I mean, it's a tiresome task to even attempt to enumerate all the ways in which I feel college failed to live up to the hype they feed you before you go in. And perhaps it's because I went to a big, run-of-the-mill state school, but I typically refer to college as an extortion racket now.
I welcome any and all attempts to disrupt what I consider a corrupt and ineffective system.
I would agree that to be counted among your "thousands of examples" of outliers, one would have to be obsessively dedicated. Not everyone wants to be a Newton or a Da Vinci though. And there is nothing wrong with that. FogCreek and 37signals are certainly nowhere near as publicly visible as many SV startups, but they are successful and they became that way without the extreme levels of energy that SV startups seem to demand.
Now those firms and their ilk may not fit your definition of "startup", but they are still ex nihilo undertakings that have been able to supply some very demanding consumers. They'll never be as sexy as the Valley kids, but their continued existence serves as ample evidence of their validity. And in that sense, it is a myth that startups must be all-consuming.
Now those firms and their ilk may not fit your definition of "startup"...
This whole debate seems to hinge on the definition of "startup". I'd be interested in historical evidence to back-up or refute the claim 37signals makes: Has the meaning of "startup" actually been hijacked? Or has it always meant what pg (and wikipedia) say it does?
Startup companies can come in all forms, but the phrase "startup company" is often associated with high growth, technology oriented companies. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company
This seems to be a reasonably good description of what the word means and what it is commonly associated with. You can call practically any young firm a startup, but it does most commonly refer to PG's definition. Like DHH said in the post, "starting a business" just does not have the near-mythical connotations "startup" has, but those connotations are result of the stories that typical startup culture provides. I don't think there's a way to make "starting a sustainable business" sound sexy because it's not a very sexy idea. And perhaps people with a spouse and kids shouldn't worry too much about how sexy an idea is, but rather how valuable it is.
"Let's face it, regular expressions aren't for everyone."
Wait, since when aren't they? I would have thought basic regex skills were a baseline shibboleth of a programmer. I even know several non-technical people that are proficient.
Your comment reminded me of Jamie Zawinski's tongue-in-cheek quotation "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think
'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems." (http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247)
Jestful, off-the-wall comments aside, I love regex. It takes away a great deal of the drudgery associated with processing volumes and volumes of text. I can't imagine not having it.
(Aside: Now that you mention it, I can think of a couple people who aren't programmers who use regex pretty frequently because it makes their life a little easier even if it isn't highly advanced, super-dense regex.)
I think the meaning becomes clear because this sense of the word is almost always used as an attributive modifier of a pejorative term: e.g., "entitled pricks", "entitled, combative princess." I agree with you that it has a much more specific meaning as a predicate compliment: "I'm entitled to my own opinion."
Language changes. People sometimes still complain about "hopefully" being used as a sentence modifier, as in, "Hopefully language mavens will see their role in speech communities as custodians and curators of beneficial older conventions, rather than as guardians and protectors of acrolectic law." However, the etymologically literal sense of this word ("in a manner full of hope") has so little use that the non-standard meaning predominates.
I am near the start of my career (3 years in or so) as a programmer, and I spent much of the first part of that working remotely. Though I enjoyed not having to get dressed and drive in traffic to be at the office by 8am, this severely stunted the development of my work skills. Now, when I was working for a startup, I would spend hours and hours at home on projects and remained fairly disciplined, but that was due to the passion I felt for my work. When that startup folded I had to enter the regular workforce for financial reasons, and I found it much harder to be motivated about what I was doing. When working remotely, I found myself constantly distracted and unfocused, and even though I felt I had fairly strong communications skills, my ability to communicate with co-workers did not develop.
There are numerous problems with younger employees working remotely, but the way it stunts one's development as a professional is probably the worst. Now that I'm in an office, I am constantly exposed not only to people more knowledgeable than I, but also people who have learned how to be a professional and how to work in a team.
One thing in particular that struck me is that I didn't really know how to behave in an office. True, there are a lot of ways that the modern office is kind of depressing, but developing decent working relationships based on mutual respect with your co-workers does a lot to make a workplace tolerable and even enjoyable. This respect is not developed in most cases unless you actually observe and learn some office behavioral norms.
Working remotely can be awesome, and stodgy companies should learn that flexibility has its advantages. But these advantages are often strongest for experienced employees who know how to organize themselves and motivate themselves to get a job done wherever they are for little reason other than professional pride and a paycheck.
Of course there are influential parties in the Valley, but that still doesn't make it one thing. What the OC seems to have reacted against was the reification[1] of the industry into a single thing. Of course you can influence an industry, but the key to understanding what that means lies in the the "fluid" part of "influence." The whole thing is a dynamic, swirling mass of people and groups constantly interacting with and reacting to one another. An industry isn't really a thing so much as it is a convenient way for us to refer (somewhat nebulously) to a collection of companies that operate in certain fields.
I agree with you. As I get older & more persnickety, it's got to the point where every time I hear somebody refer to "the community" or "the industry" as if it's a coherent entity with goals and plans and capable of taking action (or even having a stance), I cringe. What that really says to me is "I live in a fantasy land, run! run away! fleeee!"
In any "community" or industry ("community" in quotes here because people abuse that word so much worse, calling swathes of people with no connection whatsoever a "community" if they share some superficial trait), there will be a small handful of people who DO lead opinions and DO do things and DO make plans.
But then the rest are a swirling mass with no particular inlets or outlets.
But you can see it happening before your eyes every day.
You can see it in how everyone's website or logos look the same. How some ephemeral concept of lean startup infects through people talking about startups. How startup incubators start popping up everywhere.
The influence is there, to dismiss it as childish or 'fantasy' is strange to me. It's just not a physical thing, it's a subtle form of group think. And it's quite easy for someone like Techcrunch to use their influence over that group think to engage in positive discrimination, which Arrington says they have, highlighting Black and Hispanic startups more than they technically merited.
Excellent point. My dad, who was a journalist for 30 years, always complained about this assumption among his colleagues. Journalists are taught to go talk to the people in charge, and the idea that there is some group in charge of an industry is just an unspoken--and often unthought--assumption about how business works. Obviously it's ludicrous, but it's a side effect of being taught to look for the "big picture" to get the big story.
If survey classes actually connected the dots, it would promote intelligent students without challenging them to persevere, and ultimately favor the development of bright but undisciplined generalists.
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While I relate to some of the cynicism of the essay, I think this is an emergent sociological phenomenon rather than something that the designers of curricula necessarily intend to do. Sure, there's a need to weed out students who can't hack it later due to a lack of intelligence or persistence, but the idea that course designers set out to build people into student-drones who blindly memorize information because "that's what society needs" is hogwash. This is a result of a need to serve a broad range of students with a limited supply of teaching talent.
I'm confident most college departments would love to get highly intelligent students intensely interested in their field of study. Showing them how to connect all the dots could open a window towards a genuine love for the field at hand, turning a jaded generalist into a dedicated scholar. While persistence may still be an issue with some of these students, showing them how amazing and connected a field can be could encourage them to specialize in this fascinating study. Few things inspire as much persistence as deep fascination. The crappy survey classes probably do more harm than good in turning away potentially excellent students from the material.
I doubt the author is seriously suggesting a secret cabal of academic administrators meets to "build people into student-drones who blindly memorize information."
From my reading, he is suggesting that academia has evolved this way over time, due to the greater culture of the, as DFW would put it, "day to day trenches of adult life."
Furthermore, the world would probably be better of if the 15% of people who take physics 1 have a deep understanding and appreciation for how it all fits together. I've met more than a few artists and english majors that are capable of connecting those dots. Unfortunately, it seems, the dots are just actively hidden from them.
I mean, it's a tiresome task to even attempt to enumerate all the ways in which I feel college failed to live up to the hype they feed you before you go in. And perhaps it's because I went to a big, run-of-the-mill state school, but I typically refer to college as an extortion racket now.
I welcome any and all attempts to disrupt what I consider a corrupt and ineffective system.