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After Credentials

paulgraham.com

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Re: After Credentials

#131

Post by stuntgoat »

Ha! I just finished reading your essay and earlier today I was thinking about the the current and future opportunity for the youth. ( I am 32 ) Seeing some high school kids acting silly and waiting the bus, while I was driving by made me think about what opportunities there are for them when they graduate high school. 3 thoughts came to mind as I made my way to the hardware store:

a) Youth are generally cynical towards the older generation because we won't let them have as much fun as they would like to have.

b) Older generations generally hold on to their wealth and could potentially stifle innovation by keeping much of the up and coming generation in the ranks of those living paycheck to paycheck.

c) How can a society let the youth innovate more efficiently ( and safely ).

College may not be the panacea for innovation and personal happiness but: attending college helps to put an individual's impact on the world in perspective and can perhaps demonstrate that people do cool things that affect the world. College is also a good way to show people how to learn effectively.

In theory, great schools are difficult to do well in and have high standards; this is the reason that particular graduates are selected for the jobs or funding. It is more difficult to graduate from Reed than Sonoma State- it takes more time studying, writing and thinking. I would consider hiring or working with a person who, theoretically, spent more time thinking in college over another applicant who went to one of the greatest party/drinking schools. Credentials from a school with rigorous curricula is much different than a doing well at a standardized test. What I mean is that some credentials * are * a measurement of performance ( performance, as in study hard and think clearly ). I think the performace VCs and people who hire graduates to work in their factories and cubicles are trying to measure is called 'return on investment'.

Here is a question for you: what would be your standardized test for measuring return on investment.

I'll think of 3.

1) Applicant, write a short essay about how you might generate $200 in total income in a day given only the clothes you are wearing right now, a $50 bill to spend on anthing you might need, having eaten the breakfast of your choice and a wish for good luck. ( you have 30 minutes )

2) Applicant, how do you manage your time when you are trying new ways of solving a problem? Give one or many examples with your reasoning explained in context. ( you have 30 minutes )

3) Applicant, how willing would you be to share your innovative ideas with me if I helped you succeed at implementing them? ( all my best ideas; most of my greatest thoughts; some cool ideas; not many OK ideas; perhaps one daydream; you'll never know what I am thinking next )

Re: After Credentials

#132

Post by fauigerzigerk »

The problem with taking everyone and keeping just the best is that it takes a lot of resources to do that. A lot more resources than an exam would take. Just imagine YC taking on everybody who applied and working with them even just for a month.

I generally agree with the trend that pg describes, but don't think it can ever be universal (unfortunately). To be rewarded by the market you need access to the market and that's not always as easy as with consumer web apps. I would say consumer web apps are pretty atypical, because you don't need much investment, you don't need any certifications to be allowed in, there is no risk for the customer if you go bust (unlike with enterprise software), etc.

Re: After Credentials

#133

Post by danw »

pmjordan wrote: post #64
gaius wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Possibly because the UK is obsessed with league tables for universities, secondary schools and even primary schools. The University of York send me an annual survey to find out what I'm up to - I'm pretty sure they gather this data on all (willing) alumni, and where the data shows them in a good light they certainly make no secret of it at open days, etc.

Same for the UK university I attended. The survey is badly design, pretty much designed with the assumption that a graduate would be working for a big company. There's no way of reporting freelancer/self employed for example.

Re: After Credentials

#134

Post by taw »

There's an unspoken assumption in the essay that pg-style startups are a very good indicator of quality of a person and their work. I don't think there's any evidence of that:

* Most startups die horrible death after a few years at no obvious fault of founders. Startups simply do risky stuff, and the payoff comes from the risk. * If startup is successful, it is almost always someone buying you or possibly IPO - in both cases it's about convincing investors to by you, and it's almost never a real market success. * Startups dilute your specialization - even if you're the most awesome developer on Earth, if you happen to be bad at any one of other things you'll be doing, especially at dealing with investors - your startup can crash. If you're good at development you should be developing, not doing all the other things you suck at. * You get a very small sample per person - just a few bits, most likely set to FAIL.

I'd love to see research of correlation between startup success and other "quality" metrics of founders - I expect them to be positive but very low and it would surprise me a lot if it turned out otherwise.

It's not even clear to me that startup success is a better proxy for quality than credentials. Credentials might actually be a lot better, as for all kinds of credentials there's plenty of people with them, and even with weakly correlated performance metrics it should be possible to estimate how much any credential is worth based on past employees with such credentials.

Compared to pg-style startups, bootstrapped firms and consulting are much closer to a real market test.

Re: After Credentials

#135

Post by ovi256 »

cperciva wrote: post #45
pg wrote: post #10

Earlier 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. In Canada, one of the strongest selling points of universities is what fraction of their students got a job in a related field within X years of graduation -- so at least here, institutions do track this sort of data. In addition, there's a lot of work done to validate admissions processes ba…

France too, at least my school. Just had an email from them: "Please let you know if your employement situation changes in any way." Seems like they want to get some good data on the effects of the crisis.

Re: After Credentials

#136

Post by taw »

CatDancer wrote: post #32

Aha, that explains why resumes are so useless: a resume is a listing of credentials.

You can link to your portfolio in the resume, if you're a developer to whatever open source apps/websites you've written.

Re: After Credentials

#137

Post by motoko »

netcan wrote: post #122
motoko wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the leading criterion for admission was concrete evidence that the applicants collectively have the ability and motivation build things people want as measured in users and sales... ...then a cram school for YC would be a program much like YC in which younger teams built smaller, more easily guided technology start-ups.

If the leading criterion for admission was concrete evidence that the applicants collectively Big if. I'm sure that any self respecting University will tell you that the best prep for their University is anything that makes the candidates smarter, more driven & more likely to succeed. Everyone uses indicators. Some are better then others. Maybe some can never be gamed (I doubt it) but as actually mentioned in this es…

I meant admission to YC, not university.

But on that note, isn't the biggest criterion for university transfer admission is who admitted you in the first place and your consequential success at that school?

It stands to reason if one wanted to predict if a group would be successful creating a successful startup that a good predictor would be if that group had stated a successful startup in the past.

I'd assume there are other criteria, like: is what this group doing within our scope of expertise? Can we add value to this startup? Will admitting this group best add to the quality of this YC class? Will we make money on this investment?

Re: After Credentials

#138

Post by motoko »

bootload wrote: post #72

"... It was not so easy 25 years ago for an ambitious person to choose to be judged directly by the market. You had to go through bosses, and they were influenced by where you'd been to college ..." What was the hack Apple, MS and other tech companies used? Aligning themselves to rapidly improving technology where greater performance was really noticeable? I still see the barriers described here occurring particularl…

"Is YC acting as an anti-cram school hack?"

Isn't a startup itself an "economic cram?"

"Cramming" isn't necessarily "bad" when the most effective preparation is achieving thing itself.

Re: After Credentials

#139

Post by lkozma »

mhartl wrote: post #59
pg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

or as Keynes said, "on the long term we're all dead"

Re: After Credentials

#140

Post by miked »

jpcx01 wrote: post #83
aaronsw wrote: post #38

The 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?

I can give an immediate example. The left wholeheartedly supports Teacher Unions who are fundamentally opposed to merit pay, prefering seniority and tenure.

And in Missouri at least, teachers' unions have made it so that any teacher, no matter how bad, can get a raise just by getting a master's degree or a PhD.
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