Paul Graham: Hiring is Obsolete 638
jazznjava writes "Paul Graham has a new essay covering what the influences of declining operating costs will have on startup companies, and the undervaluation of undergraduates."
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Paul Graham: Hiring is Obsolete
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The one day you'd sell your soul for something, souls are a glut.
Outsourcing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Outsourcing... (Score:4, Interesting)
But your point is valid- he doesn't mention outsourcing at all.
Re:Outsourcing... (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/19/offshorin
When you take into account timezones, language difficulties, bad PR, and the fact that things like software development have little room for error (and thus saving some money to get it done cheap is false economy), in many cases it really isn't worth the cost saving.
Paul's recurring theme... (Score:5, Interesting)
His points over many essays are nearly always the same, but looked at from different angles:
- do hard work (and work hard)
- hang around with smart people
- don't follow trends, blaze your own trail
- start with good ideas
- spend as little as possible
- the internet leverages your investment
- your biggest investment is time
- Tech matters (as do languages and platforms)
- He did it (started a successful company and sold out). All of his essays encourage you to as well.
I cannot understand why anyone on this site does not like what he has to say. He's saying the time has never been better to start a business, keep your costs low and make better technology your advantage, and he's entirely encouraging with his style of presentation.I, for one, thank Paul Graham for his insight into something I want to do.
Oh, and if you didn't know this nugget of wisdom: Find and listen to someone who has done what you want to do. Don't listen to the masses. Listen to someone's who's done it.
Re:Who thinks recent grads are undervalued? (Score:1, Interesting)
What Paul Really Does... (Score:5, Interesting)
Having read about 2/3 of his articles, I have realized that most of what he talks about, I already, at some level, know. The article helps to see a topic in a new light though. Yes, some of his articles aren't all that great, and are stuff that is generally know, but very few writers are always successful.
It is the same reason that we have books on science or programming or how to use Windows, or any other number of topics. A subset of the population already intimately understands these ideas. However, to the rest of us, it lets us understand and explore the ideas in ways that never would have occurred to us/been possible.
If you really don't like Paul's articles, then don't read them. They only come up every few weeks. It's not like he posts a new one every other day.
Re:Paul's recurring theme... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't want to run my own company. I don't want to be my own boss. I don't want the headaches, hassles, frustration, and migraines of getting a struggling business off the ground. I have, in my circle of friends in just the past 5 years, been witness to two different marriages that ended in divorce because of people spending so much time and energy on getting their business going, that their own marriage ended up falling apart.
There's more to life than money. Money is wonderful to have, but if you don't have the time to use it, and in particular, don't have the people you care for with you to enjoy its benefits as well, it's worth less than the paper it's printed on.
I know what I want to do with my life... and I'm quite content to work for someone else while I do so. At least I can go home at the end of the day to be with my family and forget work for the evening.
Oh... and starting a startup takes more than just time and associated costs... it also takes an original idea and enough social skills to be able to sell other people on the idea. For people with Asperger's, to give you just one example, for that to happen would be nothing shy of simple blind luck.
Capitalism is great (Score:1, Interesting)
Utter bullcrap! (Score:3, Interesting)
IBM was briefly considering the new MC68000 as a CPU, but Motorola couldn't promise the volume. In an alternate universe, they might have been able to do that, in which case the obvious choice for OS would have been Microware's OS9/68k.
That would have given as an IBM-PC with a clean CPU design, coupled with a clean and modular OS with true multiuser and multitasking from the word go.
I sometimes wonder what the world would have been like today if that had been the first IBM-PC...
startup budget (Score:2, Interesting)
My last job was at a ".com" company. They spent mucho money on marketing and got high demand for their product. They had been around for a year when I was hired in. Little did I know, I was being hired to make this product they've already sold.
I was their only programmer. 9 months after I started, I got laid off, since it was cheaper to contract my position out. They were in business a few more months after that.
My first warning should have been when I found out the CEO of this company was also the president of pets.com. (Big "HELLO" to David Ford, if you're reading this!)
The moral: MAKE YOUR PRODUCT FIRST! Then market it.
Re:Bill Gates at Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
It was Compaq that reverse engineered the BIOS to start the clones rolling. All those clones then ultimately ran Microsoft's OS because its aggressive marketing techniques drove out all other competitors.
Result: a 95+% domination of the market, establishing a monoculture where almost everyone uses Windows, Outlook, IE, with the resulting lack of innovation, viruses, and security holes that monocultures bring with it.
Alternate history: If Microsoft hadn't come into being, companies that made alternate OSes (DR-DOS, GemStar, Visio, etc) could have continued and the situation could be like the various Linux distros (Red Hat, SuSE, Gentoo) today, except on a much more marketshare significant scale. Hardware markers would still have flourished, widespread demand for hardware would still have driven PC prices down to commodity levels.
This was actually like the situation before Microsoft came to dominate. Lots of computer makers - Commodore, Atari, Tandy, etc - competing with both hardware and an OS. The big bad Apple was never a monopoly - at its height the Mac had a maximum of 18% marketshare, and even the venerable Apple II no more than 50%. There were always others. IBM may have started the monoculture, but it was Microsoft that embraced and established it.
Re:Paul's recurring theme... (Score:3, Interesting)
For those of us lacking all three, that's not so useful. My abilities lie in coding, not in creativity, or design, or management, or marketing. I'm terrible at working on projects I want to do in my free time, I imagine I'd be equally bad at running my own company. And finally, I'm trying to put more time into my social life, not less!
Re:Who thinks recent grads are undervalued? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am usually considered an "early-career professional without a degree" because I went to community college instead of "real" college because that's what I could afford. I've forgotten more things than the average beer-swilling, frat-party-attending, cow-tipping college asshat has ever known. I know this because I work with several of them. Sounds like they've done it all, though.
I constantly learn new things and new ways of doing old stuff. I've taught myself (books and Google) several programming languages that I didn't get from high school or college and new techniques in the ones I already knew. Any "HUGE holes in [my] knowledge" that I can identify are things I "close up" as quickly as possible.
So, would you hire me as a developer when all I have is an Associates in programming (which is, admittedly, useless) and 4 years of experience doing wiring diagrams and warehouse keeping? It sounds like you wouldn't just because I don't have a "real" degree.
What if I told you I automated that CAD wiring diagram process and made my own inventory system, and put them both behind a nice web frontend, integrated into the company's website? But, wait, you wouldn't get that far with me. You'd just choose that other guy because he has a Bachelor's in drinking beer from a hose held by a college slut.
I don't mean to be abrasive or personally insulting here, but I'm currently hunting for a job (believe it or not, I don't want to do CAD-and-office-monkey work for the rest of my life) and this attitude is WAY too common amongst HR feebs. (OK, so I read too many BOFH stories and use too many parentheticals as well. Sue me.)
Re:Who thinks recent grads are undervalued? (Score:3, Interesting)
Second, Mattintosh (above) made a fantastic argument in favor of those "early career professionals without a degree". I can personally say that even the most rigorous (especially the most rigorous) CS or IT departments don't prepare workers for the daily grind of working in a devlopment company or for the variety of positions that they may be exposed to. And even in those departments that do offer a good program, you shouldn't be surprised to see plenty of students that manage to careen through without learning a drop of it. An undergraduate education can be valuable for a student, but a BS can only mean so much to a hiring manager.
Re:Outsourcing... (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget Poland.
A member of the EU and NATO, it has a stable system of government, legally enforced human rights and European levels of worker protection (i.e higher than the US). It is a candidate to join the Euro -- the Zloty is pegged to it -- so there isn't "unfair" currency distortion going on.
BUT: it's average salary is about half the EU average, so EU companies are setting up programming centres in Poland nearly as fast as they are in India.
Re:It isn't all about money! (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps you should chalk this up to your own unique experience rather than assuming it is "obviously" false. I for one (and hordes of people on Slashdot would agree) that his essay sounds strikingly familiar. Grahams writing style seems to confound people that can't distinguish between a generalization (which isn't expected to apply universally), and an absolute statement.
However, people with those sort of smarts are extremely rare and so this trend does not hold out hope for the vast majority of CS students much less undergrads in general.
And that's precisely why Graham is suggesting that those few smart kids run out and start startups. Why get paid the same as the next guy if you're (potentially) ten times as productive as he is? Why not found a startup and have something that proves you're worth ten times as much to the company? Even if your company flops, it looks good on a resume.
Heck I sure as hell wouldn't want to waste my youth as a workaholic just to end up as one of those rich bachelors at 35.
It beats wasting your youth being a workaholic for someone else. Who says you have to waste your youth, anyway? After 16 years of schooling, 2 or 3 spent working for yourself sounds like a reasonable investment, given the potential payoff.
Also, it's a lot easier to go from working for yourself to working for a company than vice-versa. You're going to have a harder time justifing the risk of founding your own startup when you're 35, and presumably have a lot more responsibilities, than you are when you're 22 and it really doesn't matter if you fail.
It isn't all about accumulating the biggest bank account but also about knowing you can provide for a family, have free time and safely plan for the future.
The question is how much time do you want to spend working to provide for a family. 30 years, or 3? Even if you waste that 3 driving a company into the ground, you've got 27 left to play it safe. The time to take chances is when you're young -- before you start worrying about those things.
On buying startups before they get big (& Goog (Score:5, Interesting)
"What companies should do is go out and discover startups when they're young, before VCs have puffed them up into something that costs hundreds of millions to acquire."
And what did Google do today? It bought a 2 people company [dodgeball.com].
Garbage (Score:3, Interesting)
Garbage.
It took years for bloggers to latch onto the same teat at which most "artists" have been suckling for millenia: You just have to have balls.
Put together some collage/sculpture thingie that your three-year-old could have regurgitated, stick it in your front yard, and your neighbors will call you a twit and call the homeowners association to get that eyesore removed. Put together some collage/sculpture thingie that your three-year-old could have regurgitated and HAVE THE BALLS TO CALL IT ART and put it in a gallery with a ridiculous price tag and wankers who have no taste and no heart but fat wallets will try to buy an image of intelligence and sophistication by flinging dollars at you. You may be forgiven for laughing all the way to the bank.
When it comes to blogs, most people, some years back, had a reasonable enough sense of shame to realize that their idiotic ramblings were of no interest to anyone but themselves and, maybe, in return for enough monetary compensation, their therapist. Fast forward nearly a decade and several things have happened. Familiarity has bred contempt. Some scam artists have made some money. And way the hell too many people have gotten the idea that it's actually a legitimate use of their time to immortalize their verbal diarhhea via the intarweb.
And I'm posting this on one big-ass blog. Damn. I should shoot myself now.