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 their kids a distaste for this kind of work by forcing them to do it. Grades are already a grim, fake world, and aren't harmed much by parental interference, but working on one's own projects is a more delicate, private thing that could be damaged very easily.
It's so true. I got obsessed with programming around 11, started off with my shitty vb6 programs and moved on to reverse engineering video games and writing hacks. I never told any adults what I was doing until I was nearly an adult myself, out of fear they'd ruin my hobby like they did everything else. I remember thinking to myself how much school sucked and being determined not to let that poison the one thing I liked worked on. My parents thought I was a degenerate who did nothing but play computer games all day. Blew them away when I got my first programming job and eventually skipped college to start working right out of high school.
I have a bunch of friends who say the same thing. They'd find some new cool thing, show even the slightest interest in it and their mom would immediately start making them drill it three hours a day until they hated it and weren't interested in it anymore. It's a sad story.
Grades still matter for the vast majority of people who aren’t born into mega rich families. Most people don’t become Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and even those that do benefit greatly from the pedigrees that academic achievement opens up (going to top colleges, working at desirable employers, although grades matter little there unless you’re right out of college). For everyone else grades are still used for tracking into the traditionally high paid professions like law and medicine, and for tracking into the target colleges for high powered banking and consulting.
I learned to program in zero period at Wilson High School in Portland, Oregon.
It was a self-taught course but I didn’t have to hide the work—-no one really cared. Not that my parents didn’t care, they were glad I was doing something I enjoyed.
But that no one had any idea how deep I was going into writing code.
The assignments were given once a quarter or so by Veryl Smith. We had far ranging latitude to figure it out on our own and gold plate projects as much as we wanted.
By the time the game of life assignment was due I had added a mouse interface and vga, color display of the cells and grid, all in Pascal.
I often lost points due to things like shadowed naming or other bad patterns.
But that didn’t really matter too much. I made up for it getting “A” grades working as a teacher’s assistant for the attendance office, writing hall passes and absence slips for myself and others as necessary. That was a great hack.
Anyhow, this essay resonates deeply with me. It has good ideas in it.
My son and one of his friends spent a huge portion of their stuck-at-home time during the pandemic playing minecraft.
It turns out a lot of what they were doing while "playing video games" was learning how to make really complex and unique game scenarios using minecraft command blocks and redstone -- essentially creating both a RPG PvP arena and a multilevel party dungeon crawl w boss fights.
I run a small minecraft server for them to play and experiment on and I've resisted the urge to try to teach them anything about setting up and running servers, backing up data, or using text editors with syntax highlighting or source control to edit and preserve their command block commands.
I just show up for demos and let them know how cool what they're doing is and backup and reboot the server as needed.
I've messed up plenty as a parent but i think not trying to turn their interest in programming within minecraft into a learning experience has been one of my better decisions.
Without going into too much detail, my mother¹ had a way of interfering in my attempts at projects both by trying to tie it into "getting a credentialed person on board"² for Proper Supervision and piling on… other abuse, often after I was a significant ways in.
Fifteen years after escaping, I still haven't published anything real, and I can see the pattern. I saw the pattern ten years ago, even, but deep conditioning is really hard to break. Only being able to finish things for other people is kind of a disaster, especially when you wind up in the “need experience to gain experience” trap.
¹ Who, again without too much detail, was Asian.
² Which never happened. She never put any actual energy into it, I had no framework for approaching it as a child, and I'm not sure the surrounding environment contained people who were willing to do that sort of thing anyway.
Very similar to my story. I grew up in a shitty industrial town of oil refineries. Schools and teachers were not that great, so I went to the local community college bookstore and stole programming books by stuffing them in my jacket and walking out. I got AOL, then internet and eventually IRC. I learned disassemblers, debuggers and x86 instruction set. Joined world-famous cracking groups and wrote key generators and cd checks. At the time I thought this was all normal, but looking back it was pretty wild. Eventually moved to silicon valley, worked for big tech, etc. But it was all no thanks to grades, exams, etc.
I hate the obsession with grades as much as anyone, but most parents are often mirroring the importance we place on them as a society. Disagree with a number of the sub-comments here, grades matter. Not eventually and not on their own, but they provide optionality the same way race and wealth and other factors do: you can succeed without them, but it definitely helps your chances.
It’s funny that he wrote this now living in the UK. As an American living in England for the better part of a decade now, it still shocks me how much grades matter in the hiring process for professionals with many years of experience. If you don’t get a first or at least a 2:1 in uni, and/or do poorly on your A-levels, it will hold you back for the rest of your life here
Very true, I opened up all electronics or electrical or mechanical things at home, from wrist watches to air conditioners just to see how they work - some I could not put back together like my watch, my parents never bought me a wrist watch ever again - haha
I am the kind of person who never gets a job unless I am so far apart from the other candidates that taking someone else would make it too obvious that they were basing their decision on "gut feeling" (or like they like to call it now, cultural fit).
The way I found to overcome that was to excel academically and technically, giving me that clear advantage I need... Unfortunately, many companies will only check your basic technical skills and then focus massively on "cultural fit", and to succeed here there's nothing much I can do other than try to show that, yes, I am a social person and I do like to work with other people and so on (things they will never be able to objectively measure). But to really have a good chance here, let's not kid ourselves: being white, male, good looking and from a wealthy background will get you way ahead before you even say a word.
My strategy served me well while I was relatively junior... but now that I am reaching a second decade in the industry, I again don't seem to have a clear advantage that I can objectively prove, and back to square one: getting a good job is a real challenge again.
Similarly, my first programming class was a middle school lunch table where me and a few friends sat around abusing TI-81s. We found ways to do fun things with these devices and showing off your work to friends became a natural driver that kept us focused. This continued through all of high school and then people wondered how we all became software engineers when our school had no such classes.
That's because parents are afraid that their child won't be competitive enough to have a decent life. If only parents were relaxed, if only they knew that their child can live full life without grinding through exercises. Then child just would pursue what they love, interested (unless it's unaffordable to their social strata). I wonder what we can do today to make this happen sooner.
> I never told any adults what I was doing until I was nearly an adult myself, out of fear they'd ruin my hobby like they did everything else.
I dropped out of college and was ~4 years into a successful career before it clicked with parents and other "adults" of what I had done and what I had "thrown away".
Having been through 3 serious tech jobs and dozens of interviews only one company rejected me due to my lack of a degree - Capitol One.
All said however I do think about going back to complete my degree at some point as I expect as my career progresses to upper upper management it might get in the way.
Immigrant parents, being more likely to be overachiever on average, are very different than normal parents in this regard. I didn’t know anybody growing up who had to drill on school work. Some dads were into sports and would pressure their kids to be the next babe Ruth or oj Simpson, but school work not so much. The education arms race is very much a function of globalization and international competition, which has added a lot of stress to childhood for today’s middle class American adolescent.
My kid is in University right now and is doing an internship - recently he's been getting deep into contributing to an open source mod for a game, and I'm worried it's distracting him from his internship work and ultimately his final year of school. I see him on steam during the work day playing the game he's modding and he's taken time to show off his modding work and how it's put together - he's really proud of it, and honestly I am too.
I've been tempted to say something to him to make sure he balances his time appropriately and fulfills his other commitments.. but maybe I'll let it go a little while longer. I think he's getting a lot out of his project and I don't want to discourage him.
I suppose ultimately he's an adult and should make his own decisions and suffer his own consequences. But I worry.
This matches my experience almost identically (starting at 11, vb6 hacks, lying about it). Had I opened up about my interest/what I was doing, my mom would've made me hyper focus on it but also used it as a weapon to demand obedience.
My parents physically beat me if I got less than A's; that just made me relish spending time on my own projects and interests away from their priorities.
A largely Chinese-American concept, the term draws parallels to strict parenting styles ostensibly common to households in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. (wikipedia)
The idea behind tiger parents is that Asians earn more money. And it's true, but not the whole store.
But the problem is that average Asian incomes are pulled up by Indian-Americans. Chinese-Americans earn less than many European-Americans. So the whole concept is based on flawed logic.
Jared Diamond, in his book "The Day Before Yesterday", talks about how children in Papua New Guinea when he was an anthropologist there would play at making a garden or raising pigs. The kid would have a toy, wooden pig, and then eventually be given a piglet, and then gradually their "play" would become more realistic until it shaded into adult work.
My daughter, as a youngun', wanted to play "coffeeshop" where she would set up a coffeeshop at home and charge her mother and I for drinks. I think this says something about how much she saw the inside of coffeeshops while I was programming there.
The main obstacle to still using the play-better-until-it's-real path, is that we don't have a good way for kids to see what adults are doing, in most jobs. Otherwise, their natural instincts are still to "play" at doing what they see the adults doing.
Yeah I'm pretty sure that Christopher Alexander makes this point in one of his books, maybe A Pattern Language
He says that suburbs are configured "wrong", in a way that's antithetical to life.
Because the children go to school somewhere nearby, where they are babysat, and the fathers (at that time) commute to work in the city.
And the children have no idea what their parents do, and that is alienating. The configuration of space diminishes people and relationships. They don't see their parents enough and they don't learn from them.
Children want to learn from "real" work, not the fake work of school, which is why so many of them can't sit still in class, and get poor grades despite being smart, etc.
That work/suburb split definitely describes how I grew up, so I remember that point very distinctly. You are supposed to jump through hoops for 12 years, and then apply to a place where you jump through 4 more years of hoops, etc. But you are confused about how the world actually works. It's not a good way of teaching people to be adaptable to the world.
I really like this post, especially the point about visibility of job details for children. We don't talk about it enough. We don't draw connections between play skills and career paths. By the time I was making study decisions that would start to dictate my job opportunities, I had no idea what options were out there. A couple of work experience placements isn't enough.
One of my jobs is in tourism photography. For some projects, I just go on holiday with my kids, speculatively take photos/videos and then sell them to tourism authorities. It works well. My 6 and 8 year olds came to me at some point and asked, "Is your job to make people want to go on holiday?" Pretty much, yep. And so they have an incentive to help (more effective I am, more holidays we go on) and they see what goes into it - getting up for sunrises, capturing moments, editing, sharing the shots, etc. It's a serious contrast to my other job(s) where they'd guess computers are involved but wouldn't know what goes on - my fault, because I've never stopped to explain it.
Another aspect of personal projects is that if they’re truly enjoyable they can be a kind of salve for burnout.* If you feel like you can’t even open your IDE, a personal project can generate the excitement that reinvigorates your passion.
There’s also less of a speed limit with personal projects — the things like: “before you go down that road let’s talk with X; hold off on that idea for now; let’s wait until...”
This freedom is conducive to learning new things. My career success rests heavily on skills I gained pursuing personal projects, where I was able to try ridiculously complicated or “out there” ideas. I’ve worked for people in the past who were strongly against me spending free time on personal projects, but benefited from all the skills I had gained doing so. Beware of this mindset — it’s fear based and leads to unsuccessful outcomes in other ways.
* Side note is: careful not to burn out on what’s supposed to be a fun personal project.
I once wrote that "My dream is to, one day, work for free."
I am now living that dream. When I left my last company, in 2017, I looked at working for someone else, but was almost immediately told that no one wants old men. It was pretty crushing.
But I went and set up a corporation that allows me to get equipment and testing kit, and started to write my own stuff. I explored surveillance cameras and ONVIF, as well as Bluetooth (I'm pretty good with devices -I've been working on them all my life. I started as an EE, and actually played with Heathkits when I was a kid).
I'm now working on a very ambitious social media app. It's probably months down the road, but it will happen. I always ship. I've been doing it all my adult life. This project is the kind and scope that is usually done by a team of 10-20 engineers (I also wrote the backend from scratch, three years ago), but I've been doing it alone. I just started working with another guy that will be adding a dashboard to the server.
If you look at the projects in my portfolio, you will see heavy-duty, industrial-strength code; not sloppy "hobby" code. The code Quality is out of this world, they all have a lot more testing code than implementation code, and the documentation is over-the-top complete.
I learned, long ago, to make my "hobbies" "ship" projects. That way, everything I do is useful.
And that is what makes me happy. I like to finish stuff; and having people use my stuff is the best way to validate its completeness.
That said; despite the completeness of my work, it isn't particularly popular, which is just fine by me. I tend to "eat my own dog food," and use a lot of my libraries in my own work. The less that people other than myself depend on my work, the more freedom I have to form it to my own needs. I take Stewardship of my work seriously.
I wish I could have more of that "ship" mentality. I have dozens of quite interesting personal projects that are stuck in the 80% complete state, because ultimately the final stages of releasing a project just aren't fun to me (bug fixing, tests, docs, build systems, code polish)
I’m in a similar boat. Previously built vaporware costing millions of dollars of seed money. Now I have my own project and although it makes no money it is awesome to see people use it and exciting to see people share it on social media.
> 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 anything remotely school like. If there is mention of a "project" it is perceived as interfering with their time away from school which is usually involving sports, friends, video games, and media consumption (netflix, youtube, etc.)
I want my kids to explore opportunities to find something that sparks their interest enough where they are excited about spending time on it, pursuing it on their own. I think this will help them identify areas of interest for college and their future.
Any ideas on how to do this without it seeming like its "school" work?
An interesting add in my opinion is that one can also do great work when working on a project not of your own origination but of an area where one's interests lie or where visions intersect.
>"You have moments of happiness when things work out, but they don't last long, because then you're on to the next problem. So why do it at all? Because to the kind of people who like working this way, nothing else feels as right. You feel as if you're an animal in its natural habitat, doing what you were meant to do — not always happy, maybe, but awake and alive."
While the above does ring true to some extent, one can also approach all tasks with a sense of being awake and alive; This is something some eastern religions preach about. I do admit that this will be hard to implement in practice though. i
One person who was able to test out their own ideas while working for others is Nikola Tesla. He might be used a case study by others with grand visions who want to do great work. Although, it can be argued that Tesla had to at some point seek independence.
"In 1883, Nikola Tesla was sent by his employer - The Continental Edison Company- to fix the problem that had occurred in the powerhouse and electric lights installation at the railroad station in Strassburg. This presented him with the opportunity to test out his theory of a two phase alternating current motor encompassing his rotary magnetic field discovery [at that time, everyone who had tried to make an alternating current motor used a single circuit]. He set to work and tested his theory in the power plant. He was successful in starting up the power generator with this new system. This meant that Tesla now had a novel electrical system that utilised alternating current."
"This is why it is a mistake to insist dogmatically on the 'work/life balance'. In fact, the phrase 'work/life' alone embodies an error: it assumes that work and life are distinct."
A beaten horse if there is one. It's not a matter of being dogmatic or seeing the 6 sides of a die. It's that, as PG says between the lines, for most people there is no particular excitement about work. For some it depends on the working conditions, for many it's their personality. I don't look for any particular excitement at work: I'm happy to work a few hours a day for a great paycheck on something I more or less enjoy.
PG, who writes as someone who has had overall a terrific time at work, by focusing only on work misses the larger behavioral point. Let me offer an example: I don't know these days, but looking at PG's photos from a few years ago, I can say with certainty that he was, and I hope for his sake that he is no longer, in not very good physical shape. I've worked out all my life, playing individual and team sports, in the gym alone and with others, and for me exercising and playing sports has overall been tremendous fun and has contributed greatly to who I am, what I've done, and what I'm doing. But I suspect for PG, to go to the gym or sweat or do anything physical has to be unpleasant, if not a nightmare. And I'm fine with that, he'd rather be doing other things, he's probably (I'm speculating here) not particularly athletically gifted, and since he's a very smart person, he can probably come up with 15 different rationalizations as to why he avoids doing enough physical activity to look better, feel better, and greatly reduce his risk of getting sick now and in the future. But, and I don't think I'm exaggerating here, it's likely that he simply doesn't like to exercise and there's no narrative about Olympic medals, great feats of physical endurance, or any dream of looking like a Greek god that would convince him to become a gym rat. Similarly, there is no Apple story that could push me toward a 12-hour workday (or whatever time is being talked about) working for others (assuming I can avoid doing so)..
> What proportion of great work has been done by people who were skating in this sense? If not all of it, certainly a lot.
I used to think like that. However, the years I spent on my masters and on my startup were a watershed.
I was finally working on projects of my very own. But, after some months of extreme excitement, I was resorting to medicine and self help articles to heep me motivated and focused, especially when the boring intricacies started to pop up.
The passion, due to its very nature, fades away.
In my case, I alleviated those issues with method and discipline. They help you overcome the boring parts. The passion even became cyclic, as the growing body of work and solved problems made me feel engaged again.
Nowadays I even feel much better about the plethora of not-my-own-projects I've worked on along my life.
I have come to realize something profoundly fundamental for myself in the last weeks - after seeing this famous marketing video by Steve Jobs and reading a biography of Nike's founder:
My passion for my own project/business is highest whenever my passion is aligned with the passion of my target audience.
In that case, I also believe your chances of success have improved.
Take Nike, for example. Phil Knight was a passionate athlete. He loved sports. However, he was never so good that he could do it for a living. Part of the reason he founded a shoe company back then was to stay in the athlete's business without being an athlete himself. Watch any Nike advertisement and you will not see many words on products, but it's always about how great athletes are.
For me the thing that distinguishes hobby from work is the second 90% of the project.
Working on the ideas, the architecture, the interface and piecing it all together is fun and I don't mind staying up long if I do say a game jam. However, once everything is up and running, you get into the tedium of making the project actually work. This might be fixing all books or making sure that the door on your tree house can, in fact, be closed.
In a hobby project you can say 'good enough' and be done with it. In work setting, not so much.
This essay works well if you imagine the audience to be a batch of YC founders, or other entrepreneurial types. I read this essay three times.
First, I read it as pg probably intended - I'm in the midst of founding my own company, and the nature and quality of effort I bring to my own endeavors is orders of magnitude apart from what I bring to an employer. Much of my life growing up has been suffering abuse for choosing to pursue my passion followed by vindication, so the essay rings true for me in that sense.
The second time, I read this essay as an average kid from my underprivileged background might've read it. School was never a path to 'work' (there was plenty of 'work' for the unschooled), it was a route to escape poverty - one of a scant few that were close to reliable. That's the reason having a passion outside of school was frowned upon, you were risking starving any future family you might've had at a point where risk wasn't all that tolerable.
In my last reading, I just saw this essay as pg getting excited about something his kid was doing, and going about highlighting the importance of letting kids be kids - but in a very strange way such that it could fit among his other essays.
This is really nice and particularly resonant with me.
I've spent maybe a good five years obsessed with coding and development in all the ways, but I never went to school for it (I have an MA in philosophy), and have never had a real tech/dev job (I have been a random temp for almost two years now, cook and grubhub before that, and many different jobs before that in kitchens and teaching guitar and such).
I dream in javascript and have many different projects that skew more into art than repertoire/repo ready projects. Out of pure curiosity I have read many many books on programming languages and development strategies. Countless hours troubleshooting and understanding other people's work, learning git, docker, emacs, gradle, bash; learning OOP and SOLID; learning lower level languages. I just eat it up, I love it so much. There is nothing more satisfying to me than grokking it and then showing that understanding by example.
Most friends I talk to say I _should_ get a job doing this stuff I love so much, and I know the kinds of things I _should_ do if I wanted to try that, but that's not really my issue. Its more... I just don't want to jinx it, I don't want to get a job involving something I love so much because it just feels like it would ruin it.
But... life is long and sometimes I wish I had real health insurance, general financial stability, and everything else that goes along with the other side of this compromise. Hard to know.
This touches on one of the most demotivating facets of modern work: the obsession with collaboration.
If you never have any autonomy or space to develop a sense of ownership, outside of being yoked like an ox in a team or mired in the tyranous mediocrity of committees, it's extremely difficult to care about what you are doing.
It's not important, but I wondered if the title was an allusion to one of the patterns in Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language" titled "A room of one's own", about the necessity in designing houses to give everyone some bit of space that's distinctly theirs. The theme seems kind of similar, and PG makes a lot of architectural references in the essay.
In googling for "A room of one's own", though, I discovered that it's also the title of an essay by Virginia Wolfe written in 1929. It's possible that might possibly have inspired the name of the pattern in Christopher Alexander's book.
Why has this been downvoted? Does no one else think it's strange that the title of the post is a direct reference to Woolf but she's not mentioned at all?
This resonated with me. I have been developing software professionally for 32 years. And I am counting the days until retirement. I don't really want to retire, I want to own the work that I do. I don't care if it is boring or if somebody else tell me what they want. But having autonomy on HOW I do the work is what is important. And when I have that, may productivity goes through the roof and that is when I am truly happy.
> If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the projects.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Unfortunately kids in Sweden have to attend school by law, homeschooling is not allowed. By extension, you're not allowed to go on trips, or take any other time off without permission from the school. As my kid is only 3, I'm not sure how strict they are with this, but it feels very suffocating to me. I want him to have breathing room to spend time on projects and whatever he's passionate about, even if that means missing out on regular school for a while or getting worse grades. The last resort is to move abroad, but that has obvious downsides. The intention for this law was probably good: ensure that all kids get an education, and are not brainwashed by religious nuts, but it really really bothers me.
I'll just say that it is way, way more fun to work with people who also look at software engineering as a hobby.
End of the day we're just playing with lego bricks that happen to be computer bits. Do you want to be the person who only knows how to follow the step by step book, or can build anything out of any legos?
“ the mere expression "work/life" embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct”
Going to have to meditate on that one for awhile. It seems “privileged.” For many work amounts to a set of indignities required for survival. A 2 hour daily commute to pay Bay Area rent prices doesn’t feel like “life” at all. Sort of Marie Antoinette vibes to the featured essay. I’m actually ok with that. Not everyone needs to be a slave, and the more people who can forego work and just tinker the better. But acknowledge it. Paul’s not talking to the proles here, but to other gentlemen of leisure who had mathematician dads, or those who had Paul graham type rich celebrity dads. Most people are in essence slaves to debt. Retirement is when work stops and life starts, for most of us in the second class.
> If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but because I've been on the other end and I know which has more predictive value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't care about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects of their own, I wanted to hear all about those.
If all you have is a hammer, you’re going to go around looking for nails.
[+] [-] brhsagain|4 years ago|reply
> [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 their kids a distaste for this kind of work by forcing them to do it. Grades are already a grim, fake world, and aren't harmed much by parental interference, but working on one's own projects is a more delicate, private thing that could be damaged very easily.
It's so true. I got obsessed with programming around 11, started off with my shitty vb6 programs and moved on to reverse engineering video games and writing hacks. I never told any adults what I was doing until I was nearly an adult myself, out of fear they'd ruin my hobby like they did everything else. I remember thinking to myself how much school sucked and being determined not to let that poison the one thing I liked worked on. My parents thought I was a degenerate who did nothing but play computer games all day. Blew them away when I got my first programming job and eventually skipped college to start working right out of high school.
I have a bunch of friends who say the same thing. They'd find some new cool thing, show even the slightest interest in it and their mom would immediately start making them drill it three hours a day until they hated it and weren't interested in it anymore. It's a sad story.
[+] [-] opportune|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bredren|4 years ago|reply
I learned to program in zero period at Wilson High School in Portland, Oregon.
It was a self-taught course but I didn’t have to hide the work—-no one really cared. Not that my parents didn’t care, they were glad I was doing something I enjoyed.
But that no one had any idea how deep I was going into writing code.
The assignments were given once a quarter or so by Veryl Smith. We had far ranging latitude to figure it out on our own and gold plate projects as much as we wanted.
By the time the game of life assignment was due I had added a mouse interface and vga, color display of the cells and grid, all in Pascal.
I often lost points due to things like shadowed naming or other bad patterns.
But that didn’t really matter too much. I made up for it getting “A” grades working as a teacher’s assistant for the attendance office, writing hall passes and absence slips for myself and others as necessary. That was a great hack.
Anyhow, this essay resonates deeply with me. It has good ideas in it.
[+] [-] josephorjoe|4 years ago|reply
It turns out a lot of what they were doing while "playing video games" was learning how to make really complex and unique game scenarios using minecraft command blocks and redstone -- essentially creating both a RPG PvP arena and a multilevel party dungeon crawl w boss fights.
I run a small minecraft server for them to play and experiment on and I've resisted the urge to try to teach them anything about setting up and running servers, backing up data, or using text editors with syntax highlighting or source control to edit and preserve their command block commands.
I just show up for demos and let them know how cool what they're doing is and backup and reboot the server as needed.
I've messed up plenty as a parent but i think not trying to turn their interest in programming within minecraft into a learning experience has been one of my better decisions.
[+] [-] rel2thr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasyatidprime|4 years ago|reply
Fifteen years after escaping, I still haven't published anything real, and I can see the pattern. I saw the pattern ten years ago, even, but deep conditioning is really hard to break. Only being able to finish things for other people is kind of a disaster, especially when you wind up in the “need experience to gain experience” trap.
¹ Who, again without too much detail, was Asian. ² Which never happened. She never put any actual energy into it, I had no framework for approaching it as a child, and I'm not sure the surrounding environment contained people who were willing to do that sort of thing anyway.
[+] [-] enos_feedler|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrishi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greghinch|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asadlionpk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yatz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brabel|4 years ago|reply
The way I found to overcome that was to excel academically and technically, giving me that clear advantage I need... Unfortunately, many companies will only check your basic technical skills and then focus massively on "cultural fit", and to succeed here there's nothing much I can do other than try to show that, yes, I am a social person and I do like to work with other people and so on (things they will never be able to objectively measure). But to really have a good chance here, let's not kid ourselves: being white, male, good looking and from a wealthy background will get you way ahead before you even say a word.
My strategy served me well while I was relatively junior... but now that I am reaching a second decade in the industry, I again don't seem to have a clear advantage that I can objectively prove, and back to square one: getting a good job is a real challenge again.
[+] [-] victor9000|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpogorniy|4 years ago|reply
On the side note. There is a great book which makes easier for parents to make piece with themselves: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35457692-the-self-driven...
[+] [-] tmp_anon_22|4 years ago|reply
I dropped out of college and was ~4 years into a successful career before it clicked with parents and other "adults" of what I had done and what I had "thrown away".
Having been through 3 serious tech jobs and dozens of interviews only one company rejected me due to my lack of a degree - Capitol One.
All said however I do think about going back to complete my degree at some point as I expect as my career progresses to upper upper management it might get in the way.
[+] [-] splithalf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bentcorner|4 years ago|reply
I've been tempted to say something to him to make sure he balances his time appropriately and fulfills his other commitments.. but maybe I'll let it go a little while longer. I think he's getting a lot out of his project and I don't want to discourage him.
I suppose ultimately he's an adult and should make his own decisions and suffer his own consequences. But I worry.
[+] [-] punnerud|4 years ago|reply
Coined by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua who have Chinese parents.
[+] [-] void_mint|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okprod|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yc-kraln|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 99_00|4 years ago|reply
A largely Chinese-American concept, the term draws parallels to strict parenting styles ostensibly common to households in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. (wikipedia)
The idea behind tiger parents is that Asians earn more money. And it's true, but not the whole store.
But the problem is that average Asian incomes are pulled up by Indian-Americans. Chinese-Americans earn less than many European-Americans. So the whole concept is based on flawed logic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
[+] [-] rossdavidh|4 years ago|reply
My daughter, as a youngun', wanted to play "coffeeshop" where she would set up a coffeeshop at home and charge her mother and I for drinks. I think this says something about how much she saw the inside of coffeeshops while I was programming there.
The main obstacle to still using the play-better-until-it's-real path, is that we don't have a good way for kids to see what adults are doing, in most jobs. Otherwise, their natural instincts are still to "play" at doing what they see the adults doing.
[+] [-] chubot|4 years ago|reply
He says that suburbs are configured "wrong", in a way that's antithetical to life.
Because the children go to school somewhere nearby, where they are babysat, and the fathers (at that time) commute to work in the city.
And the children have no idea what their parents do, and that is alienating. The configuration of space diminishes people and relationships. They don't see their parents enough and they don't learn from them.
Children want to learn from "real" work, not the fake work of school, which is why so many of them can't sit still in class, and get poor grades despite being smart, etc.
That work/suburb split definitely describes how I grew up, so I remember that point very distinctly. You are supposed to jump through hoops for 12 years, and then apply to a place where you jump through 4 more years of hoops, etc. But you are confused about how the world actually works. It's not a good way of teaching people to be adaptable to the world.
[+] [-] prawn|4 years ago|reply
One of my jobs is in tourism photography. For some projects, I just go on holiday with my kids, speculatively take photos/videos and then sell them to tourism authorities. It works well. My 6 and 8 year olds came to me at some point and asked, "Is your job to make people want to go on holiday?" Pretty much, yep. And so they have an incentive to help (more effective I am, more holidays we go on) and they see what goes into it - getting up for sunrises, capturing moments, editing, sharing the shots, etc. It's a serious contrast to my other job(s) where they'd guess computers are involved but wouldn't know what goes on - my fault, because I've never stopped to explain it.
[+] [-] gdubs|4 years ago|reply
There’s also less of a speed limit with personal projects — the things like: “before you go down that road let’s talk with X; hold off on that idea for now; let’s wait until...”
This freedom is conducive to learning new things. My career success rests heavily on skills I gained pursuing personal projects, where I was able to try ridiculously complicated or “out there” ideas. I’ve worked for people in the past who were strongly against me spending free time on personal projects, but benefited from all the skills I had gained doing so. Beware of this mindset — it’s fear based and leads to unsuccessful outcomes in other ways.
* Side note is: careful not to burn out on what’s supposed to be a fun personal project.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago|reply
I am now living that dream. When I left my last company, in 2017, I looked at working for someone else, but was almost immediately told that no one wants old men. It was pretty crushing.
But I went and set up a corporation that allows me to get equipment and testing kit, and started to write my own stuff. I explored surveillance cameras and ONVIF, as well as Bluetooth (I'm pretty good with devices -I've been working on them all my life. I started as an EE, and actually played with Heathkits when I was a kid).
I'm now working on a very ambitious social media app. It's probably months down the road, but it will happen. I always ship. I've been doing it all my adult life. This project is the kind and scope that is usually done by a team of 10-20 engineers (I also wrote the backend from scratch, three years ago), but I've been doing it alone. I just started working with another guy that will be adding a dashboard to the server.
If you look at the projects in my portfolio, you will see heavy-duty, industrial-strength code; not sloppy "hobby" code. The code Quality is out of this world, they all have a lot more testing code than implementation code, and the documentation is over-the-top complete.
I learned, long ago, to make my "hobbies" "ship" projects. That way, everything I do is useful.
And that is what makes me happy. I like to finish stuff; and having people use my stuff is the best way to validate its completeness.
That said; despite the completeness of my work, it isn't particularly popular, which is just fine by me. I tend to "eat my own dog food," and use a lot of my libraries in my own work. The less that people other than myself depend on my work, the more freedom I have to form it to my own needs. I take Stewardship of my work seriously.
[+] [-] tornato7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacksonkmarley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tppiotrowski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] streetcat1|4 years ago|reply
Why not do B2B. The market is much more fragmented and thus you can always find a niche.
[+] [-] matt_s|4 years ago|reply
The current educational system seems to turn off high school kids (anecdotal evidence being my own) from pursuing anything remotely school like. If there is mention of a "project" it is perceived as interfering with their time away from school which is usually involving sports, friends, video games, and media consumption (netflix, youtube, etc.)
I want my kids to explore opportunities to find something that sparks their interest enough where they are excited about spending time on it, pursuing it on their own. I think this will help them identify areas of interest for college and their future.
Any ideas on how to do this without it seeming like its "school" work?
[+] [-] maverickJ|4 years ago|reply
An interesting add in my opinion is that one can also do great work when working on a project not of your own origination but of an area where one's interests lie or where visions intersect.
>"You have moments of happiness when things work out, but they don't last long, because then you're on to the next problem. So why do it at all? Because to the kind of people who like working this way, nothing else feels as right. You feel as if you're an animal in its natural habitat, doing what you were meant to do — not always happy, maybe, but awake and alive."
While the above does ring true to some extent, one can also approach all tasks with a sense of being awake and alive; This is something some eastern religions preach about. I do admit that this will be hard to implement in practice though. i
One person who was able to test out their own ideas while working for others is Nikola Tesla. He might be used a case study by others with grand visions who want to do great work. Although, it can be argued that Tesla had to at some point seek independence.
"In 1883, Nikola Tesla was sent by his employer - The Continental Edison Company- to fix the problem that had occurred in the powerhouse and electric lights installation at the railroad station in Strassburg. This presented him with the opportunity to test out his theory of a two phase alternating current motor encompassing his rotary magnetic field discovery [at that time, everyone who had tried to make an alternating current motor used a single circuit]. He set to work and tested his theory in the power plant. He was successful in starting up the power generator with this new system. This meant that Tesla now had a novel electrical system that utilised alternating current."
The above was taken from https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/cracking-the-who-you...
[+] [-] borroka|4 years ago|reply
A beaten horse if there is one. It's not a matter of being dogmatic or seeing the 6 sides of a die. It's that, as PG says between the lines, for most people there is no particular excitement about work. For some it depends on the working conditions, for many it's their personality. I don't look for any particular excitement at work: I'm happy to work a few hours a day for a great paycheck on something I more or less enjoy.
PG, who writes as someone who has had overall a terrific time at work, by focusing only on work misses the larger behavioral point. Let me offer an example: I don't know these days, but looking at PG's photos from a few years ago, I can say with certainty that he was, and I hope for his sake that he is no longer, in not very good physical shape. I've worked out all my life, playing individual and team sports, in the gym alone and with others, and for me exercising and playing sports has overall been tremendous fun and has contributed greatly to who I am, what I've done, and what I'm doing. But I suspect for PG, to go to the gym or sweat or do anything physical has to be unpleasant, if not a nightmare. And I'm fine with that, he'd rather be doing other things, he's probably (I'm speculating here) not particularly athletically gifted, and since he's a very smart person, he can probably come up with 15 different rationalizations as to why he avoids doing enough physical activity to look better, feel better, and greatly reduce his risk of getting sick now and in the future. But, and I don't think I'm exaggerating here, it's likely that he simply doesn't like to exercise and there's no narrative about Olympic medals, great feats of physical endurance, or any dream of looking like a Greek god that would convince him to become a gym rat. Similarly, there is no Apple story that could push me toward a 12-hour workday (or whatever time is being talked about) working for others (assuming I can avoid doing so)..
[+] [-] myth2018|4 years ago|reply
I used to think like that. However, the years I spent on my masters and on my startup were a watershed.
I was finally working on projects of my very own. But, after some months of extreme excitement, I was resorting to medicine and self help articles to heep me motivated and focused, especially when the boring intricacies started to pop up.
The passion, due to its very nature, fades away.
In my case, I alleviated those issues with method and discipline. They help you overcome the boring parts. The passion even became cyclic, as the growing body of work and solved problems made me feel engaged again.
Nowadays I even feel much better about the plethora of not-my-own-projects I've worked on along my life.
[+] [-] shoto_io|4 years ago|reply
My passion for my own project/business is highest whenever my passion is aligned with the passion of my target audience.
In that case, I also believe your chances of success have improved.
Take Nike, for example. Phil Knight was a passionate athlete. He loved sports. However, he was never so good that he could do it for a living. Part of the reason he founded a shoe company back then was to stay in the athlete's business without being an athlete himself. Watch any Nike advertisement and you will not see many words on products, but it's always about how great athletes are.
[+] [-] yoz-y|4 years ago|reply
Working on the ideas, the architecture, the interface and piecing it all together is fun and I don't mind staying up long if I do say a game jam. However, once everything is up and running, you get into the tedium of making the project actually work. This might be fixing all books or making sure that the door on your tree house can, in fact, be closed.
In a hobby project you can say 'good enough' and be done with it. In work setting, not so much.
[+] [-] sombremesa|4 years ago|reply
First, I read it as pg probably intended - I'm in the midst of founding my own company, and the nature and quality of effort I bring to my own endeavors is orders of magnitude apart from what I bring to an employer. Much of my life growing up has been suffering abuse for choosing to pursue my passion followed by vindication, so the essay rings true for me in that sense.
The second time, I read this essay as an average kid from my underprivileged background might've read it. School was never a path to 'work' (there was plenty of 'work' for the unschooled), it was a route to escape poverty - one of a scant few that were close to reliable. That's the reason having a passion outside of school was frowned upon, you were risking starving any future family you might've had at a point where risk wasn't all that tolerable.
In my last reading, I just saw this essay as pg getting excited about something his kid was doing, and going about highlighting the importance of letting kids be kids - but in a very strange way such that it could fit among his other essays.
[+] [-] beepbooptheory|4 years ago|reply
I've spent maybe a good five years obsessed with coding and development in all the ways, but I never went to school for it (I have an MA in philosophy), and have never had a real tech/dev job (I have been a random temp for almost two years now, cook and grubhub before that, and many different jobs before that in kitchens and teaching guitar and such).
I dream in javascript and have many different projects that skew more into art than repertoire/repo ready projects. Out of pure curiosity I have read many many books on programming languages and development strategies. Countless hours troubleshooting and understanding other people's work, learning git, docker, emacs, gradle, bash; learning OOP and SOLID; learning lower level languages. I just eat it up, I love it so much. There is nothing more satisfying to me than grokking it and then showing that understanding by example.
Most friends I talk to say I _should_ get a job doing this stuff I love so much, and I know the kinds of things I _should_ do if I wanted to try that, but that's not really my issue. Its more... I just don't want to jinx it, I don't want to get a job involving something I love so much because it just feels like it would ruin it.
But... life is long and sometimes I wish I had real health insurance, general financial stability, and everything else that goes along with the other side of this compromise. Hard to know.
[+] [-] thrower123|4 years ago|reply
If you never have any autonomy or space to develop a sense of ownership, outside of being yoked like an ox in a team or mired in the tyranous mediocrity of committees, it's extremely difficult to care about what you are doing.
[+] [-] elihu|4 years ago|reply
In googling for "A room of one's own", though, I discovered that it's also the title of an essay by Virginia Wolfe written in 1929. It's possible that might possibly have inspired the name of the pattern in Christopher Alexander's book.
[+] [-] ximm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olly_r|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmageggy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] corpMaverick|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martindbp|4 years ago|reply
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Unfortunately kids in Sweden have to attend school by law, homeschooling is not allowed. By extension, you're not allowed to go on trips, or take any other time off without permission from the school. As my kid is only 3, I'm not sure how strict they are with this, but it feels very suffocating to me. I want him to have breathing room to spend time on projects and whatever he's passionate about, even if that means missing out on regular school for a while or getting worse grades. The last resort is to move abroad, but that has obvious downsides. The intention for this law was probably good: ensure that all kids get an education, and are not brainwashed by religious nuts, but it really really bothers me.
[+] [-] swman|4 years ago|reply
End of the day we're just playing with lego bricks that happen to be computer bits. Do you want to be the person who only knows how to follow the step by step book, or can build anything out of any legos?
[+] [-] splithalf|4 years ago|reply
Going to have to meditate on that one for awhile. It seems “privileged.” For many work amounts to a set of indignities required for survival. A 2 hour daily commute to pay Bay Area rent prices doesn’t feel like “life” at all. Sort of Marie Antoinette vibes to the featured essay. I’m actually ok with that. Not everyone needs to be a slave, and the more people who can forego work and just tinker the better. But acknowledge it. Paul’s not talking to the proles here, but to other gentlemen of leisure who had mathematician dads, or those who had Paul graham type rich celebrity dads. Most people are in essence slaves to debt. Retirement is when work stops and life starts, for most of us in the second class.
[+] [-] paulcole|4 years ago|reply
If all you have is a hammer, you’re going to go around looking for nails.