My dad has hypertension. He has a weak digestion(Because of stress). His legs are weak. He wears glasses(Because he battled the glare from vehicles all this life). He also has bad moods all the time(Because of the frustration battling traffic all day).
Yet he doesn't give up. That's what it really boils down to. Diseases are a part of life. You have to learn to live beyond and with them. He was lucky that every time he got an opportunity he used it, which opened up more opportunities. And he worked on those opportunities.
And by the way, No one that truly got rich and sustained his riches for a long time ever did it without working hard. The fact that not every body can work hard. The fact that most consider hard work 'not worth it'. The fact that most don't work hard is what has what has given hardworking people edge throughout history. And makes them a minority.
But I agree, Hard work may not always lead to results. But it increases your chances of success.
I consider my dad a personal hero because he demonstrated what focus and true hard work can achieve over time. Had he settled down for mediocrity like everybody else, he would be nothing more than a cab driver to me.
EDIT: Common folks why would you downvote this? Is not giving up beyond all odds, so bad?
Because our dad was paid for every hour of work he put in. He invested his time by the hour and his risk was minimal. For a startup coder he or she is investing by the month or year, and to walk away from that with not much to show for it can be awful.
These coders arent paid extra for all nighters, they aren't compensated for losing relationships, they aren't covered when they burnout, all for a realistically very slim chance of striking it rich.
For all those people who are not getting it. Today success of most software shops is about business innovation not technology innovation. Yes there are instances of Google and other big web giants innovating greatly in the technology area. But they amount to less than 1% of the software crowd.
We are all writing software to solve business problems. We are not writing software for Software innovation.
Unless you are doing something special. Most software today is written in IDE's. You don't have to remember syntax at all these days. The IDE will do it for you. It knows what libraries you want, it knows how many exceptions your code can run into. It knows how to compile, build and package your code. I can give you your code coverage. It can even do documentation for you. There is hardly anything IDE's can't do these days.
All you need is a little semantic awareness. And there are solutions to nearly every problem you are likely to run into a software shop. There are libraries, API's and frameworks that have understood and defined your problems as a generic case and solved them. There are forums to help you out on edge cases.
All you do these days is know a solution to a generic pattern of problems. You fundamentally pull out those logical solutions from your brain and parameterize them for the solution need at hand. And remaining is simply IDE play.
Very little or really a non quantifiable of highly intellectual work is happening in business based software shops today. Google, Facebook are exceptions, not the normal.
And this isn't surprising. We need armies of programmers to do all the bulk of the business job out there. If you are still thinking that as a software guy you are going to work with math theorems, then you have got it wrong.
Given all these, my success depends on only two things. How much aware of the reusable solutions. How quickly and how many problems can I solve using them. Which is productivity.
I am not sure whether you have ever worked at a startup or not. Your understanding of current software development is what big software service companies do with mediocre programmers. Startups never have army of programmers but few intelligent programmers. And there is nothing bad in using IDE, innovation does not mean to write a solution from scratch. There will always be need of abstraction based on current libraries and programming environment.
> All you need is a little semantic awareness. And there are solutions to nearly every problem you are likely to run into a software shop. There are libraries, API's and frameworks that have understood and defined your problems as a generic case and solved them. There are forums to help you out on edge cases.
Wow, I'm glad I do more interesting work than that drek.
You're being downvoted because you don't seem to be discussing anything remotely relevant to JWZ's or Arrington's posts. Your father's driving a taxi has absolutely nothing to do with VCs and the startup lottery, the economics aren't even remotely similar. Your father's compensation is tied to the results of his work in a very direct and inseparable way, and it does little to create long-term value for another person -- the cab company (if there really is one, often it's just a dispatch service) can't keep packaging up and selling your father's trips to the airport after he's quit/retired/died/etc..
No one is getting rich off your father's efforts to a massively disproportionate degree. That is not the case for the people JWZ is speaking to.
Yet he doesn't give up. That's what it really boils down to. Diseases are a part of life. You have to learn to live beyond and with them. He was lucky that every time he got an opportunity he used it, which opened up more opportunities. And he worked on those opportunities.
And by the way, No one that truly got rich and sustained his riches for a long time ever did it without working hard. The fact that not every body can work hard. The fact that most consider hard work 'not worth it'. The fact that most don't work hard is what has what has given hardworking people edge throughout history. And makes them a minority.
But I agree, Hard work may not always lead to results. But it increases your chances of success.
I consider my dad a personal hero because he demonstrated what focus and true hard work can achieve over time. Had he settled down for mediocrity like everybody else, he would be nothing more than a cab driver to me.
EDIT: Common folks why would you downvote this? Is not giving up beyond all odds, so bad?