I feel like HN should have a special flag called "survivorship bias" that we can use to tag posts like this. For every project like this one, there are 1000 others where someone spent 15 hrs/week for 5 years, built something really cool, but never got any funding or traction.
Now, that time was probably better spent on a cool project than on playing video games or watching TV. But you shouldn't think that consistent engineering effort alone will have any payoff bigger than personal intellectual satisfaction.
I agree, but IMO that is missing the point of the post. For me, this lesson transcends software engineering and applies to nearly every quadrant of life.
Yes, progress does not guarantee success, but progress for its own sake is still worthwhile.
And even if your ultimate goal is to succeed, applying these principles makes the success more likely, which is most of what matters in any kind of entrepreneurial enterprise.
There's a great quote: "The harder I work, the luckier I get." Showing up every day is another way to create this luck, and if you do it consistently, you accrue a kind of compound interest on your work.
> I feel like HN should have a special flag called "survivorship bias" that we can use to tag posts like this
Pointing out the possibility of survivorship bias doesn't add anything to the conversation on articles like this. The author never claimed that everyone who works consistently will have a successful startup. The article is barely about startups at all.
We get it - Startup success isn't guaranteed and following someone else's actions isn't a guarantee that you'll get the exact same results. Startups fail and advice isn't one size fits all. I really don't want warnings that "results may vary" appended to every article about someone's success when we all already know that success is variable.
It's also missing the point of the article. The founded startup was just an example of something that was accomplished by consistent daily effort, but it's obviously not the only thing that can be accomplished with consistent daily effort.
The core idea of doing a little bit of work every day adding up into something bigger over time applies to more than just building startups, survivorship bias or not.
I think it's still worthwhile even if you don't have "success". I spent about two years steadily cranking away on a side project almost every day. At a certain point I realized, "Whoops, this isn't going to work," and just stopped. I had hit a dead end. Was that two years wasted? Nope. I taught myself a huge amount of stuff about data structures, functional programming and application architecture in the process that I wouldn't have had the freedom to try in my real job. I learned a lot from the mistakes that lead to me coding into a dead end, about how to validate ideas more quickly and cheaply. It was a "failure", but the lessons learned have proved to be hugely beneficial in other projects. The payoff was far greater than just personal intellectual satisfaction.
>For every project like this one, there are 1000 others where someone spent 15 hrs/week for 5 years, built something really cool, but never got any funding or traction.
You're probably right, but care to name some examples? I can't think of a single blog or article about failed companies or projects.I think they would be interesting to read and dissect.
It seems that people who have that sort of persistence and choose to do something are quite rare, making the survivorship bias of posting successes even harder to balance out.
Someone I follow on Mastodon just posted this interesting look back on hist first ten years as a software developers, with a couple of technically-failed (though still educational and fun) endeavours: https://noeldemartin.com/blog/10-years-as-a-software-develop...
Aha! But had the Xanadu folks showed up every day, they might have created something more than vaporware, and people might've used their software!
From the linked Wikipedia article:
> Wired magazine published an article called "The Curse of Xanadu", calling Project Xanadu "the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry".[3] The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it was not until 1998 that an incomplete implementation was released. A version described as "a working deliverable", OpenXanadu, was made available in 2014.
Sure, but there's also tons of people who worked full-time for years without anything to show for it, I'm not sure that short-term intense focus is any less subject to survivorship bias than long-term regular focus. I do believe that at least one of them is necessary but not sufficient for most types of "success".
At the end of the day, I think outliers (across all axes) is what makes for interesting articles that get upvoted, and so if you squint hard enough probably every article is subject to some kind of survivorship bias.
> Looking back, I cannot believe how much I’ve been able to ship over the past 6 years by just following this one rule.
This seems to be his only conclusion about the effect of working a little bit every day. And I don't think survivorship bias applies here. If you work a little bit on a product every day and don't ship a lot over six years, then you're probably in the minority.
I don't think it's just about successful startups or successful projects.
Personal example: growing up I practiced the piano for about a decade, 30 minutes at a time, usually 4-ish days each week. I got more disciplined about it as I got older. After 10 years, I went from not being able to play at all to being able to play genuinely impressive stuff. I'm not especially talented, but the consistent application of 30 minutes at a time really did add up to something wonderful.
No survivorship bias needed here. Anyone with access to a keyboard or piano could have done the same thing. Yes, you would've needed to want to learn to play at least a little, and yes, you would've needed to practice at least a little intentionally, but given those things, just showing up consistently over a long period of time can do wonders.
Not all hardworking people are successful, but all successful people are hardworking. Success is not guaranteed, it has an element of randomness. Attempting to be successful involves risk, and "survivorship bias" should be accounted as part of that risk. But still success is not entirely random, because only playing video games or watching TV will not result in it.
It's not that you should think that consistent engineering effort alone will have any payoff, it's that you should think consistent engineering effort might have any payoff.
Yes in this sense we would define it as "professionally high-achieving and or rich" rather than in an ascetic sense of "coming to peace with the existence of suffering."
With that definition, your assertion that "all successful people are hardworking" is clearly false. Lots of people become rich without hard work. Inheriting a fortune, winning the lottery, etc.
Now, that time was probably better spent on a cool project than on playing video games or watching TV. But you shouldn't think that consistent engineering effort alone will have any payoff bigger than personal intellectual satisfaction.