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Comment by chawco | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to go ahead and strongly disagree on this first point -- I've seen no correlation whatsoever between education background and propensity for strong system design. In fact, my background is mathematics with very little formal CS-related education and I'm firmly in the cathedral camp.

I really think it is a matter of exposure -- at one time all anyone ever saw were cathedrals, and so that was all anyone ever built. I feel now we've swung too far the other way, where there are many in the craft who've never seen a cathedral and have only known the bazaars. The reality is we need both, and the craft of building cathedrals is becoming endangered.

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my background is mathematics

You are a terrible example because you come from a formal background of a hard science. Even worse, you come from one where proofs (the cathedral in the mathematics sense) are required or you aren't taken seriously.

The parent was talking about joe schmo off the street or the high school wunderkind who is building "twitter for teens" or "pinterest for social good". They are just slapping it together from the get go without thinking about any aspect of the design. Eventually they'll have to hire the formally schooled to come in and clean it all up, if they actually get anywhere with it.

Which makes me wonder, if more formally educated individuals were in the start up game would the failure rate be so high as it is now?

"proofs (the cathedral in the mathematics sense)"

Uh, we are talking about the same Cathedral and Bazaar thing here, right? Cathedral in the sense that only the anointed master architects get to make decisions; everyone else does what they're told and keeps their mouths shut; bazaar in the sense that everybody brings whatever they've got and hopefully the good stuff hangs around?

Huh? No, Cathedral in the sense that:

Everyone brings whatever they've got, and the anointed master architects sift through it, determine the best course of action, redirect known-bad avenues of exploration and possibly anoint new master architects from the best of the candidates.

The startup game has tons of formally educated people, and their failure rate is just as spectacularly high, if not higher. In my experience, the formally educated tend to build "science projects" at a higher rate than businesses, when compared to those building "twitter for teens"

their failure rate is just as spectacularly high, if not higher

I asked a question, you are making a statement. If you have numbers that prove that the formally educated are failing more then I think we'd all love to see them. Otherwise, this is just conjecture.

As for 'science projects' failing it could be a number of things. I would assume that hard science startups fail a lot of the time because of cost. "Twitter for teens" is much cheaper to start than one doing alternative energy. Also, hard science is less sexy than a lot of the social stuff that currently dominates the landscape. Thusly, it can be much more difficult to find the money you need due to visibility. The social startups will probably pay out sooner than long-tail hard science companies.

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