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A Project of One’s Own

paulgraham.com

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Re: A Project of One’s Own

#221

Post by jdmoreira »

zamfi wrote: post #219
jdmoreira wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grades don't matter. They matter if you really want to follow the beaten path. Sure, go ahead... join McKinsey or something like that. Being good a learning matters. Being good at executing matters. Being good at communicating matters. Being good at leading matters. Grades and credentials are just gatekeeping invented by people that are worse than talented people. Grades are for status not for wealth and even much le…

> will never allow my children to play that game I can see not forcing them to play the game, but "will never allow my children to" always struck me as a weird tone.

I will also never allow my children to gang up on and beat homeless people in the streets.

Sounds like a weird tone?

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#222

Post by kbelder »

asadlionpk wrote: post #175
brhsagain wrote: post #131

Good essay overall, but this footnote in particular stood out to me: > [2] Tiger parents, as parents so often do, are fighting the last war. Grades mattered more in the old days when the route to success was to acquire credentials while ascending some predefined ladder. But it's just as well that their tactics are focused on grades. How awful it would be if they invaded the territory of projects, and thereby gave the…

Wait so how do I 'not-force' my kid into programming these days? Our generation didn't have roblox, youtube and minecraft to distract us much.

You can program Roblox... and Minecraft pretty much _is_ a programming UI.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#223

Post by caseysoftware »

opportune wrote: post #173
throwawayboise wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've hit on it, grades matter right up until you're out of school. For most people, they matter for getting a first job (because there usually isn't much else to serve as a filter). After that, nobody will ever ask for or look at them again.

Most of the high paying professions outside of software require the degree and that first job to break into them. Sure for banking and consulting it’s not a hard requirement, but it’s much harder to get into them with bad grades or a degree from a non-target school. It’s really only in the software bubble where people are able to prove themselves to break into it, due to various factors including engineers being in v…

"Sure nobody asks for my grades now that I’ve been out of college for a while, but they still look at where I went to college.."

How do you know that? Do they mention it? I'm really curious on this one.

Other than the rare alum, I haven't had anyone comment on my undergrad more than a year or two out of it. Recent jobs and projects make up the vast majority of any conversation.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#224

Post by PascLeRasc »

opportune wrote: post #173
throwawayboise wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've hit on it, grades matter right up until you're out of school. For most people, they matter for getting a first job (because there usually isn't much else to serve as a filter). After that, nobody will ever ask for or look at them again.

Most of the high paying professions outside of software require the degree and that first job to break into them. Sure for banking and consulting it’s not a hard requirement, but it’s much harder to get into them with bad grades or a degree from a non-target school. It’s really only in the software bubble where people are able to prove themselves to break into it, due to various factors including engineers being in v…

I really wish I hadn’t bothered studying electrical engineering at a mid-tier school. There’s zero EE jobs available for that kind of graduate. You just can’t get recruiters to look at your application. Half of my graduating class is stuck doing self-taught DBA work for the local bank, telephone pole, or health insurance company. It’s so frustrating.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#225

Post by hobofan »

jdmoreira wrote: post #221
zamfi wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will never allow my children to play that game I can see not forcing them to play the game, but "will never allow my children to" always struck me as a weird tone.

I will also never allow my children to gang up on and beat homeless people in the streets. Sounds like a weird tone?

Yes, still sounds like a weird tone. Do you think that other people "beat homeless people in the streets", because their parents allowed them to do that?

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#226

Post by notsureaboutpg »

EarthLaunch wrote: post #207
convolvatron wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree about the sidenote. go for it. get as far as you can.

I'm curious, why push through on a fun personal project into causing burnout? Asking for...a friend.

Do you remember in Uni pulling all nighters for projects / classes? It was stressful, often painful, often resulting in you being a mess for a few days afterwards. If you did this, you'd know it had all the signs of burnout attached to it.

And yet... sometimes your projects ended up super cool and you were really really proud of them and when you showed them off you felt really accomplished. And sometimes that feeling is worth a little foray into burnout world.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#227

Post by antognini »

okareaman wrote: post #83
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #10

> It's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to building treehouses than studying for exams. The current educational system seems to turn off high school kids (anecdotal evidence being my own) from pursuing…

> it's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to building treehouses than studying for exams. Charles Darwin ...University of Edinburgh Medical School (at the time the best medical school in the UK) ...father…

I think PG is right, at least about Darwin. Darwin's father pushed him to study medicine, which he wasn't especially interested in. Darwin did okay grade-wise but goofed off a lot with his hobby in naturalism. His father didn't even want him to go on the trip on the Beagle!

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#228

Post by andreyk »

I think one thing this essay misses is that schools enable and encourage having one's own projects. Some examples from my experience:

- In third year of high school I joined the FIRST robotics club, and it was a pretty transformative experience. Doing such a big project for the first time, which I could not have possibly tried on my own, was amazing. And of course it improved my social skills, my communication skills, all that.

- In fourth year of high school, I took our follow up to AP CS which was on making video games (yeah, I was at a nice high school). And we just got to make whatever games we wanted, within some limits. Tons of fun.

- In college I spent a ton of time in the Solar Racing club (http://solarracing.gatech.edu/). Like, all four years - and this was some serious engineering work.

- In college I went to lots of hackathons. My favorite project was one that visualized music libraries, I spent a few months on it after the hackathon (https://www.andreykurenkov.com/projects/major_projects/meta-...).

- In college I got into 3D printing and laser cutting, since that was available there (for free). I tried going to maker spaces after, but those are NOT cheap.

- In my Masters program at Stanford, most CS classes have a project component where you do whatever you want. To take just one example, I built a neat little website in which you could visualize neural net models (https://www.andreykurenkov.com/projects/major_projects/Keras...).

And, society encourages this stuff too, in terms of interviews asking about your projects and colleges wanting to see extracurriculars. Of course it's not perfect, most classes could provide a lot of leeway in terms of self direction. But it's worth acknowleding, especially in terms of schools enabling larger group efforts and providing the environment and equipment and knowledge for doing fun stuff.

If anything , school did not beat out the drive for projects, it enabled it. I miss doing such things quite a bit, as it gets a lot harder to find people to do them with and it's seen as kind of weird.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#229

Post by notriddle »

ItsMonkk wrote: post #170
TeMPOraL wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> being competitive in school-like activities provides them To an extent. I keep wondering, wouldn't it be better if schools/universities were structured as PvE challenges, not PvP ones? Trying to elicit a culture of collaboration, instead of pitting students against each other? I may be strongly biased, because I hate competition outside of games[0], and competitive incentives generally make me stop caring. -- [0] -…

If I was a Professor teaching the same class to two different sections, it would be really neat to give the entire winning section extra credit based on the difference between the average values of the two sections. This would encourage group study and would ultimately lead to students helping their other classmates out. And since teaching is the best way to learn, everyone would do better. Maybe you don't even need…

The problem is that, if both teams are randomly selected, then they should be expected to have equal underlying performance, and the only thing your grades are measuring is noise. It is unfair when one winds up with a team that happens to contain outlier students through sheer luck of the draw.

The law of large numbers would smooth these kinds of things out, but a single semester is not a very long time, and we don't want classes to have large numbers of students.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#230

Post by babarganesh »

a small gripe about the otherwise excellent writing:

> at that point high standards are not merely useless but positively harmful. There are a few people who start too many new projects, but far more, I suspect, who are deterred by fear of failure from starting projects that would have succeeded if they had.

I think this buries the lede a bit. And "success" isn't a good measure, when the important thing many times is self-development or even just the skating feeling.

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