PG, I enjoy your essays a great deal. Often while reading the content I click on your numerically referenced notes. Clicking on the numbered reference takes you to the details of that note. Please link the number in the notes section back to the location in the essay. This way I can click the note in the text and read the note and then click the note reference to return to the essay content and continue reading. This will prevent me from having to scroll back up to place where I left off. I would appreciate this user interface improvement. Thank you again for your thought provoking work.
After Credentials
31–40 of 209 posts
Re: After Credentials
#32Aha, that explains why resumes are so useless: a resume is a listing of credentials.
Re: After Credentials
#33One could easily amend this to include "After Perceptions". As a young geek, I was often passed over because I didn't look like I could do the job. It started with little league and continued on through high school and into the work place. I even quit one of my better jobs because a slicker looking but far less talented peer was promoted into what should have been my job. No more. As a mild mannered adult geek, I sti…
> until I open my mouth and show them On a complete tangent, this is one of the perks of living in a foreign country if you speak the language well - instant recognition that you have mastered their language, and that you must therefore not be a complete moron. The downside of this in Europe, for me, has been moving about 4 hours away (absolutely nothing in the US, in terms of distance) and completely losing this adv…
>On a complete tangent, this is one of the perks of living in a foreign country if you speak the language well - instant recognition that you have mastered their language, and that you must therefore not be a complete moron.
Absolutely. I'm a partner in a small educational venture in Taiwan, and my sales conversion rate is actually significantly better than that of our local staff. I don't believe for a second that it's because I'm that good. Having people shocked at my Chinese skills definitely gives me an extra oomph.
I'm not sure if Chinese people in the US would get the same credit.
Re: After Credentials
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of what you say is true, but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name. The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those it quickly dies. YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer. The part you're right about is that "admission" to YC is structurally a lot like college or grad school admissions. The difference, though, is that our…
College admissions officers do not, as far as I know, follow up on the careers of the people they accept and see how they did. I'm not sure that's true - in the UK at least, universities often issue press releases when one of their alumni does something notable (like becoming the Prime Minster of Thailand for example, which Oxford is crowing about at the moment).
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Re: After Credentials
#35PG, I enjoy your essays a great deal. Often while reading the content I click on your numerically referenced notes. Clicking on the numbered reference takes you to the details of that note. Please link the number in the notes section back to the location in the essay. This way I can click the note in the text and read the note and then click the note reference to return to the essay content and continue reading. This…
use the back button?
Re: After Credentials
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> until I open my mouth and show them On a complete tangent, this is one of the perks of living in a foreign country if you speak the language well - instant recognition that you have mastered their language, and that you must therefore not be a complete moron. The downside of this in Europe, for me, has been moving about 4 hours away (absolutely nothing in the US, in terms of distance) and completely losing this adv…
>On a complete tangent, this is one of the perks of living in a foreign country if you speak the language well - instant recognition that you have mastered their language, and that you must therefore not be a complete moron. Absolutely. I'm a partner in a small educational venture in Taiwan, and my sales conversion rate is actually significantly better than that of our local staff. I don't believe for a second that i…
> I'm not sure if Chinese people in the US would get the same credit.
I think the problem there is that you have no idea what background the person has. There are plenty of ethnically Chinese Americans who of course speak English perfectly, whereas if you're obviously "not from around there", people are going to connect the dots faster.
Re: After Credentials
#37sadly i think college credentials in the US have lost their luster because its always a let-down. without a doubt there is only one school that i have never met a single retard from: caltech. cmu is a close second. every other school has let me down by graduating some goof who i have interviewed or worked with. never again will i get uptight or impressed by stanford, mit or the ivies. my attitude is that i do not car…
"... every other school has let me down by graduating some goof who i have interviewed or worked with. never again will i get uptight or impressed by stanford, mit or the ivies. ..."
Don't confuse 'intelligence' and 'education'. There are plenty of smart people who have never been to University. Likewise there are plenty of people who go to University who graduate but can't think beyond what they have been taught.
Re: After Credentials
#38The left likes credentials? The right doesn't like intergenerational transmission of income?
These aren't any left or right I recognize. Who is PG thinking of?
Re: After Credentials
#39If large organisations are less efficient: - why do they survive? - if they survive despite all, why do we permit them? If the market was regulated to set a cap on the size of a single company's workforce (or some other metric, perhaps market capitalisation), we'd also avoid the 'too big to fail' problem we have at the moment. Not to mention quasi-monopolistic practices like large chains killing off small local compe…
> why do they survive? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm I would really like to see more analysis of what structural differences point towards the lots of smaller firms that pg sees, and whether this is a short blip in time, or a long term trend. Also, I hate to dredge up that ugly topic "politics", but currently, in the US, if you or your firm fail, that's great in terms of opening up space for oth…
Nice link and info, thanks for that.
Re: After Credentials
#40I think Paul is treading ideas with some interesting implications for him, personally. He is the head of an organization that funds companies on the basis of a written & oral exam, whose principal selling point is the transmission of "credentials" upon the kids they pick. Part of it is the kids' merit, but part of it is YC's past success. People go to YC for many of the same reasons people went to Stanford -- past se…
Some of what you say is true, but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name. The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those it quickly dies. YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer. The part you're right about is that "admission" to YC is structurally a lot like college or grad school admissions. The difference, though, is that our…
Nobel Prizes per undergraduate is an interesting measure. More than one in every 1000 Caltech undergrads wins a Nobel Prize, and that number rises substantially if one restricts just to science students, not engineering (which doesn't have a Nobel). This suggests that the admissions office there is doing something right.