A Project of One’s Own • Hacker News Board

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#91

Post by prawn » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:30 PM UTC

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…

I really like this post, especially the point about visibility of job details for children. We don't talk about it enough. We don't draw connections between play skills and career paths. By the time I was making study decisions that would start to dictate my job opportunities, I had no idea what options were out there. A couple of work experience placements isn't enough.

One of my jobs is in tourism photography. For some projects, I just go on holiday with my kids, speculatively take photos/videos and then sell them to tourism authorities. It works well. My 6 and 8 year olds came to me at some point and asked, "Is your job to make people want to go on holiday?" Pretty much, yep. And so they have an incentive to help (more effective I am, more holidays we go on) and they see what goes into it - getting up for sunrises, capturing moments, editing, sharing the shots, etc. It's a serious contrast to my other job(s) where they'd guess computers are involved but wouldn't know what goes on - my fault, because I've never stopped to explain it.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#92

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:31 PM UTC

solipsism wrote: post #71

TeMPOraL wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Correct. I mean, it's the Maslov's pyramid - you aren't going to do interesting projects if you're constantly worrying about food and shelter.

I understand that most people don't have the luxury of starting interesting projects (I frequently talk about it on HN, too), but I think we can't read this essay (or most of the other pg writes) as targeted at everyone. His audience is clearly the people who can afford to entertain his ideas. Which is not just rich people - it's all the people who have some disposable free time, or can restructure their life to have it.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#93

Post by mcguire » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:33 PM UTC

The really neat thing about being so excited about your own projects that you have to work on them is that no one has to pay you for it. (See the state of open source.)

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#94

Post by jacksonkmarley » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:34 PM UTC

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.

That does suck. I guess there are different approaches you could take to work around it, e.g. spamming more companies or filtering out certain types of company, what kind of numbers did you put in? Do you think an early, unpleasant rejection could have discouraged you prematurely?

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#95

Post by mcguire » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #85

nickthemagicman wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think PG's argument is that having your own projects is joyful and is more akin to play than work. Not everyone wants to do this and being idle in that case is great as well. I get extremely bored If I'm idle for too long.

I feel similarly. I think, however, that PG's idea of "a project" as much as he says it should be "for fun" -- is actually just a segway (wormhole) into a start-up! > One way to ensure autonomy is not to have a boss at all. There are two ways to do that: to be the boss yourself, and to work on projects outside of work. Though they're at opposite ends of the scale financially, startups and open source projects have a…

I guess VCs wouldn't be considered "bosses"?

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#96

Post by tasuki » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

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.

Have you ever built a treehouse? It is both architecture and engineering.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#97

Post by johnwheeler » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #78

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…

I read it and I don’t think it’s a “much better essay by a vastly more skilled writer”. It’s not practical, but PGs essay is.

Peculiarly, I think your opinion and the difference between the two essays gives credibility to PGs points. One essay by an academic, and the other by a creator and people err on the relative value of the academic’s because that’s what they’re taught to do.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#98

Post by sangnoir » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #85

nickthemagicman wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think PG's argument is that having your own projects is joyful and is more akin to play than work. Not everyone wants to do this and being idle in that case is great as well. I get extremely bored If I'm idle for too long.

I feel similarly. I think, however, that PG's idea of "a project" as much as he says it should be "for fun" -- is actually just a segway (wormhole) into a start-up! > One way to ensure autonomy is not to have a boss at all. There are two ways to do that: to be the boss yourself, and to work on projects outside of work. Though they're at opposite ends of the scale financially, startups and open source projects have a…

FYI: it's spelt segue. Segway is the brand-name of a self-balancing wheeled contraption that was supposed to revolutionize urban transportation 2 decades ago, but only saw success in the mall-cop niche.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#99

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:37 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #79

TeMPOraL wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "m…

> It would have been perfectly reasonable for PG to launch his attacks on overscheduling rather than school.

I agree, it would have been. But I wouldn't let schools off the hook, because they are the other edge of the feedback loop: in big part, extracurriculars exist as a way to game admission system. Together, they form a system that tries to consume all the free time a kid has.

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

At least in his writing, pg does play with the idea that work is valuable beyond the money it earns you, so I interpreted this essay in that light.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#100

Post by prawn » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

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 don't think he's ever talking to future/lifelong employees. His passion is clearly startup founders and his writing is always directed at those people.