Three Ways to Get Paid (2018)

199 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by nate
(jasonzweig.com)

131 Comments

beej71

5 hours ago

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'!!"

catgomeyow

4 hours ago

They did this to me when I was a technical director of a mid-sized engineering consultancy (aka, a sweat shop). I learned it on the fly when they had me go to a client meeting. They showed the slide deck of all of our credentials, and I was astonished that the sales engineer took the slide I sent them and increased all my years of experience by 25%. I asked them about it later, and they said don't worry about it, everybody does it.

It's unethical and it's wrong and I won't participate in it. I stopped working there.

apprentice7

5 hours ago

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?

4lx87

5 hours ago

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."

beej71

2 hours ago

One hedge I always used to make was, "I think we have all the information we need for now. We'll get you an estimate within 3 business days."

And then I'd sit down and bust my ass trying to find out if it was feasible or not. :)

If it wasn't, we could always come back with a lesser approach and people seemed to be happy with that. ("It turns out Android doesn't widely support [feature x] so we recommend [feature y] instead.")

HeyLaughingBoy

3 hours ago

Exactly this. I'm in a situation where I have to tell a customer that we won't be able to do the thing that I've spent a long time investigating.

My answer won't be "no, we can't do it." It'll be a form of "we have to use this alternate method to get to the goal, how does that affect your budget?"

sublinear

4 hours ago

Well said, and on the flip side the strongest signal that your management sucks is their absurd sense of entitlement and inability to handle "no" correctly. Their lack of curiosity and ambition will cause the business to miss out on so many opportunities.

A naive junior shouldn't stump them, but it really does happen all the time. If all they have to do is ask what it takes to flip it to a "yes", the same information is communicated. The only thing ever truly at stake was someone's ego.

danaris

2 hours ago

> Nobody ever, ever, wants to hear "no".

Frankly, that's toddler level thinking.

While there are certainly people who are rich enough and spoiled enough that they have probably never been meaningfully refused anything in their lives, that produces terrible people, and absolutely everyone needs to learn how to accept being told "no" when "no" is the correct answer (or a reasonable one).

BeetleB

3 hours ago

One trick I learned: If you have the type of manager who doesn't like "No", then say "Yes", but continually keep him in the loop as the project progresses to failure.

If you're up front honest, they'll think you're being lazy - even if you have good reasons.

If you say "Yes", and then fail for all those reasons while providing regular reports, the manager views you as "Someone who is willing to do things".

They often don't care about your actual success/failure rate, but instead use your attitude as a proxy for the actual success/failure rate.

Also, as the project is moving to failure, he'll usually intercept with "OK, how about we changed the requirements to ...?"

If you asked for that change in the beginning, the same rationale as the above applies.

yojo

4 hours ago

Internally, it’s important to understand that every ask should have a business goal associated with it. The thing being asked for is rarely (never?) the only way to accomplish that goal.

Great engineers focus on the customer or business need and find/propose alternatives that are possible.

sublinear

4 hours ago

Great management also helps that engineer understand what the various stakeholders want without siloing off their teams.

neilv

2 hours ago

> and I think it is somewhat similar to say that you have to "lie a bit on your CV". [...] For context, I'm early in my career (3 YOE)

Please consider this input from my YOE battle scars:

1. Don't contradict your team while in a meeting with outsiders, but then you're obligated to follow up with your team offline, to try to mitigate any damage, and try to make sure it doesn't keep happening. For one example of why, I've seen one person consciously "mis-promise" things to customer, and when I talked with them offline about we couldn't be saying that, because it wasn't true, their response was "they won't remember". Narrator: "They did remember." And that's possibly why that person and a few others aren't very wealthy today.

2. Not everyone believes in "lie a bit on your CV" nor similar dishonesty. You'll probably meet colleagues, who you respect, who react to that with surprise and disappointment. You could also get fired for it, with cause. Especially if you're calling yourself an engineer, since determining and telling the truth is much of your job.

3. Though, on the other side of CV honesty, be careful about always using team-speak/think when in an interview context. Out of habit, you might naturally say "we" when talking about something you were instrumental in. But some people who think lots of people lie on their CV are going to hear that "we" as you generously including yourself in the accomplishments of others. I've started switching modes a little more for interviews, expressly claiming more credit, such as by saying unambiguously when I was the sole designer and implementer of something.

jimmydddd

3 hours ago

It took me years to notice that folks who confidently made stuff up or provided incorrect info in meetings were looked upon favorably. No one ever knew or cared that the thing the person said was incorrect. Just the confident way they said it.

MDCore

4 hours ago

Aside: start getting that exposure to management people now. You can book regular skip levels with your bosses boss and the PMs boss. Better than waiting until you get promoted and having to learn how to do it with a weight of expectation.

JohnMakin

2 hours ago

When everyone in a game is cheating, you will lose by playing fairly. And like other commenters have suggested - everyone expects similar behavior.

> 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.

It depends on a lot of things, like how big the company is, how critical the project, culture, management style, etc. - but you'd be surprised at what is actually possible that may sound impossible. I've had those "this is impossible" thoughts a lot early in my career and more often than not I was wrong. The few times I wasn't wrong, I made sure to highlight risks I saw at the outset, and when the risks materialized, point them out at the retrospective or whatever for CYA purposes.

The things you do want to avoid at all costs are death marches, impossible deadlines with consequences at the end of it, maintenance slogs which will tie you to a very annoying treadmill for your entire tenure - it's hard without experience to know where these things lie, but if all else fails, you can do what everyone else does, try the impossible thing, and either surprise yourself, or when it becomes clear it won't happen, toss it to some overly ambitious sucker (I don't condone this, I just have seen it happen far too often).

y0eswddl

4 hours ago

the corporate world is a lot of kayfabe and bullshit. Welcome. :)

gonzalohm

4 hours ago

The downside is all the stress from unrealistic objectives

nostrademons

4 hours ago

That's what I experienced early in my career, and then I independently discovered Rule 3: "Tell the truth to people who want to be lied to, and you'll go broke."

The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it. Deliver the lies that will make them happy and only those lies. The lies themselves are usually reasonably realistic; it's only when you combine them with your common-sense notions of truth that they become stressfully unrealistic. So give up your common sense and just deliver the lies the customer is asking for.

A less cynical way of putting this is to adopt the customer's frame of mind. The stress comes from the tension of your internal beliefs vs. the customer's internal beliefs; because they are coming from two different people, they are frequently incompatible. When you are working for a customer, you are working for a customer.

ngriffiths

3 hours ago

> The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it.

This is exactly it!

Like you might think "the promised features are not feasible." No, the features you will soon deliver are feasible, on account of you're about to go build them! If you fail, that is still very bad. But the point of rule 1 is you don't have to act like you signed up to deliver exactly X feature on exactly Y date. Instead you can think a little bit, and then you calmly set off on a process that should reasonably end up with the customer being happy. To many people this strategy feels like lying.

HeyLaughingBoy

2 hours ago

You don't have to lie!

You do need to understand the customer's perspective so you can reframe the reality in a way that they will agree with.

catgomeyow

4 hours ago

Yup, my breakdown was that I couldn't understand that the client doesn't actually care, they actually prefer to be lied to. Personally, I decided not to live in any system where either side is acting like this. Knowing the rules probably wouldn't have helped me, because I would've found the whole thing (and still do) disgusting and idiotic.

seanclayton

2 hours ago

God forbid you go broke, can't have that

gowld

4 hours ago

This is also how trillion-dollar megacorps get contracts signed.

WorkerBee28474

5 hours ago

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

greenhearth

5 hours ago

"Time is coming"? Pretty sure this always happened

AndrewKemendo

5 hours ago

It’s a pretty old quote

LeifCarrotson

3 hours ago

Yeah, but even when it was a new quote, it was inaccurate: People have always wanted to follow their own desires, always wanted to be told what they want to hear, and always disliked listening to harsh truths. Even in 64CE.

kuanbutts

6 hours ago

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)

jaxn

6 hours ago

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.

nyeah

5 hours ago

Some might argue that lying to those who want to be lied to is still usually dishonest.

zaphar

6 hours ago

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.

badgersnake

6 hours ago

It pays to be suspicious of those who tell you you can’t make an honest living.

c22

6 hours ago

Huh, I've always been suspicious of folks claiming the opposite.

For the downvoters, have you ever tried to explicitly map your externalities?

zaphar

5 hours ago

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.

cortesoft

5 hours ago

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.

sidewndr46

6 hours ago

oh god it's the Rumsfeld quadrants for truth....

AnthonyMouse

5 hours ago

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.

Wowfunhappy

34 minutes ago

This advice could be represented as a table:

                   They Want Lies   They Want Truth
                   +--------------+---------------+
     You Tell Lies | become rich  | ???           | 
                   +--------------+---------------+
    You Tell Truth | go broke     | make a living | 
                   +--------------+---------------+
Notice how the upper right quadrant is left out of TFA. If you end up there, I don't think things end well for you.

Maybe telling lies isn't such a great business idea after all?

jaggederest

6 hours ago

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

chasd00

4 hours ago

> 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"

jaggederest

2 hours ago

That implies the existence of reports 3 through N, so we should probably automate the process...

groby_b

5 hours ago

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.

cortesoft

4 hours ago

It depends on who is paying you. Sometimes, people pay you to tell OTHER people things they know but don't want to hear.

joewhale

3 hours ago

these are what self help books are.

allenu

5 hours ago

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.

tombert

5 hours ago

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.

renjimen

an hour ago

There are various levels of self deception that almost everyone subscribes to.

A pretty high level one is that our jobs are meaningfully making a positive difference in the world, when in fact, most white collar jobs are just producing bullshit to grease the corporate wheels of modern society. Most people don't like to admit that though, so we tell ourselves little lies and go along with the corporate narrative. That's what you experienced.

But it goes deeper the more truthful you try to be. Down near the bottom of this pile of self deception is that humans are making the world a better place, when in fact we're ruining the world, causing environmental damage at an unprecedented rate in geological history, all the while exhausting the readily-accessible non-renewable resources, like hydrocarbons and minerals, that'll make the chance of a better future civilization on Earth highly unlikely.

wrs

5 hours ago

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!

tombert

5 hours ago

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.

treis

4 hours ago

They don't have to be as cynical as the internets are these days. It's perfectly normal to take pride that half the phones in the world run software you wrote or that you've solved whatever problem for people.

tombert

4 hours ago

That's completely fine. I have no issue with people working hard on a product they are proud of at a big for-profit company. It's good to like your job, it's good to like your coworkers, it's good to be happy that your software is being used by lots of people, or if you built something that you think is really cool. I've certainly take pride in such things and I certainly do not mean to diminish that by saying "we all do this for the money".

I just think it's important to be honest with yourself, and realize that a job is transactional. When I work for BigCo, I am selling my time and/or expertise for money and/or benefits (e.g. health insurance). If the company doesn't feel like they're getting their money's worth out of me they might fire me. If I feel like I'm getting a reasonable enough compensation then I might go to another company.

Such is the way with capitalism; I don't love it, but until we change to a different system that's just how it is. I absolutely hate when companies say "we're a family here", because that's simply not true. I don't get cut from being my parents' son because I'm not meeting some bottom line this quarter.

nunez

2 hours ago

My guesses on why this _really_ happened:

- The candidate was asking for more than what the others on the panel made, which was a no-no.

- The candidate was asking for what they currently make while being younger/less tenured than the others; also a no-no.

- The others on the panel had cost savings to the company as a performance target.

- They had beef with you and the candidate.

- They preferred another candidate, and they were fine with the comp.

prmph

4 hours ago

Yeah, this tendency of people to believe a collective lie, to try very hard to believe it, or at least make it look like they believe it, even when everybody knows its a lie, astounds me to no end.

Some examples:

- Russians (or insert any other dictatorship trying to appear otherwise) faking "democratic" elections. Who are you kidding, yourselves? No one believes it. Just tell the west: to hell with your democracy. Like, I just don't see why they need to go though that charade that everybody can see through.

- A country where pretty everybody is stealing from each other, and they all know it, and are still trying to fake uprightness to each other. I guess most countries fit this scenario. Like, we all know what's going on. The world does not end if you come right out and say to the effect of, yeah, we steal from each other (if not in so direct a fashion). But for some weird reason, people seem to feel it is important that the elephant in the room remain unacknowledged.

- The world is a very shitty and harsh place, especially to those with seemingly little status. Injustice abounds. Stupidity and absurdity reigns. And yet, almost all of us are expected to put on a happy, confident, optimistic face. Those unable to keep all the horror in are labeled freaks, anti-social, maladjusted, etc. People that fail are labeled lazy, not driven, etc. And yet, we pretty much all know the truth, but we like to lie to each other.

It's hard to understand.

tombert

4 hours ago

I find it kind of sadly amusing how many conspiracy theories exist about rich elites exist and then they go off about Jews or lizard people or something else ridiculous.

Because there is a conspiracy of rich elites who are trying keep you down. They don't even hide it, and they've been so successful at it that they have bought their way into the highest levels of government. They actively campaign to ensure regular peoples' taxes subsidize their lavish lifestyles and then actively try and turn us against each other instead of us collectively realizing that we need the people who actually do the work much more than we need the people who leach off of it.

elzbardico

4 hours ago

We're all a big family here Tom, and beating you hurts us more than it hurts you, but it is good for your morale.

mlhpdx

5 hours ago

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.

1234letshaveatw

4 hours ago

My Mamma says that alligators are so ornery because they got all them teeth but no toothbrush

js2

6 hours ago

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...

sp1nningaway

4 hours ago

I like the Hebrew syntax of the golden rule! I've never seen it before.

I've always like the idea of taking it a step further and trying to do unto others as they would like done unto them. However, the current state of the world has made me realize that lying to people that want to be lied to creates a flywheel of negative outcomes.

I guess the better way to improve the golden rule is to use empathy to internalize and understand the things other people are looking for, that way you can keep the golden rule simple, while not assuming that others want the same as you.

...we find that we may misjudge a man's attitude, his background knowledge, his aims, his standards ; and we may learn from our mistakes and take care even beyond the golden rule. (Karl Popper)

calmbonsai

4 hours ago

Watching our (newly hired) CTO lie to the entire company regarding the capabilities of a new feature I was hired to build was a brutal education in money-politics.

game_the0ry

3 hours ago

Its also very telling who takes the blame when things fail.

riazrizvi

6 hours ago

Thanks. I keep doing 3. I needed this.

tchock23

4 hours ago

This hits home. I started my career in market research after someone told me that it was the only part of the business world where you’re paid to tell the unvarnished truth, which I thought was cool.

It wasn’t until many years later that I realized the clients actually wanted to be lied to, and that if you weren’t willing to do that you wouldn’t succeed.

andai

6 hours ago

In this thread: dang, I wish I was evil too!

nowittyusername

4 hours ago

I had often thought about how far I could get in life if I had no scruples or morals. And I think I could get really, really far.... But alas I don't like to lie, cheat or any of that jazz. I actually do care. Honestly it feels like a form of brainwashing. As a kid you are taught all of these things that cripples your growth in adulthood while the other guy uses that as an opportunity to enrich himself.

officialchicken

5 hours ago

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.

vcarrico

5 hours ago

So there are two ways? xD

whalesalad

6 hours ago

My first thought was "cash, grass, or ass" but this works as well.

Ccecil

5 hours ago

Might not get you far in life...but it'll get you to the next town.

quotemstr

6 hours ago

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.

toast0

6 hours ago

Could be worse. They could have padded this out a ton with emojis and dashes.

prmph

4 hours ago

No, there is something intellectual gratifying about short pieces that contain so much depth and layers the more you think about them.

It is not the length of a price of writing that determines how good it is, the same way lines of code does not an effective program make. To be able to say a lot with fewer words is impressive

darepublic

6 hours ago

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

nunez

2 hours ago

Twitter submissions have been a thing for a long time here

hoppyhoppy2

5 hours ago

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.

officialchicken

5 hours ago

It's already about 85%: (Look at) me - with charts. We can replace those with TikTok dances instead.

dapperdrake

2 hours ago

Let me LLM-expand that for you…

nunez

2 hours ago

Sales in a nutshell. The world is a pyramid of lying and incentives.

greenhearth

5 hours ago

I think they meant "fount" of wisdom

cjs_ac

4 hours ago

'Font' and 'fount' are synonyms, although they tend to be used in different contexts nowadays. Even in the sense of a font for setting text, there are older works that discuss 'founts of type'.

Forgeties79

6 hours ago

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!

ThrowawayTestr

6 hours ago

I wish I didn't have any scruples, I'd be so rich.

claytongulick

6 hours ago

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.

andai

6 hours ago

"A fool and his money are easily parted."

Andrex

6 hours ago

The scruple-to-dollar exchange rate is just the worst. Or the best. Whichever makes more sense in this analogy.

greenhearth

5 hours ago

What a bunch of complete sociopathic crap this is

hootz

6 hours ago

Ooooooooh, so that's how sociopathic CEOs and directors of big companies get rich!

neogodless

6 hours ago

The "read the rest" button seems broken in Firefox on Windows... so that makes for a very short post.

Wowfunhappy

6 hours ago

I’m interpreting the submission as just what can be read on the page, but I still liked it. Brief and to the point.

gamerslexus

5 hours ago

That's only two ways to get paid, so it's either title is wrong or there's a missing part.

AnthonyMouse

5 hours ago

Getting paid is entirely consistent with going broke. Gross income doesn't have to be zero to be less than expenses.

Wowfunhappy

an hour ago

To be fair (and perhaps overly pedantic), while the article title is "three ways to get paid," the quoted maxim begins "there are three ways to make a living."

It then goes on to say that the third way will make you "go broke", which seems somewhat contradictory.

dentemple

5 hours ago

I appreciate brief and to the point. It's a world that's rapidly going away thanks to LLMs' love of over-explaining everything.

jmkni

6 hours ago

Ha I reached that and thought to myself "do I need to read any more?"

neogodless

6 hours ago

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.

jolmg

6 hours ago

The URL: #replace-with-the-found-url

From searching the text, it seems it hasn't been published on the WSJ.

Gualdrapo

6 hours ago

So the author lied and they are trying to get rich?

Aperocky

5 hours ago

Author never told us what happens when one lies to those who seek the truth... is that on a different plane of reference?

sunrunner

5 hours ago

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.

prmph

5 hours ago

You get paid, but it does not last

bigblind

5 hours ago

Then you become a poletician, though I guess that could also apply to lying to people who want to be lied to.

jolmg

3 hours ago

If they're a writer there, I would assume it's simply still in the pipeline.

jmuguy

6 hours ago

Same in Firefox on Mac. Links are hard, I guess.

sam1r

4 hours ago

He is obviously lying to us and becoming rich in SEO from our clicks to his page.

Took me a second. The reference "replace with found url" is a lie if the URL is not found.

jubilanti

6 hours ago

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".

tiffanyh

6 hours ago

This is spelled out on the FAQ page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

gghh

6 hours ago

Can you please spell out the spell out? You're linking 1300 words.

dewey

5 hours ago

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.

gghh

3 hours ago

Thanks

anon7725

5 hours ago

It’s Jason Zweig, the Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist, not a YC alum.

tim-projects

6 hours ago

I can already think of 5 jobs this doesn't apply to in the slightest.

brailsafe

6 hours ago

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.

IAmGraydon

5 hours ago

>These are "ways to get paid"

The link literally says "There are three ways to make a living."

andai

6 hours ago

There are slightly more than three ways to make a living.

tweakimp

6 hours ago

and they are?

tim-projects

6 hours ago

Day trader Garbage collector Zoo keeper Tennis player Lifeguard

apsurd

6 hours ago

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.

nunez

2 hours ago

gambling, option 2, option 2, biological gambling, option 2

xoxolian

4 hours ago

- Day traders: Usually get rich "lying" — as influencers. As I hear, very few successful traders have day trading as their only income (and very few are successful), so they supplement it with other income streams. And those income streams, when relevant to daytrading, tend not to inform audiences that they'll best earn maybe 20% per year, and maybe only be able to live off capital above $100-500k.

- Garbage collector, zoo keeper, lifeguard: As honest jobs, you can hopefully make a living doing these. To leverage these skills to become rich.. I don't know, but would imagine there might be some big lies along the way.

- Tennis player: How do they become rich, endorsements? Does associating yourself with a racket, shoe or energy drink count as telling truth or lying? Since ads aren't an analysis of the racket's technical properties, nor its contribution to your playing... I'd say it's lying.