+1 on this request.

Would also like to be able to kick a report off automatically -- eg, on any exception or on any 4XX from the server.

[edit: I retract my comment that it's bad advice to not cancel holidays to work hard. I misread the comment that I replied to -- I had thought the commenter was saying don't work extra hard in your role as it's never worth it. That's not what the commenter said though. In my experience, people who produce more value in the world are more valuable and get rewarded more than those who don't.]

I think this is poor and dangerous advice for anyone who wants to get ahead in life. If you are happy to coast by and not achieve much in life, sure, don’t work hard. But if you want to be one of the few who either rise to the top in your field or to create value in the world, then don’t feel bad about wanting to work hard. People generally learn by doing and those who do a lot learn a lot. Of course, don’t prioritize it over things that are important to you (physical health, family etc) but don’t feel it’s wrong to prioritize it above stuff isn’t important to you (eg Netflix and YouTube shorts).

I think the difference between someone who "gets ahead in life" and someone who doesn't usually isn't the number of hours spent in the office. Usually its more related to how well you make decisions in your career, and the relationships you build along the way.

Go to therapy. Learn about yourself. Work on your communication skills. Figure out what matters to you and invest in it. (For most people, family and friends are high on that list).

By all means work hard, but be strategic about it. Martyring yourself for your company won't make people respect you.

I definitely thinks it's a factor. You really don't see CEO who worked part time during their rise to power. Maybe there is something to that.

Agreed but there is a big energetic difference between a future ceo personality working long hours vs a supporting staffer who is just sacrificing themselves inefficiently thinking someone will care. People care about results and the appearance of some effort. Long hours are a basic requirement but healthy emotional boundaries are what get someone to the top.

There's several game studios out there whose last two tweets were "we've just won an industry award for our game!" / "our studio is being shut down immediately".

It's worthwhile working for yourself if you do think you're learning, but in today's corporate environment loyalty is just showing your willingness to be exploited.

What do you mean by "getting ahead in life"? That you pass more time doing stuff at work so you are closer to your death without having done the things you like, spent time with the people you love and visiting the places that fill you with joy? Or do you mean money? I am pretty sure if you are good at your job and you are not in a dying profession there will be enough places that show you the respect you would extend to them.

Shilling for work place abuse and unpaid overtime isn't getting you ahead in life the same way begging for forgivness with an abuser will make your life better.

If your corp can't manage people's time realistically, why would you expect them to manage anything realistically? Get out and go to a real place that knows how to run projects.

Don’t ruin your health for someone else. People who throw themselves on this fire in BigCo don’t get recognition or reward, they get abused by the political animals that will take advantage.

Work hard for yourself to build your own. But don’t think for one moment that death marches will result in a swift rise to the top.

Working hard is the only reliable route to excellence, the tough part is making sure you don't get exploited along the way - 50% equity or walk.

This is the sound advice.

Nothing wrong with working hard, but make sure you get something about of it.

If you’re being asked to cancel a holiday because some clown can’t get anything done without setting realistic timelines, don’t do it.

But if you take a job where your boss says “we need to get this done by this date and we need people who are willing to get it done even if that means sacrificing work-life balance” and you get paid like you should for a job like that, then do it.

> get paid like you should for a job like that

Does that happen very often though?

I've been the person working stupidly long hours for many years. Eventually I stopped doing it, and I started to set boundaries around my downtime, and I found out something really valuable: Nobody noticed a difference in my productivity. I was doing far less, but nobody noticed. They all assumed I was still as busy, and doing as much, and it's because the things we all do to be super busy and productive ARN'T productive. You might ship some things faster, but the quality suffers, changes are harder to make later and everyone's tired all the time.

So no, "working hard" won't get you ahead. The people who really get that far ahead in life are the ones networking and learning the political games, not really working. And why do you need to "get ahead" to be successful? I'm ambitious, and I love growing in my career. I'm not someone who is happy with the bog standard things, but I've also learned that when all you value is being ahead of your peers, you miss out on more than you gain. And on top of it, you all end up in similar roles anyway.

One can work hard and still not cancel holidays for work. Plenty of people work through holidays and don't "achieve much in life". I've known many people in higher positions who use all of their time off.

Work hard != Work on your free time

I don't think it's nonsense but it's incomplete. A lot of people work really hard and achieve nothing notable. A lot of people sort of phone it in and do alright just by shrewd positioning (or luck). There is no substitute for combining both though: work smart and hard.

The trick is to make sure you're always investing in yourself. Even when you're working for others you be either "learning or earning", ideally both.

>I think this is poor and dangerous advice for anyone who wants to get ahead in life.

Oh yeah, every new-comer to the tech world thinks like this, and 99.99% of them don't get any further "ahead" in life than the rest of us. In fact, many end up further behind.

Unicorn tech founder here. Google — if you are reading, it’s stories like this and examples where you c.10x the price of products overnight like Google Maps that I would never let our team use GCP. Your reputation is losing you business here.

Someone else up-thread mentioned that they add Google as a risk when documenting risks.

I have run a 100+ user non-profit on Google Workspace. I’ve used it for many clients over the years.

There’s a reason Azure and AWS get my spend these days.

One of the biggest liabilities GCP has is that “G”.

Mine to Q of Star Trek.

But were you thinking of Q, Q, or Q?

I find assuming that there IS a solution helps focus the mind.

Thanks arnon. This makes lots of sense for software. Did you change SKUs based on changing pricing for hardware? If so, did this confuse or annoy 3rd party logistics providers who were asked to change labelling on boxes and have different SKUs for the same product?

We never needed SKUs for our "hard products" that we sent out so we never encountered this...

If the codebase is ginormous and hard to decipher then you could use the magic source control to go back in time to an early point in the codebase. It’s probably going to be easier to understand a codebase that is 3 months old vs 6 years old, so you could go and check out that version, understand it and then jump forward a few years. This also gives you the benefit of understanding the evolution of the code and understanding why it is not just what it is.

This sounds like a problem you will face many times in the future and therefore you may benefit from finding a solution that will solve for both this request and all similar future requests. For example, instead of writing any customised response, you could write a blog post / make a webpage that explains your approach to these types of request and then simply link to it in a reply. Then every time this comes up you can simply paste in “Thank you for your request. Please see [URL]”.

I find doing this type of thing (creating nice canned responses, creating reusable answers) nearly always pays off in the medium and long term and find that it’s much easier to put the effort into a response knowing that you’ll get long lived value from it vs it just being useful for one person.

Similarly, I often find others have done similar and if their thoughts align with mine I don’t need to write the answer myself but instead can refer to someone else’s blog post etc.

> simply paste in “Thank you for your request. Please see [URL]”.

I think this can make people feel like you don't understand them and maybe make them angry. It feels like an automatic response you would post when you haven't even read the request. I think you should at least clearly say that you don't want the requested feature in the response, then you can link to the page.

That sounds like a them problem.

"Pull requests welcome" if you want the feature. "Fork off" if you don't.

> That sounds like a them problem.

Yes and it's not nice to give people problems. It can even come back to you if they don't feel like they got a clear response and continue to bother you.

I like to communicate in ways that are clear, honest and complete because that way people get the information they want and we can understand each other. I think the world would be a better place if everyone did that and therefore it's what I recommend people to do.

I agree and if I thought I got any value out of communicating extra to them I would. Fact is, this is open source, I'm doing this for fun. I'm not here for you and I don't owe you understanding or complete information.

> Fact is, this is open source

The open source part of this doesn't matter. Open source means that the user has the right to use and modify and distribute the program; it has nothing to do with communication.

This is a communication question; it's about how to respond to people that are being annoying. It's always nice to do that in a way so that every one understands each other.

On the flip side, people need to be okay with "No."

Yes, a "no" is basically what I think was missing from that example response. Something clear that makes the requester feel like they got a response to their request.

The strings attached were the equity they gave up in exchange for the deal.

Which probably will be worth $0

Sounds like that’s the deal the investors agreed to.