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I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it comes down to feelings... Life choices? Business decisions? Who gets promoted? It's all vibes and feelings. People will deliberate and argue over facts but ultimately there will be some "weighting" factor which is feelings and will make or break the outcome. You can have a perfectly argued decision that fails some vibe check and is hence discarded. Or a terrible argument that plays to some emotional point so is accepted. It's all feelings. Rare is the opposite.

> You have to feel it.

The corporate machine does not feel it.

It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead.

Smart move by Mitchell to omit (in his opinion) _why_ you have to feel it, as evidenced by the spread interpretation in the comments.

In my opinion, you have to “feel it” in order to do your best work.

However(!), and also in my opinion, you shouldn’t always strive to be in a position where you “feel it”. While it is important to spend most of one’s life feeling it / doing their best work in order to be fulfilled, the hazard of insatiably “feeling it” is that you can much more quickly burn out.

Working with passion fuels a level of intensity and emotional involvement that can take a while to recover from if you don’t get the result (read: success) you desired.

But yes, you do indeed mostly have to feel it.

For me it's what I call the 'weekend test': Do I like tinkering with this thing enough that I'd want to play around with it on a weekend / in my own time, just for fun.

This needs to check a lot of boxes: is it easy and quick to setup, do I need some hard to obtain 'license key', does everything work out of box or at least is easy enough to fix, and most importantly: is it a joy to use (which is entirely subjective though).

If something doesn't pass this test then I also don't want to waste time with it at work. In a nutshell this is also why wheels should be reinvented over and over again, and if it's just for the sole reason that the new wheel feels better to just the person who reinvented it. Chances are other people will feel the same after trying the new wheel (on a weekend, hah) and start using it (or not and that's fine too), but in the end this is how innovation happens.

I went through a longer quest, called "getting naturalized in another country".

Went through the grind of getting visa, then the work permit, then the different visa, then the short-term residence permit.

Changed jobs, had to go to the immigration department again, because these residence permits are tied to the employer.

Kept a spreadsheet with dates of each exit and entry.

Had to keep all my paperwork ducks in a row.

To be able to get married, I had to get a permit from a judge.

Got married and had to go through the immigration office again, as this changed the primary purpose of my stay yet again. The queue to the immigration office was so long that I had to come there at 2am (yes, 2 in the morning) to even have a chance to file my paperwork.

Still had to keep the spreadsheet with exit/entry dates, the printout was attached to each application.

Went to another city to pass the language exam to be able to get the long-term residence permit.

In a couple of years, applied for citizenship. Had to go visit my birth country and gather some more paperwork from there, get it translated.

All the while it all felt as if I was a student again and this was an important exam each and every time. Stressed. Constantly afraid that a document would be missing and I would need to start over.

Then finally they texted me. I went to collect the papers that certified that I now was the citizen of my new country, almost ten years after starting the quest. I could apply for my new shiny national ID. I now wasn't a second-class person anymore.

Upon leaving the government building, I felt nothing. I had expected that with all that stress and buildup, some kind of relief would come. But it never came. No relief, no joy, not a sausage.

I remember that the weather was miserable on that day.

Oh, i thought it was a satirical critique of how arbitrary promotion criteria can be. Turns out someone is seriously claiming that someone else "doesn't not feel the right way" about the work they do, and THAT is their core problem. Ha. Well, at least the author feels that they are feeling the right way, good for them I guess.

This is one of the things that I’ve tried really hard to impress upon engineers new and old while working on various projects, and IMO it applies to just about every layer of the stack; ultimately everything flows up into the UX.

This vibe was pervasive at Apple and could be taken more or less for granted, but elsewhere it’s all over the place.

And, like, sure, there are projects and industries where this doesn’t matter. But giving a shit and feeling it can be a major differentiator.

For as much as the author may get roasted for stating the obvious, I've often seen this "measure everything" mindset, coming from those you'd think should know better than that.

I've even seen this stupidity in myself sometimes. In a way it's funny how you can get so lost on the numbers that you forget about the thing.

Good thought, but corporations don't care, and a whole lot of folks that play the corporate game won't, either. Money will still be made. Careers will still be advanced.

It think it was Theodore Sturgeon that said "90% of everything is crap."

For myself, I enjoy what I do. I write software that I want to use, in a way that makes me feel good.

I have no illusions that I would be allowed to work like this, if I were still in the workforce, though.

The only thing you have to do is pay taxes and die. It does help to feel good about the project and the work, but it is not a requirement for a fulfilling life.

Looking back at most times I have felt horrible in the depth of adversity, resistance or burnout I realize those were the times of greatest potential for achievement, learning and growth. Those are the memorable chapters, the things that define my character. The times when I continued to grind, continued to push through and didn't give up because of feelings were the times when I actually accomplished something: raised a kid, bought a house, switched continents.

I have delivered value, but at what cost? https://youtu.be/DYvhC_RdIwQ

Feels like a linkedin post

Yes, and no.

Yes in the sense Kano refered to as 'delight' [1]. An unexpected or tacit feeling of quality in an interaction with a product.

No, because for whatever reason we sadly have become prone to spurious and unbridled emotion, making mountains out of molehills at the slightest friction. I sometimes feel what now passes as acceptable is what used to be borderline bipolar disorders.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model

I dunno. A good demo is all about the feeling it gives. One thing I got out of my adventures in startup land is how to go up on stage and demo some software that barely works and make it look like a million bucks.

At the last hackathon I went to I was sitting in the audience at the presentation at the end with one teammate while the other one was upstairs pounding away at last minute revisions. We were scheduled last but I still had to make excuses to the organizers.

He showed up with something that basically worked but I kept cool under pressure, made sure I didn't commit to anything until I was sure about it, and used good showmanship. We were all shocked when we won the 'player's choice' award. Mind you, it helped that he was experienced at writing platformers in Unity and the other student could draw, but thanks to my showmanship people saw everything that didn't worked and didn't notice the bugs and people were left with the impression that 'wow that looked like a polished game' whereas the main author said 'I don't think I'd want to play it' afterwards. My continuous push towards a 'minimum viable product' combined with their push to make something that looked polish really helped that showmanship work.

Think most people are too numb / desensitized to feel anything (which is by design)

Unfortunately, the tech industry has completely lost touch with anything resembling this. It's a cold machine now; I'd call it soulless but I think that gives it too much animation.

I love this point. It's also one of the hardest things to do as a product person if you're not the typical user.

It's hard to feel the feelings of many types of users.

I feel it when using Ghostty. So nice.

I think that shows if you are a product person. And product people are a rare breed. Within them, you will need to find someone who could do or understand business, operation, sales and marketing. Something every successful entrepreneur will eventually acquired.

Really, I think we’re all talking around some notion of beauty here. Not in the sense of personal vanity, but more of a sense of internal cohesiveness.

Also, the feeling he’s referring to is what sold me on Ghostty. It was clear that he’d thought quite a bit about good defaults. Performance is great without having to tweak anything. In a way, I love that this sort of thing cannot be qualified, because it means that it cannot be commoditized or democratized. It either connects with someone, or it doesn’t.

> Our work evokes a feeling. The feeling matters. The feeling is part of the work. The desired feeling is part of the requirements.

I do share this ambition. In my own metric, I was as successful as it gets when “the desired feeling” is achieved. But I often have the impression that others around me don’t share this, or do so to a lesser degree. However, that doesn’t stop me one bit.

Haven’t felt it in so long, but it’s what keeps the bills paid

TFW a developer discovers UX.

As a neuro divergent person, I usually only feel relieved when I can mark a task as complete.

Doing my taxes felt the same as getting a degree and publishing a book.

I wish we could turn off the self help twitter hybrid posts that we're getting more and more often in HACKER news.

I wouldn't get anything done.

nuf said :) https://open.spotify.com/track/3cbV252akVZInSvJk7jAYX?si=86a...

feeling is something developed by evolution, not by accident

my best guess is that it is far easier to deeply feel complex concepts rather than to arrive to similar conclusions purely based on reason/logic

> When you feel it, you know. The feature makes you smile when you use it. It fits right in, like it was always meant to be there. You want to use it again. You want to tell people about it. This is the difference. This is what metrics, specifications, and demos miss.

Totally absurd! The metrics and specifications are what make all of that possible.

This feels like it was written for execs and managers who bury their heads in the sand when they're overwhelmed.

Yes, absolutely true. And this fact will be used against you.

Two sides of the same coin. Humans have an internal need to see that their work output is valuable and they are useful to society/community. This is not some unrealistic expectation. For most of history, it was fairly easy to see how one's work directly results in value. Farming, butchering animals, making clothes and shoes, paving roads or building houses or whatever it may be. People could feel satisfaction of jobs well done, applying their experience and being valued for it. It is normal. Pointless drudgery eats away at one's soul and leads to burnout, much more than simply being "overworked". If much of your work-related mental energy goes towards timing when to jump ship before it sinks, that won't be sustainable. Working on some pointless project that you know will get axed, but for some internal politics reason it has to remain up and running for a few more months to get someone promoted before killing it, etc.

When people say that a job is a job, and you wouldn't get paid for it if it was enjoyable, it's just not right. If you produce value, you do deserve the pay, it's not supposed to be compensation for being miserable.

On the flipside, when MBAs internalize this message, what they take away is that "passion" and "motivation" makes employees more productive and prone to put in extra effort. So they come up with the genius idea to test whether you are "passionate" before hiring you. Resulting in a dreaded and ugly song and dance ritual where you have to exaggerate your passion and talk in unrealistic language, and grifters and smoothtalkers win in that.

That's not the kind of passion that is needed, the outwardly, enthusiastic-glowing passion. Just something where you feel that it's neat, it's a net positive for the world even if small, and you left the world a bit better when you go to sleep at night compared to when you woke up in the morning. Even extra money can't compensate for that in the long term (short term yes).

Vibe coding

As sure as fuck don't. Just keep the paychecks coming.

Whenever my logic said one thing and my gut feeling told me different, I used to ignore my gut. This would more often than not cause some sort of backlash I could not possibly have foreseen. Sometimes immediately, sometimes several days later.

A year or so ago I got tired of this, started doing the opposite, and I will never go back.

Feelings overall are underrated.

But I feel depressed every time I use Terraform. I see why it is useful, good etc. But I just enjoy it least of all the programming activities.

Pulumi isn't much better. I feel IaC done that way isn't the way we will settle on long term.