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A Project of One’s Own

paulgraham.com

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Re: A Project of One’s Own

#71

Post by solipsism »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #52
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 p…

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

Yeah it make sense to focus on interesting projects when you are already rich.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#72

Post by bluefox »

It's a good start for an essay, and there was even a paragraph getting close to the crux of the matter (about projects of the kind that doesn't necessarily make money). The problem is that of the starving artist, and a solution, or a big step towards a solution, is universal basic income. This kind of safety net would let us at least partially revert back to the carefree ways of the child and give us the freedom to work on our own projects without the fear of and actual possibility of falling into destitution.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#73

Post by fhakx »

sodality2 wrote: post #16
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you concerned someone is MITMing Paul Graham's blog and inserting bad advice?

https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-your-static-website-needs...

Mostly nonsense, written in Twitter style. The argument for HTTP-only is to preserve the free web and not being dependent on yet another middleman.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#74

Post by austincheney »

monoideism wrote: post #24
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…

> common sentiment reminds me of reading history about lynchings in Jim Crow era and sun down towns I'm about as far from woke or PC as you could imagine, but that's an incredibly inaccurate comparison. Reading some developer scorn or arrogance, no matter how unfortunate or annoying, shares no common features with an actual lynching.

I am not claiming to be physically beaten, but to me the attitudes as I interpret them feel the same from what I have read compared to what I have experienced in how it feels and how it impairs my career progression/mobility. Earlier when I used the word hostility it wasn’t for elaboration.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#75

Post by beepbooptheory »

This is really nice and particularly resonant with me.

I've spent maybe a good five years obsessed with coding and development in all the ways, but I never went to school for it (I have an MA in philosophy), and have never had a real tech/dev job (I have been a random temp for almost two years now, cook and grubhub before that, and many different jobs before that in kitchens and teaching guitar and such).

I dream in javascript and have many different projects that skew more into art than repertoire/repo ready projects. Out of pure curiosity I have read many many books on programming languages and development strategies. Countless hours troubleshooting and understanding other people's work, learning git, docker, emacs, gradle, bash; learning OOP and SOLID; learning lower level languages. I just eat it up, I love it so much. There is nothing more satisfying to me than grokking it and then showing that understanding by example.

Most friends I talk to say I _should_ get a job doing this stuff I love so much, and I know the kinds of things I _should_ do if I wanted to try that, but that's not really my issue. Its more... I just don't want to jinx it, I don't want to get a job involving something I love so much because it just feels like it would ruin it.

But... life is long and sometimes I wish I had real health insurance, general financial stability, and everything else that goes along with the other side of this compromise. Hard to know.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#76

Post by travisjungroth »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #53
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Or does he, and this is marketing for startup portfolio company employee pipelines?

I think it's a marketing pipeline for founders. Maybe very early stage employees.

After reading many pg essays, I have this feeling that he's protective of founders. Not just YC founders, or other founders. But possible founders, too. Really the "spirit" of "founder" as it appears to him. (Use "idea" instead of "spirit" if it sounds too woo for you.)

He sometimes sees this spirit as under attack. Some other writer will dogmatically insist on work/life balance. It's probably targeted at the majority of working people who are selling their labor for the wages they need to get by. Personally, I think it's a good message. But there's no specific carve out in the article for founders, so maybe one person out there is a little less foundery than they would be otherwise. This worries pg.

So he writes some sentence like the one that kicked off this comment chain. It's really just "leave founders alone!". The intended effect is that those other writers insist a little less dogmatically, and that people feel enabled to dive into their own projects a bit more.

What the top comment is responding to is the perversion that so often happens. The line gets taken not just as gospel for the founder to live, but to preach. "We're looking for people who believe in work dash life, not work slash life." they say to the software engineer they're expecting to pop tickets off of JIRA for 40% below market wages and options on 0.01% of the company.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#77

Post by WJW »

thrower123 wrote: post #20

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.

My word, so much this. It is astounding how companies manage to kill initiative at every level as they grow. Individual team members can't change anything because they are at the bottom of the ladder and have to conform to the wishes of "the team" and low/middle managers somehow have even less autonomy because they can't go against their own managers but also have to navigate the peculiarities of their reports and various committees. You'd think that high level managers get more autonomy, but the demands of office politics (one serious mistake and you lose the shot at the C-suite you worked your whole career for) combined with their distance to people who can actually implement any changes they'd wish to make ensures that high level managers also have very little actual autonomy.

It does not help that the word "ownership" has become a euphemism for "you must now care about this thing and fix it when it breaks at 2am, but economic benefits of any improvements to it will still flow to the shareholders". You get the drawbacks of ownership but not the benefits.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#78

Post by crispyambulance »

Read also a much better essay by a vastly more skilled writer with quite a different view, Bertrand Russell, "In Praise of Idleness."

https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

Russell would say that people of the age to be tech start-up fodder should instead DO NOTHING. It's better for them and for society.

> I hope that after reading the following pages the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.

...and...

> I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#79

Post by bachmeier »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #52
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 p…

> parents sign up kids to every possible extracurricular they can afford

Yeah, that's what causes the tradeoff. Kids can't do school, work on projects, and have parents that fill their schedule with loads of other stuff. It would have been perfectly reasonable for PG to launch his attacks on overscheduling rather than school.

> pg did not talk about riches in this essay

He talked about "work they do as adults" and "more predictive value" and "When I was picking startups for Y Combinator".

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#80

Post by prawn »

bluefox wrote: post #72

It's a good start for an essay, and there was even a paragraph getting close to the crux of the matter (about projects of the kind that doesn't necessarily make money). The problem is that of the starving artist, and a solution, or a big step towards a solution, is universal basic income. This kind of safety net would let us at least partially revert back to the carefree ways of the child and give us the freedom to w…

Derek Sivers had a related comment I always think of. Very roughly, the idea is: instead of trying to love what makes you money (or make money from what you love), pick a tolerable career that makes you decent money, and then don't force your passion to be profitable.

Of course, it's hard to get excited about that when you throw 40 of your most energised hours of the week at a grind.

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