A career is a pie-eating contest and the prize for winning is more pie

by mooreds • 11 months ago

60 77 11 months ago

mooreds2• 11 months ago

Another, less colorful, way to put this is "don't put anything on your resume you don't want to do more of".

I know folks who have taken old technologies (perl, ASP.NET) off their resume so that they don't get approached by employers looking to hire for technologies they don't want to work in.

pjmlp• 11 months ago

Yes, one such example here.

A golden rule is to fit your resume into one or two pages max.

Have the private copy as big as one wants, however take the effort to sell oneself to the actual position.

HR is looking for reasons to throw away resumes out from the pile, anything that makes their work harder will contribute for that.

doctorhandshake• 11 months ago

Yeah my rule when considering taking on a freelance project is ‘do I want to become an expert in this, and do I thus want my phone to ring for this for the next 2 years?’

stavros4• 11 months ago

This blog post is interesting in that it could be a tweet. The title is the whole thing.

api3• 11 months ago

A good proportion of nonfiction books could be their blurbs. This is pretty common. We use too many words in a lot of contexts.

iammjm• 11 months ago

Nobody would pay 10-20$ for a blurb. So let’s somehow make it to about 200 pages and we’re good.

latexr2• 11 months ago

For those books, I realised that a much better use of time is to search YouTube for a talk by the author. They’ll explain everything that’s remotely interesting about the book’s thesis. Everything else in the book is typically anecdote after anecdote.

stavros4• 11 months ago

I hate this so much, I made a website against it: https://www.thesummarist.net

mooreds2• 11 months ago

I think it did start out as a tweet. Here it is in 2022: https://x.com/jlengstorf/status/1483803682206466049

I also think that he digs in a bit more:

Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on whether or not you enjoy the work.

But I agree, he could have does a lot more analysis.

The metaphor is striking, though.

leoc• 11 months ago

I'm a bit surprised that people are complaining so much about this. I have read many a blog post which stretched one or two fairly obvious thoughts out at great length. By comparison this post is just a few sentences and it manages to say something sensible, if not stunningly insightful, about the title. (The banner art and so on is a bit extra, yes, but ... meh.) The thing most worth complaining about here is that the title isn't original: 'academia', 'law school' and 'making partner' are all older and more common substitutions for 'a career'. 'Law school' seems to be particularly popular and appropriate, since (IIUC; IANAL) the best-performing US law-school students are rewarded with the coveted opportunity to move from cramming law for exams to working 996 pressure-cooker jobs as juniors at BigLaw firms.

Havoc• 11 months ago

Vibes seem off with some of the stuff doing well on hn today

paulcole2• 11 months ago

No, Company Bad, Boss Bad, Marketing Bad, AI Bad, Engineer Good is the vibe here.

shoo• 11 months ago

engineer unsure if pie good or bad. sample more pie.

DrewADesign2• 11 months ago

Worker Leverage Bad, Company Criticism Bad, Questioning Management Bad, Deliberate Equality Bad, Regulation Bad, Labor Expenses Bad, AI Good, Max Productivity Good, Business Good, Leadership Good, Shareholder Good is just as frequently the vibe here. Whichever one you disagree with most looks more prevalent.

Sharlin• 11 months ago

Can’t really disagree with TFA.

q3k• 11 months ago

You call it bad vibes, I call it people gaining class consciousness.

radialstub• 11 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIw3INYRNmY

Sorry for lazy comment, but I had to

Herring• 11 months ago

Flag it. Flag it immediately.

simianwords2• 11 months ago

Class consciousness mfs when they reach Next Stage Of Humanity tm but they are forced to pick berries in a farm

terminalshort4• 11 months ago

People who use the term "class consciousness" are almost entirely people in the upper middle class who paid too much attention in school and not enough in the real world and are capable of deluding themselves into thinking their lives of luxury are actually something to be complained about.

tossandthrow2• 11 months ago

There are a couple of reasons to do well on the job: it might be a joyful activity, it leads to better opportunities, it teaches a lesson that can be used starting something, or it ensures employment.

If none of these things have appeal, then one should carefully think about being in that job.

simianwords2• 11 months ago

The most important reason to do a good job is empathy for your customers. Everything else is secondary.

horsawlarway• 11 months ago

Personally, I find this attitude pretty derivative.

Why should a worker feel empathy for a customer if that empathy doesn't have any meaningful impact on them?

It's a good thing to say to a founder of a company, such as the owner of a small business.

It's a pretty useless thing to say to an overworked support staff... Answering more calls or putting out more fires very rarely benefits that role. Hell, I've seen support staff get told attempting to help a customer too long is a negative, and they're doing a bad job. Even in the best cases, I've often seen drive met with a management that just makes that effort the new baseline... "Great job, guys! Our ticket wait time is down 30% , now let's keep it there!"

So sure - have empathy for your customers. Don't have it blindly at bad jobs.

alistairSH• 11 months ago

The most important reason to do a good job is the slightly higher likelihood of being able to feed and house your family.

strken• 11 months ago

There's something that makes me sad about the thought of an engineer, sitting at a desk, thinking "I can't fix the fifteen second frobnizzle page load time because otherwise they'll make me fix the performance of everything."

That's not how work is meant to be. In this metaphor, one should like pie. If the pie eating contest is offering free pie then it's perfectly legitimate to walk in, eat a normal amount of pie, accept your prize, and be happy with it.

exe34• 11 months ago

I don't see the problem with more work as long as it displaces other work that I can now either not do or do at a later time. I'm not going to do more work in the same time just because I have a talent.

tossandthrow2• 11 months ago

If you derive personal satisfaction from the acitivity of fixing these performance issues, then I don't see the issue?

vlan0• 11 months ago

"The reward for good work is more work."

- timm chiusano

sigio• 11 months ago

And the reward for a job badly done... is less work.

satisfice4• 11 months ago

This is the sort of thing that sounds like insight to a creative 12 year-old who swears he will never settle for a “desk job.”

A career is actually a contest where the prize is money that you can buy things with, including pie.

javcasas• 11 months ago

Only if you learn to play the game by the actual rules, not if you play the game by what they tell you the rules are.

satisfice4• 11 months ago

Who is “they?” There is no they.

Obviously, there are no fixed rules. There is just the economy and how you position yourself to participate in it. That positioning is called your career.

I haven’t gotten a job by applying for one since 1986. I haven’t been recruited to a full-time job since 1998. So far this century, I have subsisted as an independent consultant, participating in the economy on somewhat creative terms.

jajko2• 11 months ago

Surprisingly little actual long term quality of life, happiness or life satisfaction can be bought with money, any money. They are important if you properly don't have them but as soon as you leave that category they are at best secondary.

So people boasting about their 'successful careers' are pretty boring empty bunch, rather tell me how you spend your evenings, weekends or vacations, how good parent you are (aka how much you suffer for your kids and don't outsource hard but important parts to grandparents or nannies), what you do for your community and so on.

xvilka• 11 months ago

Long term QoL definitely needs money: healthy food, means to exercise, enough time and freedom for work-life balance, travel, and so on. So yes, money are necessary for it. But the amount has a certain cap, let's say somewhere between $1-30M depending on the place where you live and the size of your family.

terminalshort4• 11 months ago

The idea that being a good parent requires extensive suffering and work is the worst that our current society has created.

satisfice4• 11 months ago

Look, I know you are trying to focus on the humanity part of humanity, instead of the nuts and bolts of economic life. I get it.

I support four adults with my work, including myself. My son writes fiction that I suspect will never earn him a dime. His wife suffers from disabling social anxiety. My wife is 65 and not able to work. We all live together in a gentle and loving cooperative existence.

Meanwhile, my career keeps a roof over our head. Now, why shouldn’t I see meaning in my struggle to keep the wheels turning? I have built something important in the course of my career. Not world shattering, but also not nothing.

A career is an honorable thing.

smikhanov• 11 months ago

More like 16 year old, but the rest is spot on.

demarq• 11 months ago

This is just a phrase repeated 3 times in a page?

latexr2• 11 months ago

The whole post is the same short thought repeated over and over.

My recommendation to the author is to read and reflect on “Atomic blog posts”¹, by Mike Crittenden. I’ll reproduce it here in its entirety:

There’s no law that says a blog post needs more than one idea or more than one sentence.

¹ https://critter.blog/2021/01/06/atomic-blog-posts/

mrcsharp• 11 months ago

I love that and strongly agree with it. I should probably start practicing that.

tpoacher2• 11 months ago

Nice atomic blogpost! Thank you for sharing!

MathMonkeyMan• 11 months ago

How many times did I read "a pie-eating contest where the prize for winning is more pie" before clicking away?

1. The hacker news title.

2. The tab title.

3. The image at the top left.

4. The text section to the right of the image.

5. The second sentence.

6. Different crop of the same image from before, but now below the second sentence.

I know that this isn't a curious comment, but holy shit dude.

kevindamm2• 11 months ago

Maybe they wanted you to see how much pie you are willing to eat.

stavros4• 11 months ago

The post was a contest and the prize was more post.

tpoacher2• 11 months ago

While the concept of atomic blogposts is a nice one, I think this characterisation is a bit unfair in this case.

In my view he put four separate but related and logically linked nice thoughts together, and tried to link them all thematically by restating the pie analogy briefly each time.

And the post was otherwise quite short and punchy.

I read this comment before the post itself and I expected to read some sort of lengthy AI slop repeating the same idea ad nauseam, but it was nothing of the sort.

DebtDeflation• 11 months ago

People forget that in the long history of human civilization, the idea of working as an employee of a big company only goes back about 150 years, the idea of white collar office work in that context only goes back about 75 years, and the idea of a "career" (as opposed to just doing the same job forever) is even newer.

jajko2• 11 months ago

Shhh, or you are going to ruin some lives of folks who have excellent corporate careers in some lets say questionable companies, and very little achievement to show in their actual lives.

terminalshort4• 11 months ago

People who point this out tend to forget that's because for most of that long history the alternative options were pretty much: 1. be born to the right parents, 2. peasant farm laborer. We're not going back to that, so might as well forget it for purposes of analysis.

Balgair2• 11 months ago

Aside: Bret Devereaux has a series on the remarkably similar lives of a peasant farm laborers throughout time and space here:

https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...

TLDR: Holy shit, so much infant mortality, penicillin and vaccination are god-sends, holy shit. Also, your fields were all over the place and everything extra gets eaten up by taxes from Big Man.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 11 months ago

I long for the romantic life of rolling into town, offering fair work for fair wages, having a fling with one or two maidens, and then moving on

It might have only been possible for a small handful of people who were, unlike me, strapping, young, men, and fictional

wolvesechoes• 11 months ago

We're not going back to that

I think future holds couple of surprises for you.

beardyw• 11 months ago

You need to read Samuel Pepys. In 1662 he definitely had a white collar job. He describes his office politics and his accumulation of wealth and his working his way up the organisation.

recury• 11 months ago

Don’t forget Thursday 28 September 1665

https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1665/09/28/

rpdillon• 11 months ago

In the 1920s poem, Desiderata, I was always surprised that Max makes a reference to career:

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;

it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs;

for the world is full of trickery.

But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;

many persons strive for high ideals;

and everywhere life is full of heroism.

redwood• 11 months ago

"If you want to get something done, give it to the busy person"

tolerance• 11 months ago

Evidently this post is excellent in its brevity, redundancy and effectiveness in getting its point across.

And flawed for the same reasons, if not for my suspicion that this is a fragment of a greater point that the author is trying to make that can be further contextualized against the posts adjacent to this one, except that there is no date on this individual post nor are they any on the main “blog” index that would allow me to orientate myself thereby.

So I’m loving the mixed reactions that this is getting. And I reckon that the author could elaborate better through either a change of format (like a book) or UX revisions.

collinmcnulty• 11 months ago

The prize for winning is two people who both want you to eat their particular pie and you say you’ll eat for the one who pays you the most.

billy99k• 11 months ago

Or you get to stay employed. If you don't like it, start a company or become a contractor/consultant. I've only been contracting for the last decade.

A company just gave me more work. It nearly doubled my income.

arisAlexis• 11 months ago

I don't understand. Pie = money. Yeah and we go around the sun?

xyzelement• 11 months ago

Life is like that. The reward of a successful marriage is staying married.

bitwize• 11 months ago

I'm reminded of the episode of the Strange Planet television series in which a "flying machine comfort supervisor" (flight attendant) is called before Being Resources, where she is promoted to comfort supervisor supervisor. "Our data show you handled your responsibilities well. Your reward is more responsibility."

singpolyma3• 11 months ago

A career is a pie eating contest where the prize for winning is money you invest so you never have to work again.

xnx• 11 months ago

"Maybe if I sacrifice enough of my body to the grinder, they'll let me crank the handle someday" https://bsky.app/profile/dasharez0ne.bsky.social/post/3ly75c...

A career is a pie-eating contest and the prize for winning is more pie

Related Stories