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A Project of One’s Own

paulgraham.com

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Re: A Project of One’s Own

#11

Post by jacksonkmarley »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #9

I once wrote that "My dream is to, one day, work for free." I am now living that dream. When I left my last company, in 2017, I looked at working for someone else, but was almost immediately told that no one wants old men. It was pretty crushing. But I went and set up a corporation that allows me to get equipment and testing kit, and started to write my own stuff. I explored surveillance cameras and ONVIF, as well as…

So do you make a living from your current company, or are you living off past income/superannuation etc.?

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#13

Post by austincheney »

If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but because I've been on the other end and I know which has more predictive value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't care about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects of their own, I wanted to hear all about those.

That was the most important part of the essay for me. I don’t see this reflected in hiring though. Most of my real challenging programming is on personal projects but interviewers just want to know about the boring junior CRUD work that I do at the job. When I go on military deployments I continue programming and solving problems and building things but none of that seems to come up.

As a web developer I prefer to keep my personal projects personal. On my current personal project I published over 950 commits before asking for feedback. Sometimes people will discover something of mine and use it, which is great, but it’s still a personal project.

The reason for that level of introversion is that I don’t trust other web developers. It mostly isn’t about ownership.

I find that my peers tend to fear data structures and present an extreme fear of original code. Call it Invented Here[1] or whatever you want but it is certainly there and it’s an irrationality I don’t want to deal with when I am writing an application.

As an example of the hostility, yes that is the best choice of word, mention explicit use of events or the DOM and the common sentiment reminds me of reading history about lynchings in Jim Crow era and sun down towns. As an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27419965

I wish the attitudes in the above example were rare, but they aren’t. So, I remain an introverted developer working on personal projects.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#14

Post by BiggsHoson »

gizmo wrote: post #2

> Indeed, it may be one of the advantages of capitalism that it encourages such rewriting. A company that needs software to do something can't use the software already written to do it at another company, and thus has to write their own, which often turns out better. I think this is a great insight, and perhaps this is the reason why open source libraries aren't a panacea. By building your own stuff from scratch you…

I once worked for a small software company that produced custom-written ERP systems for small to mid-sized manufacturers. It was a real thrill to be presented a problem and write code that solves it nicely, removing hindrances to productive work by the end users. I loved being able to visit in person, see the issue first-hand, work with them to devise a solution, and then later watch how much easier their job had become because of it.

I miss that kind of job satisfaction. Indeed, it satisfied a deep, personal need to create. I was just fortunate that I could make a living doing so.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#17

Post by beaconstudios »

austincheney wrote: post #13

If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but because I've been on the other end and I know which has more predictive value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't care about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects of their own, I wanted to hear all about those. Tha…

I think that's just a HN bubble (SV bubble?) attitude. Working outside of FAANG, I've never encountered such absolutist thinking around the use of JS. Most developers are just trying to get the feature working as specified, regardless of whether it uses a core mechanic or a bit of JS. Better developers simply know the spectrum of options for implementing their features and choose what they perceive to be the best tool for the job based on the available tradeoffs, they don't declare certain options to be heretical or proof of moral lacking.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#18

Post by myth2018 »

> What proportion of great work has been done by people who were skating in this sense? If not all of it, certainly a lot.

I used to think like that. However, the years I spent on my masters and on my startup were a watershed.

I was finally working on projects of my very own. But, after some months of extreme excitement, I was resorting to medicine and self help articles to heep me motivated and focused, especially when the boring intricacies started to pop up.

The passion, due to its very nature, fades away.

In my case, I alleviated those issues with method and discipline. They help you overcome the boring parts. The passion even became cyclic, as the growing body of work and solved problems made me feel engaged again.

Nowadays I even feel much better about the plethora of not-my-own-projects I've worked on along my life.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#19

Post by nindalf »

> That's why it's a mistake to insist dogmatically on "work/life balance." Indeed, the mere expression "work/life" embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct. For those to whom the word "work" automatically implies the dutiful plodding kind, they are. But for the skaters, the relationship between work and life would be better represented by a dash than a slash.

So I guess this is what I'll be told the next time I ask a prospective company about WLB.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#20

Post by thrower123 »

This touches on one of the most demotivating facets of modern work: the obsession with collaboration.

If you never have any autonomy or space to develop a sense of ownership, outside of being yoked like an ox in a team or mired in the tyranous mediocrity of committees, it's extremely difficult to care about what you are doing.

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