> 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".
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
Citing things is an academic tic, not one generally followed in other forms of writing. Terminator didn’t point out that the idea of machine intelligences taking over was first thought of by the Czech guy who coined the word “robot”. Nor does Terry Pratchett cite Conan the Barbarian as inspiration for Cohen the Barbarian.
Your analogies are ridiculous to the point of being non-seqiturs. Citing things is not a "tic", it's a discipline that serious non-fiction writers employ when they want to lend support to their claims, show the provenance of their ideas, and generally situate their work in the wider world of ideas. Many SV articles, including PG's, are often full of claims that would benefit from citation for all of the above reasons.
Can you elaborate more on this? This is the first time I've read such a thing.
Is it that HTTPS relies on certification, and therefore introduces one more actor that can effectively remove content that they deem "inappropriate", whatever inappropriate may be?
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.
> 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.
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.
Thinking about my own projects, a lot of them fall into your #2 (I chose "yes" for your question for some of my projects). There is a #3 that is missing, at least for me, though. That's the category where I work on something just to see if it will work at all. Sure, I'm unwinding and I'm improving my skills, but I really do want to see if I can accomplish the task at hand. I'll often think something like "if I had never heard of image compression (bitmaps were all we had to work with), how would I go about writing an image compression program?" and then try something new without searching the internet for how compression algorithms work for images. These programs will most likely not do as well as something like jpeg, but they are where derive most of my fun from. Maybe some day I'll come up with something truly novel, and then I'll probably panic because I won't know what to do with it.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
I’m in a similar boat. Previously built vaporware costing millions of dollars of seed money. Now I have my own project and although it makes no money it is awesome to see people use it and exciting to see people share it on social media.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That's still a "student vs. student" mindset, just one that incorporates a form of collective punishment, which is against the Geneva convention. It's an absolutely atrocious idea.
> 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.
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.
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!
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 ...
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?
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 :)
This is all good stuff. My kids are older and in high school so there is a change in attitude from their 9-12 year old versions to now that comes with being nearly an adult, legally speaking. There is only so much "spend X time on Y" you can do because the goal, at least ours, is to prepare them for life on their own. They need to do their schoolwork on their own without nagging. If we micro-manage their work, how will they succeed later on in college? They need to think about career options to at least narrow down schools that have potential majors. I'm not talking about deciding on a career, just give it some thought.
As an example of how their thinking changes (at least my kids and others), when they know the grading rubric the teacher uses and they have a B, they can do the math to figure out if an A is even possible. If its not, why bother with extra effort there? (that is their thinking)
In software terms this is like solving 80% of a performance problem by fixing a minor thing that was causing it. You are wasting effort to try and bring performance back much further.
Anyways I think what might work is just to get them to do something creative over the summer as a "project" but they choose it and work on it.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Depending on your location, if "woke" is where you're going to, empathically not.
Around these here parts, the term means many many things, and it involves anything from anti-vaccination & homeopathy and far further medical fringes (Crystals and essential oils for everything up to and including cancer or covid etc), through vast conspiracy theories up to and including Illuminati and Templars and Masons and everything else, impractical and frequently random / fashionable food choices and restrictions, and so on and so worth. "Sensitive", "Aware", "Liberal" or "Emotionally Intelligent" are not part of local definition of "Woke" anymore. In general, "Woke" and "Science/Fact-oriented" are fairly mutually exclusive here - while that's an unfair generalization, that's exactly the problem - the term has diffused and has a lot of negative in addition to perhaps some positive meanings; but mostly it's used by any given fanatical group to indicate their superiority compared to its antonym, "Sheeple".
If you meant a different word, noting it explicitly would be helpful :)
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.
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?
> 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.
Jim Crow is a collection of various discriminatory laws and regulations with the intention of institutionalizing racial segregation and discrimination.
It seems you are confusing Jim Crow for the various riots and racial violence that occurred during that time period. It serves no benefit to falsely intertwine similar but separate historical concepts solely to write some vague hyperbole.
He didn't just say "Jim Crow laws" but instead "lynchings in Jim Crow era", which specifically refers to extrajudicial gang murders of black people in america.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
he writes that there are two kind of people. one who need to separate work/life aka the worker and the ones where it all belongs together. the skater.
in my understanding, he argues that if you are the former, become the latter and thats the key tk a better life.
now he might not give precise instructions, but knowing PGs work, i assume that path goes through entrepreneurship. i think he even hints at it by writing: be(come) your own boss.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Probably, but they'd be missing the point. The kind of plodding work at a company rarely overlaps this sort of passion work PG is talking about.
So if they give you that speech, you can turn around and demand proper skin in the game plus a huge amount of freedom and autonomy. Fair is fair. No company will affect my work life balance unless they've made it worth my while.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Interesting. I haven't heard of anyone actually being asked for this.
Perhaps it's because they're so big now that they get a lot of fraudulent applications, so they reserve the right to check that people have really done what they say they've done. I.e., it's just to ward off bullshitters.
It may also be needed for applicants proposing ideas based on deep tech and/or bleeding-edge research, in which it would be hard for the YC interviewers to be sure the applicant really knows enough about the field to deliver what they claim they can.
Given that the thing YC was being dunked on over last week was for not doing enough due diligence on a startup trying to build an "MMO metaverse" [1] that has been unable to deliver, I guess there are still cases where they need to verify capabilities to some degree.
That said, it's still very much part of the YC ethos that founders who are self-motivated to work on interesting and ambitious projects in their own time is the best indicator of potential. They'd never make a funding decision based substantially on someone's academic record.
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'.
[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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Denmark has been growing on me. Less crime, less woke, further south (slightly better weather), still fairly close to home, Copenhagen seems super nice. But Stockholm is still where friends and family are so at the end of the day it's not really an option. Also I don't want to add to the confusion of learning 3 languages for my son (Swedish, Chinese, English) by adding a fourth!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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
I think in coming decades, homeschool might be the more sought after education for families that are able to afford it (which will be sad for public schools). It makes sense to allow kids more leeway in what they study and apply, especially with how available knowledge is on the internet (eg. Khan Academy and Wikipedia). Literally just playing Wikipedia races to get from one topic to another is probably more productive than some history or science classes.
I do wonder though how you managed to get enough socialization time with other people. Scheduling that seems like a massive pain unless there are also a lot of other families homeschooling nearby and in the same age group.
My daughter has also homeschooled, but by now there are lots of part-time options. She goes to school once a week, gets assigned a lot of homework, and works on that the rest of the week. It gives her some socialization, and also practice at time management (not leaving everything until the last day).
I think homeschooling is a lot easier than it was 20 years ago, in regards getting enough opportunities for socialization. Pandemics, now, they still are an obstacle...
Even as someone who had a reasonably good public school experience, I see no reason to be sad for them. Even accounting for inflation, funding for public schools continues to go up while quality stays flat or declines.
As for socialization, we have a large homeschool community near us. The community has regularly scheduled gatherings, and provides a way for families to work together on teaching various subjects. Other organizations like community sports, 4H, etc. are also good options.
However, it should be noted that socialization won't be (and shouldn't be) exactly like the socialization one receives in public school. The social reality of public school is very strange and not at all like the social reality of the adult world. Homeschooling provides an opportunity to shape the child's social reality to prepare them better for the adult world.
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.
Guys, education design IS social design. It's the number one biggest feature of social design. Homeschooling is expensive. The cheapest is no school, kids stay home and hang out in the neighborhood unsupervised while parents are busy. Integrating them into workplaces is expensive, I'd argue the most expensive of all. It's a neat concept, but let's acknowledge that it is a luxury not everyone can afford.
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.
>Polgár 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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah! More accurately just EC, no real systems here.
Roguelikes are highly deterministic and are not real-time, so a system updating all its respective components for every "tick" wouldn't really fit.
The biggest obstacle with roguelike development is the way the components that make up an entity have to communicate in an agnostic way. Think if a wizard tries to freeze a warrior, where in the code/flow do you specify if that is or is not allowed? And what happens when you have extreme edge cases like if a specific area, a status applied to a teammate, or some random event nearby maybe says that the warrior is actually immune to being frozen? And what if the wizard's freeze spell is so powerful that it can ignore all of those obstacles?
The approach I went with is that the EC side is relatively basic but all the components can optionally tap into a flux/redux-style event system, and those messages are very powerful in how they allow themselves to be modified or permitted/allowed while being deterministic.
(And of course the message system allows for easy client/server logic, and super easy unit or integration testing of gameplay systems which hasn't felt like anything I've used before.)
I'm quite liking it so far, hoping to have something more concrete in 5-6 months.
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).
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.
383 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadI 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".
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.
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...
Is it that HTTPS relies on certification, and therefore introduces one more actor that can effectively remove content that they deem "inappropriate", whatever inappropriate may be?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No job is the goal. No money is the problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987008
Thanks!
I wake up every day dreaming of retirement: when I will be free to do (or not do) my best work.
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.
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.
I can hang my own shingle, but I don't have a network.
Why not do B2B. The market is much more fragmented and thus you can always find a niche.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe you don't even need two sections. Just split the class into two teams? Has this been tried anywhere?
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.
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.
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 ...
How loud were all the pumps combined? You mention there was a bounce house, were the pumps quieter than that?
- 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
As an example of how their thinking changes (at least my kids and others), when they know the grading rubric the teacher uses and they have a B, they can do the math to figure out if an A is even possible. If its not, why bother with extra effort there? (that is their thinking)
In software terms this is like solving 80% of a performance problem by fixing a minor thing that was causing it. You are wasting effort to try and bring performance back much further.
Anyways I think what might work is just to get them to do something creative over the summer as a "project" but they choose it and work on it.
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
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).
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.
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...
Around these here parts, the term means many many things, and it involves anything from anti-vaccination & homeopathy and far further medical fringes (Crystals and essential oils for everything up to and including cancer or covid etc), through vast conspiracy theories up to and including Illuminati and Templars and Masons and everything else, impractical and frequently random / fashionable food choices and restrictions, and so on and so worth. "Sensitive", "Aware", "Liberal" or "Emotionally Intelligent" are not part of local definition of "Woke" anymore. In general, "Woke" and "Science/Fact-oriented" are fairly mutually exclusive here - while that's an unfair generalization, that's exactly the problem - the term has diffused and has a lot of negative in addition to perhaps some positive meanings; but mostly it's used by any given fanatical group to indicate their superiority compared to its antonym, "Sheeple".
If you meant a different word, noting it explicitly would be helpful :)
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
It seems you are confusing Jim Crow for the various riots and racial violence that occurred during that time period. It serves no benefit to falsely intertwine similar but separate historical concepts solely to write some vague hyperbole.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
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.
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.
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.
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.
So I guess this is what I'll be told the next time I ask a prospective company about WLB.
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.
second, it was on purpose. i wanted to trigger op to explain his position more. and it worked. he did.
so chill out. not everyones out to get ya
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.
in my understanding, he argues that if you are the former, become the latter and thats the key tk a better life.
now he might not give precise instructions, but knowing PGs work, i assume that path goes through entrepreneurship. i think he even hints at it by writing: be(come) your own boss.
how do you read it?
(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.
I tend to agree it's a part of a character which also can be developed.
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.
I also think it can be bad advice for founders too.
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.
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.
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.
Personally, I probably would have read that manager the riot act for even considering it appropriate to do.
So if they give you that speech, you can turn around and demand proper skin in the game plus a huge amount of freedom and autonomy. Fair is fair. No company will affect my work life balance unless they've made it worth my while.
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.
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.
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.
If all you have is a hammer, you’re going to go around looking for nails.
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.
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.
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/
Perhaps it's because they're so big now that they get a lot of fraudulent applications, so they reserve the right to check that people have really done what they say they've done. I.e., it's just to ward off bullshitters.
It may also be needed for applicants proposing ideas based on deep tech and/or bleeding-edge research, in which it would be hard for the YC interviewers to be sure the applicant really knows enough about the field to deliver what they claim they can.
Given that the thing YC was being dunked on over last week was for not doing enough due diligence on a startup trying to build an "MMO metaverse" [1] that has been unable to deliver, I guess there are still cases where they need to verify capabilities to some degree.
That said, it's still very much part of the YC ethos that founders who are self-motivated to work on interesting and ambitious projects in their own time is the best indicator of potential. They'd never make a funding decision based substantially on someone's academic record.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27319457
The final goal will be a few copies printed off the Amazon-whatjamacallit and read 'for real'.
But yes. Something real, that is theirs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An aside: Is ‘take your child to work day’ even a thing anymore?
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.
Mum got a tour of the office, did workshops with the CEO and other leaders. It was pretty cool.
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.
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..
[0] Don't worry, they socialize with plenty of other people
I do wonder though how you managed to get enough socialization time with other people. Scheduling that seems like a massive pain unless there are also a lot of other families homeschooling nearby and in the same age group.
I think homeschooling is a lot easier than it was 20 years ago, in regards getting enough opportunities for socialization. Pandemics, now, they still are an obstacle...
As for socialization, we have a large homeschool community near us. The community has regularly scheduled gatherings, and provides a way for families to work together on teaching various subjects. Other organizations like community sports, 4H, etc. are also good options.
However, it should be noted that socialization won't be (and shouldn't be) exactly like the socialization one receives in public school. The social reality of public school is very strange and not at all like the social reality of the adult world. Homeschooling provides an opportunity to shape the child's social reality to prepare them better for the adult world.
>Polgár 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
PS: This is one of the best discussion I have ever read on HN. This article is inspiring in many ways.
> 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.
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.
Yeah it make sense to focus on interesting projects when you are already rich.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a playfulness in doing something seemingly impossible, because succeeding at it simply means having fun playing with it.
https://github.com/and0p/chaos-core
Mine's a low-res MMO client/server in JS. I loved Ultima Online and experimented with 'military' isometric projection, but landed back on 3D.
Roguelikes are highly deterministic and are not real-time, so a system updating all its respective components for every "tick" wouldn't really fit.
The biggest obstacle with roguelike development is the way the components that make up an entity have to communicate in an agnostic way. Think if a wizard tries to freeze a warrior, where in the code/flow do you specify if that is or is not allowed? And what happens when you have extreme edge cases like if a specific area, a status applied to a teammate, or some random event nearby maybe says that the warrior is actually immune to being frozen? And what if the wizard's freeze spell is so powerful that it can ignore all of those obstacles?
The approach I went with is that the EC side is relatively basic but all the components can optionally tap into a flux/redux-style event system, and those messages are very powerful in how they allow themselves to be modified or permitted/allowed while being deterministic.
(And of course the message system allows for easy client/server logic, and super easy unit or integration testing of gameplay systems which hasn't felt like anything I've used before.)
I'm quite liking it so far, hoping to have something more concrete in 5-6 months.
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).
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.
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.