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When I was a kid, it dawned on me that to be among the best, you had to be the one willing to sacrifice the most. Because there are diminishing returns up there, and when everything is equal (talent, biology, etc), then what you cut of to dedicate to the craft is one of the last differentiators.

So really, did I want to be among the best that bad?

And I realized I didn't.

The price is too high.

There are self-reinforcing effects. For example, you work hard to become a top 50 player. At that point you don't have to work as hard to remain in the top because now you have certain advantages.

So you can also look at these "sacrifices" as "investments".

Being in top 50 of anything seriously competetive requires monk-like existence. You can't just coast, many atlethes who don't have the true monk mindset tried to coast a bit after a couple years of ruthless grind that got them to the top. It always results in decline of performance.

I think people have watched or read a lot about those old school or fictional competitors, arriving wasted at the event or with a messed up life because that's what the medias sell.

Even if it could have happen at a certain time, today's competitions are such high-level precision things that everybody is at the top of their game, every parameter is taken in consideration.

If you are not, you don't even get at the top.

I was surprised to chat with a few e-sport competitors a few years ago and learn that they are using drugs to maintain focus.

> everything is equal (talent, biology, etc)

But everything is non-equal. Best of the best have everything aligned in the same direction (family, wealth, genetics...). Even the "sacrifice" does not hurt, because that is just the way they do it.

Believe in "Great sacrifice" does not work in long term, and just builds resentment over time. People who promote it are usually drug addicts and broken in their personal lives!

I was hoping this would be about actual gold...at $2,376.30 USD an ounce becoming a prospector starts to make sense again.

Kinda ridiculous but I'm on a stream that changes every snow melt and gold is so $$$ I've been considering panning and/or getting a metal detector just to mess around in the stream bed. I don't know if it's the value of gold or if this is another thing that happens as I age...

You should look up the way that Japan filters streams for Iron. I cant find anything on it at the moment but essentially they would find/make bends in the river and set up ways to capture it since metal is heavier it would get caught in the bends.

See if you could put in a filter for particularly heavy sediment.

I'm surprised there's no "diy prospector bot" by now.

There are lots of laws regarding how you can and cannot mine for gold.

Oh, so I can't just drop off some kind of prospecting-box and come back next week to see if I made gold... legally.

Laws are going to depend heavily, but most often anything “powered” is likely restricted. Sometimes there are distinctions between hand powered vs motorized contraptions, sometimes there aren’t.

Dropping off a box in a river could be considered littering, or something along those lines. Basically ask yourself “could a complete piece of shit do what I want to do in such a selfish and destructive way that forces someone to make a law against it?” And you’ll start to realize it may mot be so simple, anymore.

For gold what you want to do is find spots where gold has likely accumulated due to falling out of the stream, fill buckets and then work through them.

It’s more something to do for fun than for money. An excuse to get outdoors, learn local geology and engage in the very addictive activity of “searching for something”. Prefer agates and plants myself.

> Basically ask yourself “could a complete piece of shit do what I want to do in such a selfish and destructive way that forces someone to make a law against it?”

I think I spent too many years in fintech, because I had to read this twice to make sure I understood it :)

iirc the law varies by state but generally is allowed unless you use heavy machinery (as a general guideline)

Not in practice in most the places it happens. Much of forested Guyana and Brazil is wide open to ANYONE, no law enforcement and no immigration enforcement.

[dead]

I recently found myself down the gold prospecting corner of YouTube. There is some really fun content out there on amateur prospecting. It’s worth watching a few videos.

> Do you want it bad enough to skip going to movies with your friends...? To miss a prom...? To read some books... instead of playing videogames? To go to sleep early instead of watching a good movie...?

Wait, I could have gone for a gold medal instead of learning how to program?

But learning programming felt good.

you could've gone for a gold medal *in* programming

> Do you want it bad enough to skip going to movies with your friends and use the evening off for necessary rehabilitation procedures? To miss a prom in order to take the extra practice? To read some books about nutrition instead of playing videogames? To stop posting motivational pictures and actually go running in the pouring rain? To replace fries and chicken nuggets with vegetables and high-protein meals? To go to sleep early instead of watching a good movie?

Reading this hurts. I’ve been mentoring young people for a while and one increasingly common theme is that some of them don’t want to give up anything to advance their careers. I can barely convince them to update their resumes after I spend time reviewing them and writing feedback. They refuse to practice any coding problems. They are disgusted by the idea of doing any work to prep for interviews.

An increasingly common problem is that I’ll recommend one thing but then they’ll go on Reddit and see 20 comments from people telling them not to do it. Some of them will get job interviews, receive a short take home problem (less than 60 minutes of work. They copy paste them to Slack so I know they’re not excessive) but then they’ll refuse to do it because Reddit told them they should never do any work for a job interview. Then they’re shocked when they’re dismissed from the interview process.

On the other hand, some of the mentees will take any opportunity to get ahead and run with it. They practice LeetCode in moderation. They customize resumes for each job application. They do practice interviews and ask for more feedback. And not surprisingly, it pays off. They get jobs quickly.

I wish I was better at highlighting this difference to people, but the current social media trends are pushing people toward thinking laziness is a virtue, or that working hard on anything is for suckers.

A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept.

It takes shockingly little to out-slope 90% of the population. Even for people who pre-select into competitive fields, if you read 1 relevant book per month outside work, you’re waaaaay ahead of almost everyone. Add 1 interesting paper per month and you’re “that weirdo”.

In my experience, simply having read a work relevant book after college would put someone in the top 10% !

I mentor engineers and everyone thinks I'm the weirdo when I loan out a engineering text book to help them solve a problem. Others seem think learning is just for students. I can't see this ending well for my employer.

I have seen people climb so fast just by reading about the industry and toying with competitors.

  Add 1 interesting paper per month and you’re “that weirdo”.

In one of my friend groups (consisting of folks in their 20s-30s and including both university students and professionals, mostly in the US) I’ve noticed a cultish obsession with the idea that the “system” is stacked, success is due solely to luck or unfair advantage, there are very limited resources, etc. Alluding to these themes seems to be a significant part of group identity. People even talk about how they actively sabotage their employer’s strategic and tactical goals, and I observe them receiving supportive feedback on this from other folks.

From my perspective, I think that one of the difficulties of being young is not yet knowing what exactly you should be working hard at. And in the knowledge economy where many of us must make significant career changes every few years, kicking off that new trajectory is somewhat analogous to youth. If you are working hard at the wrong thing, it will certainly feel like everything is stacked against you. I see some of my friends doing just this- trying to become something that just isn’t a good fit for them. How do you provide mentorship for people to help them identify what’s the best area to apply their efforts to?

I feel 100% the opposite of you and agree with the young people. But I'm youngish as well.

It's so stupid to spend months preparing for interviews just to learn something that you will never, ever use. There are libraries for a reason.

What you think is good and commendable to me views as a horrible practice in our industry.

If a job interview requires this and you choose not to apply then that is entirely your choice. I think the problem highlighted in the comment above is that some people do actually want that job, but don't do the required work because they don't agree with that type of interview, then get surprised when they don't get the job. There's no point turning up to a chess tournament and trying to play poker because you're morally opposed to chess.

I wish I had read your comment when I was 15! Spot on!

The problem is that people are turning up to a chess tournament and are being forced to play poker to get in the door.

That clearly says to potential players that the organization doesn't care about chess, and won't have the best chess players in the tournament. Instead, the only people playing are those willing to jump through hoops on command.

I think some of those assumptions are questionable and that thought process suffers from black and white thinking. I dont want to torture the analogy any more, so I will just be candid.

First, I agree bad interviews are bad.

That said, bad or un-necessarily difficult hiring processes dont automatically mean there is a better company out there.

IF there is, it isn't a given that the better company will hire you.

Similarly, it is not even a given the employees jump through hoops and get in are inferior to those that do. This is a numbers game, and can go many different ways.

On one hand, I appreciate the uncompromising nature of refusing to play the game, but on the other, I dont think that everyone is doing it with open eyes to the costs they are paying.

I have seen a few people progress from: 1) being uncompromising to 2) worse outcomes than if they compromised, to 3) bitterness and anger.

Back to the analogy: If your life dream is to play chess but you refuse to play poker to get in the door, you may end up bitter and playing with mud in the street.

In truth, it's really hard to judge if someone is a self-starter, creative or able to follow basic directions just based on a resume. Giving them a basic coding take-home (and I mean basic, 30-60 minutes should be more than enough) is a good way to see if: they just grabbed stackoverflow answers, chatgpt solutions, actually wrote any documentation or tests.

I agree as a candidate it can be demoralizing, but thats the exchange usually - prove you can do the job (or something close to it) and you get hired for it. It's just that your job isn't street sweeping or generalized labor -- and it's helpful to know if you're going to be the type who: Couldn't write leftpad without a library, would depend on leftpad as a library, or would understand the implications of using a library like leftpad and rely solely on trusted functions like isEven instead.

Yes, you're a programmer, you will get libraries in your day job - but as your hiring manager, I don't have the time to tell you you won't have access to most of the ones you're familiar with because we're doing real-time or large-scale compute or javascript widgets on embedded devices - I just wanna see you do as asked.

If you decline - I've seen what I needed.

I'm not sure you'd be able to distinguish ChatGPT's output once somebody who actually knows how to properly do software engineering and how to structure a codebase and write code would go through it.

ChatGPT is a really good junior programmer who can write basic functions per best practices, and when it makes a mistake or does something weird, a senior SWE will spot it, and can fix it with much less mental effort than writing the function.

Yeah for that you're better off using one of the live-coding platforms rather than take home, but my point stands -- mostly this is just the trash-can test. "What would you do if I asked you to get me that trash can?" - if your response is to go off on job roles and responsibilities, call janitorial whatever, those are fine responses -- but the winner? They just go get you a trash can.

Job's are not a popularity contest - it's about if you'll do what's asked of you, or if you'll spend more time arguing about the right way to code something rather than solving the business need -- and for my purposes, I need the business problems solved, not someone who gets self-righteous when asked to show an example of them working when applying for, ya know, work.

> as your hiring manager, I don't have the time to tell you you won't have access to most of the ones you're familiar with

You don't have time to explain the job requirements or stack?

I have zero interest in arguing with a candidate who, when asked to implement bubble sort argues the requirements instead of the implementation. I have NDA's that may preclude me from telling you the details of the stack you'll be working on. The job listing should reasonably describe the environment (embedded, data warehousing, frontend, whatever). You're being asked to implement something super basic to prove you can code yourself out of a wet paper bag basically.

Many cannot, and those that argue the premise don't even get a chance to try.

If you think you're being evaluated on your knowledge of the stdlib's sort(), you misunderstand the purpose. You're being tested not because you can hit compile and it passes, but you're being tested on if you're able to follow directions, work within scope, solve problems and explain your thinking. If your thinking stops at "I'd never do that", so does mine.

Someone who complains is for sure a pass.

That applies to any interview test though, you don't need to contrive an absurd scenario to do it.

> would understand the implications of using a library like leftpad and rely solely on trusted functions like isEven instead.

Tangent — how is isEven trusted? It seems people usually categorize leftpad and isEven pretty similarly (e.g. pointless bloat deps waiting to be next supply-chain attack), so I don’t follow the distinction you’re making.

I was absolutely snarking on NPM's collection of libraries - so that pointing to 'libraries exist' isn't necessarily a good point; Stupid libraries exist, expertise is knowing which ones to pick. Both of them would get you laughed out of a code-review in my org.

I think it's a tad naive to assume that you'll never ever use data structures and algorithms when programming. If you don't like them, that's a fine reason to not practice them, but let's not pretend they're useless (even to web devs).

I'd much hire somebody who understands things at a high level and then able to dig in deeper _if needed_, than someone who knows _some_ things really, really at depth but has no idea about other things.

I’m yet to learn something that I never ever use. If not directly, it fleshes out my mental model of the software engineering field which is incredibly valuable (but usually, everything I learnt has been pretty directly useful at some point)

As a rule of thumb (not quite _always_ true), if you couldn’t implement the lib yourself you will be showing some skills gap in some way or other

besides during uni (CS) don't remember when I needed the last time to implement a red-black tree from scratch.

It’s no just Reddit. You’ll read that here

Advice like yours is common and clearly valuable from an insider's point-of-view - but the cultural zeitgeist is that recruiting post-Covid is broken.

>but the current social media trends are pushing people toward thinking laziness is a virtue, or that working hard on anything is for suckers.

Laziness as a habit that damages your life or ruins it for others who depend on you isn't a virtue, but strategic laziness in the sense of not wasting your precious time on idiotic make-work or needlessly difficult things is indeed a virtue.

We have one single precious life with however many unpredictable years there are to it, a quantity of time that we can never in advance know the length of, and we should make a philosophy of spending large parts of it working hard on things we don't enjoy just for the sake of doing so?

If someone wants to work hard regardless, despite all the above, they always can, but it's better that they should do this once they first arrange their life so that the hard work in question is freely dedicated to what they take satisfaction from.

I disagree entirely with the implicit emphasis you place on the work aspect of "finding gold". If success can be had more easily, it should be pursued that way and is no less deserved as a result. The time we have absolutely should be spent actually doing as much as possible of what we want to do while maximizing the benefit of any work we have to do.

How many generations of authority figures have preached a dogma of "working hard" for its own sake, for the particularly cynical reason of wanting to keep another under their thumb, for their benefit.

I think both sentiments are true.

What I think the parent post was highlighting was how some people self sabotage because they don't like the effort or expectations to achieve their own goals. It is not that they are quitting to optimize their satisfaction elsewhere, but quitting without an alternative for satisfaction- essentially overvaluing their time, while spending it unsatisfied.

In some sense, it is like a protest vote against reality.

HN at its finest: majority of the discussion on this article is about gold, and not the actual article.

Yes, it's a frustratingly common practice to read a headline, think of something you want to say based on that. Come to the comments, flick open the article to briefly check the comment isn't incompatible.

Then upon finding the comment completely off-topic, post it anyway with the disclaimer, "hehe, I thought this would be about <topic they had always intended to talk about>".

Sometimes it'll just be a way to show off they know about some obscure other meaning. In other cases like this one it's just because they want to rant about something else entirely.

I'm sure someone will dig through my post history to find I've done the same, but I have earnestly tried to cut down on it, because it's a very frustrating experience for anyone who did want to engage with the article as written, not the article as imagined.

It would be interesting to see basic protection for this built into a platform. Only let users comment if they've clicked on the link, + X seconds where X is the minimum amount of time it should take to read the article.

It would be impossible to reach mass popularity, but I can see it gaining a following among people like us who see it as a positive.

To be fair, gold the metal is significantly more interesting than gold the medal.

Winning has become everything because the consequences of losing (or not competing) are increasingly harsh.

In retrospect, the article was what one should have expected given the second half of the title. And it was quite interesting. But yeah, I thought this would be about the bullion gold.

I think most winners these days are cheaters because it makes sense to cheat. Living life as a 'free' honest person nowadays is almost as bad as being in jail... So of course, given less than a 50% chance of going to jail, most people will happily cheat through their lives and think the risk is a fair trade-off.

Heck, some might think it's a fair trade-off even if you get caught. Just ask Elizabeth Holmes and her millionaire husband.

Having read (and greatly enjoyed) books by Alonzo Delano and William Lewis Manly recounting their experiences during the California gold rush, I greatly appreciate gold as being able to calculate how much a dollar was worth back then and how much they were making in a day. My calculations say it was around $130 today's dollars.

And the miner towns had ridiculous prices, like a breakfast was in the $2-$5 dollars at some point.

>I greatly appreciate gold as being able to calculate how much a dollar was worth back then and how much they were making in a day

The problem is that the value of gold is not fixed. It may have gone up or down quite a bit since then relative to everything else (not just relative to dollars)

The level of cretinism in HN votes cannot be forecasted, except the conservative "it will exceed the wildest expectations". It baffles the mind how a perfectly legitimate and genuinely interesting comment is fiercely downvoted.

Well one can take consolation with the thought that with the recession and all, very likely a lot of them imbeciles having free time to comment and downvote here are actually rightfully unemployed. Hope it stays that way, they definitely deserve it!

It's down voted because it's off topic.