6 thoughts on “On Labor Day

  1. Seth’s right.
    I’ve been working for myself since I was a teenager. That’s meant being totally into whatever I’m doing no matter what day of the week it was. The middle of the week could also be my break or weekend time. It’s your own rhythm when you’re fully responsible.
    heh …could this all be because I was (fact) born on Labor Day?
    Vera

  2. I leave this here only because I couldn’t on Seth’s site but while i appreciate his point, he’s displaying an astonishing amount of elitest thinking. Too say that the majority of American’s don’t do “hard work” (and then cite that 35% of American’s have deskjobs; obviously not a majority) is absurd and shows a depressing lack of awareness for America’s present economy and the difficulties faced by millions of Americans.

  3. I know I’m not the smartest guy alive (to put it mildly), but he seems to not have a point. He moves from working on Labor Day to a “kids these days” rant to bending semantics with “the new hard work is taking risks.” What was he trying to achieve with this article?

    First I’ll say that even if 35% of people have desk jobs, that means 65% don’t. I’m assuming he didn’t just pull some statistic out of the blue. I know people with labor jobs.

    Taking risks is good for some people, like Matt, who took a risk and ended up making some of the most used software and services on the web. But that doesn’t mean everybody should just because some people can make good decisions and have the opportunities given to them. For me, taking risks isn’t the hard part; it’s living with the consequences of those risks that’s the hard part.

    Just one more thing: programming is hard work. No, it’s not manual labor hard, but it’s finding solutions to problems and trying various ways to implement them until something works. It’s not physically straining, but it is mentally straining; perhaps not to most programmers, but certainly to me.

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