I think the direction of this is awesome, though I'd also say there's a reverse argument to be made that I'm more sympathetic to.

Rather than figuring out the less glamorous side (i.e. coffee bean suppliers) and wondering if you'd like doing that thing, I think the opposite could be a good question too:

Do I love the upside enough to deal with the downside?

No cafe owner will enjoy getting permits rejected because your bathroom sink is too high to be wheelchair accessible, replacing a supplier because they no longer carry the butter you like or having a barista not show up for work (all real examples from cafe owner friends).

But they love it enough to go through with it anyway because they care about the result. I think we should view it more that way.

Ask an aspiring software engineer if they would like to do daily 9am standups, spend hours in Jira and be lectured by a product manager who last wrote code in 2012 and they'll say no.

Experienced software engineers don't enjoy that either. They do enjoy building software enough to put up with that stuff though.

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rglynn 5 days ago | parent [-]

I actually think to some extent the ideas you shared are exactly what this article is questioning

In particular some things that stood out to me:

> No cafe owner will enjoy ...

I don't know about this specific case, but I'll bet you that, contrary to what the majority of people think, there are people who relish this challenge and don't see it as a downside.

> ... they care about the result.

I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but "result" to me here is precisely what was meant with the professor example. The point was you should enjoy the process, not the result.

> Ask an aspiring software engineer if they would like to do daily 9am standups, spend hours in Jira ...

I think that this statement is guilty of a rather typical sin on software forums which is assuming we all work similar jobs. I suspect you are right that a large portion of devs would agree with this.

However, I certainly have worked with, heck I have even been the dev who enjoys doing this. This is more true if you frame it as "lots of regular meetings with great process obsession, working with a product manager with a technical background".

A thought that occurred to me when reading your post was that TFA is somewhat guilty of being on the extreme side. Your framing to me, is actually quite helpful in providing balance, in the sense that it may not always be wise to chase for the white rabbit profession with no downsides. Rather accepting some downsides while still enjoying the process (unlike the dour university admins).

	▲	FinnLobsien 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I think that this statement is guilty of a rather typical sin on software forums which is assuming we all work similar jobs. I suspect you are right that a large portion of devs would agree with this. Thinking of myself, I guess it's kind of true. I work in marketing (content specifically) and while I consider myself a writer, I actually quite enjoy writing about things like usage-based pricing or product strategy. For most writers, those things would be the thing they want to be liberated from so they can write speculative fiction while my desire to write speculative fiction doesn't extend beyond wanting to be "wrote a novel" guy. On the other side, I was into photography as a teenager and thought I wanted to be a photographer. But when I read about the actual workday of photographers, I lost all interest. --- > A thought that occurred to me when reading your post was that TFA is somewhat guilty of being on the extreme side. Your framing to me, is actually quite helpful in providing balance, in the sense that it may not always be wise to chase for the white rabbit profession with no downsides. Rather accepting some downsides while still enjoying the process (unlike the dour university admins). I think the biggest problem with the article's take is that if we say you should enjoy the "underbelly" parts of a job, then wouldn't that select for people who don't care about the result? Do we want the researchers who love writing grant applications and teaching hungover undergrads more than they do working on visionary ideas? Ultimately, I guess one thing the article is missing is that sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too. In many situations, you can bring in a co-founder/creative partner who loves the stuff you hate and vice versa.