"There are so many problems with Graham’s thinking that it is difficult to organize a focused response."
Statements like these are pointless theatrics. The more wrong someone is, the easier, not harder it is to point out where and how. What's the argument?
You have to wait until section 2 to find one:
"...there are actually several critical errors in the above reasoning which render Graham’s conclusions baseless. The first is the idea that measurement of things like quality and success can be objective, perfect and fair. These are not objective facts, they are highly contextual and can be manipulated by power struggles, charisma, clever marketing, or outright fraud. Value is a social construct..."
After about eight paragraphs about how "pedestrian" PG is, his point (finally) is basically that value is subjective and immeasurable. I don't know how true this is philosophically, but for all intents and purposes, if it were true, it would mean that nothing could be better than anything else. [1] It's also a conflation of ideas. Marketing doesn't create value; it distributes and sells it. Value as defined in the original essay is the meaty stuff people want: a home computer, for example, or an affordable spaceship.
"Graham identifies that “Many of the employees (e.g. the people in the mailroom or the personnel department) work at one remove from the actual making of stuff.” So what exactly do they contribute to the wealth generation process? Does Graham imply that without these others working at “one remove”, the programmers could still create the wealth they do? Without the human resources team to coordinate their medical benefits, would the programmers be as productive? Without the legal team to fend off frivolous lawsuits brought by patent trolls [...]?" (And so on.)
All Graham is saying is that programmers are directly involved in the creation of the product itself — its design, engineering, and maintenance. Other people create the social environment that makes it possible for this product to be distributed and not be killed, but don't make stuff in the artisanal sense.
I can understand why it would be insulting if someone claimed that anyone who isn't a maker were somehow useless, but Graham never did.
I'm ten minutes in, and everything I've read is basically a verbose form of "it's all relative" and "things are more complicated than that." Philosophy has a standard refutation to this: we deal with complex phenomena by isolating principles. For example, the abstract idea of value, the distinction between creation and distribution, and so on. It's the most boring thing in the world to hear, "the universe is more complex than that idea captures." All abstractions are reductions.
This sort of argument based on moral outrage and authority about how the real world works holds back truthseeking discourse.
[1] I also have a hard time understanding how someone who has earnestly tried to make good things could want this to be true.
> Marketing doesn't create value; it distributes and sells it.
But that value doesn't exist until marketing "unlocks" it! The example discussed is marketing finding a new vertical which then expands the profitability of a product line without any additional work. A portion of the value didn't exist until marketing sold it to a new market. I don't consider that conflation of ideas, more of highlighting the nuance that quantifiable portions of value cannot be ascribed to individual efforts.
The fact that value is subjective and immeasurable doesn't insult anyone who tries to make good things. I try to make good things too, the value I get from them is the sense of accomplishment that I've done a good job. But whether my "good job" translates into a $1bn unicorn is up to luck, not simply my effort.
I think your disagreement with Graham is over a definition of words. You seem to be saying that creation of value is the indivisible sum of efforts to (a) decide what to build, (b) build it, and (c) sell it. He assumes a and b can be isolated out.
In any case though, take any highly successful company. Imagine if all the marketing people and product/engineering/design people were suddenly segregated, and forced to work without the other. Who's more worried?
I'm not at all saying marketing people are useless, which seems to be the idea you take issue with. They provide value. But (I'm sorry) less than the designers and engineers, and measurably so, from successive thought experiments like the above. That's why they're paid less.
"The fact that value is subjective and immeasurable doesn't insult anyone who tries to make good things. I try to make good things too, the value I get from them is the sense of accomplishment that I've done a good job."
But by your argument, I can steal your sense of accomplishment by saying, who knows how much of your success was due to you? How much was due to the marketing team? 10%? 50%? 80%?
"But whether my "good job" translates into a $1bn unicorn is up to luck, not simply my effort."
On this topic I mostly defer to Hamming's point in You and Your Research. I'd say there's luck involved, not that it's up to luck. While it's true not everyone who can become Bill Gates does, some people outright can't become Bill Gates, while others can. The point is, this doesn't show that value is subjective.
> In any case though, take any highly successful company. Imagine if all the marketing people and product/engineering/design people were suddenly segregated, and forced to work without the other. Who's more worried?
I tend to avoid engaging in the eternal engineer vs. sales/marketing debate (nothing ever comes of it), but that sounds like a pretty disingenuous argument. Whether you remove (a) and (b) or (c) from the equation, you're still missing an essential part of the business. Engineers with 0 sales channels make 0 revenue. Marketers/Salespeople with no product make 0 revenue. Who should be more worried?
If you're saying "Well, engineers could always try selling stuff themselves, while marketers couldn't code" you're adding, I believe, unwarranted assumptions. The reason people are paid more or less has more to do with supply/demand. Also note that salespeople at Oracle often make more money than their engineers.
Of course "marketers" could code (it's not that hard) and of course coders could sell (lose the self defeating "introvert" bullshit). If one or two people do everything that's required to "provide value", what do you have? A startup.
FWIW, I've seen 3 or 4 "rebuttals" of pg essays, and they all read about the same.
For instance, one pg essay mentions how large glossy magazines all cost about the same, and how this spelled difficult times for the publishing industry in the future, given the likely average for a digital book or a website view. Someone wrote a rebuttal from the viewpoint of the publishing industry, which, when unpacked, contained only one concrete point, which was approximately "No, publishing is doing great -- look how many millions of copies Sarah Palin's book sold!"
> Marketing doesn't create value; it distributes and sells it.
I would argue it does create value. Not only for increasing the speed of information, but to attach a sentimental value to an object people like it more. People enjoy coca cola more because of the brand and thus the value is greater.
So I understand the point here, and would say that marketing provides separate value. Distribution networks are certainly highly valuable, but as distribution, not as part of the product. From the perspective of creating things and selling them as one indivisible task, you're right, but I think it's useful to draw a distinction between craftsmanship and selling/storytelling.
Statements like these are pointless theatrics. The more wrong someone is, the easier, not harder it is to point out where and how. What's the argument?
You have to wait until section 2 to find one:
"...there are actually several critical errors in the above reasoning which render Graham’s conclusions baseless. The first is the idea that measurement of things like quality and success can be objective, perfect and fair. These are not objective facts, they are highly contextual and can be manipulated by power struggles, charisma, clever marketing, or outright fraud. Value is a social construct..."
After about eight paragraphs about how "pedestrian" PG is, his point (finally) is basically that value is subjective and immeasurable. I don't know how true this is philosophically, but for all intents and purposes, if it were true, it would mean that nothing could be better than anything else. [1] It's also a conflation of ideas. Marketing doesn't create value; it distributes and sells it. Value as defined in the original essay is the meaty stuff people want: a home computer, for example, or an affordable spaceship.
"Graham identifies that “Many of the employees (e.g. the people in the mailroom or the personnel department) work at one remove from the actual making of stuff.” So what exactly do they contribute to the wealth generation process? Does Graham imply that without these others working at “one remove”, the programmers could still create the wealth they do? Without the human resources team to coordinate their medical benefits, would the programmers be as productive? Without the legal team to fend off frivolous lawsuits brought by patent trolls [...]?" (And so on.)
All Graham is saying is that programmers are directly involved in the creation of the product itself — its design, engineering, and maintenance. Other people create the social environment that makes it possible for this product to be distributed and not be killed, but don't make stuff in the artisanal sense.
I can understand why it would be insulting if someone claimed that anyone who isn't a maker were somehow useless, but Graham never did.
I'm ten minutes in, and everything I've read is basically a verbose form of "it's all relative" and "things are more complicated than that." Philosophy has a standard refutation to this: we deal with complex phenomena by isolating principles. For example, the abstract idea of value, the distinction between creation and distribution, and so on. It's the most boring thing in the world to hear, "the universe is more complex than that idea captures." All abstractions are reductions.
This sort of argument based on moral outrage and authority about how the real world works holds back truthseeking discourse.
[1] I also have a hard time understanding how someone who has earnestly tried to make good things could want this to be true.