Comment by edw519
12 years ago
Every once in a while you read something and shake your head thinking, "I always felt this but was never able to verbalize it like this." This is one such post: one of the best things I've discovered in 6 years of Hacker News.
As someone who has always built and shipped, I've been troubled by a subtle shift in thinking in our industry the last few years. Why so much hostility and failure to learn from others? Why so much attitude?
This brilliant post finally explains it: because so many of us who at one time would have been building products, services, and value are now building anything but: resumes, reputations, portfolios, and (Heaven forbid) "personal brands".
Thank you, Glenn Kelman, for one of the best arguments I've seen in a long time for builders to just shut up, find a customer, and satisfy them.
Just a few gems that really resonated with me:
But one crucial difference between this boom and the last is that the folks in the last boom had to ship or starve.
Amazing what you can do when you have to.
But how many engineers hired from Stanford or Berkeley in the past year will ever feel the savage need to make something happen, to bust out of the matrix, to push the limits of their abilities?
Is "bust out of the matrix" the new "think outside the box"?
The problem is that the young engineers earning that much become well-fed farm animals at the very moment in their lives when they should be running like wild horses.
What a great metaphor!
The result for many engineers and product managers is often a case of arrested development, as they drift from one startup to the next, dabbling in several side-projects, without the ballast of having solved some really hard problems or contributed to a lasting business.
Sometimes, not having an alternative is the best motivator to finish something.
After all, the only way to get much better at your craft is to be challenged in ways that make you uncomfortable. Yet not many people in high technology are uncomfortable these days.
I had no idea.
Startups, like professional football, are best done by the most desperate people on the planet.
Great observation!
These are very good points. I believe this also echoes Bret Victor's comment at the end of his famous Inventing on Principle[1, 2]
There are many ways to live your life. That's maybe the most important thing to realize in your life, that every aspect of your life is a choice. There are default choices. You can choose to sleepwalk through your life, and accept the path that is laid out for you. You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don't have to. If there's something in the world that you feel is a wrong, and you have a vision for what a better world could be, you can find your guiding principle, and you can fight for a cause. So after this talk, I'd like you to take a little time, and think about what matters to you, what you believe in, and what you might fight for.
The Passionate Programmer[3] had a similar point throughout the book. Pg said similar thing years ago on his You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss[4].
[1] http://vimeo.com/36579366
[2] http://gumption.typepad.com/blog/2012/03/principle-centered-...
[3] http://pragprog.com/book/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer
[4] http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html
As someone outside the valley (but a fellow traveler on HN), this attitude of "personal brand" has always confused me. Are the problems being worked on so hard that genius defeats competition? In essence, are the incentives for people in Silicon Valley so misaligned that a person can open numerous unsuccessful companies and still have a positive brand?
When you say for builders to shut up, find a customer, and build--isn't that what was being done before? If so, how could this incentive setup of serial failure being rewarded be avoided?
The problem is that the young engineers earning that much become well-fed farm animals at the very moment in their lives when they should be running like wild horses.
It's a great metaphor, and I've heard it before - Dave Thomas gave a presentation on Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Developing-Expertise-Dave...
> well-fed farm animals
So you think that just paying a young grad $100k a year (which is a shitload of money by most European standards, but adjusting to your SV environment not that much) will just turn him into a well-fed far animal? will just put off their need to "break outside the matrix"? If you want most of your engineers to be mostly motivated by "hunger", you're doing something very wrong at one level or another!
$100k is beyond comfortable for everywhere in the Bay Area except SF. You can still spend ~$2700/mo on rent, and have money leftover for fun and savings. Hell, even in SF that will get you a pretty nice life.
I just noticed the football comment and now I'm wondering how bad I just got trolled. (Surely a $2M salary makes you desperate indeed.)
Pro football players have to earn a life's salary in a few years before they get worn out. $2 million over 50+ years isn't really that much.
And they often come out of it with long-term injuries that require ongoing, lifelong medical treatment, similar to boxers. Hence all of the recent discussion about concussions, though there are more factors than just that.
They have the opportunity to. But they don't have to. They have their whole life to continue to make their living, they don't turn to vegetables without any ability to work.
You mean it is impossible for them to work a regular job after retiring from the NFL? Keep in mind that NFL recruits from College, and (if you ignore the cases of cheating the system) most colleges have academic eligibility requirements. Therefore pretty much all pro football players also have a college degree (except the ones that get drafted before graduating -- I don't know what that statistic is).
Heck, if I could have gotten a couple million dollar head start in life by working on my hobby once a week, I'd take that even if I had to delay a regular career by a few years.
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You make a good point, but football players also have the desperation maker of competition and winning. There are surely players that make it to the NFL and coast, but 1) they have competed to get to the NFL, 2) there are plenty of people willing to take their current jobs, and 3) a Super Bowl win is a big prize that they probably haven't gotten yet and requires some amount of "desperation" to achieve.
ooh come one the NFL is cosy cartel ask a premiership football (soccer) manager about the pressure they are under.
In the UK the bottom 3 teams are relegated down to the lower division now if the NFC and AFL did that you'd seem some pressure.
Most of the young men who play in the NFL do not come from money. In fact for a lot of them, being the best football player in their high school was their only hope to go to college at all, let alone earn millions of dollars.
>>But one crucial difference between this boom and the last is that the folks in the last boom had to ship or starve.
>Amazing what you can do when you have to.
It's not any different this time around. We just haven't reached the starvation period.
But it's very, very close.
> very, very close
Why do you think this? What are the signals you're seeing?
Most returns on VC are negative, almost all are below-market versus standard investments.
EDIT: On the other hand, it's questionable the degree to which the market valuations of regular investments are being pumped up by our capitalism-and-bailouts-induced capital glut.
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Here's a bit of nonsense logic for you:
The social craze was clear with Groupon's blunders and Facebook's IPO. That there is a crash coming should have been--and was--clear then.
Ever since then it's only gotten clearer that there's a crash coming, even if those that say "It's soon" were repeatedly proven wrong.
In other words, it is asymptotically becoming "sooner" the more and more it's being proven that "soon" isn't actually that "soon."
(This is, of course, the nature of predicting events that throw up so many signals.)
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What I mean to say, actually, is that you're asking a pointless question. The signals that indicate "Crash imminent!" have long been fired.
When I say it's "very, very close," did you think I mean it's within a year, or within days?
From a certain way of looking at it, it's at the moment of _least_ certainty how 'soon' an event will occur that the event becomes very, very likely to occur. Because that's when we're the _most_ certain that it's inevitable, but the least certain how it will happen!
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The answer you probably wanted: Google Reader's collapse makes it devastatingly clear to the tech world that there's a giant gaping opportunity to displace social media. All of it. App.net thinks too small, and the start-up world's programmers--all of them--are sharpening knives.
So... will Wednesday work for you?
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So what are you doing about it?
Oh, you know. Writing HN comments.