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After Credentials

paulgraham.com

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Re: After Credentials

#51

Post by mthg »

retyred wrote: post #16

sadly 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…

I agree with this sentiment entirely. I went to a public magnet high school with SAT scores averaging around 1480 and at least half our graduating class every year ends up in an ivy / mit / stanford. I'd say more than half of those who made it to the top tier got in from legacy / extracurriculars / obsessive dedication to good grades and making teachers happy as opposed to genuine intelligence and love of learning. Also curiously, like you said, everybody from my graduating class who went to caltech, although not necessarily teh uberg3nius math wiz, was at least minimally competent in some technical field.

Although one could make the case that a lot of those schools, especially the ivies, are picking people based on their ability to lead and 'make a difference' in some general sense rather than pure raw ability. Therefore they may intentionally focus on apparently manifested soft qualifications like achievement in extracurriculars, personal discipline as exhibited by a flawless GPA, or well-established personal connections.

This is all strictly re: undergrads of course. I've never seen a single retard get admitted to a top-tier PhD program in science or engineering.

Re: After Credentials

#52

Post by nazgulnarsil »

bootload wrote: post #37
retyred wrote: post #16

sadly 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.

any type of creative field runs into this problem a lot. a lot of people reach a certain level and realize that they don't actually have any talent for X, they were just good at following the directions.

Re: After Credentials

#53

Post by greg »

Paul argues testing will be pushed aside by measurement of actual performance. He may be right but existing methods of testing are amazingly unsophisticated and open to improvement. For instance:

Most work in the real world is done in teams, but schools tend to grade on average team output, which is vulnerable to free riders. Why not rotate individuals through teams and measure independent contributions with some simple statistics? That's what coaches do for sports like rowing.

Knowledge in the real world is rarely all or nothing. It matters how confident you are in what you know. Will you risk your company's future on an algorithm? Why not adjust test results by student's own ratings of their confidence in their answers? Then we could see who can really be trusted with their knowledge.

Re: After Credentials

#54

Post by cperciva »

pg wrote: post #27
cstejerean wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly, once you get some momentum your startup will survive or die based on how good it is. But if I hear cperciva correctly, had it not been for his credentials lots of users might not have even tried tarsnap to begin with, and I assume that would also translate into far less users a year from now, even though the product would be the same.

I assume that would also translate into far less users a year from now That's the mistake. The number of users you get long term depends more on the "interest rate" than the size of the initial seed. E.g. Google.

I have to dispute the notion that the "initial seed" is irrelevant. Given a fixed "interest rate", the number of users at any time will be proportional to the initial number of users; and given that the initial number of users can easily vary by an order of magnitude based on external factors, I'd say this is pretty significant. (Of course, it's quite possible that the growth rate is not independent of the initial number of users.)

There's also a more dangerous factor to consider: The number of users of a startup is far more visible than its growth rate, so it's entirely possible that great startups end up shutting down due to a disappointing apparent lack of traction when -- if they had stayed around for longer -- their inherent advantages would have produced enough growth to make them wildly successful. Even if we suppose that the ultimate potential of a business is entirely dependent on the inherent quality of the product or service it produces -- which would be rather stretching credulity -- then the external factors of marketing and luck still have a significant impact on whether companies remain in existence long enough to reach their potential.

Re: After Credentials

#55

Post by slvrspoon »

i believe, without having done any research, that credentialism worldwide has GROWN massively as the middle classes try to protect their positions for the selfish reasons PG states. less biased, more thoughtful research would make for a more reasoned debate about an important topic, to Y combinator, and to wider society.

Re: After Credentials

#56

Post by evgen »

retyred wrote: post #21
jbert wrote: post #9

If 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…

this entire "lots of small firms are the future" meme is probably just wrong. paul graham knows a lot about websites but very little about the rest of the economy. show me the ten person company that can produce the equipment to generate and transmit electricity. or food production. where are all the ma and pa grocery stores? and banking...we have fewer banks now than ever and the number is still dropping. and PCs...…

Music production. Video production.

Any industry where the capital costs are low, or where a small group of niche specialists can add a significant multiplier to the value chain are candidates for this sort of effect. As more industrial tasks are farmed out to large companies that specialize in flexible production it is possible that you will see this show up in industries that are currently have strong vertical integration.

For example, ten people can't mass-produce a car. Ten people can provide spcialized bodywork and personalization of a mass-produced car. Ten people could probably design and oversee the outsourced manufacturing of discrete components in the car. Ten people could probably manage a company that deals with other small firms to create bespoke vehicles based upon mass-produced frames and engines. As you increase the specialization and make more parts interchangeable it is possible to decentralize and distribute a production chain to the point where a large collective of ten person companies can provide a higher-value good at a lower per-unit cost than a single large company.

Certain activities will always need large, high-capitalization organizations, but it seems that more and more of these companies and factories are being forced to become more flexible and nimble which is leading to a point where a larger and larger part of your world can be serviced by smaller teams than by large enterprises.

Re: After Credentials

#57

Post by maurycy »

cperciva wrote: post #8

PG claims that a shift towards smaller companies results in people being judged on their performance rather than based on factors which do rather poor jobs of predicting said performance; my experience with tarsnap indicates otherwise. I have a small number of customers -- somewhere between 10% and 20% -- who are using tarsnap based on a recommendation from another tarsnap user; but the vast majority of tarsnap users…

I think that in case of tarsnap it is relatively hard to make the decision if you don't have basic knowledge in cryptography, at least. That's why the information assymetry occurs and thus signalling has much more impact on it.

Re: After Credentials

#58

Post by evgen »

geebee wrote: post #46

I agree with much in the essay, but it's interesting that PG used law as an example of an organization that broke from the deferred compensation principle. Most "elite" law firms actually do pay by seniority. An associate is generally paid according to the number of years he or she has been with the firm. And while the salaries for young lawyers is very high, they are actually (often) working for the potential of bec…

> I think Law, Medicine, and other professions will be the holdouts against the trend away from school-based credentials. It's probably no surprise - these are the few sectors of the economy that can actually ban someone (with the full weight of government behind them) from practicing based on degrees and exams.

These are also fields where the actions of a single bad/incompetent actor can have very, very serious consequences for their customers. Death and long-term incarceration are pretty heavy negative externalities and most of us do not want to wait for "reputation" to sort out the bad apples. These are also fields with large bodies of knowledge that an applicant in the field needs to master, with relatively easy mechanisms for testing this knowledge.

There is a reason your doctor has copies of his diploma's on the wall, and a reason why your eye searches them out when you are discussing your problem. Sometimes knowing that the other party has passed through several well-regarded and reputable gatekeepers is a good thing. Will the "wisdom of the crowd" ever replace the bar exam, medical boards, and graduation from an elite university? No.

Re: After Credentials

#59

Post by mhartl »

pg wrote: post #27
cstejerean wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly, once you get some momentum your startup will survive or die based on how good it is. But if I hear cperciva correctly, had it not been for his credentials lots of users might not have even tried tarsnap to begin with, and I assume that would also translate into far less users a year from now, even though the product would be the same.

I assume that would also translate into far less users a year from now That's the mistake. The number of users you get long term depends more on the "interest rate" than the size of the initial seed. E.g. Google.

I'm sympathetic to this argument, but the "long term" could easily be quite long on the timescale of a startup's solvency. FogBugz, for example, might well not have survived without the initial user base provided by the readers of Joel on Software. Having that promotion channel could easily have meant a factor of ten in the initial customer base compared to a "normal" startup. And that factor of ten represents more than three years of growth even if you double your users each year. Of course, with growth like that presumably you could raise money to increase your runway, but that adds the complexity of dealing with investors and adds more time for things to go wrong.

Re: After Credentials

#60

Post by Dilpil »

smanek wrote: post #13

I honestly don't think that 'cram schools' are particularly effective. I taught for the Princeton Review for a while ($20+/hr when I was 18 sounded pretty good). In my experience, the average student would only gain about an extra 50 points the SAT (relative to what they would have gained studying on their own). If memory serves, a standard deviation (on the old 1600 point test) was usually in the neighborhood of a 1…

But then again, how many of those students would have studied alone if not for the class?
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