[aprime7]

What are folks thoughts on changing hard work into difficult problems?

That seems to be the more interesting transformation. And potentially where startups thrive.

What are some cases where you thought you transformed hard work into a difficult problem?

[dannyobrien]

I actually think this (changing hard work into difficult problems) can be a danger on the individual level: a dislike of "mere" hard work means that we often seek to transform it into an "interesting" difficult problem. The classic example here is spending a day automating a task that only takes a few minutes of boring low-level maintenance a week.

[mikkergp]

A third category is easy work.

As someone in devops/sre/ops/etc., I think we do alot of easy work and most of our more ambitious work, i.e. automating tasks within our control or refactoring infrastructure as code is turning easy work into hard work. Often times in this world though we're dealing with someone else's code/software. A problem I've seen in many companies is keeping things up to date. Terraform Modules, Kuberenetes components, etc. There's a lot of hard work involved in this, and I do dream of trying to turn that hard work into hard problems of making it 10x easier to keep everything up to date; but I don't know that I've spent a lot of time trying to. I spend much more time automating, i.e. turning "easy work" into "hard work".

Sometimes avoiding the hard work is more trouble than it is worth, but turning hard work into hard problems can be difficult given the ambiguity and lack of control.

[dinkleberg]

That is an excellent point. Creating solutions to hard work by solving a difficult problem is a great land of opportunity.

Something that comes immediately to mind is Hasura. They’ve taken the hard work problem of building CRUD GraphQL APIs and made it almost instant for their users by solving those difficult problems.

[aprime7]

Or a much more interesting question: what are some examples of hard work that you're laboring through right now?

Most likely folks here may have suggestions on how to convert it to difficult problems :-).

[molsongolden]

Various flavors of process automation. Lots of computer-based work out there that is hard for humans but simple for a computer. Data manipulation tasks that are rote, tedious, and error prone can be transformed into a single click or an overnight script.