Paul Graham: News from the Front
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
He is referring to Jamie Zawinski. http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Google also has a list of schools that are considered top-tier, and if you're not from one of those, you're unlikely to be hired. I don't believe Google has always been this way--and I think the pressure to raise the hiring bar in so many artificial ways comes not from any elitism, but from the fact that Google is hiring way too fast, and the folks at the top know it. By ruling out everyone below a quite high academic threshold, they've cut down the number of applicants under consideration.
I suspect, but don't know for sure, that if you have a long track record of producing good results, you can still get hired by Google. I received a recruitment letter from them, but never followed up by going through the hiring process to find out if someone with a couple of two year community college degrees (and no computer science classes at all aside from AP high school classes--I tested out of all of the computer-related classes for my degrees) could get hired there, based on the strength of accomplishments, alone. The letter came two days after I accepted funding from YC, and a few months after we started making money with Virtualmin, so it wasn't really of interest at all. But now that I think about it, it would have been an interesting experiment.
If not, blender blades rarely reach the very bottom of the pitcher. Lie flat underneath them.
The 5 second limitation makes it a little less useful for that purpose, though...and, in general, I've never liked this particular puzzle question.
Besides, the center part of my blender does spin...it's what holds the blade.
2) I've taken classes at CMU, Berkeley, and Stanford, and while the differences didn't particularly correlate with the rankings (since the relative rankings of those three places in CS get permuted regularly anyway), there were serious differences in attitude and rigor. CMU and Berkeley were both very rigorous; the difference was that CMU was rigorous in a somewhat more pointless, soul-sucking manner, on average, and didn't explain things as well. Stanford was somewhat less rigorous, which I imagine was because of the Ivy-league difficult-to-get-in but easy-to-pass phenomenon. This seems to correlate somewhat with the number of undergrads at each place involved in research; at both CMU and Berkeley, I know many undergrads involved in research, while the one professor I talk to at Stanford hungrily scrounges for the rare undergrad who's good at research.
So there are differences in curriculum and selection, I think; they're just not particularly amazing predictors of success. They certainly should influence the decision of which colleges to apply to, though.
For all the talk of, "I have a lot of data" and "[w]e're just finally able to measure it," there are no supporting numbers, just general impressions.
C'mon, give this topic the rigorous Bayesian treatment. How does the population of YC market-successes compare with YC-chosen and YC-applicants, along the 'prestigious college' dimension? How do these compare with the college-graduate population as a whole, and the college-graduate population succeeding in other competitive fields?
Those numbers would be great, and I'm rooting for the "college-doesn't-matter" result.
Even with hard data, two major sample-selection issues would make me hesitate to generalize the YC experience. First, the YC process attracts especially confident and ambitious people -- not representative of all graduates of the same colleges. Second, prestigious college graduates may have found high-fulfillment work or more traditional startup financing before even considering the YC route. So YC may be rigged to attract an A-team of general collegians (smart go-getters still with something to prove) but a B-team of prestigious collegians (those not already swept up by other plentiful opportunities).
Indeed, "Notes from the Front" can be read as a YC recruiting letter to ambitious prospects from less-prestigious academic backgrounds.
That is a completely different statement than showing that it doesn't matter what school you went to. Your article appears to me like it is conflating the two.
(1) Conditional on having applied to YC, YC finds that having attended a prestigious college makes one no more likely to be selected for interviews.
(2) Conditional on having been selected for YC interviews, YC finds that having attended a prestigious college makes one no more likely to receive YC support.
(3) Conditional on receiving YC support, YC finds that having attended a prestigious college makes one no more likely to succeed in the market (here defined as visibly thriving within about a year).
Given the initial essay's strong emphasis on market success as the ultimate verifier (paragraphs 5-8), I thought the main idea was (3) -- but if interview invites/subjective-evaluations are a factor, some amount of (1) and (2) are mixed in, too.
There are two arguments happening here. The first is that entrepreneurship and business success are not so well correlated with where you go to undergrad. The second is that where you go to college doesn't make much of a difference in life in general. I won't really quarrel with the first, since it's been demonstrated pretty often, and YC's results support it as well. The second, on the other hand...
The main problem with trying to assert that college doesn't make a difference in life is that there's really no easy measurement you can do over "net change" in life. That's due both to the long span of time a life consumes as well as the complex and/or fuzzy cause-effect relationships that are at play throughout. At best, I think, you would need to argue over objective differences that have some immediate effect, and then hope that those actually do make a difference. As an example, here are some of the things that I think made Paul Graham successful that are pretty strongly related to his going to graduate school at Harvard:
- he met RTM and Trevor there
- he got to spend his time in Boston, where he's acknowledged startups can thrive
- being able to drop the H-bomb almost certainly helped give credibility to his company
- he learned Lisp (not really the most popular language at the time, except at certain places)
Would Viaweb have happened had he gone elsewhere, or skipped grad school altogether? Well, maybe. But I doubt it. Harvard's name is what convened the talent (peers, advisors, mentors, investors) that shaped much of that company, and it's there that Harvard's value lies. I think this essay horribly undervalues the magic that happens when everyone in the world thinks your university is amazing.
This essay is about college, not grad school. I tried to make that clear by always using the word college rather than university. Maybe it was not clear enough.
> undervalues the magic that happens when everyone in the world thinks your university is amazing
Sure, but not by accident. The whole thesis of this essay that this "magic" is bullshit, and that as success depends more on measurable results, it will play much less of a role.
Certainly not clear enough for this non-US reader. But of course the word "college" has a different meaning on this side of the border (and an entirely different meaning in Oxford).
UK: You write a dissertation for a masters degree and a thesis for a PhD.
US: The opposite.
I wonder if the terminology will converge...
"In academia, a thesis or dissertation is a document that presents the author's research and findings and is submitted in support of candidature for a degree or professional qualification."
Edit: yikes. Somebody went on a downmodding spree on this thread.
You do know that's a sexual euphemism, right? ;)
For low income minority students there was an option to set the app aside for a second reading in order to learn more about the student's situation and if there were an ameliorating factors, but for the rest of the students the admissions officers were expected to make a decision on the first pass after the three minutes.
Athletes also largely got pre-approved by the academic department they were applying for, so they pretty much knew whether they'd be accepted before they ever applied. The flip side is that they only got an edge in admissions if they applied early decision, because if they were going to bring down the average GPA then they had to bring up the average matriculation in order to not affect the overall US News rank.
I think it's one of those things like eVoting. That is, people with no CS experience think eVoting is totally secure whereas CS experts know it isn't. Similarly, I highly suspect that anyone who thinks getting admitted to an Ivy shows a certain baseline level of respectability has never worked in admissions. I'd guarantee it.
As for the importance of college GPA, if you want to see something funny then apply for a wall street job. If they ask you what your GPA was in college, ask them how GPA correlates with alpha. :-)
The craziest thing was that Google did a massive HR survey and determined that there was basically zero correlation between college GPA and value created for the company. Because of this they decided that they would give jobs to five or six people with sub 3.0 GPAs each year. Well if there is little or no correlation, why should it matter what GPA is at all? I suspect the psychology behind the Google hiring process has a lot in common with the psychology of female circumcision. That is, it was done to me so it must be a good thing. And if it's a good thing, then by definition it must be good to do unto others.
edit: fixed a few grammatical errors
As ridiculous as this is at a fundamental level, you know damn well that the athletic recruiters take long, careful looks at all the potential players, unlike the academic recruiters.
basically zero correlation between college GPA and value created for the company
I'm a GPA skeptic myself, having blown off every class (including the important ones), but this is easily explained: If a company puts weight upon GPA, then any low-GPA students they happen to hire likely had some manifest achievements that got them in. Such achievements are more important than GPA one way or the other.
That being said, the NCAA bureaucracy is still lame.
At the "elite" colleges, there is a greater percentage of smart students, which lends itself to more productive discussions and more difficult tests that force you to challenge yourself. Also, it is like the difference between the regular classes in high school and advanced classes -- in the advanced classes you cover the same material, but with greater breadth and a deeper understanding.
And the number 1 biggest advantage of going to an elite college is that you have a much better chance of meeting the world's future movers and shakers -- the people that will be the educational and business leaders of the next generation. That alone is a good reason to go to an elite college.
So I have to disagree, and say that there are indeed advantages to going to an elite college, just not the advantages that most people think.
My interpretation of this essay is that one's success won't be predicated on which school you go to, and that is the point that I am disagreeing with. Did I misinterpret the point of the essay?
I.e. the benefit of going to an elite college is that you get almost for free something you have to work at otherwise: knowing lots of smart people.
Earlier, in "Colleges are a bit like exclusive clubs" I think pg intended "a bit" to communicate that what he's saying about exclusive clubs is less true for colleges. Humans read differently from computers, and those two tiny words are easily lost. "So it is with colleges" dominates.
In general, I find myself a poor judge of what will or won't be clear to other people in a given essay; I read differently from most. I discover what did and didn't work in your essays from reading comments. I have a hard time extracting general communication principles from each essay's success or failure, because audiences differ. Still, I hope to learn something; writing is important.
In this context, we can say there are three things that can determine someone's success:
1) confidence others have in you
2) self-confidence
3) actual ability
Going to a "good" college affects 1 and 2 the most, and arguably 3 the least. In a startup 3 and 2 are arguably the most important, and 1 the least - so I guess that agrees with pg's argument. In the corporate world, 1 and 2 matter the most, and 3 the least - aligned with what a brand-name college provides.
So the argument seems a bit circular: based on the yc sample set, college doesn't matter because college doesn't matter to the yc sample set. Even if that SHOULD extend to the world at large, it doesn't.
The largest advantage of a great university like Oxford is in increasing the range and depth of ideas presented to students. It's impossible to completely separate the teaching role of a university from its research role: Teaching (and inconvenient questions asked by irritating students, like yours truly, in class) informs research, and research informs teaching. And quite apart from the "indigenous" research, if you're at a minor university without a strong reputation for research, you don't have Knuth dropping by for a few months, or Rivest visiting to give a lecture (albeit about the rather odd notion of obtaining forward security by using a stream of broadcasted random numbers which is too fast to be stored).
There are undeniable advantages to being at a great university in being exposed to new ideas. Why haven't PG et al. noticed this? Probably because their measurement -- can someone create a successful startup? -- is just as biased as everyone else's measurements. After all, when was the last time that a YC-funded startup really did anything new?
Considering how many there are of them, probably within the last couple days. But instead of me giving you an example to which you will predictably reply "that's not really new," how about you giving us an example of a non-YC startup you think is doing something really new, so we can see what level of really-newness it would take to satisfy you?
Here are a few "cool" ventures I have in mind:
On the other hand, they'd be stupid not to go where the money is (that is, were all the MySpace generation kids are).
Then again, I guess that's true for all kinds of reality TV we've seen so far, including justin.tv.
At the moment though, they just aren't set up to make short snippets of content from different broadcasters easily findable.
The distribution of tech is a problem as well. Another random idea; I wonder if they could set up a post based rental of equipment for one off events.
The first example which comes to mind is powerset.
Anyway, they're probably at +3 standard deviations for "newness" compared to all tech startups. Kind of a high bar to match.
But natural language search that works would be HUGE.
Let me remind you that Google was a small startup very recently, and that was during the "dot com bust".
Of course, Canadian universities seem to vary less in quality compared to institutions in the US.
For universities with medical programmes, I'd say that UToronto is at the top, closely followed by UBC and McGill. If you're not interested in medicine or law, though, I'd say that Waterloo and SFU are pretty much tied, with UVic coming second.
>Of course, Canadian universities seem to vary less in quality compared to institutions in the US.
I'm sure you could find people who think that any of the universities I've mentioned are Canada's best university; to a certain extent it will depend upon their field. That said, few would dispute that all the above are better than UCalgary, UManitoba, York, or Carleton.
"The unfortunate thing is not just that people are judged by such a superficial test, but that so many judge themselves by it. A lot of people, probably the majority of people in the America, have some amount of insecurity about where, or whether, they went to college. The tragedy of the situation is that by far the greatest liability of not having gone to the college you'd have liked is your own feeling that you're thereby lacking something. Colleges are a bit like exclusive clubs in this respect. There is only one real advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you wouldn't be missing much if you weren't. When you're excluded, you can only imagine the advantages of being an insider. But invariably they're larger in your imagination than in real life."
Same basic idea.
More people read it, leading to an extra opportunity to gain Karma. Of course, if I don't stay "on topic" (let's say "go to class") people will notice and downmod me (let's say "flunk me"). Staying "on topic" leads to a dull uniformity.
What do you think?
The most obvious way, and the way the essay seems to imply, is simply to look for correlations between success / failure and which school the founders attended.
If this is how it was done, then the conclusion is flawed. All it shows is that the school doesn't matter, conditional on being accepted by YC (rather than rejected). This is a completely different conclusion than the one the essay reaches, namely that the school doesn't matter, period.
Seems to me there's an extra factor contributing to the longevity of the "which school" criterion. There are other roles in the business (especially larger businesses) such as biz dev, M&A, etc. where attending an elite school might enhance success considerably - not for the academic content learned, but for the network of friends and colleagues you gain at that school. It's the English Grammar School model of corporate success.
s Paul points out, hiring decisions are often made by HR types: but HR is a very extroverted, business process focussed profession. As personalities, and in job description, the HR folks have more in common with the people and roles that do benefit from elite school connections than with technical people for whom the elite school is irrelevant. Like all of us, they apply lessons from familiar situations to more unfamiliar situations. And so the Stanford Screen lives on.
I wish this would be repeated more often. I've implemented many interesting algorithms based on papers written by people at, like, Louisiana State University. Noname places.
It looks to me like the education market is starting to catch up with the job market. Prestige in either area probably means that you're paying too much or being paid too little.
I never got around to finishing my college degree, I left about 2 years into it and got a job because I ran out of things to learn in college. I've worked for a series of both small and large companies and I've found that most companies also don't care where one went to college (Google is a big exception to this). Most companies simply don't value people that are fresh out of college because colleges don't teach people the right skills.
It's true however that in good schools there are more smart people and you are more likely to meet interesting people, but that doesn't mean you need to go to a top school, just live close to one.
Putting exact numbers on it is difficult due to the self-segregation at MIT and subjectivity obviously at play. However, I would say perhaps 30% fall into the seriously lacking category, another 30% in a substantially lacking category and another 25% in a good but not great category (perhaps lacking only one major thing). That leaves only 15% or so of people I came across I would say were "smart" in the sense described above. When you move to people with the essential qualities necessary to work successfully at a really early stage startup, I would say it drops to 7% or so. I'm not saying found one, just work at one as one of the first employees. When you move to people with all the founding qualities, the % probably drops to 1-2%. I know this first hand after trying to start companies with people in the "smart" category.
The above has really hit home other times as well. Here are two more occasions. First, when graduating, 62 people in my class out of about 1,080 (~6%) were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. I was shocked at a) how many of these people were my friends at MIT; b) how many of these people I had come across (given that I didn't meet all 1,080; and c) that this list included pretty much all of the people I had previously labeled "smart" myself in my class that I had come across.
Second, my wife taught statistics at MIT for several years. One time a kid came up to her complaining about an exam grade and told her it was not possible to have gotten an A on this exam. He said all his friends studied real hard and yet they all ended up with Cs and Ds. To which she replied, actually roughly 30% of the class got As. The point is, they were completely self-segregated by "smartness" and didn't even really know it.
All that being said, an MIT degree really does go a long way in terms of impressing the average person/company. I have done independent consulting and applied for jobs where they basically stopped researching me when they saw MIT. That is the rule, not the exception. And that was in Boston. Now that I live in PA, it seems even more shocking to people to come across someone from MIT. Given the above, and in agreement with PG, this behavior is unwarranted. I of course am thankful, but it also annoys me that so many people are free-riding on the name.
Not obsess about how a selective kindergarten will help them get into the right college, but about whether the environment will suppress creativity, being a self-starter, and intellectual curiosity, as most schools do. Unfortunately, schools that nurture those qualities usually cost money.
Whenever I meet someone who was home-schooled (or occasionally alternatively schooled) I can often guess that they were after a few minutes of conversation. There's a certain kind of confidence and maturity in them that doesn't survive public schools and never comes back afterward. I envy it.
The more you expect for yourself, the more others expect from you the more you are driven to succeed or make something of your life.
Elite colleges are like the newsweek article on octopart, it makes you want to beat the expectations on you, only several order or magnitudes less.
I think getting an education is secondary in college. Finding people who live with passion used to be a problem when we didn't have the internet. And working/studying in elite institutions gave you a higher chance of meeting passionate people.
Success at the highest levels of scientific research takes an odd mix of creativity, intuition, and intellegence that has little to do with academic success in high school or undergrad.
"It doesn't matter much where a given individual went to college."
From Y-Combinator's perspective, yes, I'm sure that's true. The people they're looking at are self-selected, and pretty much guaranteed to be smart, motivated and well-educated, which means that all Y-Combinator needs to do is worry about how they think - not where they were taught. But that's after the fact. To someone deciding what college to go to, or where to send their children, I think the choice is still very important.
"someone with a real thirst for knowledge will be able to find a few smart people to learn from at a school that isn't prestigious at all." True, of course. But where does that thirst for knowledge come from? With the right support, or the right teachers, perhaps that party animal would have changed his ways. As far as I'm concerned, _that_ is really the purpose of good schools.
In Y-Combinator terms, it's not that they make a founder more likely to succeed: it's that they make him more likely to try being a founder in the first place.
The whole time I was going to school I was super impatient to get done so I could actually get working on something real. I was really just after the piece of paper they give you at the end (though I never attended my graduation to get that paper, and the original was sent to the wrong house).
Once I graduated I started my own project so that I would have some work to show when applying for jobs. I found that that experience led to as much or more knowledge gained as my best year in school. And that is not a knock against the school I went to (I thought the staff there was awesome).
I am always reminded of a quote from some movie (cant think of the name of it now)... "You spent x thousands of dollars on an education you could have got for 2 dollars in library late fees"
Good Will Hunting.
There are alot of really talented self-taught coders out there, but for the rest of us, the breadth of understanding from slogging through those boring lectures on BNF, multi variable calculus, and linear algebra gave us an incredible analytical base thats easy to assume we always had.
But unlike the Watts talk, the essay does converge to a very rigid notion of "success".
It bears repeating: out of the top 10 richest "U.S. Americans", 4 inherited it; of the six who didn't, one has a degree (Warren Buffett), and 5 are drop-outs: Bill Gates, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Ellison, Paul Allen, and Michael Dell. Woz dropped out to start Apple (he went back to school only after he was done working there) and Jobs dropped out of Reed College here in Portland. (We're all very proud of him.)
http://www.eslnotes.com/movies/word/Bowling-for-Columbine.do...
thank you for writing this.
Additionally, it may be the case that overall you have noticed that attending an elite school has no correlation with success in your program, but that doesn't mean an identifiable subset of elite school candidates do not as well. For example, suppose GPA doesn't correlate by itself, or even a high GPA at an elite school. Yet maybe a super-higher GPA at an elite school does, or Phi Beta Kappa or whatever.
college is not for everyone (we need good plumbers and auto mechanics, fer chrissakes). i didn't apply myself as well as i could have at college, but about 40% of the value I got was from reading interesting books I found in the library, which I could have got for $100 a year while working in the real world and gaining money and experience -- which is what I'm doing now.
that said, some things are very hard to learn outside of a classroom and the mathematical maturity I gained from taking math classes will serve me for a life time.
I still chuckle when I think of the drones in my fraternity that missed the best 4 years of their lives because their heads were stuck in their books. Sure, they got 4.0 averages, but who cares now?
Similarly, high IQ implies smart, but low IQ does not imply unsmart.