I think the source of this issue is as recent as the industrial age. People grow up wanting to be "Managers". We grew up watching our parents have a skill and working at a corporation, but then looking for that promotion to become a Manager. Somewhere along the line people are like, why don't I skip the whole working my ass off part and just hack resources together and manage it (Especially with the rise of the startup life). We lost the notion that there is a value to hard work, that there is a value to failing and picking yourself up. This is further compounded by the corruption we see in our governments, societies and money markets where people move around shares and numbers on excel sheets and become millionaires. It feeds further into the idea that people who work hard or develop a skill are losers
I'm not a great developer by today's measurements. I struggled throughout my degree and the first 4 years of my career. Especially, when it came to computer networking and algorithms. 7 years into this profession and few projects high-profile projects later, I feel like I'm just getting my legs going. What keeps me going is adopting the mindset that
software development is a lifelong craft from posts like this and HN community.
The software profession has been corrupted and utterly misdirected by the entire management industry that has been built around it -- it sounds like you've got the beginnings of enlightenment brewing inside of you and I invite you to use your critical reasoning outside of the facts of your `craftmanship` and see how the algorithms and concepts of computer science apply directly to one's pursuit of ultimate understanding and personhood
Look to the history of computer science and the greats that brought us to where we are now, like Alan Turing and ask yourself if this is the future they had envisioned for our calling?
There was no 'calling' as those mathematicians and electrical engineers in the pre-computer ages saw it. They wanted to solve problems and build amazing machines. They did not imagine some mystical future of benevolence for programmers.
Yes I'm sure that's what was going through Turing's mind when he solved the enigma -- let me save freaking Western civilization so I can be forced to suicide and all these millennials can come and get free lunch from their benevolent corporations
"4 hours work week" mindset and a craftsman mindset are not at odds with each other.
If you can build a business that you can maintain in four hours a week while generating enough profit to pay the bills, why not?
That would free up a lot of time that you can then spend pursuing interests that are unlikely to ever pay the bills (mathematics, music, painting, creative writing, whatever).
If your business is a means to that end, are you still a hack or are you a craftsman?
This disdain for lifestyle businesses is absurd. It's both sad and gross that some people are unable to see that it's possible to have ambition that is not tied to making money. A lifestyle business can give you an experience similar to that of being independently wealthy.
It might be hard for some to imagine, but not everyone is an Elon Musk wannabe, there are people who see building a business as a means to an end, not an end in itself.
I understand that he didn't address the scenario I propose, presumably because he can't even conceive of it, but I don't get the traveling the world criticism either.
I mean, I myself am very critical of the digital nomad lifestyle, but "Spending time on something that you find enjoyable is professional malpractice" is not among my list of criticisms.
Appreciate the content, but not sure that "craftsmanship" is what is needed, it's a "generalist" approach rather than "specialist" that entrepreneurs need.
Craftsmanship is about a dedication to a single activity, so a master cabinet maker, or a Wall St quant, or a "rock star" programmer (titles may vary).
Maybe we could consider Craftsmanship in this sense to be the dedication to building a good business. Ideally, the CEO/Founder wouldn't be the most skilled artisan in any one thing in their company, but would be an artisan of integration of available parts into a viable business strategy. To borrow from your cabinet maker example, the cabinet craftsman isn't necessarily great at making high quality lumber, or fasteners. But trains themselves to understand the parts available and integrate that through skilled labor into a fine cabinet. In some sense, all craftsmanship is skilled integration.
Well capitalism is about arbitrage, so yeah you can buy low and sell high somewhere else. Problem with that is everyone does it and there's no market differentiation.
I absolutely think you need craftsmanship. If you don't have it you have to pay for it or find someone who does. If you open a restaurant you need a chef if you release music you need a singer if you write code you need some developer to give you an edge.
You can be some generalist who's good at raising money and coding at the same time to save some pennies or you can be really good at raising money and hire someone to deal with the coding. The second is way more likely to succeed. Not to mention you can usually tell what startups will succeed by one simple test. Walk around their shop after hours and on the weekend, the ones that will succeed have people (persons) working after hours. At least, that's one way of telling.
So there is no avoiding your craft if you build a product. Yes you can be generalist in your approach and solve general problems but to build a big enough box to catch everyone you have to be very, very good at building boxes.
The alternative is to constantly raise as much money as possible and hire everyone under the sun but eventually you will run up against a wall. If you can raise Series A B C D E F H ad infinitum rounds and become the next Uber sure you can hire "generalist" programmers who only know algorithms and nothing domain specific or technology specific but then you are just shifting the problem... Instead of guy who has 30 years of C++ you hire guy (or girl) who can raise so many money bags your company takes over the world.
So you always need craftsmanship of some kind and the less you have the more money you need (which is a craft itself).
A question to HN: reading this and other discussions, it seems to me that "craftsmen" are being rated by how good a business they run (or are contributing to). Similarly with the word "professional". I'd like to ask, what then would be the word for a "craftsmen" by rated how good the work is at its purpose (and without the usual cop-out of redefining "good" as value in dollars)?
Optimization for "good work" is only partially aligned with "good business"; frequently, the two are at odds. A good product, in my view, is one that lets the user achieve their goals as efficiently as possible, endures for as long these goals need to be achieved (often lifetime or more), and - after meeting these constraints - is also optimized to minimize the price and use of materials. It's the kind of product that you buy once, are happy about it, and when you no longer need it, give or sell to someone else. It's your grandfather's watch, passed on to you by your parents, and who you'll one day pass on to your kid. It's the furniture you've inherited with the house that remembers World War II, but is still almost as good as new. It's the forever repairable Soviet-era sound amplifiers or irons for clothes. It's the web page your bank had three redesigns and two SPA frameworks ago.
A good "professional" would take a look at one of such products and declare them bad. Overengineered. Because what's "professional", what's good for business, are products that break fast (ensuring recurring revenue) and are as cheap as possible to make. Do they solve 100% of the problems it was supposed to? Doesn't have to, customers don't know that when buying, and when they figure it out, it'll be easier for them to learn to deal with missing part of functionality, or learn to be extra careful around the product, than it'll be for them to spend money on something else. Whatever other defects there may be, we can cheaply cover for with sales&marketing. What a "professional" does is ensures their work makes them (or their employer) maximum amount of money for minimum amount of effort.
So, HN, I'm looking for a word that describes the person, the art, of doing good work and good products, as defined above, in contrast to being a "professional", which I increasingly despise of.
You've built a false dichotomy between over-engineering and planned obsolescence. Outside of a few cases you can still buy the watch that will last 60 years or the amp that will last 20.
The problem is that most people don't want to pay $2k for an amp when it's only benefit over a $400 one is that it'll work 16 more years. Most folks don't care to buy a $400 watch when you can get a nice one for $40. And, a lot more folks can afford watches and amps these days as a result.
The price issue seems like a somewhat false dichotomy, because the more expensive brands don't operate on razor thin margins, so they could (and would have to) cut prices if there wasn't a back-pressure from the bottom-feeder brands.
On top of that, I wonder at which point does planned obsolescence and lack of quality becomes the broken window fallacy? What's a difference between a glazier's son running around and breaking windows, and the glazier installing a delayed-action chemical that cracks windows months after installation? What's the difference between either of that and designing products to fall apart sooner and sooner?
> Outside of a few cases you can still buy the watch that will last 60 years or the amp that will last 20.
Perhaps from artisans. I don't trust you can buy such things at any premium brands. There is every incentive to cheat, charge premium prices while still cutting corners on quality, and pocketing the difference. People eventually wise up to that, but that takes a lot of time, so it's reliable only with niche products.
Planned obsolescence is wrong, and we are in agreement.
Having cheap (and therefore widely available) products that are hard to repair and may have short lifespans is generally desirable in my opinion, even though there are some ecological and worker rights issues.
We should be wary when we discuss what a premium brand is. Artificial brand tiers have led us to treat many mass market craptastic companies as "premium" despite them not knowing quality if it smacked them. Bose is an example of this - mass availability at a markup under the guise of a premium brand. But very few audio productions would depend on Bose products because they barely last in any kind of harsh environment.
> Having cheap (and therefore widely available) products that are hard to repair and may have short lifespans is generally desirable in my opinion, even though there are some ecological and worker rights issues.
I'm of mixed feelings about this. Having a 10x more expensive electric kettle that lasts 10x longer doesn't mean I won't buy a kettle. It means that I'll generate 10x less trash for the same utility received. When I look at it, making things more durable wouldn't hurt necessities that much - people would save up and buy appliances, and the longer lifetime would mean they actually save money over time.
In general, I think that cheap availability of crap products perpetuates the cycle of poverty. I strongly agree with the Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness[0]. Perhaps with a twist - I blame sacrifices of quality made in order to make the products cheaper. I think the world would be better off if we suddenly removed the bottommost quality tier of all goods categories, and didn't replace with anything. There should be hard limits on how low the market can get with respect to quality, because price is flexible - it's predicated by demand - wheras quality is not, and low quality is what sets off the poverty trap.
> Artificial brand tiers have led us to treat many mass market craptastic companies as "premium" despite them not knowing quality if it smacked them.
Yes. But part of the reason behind brands and price tiers was so that we don't have to be experts in ascertaining quality. We're supposed to trust the brands, but it turns out we can't - trust on the market is something to be exploited.
Nice that you brought up Bose, because I was under impression they were a premium quality brand, in a similar fashion to Apple - i.e. extra overpriced on top of above-average quality. So you're saying, I shouldn't really buy into the "above-average quality" part with them?
> Nice that you brought up Bose, because I was under impression they were a premium quality brand, in a similar fashion to Apple - i.e. extra overpriced on top of above-average quality. So you're saying, I shouldn't really buy into the "above-average quality" part with them?
Bose is above average in their technology but not their quality or durability. For your $400 you will get some very fancy tech, both nothing near $2000 IEMs.
Perhaps "artisan", although in practice I don't think there is a single word. Instead, people tend to use the domain-specific term for whatever type of true craftsman they are referring to. "Welder" "Machinist" "Watchmaker" "Tailor" "Woodworker" etc.
Also as an aside, I think the whole "craft" term was co-opted by people who wanted to cash in on the perception of quality and care when really they just wanted better small business margins. It used to mean something more.
becoming a craftsman and getting to the 99th percentile has major trade offs. In order to survive as a business you need to create value and capture the market faster than your competition can. To do that you need to do more than your craft.
You have to operate a business or you’ll get swallowed up by competition who doesn’t follow your mantra.
I also believe the cheapification of so much of society and the shallowness of so many companies means that people will be craving high quality, authentically produced goods and services.
In the long run quality may win out, but that’s if your competition doesn’t put you out of business before.
If you want authentic and high quality you need craft.
If you're not building a lifestyle business you need craft to operate as a business.
Who do you really think has a chance at success the guy who works 4 hours a week or the guy who puts time in their work?
You need more but you need different kinds. There's no way to avoid the work, and you got to be good at the work to get anywhere. Marketing is a craft so is sales so is raising money so is writing. There's no way around it and "4 week work week" is probably more applicable to the time of dropshipping, blogging, affiliate marketing and other lifestyle business than anything concerned with "time to market".
Ignore craft at your own peril (cannot go anywhere without a very experienced CTO).
I don't see why you think the "4 hours a week guy" doesn't have a chance at success.
Presumably, his definition of success is building a business that can be run in 4 hours a week while making enough money to fund his desired lifestyle.
So if he managed to do that, he's already successful.
I don't get this contempt for lifestyle businesses.
I think if "4 hours a week" means "spend 400 hours or 4000 hours then you can spend 4 hours a week" it's more honest. In short I think it's more honest to say, you might have to give up your lifestyle for awhile or have it be a small part of your life... For months or years. And have no guarantee of success.
It's not irrelevant it is key because it means giving up the way you live. It is important to go into it eyes wide open so if you lose you know how to try again or recover.
It's not a contempt I think it's a great idea I might even do it one day but the hidden catch of "lifestyle business" exists enough. And people deserve to know and compare with someone working their ass off, and compare chances of success.
I'm going to bring up a concept that you might not have considered called 'break-even'. And perhaps one called 'never run out of cash' ;)
You've got a fundamental error in your reasoning here. To a craftsman, the market is _irrelevant_. They cannot necessarily scale anyhow. To a craftsman (I know what I'm talking about as I run a Patreon-based open source business along just these lines) the only thing that matters is cash flow and whether you've got your own clientele doing enough business with you to keep the doors open.
You're certainly still creating value, and operating a business just as much as publically held companies, but the market is irrelevant to you and you may even benefit from repudiating the market and claiming you're not confined by its expectations (I do this, quite successfully).
It is still possible to be killed by competition doing this, but only through illegal acts (such as buying your building and kicking you out, or colluding with all your suppliers and making them refuse to sell to you, or killing you outright). If you aren't publically held and you have a clientele that you can service, you cannot get swallowed up by competition no matter what they do: in fact, it's possible to manipulate hostile actions by a larger competitor to your own benefit, by crying foul or claiming they are trying to eradicate a superior option.
These things are, yes, more than 'your craft', but they're completely realistic. I've run Airwindows for over ten years in a really nasty industry along these lines, and as long as I stayed over break-even (or hung in there through lean times!) I ended up just fine :)
"Market capture" doesn't exist in a competitive marketplace. Being the first to serve a market first guarantees no such future performance. Customer loyalty is another myth.
I tend to take this kind of article with a grain of salt, especially when there are definitive statements like: "To be successful over the course of a career requires the application and accumulation of expertise". This idea that top-skills are required to succeed is comforting for us craftsmen and craftswomen but ultimately misleading because it forces us to only look for paths leading to skill improvements.
I strongly believe that success is mostly opportunity-driven. Exploring the search space to find the most opportunities (ie. the Ferriss way) or exploiting those available by putting the effort in (ie. the craftsmanship way) are two valid non-mutually exclusives strategies. As always, either of them can work but for the best result I believe a combination of the two will outperform any strategy applied narrow-mindedly. Now, for the mixing proportions...
I like the author's emphasis on taking one's craft seriously, and pursuing curiosity as a means to build expertise in any domain of their choice. The interpretation of "four hour work week" is fragmented, and people choose the parts to retain what they think aligns closely to them or sometimes easy to adopt. To me, the essence of the the "four hour work week" is to look beyond traditional occupations and instil habits that allows one to optimize on their time while keeping a healthy work-life harmony. The take away for me is that hard work and dedication has no substitutes and one should not see "hacks" and "shortcuts" as a way to achieve long term success, but rather use them reasonably as a means to validate assumptions and pursue curiosity.
> If you are to optimize for anything, optimize for the long term. Use the challenges of your business today to build mastery in your craft. There is no guarantee that any one venture will succeed, but that mastery will bend luck in your favor over the long course of your career.
I’ve found this has personally served me very well. Failed businesses and startups have indeed been great learning experiences. If you can keep a growth mindset and use cognitive tools to prevent rumination, it all just becomes more fuel to the fire that burns inside. Even if that simply means you are a more beneficial employee.
This post really changed my mindset towards four hour work week mindset. But, I want to ask one thing from you which is- are you suggesting us to choose those entrepreneurial endeavors in which we have a huge desire to get an excellence instead of finding those ideas which are easy to setup and do not need so much knowledge crunching from our side?
I guess if we're going to discuss this article again, I should get to say my piece about it again:
> To lounge on a beach or travel the world and not actively engage in building your arsenal of expertise is professional malpractice.
I've seen this thought expressed before in writing about Startups. If you're not burning your life down 24/7 in the struggle to make it Big, you're doing it wrong.
But that's silly.
The entire goal of building a business, in my mind, is to get the point where you can lounge on a beach or travel the world and not need to actively engage in anything except the pursuit of happiness.
I personally averaged out at a little less than four hours of work per week in 2017, running the sort of low maintenance, feature complete, Software-as-a-Service business that the author spends a paragraph explaining is not in fact a "serious company".
But look at the product and you'll see craftsmanship. Ten years of work, in fact as of roughly today. But never at the author's pace. Always at mine. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
That's the great thing about building a business. You can do it any way you like.
Please don't copy-paste comments on HN. That lowers the signal-noise ratio. If you don't have something new to say, it's fine to let your old comment stand for itself.
Did this repost have anything new to say? Why not let the old thread speak for itself? Should HN block reposts?
Note he copied his own comment... Which the majority of people wouldn't have seen otherwise because nobody goes through all the threads of all the reposts to see what was discussed back then.
HN threads are supposed to be conversations. In conversation one doesn't take a recording of what one said in a previous conversation and replay it. One makes a fresh statement of one's views, even if they're mostly the same as what one has thought in the past. That's part of how we relate to each other.
Submissions and comments play different roles. Submissions provide topics for conversation. Once enough time has gone by—on HN, about a year—the cache is considered clear and the floor is open for a fresh conversation on that topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
> Please don't teach people how to self-censor.
You could say that about any rule that asks users to do one thing rather than another. I think most people here would support "please don't copy/paste into the threads" as serving the overall quality of the forum rather than seeing it as a censorship issue. This is the sort of case where it's probably good to have a rule, since the thing we want to avoid is having copy/pasting become common.
So, if the same person happens to hit a repost and still holds the same opinion they want to publicly state, they are supposed to rephrase it? How does that help your signal/noise ratio: this seems to increase noise.
And I totally see a scenario where copy paste makes sense. Maybe the person wanted to have a discussion about their idea and there wasn't enough engagement (for whatever reason) previously. Repeating (and copy-pasting) the same idea with the hope that this time it gets discussion and cleared up seems totally fine.
Even in real life people do totally repeat themselves.
Anyhoo, you seem to be some sort of admin, so I guess this is important for you folks.
I think you're missing the point of craftsmanship as a general value. It is not about extracting and then spending resources. It's about dedicating your time, perhaps even your life, to mastering a skill. Traditional Japanese culture understood this and that's why you still get people like Jiro.[1] In the West, the only remaining traditional craftsmen that I can think of offhand are the bespoke tailors in Savile Row and their counterparts in France and Italy.
In the craftsmanship model, the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of purpose and mastery, not simply the pursuit of sensory pleasures and relaxation.
But I am dedicating my time and my life to mastering a skill. That skill is Rock Climbing.
To do so, I have also needed to find a way to live at a world class bouldering area and to spend 4 full days per week training and climbing, which means not having a full time job. Building a software business is a means to that end.
Keep in mind, also, that if one begins programming at age six and does it every day for 40 odd years, one tends to achieve mastery of programming as well. Even if one figures out a way to not need to do it full time for the last half dozen of those years.
> But I am dedicating my time and my life to mastering a skill. That skill is Rock Climbing.
I'm not certain that rock climbing qualifies as a craft, as you aren't creating anything. Nonetheless, that distinction isn't important, and I certainly do think there is merit in the idea that a starting a business is a good way to earn income in order focus energy on something more important.
However, that isn't the viewpoint that you expressed in your initial comment; it is the opposite ("lounge on the beach, travel the world...")
> Keep in mind, also, that if one begins programming at age six and does it every day for 40 odd years, one tends to achieve mastery of programming as well.
How are you defining mastery? As the ability to make a respectable income with low effort required? That seems a fairly low bar. I'm not entirely sure that programming is best thought of as a craft, but assuming that it is: someone programming every day for 8 hours a day for 40 years would surely have a greater mastery than someone who only does it part-time.
someone programming every day for 8 hours a day for 40 years would surely have a greater mastery than someone who only does it part-time.
I think you hit it there. We're not disagreeing. I'd just add to your point that one might still retain that mastery gained over 40 years of practice if one dialed things back for the next five years to focus on something else.
My pursuit of happiness consists of meaningful work. My startups reflect that. If I ended up on a beach long term, I am sure I would be starting a new business right there, removing pollution or whatever.
This is a way. But you still focused on craft. You just took much longer to do it and in smaller chunks. Also you probably underestimate your own skill or have some perfect combination of skills to makeup for lack of focus.
It's possible that for most people your way wouldn't work and the alternative way (putting in a lot of time) works better. Also at the start you could not have put in only 4 hours. You put in hundreds if not thousands of hours and only in maintenance mode do you go down to nothing. There's probably time you aren't counting either. All your life led up to that moment and all that.
So I think you and people like you are the exception and saying what the OP says is much more realistic and widely applicable. It's simply not possible to get where you want to go without putting in time (talent luck market and perseeverence could lower time to near zero but that's the exception).
I find your comment exceptionally interesting, because I find it really easy to square what you’re saying and what the article is saying. A couple hypotheses that I’ve been chewing on for a few years now:
- the “grow huge or go home” startup is one path, but not the only path. Looking around your own city will make it obvious that smaller profitable businesses that provide goods or services do exist in this world and are a perfectly reasonable way to make money. I, personally, am perfectly happy to be involved in a business that makes a consistent healthy profit, rather than being perpetually in the red, chasing hockey stick growth.
- putting time/money into things that will pay consistent dividends is huge leverage. In your case, you put time into your product upfront and are now reaping those dividends. You don’t say explicitly whether you built it yourself or hired someone to do it, but either way... over a decade, you either invested time or money into it to turn it into a dividend-generating machine
- in a lot of ways, the ultimate goal for a business is to turn into something that can continue to run without the owner/founder’s involvement at all. It may not get 100% there while the owner is still around, but if the business isn’t something that can eventually be sold and managed by someone else, it’s more a job than a business, and when the owner retires, the business disappears too.
For me, your model of a lifestyle business is beautiful, but it’s significantly different than the 4 Hour Work Week model of a lifestyle business. Those two end up getting lumped together and depending on which model people are thinking about when they read “lifestyle business”, they have significantly different reactions. My own reactions:
- “I spent 10 years building a SaaS product that makes me enough money to go rock climbing all the time”: AWESOME! Nicely done! That is fantastic!
- “I spent a few months tracking down suppliers on AliExpress that can dropship cheap sunglasses. This makes enough money to go rock climbing all the time”: Urgh... well... hopefully that works out well for you long term I guess.
