The Lesson to Unlearn • Hacker News Board

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#431

Post by kaens » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 10:50 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #400

kaens wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty hard for companies to not skew very heavily towards being about making money when people require money for food, shelter, and healthcare (at least in the states). Unless the people involved are in a financial state where they are not dependent on revenue from the company, or we divorce survival from capital, I doubt it's really possible for "not making money" to disappear as a terrifying core motivator for eve…

I'm not saying companies should not make money. I'm talking about instrumental vs. terminal values. Money can and should be viewed as means to an end, as instrumental for achieve the company's purpose - be it feeding people, making good tools or getting them to space. But very often it becomes terminal - the company's purpose becomes making money, and what they do becomes means to an end. The entire structure becomes…

Yes, what I'm arguing is that it's very difficult for it to not become terminal because people die without income.

That's the root of the issue, not motivation or purpose or what the individuals value or the intentions behind the creation of the company.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#432

Post by rglullis » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 10:51 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #396

rglullis wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It comes from grades being used to evaluate people outside the particular schools they attend. Are they really, or is just this elaborate illusion supported by most decision makers to give some rationalization to their own selection processes? When you have Harvard being sued for discriminating against Asians, how can we keep a straight face and tell the kids that they need to study hard because the grades matter?…

> why do we actually care about grades at all? Because jobs are at a premium and evaluating prospective hires is hard, so employers look for anything they could use to filter and sort the stream of candidates. Education - both the what and the where is somewhat correlated, so that's what's being used.

The "what" and the "where" do not require the "how many points" to work as a filter, do they?

I think I spent too much on this discussion already, but the point I am trying to make is that standard tests are bad both as a filter for selection and as predictor of performance.

While not necessarily agreeing, I do understand if someone says "I will hire someone good from a top-tier school vs a top student from a not-so-good university". The "what" and "where" are definitely useful data points to filter out candidates.

What I don't understand is any employer that says they will hire based on SAT, GPA or any variation of an IQ test. It seems to be so unreliable measures to the point of actually hindering the process.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#433

Post by dunkelheit » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 10:51 PM UTC

hooande wrote: post #106

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…

Observation: creators and maintainers of hackable systems will typically spend a lot of effort to convince you that these systems are not hackable and absolutely reward only "honest effort". Pg's essay meshes very well with this observation.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#434

Post by Gatsky » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 10:51 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #228

Gatsky wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What makes you think the world isn't? It hardly ever is the best service or product that wins, but the one that sells best. And that is, to a huge degree, marketing. Maybe crap is to harsh, but not the best products? I certainly would sign that sentiment.

You are perhaps too optimistic. Just heard a scooter start up called ‘Unicorn’ went bust without making a single scooter, losing all the money people gave them for pre-orders. All the money was spent on facebook ads. This is the purest application of marketing, where there is no product, let alone a crap one.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#435

Post by ajju » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 10:54 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #417

I usually find PG’s writing to be very illuminating, but I largely disagree with this piece. I think the reason founders want introductions to influential people is not because they think that this is what you need to be successful. It’s because they have seen many cases where influential people talked up startups that seemed to be pretty mediocre, and it helped them succeed. And they think “well my startup is at lea…

> They think (correctly) that having these things will accelerate their growth and somewhat lower the bar to success

Incorrectly, unless you define success as a local maxima. You usually can’t influence your way to broad user adoption

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#436

Post by detaro » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 10:56 PM UTC

Gatsky wrote: post #434

hef19898 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think the world isn't? It hardly ever is the best service or product that wins, but the one that sells best. And that is, to a huge degree, marketing. Maybe crap is to harsh, but not the best products? I certainly would sign that sentiment.

You are perhaps too optimistic. Just heard a scooter start up called ‘Unicorn’ went bust without making a single scooter, losing all the money people gave them for pre-orders. All the money was spent on facebook ads. This is the purest application of marketing, where there is no product, let alone a crap one.

context: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/7/21000094/unicorn-electric...

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#437

Post by novok » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 10:57 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #364

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a hiring manager at a big company for years. We never did coding tests, and I like to think that I made good choices every time. I kept a high-functioning team together, under fairly humble pay, and stressful, sometimes demoralizing, conditions, for decades. I'm mediocre, at best, at these tests. I don't come from a traditional CS background (started as an EE). I tend to take unusual, hybrid approaches to solvi…

I've often wondered as well why tech companies seem to go out of their way to ignore portfolios. First I thought it's a misguided but honest attempt to make the process look more like a blind meritocracy, to basically turn the interview into a modern version of the Imperial Examination of ancient China. Then I read "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder, a book that documents the design process of a minicomputer in…

Also there are a lot of good people who can't show you their portfolios beyond a few sentences on a resume. And most places are hiring for group projects, not solo projects where you could make portfolio projects in your spare time.

But everyone can do a whiteboard interview!

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#438

Post by kccqzy » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 10:59 PM UTC

eggsmediumrare wrote: post #348

kccqzy wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think testing algorithmic questions is certainly evil, but it's a necessary evil because all other methods are either too time-consuming or unrealistic. You wouldn't believe in a big company how many clearly unqualified applicants there are, and there has to be some quick and dirty rule to run a filter through them. Perhaps it's the aura of FANG companies that make unqualified applicants try because they have nothi…

I've never done that (self-taught dev), but I've set up SSO, terraformed production systems, wrote ETLs for system critical data... I'm not an amazing developer, but I get things done. That test would filter me out simply because I've never tried it before.

I totally understand. Different job expectations. Whenever I tell people I actually need to write dynamic programming in my job people are always incredulous. To many, dynamic programming is a technique they learn only to pass interviews and not use in real life. It's really that if you don't know certain algorithmic stuff, you can't actually work on the lowest levels of the stack, but not all companies expect their developer to do that.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#439

Post by read_if_gay_ » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

coffeemug wrote: post #258

iamwil wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's because he doesn't believe getting into YC is the achievement. 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…

> Now the question is, is the essay wrong or is the YC structure/culture wrong.

I think that's a false dichotomy.

> 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.

It's correct that this creates a hackable test, but the losses incurred via that might be less than "going on a crusade to completely eliminate all forms of favoritism". This does not imply that hackable tests aren't bad, meaning the the essay is wrong, just that the pendulum can swing too far in the other direction too. Which isn't that striking of a realization.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#440

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

novok wrote: post #437

pavlov wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wondered as well why tech companies seem to go out of their way to ignore portfolios. First I thought it's a misguided but honest attempt to make the process look more like a blind meritocracy, to basically turn the interview into a modern version of the Imperial Examination of ancient China. Then I read "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder, a book that documents the design process of a minicomputer in…

Also there are a lot of good people who can't show you their portfolios beyond a few sentences on a resume. And most places are hiring for group projects, not solo projects where you could make portfolio projects in your spare time. But everyone can do a whiteboard interview!

Not everybody. I can DO them, but I pretty much guarantee that I won't do them WELL.

After a couple of these fiascos, I just gave up, and decided to start my own gig. I'm fairly good at what I do, and it really is too bad that it doesn't show in half-hour theory tests.

I do have a pretty massive portfolio, though. Comes from doing open-source software for over twenty years. I was paid to manage; not develop, so I needed to keep my tech chops up in other projects.

I also realize that this is not a typical thing. It's just my journey.

I thought it was funny that I mentioned this once, and someone insisted that I could have faked the portfolio.

If someone can fake ten years' worth of commit history, in dozens of repos, and tens of thousands of lines of code, as well as hundreds of pages of documentation, and dozens of articles, you should hire them immediately, because they are a genius.