Don’t Let the Robots Get You Down

Paul Ford:

And after building software for collective decades, I think everyone would say: It’s still really freaking hard. Deadlines slip. Requirements change. Brilliant ideas turn out to be dumb. You change your mind and throw work, money, and time away.

it wasn’t Anna Indiana or any other Silicon Valley attempt at culture that brought anyone pleasure in 2023—it was real artists like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, who took over the world with these perfectly crafted mega-spectacles that pulled millions of people into stadiums and movie theaters.

But what I wish I could get across to our friends in the Palo Alto area is that the last 20% is really, actually, hard—not just in tech, but in writing, music-making, carpentry, middle-school teaching, cobbling—it’s a grind. Sometimes for dumb, bureaucratic reasons, sometimes because it’s just hard to make things happen, inside or outside of the computer. And everything happens—all the growth, profit, promotions—in that last 20%. That’s when human connection happens.

If you do work that is hard, kind of a grind sometimes, and involves lots of little and small decisions, I think you’re pretty safe for a while.

Just as most jobs are harder than people think, most things in life are nowhere near as generic as people think.