101–110 of 159 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I can tell, how hard people work has little correlation with whether they have follower-type personalities. It does, however, have quite a high correlation with working on a startup. So my guess is the cause is that they're working on a startup.
So do you condone working such long hours that founders are routinely sleep deprived?
Actually there's a fundamental incompatibility between cults and startups. Cult followers tend to be people who want someone to tell them what to do. There are a lot of people like that, but they're the opposite of the kind of people who make good startup founders. What you want in a startup founder is the sort of tenacious independent mindedness that makes you start a new search engine in 1998, when everyone else th…
So, what's up with these insane hours? You've written about the need for working long hours, but aren't Michael Parkatti and Mike Marrone taking it a bit too far?
All of that being said, ever since I've been a founder (and especially during YC), I've noticed my work time shooting off the charts compared to how I used to work for other companies. I know why this is for me: it's simply because I know that every minute I'm not working is a minute that I'm subtracting from the company's success timeline. People talk about compressing your career into the span of 4 years as a founder, and yeah that's really what's going on. The reason is because if you don't work on your startup, there literally is nobody else that will. And for me, it feels like I'm costing myself money when I'm not working, and that takes a while for people like me to figure out how to balance. I have found that it gets easier after you've reached a more stable 1.0 of your product, but it's always a challenge.
I must say, though, that the idea that YC is a cult is pretty ridiculous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I can tell, how hard people work has little correlation with whether they have follower-type personalities. It does, however, have quite a high correlation with working on a startup. So my guess is the cause is that they're working on a startup.
So do you condone working such long hours that founders are routinely sleep deprived?
It's sad to see this trollish content rising to the top of news.yc.
Sorry, but all your comment does is pretty much confirm the article. Dismissing criticism as "trolling" is exactly what a cult member would do. Even invalid criticism warrants a proper rebuttal, if at the least to educate those leveling the criticism as to their errors. The fact that it has risen to top stop this morning only serves to illustrate that there are many things about the YC process that people don't parti…
It's sad to see this trollish content rising to the top of news.yc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but all your comment does is pretty much confirm the article. Dismissing criticism as "trolling" is exactly what a cult member would do. Even invalid criticism warrants a proper rebuttal, if at the least to educate those leveling the criticism as to their errors. The fact that it has risen to top stop this morning only serves to illustrate that there are many things about the YC process that people don't parti…
I think you may be mistaken about which Paul you're responding to. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul
I thought your comment was a more appropriate response, to be honest.
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Except, in Apollo people died/can die. That is a rather silly criterion. All engineers build things that can kill people if they go wrong. That's what engineers do. You think that social software can't be used to kill people? Do you know the number of people (mostly women) who are murdered each year by stalkers, most of whom are former lovers or spouses? Do you want to bet that none of those stalkers have used, say,…
Apollo engineers make a design mistake, it kills people. If you don't like that because it doesn't effect enough people (Sorry I didn't realize that since Facebook serves 100 million people it is more of a feat than going to the moon) lets talk about Boeing. Boeing makes a design mistake, hundreds of people die. That has happened and will continue to happen. Now you compare that to Facebook - if Facebook or Google go…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where did I compare them? My comment just pointed out that the definition of a cult used in the blog post falls down badly when applied to famous successful projects (which we can presumably agree were not cults), and is therefore either being misused or broken.
He's using the accepted psychological definition of a cult. The reference is right there in the post.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I can tell, how hard people work has little correlation with whether they have follower-type personalities. It does, however, have quite a high correlation with working on a startup. So my guess is the cause is that they're working on a startup.
So do you condone working such long hours that founders are routinely sleep deprived?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except, in Apollo people died/can die. That is a rather silly criterion. All engineers build things that can kill people if they go wrong. That's what engineers do. You think that social software can't be used to kill people? Do you know the number of people (mostly women) who are murdered each year by stalkers, most of whom are former lovers or spouses? Do you want to bet that none of those stalkers have used, say,…
Apollo engineers make a design mistake, it kills people. If you don't like that because it doesn't effect enough people (Sorry I didn't realize that since Facebook serves 100 million people it is more of a feat than going to the moon) lets talk about Boeing. Boeing makes a design mistake, hundreds of people die. That has happened and will continue to happen. Now you compare that to Facebook - if Facebook or Google go…
I have no idea. This whole conversation seems like a big tangent, and perhaps I'm having a bit too much fun following it off into infinity. Shame on me.
Anyway:
Yes, Boeing has a more difficult task than many startup founders. Of course, there are also more engineers at Boeing, and they've been working on the problem for a much longer time.
Yes, it would be possible for a Google or Facebook design error to get someone killed. Leaks of personal or financial information are potentially deadly. Bad information can be deadly.
No, I can't give you a specific example of a design error (as opposed to a user error) that killed a Google or Facebook user. That's partly because Google and Facebook engineers -- like Boeing engineers, and most engineers worthy of the name -- take their work seriously and don't make many consequential mistakes. But mostly it's because our standards are looser, and reasonably so: The internet is a twelve-year-old invention, and when planes were twelve years old people crashed and burned all the time. They were experimental, and nobody expected anything different.
Standards will change. We're hearing stories of users who followed a Google map off a road and are now suing Google for damages. Right now those stories serve as hilarious examples of lawsuit-happy, stupid people, but perhaps in fifty years middle-class people will expect digital maps to be perfectly accurate, just as today they expect to have clean water and lead-free plumbing, and to always be able to reach an operator by dialing 911 on their cell phone.
Finally, I don't think this sentence is correct, in general:
The fact that people misuse something doesn't make it the engineers fault.
The problem is that there's no bright, shining line. Your kitchen knife example is far to one side of the line: Because kitchen knives are a very well-established technology, most knife accidents are caused by people misusing the product. On the other side of the line is, say, food that's been sweetened with ethylene glycol. That's pretty obviously a design error. And in between is a huge grey area, in which most software falls. Is Boeing responsible when a confused pilot pulls the wrong lever and fails to lower the landing wheels? [1] Is the guy who built the buggy online spreadsheet responsible when the civil engineer uses it to design a bridge that falls down? Well, that's why we have courts -- and why your startup needs to have a lawyer.
[1] I do know that planes used to have a little wheel-shaped lever to guard against this very problem. Maybe they still do. I forget where I learned that -- was it from Donald Norman?