Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope) • Hacker News Board

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#161

Post by jfoster » Sun, Jul 08, 2012, 11:38 PM UTC

stfu wrote: post #158

pooriaazimi wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assure you these numbers are real. I have no inside knowledge, but I have submitted a few StackOverflow posts (with my username attached to them) that made it to the front page, and I watched how many of them were from my link on HN. "Stuck due to “knowing too much”" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4037794 ), 68 votes, about 15,000 visitors "What's The Best Language For Safety Critical Software?" ( http://new…

Very interesting, thanks a lot for sharing! But this makes it only even more mysterious, why so few people vote or take part in the discussions.

My hypothesis is that the majority visit HN to learn from those that do participate. Of course, their learning would be most effective if they participated themselves.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#162

Post by SatvikBeri » Mon, Jul 09, 2012, 2:20 AM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #108

I've come to the conclusion that success in business is like the game Rochambeau (Rock, Paper, Scissors). People will argue to death whether it's a game of luck or skill, and often it gets very emotional, with people who've had success attributing it to skill and the rest attributing their lack of success to bad luck. In reality, it's neither. It's a game of strategy in the academic, game-design sense (interaction ra…

What I've seen for the most part isn't that people make the wrong strategic decisions. It's that they don't realize there are decisions to be made.

For example, there's a major correlation between your career success and how visible your role is. Maintaining internal systems will almost never pay off as well as working on the flagship product. This, and many other considerations, matter as much or more than your individual performance/talent. But the majority of people never consider them.

(A quick sampling of major strategic decisions: your elevator pitch, the elevator pitch other people use when introducing you, how visible your role/projects are, making sure your day-to-day responsibilities don't take up much time, refusing to work on projects that will pull your career in the wrong direction, working at successful companies/projects, and perhaps most importantly, understanding how connections are really formed).

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#163

Post by justanother » Mon, Jul 09, 2012, 2:40 AM UTC

Clearly, this individual's problem isn't that he hasn't found Shangri-La, it's that he needs a new compass. Dave, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was just hallucinating. Kublai Khan's pleasure dome is right next to you every morning, and she's [presumably] gorgeous. The sun still rises on the bankrupt, and many of them do absolutely fulfilling things with those days, even if it's beating an old game or learning to catch more fish.

Or to speak more plainly, cash is but one axis on the graph of success, and often it is the very worst of them. Winning is having the strength to disregard it.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#164

Post by chrisyeh » Mon, Jul 09, 2012, 2:43 AM UTC

iwallace wrote: post #116

michaelochurch wrote: post #108

I've come to the conclusion that success in business is like the game Rochambeau (Rock, Paper, Scissors). People will argue to death whether it's a game of luck or skill, and often it gets very emotional, with people who've had success attributing it to skill and the rest attributing their lack of success to bad luck. In reality, it's neither. It's a game of strategy in the academic, game-design sense (interaction ra…

Thank you for this post. I'm in nearly the same boat (41 years old, < 1M net worth, on my fifth startup with < 100k to show for those efforts) and watching seemingly complete idiots pass me by. I'm too old to be infuriated by the vagaries of chance, however, it does make me wonder if I've done something wrong. I suspect that the numbers are slightly skewed - that there are far fewer people having wild success than th…

The odds are always against entrepreneurs:

http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2010/07/entrepreneurship-is-abo...

"Let me reiterate--you have a less than 50/50 chance of founding a successful startup, even if you manage to raise VC every time (which is not a forgone conclusion) and even if you devote essentially your entire professional life to it."

On the other hand, if you enjoy entrepreneurship, don't let the lack of success get to you. After all, there's always the next company!

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#165

Post by chrisyeh » Mon, Jul 09, 2012, 2:47 AM UTC

kinleyd wrote: post #111

andyl wrote: post #58

So @Dave isn't Marc Andreesen or Larry Page. So f-ing what. The only tragic thing is that he hasn't figured out yet that work != life. I'm in a similar demographic as @Dave, live in palo alto, near his age. Had some really good successes 10-15 years ago, and nothing since then. My big activities for the past decade have been climbing, skiing and raising my kids. Some of my friends kept working and now have vineyards…

I like the original post by @Dave and the honesty that comes through. I also like this reply. Life can feel so frenetic and short on time sometimes, and yet very, very long - too long even - at other times. Time is really a very elastic perception. The bottom line is you need to figure out what you want in life and how you define success. Hopefully at some point we all come to realize that while wealth, power or fame…

Scientists have already done great work in this area. "Success" doesn't bring happiness:

http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2005/12/meaning-of-life.html

Here's the money quote:

"In the book, Deci talks about a study which discovered that humans have six basic aspirations. The first three, the extrinsic aspirations, are to be rich, famous, and good-looking. (Actually, rich/powerful and famous/well-liked, but why ruin a euphonious phrase?) Sound familiar?

The second three, the intrinsic aspirations, are to have good relationships with the ones you care about, to achieve personal growth, and to feel like you contribute to your community.

Deci's work showed that people who focused on extrinsic aspirations (regardless of whether or not they achieved them) tended to display narcissism, anxiety, and depression, while the people who focused on instrinsic aspirations displayed a strong sense of well-being."

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#166

Post by robbles » Mon, Jul 09, 2012, 3:04 AM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #32

prophetjohn wrote: post #19

This is kind of inspiring. As someone who wrote their first line of code at 25 and won't be able to shed the "intern" title until I graduate at almost 28, it's really easy to feel like I screwed myself over by not being where I am now 5+ years ago. Especially so in an industry where the younger you are the better and there are stories of people in their 40s having a problem finding work. The real kicker is that I act…

To be honest, I wouldn't worry too much. Everyone is like "I was programming since I was 10!" Nobody ever asks what they were programming at 10, most people wrote relatively simple stuff until they grew up and got a professional job. Now to wait for replies from people who designed OSes when they were 12 :)

I've been programming since I was 12. I would say the only advantage it gave me was an unshakeable faith in my ability to figure things out - it really built up my problem-solving skills and gave me an attitude of "I'm going to figure this out somehow, even if I have to stay up all night" that I've noticed is missing in many new developers.

However, the idea that people who start this early have a 10 year head start on someone who starts at 22 is silly. Maybe for child prodigies this is true, but I was neither driven nor intelligent enough then to learn at the rate I do now. I distinctly remember being incredibly confused by the syntax of for loops, and being unable to solve trivial C++ compiler errors because I had no idea how to approach debugging them or where to find more information. I also had a casual hobbyist approach, where if something wasn't working, I would just give up and go play outside with my friends. Even with all the resources we have today, I don't think I had the mental faculty back then to design an OS. :)

Also, learning programming now is an order of magnitude more effective nowadays, with all the free online resources, new languages and frameworks, and public interest in the subject. Back in 2000, Arduino didn't exist, there were no decent web frameworks or JS libraries, and I remember sadly giving up on trying to build a robot because the only books I could find on the subject were university textbooks that required proprietary tech provided by the prof.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#167

Post by leeny » Mon, Jul 09, 2012, 3:23 AM UTC

arthurrr wrote: post #106

is74 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is already extremely successful, and not only in his career: " and at 40 hadn’t accomplished much other than finding a good woman who was foolish enough to marry me, and somehow managed to have two wonderful children that I was vastly unqualified to have fathered" So all he needs to enjoy the spoils of his success is to change his point of view. It can be done. But if it is not done, then it may be impossi…

Finding a good woman is a very difficult task, NP Complete I would say, depending on how you optimise. If you've solved that problem in your life, everything else is just noise. Starting a startup is trivial by comparison.

apropos,

http://en.nothingisreal.com/wiki/Why_I_Will_Never_Have_a_Gir...

and

http://mat.tepper.cmu.edu/blog/?p=1392

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#168

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 09, 2012, 3:28 AM UTC

alexkearns wrote: post #100

toyg wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you back in Manchester then? I personally wouldn't call it "a provincial city" (it's very sparse, but overall Greater Manchester is home to 3 million people, on par with Birmingham and Glasgow for the title of "most populous urban conglomerate in the UK" just behind London); of course it's nothing like the capital, but it does provide a fairly good lifestyle at a fraction of London prices. There is usually at lea…

Not back in Manchester. Still in London. But, yes, Manchester is a great city with a great culture. I have a fondness for the place that I will never have for London, and one day may return. I did not intend to use 'provincial' in any derogatory way but to explain to non-UK readers that Manchester is in the UK's provinces.

[deleted]

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#169

Post by larrys » Mon, Jul 09, 2012, 3:41 AM UTC

stfu wrote: post #158

pooriaazimi wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assure you these numbers are real. I have no inside knowledge, but I have submitted a few StackOverflow posts (with my username attached to them) that made it to the front page, and I watched how many of them were from my link on HN. "Stuck due to “knowing too much”" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4037794 ), 68 votes, about 15,000 visitors "What's The Best Language For Safety Critical Software?" ( http://new…

Very interesting, thanks a lot for sharing! But this makes it only even more mysterious, why so few people vote or take part in the discussions.

"why so few people vote or take part in the discussions."

To vote or participate you have to be logged in.

Would be interesting if PG released some data on logged in visitors.

Also, isn't the amount of votes the amount of net votes? So you could have 100 upvotes and 60 downvotes to net 40? (Of course that still doesn't jive with his numbers which I agree were very interesting and unexpected I would have never guessed that.)

Not participating could be also a) a confidence issue or b) lack of ability to type or use of a particular keyboard (I never comment from mobile for example).

Still, it doesn't explain the discrepancy in the numbers.

Re: Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

#170

Post by kinleyd » Mon, Jul 09, 2012, 3:49 AM UTC

chrisyeh wrote: post #165

kinleyd wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the original post by @Dave and the honesty that comes through. I also like this reply. Life can feel so frenetic and short on time sometimes, and yet very, very long - too long even - at other times. Time is really a very elastic perception. The bottom line is you need to figure out what you want in life and how you define success. Hopefully at some point we all come to realize that while wealth, power or fame…

Scientists have already done great work in this area. "Success" doesn't bring happiness: http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2005/12/meaning-of-life.html Here's the money quote: "In the book, Deci talks about a study which discovered that humans have six basic aspirations. The first three, the extrinsic aspirations, are to be rich, famous, and good-looking. (Actually, rich/powerful and famous/well-liked, but why ruin a euph…

Great quote. It sums it up really well, especially the distinction it draws between extrinsic and intrinsic aspirations. Going to follow up on Deci. Thanks.