When I was a dev working with my business-oriented business partner, I had to get used to sitting in meetings where we promised the client the world having no idea if I could accomplish it or not.
Made a lot more money than I could have on my own.
"Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say 'YES'!!"
This is often the advice given by senior folks and I think it is somewhat similar to say that you have to "lie a bit on your CV". Still, I always wonder what would I do if I make these big promises to clients/bosses/management and I fail to deliver. Wouldn't that be worse than having said "no, I won't be able to make it in time" from the beginning?
For context, I'm early in my career (3 YOE) and I don't deal with management that much yet (I'm still shielded by my tech lead and PM), so I'm always looking for advice on how to navigate these things. I really can't just say "YES, YES, YES" when I know *very well* that something won't be possible.
For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear.
That earns you a special position as one of a pair of guards in a labyrinth with two doors, one of which leads to freedom and the other to... ba-ba-ba-bum - certain death.
Heh, well I was kind of thinking, this sounds like something someone in sales or content management or marketing might think is pithy and thoughtful. And we are (or just were) in the "Information Age", so that's what has value. But also, there are lots of other ways to um... make money. Unless you try to twist your brain around "well selling kids' toys to parents is selling lies to someone who wants lied to" or something perverse like that. shrug Maybe the big article does a great job of exploring these ideas, but I don't think they stand up to much scrutiny.
It's not really a rule of thumb that "Tell others the truth, tell yourself the truth" means you have to barely scrape by. Plenty of people make good money that way.
What does mapping your externalities have to do with honesty? Is this a poor attempt to suggest that no one can actually be honest because no one has a full understanding of the entire universe? Because that's just a lazy excuse for not trying to be honest and not really worth being in the debate.
Having externalities does not mean you are dishonest. Hell, you can even ignore your externalities and still be honest. You can even outright steal from people and still be honest.
The missing quadrant on that one is interesting too:
> "there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know."
The fourth corner is unknown knowns, things that we don't know that we know. Bureaucracies have that one in spades.
The wisdom from my Mom was “it’s better to be paid for what you know than what you do”. I’ve found it’s a bit more subtle than that, and enjoyed and learned a lot from piece work labor. But the sweet spot seems to be getting paid for what you do that uses what you know.
It sounds like another way to put it: tell people what they want to hear and you'll go far. Most people want their beliefs confirmed, whether what they believe is true or fiction. Unfortunately it can lead to an echo chamber-y world where people only associate themselves with others who have the same core beliefs, which is even easier when communities are online.
When I worked at BigCo [1], we were interviewing a candidate for a position. He was pretty good, and we were in the process of making him an offer, but he was asking for more money and trying to negotiate his salary higher.
I don't have an issue with this, BigCo has plenty of money, but other people, including a manager, were complaining. They felt that this is a good job and he shouldn't be doing this for the money.
I, not realizing that this was controversial, said "yeah, but come on, we all do this for the money."
Some people got defensive, explaining that they love the job. I responded "sure, it's good to like your job and your coworkers, I'm not trying to discourage that, but if BigCo stopped paying you then you'd probably stop showing up for work. At least I would hope so."
They kind of begrudgingly agreed, and the day went on as normal. The next day, I have an impromptu meeting scheduled with my manager's manager, explaining that I have a "bad attitude" and he mentioned that specific comment as a reason that this meeting was being called.
Now, to be fair, at the time I did have a bad attitude (in no small part due to at-the-time-undiagnosed sleep apnea), but the fact that I got in trouble for mentioning something that is objectively true really confused me. We weren't working for a charity, we weren't trying to cure cancer, we were working for a for-profit corporation. Of course we were doing it for the money, just like the corporation hired us so that they could make more money.
But I guess people just like to believe a collective lie.
[1] I'm sure you might be able to go through history and find the specific BigCo, and that is fine, but I politely ask that you don't post it here in relation to this comment.
I've been at BigCos in times past where there was some plausibility to this, but in the current BigCo workplace climate, anybody who tries to claim it's not about the money has a long row to hoe!
My father, who died in 1981, was an inexhaustible font of wisdom and wit. I don’t know when he told me this particular three-part rule, but I’ve never forgotten it. I tweeted it three years ago, but people keep asking for it in one place, so here it is.
There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
The rest is commentary.
---
That last line is undoubtedly a reference to:
> When someone challenged Hillel the Elder (b. 110 BCE) to teach the entire Torah while his listener stood on one foot, he famously replied, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
Aside, I've always seen it spelled "fount of wisdom", but either spelling is acceptable and this seems to mostly be an American/British spelling difference:
He's done some absolutely god-tier moderation around here over the years and it wouldn't surprise me at all if he actually possessed the power to grant that kind of wish.
I was offered a project to develop a game for this sweet old lady once.
She'd heard that if you made a video game and sold it, you would make a lot of money, so she'd decided to take her life savings, $200k, and hire someone to make a game. She didn't know what kind of game or anything, just "make a game".
I was really worried about her and spent two hours on the phone with her trying to educate her and help her protect herself and her savings.
At the end, she just got sort of mad at me and I could tell she was just going to get someone else to do it.
There are very rich/powerful people that do #1 shocking well and I kind of wish I had figured it out sooner. Having a moral compass apparently set me back irreparably. I could've been somebody!
Apparently if you're a YC alum you can get to the top of the front page of HN posting an advertisement to go read someone's paywalled Wall Street Journal op ed, with a broken link when you click "read the rest".
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.
These are "ways to get paid", but "jobs" implicitly may or may not be relevant to the topic. If there's no game, politics, or sales aspect whatsoever, which is rarely but not never the case, then it's kind of irrelevant.
When I was a dev working with my business-oriented business partner, I had to get used to sitting in meetings where we promised the client the world having no idea if I could accomplish it or not.
Made a lot more money than I could have on my own.
"Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say 'YES'!!"
This is often the advice given by senior folks and I think it is somewhat similar to say that you have to "lie a bit on your CV". Still, I always wonder what would I do if I make these big promises to clients/bosses/management and I fail to deliver. Wouldn't that be worse than having said "no, I won't be able to make it in time" from the beginning?
For context, I'm early in my career (3 YOE) and I don't deal with management that much yet (I'm still shielded by my tech lead and PM), so I'm always looking for advice on how to navigate these things. I really can't just say "YES, YES, YES" when I know *very well* that something won't be possible.
Maybe it is just a sign of being too junior?
Nobody wants to hear "no". The way you say "no" without saying it is by turning "no" into an option, and attaching costs to options.
"no, I won't be able to make it in time" would be "I can confidently deliver in time if I have X, and we save Y and Z for later."
For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear.
2 Timothy 4 (NLT), circa 65 Anno Domini
"Time is coming"? Pretty sure this always happened
It’s a pretty old quote
It's relatively not
The "read the rest" button seems broken in Firefox on Windows... so that makes for a very short post.
I’m interpreting the submission as just what can be read on the page, but I still upvoted it. Brief and to the point.
That's only two ways to get paid, so it's either title is wrong or there's a missing part.
Getting paid is entirely consistent with going broke. Gross income doesn't have to be zero to be less than expenses.
I appreciate brief and to the point. It's a world that's rapidly going away thanks to LLMs' love of over-explaining everything.
The URL: #replace-with-the-found-url
From searching the text, it seems it hasn't been published on the WSJ.
So the author lied and they are trying to get rich?
Author never told us what happens when one lies to those who seek the truth... is that on a different plane of reference?
That earns you a special position as one of a pair of guards in a labyrinth with two doors, one of which leads to freedom and the other to... ba-ba-ba-bum - certain death.
> … ba-ba-ba-bum - certain death
ftfy
You get paid, but it does not last
Then you become a poletician, though I guess that could also apply to lying to people who want to be lied to.
Ha I reached that and thought to myself "do I need to read any more?"
Heh, well I was kind of thinking, this sounds like something someone in sales or content management or marketing might think is pithy and thoughtful. And we are (or just were) in the "Information Age", so that's what has value. But also, there are lots of other ways to um... make money. Unless you try to twist your brain around "well selling kids' toys to parents is selling lies to someone who wants lied to" or something perverse like that. shrug Maybe the big article does a great job of exploring these ideas, but I don't think they stand up to much scrutiny.
It's also broken for Safari (on Mac).
And Brave
Same in Firefox on Mac. Links are hard, I guess.
There's got to be a variant that is a 2x2 matrix of this:
Lie to others, lie to yourself (spiral together; either fantastically poor or spectacularly rich)
Lie to others, tell yourself the truth (manipulation, morally broke, but materially rich)
Tell others the truth, tell yourself the truth (integrity, barely scrape by)
Tell others the truth, lie to yourself (be used by the system, usually end up poorly)
I think the fourth would be "lie to those who want you to tell the truth".
His father's saying may have been: "There are three honest ways to make a living".
The fourth option is where scams and fraud live.
Some might argue that lying to those who want to be lied to is still usually dishonest.
It's not really a rule of thumb that "Tell others the truth, tell yourself the truth" means you have to barely scrape by. Plenty of people make good money that way.
It pays to be suspicious of those who tell you you can’t make an honest living.
Huh, I've always been suspicious of folks claiming the opposite.
For the downvoters, have you ever tried to explicitly map your externalities?
What does mapping your externalities have to do with honesty? Is this a poor attempt to suggest that no one can actually be honest because no one has a full understanding of the entire universe? Because that's just a lazy excuse for not trying to be honest and not really worth being in the debate.
Having externalities does not mean you are dishonest. Hell, you can even ignore your externalities and still be honest. You can even outright steal from people and still be honest.
Love it! https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/c85ca76f-bff7-4ff4-87e7-3...
oh god it's the Rumsfeld quadrants for truth....
The missing quadrant on that one is interesting too:
> "there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know."
The fourth corner is unknown knowns, things that we don't know that we know. Bureaucracies have that one in spades.
There's also good money to be made telling people what they already know, usually in the form of a report and/or powerpoint deck
> report and/or powerpoint deck
if you can sell someone on a second report to verify the first you can make a lot of money too.
"a man with one watch always knows what time it is, a man with two watches is never quite sure"
Ah, but you only tell them the things they already know and want to hear.
That filter is crucial in any kind of advisory/consulting work. You're there to confirm biases, in 95% of the cases.
It depends on who is paying you. Sometimes, people pay you to tell OTHER people things they know but don't want to hear.
The wisdom from my Mom was “it’s better to be paid for what you know than what you do”. I’ve found it’s a bit more subtle than that, and enjoyed and learned a lot from piece work labor. But the sweet spot seems to be getting paid for what you do that uses what you know.
AI notwithstanding, of course.
It sounds like another way to put it: tell people what they want to hear and you'll go far. Most people want their beliefs confirmed, whether what they believe is true or fiction. Unfortunately it can lead to an echo chamber-y world where people only associate themselves with others who have the same core beliefs, which is even easier when communities are online.
So there are two ways? xD
I've told this story before, but it's relevant.
When I worked at BigCo [1], we were interviewing a candidate for a position. He was pretty good, and we were in the process of making him an offer, but he was asking for more money and trying to negotiate his salary higher.
I don't have an issue with this, BigCo has plenty of money, but other people, including a manager, were complaining. They felt that this is a good job and he shouldn't be doing this for the money.
I, not realizing that this was controversial, said "yeah, but come on, we all do this for the money."
Some people got defensive, explaining that they love the job. I responded "sure, it's good to like your job and your coworkers, I'm not trying to discourage that, but if BigCo stopped paying you then you'd probably stop showing up for work. At least I would hope so."
They kind of begrudgingly agreed, and the day went on as normal. The next day, I have an impromptu meeting scheduled with my manager's manager, explaining that I have a "bad attitude" and he mentioned that specific comment as a reason that this meeting was being called.
Now, to be fair, at the time I did have a bad attitude (in no small part due to at-the-time-undiagnosed sleep apnea), but the fact that I got in trouble for mentioning something that is objectively true really confused me. We weren't working for a charity, we weren't trying to cure cancer, we were working for a for-profit corporation. Of course we were doing it for the money, just like the corporation hired us so that they could make more money.
But I guess people just like to believe a collective lie.
[1] I'm sure you might be able to go through history and find the specific BigCo, and that is fine, but I politely ask that you don't post it here in relation to this comment.
[delayed]
I've been at BigCos in times past where there was some plausibility to this, but in the current BigCo workplace climate, anybody who tries to claim it's not about the money has a long row to hoe!
This would have been 2019. Even then, I feel like anyone who had been in the industry long enough should have developed some level of cynicism.
Copy/pasta of the entire post:
My father, who died in 1981, was an inexhaustible font of wisdom and wit. I don’t know when he told me this particular three-part rule, but I’ve never forgotten it. I tweeted it three years ago, but people keep asking for it in one place, so here it is. There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
The rest is commentary.
---
That last line is undoubtedly a reference to:
> When someone challenged Hillel the Elder (b. 110 BCE) to teach the entire Torah while his listener stood on one foot, he famously replied, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/5410546/jewis...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder
Aside, I've always seen it spelled "fount of wisdom", but either spelling is acceptable and this seems to mostly be an American/British spelling difference:
https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/font-knowledge-fount-wis...
Thanks. I keep doing 3. I needed this.
My first thought was "cash, grass, or ass" but this works as well.
Might not get you far in life...but it'll get you to the next town.
Is it me, or have HN submissions gotten shorter and shorter recently? At this rate, top-scoring articles will consist of a single word in a few years.
[delayed]
I'd rather have a short article than a short article that was fed into an LLM to be expanded into a long one that says very little.
But yeah, when I seek truly "intellectually gratifying" material I usually log off of HN and read a book.
Could be worse. They could have padded this out a ton with emojis and dashes.
This title makes you want to click the article. Other titles that give away the lede influence people to just directly hit the comments section
It's already about 85%: (Look at) me - with charts. We can replace those with TikTok dances instead.
To wit:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368059
There’s basically no content in that one
At least this one has reasonable content
What little content is in that one is a quote by a fraudster.
In this thread: dang, I wish I was evil too!
He's done some absolutely god-tier moderation around here over the years and it wouldn't surprise me at all if he actually possessed the power to grant that kind of wish.
I think they meant "fount" of wisdom
I wish I didn't have any scruples, I'd be so rich.
I was offered a project to develop a game for this sweet old lady once.
She'd heard that if you made a video game and sold it, you would make a lot of money, so she'd decided to take her life savings, $200k, and hire someone to make a game. She didn't know what kind of game or anything, just "make a game".
I was really worried about her and spent two hours on the phone with her trying to educate her and help her protect herself and her savings.
At the end, she just got sort of mad at me and I could tell she was just going to get someone else to do it.
Was so sad. Wish I could have helped her more.
"A fool and his money are easily parted."
The scruple-to-dollar exchange rate is just the worst. Or the best. Whichever makes more sense in this analogy.
I have a running tally of job offers that paid crazy money but I did not do because they were unethical
Every spiritual tradition on the planet rejects material wealth as undignified and immoral
https://genius.com/Wayne-wade-poor-and-humble-lyrics
There are very rich/powerful people that do #1 shocking well and I kind of wish I had figured it out sooner. Having a moral compass apparently set me back irreparably. I could've been somebody!
What a bunch of complete sociopathic crap this is
Ooooooooh, so that's how sociopathic CEOs and directors of big companies get rich!
Apparently if you're a YC alum you can get to the top of the front page of HN posting an advertisement to go read someone's paywalled Wall Street Journal op ed, with a broken link when you click "read the rest".
This is spelled out on the FAQ page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Can you please spell out the spell out? You're linking 1300 words.
Cmd +F "Paywall"
> Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.
It’s Jason Zweig, the Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist, not a YC alum.
I can already think of 5 jobs this doesn't apply to in the slightest.
These are "ways to get paid", but "jobs" implicitly may or may not be relevant to the topic. If there's no game, politics, or sales aspect whatsoever, which is rarely but not never the case, then it's kind of irrelevant.
>These are "ways to get paid"
The link literally says "There are three ways to make a living."
There are slightly more than three ways to make a living.
and they are?
Day trader Garbage collector Zoo keeper Tennis player Lifeguard
They're all making a living by telling people the truth that want the truth. The more money they make the more they deviate being solidly in camp #2.
It's an aphorism. I enjoyed it. It's not a proof of the Universe.
I didn't realise this was Facebook
Fruit picker.