[HN Gopher] A Project of One's Own
___________________________________________________________________
A Project of One's Own
Author : prtkgpt
Score : 501 points
Date : 2021-06-08 10:36 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| yoz-y wrote:
| For me the thing that distinguishes hobby from work is the second
| 90% of the project.
|
| Working on the ideas, the architecture, the interface and piecing
| it all together is fun and I don't mind staying up long if I do
| say a game jam. However, once everything is up and running, you
| get into the tedium of making the project actually work. This
| might be fixing all books or making sure that the door on your
| tree house can, in fact, be closed.
|
| In a hobby project you can say 'good enough' and be done with it.
| In work setting, not so much.
| amackera wrote:
| Sadly, in my experience at least, most commercial software
| projects also suffer from the "treehouse door doesn't close"
| problem. I think far too many "professional" developers give up
| after good enough.
| brhsagain wrote:
| Good essay overall, but this footnote in particular stood out to
| me:
|
| _> [2] Tiger parents, as parents so often do, are fighting the
| last war. Grades mattered more in the old days when the route to
| success was to acquire credentials while ascending some
| predefined ladder. But it 's just as well that their tactics are
| focused on grades. How awful it would be if they invaded the
| territory of projects, and thereby gave their kids a distaste for
| this kind of work by forcing them to do it. Grades are already a
| grim, fake world, and aren't harmed much by parental
| interference, but working on one's own projects is a more
| delicate, private thing that could be damaged very easily._
|
| It's so true. I got obsessed with programming around 11, started
| off with my shitty vb6 programs and moved on to reverse
| engineering video games and writing hacks. I never told any
| adults what I was doing until I was nearly an adult myself, out
| of fear they'd ruin my hobby like they did everything else. I
| remember thinking to myself how much school sucked and being
| determined not to let that poison the one thing I liked worked
| on. My parents thought I was a degenerate who did nothing but
| play computer games all day. Blew them away when I got my first
| programming job and eventually skipped college to start working
| right out of high school.
|
| I have a bunch of friends who say the same thing. They'd find
| some new cool thing, show even the slightest interest in it and
| their mom would immediately start making them drill it three
| hours a day until they hated it and weren't interested in it
| anymore. It's a sad story.
| josephorjoe wrote:
| My son and one of his friends spent a huge portion of their
| stuck-at-home time during the pandemic playing minecraft.
|
| It turns out a lot of what they were doing while "playing video
| games" was learning how to make really complex and unique game
| scenarios using minecraft command blocks and redstone --
| essentially creating both a RPG PvP arena and a multilevel
| party dungeon crawl w boss fights.
|
| I run a small minecraft server for them to play and experiment
| on and I've resisted the urge to try to teach them anything
| about setting up and running servers, backing up data, or using
| text editors with syntax highlighting or source control to edit
| and preserve their command block commands.
|
| I just show up for demos and let them know how cool what
| they're doing is and backup and reboot the server as needed.
|
| I've messed up plenty as a parent but i think not trying to
| turn their interest in programming within minecraft into a
| learning experience has been one of my better decisions.
| punnerud wrote:
| Called "Tiger parents" because this is common in China?
|
| Coined by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua who have Chinese
| parents.
| roland35 wrote:
| The term "Tiger Mom" became popular when Amy Chua (Chinese
| American) wrote a book about how she pushed her kids hard. I
| am sure the term existed before but I am not sure!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Chua
| greghinch wrote:
| It's funny that he wrote this now living in the UK. As an
| American living in England for the better part of a decade now,
| it still shocks me how much grades matter in the hiring process
| for professionals with many years of experience. If you don't
| get a first or at least a 2:1 in uni, and/or do poorly on your
| A-levels, it will hold you back for the rest of your life here
| codefined wrote:
| Interesting. Mileage may vary by company / area of work. I
| didn't go to Uni and went straight to work. Got a few
| A-levels but nothing special.
|
| Wasn't even asked about them for my first job.
| yw3410 wrote:
| It's certainly true for a lot of corporate graduate schemes
| require a 2.1 in a relevant subject and reputable
| university in the UK. It's typically used as an initial
| filter.
| rel2thr wrote:
| Tiger parents are already evolving on this, every elite high
| school student is now starting non profits or micro startups to
| put on their resumes .
| dpogorniy wrote:
| That's because parents are afraid that their child won't be
| competitive enough to have a decent life. If only parents were
| relaxed, if only they knew that their child can live full life
| without grinding through exercises. Then child just would
| pursue what they love, interested (unless it's unaffordable to
| their social strata). I wonder what we can do today to make
| this happen sooner.
|
| On the side note. There is a great book which makes easier for
| parents to make piece with themselves:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35457692-the-self-driven...
| foobarian wrote:
| > If only parents were relaxed, if only they knew that their
| child can live full life without grinding through exercises.
|
| Isn't that how young people end up with liberal arts degrees
| saddled with debt they have little chance of ever repaying? I
| guess it might be a full life still but I haven't met many
| people in this position who enjoyed it.
| philwelch wrote:
| > Isn't that how young people end up with liberal arts
| degrees saddled with debt they have little chance of ever
| repaying?
|
| Sometimes, but sometimes it's the direct opposite. People
| let their lives get consumed with the game of "go to
| school, get good grades, receive certification of having
| gone to school and gotten good grades" until they find out
| there's nothing left for them at the end of the road.
|
| It's a shame because there are people who are obsessive
| nerds about academic subjects. And maybe there are more of
| them than there is a need for professional, full-time
| academics, which is sad. But I think there are a lot of
| people for whom formal education is a cargo cult, and these
| people crowd out the obsessive nerds.
| fossuser wrote:
| I feel like there's a middle ground? Encourage the child to
| do well and be honest about the importance of
| credentials/marketability of jobs without crushing their
| spirit?
|
| I think the main issue is parents are largely ignorant of
| what's important for a new generation - especially when
| things are undergoing radical technical change.
|
| My fiancee is reading Walden - and there are comical
| similarities to a modern day van life Silicon Valley
| programmer. The industrial revolution left parents at the
| time clueless - something similar is happening again.
| thebradbain wrote:
| While we're comparing anecdotal evidence, here's mine:
|
| Have a liberal arts degree from a small liberal arts
| college (<2000 students), had no problem at all breaking
| into tech or FAANG tech internships, anecdotally I think it
| helped me get my foot in the door.
|
| Most of my peers also have degrees in liberal arts, and
| most of them are living successful and fulfilling lives,
| both professionally, socially, and even monetarily; some
| went into tech and finance, many are not.
|
| I think something important to realize is there's many
| paths to success -- even the same idea of success that many
| in tech seem to have (financial security) -- and someone
| who is passionate and talented will find one; following a
| pre-set college curriculum churning out STEM majors is just
| one way to get there.
| splithalf wrote:
| Some people are never content and need to increase their
| wealth and social status constantly. Others will be content
| and happy regardless of their social status. Those who need
| to keep amassing ever more wealth "to keep up with the
| Jones'" are the future we're choosing. Hope it's the right
| choice.
| yatz wrote:
| Very true, I opened up all electronics or electrical or
| mechanical things at home, from wrist watches to air
| conditioners just to see how they work - some I could not put
| back together like my watch, my parents never bought me a wrist
| watch ever again - haha
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| > I never told any adults what I was doing until I was nearly
| an adult myself, out of fear they'd ruin my hobby like they did
| everything else.
|
| I dropped out of college and was ~4 years into a successful
| career before it clicked with parents and other "adults" of
| what I had done and what I had "thrown away".
|
| Having been through 3 serious tech jobs and dozens of
| interviews only one company rejected me due to my lack of a
| degree - Capitol One.
|
| All said however I do think about going back to complete my
| degree at some point as I expect as my career progresses to
| upper upper management it might get in the way.
| 99_00 wrote:
| Tiger parents
|
| A largely Chinese-American concept, the term draws parallels to
| strict parenting styles ostensibly common to households in East
| Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. (wikipedia)
|
| The idea behind tiger parents is that Asians earn more money.
| And it's true, but not the whole store.
|
| But the problem is that average Asian incomes are pulled up by
| Indian-Americans. Chinese-Americans earn less than many
| European-Americans. So the whole concept is based on flawed
| logic.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >Chinese-Americans earn less than many European-Americans.
|
| On the page you link, Chinese-Americans have a lower per-
| capita income than Americans of Macedonian, Russian, Latvian,
| British (not otherwise specified), Lithuanian, Slovene,
| Australian, and Austrian ancestry.
|
| They have a _higher_ per-capita income than Americans of
| Scottish, Czechoslovakian, Croatian, Romanian, Hungarian,
| Slovak, Belgian, Swiss, Welsh, Danish, Israeli, Ukrainian,
| Canadian, Scotch-Irish, English, European (not otherwise
| specified), Bulgarian, Polish, Norwegian, Italian, German,
| Finnish, Irish, Dutch, French (excluding Basques), Yugoslav,
| Portuguese, American (not otherwise specified) and
| Pennsylvania German ancestry.
|
| I am curious to hear how you define "many".
| foobarian wrote:
| The Americans of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian
| origin must really be doing crappy if Yugoslav is in the
| lower bucket while Slovene and Macedonian are in the
| higher. Or maybe it is filtering out immigrants who weren't
| born while that country existed (soooo... before 1918? And
| after 1992?)
| selimthegrim wrote:
| They tend to cluster in certain metropolitan areas in the
| Rust Belt (St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cleveland, the
| latter two of which used to have regular JAT flights in
| 1980s) that have been hit hard by deindustrialization.
|
| Source: I'm from Cleveland, aunt married one of the
| (many) Slovenian-Americans there
| foobarian wrote:
| Those cities sound familiar from high school geography.
| We were told that Pittsburgh was the city with the world
| second largest Croatian population. Not sure when that
| would have been true but cool nonetheless.
| 99_00 wrote:
| >I am curious to hear how you define "many".
|
| I define 'many' as a number, such that it is sufficient to
| disprove the thesis that "Chinese parenting" (if that is
| even a thing, China is very diverse) results in higher
| incomes.
| MispelledToyota wrote:
| I think the idea behind it is the parenting approach. A
| hypothesis about it is that it results in children earning
| more money, but that's not inherent to the concept.
| m0llusk wrote:
| One idea is that tiger parenting results in kids that make
| more money as adults. The more general observation is that
| strict parenting results in different behaviors and
| expectations and patterns of engagement. While wealth is a
| dominant social metric other measures such as criminal
| convictions also come up and do indicate some differences in
| outcomes.
|
| Saying this is about flawed logic is a mistake as the idea is
| not based in logic but rather on the wild variation exhibited
| during the process of raising children.
| void_mint wrote:
| This matches my experience almost identically (starting at 11,
| vb6 hacks, lying about it). Had I opened up about my
| interest/what I was doing, my mom would've made me hyper focus
| on it but also used it as a weapon to demand obedience.
| dasyatidprime wrote:
| Without going into too much detail, my mother1 had a way of
| interfering in my attempts at projects both by trying to tie it
| into "getting a credentialed person on board"2 for Proper
| Supervision and piling on... other abuse, often after I was a
| significant ways in.
|
| Fifteen years after escaping, I still haven't published
| anything real, and I can see the pattern. I saw the pattern ten
| years ago, even, but deep conditioning is really hard to break.
| Only being able to finish things for _other_ people is kind of
| a disaster, especially when you wind up in the "need experience
| to gain experience" trap.
|
| 1 Who, again without too much detail, was Asian. 2 Which never
| happened. She never put any actual energy into it, I had no
| framework for approaching it as a child, and I'm not sure the
| surrounding environment contained people who were willing to do
| that sort of thing anyway.
| asadlionpk wrote:
| Wait so how do I 'not-force' my kid into programming these
| days? Our generation didn't have roblox, youtube and minecraft
| to distract us much.
| emteycz wrote:
| Half the junior programmers I worked with during the last 10
| years got into programming because of Minecraft with no other
| motivation at all until much later.
| Tarsul wrote:
| That's great! Minecraft was never "my" game but I was
| always happy that this _kinda lego_ game was the most
| successful game last decade, because it 's so creative.
| Just shows that gamers (or young people or whatever) aren't
| _just_ looking for dopamine rushes.
| grahamburger wrote:
| Our generation had distractions, too. TV, for example. I
| don't know the direct answer to your question but at least
| part of it is that 'not-forcing' your kid in to programming
| means they might just never be in to programming. My oldest
| is at least kind of in to programming (and also plays a lot
| of Minecraft and watches a lot of YouTube) my youngest two
| have shown zero interest in programing, but have interests of
| their own.
| distribot wrote:
| Imo TV is so much worse than the kind of entertainment the
| person you're replying to listed.
|
| The cable TV I watched as a kid was just garbage. I know
| it's still all ad driven, but the stuff kids watch now
| seems much more useful. Roblox is programming.
| celrod wrote:
| Growing up, what my late father probably wanted most from
| me is for me to find a project of my own. When I was in
| high school, he once threatened me with "get a life, or I
| will get you one". Engines, and especially motorcycles,
| were always a passion of his. He grew up on a farm, and
| "was rebuilding tractor engines when the other kids were
| learning to ride bicycles." He still holds a few land speed
| records he set with motorcycles he designed and built.
|
| But I had no real hobbies or passions of my own, other than
| playing card games.
|
| It wasn't until my twenties, after I already graduated
| college with degrees I wasn't interested in and my dad's
| health failed, that I first tried programming. A decade
| earlier, my dad was attending the local Linux meetings when
| away from his machine shop.
|
| Programming, and especially performance optimization/loop
| vectorization are now my passion and consume most of my
| free time
| (https://github.com/JuliaSIMD/LoopVectorization.jl).
|
| Hearing all the stories about people starting and getting
| hooked when they were 11 makes me feel like I lost a dozen
| years of my life. I had every opportunity, but just didn't
| take them. If I had children, I would worry for them.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I got my start around 11 but kinda squandered it. Spent
| most of my time reading about random obscure
| languages/technologies/frameworks I wouldn't understand
| until years later (though it's great because I can hold a
| conversation on a topic for a little bit while being
| completely incompetent) and swearing I was going to make
| games until I realized I couldn't do asset design worth
| shit. To this day I don't think I've ever made
| (graphical) game.
|
| I was around 14 when I first heard about Haskell, I
| didn't know anything about it, functional programming,
| type theory, lambda calculus or anything related. I just
| knew it was a programming language. Nowadays I see people
| around that age programming relatively fluently with it.
|
| All the actual programming I ever did as a kid was make
| terrible websites, console apps that did nothing useful
| in particular and a few desktop app shells that did the
| same. I was probably around 17 before I did anything
| "serious" and even at that point it wasn't great.
|
| Now I'm not very old, so I'm not sure if it was simply
| the environment I was in, but I didn't know that many
| other people that were into programming when I was a
| teenager, even with the internet and all I was normally
| the youngest guy in every chat/forum/site/group I was on.
| Nowadays though, I know several teenagers that could code
| circles around me.
| Tarsul wrote:
| You'd worry like your dad, and in the end your kid would
| still find its way like you did :)
|
| Also, there's no use in regrets. Only lessons learned.
| saalweachter wrote:
| > Hearing all the stories about people starting and
| getting hooked when they were 11 makes me feel like I
| lost a dozen years of my life.
|
| To be totally honest, most of us who start programming
| when we are <some small age> don't really get that large
| of a head start.
|
| I'd probably count all of my programming experience from
| ages 10-20 before I switched from math to CS as "no more
| valuable than 1-2 years of dedicated undergraduate
| experience".
|
| The biggest value of early programming experience is
| learning if you enjoy it well enough to not hate a career
| at it.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Boredom is the mother of curiosity. Take away the dopamine
| factories and let your kid be bored enough to be interested
| in learning things.
| asadlionpk wrote:
| That's pretty hard to do imo, specially when other kids in
| school have all kinds of devices and are hooked to youtube
| 24/7.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Kids in school don't have time to affect others 24/7,
| maybe an hour tops if they aren't in sports.
| jimbokun wrote:
| And that's the key, pry the device out of their hand and
| send them outside.
|
| Good luck actually doing it, though.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Indeed. Youtube is in short supply at our house, and not
| only as a result of the advertising, surveillance, and
| addiction factors.
| kbelder wrote:
| You can program Roblox... and Minecraft pretty much _is_ a
| programming UI.
| bredren wrote:
| I had mostly the opposite experience.
|
| I learned to program in zero period at Wilson High School in
| Portland, Oregon.
|
| It was a self-taught course but I didn't have to hide the work
| ---no one really cared. Not that my parents didn't care, they
| were glad I was doing something I enjoyed.
|
| But that no one had any idea how deep I was going into writing
| code.
|
| The assignments were given once a quarter or so by Veryl Smith.
| We had far ranging latitude to figure it out on our own and
| gold plate projects as much as we wanted.
|
| By the time the game of life assignment was due I had added a
| mouse interface and vga, color display of the cells and grid,
| all in Pascal.
|
| I often lost points due to things like shadowed naming or other
| bad patterns.
|
| But that didn't really matter too much. I made up for it
| getting "A" grades working as a teacher's assistant for the
| attendance office, writing hall passes and absence slips for
| myself and others as necessary. That was a great hack.
|
| Anyhow, this essay resonates deeply with me. It has good ideas
| in it.
| splithalf wrote:
| Immigrant parents, being more likely to be overachiever on
| average, are very different than normal parents in this regard.
| I didn't know anybody growing up who had to drill on school
| work. Some dads were into sports and would pressure their kids
| to be the next babe Ruth or oj Simpson, but school work not so
| much. The education arms race is very much a function of
| globalization and international competition, which has added a
| lot of stress to childhood for today's middle class American
| adolescent.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Very similar to my story. I grew up in a shitty industrial town
| of oil refineries. Schools and teachers were not that great, so
| I went to the local community college bookstore and stole
| programming books by stuffing them in my jacket and walking
| out. I got AOL, then internet and eventually IRC. I learned
| disassemblers, debuggers and x86 instruction set. Joined world-
| famous cracking groups and wrote key generators and cd checks.
| At the time I thought this was all normal, but looking back it
| was pretty wild. Eventually moved to silicon valley, worked for
| big tech, etc. But it was all no thanks to grades, exams, etc.
| yc-kraln wrote:
| are you me?
| opportune wrote:
| Grades still matter for the vast majority of people who aren't
| born into mega rich families. Most people don't become Silicon
| Valley entrepreneurs and even those that do benefit greatly
| from the pedigrees that academic achievement opens up (going to
| top colleges, working at desirable employers, although grades
| matter little there unless you're right out of college). For
| everyone else grades are still used for tracking into the
| traditionally high paid professions like law and medicine, and
| for tracking into the target colleges for high powered banking
| and consulting.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| You've hit on it, grades matter right up until you're out of
| school. For most people, they matter for getting a first job
| (because there usually isn't much else to serve as a filter).
| After that, nobody will ever ask for or look at them again.
| scooble wrote:
| I agree, but there can be some exceptions. I got auto-
| rejected when applying for a law conversion course because
| of my A Level grades. I have a first class degree, a
| master's degree with distinction and a phd.
| opportune wrote:
| Most of the high paying professions outside of software
| require the degree and that first job to break into them.
| Sure for banking and consulting it's not a hard
| requirement, but it's much harder to get into them with bad
| grades or a degree from a non-target school.
|
| It's really only in the software bubble where people are
| able to prove themselves to break into it, due to various
| factors including engineers being in very short supply
| relative to demand for over a decade now. Sure nobody asks
| for my grades now that I've been out of college for a
| while, but they still look at where I went to college
| (based on high school achievement) and my first job (based
| on college achievement) and subsequent jobs (much easier to
| get because of where I worked at my first job), etc.
|
| I just see this argument as very tone deaf because there
| are hundreds of millions of us regular people out there,
| and academic achievement is the most surefire way to get
| noticed and be given opportunities if you aren't lucky
| enough to come from an important/influential family.
|
| It's not only about the grades themselves but how they
| pipeline the rest of your career and credentials. Rich
| people can shmooze and scheme to get some of those
| credentials and opportunities for their kids without the
| grades, but not us regular folk.
| withinboredom wrote:
| > but they still look at where I went to college (based
| on high school achievement) and my first job (based on
| college achievement) and subsequent jobs (much easier to
| get because of where I worked at my first job), etc.
|
| No one has ever asked me about my schooling and I haven't
| had a school on my resume in over 10 years. Do they look
| at it because you put it on your resume?
| opportune wrote:
| I am still early in my career. And many jobs I have
| applied for/am interested in unfortunately index on
| having gone to a good school. I'll probably never work
| for one but I'm pretty interested in HFT and quant hedge
| funds, and have interviewed with them before, and am of
| the understanding that having a name brand college on
| your resume is a soft requirement.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| _" Sure nobody asks for my grades now that I've been out
| of college for a while, but they still look at where I
| went to college.."_
|
| How do you know that? Do they mention it? I'm really
| curious on this one.
|
| Other than the _rare_ alum, I haven 't had anyone comment
| on my undergrad more than a year or two out of it. Recent
| jobs and projects make up the vast majority of any
| conversation.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Biases work quietly. A recruiter that favors Ivy League
| grads does not comment on that to the candidates they
| contact, and obviously doesn't to the ones they don't.
| opportune wrote:
| To echo the sibling comment, it's more for getting past
| screening than for anything involving interviews.
| Although it likely does add some implicit bias even for
| later interviewers/hiring managers who see my resume even
| if they don't mention it.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| I really wish I hadn't bothered studying electrical
| engineering at a mid-tier school. There's zero EE jobs
| available for that kind of graduate. You just can't get
| recruiters to look at your application. Half of my
| graduating class is stuck doing self-taught DBA work for
| the local bank, telephone pole, or health insurance
| company. It's so frustrating.
| prtkgpt wrote:
| I agree with you 100%. Almost all of my EE group of
| friends weren't able to find jobs right away! Even
| internships were limited. Almost everyone learned coding
| languages in demand around Silicon Valley and were able
| to find employment! 4 years of EE went to waste. Sad.
| nzmsv wrote:
| You are right: you can't get recruiters to look at such
| an application. This applies to CS as well, not just EE.
| They only look at the top 10 or so schools.
|
| The trick is to get a job without a recruiter looking at
| your application. The only way they'll help you is to
| speed up the trip your resume takes to the bin. Your task
| is to bypass them.
|
| However, once you get your first job in the Valley
| everything changes. Suddenly the very same recruiters
| will spam you with offers. They operate like web
| scrapers: ingest resumes from top 10 CS school grads OR
| employees of SV companies :)
|
| So how does one get such a job? You'll probably have to
| take a chance on a small company that doesn't have a wall
| of recruiters yet and talk to the people who actually
| need to hire someone. Show them a project that will
| impress them.
|
| PS: there are probably good recruiters out there, but the
| chances of meeting them are slim. Personally I'd go with
| the "bypass" heuristic for the first job.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The reason software is different is simply that it is a
| recently developed industry.
|
| If you look back, all industries start this way. The most
| heavily-credentialed and tightly-regulated field you can
| think of today started off as a bunch of hustlers making
| it up as they went along.
|
| It didn't last for those other industries and it likely
| won't last for software.
| golemiprague wrote:
| I am not sure, software is a bit like a trade, you
| actually build something only it is virtual and if you
| build it they will come, nobody can stop you from
| building things.
|
| Medicine, Law or consulting are services, not actualy
| creating any actual new value. They build their moat by
| making the license very hard to obtain and making one's
| status and prestige the most important thing. You do need
| licenses to do certain trades but they are usually not
| that hard to obtain and the prestige of the institute
| giving them is less important.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jdmoreira wrote:
| Grades don't matter. They matter if you really want to follow
| the beaten path. Sure, go ahead... join McKinsey or something
| like that.
|
| Being good a learning matters. Being good at executing
| matters. Being good at communicating matters. Being good at
| leading matters.
|
| Grades and credentials are just gatekeeping invented by
| people that are worse than talented people. Grades are for
| status not for wealth and even much less for creative and
| fulfilment. It's a losers game. I played it and it was stupid
| I will never allow my children to play that game.
| [deleted]
| opportune wrote:
| For most people the beaten path is how they get on the
| ladder towards building wealth. You can always hop off the
| well worn part of that ladder but you can't easily get back
| on it once you've fallen off.
|
| You can feel that way regarding status vs talent if you
| want. Reality to me indicates that learning and execution
| are only important if you can get yourself into a position
| where you can use them. If you are a peon it's quite hard
| to make a difference in the world even if you have those in
| spades. The way you find yourself in such a position might
| vary but going through the well worn path is tried and
| true.
| bawolff wrote:
| Grades are an easy way to communicate your value. They stop
| mattering when you have alternative way to show your value
| (e.g. work experience).
|
| Finding non traditional ways to demonstrate your value can
| be hard and is a skill that isn't really tought. If you're
| going to not care about grades you better be sure you know
| some alternative way to show your potential value.
| zamfi wrote:
| > will never allow my children to play that game
|
| I can see not forcing them to play the game, but "will
| never allow my children to" always struck me as a weird
| tone.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| I will also never allow my children to gang up on and
| beat homeless people in the streets.
|
| Sounds like a weird tone?
| triceratops wrote:
| Beating up people is immoral and illegal. Grinding for
| grades is neither. I don't really see the connection.
| [deleted]
| hobofan wrote:
| Yes, still sounds like a weird tone. Do you think that
| other people "beat homeless people in the streets",
| because their parents allowed them to do that?
| [deleted]
| nostromo wrote:
| Grades correlate with learning ability, executive function,
| and communication skills.
|
| Good grades aren't the goal. Good grades are an indicator
| other people can use to gauge your preparedness for a job
| or opportunity.
| swman wrote:
| I'll just say that it is way, way more fun to work with people
| who also look at software engineering as a hobby.
|
| End of the day we're just playing with lego bricks that happen to
| be computer bits. Do you want to be the person who only knows how
| to follow the step by step book, or can build anything out of any
| legos?
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| This is really nice and particularly resonant with me.
|
| I've spent maybe a good five years obsessed with coding and
| development in all the ways, but I never went to school for it (I
| have an MA in philosophy), and have never had a real tech/dev job
| (I have been a random temp for almost two years now, cook and
| grubhub before that, and many different jobs before that in
| kitchens and teaching guitar and such).
|
| I dream in javascript and have many different projects that skew
| more into art than repertoire/repo ready projects. Out of pure
| curiosity I have read many many books on programming languages
| and development strategies. Countless hours troubleshooting and
| understanding other people's work, learning git, docker, emacs,
| gradle, bash; learning OOP and SOLID; learning lower level
| languages. I just eat it up, I love it so much. There is nothing
| more satisfying to me than grokking it and then showing that
| understanding by example.
|
| Most friends I talk to say I _should_ get a job doing this stuff
| I love so much, and I know the kinds of things I _should_ do if I
| wanted to try that, but that's not really my issue. Its more... I
| just don't want to jinx it, I don't want to get a job involving
| something I love so much because it just feels like it would ruin
| it.
|
| But... life is long and sometimes I wish I had real health
| insurance, general financial stability, and everything else that
| goes along with the other side of this compromise. Hard to know.
| and0 wrote:
| I can say as someone who fell in love with coding that doing it
| professionally did not extinguish that fire. Still spent 12 or
| so hours doing game dev this weekend, and a few hours every
| night this week.
|
| e: To clarify I started learning in 2013ish, became a full-time
| dev in late 2015. So 6 years later, still finding joy in the
| day-to-day, but definitely have a special fire for the pipe-
| dream projects.
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| That makes me curious what project you're working on, and you
| might be interested in my own pipe-dream project!
|
| There's a playfulness in doing something seemingly
| impossible, because succeeding at it simply means having fun
| playing with it.
| indigochill wrote:
| In my particular position as a professional self-taught dev
| (working as far from SV as possible), I would say it's a bit of
| a mix for me. I still obsess about code (more my own than work
| code), but I just don't have the mental bandwidth to code at
| work and then go full-bore into my own projects as well. I need
| to do other things with my time off.
|
| I've occasionally toyed with the idea of taking a less mentally
| draining career to focus my mental energies on my own things,
| but I also know I don't want to run a startup or think about
| money in relation to my own projects, so for now I feel like
| I'm happy with being on this side of the fence (it helps
| immensely that I happen to like my company and work).
| Tade0 wrote:
| > (I have an MA in philosophy),
|
| Judging by my experience you actually did go to school for it -
| or at least half of it.
|
| I worked with a few PhDs in this field and it appears that it
| uniquely prepares one for this line of work.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| It's definitely something I would make known/have made known
| in my resumes/applications, especially my training with
| modern symbolic logic/metalogic! But yes, even philosophy in
| general I think has some more organic agreement to coding
| beyond that.
|
| The hardest language anyone could grok is probably the First
| Critique and works like that, and really understanding it is
| quite akin to the abstract kinds of thinking you need for
| coding.
| openthewindow wrote:
| Paul Graham's essays now reflect his life which is obviously much
| less about startups and YCombinator and much more about family
| life.
| Aditya_Garg wrote:
| There's a video about a Chinese kid going through this exact
| dilemma
|
| https://youtu.be/4L6RKFbQoxs
| matt_s wrote:
| > It's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning
| their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully
| learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work
| that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit
| to building treehouses than studying for exams.
|
| The current educational system seems to turn off high school kids
| (anecdotal evidence being my own) from pursuing anything remotely
| school like. If there is mention of a "project" it is perceived
| as interfering with their time away from school which is usually
| involving sports, friends, video games, and media consumption
| (netflix, youtube, etc.)
|
| I want my kids to explore opportunities to find something that
| sparks their interest enough where they are excited about
| spending time on it, pursuing it on their own. I think this will
| help them identify areas of interest for college and their
| future.
|
| Any ideas on how to do this without it seeming like its "school"
| work?
| tmotwu wrote:
| People need incentives, and being competitive in school-like
| activities provides them.
|
| Universities have been moving away from evaluating candidates
| from raw academic or scholastic perspectives. For instance,
| removing standardized testing from the process. [1,2,3] This
| has raised concerns and considerable pushback from parents. It
| raises the uncertainty of admission, even if they raise a child
| to do everything right and mold them into the standard high
| achieving student.
|
| Of course, not unwarranted concerns: how do we fairly evaluate
| a student's external achievements without picking favorites.
| There is no objective measure to solve that problem.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/us/SAT-scores-uc-
| universi...
|
| [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-university-wont-
| require...
|
| [3] https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/a-special-
| announcement...
| matt_s wrote:
| I was asking how to get kids to explore things where they
| might find something that sparks them to desire to spend time
| on "A Project of One's Own".
|
| Competition in school or school-like activities is a
| fabricated incentive that doesn't have anything to do with
| kids doing what Paul is talking about with "A Project of
| One's Own". Chasing a GPA leads to a feedback loop akin to
| "keeping up with the Joneses" and basically the "plodding
| along" path in life.
| tmotwu wrote:
| Where do you find the balance between spending time
| maximizing your child's entry into a safe and secure future
| versus entertaining their passions? Not that being
| passionate about something and school-like activities are
| mutually exclusive anyway. Anyway, kids are far too young
| to decide what they want to do, so college is a good time
| and place for that already. Most students coming in to top
| universities come in undeclared.
|
| Maybe Paul's kids have that privilege to go down that
| riskier alternative. For many others, its non existent and
| frankly, it is tone deaf.
| ryandrake wrote:
| As a (relatively new) father, I think about this a lot.
| The way I see it, when I was my kid's age, we used to
| have middle-class opportunities for A students, B
| students, C students and D students. Maybe A students
| went on to good universities and did really well, B
| students went to college or something but still lived a
| solid middle class life, C students maybe could do a
| little community college and still eek out a living, and
| D students got by with hard work and some assistance.
| There was a reasonable shot at a middle path for
| everyone. But now the middle class is disappearing, and
| society is very quickly bifurcating into two classes:
| "Well off" and "Crippling poverty/prison". The bar is
| higher and the stakes are higher now than when I was a
| kid. The world is now a brutal and competitive slug-fest
| for those shrinking number of top slots, and if my kid
| doesn't get one of them, she's doomed to a really tough
| life. Only the top-tier of the A students gets a crack at
| "well off" and the rest--will be left behind. There's no
| middle path anymore. There is a huge tidal wave of
| inequality coming, and I am willing to sacrifice to
| ensure my kid gets on one of the few boats left. She can
| figure out what she's passionate about once she's safely
| on the boat.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| I actually learned this lesson playing World of Warcraft,
| a Massively Multiplayer Online game. You see in WoW there
| is a huge timesink of effort required to beat the game.
| We're talking thousands of hours of gameplay. It's a
| social game, and the more skilled the people that you are
| with, the quicker that comes. It's also an RPG, meaning
| that you need to do x to do x+1.
|
| The playerbase therefore learns the most optimal way to
| do everything the fastest possible way, and they call
| that the meta. The meta is almost always monotonous and
| boring. It's a terrible way to play the game, but if it
| gets you to be playing with a cool group of people,
| people will bore themselves to death.
|
| Another aspect of the meta is that being an RPG, you are
| just about forced to stick to one character. When a patch
| is added to the game and your character goes from the
| storngest to the weakest, your social status drops
| considerably. But no problem, because in a few months
| another patch might launch that switches the balance. The
| group of people that you deal with therefore need to
| treat you well when you are weak so that you will stay
| with them when you are strong.
|
| The neat thing with WoW is it's 15 years old, there have
| been many many cycles, and all of the people driven to
| play this way have long since burned themselves out. We
| see numbers for what they are. We see the social status
| games.
|
| The balance is to ignore the numbers and find the people.
| The people going to Stanford might just be on average
| better people than going to your local State University,
| but if you can find people to fill out your social circle
| within your State university that meet your criteria, do
| that. If you can sacrifice a little bit of effort to move
| yourself somewhere slightly better to get around better
| people, maybe that's worth it. But don't sacrifice
| everything for Moloch.
|
| And the lesson you learn once you give up the numbers,
| that we all intuitively know anyway, is that you very
| quickly get BIGGER numbers than those chasing it.
| Capability comes from the feedback of learning and doing.
| When you do stuff for fun and feel pain when you mess up,
| you become motivated to learn, which gives you more
| opportunity to play. So there was actually no balance
| after-all, the dominant choice was always to play.
|
| So here's to play. Here's to WoW. A gigantic waste of
| time that has taught me many of lives most important
| lessons.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _being competitive in school-like activities provides them_
|
| To an extent. I keep wondering, wouldn't it be better if
| schools/universities were structured as PvE challenges, not
| PvP ones? Trying to elicit a culture of collaboration,
| instead of pitting students against each other?
|
| I may be strongly biased, because I hate competition outside
| of games[0], and competitive incentives generally make me
| stop caring.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Particularly, games in which points are fake and only
| matter for brief status rewards and after-play joking.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| If I was a Professor teaching the same class to two
| different sections, it would be really neat to give the
| entire winning section extra credit based on the difference
| between the average values of the two sections. This would
| encourage group study and would ultimately lead to students
| helping their other classmates out. And since teaching is
| the best way to learn, everyone would do better.
|
| Maybe you don't even need two sections. Just split the
| class into two teams? Has this been tried anywhere?
| notriddle wrote:
| The problem is that, if both teams are randomly selected,
| then they should be expected to have equal underlying
| performance, and the only thing your grades are measuring
| is noise. It is unfair when one winds up with a team that
| happens to contain outlier students through sheer luck of
| the draw.
|
| The law of large numbers would smooth these kinds of
| things out, but a single semester is not a very long
| time, and we don't want classes to have large numbers of
| students.
| tmotwu wrote:
| Collaboration and competition are not mutually exclusive.
| Competition does not always result in self-determination.
| For instance, people mentor others because they might learn
| something new themselves or grow their network. Thus, you
| can enjoy collaborating with others while doing so because
| of your competitive ambitions.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's the question of who are you competing with, and how
| hard. That's why I mentioned PvE and PvP games. I find a
| fair competition against a (widely understood)
| environment fine. I dislike competing against my fellow
| players.
|
| As an example: our class at the university was somewhat
| unique in that, unlike most other departments/subjects,
| our scholarships were thresholded _only_ by grade
| average. So, where students in other classes were
| competing against each other to reach the few top spots
| that paid money, in our class, we all helped each other
| out. Helping another student didn 't jeopardize your
| chances at the scholarship, and it felt _nice_ when the
| person you helped got the scholarship too. We were
| playing a PvE game - competing against the grading
| system. Even though ultimate rewards were given based on
| individual performance, there was no downside to
| cooperation.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I have a 9-year-old, and he's pretty much into his "iPad time"
| where he gets 30 minutes per day. He's got a soccer team which
| demands a certain amount of time per week, but like most kids
| he has a lot of free time...
|
| We did two main things:
|
| 1) From the age of about 7, we started him on something called
| "Beast Academy", which is basically a maths course for kids,
| using examples in a cartoon-like style. He did simultaneous
| linear equations a month or so back, and I'm pretty sure we
| didn't do that until I was 11 or so...
|
| He's pretty competitive, so harnessing that and treating it
| like a competition or puzzle that he could solve was the best
| way to get him to accept a daily dose of maths, say 2-3 pages
| of questions in the books. That's not to say there haven't been
| times when we say "Beast Academy first, iPad after". He is a
| kid after all...
|
| What we don't do is treat it like schoolwork. We draw the
| distinction between the two - this stuff is more advanced than
| his school is teaching, and he understands that doing it now
| makes it easier in school, which is a win - but treating it as
| a "joint exploration" thing where we talk about the concepts
| ahead of time, and then he tries out the questions, then we go
| over them without worrying about which ones he got right or
| wrong lets _him_ see the difference between this and school
| too. It became more like puzzles and fun because we worked at
| making it more like puzzles and fun.
|
| 2) Every two weeks or so we get one of {Makeblock kit[1],
| AdaBox[2] or Kiwikit[3]}; he got 3 of the large technical lego
| sets (the 3-4000 block ones) for Xmas; he's seen me programming
| stuff before (Saltwater fishtank controller, most recently
| radio telescope software) and he likes building stuff and
| coding stuff - the kits above (apart from Adabox) often have a
| guide of what to do to get started then leave it to the
| imagination, and it's actually interesting to see where he
| takes them. I'm fairly certain he gets a kick out of the weekly
| show-what-I-built to grandparents over FaceTime as well.
|
| I also include him in my "building stuff" projects. When I
| wanted a better solution for hanging the lights off the ceiling
| over the fishtanks [4], we both sat down, I sketched, I asked
| him questions and whenever he came up with an idea that I
| thought would work well, or even if he came up with the same
| idea I'd already had, I'd say "ok, let's go with that",
| sparking interest and involvement. Even at age 9, you want some
| ownership of what's happening :)
|
| When he was 6, actually for his birthday party, I made a lego-
| boats raceway [5], and since it was for _him_ he gave a lot of
| input (and wanted to help make it so it was "perfect"). I
| don't give 6-year-olds power tools but letting him decide where
| the obstacles ought to go, then doing a test-run, and talking
| about why the placement matters and letting him change his mind
| to have something "better" to show his friends was a lot of fun
| for him, and he got a kick out of talking about _why_ it was
| better in the current configuration when people came to the
| party.
|
| We do other things, but the common thread is involvement and
| ownership, and that also comes with consequence. I'm
| (generally) fine with him making mistakes and not fixing them
| myself (unless it's really crucial, I'm not going to let him
| hurt himself). He gets to understand consequences that way, and
| (slowly :) learnt that it's better not to always insist on his
| own way.
|
| At the end of the day, I'm just trying to make him use that
| brain of his for more than watching videos, and the best way I
| know of is to make it fun to do. Coincidentally, that makes it
| fun for me too :) The results manifest in often-unlooked for
| ways: when we were watching a Saturday night movie he'd chosen
| (we rotate choice) and after a giant 60' tall baboon-like
| creature had jumped up an improbably large distance, he turned
| to me and said "that wasn't right - he's strong because he's
| big but he's really heavy too". There's looking, and there's
| seeing. I'm trying to teach him to see by learning to do.
|
| [1] https://www.makeblock.com
|
| [2] https://www.adafruit.com/adabox
|
| [3] https://www.kiwico.com
|
| [4] https://i.imgur.com/46jq2XM.jpg
|
| [5] http://lego-boats.oobergeek.net
| philsnow wrote:
| You mention in the epilogue that you would use plastic
| sheeting instead of directly waterproofing the 8'x4' plywood
| sheets -- that would also make the plywood somewhat more re-
| purposeable.
|
| How loud were all the pumps combined? You mention there was a
| bounce house, were the pumps quieter than that?
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Pumps were inaudible - I mean a birthday party full of 5-8
| year-olds isn't a quiet environment, but:
|
| - the pumps were submerged
|
| - I put a rubber mat on the bottom of the big black
| rubbermaid container, though the thinking here was to stop
| them bumping around rather than noise per se
|
| - and the connection to the raceway was via flexible
| tubing, so there was no vibration transfer.
|
| Overall I'd expect the pumps to be one of the least-loud
| parts of the system , the flowing water was way louder, and
| that's not very loud.
|
| I've since bought myself a 4'x3' laser-cutter [1] (and many
| projects have been jointly undertaken as a result :), and
| the plywood has been satisfactorily repurposed (one side is
| fine, so I just made sure the side I had painted previously
| wasn't visible. There's lots of projects where re-using is
| pretty simple :)
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/IiIvFFv.jpg
| okareaman wrote:
| > it's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning
| their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class
| dutifully learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam,
| when the work that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually
| closer in spirit to building treehouses than studying for
| exams.
|
| Charles Darwin ...University of Edinburgh Medical School (at
| the time the best medical school in the UK) ...father sent him
| to Christ's College, Cambridge, to study for a Bachelor of Arts
| degree ...In his final examination in January 1831 Darwin did
| well, coming tenth out of 178 candidates for the ordinary
| degree.
|
| Newton was a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian
| Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
| antognini wrote:
| I think PG is right, at least about Darwin. Darwin's father
| pushed him to study medicine, which he wasn't especially
| interested in. Darwin did okay grade-wise but goofed off a
| lot with his hobby in naturalism. His father didn't even want
| him to go on the trip on the Beagle!
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| Didn't the wealthy also have amazing tutors..? Today tutors
| are more for people who are behind but I think back then
| tutors would fulfill the role that the web plays today.
| Except way more effectively.
| myth2018 wrote:
| > What proportion of great work has been done by people who were
| skating in this sense? If not all of it, certainly a lot.
|
| I used to think like that. However, the years I spent on my
| masters and on my startup were a watershed.
|
| I was finally working on projects of my very own. But, after some
| months of extreme excitement, I was resorting to medicine and
| self help articles to heep me motivated and focused, especially
| when the boring intricacies started to pop up.
|
| The passion, due to its very nature, fades away.
|
| In my case, I alleviated those issues with method and discipline.
| They help you overcome the boring parts. The passion even became
| cyclic, as the growing body of work and solved problems made me
| feel engaged again.
|
| Nowadays I even feel much better about the plethora of not-my-
| own-projects I've worked on along my life.
| swalsh wrote:
| If it helps, I used to be motivated out of sheer wanting to get
| that thing that was in my head out, and see it working. That
| might be enough for a youtube video or a product demo with some
| executives at the company. Heck you can turn that 80% into a
| real career booster (I've done this), but it's not a production
| ready product. The last 20% of the work will take 80% of the
| time. It's really hard to be motivated for that last part. It's
| all the hard stuff that seems insignificant... and you've
| already got the cheese.
|
| If you can accomplish it, the trick to staying motivating is to
| figure out the mental gymnatics to move where you put the
| cheese in the trap. If you can do that... you have a real
| chance at being motivated past the proof of concept.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| > _If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and
| working on ambitious projects of their own, I 'd pick the
| projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but because
| I've been on the other end and I know which has more predictive
| value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't
| care about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects
| of their own, I wanted to hear all about those._
|
| That's quite rich coming from pg considering that the YC
| application explicitly states that they may ask for transcripts
| if you are still in school.
| tomhoward wrote:
| Where does it say this?
|
| I can't find any mention of anything like this on the
| application form or FAQs.
|
| https://apply.ycombinator.com/app/edit
|
| https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/
| bko wrote:
| Why does everything written on the internet immediately trigger
| such a dunk reflex in some? Is your comment productive to the
| ideas presented in this article?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| pg wrote, "When I was picking startups for Y Combinator". Did
| the YC application state that back then?
|
| Also, is it known how YC is actually evaluating those? Myself,
| if I were trying to pick people to fund, I'd consider grades a
| weak signal, and apply a concave, ^-shaped function to it, i.e.
| bad grades are obviously bad, but if the grades are all
| perfect, this may indicate lack of independent thinking.
| corpMaverick wrote:
| This resonated with me. I have been developing software
| professionally for 32 years. And I am counting the days until
| retirement. I don't really want to retire, I want to own the work
| that I do. I don't care if it is boring or if somebody else tell
| me what they want. But having autonomy on HOW I do the work is
| what is important. And when I have that, may productivity goes
| through the roof and that is when I am truly happy.
| andreyk wrote:
| I think one thing this essay misses is that schools enable and
| encourage having one's own projects. Some examples from my
| experience:
|
| - In third year of high school I joined the FIRST robotics club,
| and it was a pretty transformative experience. Doing such a big
| project for the first time, which I could not have possibly tried
| on my own, was amazing. And of course it improved my social
| skills, my communication skills, all that.
|
| - In fourth year of high school, I took our follow up to AP CS
| which was on making video games (yeah, I was at a nice high
| school). And we just got to make whatever games we wanted, within
| some limits. Tons of fun.
|
| - In college I spent a ton of time in the Solar Racing club
| (http://solarracing.gatech.edu/). Like, all four years - and this
| was some serious engineering work.
|
| - In college I went to lots of hackathons. My favorite project
| was one that visualized music libraries, I spent a few months on
| it after the hackathon (https://www.andreykurenkov.com/projects/m
| ajor_projects/meta-...).
|
| - In college I got into 3D printing and laser cutting, since that
| was available there (for free). I tried going to maker spaces
| after, but those are NOT cheap.
|
| - In my Masters program at Stanford, most CS classes have a
| project component where you do whatever you want. To take just
| one example, I built a neat little website in which you could
| visualize neural net models (https://www.andreykurenkov.com/proje
| cts/major_projects/Keras...).
|
| And, society encourages this stuff too, in terms of interviews
| asking about your projects and colleges wanting to see
| extracurriculars. Of course it's not perfect, most classes could
| provide a lot of leeway in terms of self direction. But it's
| worth acknowleding, especially in terms of schools enabling
| larger group efforts and providing the environment and equipment
| and knowledge for doing fun stuff.
|
| If anything , school did not beat out the drive for projects, it
| enabled it. I miss doing such things quite a bit, as it gets a
| lot harder to find people to do them with and it's seen as kind
| of weird.
| cousin_it wrote:
| I think the tricky part is keeping that sense of "awake and
| alive" as you get to the forefront of a problem, which might
| involve a different set of tasks than those that originally
| attracted you. For example, playing chess is fun for me at the
| tactical level, but learning openings isn't fun, so maybe I'll
| never get good. PG might have the same problem: making
| programming languages is fun, but studying the current state of
| programming language design is less fun, so the results (Arc,
| Bel) don't go very far.
| nindalf wrote:
| > That's why it's a mistake to insist dogmatically on "work/life
| balance." Indeed, the mere expression "work/life" embodies a
| mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct. For those to whom
| the word "work" automatically implies the dutiful plodding kind,
| they are. But for the skaters, the relationship between work and
| life would be better represented by a dash than a slash.
|
| So I guess this is what I'll be told the next time I ask a
| prospective company about WLB.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yeah this is horseshit for everybody except maybe founders. I'm
| selling my labor for money. If I work harder and the company
| does better, this translates into almost no extra benefits to
| me, with all of the net benefit going to the owners. I want
| "work/life balance" because I am being paid for a very specific
| amount of work and I want my employer to keep its nose out of
| the rest of my time.
|
| At least with a founder they capture more of the economic
| output of their overwork, but even then you hear so many
| stories of families that have been sacrificed at the altar of
| entrepreneurship that I can't even support this approach for
| most founders.
| Tycho wrote:
| You're not just selling your labour though, you're
| cultivating your own career. That's why people generally
| advance with more years of experience. You are the 100%
| majority stake owner in the startup of _you._
| holri wrote:
| And if you focus on WLB you're cultivating your life,
| health and family.
| dunnock wrote:
| PG is not saying everyone are skaters, neither convincing
| everyone to become skaters. There are definitely such people
| and work-life balance indeed is not as standard for them.
| Moreover they being hated by people who are just for money on
| a work as they are raising the bar, but it does not mean they
| should stop.
|
| I tend to agree it's a part of a character which also can be
| developed.
| corry wrote:
| "this is horseshit for everybody except maybe founders"
|
| Well, who do you think PG's audience is?
|
| A 45-yo welder? A school teacher who loves their job? Or even
| someone happy at their FAANG job?
|
| This advice isn't meant for them. Like most PG essays, it's
| obviously meant for people who want to be founders (or
| already are).
|
| You might think it's dumb. But given he's seen people go out
| and do this, what, 5,000 times now? (Not sure what the total
| YC company count is) with some median level of success? He's
| got something valuable to add.
|
| Perhaps you'd like 10x more qualifiers, 10x more nuance, 10x
| more comprehensive treatment of ALL potential types of people
| in his essays.
|
| But he'd be far less effective at reaching his real audience
| - founders and potential founders.
| raclage wrote:
| I think you're mostly right, but his writing never says or
| really even directly implies that it's relevant
| specifically to founders. That would be very easy to do,
| but by not doing so he lends an air or universality and
| depth to the whole thing that makes it feel more insightful
| to people. The examples about startups are interpreted not
| as specifics but as examples of universal truths when as
| you point out they almost certainly are not.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| PG is making large claims about the nature of schooling.
| The essay is not just for founders. He laments that people
| sit in class learning about Darwin rather than building
| treehouses and does not write that this only applies to a
| tiny minority of people who he expects to become
| entrepreneurs.
|
| I also think it can be bad advice for founders too.
| mpfundstein wrote:
| i think you really didn't get the message, did you? maybe
| read it again, carefully, and then edit your initial post
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I know what PG is saying. And I'm saying that it is
| _stupid_ and is (consciously or not) part of a larger
| culture designed to allow owners to extract ever more labor
| from workers without paying them more. It is so easy for
| him to make wild decrees about the best way to live,
| because he happens to hold the keys to the kingdom.
|
| Even if I care deeply about projects and software and even
| entrepreneurship in my own time - that should have
| precisely zero bearing on my work.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| That comment is entirely unhelpful, and a net negative with
| the condescension. If you think someone misunderstood, help
| them by restating the idea in a way you find more
| understandable.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Tangentially to that, I've worked at exactly one place that
| had a really good profit-sharing system. On paper, everyone
| had a relatively low salary. But, at the end of the fiscal
| year, they'd tally up the profits, divide them up among the
| employees, and cut everyone a check.
|
| (Naturally, this was not a publicly-held company, nor was it
| financially beholden to any venture capitalists. One rarely
| finds much equity in extractive economies, regardless of
| whether the thing being extracted is mineral resources or
| intellectual resources.)
|
| There were a few peculiar social phenomena that might have
| been attributable to this setup. One was the natural culture
| of collaboration and relative lack of office politics.
|
| A more interesting one, though, was that people rarely worked
| any overtime at all. My guess as to why is that more
| traditional pay structures encourage more ambitious people to
| overwork, because it sets up a situation where employees feel
| a lot of pressure to compete with each other for raises. (And
| it demotivates other people, because they understand that any
| level of productivity in between the minimum, and whatever it
| takes to get ahead in the rat race, is wasted effort.) If the
| rising tide really does, obviously, visibly lift all boats,
| though, then there's no particular need to treat your entire
| career like a Black Friday doorbuster.
| bsedlm wrote:
| sounds like it was a relatively small company, but was it?
| how many people were there?
| mumblemumble wrote:
| About 1,000.
| lelanthran wrote:
| Yeah; I recently had a conversation with someone who went off
| at their manager because their manager said that the company
| (the second largest in its field in the world) told them that
| "work-life balance" is not the correct term, the official
| company policy replaces the term with "work-life integration".
|
| Personally, I probably would have read that manager the riot
| act for even considering it appropriate to do.
| davidcbc wrote:
| On the bright side it's better to find out ahead of time. If
| someone told me this during the hiring process I would
| immediately end negotiations.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| It really speaks to how little PG understands the realities of
| being an employee, rather than a founder or "visionary" or some
| such high up idea person.
|
| I enter into employment with an employer, and the terms are
| laid out in a contract, possibly based on an agreement the
| company and a union.
|
| My employer gets to call the shots during the working hours, as
| specified by the contract. For anything outside of that, they
| have no say in what I do, and the less they know about it, the
| better. Work is something I have to be compensated for,
| otherwise I wouldn't be doing it.
|
| I bring very little of my private life into work, just what
| seems reasonable for general interactions with my colleagues
| and talk about random subjects over lunch. I'll talk about a
| recent concert I went to or a nice restaurant, and that's it.
| We can have a beer at the Friday bar and some small talk, but
| colleagues != friends. We have a professional and cordial
| relation, not a friendship.
|
| Conversely, I also don't take my work home with me. My phone
| and laptop get shut off completely at the end of the work day,
| and they do not get switched on before I am at the office again
| (or around 8 when WFH).
|
| My time is _mine_ , and that is non-negotiable.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I just wish I could get some signal out of his writings as to
| if PG is simply out of touch or knowingly has less than
| positive intent as it relates to the startup/founder/employee
| power balance. Does he really not understand how much more
| benefit founders realize versus employees at an organization?
| Or does he, and this is marketing for startup portfolio
| company employee pipelines? I assume you will be passionate
| if you possess double digit percentages of the total equity
| of your company, but not so if you have a fraction of a
| percent and are at will employed.
|
| A job should absolutely be able to be just a job you perform
| to generate income if you can do the job, regardless of
| passion for it. The bar is high enough already for employees
| trying to climb the employment/career rock face without
| retired "thought leaders" adding additional constraints.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| > Or does he, and this is marketing for startup portfolio
| company employee pipelines?
|
| I think it's a marketing pipeline for founders. Maybe very
| early stage employees.
|
| After reading many pg essays, I have this feeling that he's
| protective of founders. Not just YC founders, or other
| founders. But possible founders, too. Really the "spirit"
| of "founder" as it appears to him. (Use "idea" instead of
| "spirit" if it sounds too woo for you.)
|
| He sometimes sees this spirit as under attack. Some other
| writer will dogmatically insist on work/life balance. It's
| probably targeted at the majority of working people who are
| selling their labor for the wages they need to get by.
| Personally, I think it's a good message. But there's no
| specific carve out in the article for founders, so maybe
| one person out there is a little less foundery than they
| would be otherwise. This worries pg.
|
| So he writes some sentence like the one that kicked off
| this comment chain. It's really just "leave founders
| alone!". The intended effect is that those other writers
| insist a little less dogmatically, and that people feel
| enabled to dive into their own projects a bit more.
|
| What the top comment is responding to is the perversion
| that so often happens. The line gets taken not just as
| gospel for the founder to live, but to preach. "We're
| looking for people who believe in work dash life, not work
| slash life." they say to the software engineer they're
| expecting to pop tickets off of JIRA for 40% below market
| wages and options on 0.01% of the company.
| prawn wrote:
| I don't think he's ever talking to future/lifelong employees.
| His passion is clearly startup founders and his writing is
| always directed at those people.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Tangentially related, I am writing a book each with each of my
| (older) kids. Its nothing much (just some fun sci-fi that got
| them a bit interested in the project(s) at all) but it is
| _theirs_. Its rumbles along as they have ideas - I try and type
| up and edit a bit, we sometimes kick around ideas at 'storytime'
| (which is a bit less fun for them as they enter teens).
|
| The final goal will be a few copies printed off the Amazon-
| whatjamacallit and read 'for real'.
|
| But yes. Something real, that is theirs.
| ximm wrote:
| I kept waiting for the virgina woolf reference, but it never
| came...
| [deleted]
| shmageggy wrote:
| One (of the many) things that irks me about most of the writing
| from SV-bigwig-types: they almost never cite anything.
| olly_r wrote:
| Why has this been downvoted? Does no one else think it's
| strange that the title of the post is a direct reference to
| Woolf but she's not mentioned at all?
| Kevin_S wrote:
| I find that ownership of one's work is a gigantic motivator for
| me, though not necessarily for others. I moved from a consulting
| job to academic research and am significantly more fulfilled
| doing research projects rather than being a small piece of a
| greater machine at a corporation.
|
| There is nothing I love more than finding the seed of an idea and
| spending a whole day getting it started.
| srikanthap18 wrote:
| there is a saying and it may be relevant to quote here - "first
| 30 years of your life you make hobbies, the next 30 years of your
| life your hobbies makes you"
| choonway wrote:
| [2]Oh but it already has happening in Singapore. IF the kid can't
| make it through the conventional academic path, and has to rely
| on the discretionary route, there are plenty of coaches who will
| 'teach' your kid how to interview and even 'help' write the essay
| on his 'interests'.
|
| Of course, the interviewers can easily spot those coached this
| way, but that is not going to stop the tiger mom from doing what
| she wants.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Read also a much better essay by a vastly more skilled writer
| with quite a different view, Bertrand Russell, "In Praise of
| Idleness."
|
| https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
|
| Russell would say that people of the age to be tech start-up
| fodder should instead DO NOTHING. It's better for them and for
| society.
|
| > I hope that after reading the following pages the leaders of
| the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do
| nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.
|
| ...and...
|
| > I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is
| being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness
| of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an
| organized diminution of work.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Russell had the benefit of being born into the highest classes
| of English society and succeeding at everything he undertook. I
| don't think his advice is generally applicable, and he didn't
| seem to follow it himself.
| retzkek wrote:
| Isn't that the point, though? He was able to live leisurely,
| and pursue whatever interested him, which helped him be
| successful.
|
| This is a main argument for UBI - how many people who
| currently have to work sub-optimal jobs just to survive,
| would be able to explore and innovate instead?
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I think BR's advice is more generally applicable than PG's.
|
| PG has always been about the grind: the enormous work and
| outsized rewards of tech startups. Very few people are or
| ever will be successful startup founders using PG's
| definition of success (which ends with a billion dollars
| minus whatever the VC's take). I admit it's interesting to
| read sometimes, but it will not resonate fully unless you're
| all about the business.
|
| BR is more about the individual, their potential, and the
| life of the mind. None of his ideas valorize about money and
| status.
| gregorymichael wrote:
| As a father of two kids who enjoyed this article, I clicked on
| the comments thinking, "I bet the top one is a criticism of
| PG." I don't understand how a predictable snide remark about
| PG's writing elevates this conversation. If the purpose of
| writing is to be read and to provoke thought and action, PG is
| a _great_ writer.
| paulz_ wrote:
| Hey if the worst thing the HN comments have to say is "Well,
| he's no Bertrand Russell." I'd call that a pretty positive
| reception!
| omarhaneef wrote:
| Same thought.
|
| PG gets held to a higher standard than anything else on here.
| If some random smart person put up the same article, everyone
| would congratulate them for at least the effort.
|
| I can't tell if PG's (cultivated) simple style makes people
| think the "idea" is simple.
|
| In any case, even if people don't like something, they don't
| usually go out of their way to tell the author, especially
| when it is something as personal as PG's essays.
|
| This is something else PG does in this essay: he pays
| attention to his own feelings and sensations, and draws
| lessons out.
|
| Not saying you have to like that sort of thing, but at least
| look at it based on its own goals.
|
| p.s. I keep adding to this response but Russell's answer
| doesn't really contradict PG, at least not the way I read
| them.
| gist wrote:
| > If some random smart person put up the same article,
| everyone would congratulate them for at least the effort.
|
| Some 'random smart person' or 'some random notable smart
| person'?
|
| Perhaps what people react to is the implied wisdom and halo
| around PG. That creates the negativity. It's the 'he's
| achieved something therefore what is being said is
| notable'.
|
| If PG wanted he could post same thoughts under some assumed
| name or blog (without having Trevor, Paul et all review
| first) and what people think.
|
| Also he is not opining about an issue where his expertise
| in particular is anything special. What he has achieved in
| life (that creates the halo) is not related to what he is
| talking about. And even in what his area of expertise is
| (startups or programming) he is not even close to being
| right most of the time (maybe programming because that is
| more science than art).
| omarhaneef wrote:
| I think there is something to what you say, but the
| "halo" isn't his problem. He should write as he pleases.
|
| He doesn't have to be an expert in what he writes. I mean
| from his own perspective (I assume, never met him, don't
| know him) he is just a regular person writing a regular
| article about something he found interesting.
|
| It is entirely the reader's problem if they put this
| extra pressure on his "implied wisdom and halo".
| shmageggy wrote:
| > _PG gets held to a higher standard than anything else on
| here._
|
| This is a crazy statement to me. I'm sure you believe it,
| but I have the exact opposite impression: that if the
| majority of his stuff were posted anonymously on another
| domain nobody would notice or care.
|
| > _even if people don 't like something, they don't usually
| go out of their way to tell the author_
|
| I think people do this because of the outsized home-crowd
| effect. His stuff is always (IMO) disproportionately
| upvoted here so that entices a reaction.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| > if the majority of his stuff were posted anonymously on
| another domain nobody would notice or care.
|
| That may be true, but it does not contradict anything I
| said.
| munificent wrote:
| _> PG gets held to a higher standard than anything else on
| here._
|
| He's unbelievably wealthy and created HN. That gives him an
| outsize influence that doesn't come from the merit of his
| ideas. Critique is a useful counterbalance to that effect
| so that his ideas get a level of weight more appropriate to
| their worth.
| lliamander wrote:
| People joined HN because of the merits of his ideas.
| [deleted]
| raclage wrote:
| > If the purpose of writing is to be read and to provoke
| thought and action
|
| There's a LOT more to good writing than that, and in any
| event it's not that big of an insult to say someone isn't as
| good a writer as Bertrand Russell.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| I think PG's argument is that having your own projects is
| joyful and is more akin to play than work.
|
| Not everyone wants to do this and being idle in that case is
| great as well.
|
| I get extremely bored If I'm idle for too long.
| codezero wrote:
| A very suspect position coming from an investor who wants to
| turn your passion project into a profitable corporation that
| he has a large stake in.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Precisely! In the PG world-view "success" means a unicorn
| start-up and a billion dollar "exit."
| [deleted]
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I feel similarly.
|
| I think, however, that PG's idea of "a project" as much as he
| says it should be "for fun" -- is actually just a segway
| (wormhole) into a start-up!
|
| > One way to ensure autonomy is not to have a boss at all.
| There are two ways to do that: to be the boss yourself, and
| to work on projects outside of work. Though they're at
| opposite ends of the scale financially, startups and open
| source projects have a lot in common, including the fact that
| they're often run by skaters. And indeed, there's a wormhole
| from one end of the scale to the other: one of the best ways
| to discover startup ideas is to work on a project just for
| fun.
| mcguire wrote:
| I guess VCs wouldn't be considered "bosses"?
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| VCs don't want you to _feel_ like they 're bosses.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Indeed, sometimes founders learn "the hard way" who the
| boss really is.
| sangnoir wrote:
| FYI: it's spelt _segue_. Segway is the brand-name of a
| self-balancing wheeled contraption that was supposed to
| revolutionize urban transportation 2 decades ago, but only
| saw success in the mall-cop niche.
| Izkata wrote:
| We also have Segway tours in Chicago, where you get to
| ride one while seeing the sights.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Yikes! I guess I've never seen "segue" in writing before,
| always spoken. I didn't know!
| sangnoir wrote:
| I feel you! I mostly suffer from the opposite problem
| (seen words in writing by never heard them spoken, and
| end up pronouncing them wrong).
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yes, but also no. PG is not just saying that this is good for
| people, but also should be sought by their employers. The
| former is fine. Go find a thing that brings you joy and pay.
| The problem is when employers seek people who find joy in
| their work so they can abuse them by cutting other benefits.
| kd5bjo wrote:
| I think you mischaracterize Russell's view; his "doing nothing"
| looks an awful lot like Graham's "project of your own:"
|
| > In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four
| hours a day every person possessed of scientific curiosity will
| be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint
| without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young
| writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by
| sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic
| independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the
| time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and the
| capacity. Men who in their professional work have become
| interested in some phase of economics or government will be
| able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment
| that makes the work of university economists lacking in
| reality. Medical men will have time to learn about the progress
| of medicine. Teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to
| teach by routine things which they learned in their youth,
| which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.
|
| He's not talking about literally sitting still, but about
| having the freedom to do _whatever you want_ , without needing
| to justify your actions to anyone. For some people, that's
| watching TV all day. For others, that's actively pursuing a
| vision.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| I read it and I don't think it's a "much better essay by a
| vastly more skilled writer". It's not practical, but PGs essay
| is.
|
| Peculiarly, I think your opinion and the difference between the
| two essays gives credibility to PGs points. One essay by an
| academic, and the other by a creator and people err on the
| relative value of the academic's because that's what they're
| taught to do.
| simiones wrote:
| Russel's essay challenges many long-held assumptions about
| how the world _should_ even work, so it goes far deeper than
| PG 's essay. It is held in high regard particularly because
| of this, not because Russel was an academic.
|
| It also explains its points in quite a lot of detail,
| building a very clear picture of the world and how it got
| here, pre-emptively dispelling any attack in the style of
| Chesterton's fence: it not only complains about the negative
| effects of the praise for work, but also explains why they
| were initially put in place.
|
| Thirdly, PG's essay is essentially a special case of pretty
| well known, more general point. PG is essentially word for
| word stating a common socialist critique of wage work: the
| alienation one feels when their work is not under their own
| control, but instead dictated by a capitalist owner. "Finding
| a project of one's own" is in fact the individualist version
| of "seizing the means of production".
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| > One essay by an academic, and the other by a creator
|
| It's a bit unfair to paint PG as just an "academic". Sure he
| basically rushed from academia straight into the business
| world, but he's created things as well. I mean being an
| investment capitalist will hardly compete with creating
| ambitious works like Principia Mathematica, but PG has
| written a few books on the side. Some of his earlier stuff,
| like On Lisp isn't half bad.
|
| PG has also done his fair share to influence other creators,
| of course his influence will never be near as great as
| Russel's, I mean you don't run into a Wittgenstein more than
| once a generation. While most of PGs influence has been
| mostly to help other capitalist acquire more wealthy by any
| means necessary, he was able to help a few very interesting
| people like Aaron Swartz.
|
| And while PG will never stick is neck out for anyone but
| himself, worried endlessly about this "intellectual"
| reputation, you can't expect all creators to be willing get
| themselves thrown in prison at the age of 89 to fight for
| what they believe is right.
|
| tl;dr sure PG will never be as powerful of a creative and
| inspirational force as Russell, but it's unfair to say he's
| "just an academic"
| [deleted]
| simiones wrote:
| The GP was saying _Russel_ is "just an academic", while PG
| is painted as a "creator".
| tomgp wrote:
| I think that was not_jd_salinger's joke, challenging the
| tacit assumption that academia produces nothing of value
| or practical worth whilst business people are inherently
| creative and value creating.
| fallat wrote:
| I read it and I don't think it's a "much better essay by a
| vastly more skilled writer". It's not practical, but BRs
| essay is.
|
| Peculiarly, I think your opinion and the difference between
| the two essays gives credibility to BRs points. One essay by
| a egocentric multimillionaire, and the other by a man of
| knowledge and people err on the relative value of the people
| who make money because that's what they're taught to do.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| What is the point of this post exactly? That the same logic
| can be used to argue the opposite if you invert the basic
| assumptions? Do you think that's such a groundbreaking
| observation that it justfies such a snarky post? If you
| actually wanted to contribute something, how about
| attacking those basic assumptions?
| thrower123 wrote:
| This touches on one of the most demotivating facets of modern
| work: the obsession with collaboration.
|
| If you never have any autonomy or space to develop a sense of
| ownership, outside of being yoked like an ox in a team or mired
| in the tyranous mediocrity of committees, it's extremely
| difficult to care about what you are doing.
| WJW wrote:
| My word, so much this. It is astounding how companies manage to
| kill initiative at every level as they grow. Individual team
| members can't change anything because they are at the bottom of
| the ladder and have to conform to the wishes of "the team" and
| low/middle managers somehow have even less autonomy because
| they can't go against their own managers but also have to
| navigate the peculiarities of their reports and various
| committees. You'd think that high level managers get more
| autonomy, but the demands of office politics (one serious
| mistake and you lose the shot at the C-suite you worked your
| whole career for) combined with their distance to people who
| can actually implement any changes they'd wish to make ensures
| that high level managers also have very little actual autonomy.
|
| It does not help that the word "ownership" has become a
| euphemism for "you must now care about this thing and fix it
| when it breaks at 2am, but economic benefits of any
| improvements to it will still flow to the shareholders". You
| get the drawbacks of ownership but not the benefits.
| 0xFACEFEED wrote:
| I don't think the problem is an obsession with collaboration.
| I've observed that it's mostly a defensive measure.
|
| The amount of damage that (sorry for putting it this way)...
| stupid people... can do is unbounded. The potential blast
| radius of bad decisions grows with the size of the company.
| Recovering from bad decisions is also very costly.
|
| The flip side of autonomy and empowerment is just that. When
| it's in the hands of a person that has a sense of pride in
| their work, a high bar for quality, determination to get the
| job done, loves the customer/user, etc then it's a recipe for
| productivity and happiness. When it's in the hands of a person
| who constantly ships broken code, has no work ethic, blames or
| doesn't care about the user, is jumping on every newest fad,
| etc then it can kill a whole company or a department.
|
| The only solution I've seen is hiring VERY defensively ("one
| bad apple..."), keep the team small, and keep the scope/focus
| very narrow. That's just not possible in the enterprise space
| though.
| [deleted]
| babarganesh wrote:
| a small gripe about the otherwise excellent writing:
|
| > at that point high standards are not merely useless but
| positively harmful. There are a few people who start too many new
| projects, but far more, I suspect, who are deterred by fear of
| failure from starting projects that would have succeeded if they
| had.
|
| I think this buries the lede a bit. And "success" isn't a good
| measure, when the important thing many times is self-development
| or even just the skating feeling.
| martindbp wrote:
| > If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and
| working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the
| projects.
|
| I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Unfortunately kids
| in Sweden have to attend school by law, homeschooling is not
| allowed. By extension, you're not allowed to go on trips, or take
| any other time off without permission from the school. As my kid
| is only 3, I'm not sure how strict they are with this, but it
| feels very suffocating to me. I want him to have breathing room
| to spend time on projects and whatever he's passionate about,
| even if that means missing out on regular school for a while or
| getting worse grades. The last resort is to move abroad, but that
| has obvious downsides. The intention for this law was probably
| good: ensure that all kids get an education, and are not
| brainwashed by religious nuts, but it really really bothers me.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| If that is at all an option for you, cross the belt over to
| Denmark, not only is homeschooling allowed, but you can get 85
| (I think) percent of what is paid towards a normal school to be
| paid towards a school of your choosing in case you want your
| kid to attend a private school, making private schools very
| affordable.
| prawn wrote:
| Can't speak for Sweden, but here in Australia, we went to our
| son's school and explained that we intended to take him out for
| three months for an extended holiday. His teacher had no issue
| with it and based on that, the principal signed off easily
| enough. For a struggling kid, there might've been push back,
| but you have to ask to find out.
|
| When I was in high school, my parents took us out of school for
| 3-4 months to travel Asia including months in China. I've
| always appreciated them having done this for us. I was studying
| Chinese at the time, so it was an incredible opportunity on
| that front alone.
| [deleted]
| Lammy wrote:
| > People like Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson
| and Susan Kare were not just following orders. They were not
| tennis balls hit by Steve Jobs, but rockets let loose by Steve
| Jobs.
|
| Jef Raskin*
| maverickJ wrote:
| Great write up Paul.
|
| An interesting add in my opinion is that one can also do great
| work when working on a project not of your own origination but of
| an area where one's interests lie or where visions intersect.
|
| >"You have moments of happiness when things work out, but they
| don't last long, because then you're on to the next problem. So
| why do it at all? Because to the kind of people who like working
| this way, nothing else feels as right. You feel as if you're an
| animal in its natural habitat, doing what you were meant to do --
| not always happy, maybe, but awake and alive."
|
| While the above does ring true to some extent, one can also
| approach all tasks with a sense of being awake and alive; This is
| something some eastern religions preach about. I do admit that
| this will be hard to implement in practice though. i
|
| One person who was able to test out their own ideas while working
| for others is Nikola Tesla. He might be used a case study by
| others with grand visions who want to do great work. Although, it
| can be argued that Tesla had to at some point seek independence.
|
| "In 1883, Nikola Tesla was sent by his employer - The Continental
| Edison Company- to fix the problem that had occurred in the
| powerhouse and electric lights installation at the railroad
| station in Strassburg. This presented him with the opportunity to
| test out his theory of a two phase alternating current motor
| encompassing his rotary magnetic field discovery [at that time,
| everyone who had tried to make an alternating current motor used
| a single circuit]. He set to work and tested his theory in the
| power plant. He was successful in starting up the power generator
| with this new system. This meant that Tesla now had a novel
| electrical system that utilised alternating current."
|
| The above was taken from
| https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/cracking-the-who-you...
| gregwebs wrote:
| You could look at Tesla different ways. Tesla claimed Edison
| withheld a promised bonus and then Tesla left to directly work
| on his own projects for the rest of his life.
| austincheney wrote:
| _If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and
| working on ambitious projects of their own, I 'd pick the
| projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but because
| I've been on the other end and I know which has more predictive
| value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't
| care about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects
| of their own, I wanted to hear all about those._
|
| That was the most important part of the essay for me. I don't see
| this reflected in hiring though. Most of my real challenging
| programming is on personal projects but interviewers just want to
| know about the boring junior CRUD work that I do at the job. When
| I go on military deployments I continue programming and solving
| problems and building things but none of that seems to come up.
|
| As a web developer I prefer to keep my personal projects
| personal. On my current personal project I published over 950
| commits before asking for feedback. Sometimes people will
| discover something of mine and use it, which is great, but it's
| still a personal project.
|
| The reason for that level of introversion is that I don't trust
| other web developers. It mostly isn't about ownership.
|
| I find that my peers tend to fear data structures and present an
| extreme fear of original code. Call it Invented Here[1] or
| whatever you want but it is certainly there and it's an
| irrationality I don't want to deal with when I am writing an
| application.
|
| As an example of the hostility, yes that is the best choice of
| word, mention explicit use of events or the DOM and the common
| sentiment reminds me of reading history about lynchings in Jim
| Crow era and sun down towns. As an example:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27419965
|
| I wish the attitudes in the above example were rare, but they
| aren't. So, I remain an introverted developer working on personal
| projects.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > As a web developer
|
| Don't brand yourself as that, because you subject yourself to
| the cultural baggage that comes with it, including the hiring
| practices and aesthetics (if you can call them that).
|
| "But I program mostly for the web!" No, you don't program
| _just_ for the web, you program more holistically than your
| peers, you said it yourself:
|
| > my peers tend to fear data structures...and present an
| extreme fear of original code
|
| And we really need more people like that.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I think that's just a HN bubble (SV bubble?) attitude. Working
| outside of FAANG, I've never encountered such absolutist
| thinking around the use of JS. Most developers are just trying
| to get the feature working as specified, regardless of whether
| it uses a core mechanic or a bit of JS. Better developers
| simply know the spectrum of options for implementing their
| features and choose what they perceive to be the best tool for
| the job based on the available tradeoffs, they don't declare
| certain options to be heretical or proof of moral lacking.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > mention explicit use of events or the DOM and the common
| sentiment reminds me of reading history about lynchings in Jim
| Crow era and sun down towns
|
| Mass murder with no judicial punishment resembles people being
| mean to you at work? Black people were _disemboweled and burned
| alive_ by gangs of people who did it _for fun_. This is the
| most ridiculous comparison I think I have ever seen on this
| forum.
| dkarl wrote:
| If you want to impress someone, publish your side project,
| whatever that means for the type of project it is. Of course
| the code needs to be public on GitHub or somewhere similar, but
| if it's a web project, publish it to the web. If it's an app,
| publish it to an app store and have it on your phone in the
| interview.
|
| The reason people aren't as interested in side projects is that
| most aspects of professional software development are optional
| in side projects. The vast majority of side projects are done
| alone, and for a very narrow purpose: write a command line
| utility to learn Rust, write a web app to work through a design
| idea for it, write a game for the sake of implementing a
| pathing algorithm.
|
| As a result, in most cases programmers rightly neglect 95% of
| the work that it would require to produce a version for public
| consumption, and on top of that, they don't have to communicate
| with product, QA, or other developers. Building something that
| is fit for purpose is usually orders of magnitude easier when
| the purpose is to learn something, satisfy curiosity, or solve
| the narrow version of a problem that you are personally facing.
|
| Because of this, interviewers have very low initial assumptions
| about what it means when you say you did something as a side
| project, and you'll have to show them.
| christophilus wrote:
| Anecdotally, but the thing that got me into FAANG companies was
| my resume, not my grades. I had started a company in college,
| and that ambitious project opened a whole lot of doors.
|
| I've been in charge of hiring many times, and not once have I
| looked at grades. I don't even bother looking at the
| "education" portion of resumes (except when looking at the rare
| candidate who has no work experience).
| monoideism wrote:
| > common sentiment reminds me of reading history about
| lynchings in Jim Crow era and sun down towns
|
| I'm about as far from woke or PC as you could imagine, but
| that's an incredibly inaccurate comparison.
|
| Reading some developer scorn or arrogance, no matter how
| unfortunate or annoying, shares no common features with an
| actual lynching.
| austincheney wrote:
| I am not claiming to be physically beaten, but to me the
| attitudes as I interpret them feel the same from what I have
| read compared to what I have experienced in how it feels and
| how it impairs my career progression/mobility. Earlier when I
| used the word _hostility_ it wasn't for elaboration.
| edent wrote:
| Perhaps you would describe yourself of being aware of the
| negative power that racialised language can have on people?
| And now you've realised that, it seems wrong to draw
| distasteful comparisons - not least because of the potential
| reaction of your peers.
|
| It is almost like you've had an awakening and realise that it
| is important to understand how important it is to behave in a
| politically savvy way.
|
| If only we had some words for that...
| walugipnts wrote:
| Seriously, lynchings? Is this the type of comparison you really
| want to make here? that was the first thing that came to mind?
| Do we really need to double down on the perception that HN
| consists solely of out of touch white men?
| gdubs wrote:
| Another aspect of personal projects is that if they're truly
| enjoyable they can be a kind of salve for burnout.* If you feel
| like you can't even open your IDE, a personal project can
| generate the excitement that reinvigorates your passion.
|
| There's also less of a speed limit with personal projects -- the
| things like: "before you go down that road let's talk with X;
| hold off on that idea for now; let's wait until..."
|
| This freedom is conducive to learning new things. My career
| success rests heavily on skills I gained pursuing personal
| projects, where I was able to try ridiculously complicated or
| "out there" ideas. I've worked for people in the past who were
| strongly against me spending free time on personal projects, but
| benefited from all the skills I had gained doing so. Beware of
| this mindset -- it's fear based and leads to unsuccessful
| outcomes in other ways.
|
| * Side note is: careful not to burn out on what's supposed to be
| a fun personal project.
| rikroots wrote:
| Paul Graham's essay really resonated with me - I was saying
| 'yes, yes!' as I read every sentence. But I think the most
| important bit for me is in your comment: "This freedom is
| conducive to learning new things."
|
| I have many projects; I've always been this way. School work
| was interesting (sometimes) but things only got really
| interesting when I took something from school and turned it
| into something of my own. Like the time I decided that while
| atlases were really interesting, building my own atlas with
| different continents and countries would be much more fun[1].
| Or the thing that happened when, after a couple of weeks of
| starting to learn French I decided: I can do better than
| that![2].
|
| I taught myself how to build websites not because I wanted a
| job building websites - it turns out that building other
| people's websites is quite boring, though the money comes in
| useful. I learned to code because I wanted to show off my work
| on my projects to other people - even if the displays looked
| nonsensical (or, as family members have suggested: a waste of
| time). For instance I've learned a lot about designing and
| building fonts, and had much enjoyment doing the work, even
| though the end products will never be used by anyone
| else[3][4]. The face that, as a consequence, I can now have
| heated arguments with designers about font kerning issues is a
| useful byproduct of my hobby, nothing more.
|
| [1] - Example map: http://rikweb.org.uk/map/images/bigmap.jpg
|
| [2] - I called the result Gevey: http://gevey.rikweb.org.uk/
|
| [3] - Example font:
| http://www.rikweb.co.uk/kalieda/oyis/index.php?page=script
|
| [4] - Another example font because this one is a bit mad:
| http://www.rikweb.co.uk/kalieda/wakat/index.php?page=script-...
| convolvatron wrote:
| I disagree about the sidenote. go for it. get as far as you
| can.
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| I'm curious, why push through on a fun personal project into
| causing burnout? Asking for...a friend.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Do you remember in Uni pulling all nighters for projects /
| classes? It was stressful, often painful, often resulting
| in you being a mess for a few days afterwards. If you did
| this, you'd know it had all the signs of burnout attached
| to it.
|
| And yet... sometimes your projects ended up super cool and
| you were really really proud of them and when you showed
| them off you felt really accomplished. And sometimes that
| feeling is worth a little foray into burnout world.
| convolvatron wrote:
| I guess I have a different theory of burnout. to me it
| happens when I can't connect the dots anymore. its not
| because I worked too hard. company found a vertical and how
| I spend all my time trying to fix 'bugs' that are really
| because the product is being mis-applied. most of the
| senior team left and its clear that we aren't going to be
| taking on any other work than cleaning up. sales are
| flagging and its clear that the whole narrative was corrupt
| to begin with.
|
| the only projects I can remember, paid or not, are the ones
| that took up a huge fraction of my output and really did
| something cool. do that. shoot big. make something really
| different.
|
| don't turn programming into sitting at the end of an queue,
| picking up random things and gamifying retiring them as
| fast you can. you have a chisel. make a sculpture.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Amen.
| emc3 wrote:
| Ugh, PG discounted his earlier works, again.
|
| I can't relate to "workers" (employees) and I haven't been out of
| the workforce for nearly as long as PG.
|
| Dalio emphasizes the importance of being believable, and I don't
| believe that PG understands the concept of work/life balance(or
| "work-life" or whatever).
|
| Disclaimer: @paulg blocked me on Twitter.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| No https://?
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| Are you concerned someone is MITMing Paul Graham's blog and
| inserting bad advice?
| sodality2 wrote:
| https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-your-static-website-
| needs...
| fhakx wrote:
| Mostly nonsense, written in Twitter style. The argument for
| HTTP-only is to preserve the free web and not being
| dependent on yet another middleman.
| jmkni wrote:
| _Hey guys, Paul Graham wrote an article about me!_
| erwinh wrote:
| Small new project of my own, doing NFT platform analytics:
| https://twitter.com/hoogerwoord/status/1402020462268387336?s...
| jart wrote:
| Gluing together personal projects is the foundation of the UNIX
| operating system. It's the point of any operating system really,
| but UNIX does it best. Docker and the microservice paradigm have
| also had a meteoric rise, probably because they promise to plug
| together clean slate personal projects.
|
| One management technique I've seen companies use to grant
| employees the freedom to pursue personal projects, without it
| being seen as treachery, is to have a contract that says the
| company owns everything your mind produces, and then define
| quarterly expectations. That way you can sprint for a month doing
| what management wants, and spend the rest of the time inventing
| things like voicemail for fun.
| pram wrote:
| I worked at a place that had explicit "20% time" to work on
| "whatever" and it (incredibly) turned into more micromanaged
| bullshit. Now I had to set separate goals and milestones for
| that project too, and report it in one-on-ones with my manager.
| I just dropped the whole thing because it was literally more
| work than doing my regular job!
| truetraveller wrote:
| As an aside, PG is a fantastic writer. Truly one of my favorites
| reads. His writing reminds me of Joel Spolsky's writings in some
| ways, Joel also being a gifted writer.
|
| PG's writing is not pretentious; it employs "easy" words and
| grammar on purpose. And his writing genuinely provides a
| tremendous amount of new insight.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Yes, one must wonder at the way he effortlessly expresses his
| largely half-baked ideas.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| Glad someone mentioned it. The man is pretty much unanimously
| worshipped around here but his writing just doesn't resonate
| with me. It's not just that I don't agree, I think it's
| possible to appreciate someone's talent without agreeing with
| it, but it just doesn't feel particularly thought-provoking
| or insightful to me. That might say more about me than him
| but it is how it is.
| truetraveller wrote:
| Wow, I truly have a different taste I suppose. Do you like
| Joel Spolsky's writings?
| paulcole wrote:
| > If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and
| working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the
| projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but because
| I've been on the other end and I know which has more predictive
| value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't
| care about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects
| of their own, I wanted to hear all about those.
|
| If all you have is a hammer, you're going to go around looking
| for nails.
| gluegadget wrote:
| Off-topic but I tried https version of paulgraham.com but got a
| bad cert domain name error. SANs are for store.yahoo.com,
| leftover of Viaweb?
| splithalf wrote:
| " the mere expression "work/life" embodies a mistake: it assumes
| work and life are distinct"
|
| Going to have to meditate on that one for awhile. It seems
| "privileged." For many work amounts to a set of indignities
| required for survival. A 2 hour daily commute to pay Bay Area
| rent prices doesn't feel like "life" at all. Sort of Marie
| Antoinette vibes to the featured essay. I'm actually ok with
| that. Not everyone needs to be a slave, and the more people who
| can forego work and just tinker the better. But acknowledge it.
| Paul's not talking to the proles here, but to other gentlemen of
| leisure who had mathematician dads, or those who had Paul graham
| type rich celebrity dads. Most people are in essence slaves to
| debt. Retirement is when work stops and life starts, for most of
| us in the second class.
| mcguire wrote:
| The _really_ neat thing about being so excited about your own
| projects that you have to work on them is that no one has to pay
| you for it. (See the state of open source.)
| Ontol wrote:
| Russian translation: https://habr.com/ru/post/561716/
| [deleted]
| bluefox wrote:
| It's a good start for an essay, and there was even a paragraph
| getting close to the crux of the matter (about projects of the
| kind that doesn't necessarily make money). The problem is that of
| the starving artist, and a solution, or a big step towards a
| solution, is universal basic income. This kind of safety net
| would let us at least partially revert back to the carefree ways
| of the child and give us the freedom to work on our own projects
| without the fear of and actual possibility of falling into
| destitution.
| prawn wrote:
| Derek Sivers had a related comment I always think of. Very
| roughly, the idea is: instead of trying to love what makes you
| money (or make money from what you love), pick a tolerable
| career that makes you decent money, and then don't force your
| passion to be profitable.
|
| Of course, it's hard to get excited about that when you throw
| 40 of your most energised hours of the week at a grind.
| ruthvik947 wrote:
| Needed to read this, thank you Paul! Was on the edge about a
| summer project -- deterred mostly by high-expectations, the
| project being likely non-monetisable, and a fear of failure. I
| see now none of those are valid excuses!
| iamwil wrote:
| " The natural alignment between skating and solving new problems
| is one of the reasons the payoffs from startups are so high "
|
| In my experience, startups aren't always run by skaters nor do
| they recruit skaters, but can be, by most measures, successful.
|
| Anecdotally, these characteristics appears to be a subset of
| successful startups.
| trilinearnz wrote:
| A delightful read. Certainly my most elative moments have come
| from personal projects, mostly games. Something I struggle with
| is gaining traction on subsequent projects when my burnout is at
| it's worst, as it's obviously a mentally-intensive endeavor
| despite the possibility of net gains.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> There turn out to be two senses in which work can be one's
| own: 1) that you're doing it voluntarily, rather than merely
| because someone told you to, and 2) that you're doing it by
| yourself.
|
| Maybe that's why I sometimes get more involved in helping other
| people at work than doing my own. Helping someone else is
| voluntary, while doing my own work is a bit more of an
| obligation. Helping out is also more transient and not a constant
| daily thing, so it serves as a break from work even though its
| still work. So now that I've said all that, it's obvious that
| people are more motivated to do something they choose vs
| something they're told to do. Sounds like a discipline problem
| when phrased that way.
| shoto_io wrote:
| I have come to realize something profoundly fundamental for
| myself in the last weeks - after seeing this famous marketing
| video by Steve Jobs and reading a biography of Nike's founder:
|
| My passion for my own project/business is highest whenever my
| passion is aligned with the passion of my target audience.
|
| In that case, I also believe your chances of success have
| improved.
|
| Take Nike, for example. Phil Knight was a passionate athlete. He
| loved sports. However, he was never so good that he could do it
| for a living. Part of the reason he founded a shoe company back
| then was to stay in the athlete's business without being an
| athlete himself. Watch any Nike advertisement and you will not
| see many words on products, but it's always about how great
| athletes are.
| munificent wrote:
| _> My passion for my own project /business is highest whenever
| my passion is aligned with the passion of my target audience._
|
| This is a critical insight. Taking this out of the business
| domain and into psychology/philosophy, I think the key question
| is "What does working on the project _mean_ for me? "
|
| Here's an interesting thought experiment: Take the hobby
| project you are working on now and imagine that when it was all
| done, you planned to just delete all the code without another
| soul ever seeing it. Would you still work on it?
|
| Sometimes the answer is "yes". In those cases, I think the
| meaning of project is usually either:
|
| 1. A way to relax and unwind. Essentially a videogame. It just
| feels good to use one's skills in a low stakes way.
|
| 2. Where the output is to develop your own skills with the
| expectation that you will use those skills later in ways that
| touch other people. Essentially piano practice.
|
| If the answer is "no", then you have hit the realization that
| for many projects, the meaning is intrinsically tied to _making
| something that benefits other humans_. This is probably obvious
| for most but is easily overlooked by us awkward introvert
| types.
|
| Knowing _why_ you are doing something is key to being able to
| do it well.
| shoto_io wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. Thanks for sharing your insights. I like the
| test/thought experiment.
|
| You know, there is also the other camp, and I have been part
| of it myself. Those who say that you shouldn't find a passion
| to follow, and why that's a foolish and romantic thing to do.
| But I have switched sides (again).
|
| Why solve problems for people you don't care about even if
| that makes you rich? It's nothing I'd like to do with the
| limited amount of time I have on this planet.
| sombremesa wrote:
| This essay works well if you imagine the audience to be a batch
| of YC founders, or other entrepreneurial types. I read this essay
| three times.
|
| First, I read it as pg probably intended - I'm in the midst of
| founding my own company, and the nature and quality of effort I
| bring to my own endeavors is orders of magnitude apart from what
| I bring to an employer. Much of my life growing up has been
| suffering abuse for choosing to pursue my passion followed by
| vindication, so the essay rings true for me in that sense.
|
| The second time, I read this essay as an average kid from my
| underprivileged background might've read it. School was never a
| path to 'work' (there was plenty of 'work' for the unschooled),
| it was a route to escape poverty - one of a scant few that were
| close to reliable. That's the reason having a passion outside of
| school was frowned upon, you were risking starving any future
| family you might've had at a point where risk wasn't all that
| tolerable.
|
| In my last reading, I just saw this essay as pg getting excited
| about something his kid was doing, and going about highlighting
| the importance of letting kids be kids - but in a very strange
| way such that it could fit among his other essays.
| gizmo wrote:
| > Indeed, it may be one of the advantages of capitalism that it
| encourages such rewriting. A company that needs software to do
| something can't use the software already written to do it at
| another company, and thus has to write their own, which often
| turns out better.
|
| I think this is a great insight, and perhaps this is the reason
| why open source libraries aren't a panacea. By building your own
| stuff from scratch you get something that makes sense for --your
| project--. When you glue libraries together you get something
| that works, but the parts never quite fit and product quality
| suffers. And the sheer enjoyment of building something entirely
| from scratch combined with having a lean and mean thing that
| works exactly the way as intended is absolutely worth it.
|
| The next time you're comparing libraries and none of them suit
| your application perfectly, maybe ask yourself if you should just
| re-invent the wheel, and thereby make it "a project of one's
| own".
| BiggsHoson wrote:
| I once worked for a small software company that produced
| custom-written ERP systems for small to mid-sized
| manufacturers. It was a real thrill to be presented a problem
| and write code that solves it nicely, removing hindrances to
| productive work by the end users. I loved being able to visit
| in person, see the issue first-hand, work with them to devise a
| solution, and then later watch how much easier their job had
| become because of it.
|
| I miss that kind of job satisfaction. Indeed, it satisfied a
| deep, personal need to create. I was just fortunate that I
| could make a living doing so.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Jared Diamond, in his book "The Day Before Yesterday", talks
| about how children in Papua New Guinea when he was an
| anthropologist there would play at making a garden or raising
| pigs. The kid would have a toy, wooden pig, and then eventually
| be given a piglet, and then gradually their "play" would become
| more realistic until it shaded into adult work.
|
| My daughter, as a youngun', wanted to play "coffeeshop" where she
| would set up a coffeeshop at home and charge her mother and I for
| drinks. I think this says something about how much she saw the
| inside of coffeeshops while I was programming there.
|
| The main obstacle to still using the play-better-until-it's-real
| path, is that we don't have a good way for kids to see what
| adults are doing, in most jobs. Otherwise, their natural
| instincts are still to "play" at doing what they see the adults
| doing.
| shoto_io wrote:
| Very interesting. However, there is also the other camp that
| says let children stay children as long as possible. I wonder
| if that's conflicting with your line of thought.
|
| PS: This is one of the best discussion I have ever read on HN.
| This article is inspiring in many ways.
| andreyk wrote:
| Yeah, I found this weird: "We treat "playing" and "hobbies" as
| qualitatively different from "work". It's not clear to a kid
| building a treehouse that there's a direct (though long) route
| from that to architecture or engineering. "
|
| There is not really a route from such playing to engineering
| except for the general kinds of reasoning involved. It's a cute
| idea, but does not seem very useful.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I disagree. I'd say there is a pretty direct route. The kid
| is trying to construct a building. They face great many
| object-level challenges: what materials to use, where to get
| them, how to connect them, how to make the structure stable,
| how to reduce work, etc. Behind each challenge is a field of
| study for the kid to dabble in, in order to overcome the
| problem.
|
| "Real" architecture and civil engineering, as done by adult
| professionals, deals with _exact same challenges_ (and then
| some more). The work is more complex, you need to explore
| relevant fields of study much deeper (and professional
| education gives you just that, in a structured way), but it
| 's fundamentally the same thing, just in hard mode.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I disagree with your disagreement!
|
| Anyone who has built a personal project and a real-world
| professionally engineered project knows that the actual
| tasks involved are wildly different. What you think the
| correct solution is becomes a tertiary consideration. You
| need to consider the desires of stakeholders, money people,
| regulators, and quite a few others. Designing a treehouse
| for fun and designing a professional solution to a list of
| sometimes contradictory constraints and optimizations
| scratch some very different itches.
|
| One is very clearly play and one is very clearly work.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _You need to consider the desires of stakeholders,
| money people, regulators, and quite a few others._
|
| You mean, like, parents? :).
|
| I don't see the difference. The considerations you listed
| can sometimes dominate the object-level work, but they're
| also mostly generic skills for all creative white collar
| jobs. The core that distinguishes an architect from an
| aviation engineer or a graphic designer - this is the
| treehouse stuff.
| grahamburger wrote:
| I mean, that's also true of hacking game mods as a kid
| vs. actual programming for money as an adult. But many
| professional programmers got their start by just playing
| around with computers as a kid.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Right, the business and politics parts are orthogonal to
| the engineering or programming parts. They are general
| facts of life you can't escape regardless of your
| vocation.
| tasuki wrote:
| Have you ever built a treehouse? It _is_ both architecture
| _and_ engineering.
| chubot wrote:
| Yeah I'm pretty sure that Christopher Alexander makes this
| point in one of his books, maybe _A Pattern Language_
|
| He says that suburbs are configured "wrong", in a way that's
| antithetical to life.
|
| Because the children go to school somewhere nearby, where they
| are babysat, and the fathers (at that time) commute to work in
| the city.
|
| And the children have no idea what their parents do, and that
| is alienating. The configuration of space diminishes people and
| relationships. They don't see their parents enough and they
| don't learn from them.
|
| Children want to learn from "real" work, not the fake work of
| school, which is why so many of them can't sit still in class,
| and get poor grades despite being smart, etc.
|
| That work/suburb split definitely describes how I grew up, so I
| remember that point very distinctly. You are supposed to jump
| through hoops for 12 years, and then apply to a place where you
| jump through 4 more years of hoops, etc. But you are confused
| about how the world actually works. It's not a good way of
| teaching people to be adaptable to the world.
| caseyross wrote:
| > Children want to learn from "real" work, not the fake work
| of school, which is why so many of them can't sit still in
| class, and get poor grades despite being smart, etc.
|
| Furthermore, you could argue that not paying attention to
| more abstract lessons is actually way _more_ rational of a
| decision than sitting straight and taking notes. The human
| brain is expensive to run, and our ancestors didn 't survive
| by squandering calories to process worthless information.
|
| In contrast, as any parent can attest, when kids see
| something that has clear real-world benefits for them (e.g.
| Minecraft), they'll jump in with unequaled gusto and learn
| everything they possibly can.
| ankitg12 wrote:
| So much right. Children do pay attention and many times get
| glued to the thing they see we adults really value. Since
| for most of the families formal education is not the thing
| their world revolves around (except people in university
| jobs/professors), children don't gel as well with the
| books, as they do with other things we value (for example,
| our phones or TV).
| Tarsul wrote:
| That's an intriguing point. I always thought children of
| professors/teachers would be better in school because
| their parents would push them (gently!) in that direction
| (and because they are probably genetically inclined to be
| good learners...), but this type of indirect watching of
| their parents and what they value must have quite a big
| impact as well (also in that the parents are natural role
| models). My parents had quite a hands-off approach
| (they're not teachers, as you might have guessed ;)) and
| I subsequently didn't care much about my grades or
| certain school subjects that I found uninteresting.
| cbushko wrote:
| You just sparked the thought in my head about how much has
| the pandemic changed this?
|
| With myself working from home and my kids being virtual that
| they have been to see what my day to day is like.
|
| I think they realize that I have too many meetings and how
| much it stops me from getting real/deep work done..
| [deleted]
| lliamander wrote:
| I feel fortunate in that regard, in that I work from home and
| we homeschool our children[0]. Not only do they have a chance
| to see how adults work, but I they also get more
| opportunities to see how adults interact with each other in
| general. I also get a chance to be more a part of their
| childhood, which is a nice plus.
|
| [0] Don't worry, they socialize with plenty of other people
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I fail to see how living in a city changes this
| substantially. The white collar knowledge work that's driving
| the economy of modern cities is not something kids there see
| much of either.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| As a teacher, this resonates. For many, the knowledge and
| skills development in school is too abstract.
|
| An aside: Is 'take your child to work day' even a thing
| anymore?
| e17 wrote:
| I used to work at ASOS in London where they had a 'bring
| your parents to work' day. At the time (2015ish) more than
| half the staff were under 30yo.
|
| Mum got a tour of the office, did workshops with the CEO
| and other leaders. It was pretty cool.
| humanlion87 wrote:
| I have been in a couple of companies where they have had
| the "bring your child to work day" concept. Though it
| happens very rarely (maybe 1-2 times per year) I doubt that
| it has any impact.
| borroka wrote:
| It is for the parents and for the company, not for the
| kids. And, as it happened to a colleague of mine, it can
| be a sad day for those who cannot bring their kids to
| work on that day (e.g., disabilities, death). I would get
| rid of those days, stat.
| munificent wrote:
| I work at Google which (before COVID, of course) had a take
| your kid to work day every year. But it always seemed
| strangely structured. They would set up a bunch of separate
| activities for kids to do and the parents would go hang out
| there and do those with them.
|
| It ended up looking at lot more like "take your kid _to the
| office_ " to me, which sort of defeated the point. But I
| don't know if there's a good solution when the work adults
| do is just staring at a screen.
|
| I think about this a lot with my screen-based hobbies too.
| I'd love to share them with the kids more, but they are
| just totally opaque. The kids seeing me really can't tell
| the difference between "filing taxes", "programming",
| "watching YouTube", "making music", etc.
|
| Knowledge work really doesn't align well with how kids
| naturally learn.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Pair programming?
| alex_g wrote:
| I believe Jane Jacobs also discusses the same point in her
| book _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_.
| prawn wrote:
| I really like this post, especially the point about visibility
| of job details for children. We don't talk about it enough. We
| don't draw connections between play skills and career paths. By
| the time I was making study decisions that would start to
| dictate my job opportunities, I had no idea what options were
| out there. A couple of work experience placements isn't enough.
|
| One of my jobs is in tourism photography. For some projects, I
| just go on holiday with my kids, speculatively take
| photos/videos and then sell them to tourism authorities. It
| works well. My 6 and 8 year olds came to me at some point and
| asked, "Is your job to make people want to go on holiday?"
| Pretty much, yep. And so they have an incentive to help (more
| effective I am, more holidays we go on) and they see what goes
| into it - getting up for sunrises, capturing moments, editing,
| sharing the shots, etc. It's a serious contrast to my other
| job(s) where they'd guess computers are involved but wouldn't
| know what goes on - my fault, because I've never stopped to
| explain it.
| fearthetelomere wrote:
| There's a working theory that you could do this with anything.
| A cool story to read is the Polgar family. His daughters became
| some of the best chess players of their time.
|
| >Polgar and his wife considered various possible subjects in
| which to drill their children, "including mathematics and
| foreign languages," but they settled on chess. "We could do the
| same thing with any subject, if you start early, spend lots of
| time and give great love to that one subject," Klara later
| explained. "But we chose chess. Chess is very objective and
| easy to measure."[3] His eldest daughter Susan described chess
| as having been her own choice: "Yes, he could have put us in
| any field, but it was I who chose chess as a four-year-old... I
| liked the chessmen; they were toys for me." [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r
| Tarsul wrote:
| wow, I always thought he had adopted his children. But he
| didn't, they were his own. It's written that he thought about
| adopting boys later in life but didn't. Still, I'm shocked
| that I remember this so wrong. Thanks for posting.
| kapilkale wrote:
| book is called "the world until yesterday"
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I once wrote that "My dream is to, one day, work for free."
|
| I am now living that dream. When I left my last company, in 2017,
| I looked at working for someone else, but was almost immediately
| told that no one wants old men. It was pretty crushing.
|
| But I went and set up a corporation that allows me to get
| equipment and testing kit, and started to write my own stuff. I
| explored surveillance cameras and ONVIF, as well as Bluetooth
| (I'm pretty good with devices -I've been working on them all my
| life. I started as an EE, and actually played with Heathkits when
| I was a kid).
|
| I'm now working on a very ambitious social media app. It's
| probably months down the road, but it _will_ happen. I _always_
| ship. I 've been doing it all my adult life. This project is the
| kind and scope that is usually done by a team of 10-20 engineers
| (I also wrote the backend from scratch, three years ago), but
| I've been doing it alone. I just started working with another guy
| that will be adding a dashboard to the server.
|
| If you look at the projects in my portfolio, you will see heavy-
| duty, industrial-strength code; not sloppy "hobby" code. The code
| Quality is out of this world, they all have a lot more testing
| code than implementation code, and the documentation is over-the-
| top complete.
|
| I learned, long ago, to make my "hobbies" "ship" projects. That
| way, _everything_ I do is useful.
|
| And that is what makes me happy. I like to _finish_ stuff; and
| having people use my stuff is the best way to validate its
| completeness.
|
| That said; despite the completeness of my work, it isn't
| particularly popular, which is just fine by me. I tend to "eat my
| own dog food," and use a lot of my libraries in my own work. The
| less that people other than myself depend on my work, the more
| freedom I have to form it to my own needs. I take Stewardship of
| my work seriously.
| tornato7 wrote:
| I wish I could have more of that "ship" mentality. I have
| dozens of quite interesting personal projects that are stuck in
| the 80% complete state, because ultimately the final stages of
| releasing a project just aren't fun to me (bug fixing, tests,
| docs, build systems, code polish)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Shipping is boring as hell. Lots of not-fun stuff. I
| generally have to force myself to polish the fenders. For
| example, one of the things I always do, is create a project
| social media card for my repos. Silly, but it helps me to
| feel like it's "for real."
|
| But it's _really_ nice to know that I can include one of my
| projects as a dependency, and not have to worry a bit about
| whether or not it will bork my project.
| j4yav wrote:
| Funny, for me not shipping is a source of anxiety and I get
| paralyzed at the getting started point.
| jacksonkmarley wrote:
| So do you make a living from your current company, or are you
| living off past income/superannuation etc.?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Basically, the latter, but I'd like to get back to making
| money. It just hasn't been an option.
|
| I'm not kidding. The door was slammed on me, quite hard (I
| think part of it was because I live in New York. New York's
| ageism problem is _much_ worse than Silicon Valley 's). I'm
| very fortunate, in being able to work on my own. I can't
| imagine what it must be like for the folks that don't have
| that option.
| jacksonkmarley wrote:
| That does suck. I guess there are different approaches you
| could take to work around it, e.g. spamming more companies
| or filtering out certain types of company, what kind of
| numbers did you put in? Do you think an early, unpleasant
| rejection could have discouraged you prematurely?
| [deleted]
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I did write a big whiny rant, but deleted it. I don't
| think it adds to the conversation.
|
| Let's just say that I can't work in today's industry, and
| maintain my personal sense of Integrity.
|
| It's not them; it's me. My choice.
| jacksonkmarley wrote:
| Actually I read it before you deleted it haha.
|
| Curious if you think some sort of independent contractor
| style would work in your situation? I'm not experienced
| in that type of workstyle, but it seems like companies
| with less long term investment in training, benefits etc
| would care less about age, as long as you deliver.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That was the company that dissed me. They want young,
| fresh-faced contractors.
|
| I can hang my own shingle, but I don't have a network.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| In the immortal words of 'nostromo, which I still have
| printed on a t-shirt:
|
| No job is the goal. No money is the problem.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987008
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's a keeper!
|
| Thanks!
| ryandrake wrote:
| I love it. I think I'll print it out on a big banner
| above my home office.
|
| I wake up every day dreaming of retirement: when I will
| be free to do (or not do) my best work.
| streetcat1 wrote:
| Social media apps are very hard to monetize, since consumer
| only want free, and hence you would need traffic, which is very
| hard to get.
|
| Why not do B2B. The market is much more fragmented and thus you
| can always find a niche.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Not for monetization.
|
| It is a free app, done by a 501(c)(3), and targets a specific
| demographic (recovering drug addicts). That said, it has an
| architecture that could, quite easily, be adapted for
| monetization, but that's not why we're doing it.
|
| When I said "I'm working for free," I meant it. The people
| I'm working with are getting something _way_ beyond what they
| expected. It would be silly to attach a dollar figure to the
| work. The government doesn 't let you write off sweat equity.
| bachmeier wrote:
| The essay starts out okay, but then kind of goes off the rails:
|
| > Instead of telling kids that their treehouses could be on the
| path to the work they do as adults, we tell them the path goes
| through school.
|
| There are two things wrong with that sentence. First, there's no
| tradeoff because kids have enough time for both. Second, a
| treehouse is rarely the path to riches. Let's not kid ourselves
| (pun intended). Most kids do not have projects that are valuable
| from a career perspective.
|
| > And unfortunately schoolwork tends be very different from
| working on projects of one's own.
|
| Well sure, because the average kid needs to learn to write and do
| basic arithmetic. The author may be unaware of what most kids are
| like.
|
| > So as school gets more serious, working on projects of one's
| own is something that survives, if at all, as a thin thread off
| to the side.
|
| That's true, but that's because teenagers would rather spend
| their time hanging out with other teenagers than working on a
| startup idea. Most high school kids in the US have time for
| projects but they choose to spend time on other things. And
| that's good, though maybe not for the VCs of the world.
| ant6n wrote:
| Going from plan to finish is extremely valuable no matter what
| the project is. I myself was always a dreamer, just planned
| stuff, and that tendency carried all the way into adulthood.
| Perhaps I should have finished more projects when I was a kid,
| maybe I'd be a bit more productive and less of a dreamer today.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _First, there 's no tradeoff because kids have enough time
| for both [projects and school]._
|
| Do they, though? Between schools offloading teaching as
| "homework", making kids do after school what should've been
| done in-class, and the cultural pressure making parents sign up
| kids to every possible extracurricular they can afford -
| there's not that much time in a kid's day left.
|
| > _a treehouse is rarely the path to riches_
|
| pg did not talk about riches in this essay, and especially in
| this paragraph. He talked about doing interesting work.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > parents sign up kids to every possible extracurricular they
| can afford
|
| Yeah, that's what causes the tradeoff. Kids can't do school,
| work on projects, and have parents that fill their schedule
| with loads of other stuff. It would have been perfectly
| reasonable for PG to launch his attacks on overscheduling
| rather than school.
|
| > pg did not talk about riches in this essay
|
| He talked about "work they do as adults" and "more predictive
| value" and "When I was picking startups for Y Combinator".
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _It would have been perfectly reasonable for PG to launch
| his attacks on overscheduling rather than school._
|
| I agree, it would have been. But I wouldn't let schools off
| the hook, because they are the other edge of the feedback
| loop: in big part, extracurriculars exist as a way to game
| admission system. Together, they form a system that tries
| to consume all the free time a kid has.
|
| > _He talked about "work they do as adults" and "more
| predictive value" and "When I was picking startups for Y
| Combinator"._
|
| At least in his writing, pg does play with the idea that
| work is valuable beyond the money it earns you, so I
| interpreted this essay in that light.
| solipsism wrote:
| _pg did not talk about riches in this essay, and especially
| in this paragraph. He talked about doing interesting work._
|
| Yeah it make sense to focus on interesting projects when you
| are already rich.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Correct. I mean, it's the Maslov's pyramid - you aren't
| going to do interesting projects if you're constantly
| worrying about food and shelter.
|
| I understand that most people don't have the luxury of
| starting interesting projects (I frequently talk about it
| on HN, too), but I think we can't read this essay (or most
| of the other pg writes) as targeted at _everyone_. His
| audience is clearly the people who can afford to entertain
| his ideas. Which is not just rich people - it 's all the
| people who have some disposable free time, or can
| restructure their life to have it.
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