251–260 of 588 posts
It would have been an interesting contrast.
I wonder is that because almost all people who do YC are university educated.
Perhaps Paul graham doesn’t have much experience of entrepreneurs who are not university people.
Companies and other big institutions need very strong assurance that supplicants will indeed "work out" by comporting themselves to the culture and making valuable contributions to their goals. And the reason such absurdly strong signals of assurance are needed is the ridiculous level of friction inherent in admission to and ejection from these institutions and their hierarchy of stations.
So, to get into Big Company X, you need a prestigious degree, and to advance once you're there, you must identify and play their internal signalling games. Such is the attachment to signalling, that you'd often do much better to lead the holiday decoration committee than to create actual value by solving some important problem.
The relative lack of friction in open source is why, given the ability and inclination, even a dog can contribute at a high level.
The tech industry has unfortunately adopted the methodology of centralized hackable tests as the canonical gatekeeping method in the form of programming interviews. Most big tech companies don't care about how good you have been at delivering some value through creating software: they want to see you deliver a very specific type of performance at a whiteboard. Interviewers are given specific math puzzle questions to…
I will say though, the problem is one of “standardization” across an organization where it’s too big for everyone to fit in a room.
Suppose you give each team high autonomy to hire whoever they like using whatever “good” process they come up with. 90% of the time this results in good hires. But as you grow, that ten percent of underperforming people becomes large in absolute numbers, and is very painful to deal with.
It becomes a real problem when relatively lower performing people end up concentrated on a team, and then start being the hiring gatekeepers for that team, thus multiplying the number of lower performing hires.
Later you start having institutional problems when everyone starts to perceive that the engineers in Department A are generally better than the engineers in Department B. Engineers in Department A are more likely to leave if they perceive the company is getting worse at engineering - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Then you get enormous pressure to come up with standardized testing - aka algorithms on the whiteboard, or some other academic inspired exercise - imposed by higher level leadership that wants to address a genuine problem (skill disparity across the org) but does not know any better way to do it.
I think, as PG points out, there may be a real opportunity to innovate here, and probably a big financial opportunity if anyone can figure out how to productize and scale a solution.
I struggle to see an easy answer, though. In a utopian universe (for a hiring manager) I’d do something like pay candidates to come on site and work for a week, then make a hire/no-hire decision based on that. But I think that is far too onerous for candidates (and a big company) to have legs.
I got into "computer science" before there was a CS degree. Our CS classes were taught in the math dept (fortran), business dept (cobol), or engineering (assembler). The profs were literally 1 chapter ahead of the students. I, however, was in love with the subject. I was the "student advisor" in our "machine room". We had 5 teletypes connected to a remote mainframe at Rutgers. I lived and breathed CS. I wrote tests f…
The tech industry has unfortunately adopted the methodology of centralized hackable tests as the canonical gatekeeping method in the form of programming interviews. Most big tech companies don't care about how good you have been at delivering some value through creating software: they want to see you deliver a very specific type of performance at a whiteboard. Interviewers are given specific math puzzle questions to…
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…
Companies are this way too. The best companies are all run by OKRs and metrics. But if you peek under the hood, all of it is insanely hackable; you have to be naive to try and actually meet your explicitly stated objectives because that's not how you get promoted. It reminds me of a quote from The Elephant in the Brain. I don't remember the wording exactly, but it's something like "if there is a behavior in a large g…
Is "steelman" a typo or a new slang verb that I've not yet learned the meaning of?
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…
It's because he doesn't believe getting into YC is the achievement. Creating a company with users / profitability / growth is. You can get into YC and still fail with your company. And it's desirable for founders and YC to be more interested in building a successful company. When he says, "Make a good product", I think he's trying to convey a core and fundamental principle of business that gets obfuscated by all the…
But so much of YC felt (and probably does more so now) like you're being judged all the time. Which makes total sense to me, because seeking prestige is so fundamental to human nature. That co-evolved with social cooperation in a virtuous cycle.
If pg really believed what he wrote in this essay, YC would be structured very differently. The moment pg allowed some companies/founders to have better access to him than others, or the moment he talked about how some founders are better than others, he implicitly set up a criteria for judging founders and their companies. And people will always naturally feel envy and try to hack that criteria. But a precondition for doing good original work is not feeling judged. So he should have gone on a crusade to completely eliminate all forms of favoritism if he wanted to maximize the odds of success for a modal company. But that's not what he actually ended up doing. At all.
Now the question is, is the essay wrong or is the YC structure/culture wrong. If I were a betting man, I'd put all my money on the former every single time, and I think I'd never come lose that bet once.
So TLDR is, I dont think the situation is so bad, because grades are not only a function of tests but also assignments and projects. I think the deeper issue is that people learn to be told how to learn (which assignments or projects to do), and not taught how to learn by themselves. There are exceptions (at Stanford a ton of CS classes have projects where the students map out the problem and solution themselves), but I think this is pretty important too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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 d…
No. I consult with B2B startups on marketing and have seen the internal data for 20+ B2B tech companies. If anything, the best products with the lowest churn have less referrals, since people don't want their competitors to have the competitive advantage the product provides.
That sounds like a very cut-throat business.
In my target audience, most people are happy to share how they work and which tools they use. I even occasionally see random people recommending my product online (which makes me very happy)