221–230 of 588 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially since going to any kind of private school tracks closely with “parents have lots of money” which probably has a lot more to do with it.
Not necessarily, there are lots of private schools which do things very normally.
> I was genuinely interested in most of the classes I took, and I worked hard. And yet I worked by far the hardest when I was studying for a test.
I know that learning how to hack systems is valuable because that's how I got into YCombinator. I set out specifically to hack the application process and succeeded. It wasn't even that difficult to do. If pg believes what he's saying in this essay, I have two questions: 1. why did he design a testing system that was easily hacked? 2. why does YCombinator itself focus so much on hacking the venture capital system, as…
> YCombinator was (in 2008) oriented around learning what magic words to say to investors and exactly when to time techcrunch launch articles, etc. There seemed to be no time given to "how to make a great product”
Making a good product (with whatever shortcuts/hacks come with it) is necessary for doing well. Getting exposure and launching on a Tuesday are neither necessary nor sufficient, but they will give a marginal edge.
Both the former and the latter are 'hacks', the only difference is degree of relevance. pg throws the baby out with the bathwater a bit by saying don't do both types of hacks.
For me when younger this was about Ivan Illich (deschooling society), Feynman (the Brazilian light polarization story) etc. Now I'm older it's reading the anger in 'Excellent Sheep', watching the pain in low-trust workplaces, and telling my kids I value real learning over test-passing (they listen, but huge pressure to conform).
It seems true that a new field is more intellectually stimulating and liberating than a codified one (I've talked to older female analyst programmers from the 70s/80s who had a blast with computers and left when it got rigid and boring, I worked in Gurgaon early 00s when those interested in IT were self-educating geeks doing it for love, who later got moved aside + down when the money arrived). Maybe this is why IT people chase the new shiny, as a defensive strategy against codification, a red queen game to keep the game interesting ( though inefficient).
Anyway, glad Paul is publishing these viewpoints, even if the actions to be taken are not clear. Also, society is over-geeked currently. It's not obvious that hackers ( or intellectuals or logistics experts or technocrats) should have too much power instead of History students, or politicians or sports-stars or whoever. Life is both a game and not a game, short term gaming has long-term consequences. History and Biology and Literature teach us this clearly.
This is great seeing so many PG essays! I've really missed his writing. > And at elite universities, that means nearly everyone, since someone who didn't care about getting good grades probably wouldn't be there in the first place. The result is that students compete to maximize the difference between learning and getting good grades. > When I started advising startup founders at Y Combinator, especially young ones,…
> This is great seeing so many PG essays! I've really missed his writing. I love reading his tweets! They're all so down to earth and illuminating. That said, I'm not a fan of his blog writing as much. I find it full of overly-sparse nuggets of wisdom. It needs to be more concise, to the point, with fewer clever metaphors. This article could've been compressed 70% and still have been human readable.
"Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
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https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060932237/essays-of-e-b-wh...
It is still true. A FAANG job is the easiest path for a engineer to millionaire status in about 5 - 10 years.
The interview process is eminently hackable.
Or perhaps you want to do a startup, get funding. You build a this for that .com. Do some social media, find a few users who love it. Read pg's advice, pitch deck advice, go to some demo days.
Hack the test. Get funding. The incubators, the vc fiends are themselves, oligopolic. A handful of firms with common expectations. Mmr. Hockey stick user growth. It's the team! Here's your A good chap.
Those are the tests here. But there are other ways to get an A+. You don't have to start a business the way software people start a business. You can do it like the cabinet maker, or the electrician, or the store owner.
You can buy one increasingly easier today because the baby boomers who started than decades ago want to retire. Imagine how you can take that business into the future with the software you can use to automate it.
Business brokers abound. Go talk to one.
Stop thinking go big or go home.
Go talk to a business broker. Go ask about owner absent business options. Residual income and you didn't even have to be there. Use automation to make the employees lives better and more prodictive. And your customers' lives.
Package that software you write into a SaaS and sell it to you competitors. Profit more.
You are your own case study.
> The way you get lots of users is to make the product really great. That is wrong – or, at the very least, incomplete. "Build it and they will come" is the dream and misconception of every programmer who's talented at software development but not at sales. Hell, this is the number one advice of every business how-to book ever: You can't rely on people finding out about your great product by chance, you need to put i…
Yeah it’s a matter of emphasis. When you are starting up, not having a great product is your biggest problem by far. Also your attitude, if widely applied, would result in a world filled with useless crap with brilliant marketing.
A: Because you and them don’t have the same circumstances, and thus don’t have the same utility function. You have different values.
The whole (long) thing is a mess of obvious misses. Too bad.
> The way you get lots of users is to make the product really great. That is wrong – or, at the very least, incomplete. "Build it and they will come" is the dream and misconception of every programmer who's talented at software development but not at sales. Hell, this is the number one advice of every business how-to book ever: You can't rely on people finding out about your great product by chance, you need to put i…
100% right, and the corollary of this is: you don't actually need to make a great product, if your sales&marketing game is good enough. Or, in other words, a lot of successful business - including startups - is exactly the "test hacking" PG urges founders to unlearn. I'm honestly surprised by this essay arguing that "hacking the test" is the wrong approach in startups/business. "Hacking the test" is essentially what…