The Lesson to Unlearn

> "Build it and they will come" is the dream and misconception of every programmer (...)

Well, the amount of marketing required strongly depends on the quality of and demand for your product.

I built a software product and launched it with very very minimal marketing (I emailed a blogger and published it on a mailing list).

People liked my app so much that I had a 1000 downloads within a few weeks (which I consider decent for a somewhat niche app).

Working on that app has since become my full time job, and I do very minimal marketing.

Maybe I could make more revenue if I focussed more on marketing, but to be honest I'm pretty amazed how well word of mouth advertising works.

>angering my parents by getting bad grades

At secondary school level, it's no longer an issue. Parents just change schools. A few months ago, an uber unserious secondary girl altered her end of term results. The father brought the slip to school to complain about the unprofessional look of the slip due to multiple alterations.

Found out what his daughter did and change schools.

My son is 8, and yesterday he came home from school and said, "I'm not above grade level in math." He sounded a little disappointed, but not too much; he also seemed to be asking if that really means anything.

We had a really interesting conversation. I've been a middle and high school math teacher most of my life, so this is quite familiar ground for me. Over dinner I asked him how he would go about measuring whether a kid is "above grade level". He got really animated and started to tell me what he thought second graders should know and be able to do, and how third graders should expand on that, and what he thought he'd start to learn in fourth and fifth grade.

I told him I could start to teach him some of the operations and skills he'll learn in the coming years, but that it probably wouldn't mean a whole lot. Instead I asked him what ideas he's already familiar with that other kids his age don't know about, because we talk about math almost every day. "I know what phi is, and pi!" Yes, and we've also talked about limits, calculus, negative numbers, fractions, decimals, and he's looked at pages of math that's well beyond my understanding as well.

I told him that when he gets to middle and high school classes, he's going to see higher level math and it's going to sound familiar because we've already been talking about the ideas for years. He's going to watch other kids fail and drop out of those classes because the ideas and the skills will be too new and too difficult for them to take in. I said we're probably much better off just continuing to talk about fun and interesting areas of math for the time being instead of worrying about "grade level".

> I would think most of the startups have products as instrumental goals; the exit is the terminal goal.

Depressing, if true.

I would hope that most people have a product that they want to build, and more money is an instrumental goal that lets them build it better. For example, I'd expect someone who loves to code to have software they want to write, and want enough money to allow them to do so—as opposed the executive who loves money and views writing software as the best way to get it. I'm not convinced that any great work was ever crafted by someone who was primarily crafting for instrumental reasons.

But you're probably right, and that's probably a big part of what's so toxic about startup culture these days.

I think what he's saying is that the approach is wrong. The highly industrialized school system is the way it is because of scale. His perspective is the initial point (paraphrasing: tests should be the same as taking a blood test).

To add to that point, take a urine test: people have been hacking it for years. The purpose of the urine test is to see what residual byproducts from certain drugs are in my system. I can hack it by using someone else's urine or imbibe on drugs that have a short lifetime in my bloodstream. Otherwise, to pass the test I have to not consume drugs.

His complaint is that people who pass the tests really shouldn't have. It's like a principal assuring parents that a strict urine exam is given to all teachers only to find out all the teachers who work for you are drug addicts (drug addicts who can hack the pee test).

His reference to private schools teaching students how to hack tests resonates with me as social workers teaching drug users how to hack their pee tests. I take that to mean that if teachers are doing their best but resort to teaching how to hack tests then their needs to be more work done outside of the teacher-student system.

[This is where disparities due to parent's wealth and income come in:] Students who have access to tutors can get the help they in a way having a teacher can't. A teacher can be a tutor, but cannot be a tutor for everyone (an issue with scale).