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Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope)

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

#171

Post by pooriaazimi »

larrys wrote: post #169
stfu wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know about the reason behind low number of votes, but the relatively low number of comments could be because the general attitude on HN (for the most part) is to be silent unless you have something constructive to say :)

For example, I don't know anything about python for example, so anything I can possibly say would be completely un-constructive (except if it's a question), so I shut my mouth and don't say anything; even when I see a (provocative) comment saying Node.js, which I really like, is shit and we should all be using python.

I've done my share of posting useless things on this site, but in the paste few months I've tried to not waste other people's times with useless comments and have removed maybe 40 comments (I would write a comment, read it and see it's not important and don't press "reply").

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

#172

Post by Schwolop »

JohnLBevan wrote: post #101
waterlesscloud wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the message he's communicating is that he knows he hasn't fully committed himself ever. He's shied away from it, danced along the edges of it. But never done it. I'm of a similar age, and a similar childhood. I get where he's coming from, even though he's far more successful than me. He's comparing himself to what he knows his potential to be. Or what he believes it to be, anyway, which might as well be the s…

I had a similar experience in school - though no yelling. I often achieved A4s; A for academic grade, 4 for effort (1 being putting in all you've got, 4 being the opposite end of the scale). I took pride in this saying it showed I could deliver effortlessly. In some subjects which weren't in my skillsets (e.g. French & English) where I was getting Bs my parents said they wouldn't mind if they didn't think I could do…

Yep. This resonates. AEs (the Australian A4) all the way through school.

I cruised through University getting a weighted mean of 75.1 because that was enough to receive first class honours, and the next step up the reward scale was the university medal, with a pre-req of 85.0 and competition from other people. If you missed out on being #1, you just got the same first class honours as everyone else. It didn't add up to me, so I took the lazy approach.

I have a few regrets about this, because now working for myself, I realize exactly how lazy I've made myself. I like working hard, but not on things I find difficult. Hacking and making stuff is fun; being the boss is hard. Taking a lean startup/Steve Blank approach is hard; giving up, making the product I want to make, and probably failing because I didn't put in the effort to make sure someone wanted it ahead of time seems easier. I'm beating myself up about this because ranting on the internet is easier than knuckling down and doing the hard work.

I need a wise and grumpy mentor to slap me around the head a few times. :-P

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

#173

Post by richardw »

I see a few knocks on Dave. What he should be valuing more, why he should(n't) consider himself successful, what other smart people think about what he said from their own perspective.

Well, he opened himself up. In a world where opinions about others are far more numerous than people standing up and saying "this is my story, from the heart. these are my faults and failures, and my dreams". I find that more valuable than 100 posts blowing their own horn. It's the most basic story of all, shared by many, and one of the hardest to write.

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

#174

Post by 5hoom »

robbles wrote: post #166
jiggy2011 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your story rings true for me. I dabbled in programming in my teens, but like you I was a hobbyist at best. When things got tough I would just give up. Programming seemed really hard and I just couldn't figure out how people who did it knew all the stuff they did (this was the mid 90's and there was no stackOverflow if things went wrong).

I didn't really start taking it seriously until I was in my mid twenties by which time the quality and quantity of free educational material, languages and tools for programmers had exploded. Learning how to program has never been easier. It's really a great time to be in this field, beginner or otherwise.

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

#176

Post by AncientPC »

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…

Civilian pilots log plenty of flight time, but their flying experience is nothing compared to fighter pilots'. Time is not a substitute for quality.

My code has significantly improved compared to what I wrote a decade ago (or even a few months for that matter), but it's due to better resources (GitHub, etc), and exposure to better programming practices (SCM, TDD, CI, etc).

Computer science and software engineering is a relatively young field, and there is still plenty of room for improvement.

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

#177

Post by avocet »

leeny wrote: post #167
arthurrr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I read through "Why I Will Never Have a Girlfriend". It's a self-defeating load of bollocks. His odds are VASTLY better, and he's not giving himself any credit.

So he's saying out of all of the women in developed countries aged 18-25: 65 399 083

And let's assume his claim that only 50% are single: 32 699 541 (rounded down)

According to his numbers, only this many of these women would be beautiful and available: 73 919

Only 2% of ALL single women aged 18 to 25 are beautiful enough for him? So if he walked into a room full of 100 single women (not too difficult at a typical bar or social gathering) only 2 of them would qualify? This is ludicrous. Unless this particular gathering was a Buttered Pork Rind Aficionado's Convention, it's safe to say that the most discerning man would find at the VERY least 8 of those 100 women desirable.

And the "also might like me" bit. He's saying just one measly percent of these women he's attracted to will desire him. Come on. Unless you are an absolute creep or raging puppy-kicking bastard, you are not going to only attract 1 out of 100 women that you ever talk to. Do you realize how many people that is? Go about your day and count how many people you talk to, ALL of them. Coworkers, cashiers, friends, family, everyone. The average person won't reach anywhere near 100. It would have to be a stunning amount of rejection.

The whole statistical assumption is flawed, regardless. Finding a mate is not Brownian motion. You are not two particles hoping to collide in the cold vacuum of space. Go to large gatherings of people and put the odds in your favor. More people in less time means greater opportunities. And if you have personality preferences, go to places that attract the personality type you want. Do you like artistic women? Go to art shows. The author is seeking smart women... that's fairly broad. Perhaps classical concerts, wine tastings? Those kinds of events tends to attract women with academic credentials.

Either way, he is vastly improving his odds. At a gathering like that, 30 of those 100 single women could easily catch his interest.

Then again, he lives in London...

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

#178

Post by threelittlepigs »

is74 wrote: post #74
simonsarris wrote: post #7

Well he's not a late bloomer to the vast majority of people. I think no matter your lot in life, if you're competitive, you get the feeling that you missed out on a lot that you could have accomplished. Stories of kids learning programming at 6, or starting companies at 16, etc, feed into this. Even I feel like I would be much farther "ahead" if I had only started programming before high school, if I had been more gu…

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…

No-one is qualified to have children. If the OP thinks of himself as "unqualified" probably it really means that he doesn't give them as much attention as he thinks he should.

The modesty, anyway, is false, because clearly the OP is proud of his children. However he is wrong not to consider it an accomplishment - it's easy to have children, but difficult to bring them up well. I have met so many people who put their career before their children, who are not prepared to give something up (e.g. money or career prospects) for their children.

Didn't the parents of Gandhi, for example, accomplish something for having brought up Gandhi?

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

#179

Post by michaelochurch »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #162
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 indi…

Excellent post.

Still, how do you advise one go about "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"?

On the first, it seems that the solution a lot of people take is to have short job tenures, because (in the absence of mentorship or high-level interest in career development) responsibilities accumulate while learning opportunities tend to get rarer, so a lot of people leave once the responsibility/learning balance tilts out of their favor. The problem with this strategy is that, at some point, having a string of 6- to 18-month job tenures starts to look really bad.

The second is even more tricky. Most people aren't in the position of being able to "refuse to work on" bad projects, especially since it's obvious what the person's doing. It seems like this is a recipe for getting fired (which may help a person's career in the long run by preventing a rut, but is something most people would rather avoid).

On top of that, there's the even harder question of how to know that the direction a project will pull a person's career in the first place. It's rarely obvious. Sometimes, doing the grunt work makes a person more trusted and puts him in line for the best projects. Sometimes, it leads to more grunt work and otherwise goes nowhere. These depend on the individuals involved and it can't easily be broken down into simple if-then rules.

The strategy that most people seem to follow is to change jobs frequently until they find a fit. The problem with that is that, although the "job hopper" stigma is much less severe than it was 20 years ago, it still exists.

"[P]erhaps most importantly, understanding how connections are really formed"

How are they really formed? There are a lot of pet theories on this one, but it's not clear which of them (if any) is right. And people tend to be different enough that I'm skeptical that there is a general-purpose answer to the social engineering problem.

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

#180

Post by jacobolus »

michaelochurch wrote: post #120
cs702 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been arguing the same thing about investing for a long time: is it a game of luck or skill? On one hand, there are academics saying it's always mostly luck, and their typical argument goes roughly like this: Say 100,000 orangutans enter a coin-flipping contest in which 'heads' wins and 'tails' loses; so around 50,000 orangutans will win on the first throw; of those orangutans, around 25,000 will also win…

I've worked in game design. I once built a card game (Ambition) with the express purpose of taking card-luck out of the game as much as possible. (To make a long story short, I was in Budapest and left all my German board games at home, so I had to make do with a deck of cards.) Bridge solves this problem by duplication. (Bridge is an immensely deep and skillful game, but there's a lot of card-luck when the players a…

Almost every multiplayer strategy game becomes more about the players involved than the specific game rules, once at least some of the players have a bit of the strategy figured out. And pretty much any 3 or 4 player game can be thrown by a player who decides he doesn’t care to try to win himself (this is even often true in 6 player games, though it usually takes a bit of skill and cooperation from the to whom the game is being handed).

One way to make multiplayer games interesting is to have enough variance so that with 3 players left, the balance between a player who pulls some lucky breaks and the other two players working together is just barely in favor of the two players. If the game is well designed and the players act strategically, this shifting balance of alliances can last quite a while without either handing one of the players the game or getting boring, and winning is about figuring out how to hold your ally past the time its in his best interest to turn on you, or turning on him at just the right moment to maximize impact.

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