A Career Is a Pie-Eating Contest and the Prize for Winning Is More Pie
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The article 'A career is a pie-eating contest and the prize for winning is more pie' sparks a discussion on the nature of career advancement and the rewards of hard work, with commenters offering varying perspectives on the topic.
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Sep 7, 2025 at 7:06 AM EDT
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I know folks who have taken old technologies (perl, ASP.NET) off their resume so that they don't get approached by employers looking to hire for technologies they don't want to work in.
A golden rule is to fit your resume into one or two pages max.
Have the private copy as big as one wants, however take the effort to sell oneself to the actual position.
HR is looking for reasons to throw away resumes out from the pile, anything that makes their work harder will contribute for that.
I also think that he digs in a bit more:
> Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on whether or not you enjoy the work.
But I agree, he could have does a lot more analysis.
The metaphor is striking, though.
Sorry for lazy comment, but I had to
If none of these things have appeal, then one should carefully think about being in that job.
Why should a worker feel empathy for a customer if that empathy doesn't have any meaningful impact on them?
It's a good thing to say to a founder of a company, such as the owner of a small business.
It's a pretty useless thing to say to an overworked support staff... Answering more calls or putting out more fires very rarely benefits that role. Hell, I've seen support staff get told attempting to help a customer too long is a negative, and they're doing a bad job. Even in the best cases, I've often seen drive met with a management that just makes that effort the new baseline... "Great job, guys! Our ticket wait time is down 30% , now let's keep it there!"
So sure - have empathy for your customers. Don't have it blindly at bad jobs.
That's not how work is meant to be. In this metaphor, one should like pie. If the pie eating contest is offering free pie then it's perfectly legitimate to walk in, eat a normal amount of pie, accept your prize, and be happy with it.
- timm chiusano
A career is actually a contest where the prize is money that you can buy things with, including pie.
Obviously, there are no fixed rules. There is just the economy and how you position yourself to participate in it. That positioning is called your career.
I haven’t gotten a job by applying for one since 1986. I haven’t been recruited to a full-time job since 1998. So far this century, I have subsisted as an independent consultant, participating in the economy on somewhat creative terms.
So people boasting about their 'successful careers' are pretty boring empty bunch, rather tell me how you spend your evenings, weekends or vacations, how good parent you are (aka how much you suffer for your kids and don't outsource hard but important parts to grandparents or nannies), what you do for your community and so on.
I support four adults with my work, including myself. My son writes fiction that I suspect will never earn him a dime. His wife suffers from disabling social anxiety. My wife is 65 and not able to work. We all live together in a gentle and loving cooperative existence.
Meanwhile, my career keeps a roof over our head. Now, why shouldn’t I see meaning in my struggle to keep the wheels turning? I have built something important in the course of my career. Not world shattering, but also not nothing.
A career is an honorable thing.
My recommendation to the author is to read and reflect on “Atomic blog posts”¹, by Mike Crittenden. I’ll reproduce it here in its entirety:
> There’s no law that says a blog post needs more than one idea or more than one sentence.
¹ https://critter.blog/2021/01/06/atomic-blog-posts/
1. The hacker news title.
2. The tab title.
3. The image at the top left.
4. The text section to the right of the image.
5. The second sentence.
6. Different crop of the same image from before, but now below the second sentence.
I know that this isn't a curious comment, but holy shit dude.
In my view he put four separate but related and logically linked nice thoughts together, and tried to link them all thematically by restating the pie analogy briefly each time.
And the post was otherwise quite short and punchy.
I read this comment before the post itself and I expected to read some sort of lengthy AI slop repeating the same idea ad nauseam, but it was nothing of the sort.
https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...
TLDR: Holy shit, so much infant mortality, penicillin and vaccination are god-sends, holy shit. Also, your fields were all over the place and everything extra gets eaten up by taxes from Big Man.
I can't find the link, but I think Bret also had an article on how nomadic cultures had generally worse lives than settled ones, from what little we can know. If I recall correctly, it's hard to tell, as nomadic cultures don't really record things. But from the burial sites and little other evidence we have, it seems (again via mostly their bones) that their lives were much harder, shorter, more disease ridden, and more violent than what we see in agricultural remains. But also, trying to say for certain that any one set of bones was from a nomad, a settler, or something of a mix, was very difficult. Like, such categories aren't really all that 'real' when you have to sit down and fit a particular femur into a category.
But, again, I want to stress that I'm trying to recall something here, and that the thing I'm recalling also stressed that the physical evidence is quite scant as is and very hard to discern when you have it.
It might have only been possible for a small handful of people who were, unlike me, strapping, young, men, and fictional
I think future holds couple of surprises for you.
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1665/09/28/
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
A company just gave me more work. It nearly doubled my income.
And flawed for the same reasons, if not for my suspicion that this is a fragment of a greater point that the author is trying to make that can be further contextualized against the posts adjacent to this one, except that there is no date on this individual post nor are they any on the main “blog” index that would allow me to orientate myself thereby.
So I’m loving the mixed reactions that this is getting. And I reckon that the author could elaborate better through either a change of format (like a book) or UX revisions.