Horribly out-of-date in parts. The 'substance' has evaporated.
"I thought it would be useful if I explained what a nerd was.
What I came up with was: someone who doesn't expend any
effort on marketing himself."
I always considered Paul Graham a 'nerd' despite his excellent essays marketing his intellect to nerds. (A positive is that he seems very humble; he does not recurse very well, and so had to create a Y-Combinator for this purpose. For somebody that doesn't appear to believe in marketing this man sure knows how to signal to me.)
I also don't see dressing informally as a very positive signal anymore. Many nerds have lost their right to wear formal clothes and they've just not woken up to that reality yet. Companies want their executives to wear suits and ties but their engineers have a new uniform: "no uniform". You can tell you're wearing a uniform, because there is a reputational cost to rejecting it. My slightly rebellious slant is to just pick the opposite of what everybody else is doing and do that.
I've definitely noticed that with the clothes. As a programmer, you have the right and obligation to wear an informal but fairly regimented and slightly embarrassing uniform (e.g., cargo shorts + thinkgeek tshirt), which cements your social position. You basically cannot dress "nicely" without people judging you, from both above and below.
I'm a rather fashionable young woman thanks. It doesn't bother me in the slightest when I meet someone whose clothes don't fit the stereotype, perhaps you are in a more cloistered environment?
I wish it was not the case, but when it comes to this behavior, the social norms are not within our personal control.
I mostly like the informal dress, but have been told more than once (by executives) that it makes me appear like someone who cant be trusted with authority. When I dress up, many of my ilk feel uncomfortable around me.
Wear what you like, but I have learned time and again that whatever clothing choice you make, everyone is always judging it and making decisions based on that judgement.
>but have been told more than once (by executives) that it makes me appear like someone who cant be trusted with authority
I'd consider that a cloistered environment, when you are judged by others on physical appearance. It really sucks, but I also worked hard to make sure I have my own authority. Would you still trust Richard Stallman, wearing a soggy full-size panda-pyjama suit and carrying a small stuffed pink elephant while singing "bye bye blackbird" quietly to himself? Probably!
I was going to say "trust him with what?", because while Stallman can be respected on some bounds, I wouldn't trust him to do anything but develop software.
I take your point that where I work might be considered a cloistered environment, but the comment about people judging your appearance is a world wide phenomena, not something that lives in one workplace.
For example:
1. Recently HN had an article about a younger guy who added a fake beard to his freelancer profile, and noticed he received more gigs as a result.
The average callback rate was 30% across all of the CVs sent out. For attractive women, it was 54%, and for attractive men, 47%.Unattractive women had by far the worst results, with a 7% callback rate. Unattractive men had a 26% rate.
I could go on, but this is not a me thing, its a we (people) thing.
I totally get your point but you can choose to not have that validate you. I put effort into my appearance because I really enjoy it, but more than anything - anything at all - I care about how good my work is and I'd rather be a hermit in a cave celebrated for my brilliant works. The outliers that we love, generally aren't known for their attention to appearance first.
You can dress business casual as a programmer, and I don't think anyone judges you (I know plenty of "nerds" who dress business casual). So I'm assuming that when you say "nicely", you mean suit&tie. As I was reading your comment, one question came to my mind: why? If you work in front of a computer for 8-10 hours a day, and the only people you interact (briefly) are others on your team, what's the point of dressing up? I can see the reason for it in jobs where there's a lot of contact with others (who you need to impress), but that's not the case for programmers.
Depends on the setting, but in some settings I've felt overdressed and even gotten odd comments when dressing business casual. I interpret that to mean slacks and button shirt, plus sport coat when weather warrants (but not a suit, and probably no tie). Less of an issue in Europe than in the US afaict, although the opposite could be an issue in Europe (wearing shorts to the office is fairly unusual in many countries, even for programmers).
In my experience, cargo shorts are pretty rare, as are overtly geeky shirts. Not to mention the post-hipster dandy look, which is increasingly popular.
I decided to get a mohawk (and dye it purple) last year. I also decided to wear nothing but business suits with tie and french cuff shirts when out in public during this period. The company I work for slapped pictures of me all over their Facebook feed a week after I made the change. I went to a developer conference and got mugged by a dutch film crew. I caught people using me as a landmark when the main conference hall got crowded. I popped up on instagram more often than the keynote speaker for the event. On several ocassions I had total strangers approach my table while dining out with my wife to tender complements. I'm not sure what my point is here other than I don't feel any pressure to conform to a given uniform and my intermittent refusal to do so hasn't seemed to impact my career so far.
Conformity and non-conformity are just two sides of the same coin, they are both marketing statements.
Einstein was the opposite, he had 5 sets of the same suit so that he didn't have to waste time thinking about his wardrobe. He would rather spend his time thinking about important problems.
A dyed mohawk and a suit, to me, is a lot of work and thought that I personally would rather spend on the work.
There is nothing wrong with marketing oneself, it's part of being a a social animal. But when you market yourself you are making a statement to others that you want them to notice and to be noticed. It is spending time on marketing and not on ideas and the work.
I would agree with Graham's definition of nerd. The fact that many people who like to think of themselves as nerds today, who actually aren't, doesn't change the kind of person he was describing.
"dyed mohawk and a suit, to me, is a lot of work and thought that I personally would rather spend on the work."
The mohawk was a lot of work to keep up. The suit? Not so much. Typically putting one on only added 5 minutes to my morning routine, and most of that was getting cufflinks in and deciding which tie to wear. In any case I'm not sure I agree with the assertion that this was a marketing statement. I telecommute so if this was merely signalling behaviour on my part it was a total waste of time as I'm sure the message was lost on my cats.
> Einstein ... had 5 sets of the same suit so that he didn't have to waste time thinking about his wardrobe.
So this has been done before! A word of warning if you're thinking of trying this...
I went through a time where I'd buy 3 or 4 of the exact same T-shirt whenever I had to go shopping for clothes. Unfortunately, when I'm seen wearing the "same shirt" for a whole week, especially in summer, suits and nerds alike look at me like I never wash my clothes. I soon modified my behavior to always wear a different colored T-shirt from the previous day, and buy different colored ones whenever I need to buy more.
So whatever else is said here about non-conformity in clothing, you're taking a risk if you extend the concept to 5 sets of the same suit or T-shirt.
I think it was because, for lack of a better word, you were "weird". It's not just the clothes, it's the entire look. Had you worn the same clothing, but had a "normal" haircut, you likely would have been perceived to be more like the business/non-tech type.
The dyed mohawk gave you enough of a counter-culture look that, when paired with the suit, gave you an overall look completely unique from the informally-dressed nerds and the formally-dressed suits, and that's generally viewed positively by the nerd crowd.
And it's also about the people around you. You'd presumably already established your personality and technical competence at your company before that, so while the change in look was of course a change, they already had context in which to appreciate the change. In that context, even if you hadn't changed your hairstyle, while you may have gotten some surprised looks and questions when you suddenly show up in a suit, your colleagues would still assume "the best" before believing you'd turned into a "suit" they don't trust anymore.
Companies want their executives to wear suits and ties but their engineers have a new uniform: "no uniform".
Strongly disagree. I look at it the other way: if I weren't at work, what would I be wearing? Well... the same thing I just happen to be wearing at work. I own a couple suits (one of them actually well-tailored and fitted), a few blazers, a bunch of buttoned shirts. They're great when I'm going for that look, but they're never going to be as comfortable to me (both physically and psychologically) as a tshirt, jeans, and hoodie. When I get home from work, I don't change into something more comfortable like my dad always did when I was growing up. I'm already comfortable.
I think that's the definition of dressing informally to me: not changing my look based on the current situation.
Many nerds have lost their right to wear formal clothes and they've just not woken up to that reality yet.
I do agree with that, unfortunately. At the worst end of it, some people are rejected for positions because of "culture fit", and often the signal for that lack of fit is that they showed up to the interview dressed too formally.
On the other hand, a employee at my company (before my time, sadly) just showed up one day wearing a suit. When asked about it, he simply said, "I just decided I want to dress like this from now on". And that was that.
Totally off topic: I don't get (grok) twitter. The conversation escapes me. I'm more of a long form writer. When I start blogging again, I'll do my own thing vs sharecropping.
Long-form twitter is actually a thing! You just keep replying to yourself and removing your name to create a gigantic stream of consciousness - unsightly perhaps, but I personally enjoy quality tweeters that do this. Most of the tweeters I enjoy just write aphorisms though.
The bedrock of twitter is in finding and following non-noisy tweeters that are similar thinkers to yourself. I'm @sebinsua on there. I can vouch for accounts like @afoolswisdom, @macroresilience, @asquidislove, @pmarca, @EpicureanDeal, and @groditi. These are people that I recognise to be unusual and phenomenally smart, and that I admire from a distance.
I find that considering any part of one's appearance to be acquiescing or reacting to company policy is ultimately still acknowledging it, and PG touches on the reason why that alone should be distressing: "dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas".
Focus on building a wardrobe that can modulate and interplay. A nice (and here I mean non-stuffy, my personal preference is a rich blue slim-cut) suit can lose the trousers in favour of jeans for the weekend, or lose the jacket in favour of a sweater for the workplace of a programmer. You won't look especially trendy, or 'like a programmer', but nor will you look tasteless or in any way aberrated; you will look competent. Expecting anything else is probably quite vain.
I much prefer early pg to current-day pg writing. Hopefully handing over the reigns will bring back some clarity of thought.
This is a good article which highlights several things I agree with:
>The prospect of technological leverage will of course raise the specter of unemployment. I'm surprised people still worry about this. After centuries of supposedly job-killing innovations, the number of jobs is within ten percent of the number of people who want them. This can't be a coincidence. There must be some kind of balancing mechanism.
precisely. The whole 'technology gone done taken our jerbs' thing seems to be popping up again lately - anyone taking this line needs to justify why this time it's different.
>One upshot of which is that the companies of the future may be surprisingly small. I sometimes daydream about how big you could grow a company (in revenues) without ever having more than ten people. What would happen if you outsourced everything except product development? If you tried this experiment, I think you'd be surprised at how far you could get.
A company with big revenues and a small staff means a very productive company - someone delivering lots of value for very little work.
Whenever you have a productivity multiplier working away, jobs are being created. The jobs might not necessarily be for the company, but the productivity benefits show up somewhere.
It's easy to employ people - just pay lots of people to do low productivity or negative productivity jobs. But to make a better society with better jobs, you need productivity to go up. This requires people to lose their current (less productive) jobs, but the forces created when this happens always create more jobs somewhere.
Case in point....before Henry Ford automates his production line, cars are built by hand slowly. It is a low productivity industry. He automates, and builds many more cars, for much higher revenue per person, than before. The price of the car drops as a result. More people can now afford cars, which means lots more people can use this new tool to do their job more productively. Eventually all this increase in productivity increases employment. There are specific cases of unemployment (coachbuilders, manure collectors) but there is a rise in general employment.
Taking your example a step further (and subsequently bringing it into a more modern context), what happens to those jobs when Google (or someone) builds a mass production driver-less car? Sure, a few thousand engineers will be employed, but that's barely going to put a dent in the millions of taxi/truck/delivery drivers that now find themselves out of work.
This is a matter of opinion, as none of us can predict the future, but I believe that one of the purposes and goals of technology is to replace and reduce the drudgery of human labor. If I was a VC, I would be investing in almost any labor-replacing tech startup that came across my desk because the market for the tech has already been validated (companies paying for the labor) and you are bringing a more efficient solution to that market. You believe that this process somehow results in more jobs. I believe, baring massive changes in the education and social infrastructures, that this process inevitably leads to fewer jobs.
>what happens to those jobs when Google (or someone) builds a mass production driver-less car?
Lots of people will no longer be employed in low-productivity jobs of driving vehicles. That is exactly what will happen.
>as none of us can predict the future
Correct. And Henry ford didn't foresee Pizza delivery.
>You believe that this process somehow results in more jobs
The process creates higher productivity. Higher productivity leads to higher living standards and more jobs in aggregate, though not for the affected workers.
> I believe, baring massive changes in the education and social infrastructures, that this process inevitably leads to fewer jobs.
For this to be true, you must explain why this time it is different.
It's not the fact that a few thousand engineers replace millions of drivers. It's the fact that the increased productivity drives down the cost of things. The increased productivity also releases human capital and actual capital to pursue new things and create new jobs. This leads to new jobs in entirely new industries. It's comment to lament and say 'what are these new industries going to be?'. But as already stated - nobody can see the future. We don't know, but we must accept that it will happen, simply by looking at all of human history. The fashionable argument currently is that you need to reform education to make this possible, but other large-scale changes in technology have happened when people usually didn't finish high school. When a person needs to learn new skills, they generally find a way of doing so.
>The increased productivity also releases human capital and actual capital to pursue new things and create new jobs. This leads to new jobs in entirely new industries.
Correct, but it doesn't necessarily result in an equal number of or more jobs than before.
>but we must accept that it will happen, simply by looking at all of human history.
This is where I think we disagree the most. I don't think history sets a good precedent for predicting the future, especially in this current environment. At no point in history have we had robots and AI. We still don't have that now, and there are no guarantees that we will fully achieve AI, but in many areas we are making humans obsolete and I expect this trend to continue. Using your eariler analogy, what happened to the horses after Ford introduced mass produced cars? They were turned to glue. In many ways, this is the issue we are currently facing.
I do agree that highly skilled and entrepreneurial folks will create new industries which could dramatically alter the economic landscape, but I am still not convinced that this is going to result in full employment. These new industries will still be taking advantage of the highly automated and efficient technologies that other industries use and lower-skilled and less educated people are going to find it increasingly difficult to find work.
Why is there a contradiction? Sounds more like a formula for a lot of small to medium sized businesses being started. If there were no Big-COs that provide thousands of jobs, people wouldn't roll over and decide not to work. On the contrary, it's likely more people would form their own business out of necessity.
Now, would this be better for the US economy in general? Maybe. Maybe not. When I was in college I spent a stint as a Political Science major (focusing in IR). When learning about Asia I remember a lot of discussion about Taiwan's economy being successful in part because of their strong small to medium sized businesses.
In addition to what others have said you can subcontract significant amounts of work (e.g. using SAAS systems rather than in house) supporting other companies. Of course managing significant contract will become much of the work for the ten employed people.
Yahoo was a special case. It was not just our price to earnings ratio that was bogus. Half our earnings were too...What made our earnings bogus was that Yahoo was, in effect, the center of a Ponzi scheme. Investors looked at Yahoo's earnings and said to themselves, here is proof that Internet companies can make money. So they invested in new startups that promised to be the next Yahoo.
This section seems eerily prescient in foreseeing the current bubble - replace Yahoo with FB or Google, and it could have been written in 2013. Values are supported by confidence in larger companies which subsist on the advertising bought by smaller companies, which are funded in the hope of acquisition by larger companies. When that confidence evaporates, things will collapse, even the companies which provide true value, if they sell advertising and depend on the entire ecosystem continuing to grow.
This bubble gets some things right too - there are of course many many profitable and valuable communications and social networking companies (as there were in the first boom, probably even more now), and Twitter, FB and Google are not going to disappear any time soon, but if your income is based on advertising or VC funding, this sort of bubble can be really damaging, and when a crash comes, many worthy projects will be thrown out with the unworthy.
Perhaps bubbles repeat themselves too - the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
The largest sources of advertising are the FIRE industries: finance, insurance, and real estate. After that: retail, travel, jobs & ed, home & garden, consumer electronics, vehicles, business, and gifts.
The problem I see here is that both FIRE and the consumer Web are largely catabolic industries -- they're liberating some stuck capital, but I don't see them as actually creating a whole lot in the way of new productive capacity. Which means you've got two bubbles feeding on one another.
The good news is that it's not the incestuous Internet bubble of the late 1990s. The bad news is that it's a much larger piece of the economy. Perhaps the only parts which have been growing appreciably.
(From #4, Youth) A 26 year old may not be very good at managing people or dealing with the SEC. Those require experience. But those are also commodities, which can be handed off to some lieutenant. The most important quality in a CEO is his vision for the company's future. What will they build next? And in that department, there are 26 year olds who can compete with anyone.
Some 26-year-olds are immensely talented, sure. Anyone who would argue against that point is an idiot. Some people learn how to lead very early on. But the ability to lead a team or motivate people and the ability to keep one's company legal are not commodities. Not even close. If your CEO is an idiot or a naif then he can't evaluate his lieutenants, he will pick idiots to manage the day-to-day, they will do shoddy work (or screw him over behind his back) and he won't know, and disaster will ensue.
This has nothing to do with age, really, because there are many 26-year-olds who can do those stereotypically "older" jobs.
On age more directly, the age discrimination culture is disgusting and perverse in its half-assed homoeroticism (I have no problem with actual gay people; my issue is with the chickenhawks who rule VC-istan, who identify as heterosexual and are often married men, yet have creepy "I'll support your career in order to look at you" relationships with 24-year-old, hipsterish manboys with minimal talent. Hmmm. Nothing weird about that. Of the VCs who backed Duplan and Spiegel, what do their wives think?) The '90s bubble may have corrected for a previous (and surely pernicious) anti-young bias, but this 2014-era, VC-istan age discrimination culture is just as disgusting and stupid. Let's stop being crass fuckheads and just make age a total nonfactor either way, ok?
On "vision", I would likewise say that the age correlation is probably 0.0 over the relevant range (20 to 65). However, many businesses don't require a vision-- they require taking a known problem and executing well, and for those, I'd argue that age is an advantage (but a very slight one) in those.
(From #6, Nerds) A nerd, in other words, is someone who concentrates on substance.
Really? Because the current tech bubble is driven by fart (no typo) boys like Lucas Duplan and Evan Spiegel, who aren't nerds. This round is actually disgustingly conformist. It has the mechanisms of startups, but no soul. Sure, you don't have to dress up if you work for one of these post-2008 VC darlings, but you face closed allocation and corporate politics and cultish conformity and boring problems, so what's the fucking point?
True nerds (by that definition) have no home in the VC-funded world these days. It is now owned by the fratty shitscum.
(From #7, Options) Options are a good idea because (a) they're fair, and (b) they work.
I disagree. In a typical VC-funded tech company, an engineer makes $100k while the VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) working 11-to-3 and bikeshedding makes $150k. That's 1.5x more. In equity, the engineer is getting 0.05% while the VP gets 1%. That's 20 times more. The inequities in equity are absurd and would never be tolerated in salary numbers. Gender and race inequities are also much more extreme in the options/equity front.
9. California
You mean that dysfunctional broke state with extreme economic inequality?
Real estate is still more expensive than just about anywhere else in the country.
That's a bad thing, and if you don't realize that, you're a dumbass with little insight into how the economy works (101 lesson: elasticity). Expensive real estate is what you get when regulatory corruption (NIMBYism) meets the extreme inelasticity of housing costs: a 2% gap between how much housing there should be and what there is can cause prices to go up 50% or even double. The price/income ratio of housing is constant absent regulatory dysfunction. Bay Area incomes are higher than the national average, but not by enough to match the housing prices.
What makes the Bay Area superior is the attitude of the people. I notice that when I come home to Boston. The first thing I see when I walk out of the airline terminal is the fat, grumpy guy in charge of the taxi line.
Wait, so you can't launch a startup if there are too many fat people? Weird. I know plenty of fat people I'd found with if they were so inclined, but what do I know?
That 26 year olds with good ideas will increasingly have an edge over 50 year olds with powerful connections.
Now, the 26-year-old and 50-year-old with great ideas both get screwed over because the VC and support and resources all go to the 26-year-old with powerful (inherited) connections. (Or the 26-year-old with the creepy chickenhawk relationship with the powerful 50-year-old.) Ageism begets classism, because any 22-year-old who can get VC (in 2014, with the social distance between VCs and peons at record high) had parental lift. What's happening now is not an improvement.
I read about half way through before realizing that I was reading your writing...you've switched up your spiel a bit recently I see. Usually it takes no more than 1 to 2 sentences to figure out it's you.
This isn't meant to be negative btw. I just think it's funny how I can spot your writing and ideas from a mile away.
It doesn't bother me when people think I'm wrong or disagree, but just because I use "VC-istan" doesn't mean my ideas are wrong.
VC-istan is the perfect descriptor for that ecosystem. "VC-funded world" is too many syllables, "VC-land" sounds like a theme park, and Silicon Valley is a geographical location more than an economic sector. Nothing works as well as "VC-istan".
No, this time he added in some vaguely homoerotic insinuations. His rant is evolving; maybe in another year or two it will reach full fledged conspiracy theory status.
It's clear you use the suffix '-stan' in a pejorative sense. As though simply adding a -stan is sufficient to describe the terrible, backward, self-serving state of things. It's not even comedic, as you clearly think this term is the right one. This has always bothered me as this approach is insulting given the many countries around the world who use the suffix [1]. They're conveniently far away from the US so I doubt you've ever considered this.
I'd ask you to stop using this phrase but it seems you're attached to it (for no good reason).
No, -istan is not always pejorative. See, Nassim Taleb's concept of Extremistan. I've used "Nerdistan" positively.
People find "VC-istan" pejorative because they're all aware of (as you put it well) "the terrible, backward, self-serving state of things."
I've heard people read into the term, as a comment on VC-istan as somewhat like a feudal, ex-Soviet state. That works, but it wasn't what I intended. I was just using "stan", originally, to describe something in few syllables.
> [...] because the VC and support and resources all go to the 26-year-old with powerful (inherited) connections.
Really? Do you really think this is so? Is y combinator, in that case, rigged? Because as you know pretty much all graduates of YC are practically promised some sweet funding money from investors all around -- and it seems (so far to me) that getting into YC is less about connections and more about having a thing that can actually make money.
I think the reason more 26 year olds are succeeding in this game is that they've grown up in a world filled with computers, and their intuition (in a broad spectrum of tech-related things) is simply better and greater than the 50 year olds'. They know better than 50 year olds' what model of mobile payments is more likely to be popular with their peer-aged 26 year olds, what kind of ad strategy is more likely to be effective for the key markets (which are generally younger, speaking in terms of the big money), and so on. They're just better positioned in the tech world to succeed because of these natural coincidences. That's really all there is to it. Where do you disgaree?
Maybe I'm being too simplistic. I think the VCs want to mentor young founders because the younger they are, the more chances they get to found/fail before life starts calling to them in mid-thirties. A founder I had talked with said that young founders are judged on their potential while older founders get judged on business fundamentals of their idea.
In the absence of work on groundbreaking tech, maybe you do want young founders to build "iFart 2014"
>> Real estate is still more expensive than just about anywhere else in the country.
> That's a bad thing, and if you don't realize that, you're a dumbass with little insight into how the economy works (101 lesson: elasticity). Expensive real estate is what you get when regulatory corruption (NIMBYism) meets the extreme inelasticity of housing costs: a 2% gap between how much housing there should be and what there is can cause prices to go up 50% or even double. The price/income ratio of housing is constant absent regulatory dysfunction. Bay Area incomes are higher than the national average, but not by enough to match the housing prices.
Yes high housing costs are a bad thing but I don't think pg was saying they are/were a good thing. What he was saying was that the impression that Silicon Valley was dead was wrong. The fact that house prices remained high was an indicator that there was demand and that Silicon Valley was not dead. I think that the last decade suggests he was right on this issue.
As an outsider to the VC/SV world I generally enjoy your different perspective on it but this post felt like it was crossing the line from sceptic to slightly crazed conspiracy theorist with some good points hidden in the middle. It does name names but they are unfamiliar to me. I do remember in other posts you have mentioned not wanting to name names about the bad experiences you had in VC startups as good people still worked in the bad companies, has enough time passed that you can tell your story as I think you need to get it off your chest (apologies if you have and I missed it).
Not even close. If your CEO is an idiot or a naif then he can't evaluate his lieutenants, he will pick idiots to manage the day-to-day, they will do shoddy work (or screw him over behind his back) and he won't know, and disaster will ensue.
I also don't see dressing informally as a very positive signal anymore. Many nerds have lost their right to wear formal clothes and they've just not woken up to that reality yet. Companies want their executives to wear suits and ties but their engineers have a new uniform: "no uniform". You can tell you're wearing a uniform, because there is a reputational cost to rejecting it. My slightly rebellious slant is to just pick the opposite of what everybody else is doing and do that.