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A Project of One’s Own

paulgraham.com

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Re: A Project of One’s Own

#51

Post by dkarl »

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…

If you want to impress someone, publish your side project, whatever that means for the type of project it is. Of course the code needs to be public on GitHub or somewhere similar, but if it's a web project, publish it to the web. If it's an app, publish it to an app store and have it on your phone in the interview.

The reason people aren't as interested in side projects is that most aspects of professional software development are optional in side projects. The vast majority of side projects are done alone, and for a very narrow purpose: write a command line utility to learn Rust, write a web app to work through a design idea for it, write a game for the sake of implementing a pathing algorithm.

As a result, in most cases programmers rightly neglect 95% of the work that it would require to produce a version for public consumption, and on top of that, they don't have to communicate with product, QA, or other developers. Building something that is fit for purpose is usually orders of magnitude easier when the purpose is to learn something, satisfy curiosity, or solve the narrow version of a problem that you are personally facing.

Because of this, interviewers have very low initial assumptions about what it means when you say you did something as a side project, and you'll have to show them.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#52

Post by TeMPOraL »

bachmeier wrote: post #42

The essay starts out okay, but then kind of goes off the rails: > Instead of telling kids that their treehouses could be on the path to the work they do as adults, we tell them the path goes through school. There are two things wrong with that sentence. First, there's no tradeoff because kids have enough time for both. Second, a treehouse is rarely the path to riches. Let's not kid ourselves (pun intended). Most kids…

> First, there's no tradeoff because kids have enough time for both [projects and school].

Do they, though? Between schools offloading teaching as "homework", making kids do after school what should've been done in-class, and the cultural pressure making parents sign up kids to every possible extracurricular they can afford - there's not that much time in a kid's day left.

> a treehouse is rarely the path to riches

pg did not talk about riches in this essay, and especially in this paragraph. He talked about doing interesting work.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#53

Post by toomuchtodo »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #39
nindalf wrote: post #19

> 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…

It really speaks to how little PG understands the realities of being an employee, rather than a founder or "visionary" or some such high up idea person. I enter into employment with an employer, and the terms are laid out in a contract, possibly based on an agreement the company and a union. My employer gets to call the shots during the working hours, as specified by the contract. For anything outside of that, they h…

I just wish I could get some signal out of his writings as to if PG is simply out of touch or knowingly has less than positive intent as it relates to the startup/founder/employee power balance. Does he really not understand how much more benefit founders realize versus employees at an organization? Or does he, and this is marketing for startup portfolio company employee pipelines? I assume you will be passionate if you possess double digit percentages of the total equity of your company, but not so if you have a fraction of a percent and are at will employed.

A job should absolutely be able to be just a job you perform to generate income if you can do the job, regardless of passion for it. The bar is high enough already for employees trying to climb the employment/career rock face without retired “thought leaders” adding additional constraints.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#54

Post by TeMPOraL »

andreyk wrote: post #47
rossdavidh wrote: post #41

Jared Diamond, in his book "The Day Before Yesterday", talks about how children in Papua New Guinea when he was an anthropologist there would play at making a garden or raising pigs. The kid would have a toy, wooden pig, and then eventually be given a piglet, and then gradually their "play" would become more realistic until it shaded into adult work. My daughter, as a youngun', wanted to play "coffeeshop" where she w…

Yeah, I found this weird: "We treat "playing" and "hobbies" as qualitatively different from "work". It's not clear to a kid building a treehouse that there's a direct (though long) route from that to architecture or engineering. " There is not really a route from such playing to engineering except for the general kinds of reasoning involved. It's a cute idea, but does not seem very useful.

I disagree. I'd say there is a pretty direct route. The kid is trying to construct a building. They face great many object-level challenges: what materials to use, where to get them, how to connect them, how to make the structure stable, how to reduce work, etc. Behind each challenge is a field of study for the kid to dabble in, in order to overcome the problem.

"Real" architecture and civil engineering, as done by adult professionals, deals with exact same challenges (and then some more). The work is more complex, you need to explore relevant fields of study much deeper (and professional education gives you just that, in a structured way), but it's fundamentally the same thing, just in hard mode.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#55

Post by mumblemumble »

UncleMeat wrote: post #34
nindalf wrote: post #19

> 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…

Yeah this is horseshit for everybody except maybe founders. I'm selling my labor for money. If I work harder and the company does better, this translates into almost no extra benefits to me, with all of the net benefit going to the owners. I want "work/life balance" because I am being paid for a very specific amount of work and I want my employer to keep its nose out of the rest of my time. At least with a founder th…

Tangentially to that, I've worked at exactly one place that had a really good profit-sharing system. On paper, everyone had a relatively low salary. But, at the end of the fiscal year, they'd tally up the profits, divide them up among the employees, and cut everyone a check.

(Naturally, this was not a publicly-held company, nor was it financially beholden to any venture capitalists. One rarely finds much equity in extractive economies, regardless of whether the thing being extracted is mineral resources or intellectual resources.)

There were a few peculiar social phenomena that might have been attributable to this setup. One was the natural culture of collaboration and relative lack of office politics.

A more interesting one, though, was that people rarely worked any overtime at all. My guess as to why is that more traditional pay structures encourage more ambitious people to overwork, because it sets up a situation where employees feel a lot of pressure to compete with each other for raises. (And it demotivates other people, because they understand that any level of productivity in between the minimum, and whatever it takes to get ahead in the rat race, is wasted effort.) If the rising tide really does, obviously, visibly lift all boats, though, then there's no particular need to treat your entire career like a Black Friday doorbuster.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#56

Post by sombremesa »

This essay works well if you imagine the audience to be a batch of YC founders, or other entrepreneurial types. I read this essay three times.

First, I read it as pg probably intended - I'm in the midst of founding my own company, and the nature and quality of effort I bring to my own endeavors is orders of magnitude apart from what I bring to an employer. Much of my life growing up has been suffering abuse for choosing to pursue my passion followed by vindication, so the essay rings true for me in that sense.

The second time, I read this essay as an average kid from my underprivileged background might've read it. School was never a path to 'work' (there was plenty of 'work' for the unschooled), it was a route to escape poverty - one of a scant few that were close to reliable. That's the reason having a passion outside of school was frowned upon, you were risking starving any future family you might've had at a point where risk wasn't all that tolerable.

In my last reading, I just saw this essay as pg getting excited about something his kid was doing, and going about highlighting the importance of letting kids be kids - but in a very strange way such that it could fit among his other essays.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#57

Post by TeMPOraL »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #50
jacksonkmarley wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Basically, the latter, but I'd like to get back to making money. It just hasn't been an option. I'm not kidding. The door was slammed on me, quite hard (I think part of it was because I live in New York. New York's ageism problem is much worse than Silicon Valley's). I'm very fortunate, in being able to work on my own. I can't imagine what it must be like for the folks that don't have that option.

In the immortal words of 'nostromo, which I still have printed on a t-shirt:

No job is the goal. No money is the problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987008

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#58

Post by yoz-y »

For me the thing that distinguishes hobby from work is the second 90% of the project.

Working on the ideas, the architecture, the interface and piecing it all together is fun and I don't mind staying up long if I do say a game jam. However, once everything is up and running, you get into the tedium of making the project actually work. This might be fixing all books or making sure that the door on your tree house can, in fact, be closed.

In a hobby project you can say 'good enough' and be done with it. In work setting, not so much.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#59

Post by mattgreenrocks »

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…

> As a web developer

Don't brand yourself as that, because you subject yourself to the cultural baggage that comes with it, including the hiring practices and aesthetics (if you can call them that).

"But I program mostly for the web!" No, you don't program _just_ for the web, you program more holistically than your peers, you said it yourself:

> my peers tend to fear data structures...and present an extreme fear of original code

And we really need more people like that.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#60

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #57
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, the latter, but I'd like to get back to making money. It just hasn't been an option. I'm not kidding. The door was slammed on me, quite hard (I think part of it was because I live in New York. New York's ageism problem is much worse than Silicon Valley's). I'm very fortunate, in being able to work on my own. I can't imagine what it must be like for the folks that don't have that option.

In the immortal words of 'nostromo, which I still have printed on a t-shirt: No job is the goal. No money is the problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987008

That's a keeper!

Thanks!

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