question of motivation and ability to work hard. Apologies if I have strawmanned you. Could you please describe your model explicitly?
As a hypothetical example, imagine someone diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and ADHD, who during school keeps working 8 hours or more on their software development projects. This person gets extremely motivated by ideas of success and early retirement. They have no experience managing a company, and neither has anyone in their family or social group.
If such person starts a company, what probability of success do you estimate, and how many years do you expect it would take for that success to come (after how many years should the person give up if the success did not come)? Let's define "success" as the moment when the person keeps making 2x as much money as they would otherwise get in a job (with the same skills and the same hard work), and doesn't have to work more than 8 hours a day (this includes all work, such as doing their taxes, etc.).
Not sure why you choose Asperger's as they have average or above average intelligence and same with ADHD followed by they work hard; something ADHD constrains.
In your hypothetical I'd imagine it's quite high although putting an exact number would be difficult. By the way, I believe that most people believe by business I am referring to a physical business such as a restaurant and businesses with a high capital cost. That's not what I am referring to, programming is more like what I am referring to.
I don't see why they would give up if they are giving 8 hours a day of actual work they're bound to be successful assuming they don't end up with catastrophic luck. Lets say you wind up getting quite good at coding in 3 months of coding for 8 hours a day. Why wouldn't you than be able to leverage that skill into coding whatever and monetizing it?
Ok screw that example, Just in college, not in high school or anything extra. If you spend 40 hours a week on coursework, for 30 weeks a year (2 semesters a year - 15 weeks per semester) for 4 years. You dedicate (40 hours*30 weeks)(4 years) = 4800 hours just to college.
Which is 600 days of 8 hours of work on a business. Instead of going to college you do that. Are you going to say the odds of success are low?
Not sure why you choose Asperger's
Because lack of social skills makes it more difficult to figure out what other people want and how much they are lying when they say they want something, more difficult to convince people to buy your product instead of the competing products, etc.
To put it simply, I assume that in modern economy, the actual problem is selling stuff, not producing it. Things can be produced cheaply in China; software can be written by Indians or LLMs; apologies for the crude simplification. Some people make money selling worthless shit, such as homeopathy. Markets for useful things are oversaturated.
If you are good at selling, but you can't produce, you can hire someone to produce the stuff, or you can become someone's agent. If you are good at producing, but you can't sell, you can... get a job, or give it away for free and beg for money on Patreon (and even that is a kind of selling, because if you suck at self-promotion, people will simply ignore your Patreon account).
Jobs are the way to convert your production skills into income if you don't have the social skills.
600 days of 8 hours of work on a business. [...] Are you going to say the odds of success are low?
Yes. Hours of work do not automatically translate to success. It is possible to spend two years working full-time on something that no one wants to buy, and maybe isn't even good enough (you mention skipping college, so we are talking about a person with high-school level skills and experience).
If someone told me that he spends 8 hours a day working on his business, I would be deeply impressed because I would automatically assume that it was on top of 8 hours spent at work.
After learning that it was actually 8 hours instead of work... well, I would be impressed that he simultaneously has the skills necessary to (1) figure out what needs to be done, (2) actually do it, and (3) sell the result successfully. But the 8 hours a day would just seem... normal.
Now that I have kids, I am usually too tired and distracted after work to do anything meaningful, because I need to get them to/from school, prepare food, make sure they do their homework, interact with them, etc. It's not that I have literally no time left, but rather that I am constantly distracted by their needs.
But before that, here are some things that I often did after returning from work:
- learned something new about programming
- programmed something for someone for money
- contributed to an open-source project
Okay, point 2 is just another job. (Uhm, does having two jobs mean that the person is twice as lazy?) Point 3 is even worse, just another unpaid job. And the point 1 is not exactly a job, but... it's kinda job-related? I mean, does the hypothetical person who spends 8 hours a day doing their business also spend some time learning and generally thinking about stuff, and if yes, is that time also included in those 8 hours?
(I admit, this is a point that I am confused about: are employees generally expected to learn new skills, and if they do, are they expected to do that on company time or during their free time? Before I had kids, I automatically went with "free time", and only started to reflect on that after the free time disappeared.)
Okay, so why don't I start my own company?
One reason is that I am bad at wearing multiple hats at the same time. I can talk to the customer and figure out what needs to be done. I can implement a solution. I can write documentation. I can do the paperwork. But if I had to do all of that at the same time -- while the clock is ticking -- I would mentally collapse. Maybe it is ADHD, or maybe this is difficult for everyone; I am not sure. But it is definitely difficult for me; I know, because I tried.
Another reason is that I never had much of a safety net. And when you need to pay your bills, you need something that will bring you money right now, reliably. In my experience, employment is reliable. (Yes, they can fire you, but that happens rarely, and until they do, they usually keep paying you as agreed.) When you work on a contract, it is way less predictable. And when you work on your own project, who knows when it will be done, and whether someone will buy it.
But if you're not the majority, the optimal move would be to start a business instead of wasting immense time in the highschool>college>job cycle.
How much of that is selection bias? You will meet those who tried this and succeeded, but not those who tried the same and ended up homeless.
I admit, this is a point that I am confused about: are employees generally expected to learn new skills, and if they do, are they expected to do that on company time or during their free time? Before I had kids, I automatically went with "free time", and only started to reflect on that after the free time disappeared.
Why not just ask your company?
In my experience, there are two kinds of companies. Either there is enough slack, in which case I simply do not ask, and just learn new skills on company time, and no one seems to mind. Or it is the kind of a company that makes sure that their employees get enough workload for at least eight hours a day... and in that situation I have actually asked... but the answer was self-contradictory and the boss seemed really annoyed about me asking such "obvious" thing.
On one hand, the boss said explicitly that it is a duty of each professional to spend at least one hour every day learning new things. But also, we worked for an external customer, and we needed to provide detailed reports how much time did we spend doing what, and which of those hours should be billed to the external customer. When I put an hour of learning as a time billed to the customer, the customer complained, and the boss was asking me angrily whether doing that was absolutely necessary, because it made me look incompetent if I had to learn something about a project I was already assigned to. When I put an hour of learning as time not billed to the customer, the boss asked me whether it was related to any project or not: if not, then I was not supposed to do it; and if yes, then it should be billed as a part of that project. When I asked whether I am supposed to learn in my free time, my boss insisted that 8 hours are quite enough for everything. When I asked whether it would be possible to learn something project-related for 1 hour and then work on the project for 7 hours, and bill that as "8 hours of work" so that the customer does not freak out, I was told that absolutely not, the reports to the customer needed to be 100% truthful. (This was already under a quite optimistic assumption that I would be able to learn anything in 1 hour. I must sadly admit that there are things where even 1 day - or more - is not enough.)
So, putting all of this together, I was supposed to do 8 hours of work for the external customer (legible work, such as meetings and writing the code, not learning), and also learn for at least 1 hour, but this all taken together should not exceed 8 hours. And I should not be asking about obvious things.
Despite my autistic traits I already learned to recognize this pattern as "there is an answer, which is obvious to most people except for you, but the answer cannot be discussed explicitly, because some hypocrisy is involved". We can narrow it down to three possibilities:
- you are not supposed to actually learn, only pay lip service to learning
- you are supposed to learn on company time, and you are supposed to bill it to the customer as "writing code" to keep the fiction of 100% efficient code monkey, but your boss cannot say it explicitly because there is a risk the customer might learn about that
- you are supposed to learn in your free time, but your boss cannot say it explicitly, either because the labor law would have a problem with that, or simply because the employees might realize that their hourly salary is not exactly what they think it is
The first option could be okay for a different company, but not that specific one, because we worked with some latest technologies there and had to be fluent at them. The second option is realistic (the customer will not find out the difference between 7 and 8 hours of typing code), assuming the learning is of the kind that you can fit into 1 hour at a time, because spending the entire day without coding would be visible at a daily standup. The third option... I believe is the one that most of my colleagues actually took.
From my perspective, the problem was ultimately solved by changing jobs, to get more slack.
I disagree with the notion that there's no difference between spending 8 hours working at school/work vs 8 hours on a business because you kinda 'have to' do school/work.
As once your in that building, it's not like you can just be like "oops ima just stop right now and do something else" + always an authority figure close by so you feel watched 24/7 + pressure from them.
While when you're spending 8 hours on your business with nobody pushing you to keep on working, when your mind can easily just be like: "ehh I don't feel like working this week and it's not like missing one week is going to be the end of the world."
While if you did that at your job you'd be fired.
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If you look at what people do when their not at their job/at school, it's oftentimes not productive (look at what people do on days they have off, weekends, summer, holidays) and sure you can say well that doesn't count because their recharging from their work, etc. But I still believe the point stands as every time people get off work, they rarely do things that suck but they know they should do (chores and caring for your family doesn't really count for the opposite reason that's in the next sentence).
As they aren't 'forced' to do so, hence aren't: working out, eating healthy, getting good quality sleep, not wasting time on tiktok/youtube, not drinking, not smoking, or plenty of other things the majority of people don't do despite the obvious benefits. But they do school/work due to their hand being kind of forced to do so.
Hence I believe the majority should willingly put themselves into situations where they are 'forced' to be productive so they don't do things that they know are bad for themselves. Hence why I advocate for school/work for the majority as not doing those will likely lead to them spending their time on worser things. (You never go like, "hmm my job/school gave me off today so I will replace the free-time with 8 hours of doing things I don't like to do but know I should." Again, chores & taking care of your family doesn't count as you're 'forced' to do so).
But rationally speaking, since people don't even like work or school and spend high amounts of time on it for little returns. I believe that humans would be much better off spending that time on starting a business which has a much higher ROI (especially considering that in this day and age, if you can code than you don't need much capital).
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Okay, point 2 is just another job. (Uhm, does having two jobs mean that the person is twice as lazy?) Point 3 is even worse, just another unpaid job. And the point 1 is not exactly a job, but... it's kinda job-related? I mean, does the hypothetical person who spends 8 hours a day doing their business also spend some time learning and generally thinking about stuff, and if yes, is that time also included in those 8 hours?
There's a big difference in doing non-instant gratification activities because you enjoy them and doing them despite your intense dislike of it (like people often experience with school/work).
I too code and similarly to you have spent years coding and have done some projects for people in return for money. But I wouldn't say that's work as I enjoyed it and was only doing the parts of coding I enjoyed (as I could have made much more money coding, if I were to do things I felt less passion for and solely focused on the things that I disliked but would have made me money).
And I assume your like me as, who contributes to an open-source project if their not coding for the enjoyment of it?
If you do have the ability to self-motivate yourself to work hard, school/job is a bad choice instead of starting a business.
1Laziness might be the reason jobs are better for some people, but I think it's more common for this to be a skill issue. It's much easier to find a good job than to create one. I'm happy to (effectively) pay my bosses a large amount of money to create good businesses since they're much better at creating business than I am. On the other side, I see people "starting their own business", hustling 24/7 and annoying their friends, and still making less money than if they just paid a restuarant owner to start a business for them got a job at a restaurant.
What most people call "hustling" isn't actually hustling and their just doing work that feels productive when in actuality their ignoring the work that would actually benefit them. Dude seriously MLM?
See my other comment for a better understanding of my views seems I didn't do a good enough job explaining it sorry for that.
If this is your first post, I am curious what your 100th post will look like, should you get that far.
It's funny how I almost didn't post this because I thought it was so obvious but turns out everyone disagrees with me but you lol
1I had a many similar experiences when I started writing on this website. Eventually, I learned to predict what people tend to get triggered by, and how to get my point across while evading those triggers.