Why I Left the Thiel Fellowship for Quora | Hacker News Reader

Why I Left the Thiel Fellowship for Quora

lucyguo.quora.com

51 pointsgailees53 comments

Hmm, the essay does sound like it was written by a 20 year old indeed. Unfortunate then that she is maximizing learning by going to Quora. What exactly is she going to learn at Quora? The industry has very little to offer in terms of learning unless you are in the top echelons of Google's, Microsoft's, and Facebook's research divisions. Most software and product engineering is mundane drudgery and even if there is room to learn and grow you still have to deal with workplace politics, credit stealing, jealousy, etc. All those things are detrimental to learning.

Within the first 3 months she is going to learn everything there is to learn about Quora. By her own admission she will then move on to the next learning experience until one day she will realize academia is the only place that true learning happens.

"True learning"

Where else are you going to be free from business and product pressures and get sustained periods of solitude or collaboration? In the industry where every decision lasts until the quarter ends and everyone is beholden to making metrics go up and to the right?

Tell me what exactly are you going to learn by being under business pressures and goal posts.

You have a couple of assumptions baked into your world view that may not be valid. The most obvious being that people need "sustained periods of solitude and collaboration" to truly learn. I don't know if that assumption is warranted, it seems there are a number of people who learn quite a bit without those things. I could be persuaded to agree that you might maximize the rate at which you learn with those conditions however.

Learning is a lot like exercise in that regard (not surprisingly for similar physiological reasons). Just as walking to and from your cubical to the bus is "exercise", and you do derive a cardie-vascular benefit from it, deconstructing a broken application deployment process and recreating it without the obvious defects is "learning."

Those are not assumptions. Historical precedent is on my side and there is no shortage of examples: Feynman, Einstein, Grothendieck, Newton, Pierce, Hamming, Margaret Hamilton, Leslie Lamport, Barbara Liskov, Rich Hickey, and on and on. I think it would be foolish to argue that those individuals have not contributed in significant ways and they have all accomplished those contributions in academic and non-industrial settings. Rich Hickey even has a talk where he explicitly mentions the fact of needing long hours of solitude to think about things.

If "true learning" means making $9.25 an hour and slaving away 60 hours per week while a prof makes ~200k and takes all of the credit: I'd rather be ignorant.

This reads like a parody of what grad students think.

"How could building a real business that people (want to) use possibly engender skills transferable to real life? Only when completely removed from reality can we begin to understand those forces which drive it"

No, it's pretty true if you've ever been through the average dev-shop in the valley. 95% of the eng work is the same problems you've seen a dozen times in the last year rehashed. The 5% of the interesting work is usually incredibly difficult and requires real skills (i.e. some sort of cv/dist-systems/PL skills) that can't be casually acquired without serious commitment. The people who do these jobs are either undergrads who worked incredibly hard to pick up these skills or phd's.

> The 5% of the interesting work is usually incredibly difficult and requires real skills (i.e. some sort of cv/dist-systems/PL skills) that can't be casually acquired without serious commitment. The people who do these jobs are either undergrads who worked incredibly hard to pick up these skills or phd's.

Can you elaborate? I am an undergrad and this sounds incredibly interesting. What are those skills? How do you pick up them?

It really depends on what you want to do. If you see yourself getting into programming languages, and want to work at a place like fb/google or even a trading-house like JaneStreet, most of the interesting work will be parceled out to folks who really tinkered with language design/logic/type theory at school.

I can talk about each of the (few) areas I mentioned in detail, but I think I'd be leading you astray. The real question is: what are you interested in specializing in? Let's say it's field x. What will it take for you to become so well versed in x that a company will hire you to work on hard problems involving x? X can be anything - programming languages, graphics, kernel, distributed systems. And x doesn't just have to be something "hard in CS" - it can be any number of UI/UX/HCI related fields that are popping up these days.

In terms of how you pick them up: figure out what your interests are and either find a professor at school that's into this and work with him/her, or start hacking on this stuff and getting your hands wet in your spare time. I'm a new grad myself, and I can say for a fact that the ~5% of my peers who are working on truly hard problems in industry are exactly those peers who worked on hard problems in their spare time at school.

Hey,

I have a growing interest in distributing systems but I am also very interested in programming language theory. I know that I want to become a software engineer but I also like to dabble with research papers.

This summer I'll join the Infrastructure team of a mid-sized startup in Waterloo, I think that's a good start but I would like to know more about your experience. What do you found the most effective way to turn an "interest" into a subject you are expert in (read able to create new and non-trivial things). I want to get my hands dirty but I am also a bit clueless as to where to start!

I have just started college but I feel that I need to figure out a (even very rough/broad) strategy to structure my learning. Waterloo is a great school but the meaty CS electives are reserved for 3rd/4th year student and I feel that I can work by myself until I reach this academic level.

Distributed systems is a very broad field, do you think that I should start by the fundamentals and then pick-up a niche area to grow in or would you rather have a broad approach, experience different things and specialize after graduation?

It would be really cool if you could shoot me an email: aaron_at_rely_dot_io Thank you :))

Learning how to ship working software (however mundane) while subject to "business and product pressures" is a skill worth learning to some.

What a horribly depressing view of engineering culture.

I've dealt with very little politics, credit stealing, and jealousy as a % of my time since joining the workforce. They definitely exist, but to say they're so bad that they prevent you from learning is laughable.

I still find opportunities to grow and learn on a weekly basis. I don't work at one of the worlds top research divisions, but that's never stopped me from improving/developing myself.

Most work is what you make of it but don't fool yourself into thinking that you are going to learn and grow at an optimum rate in an industrial setting. Your emotional reaction to the reality of the situation does not change the fact that learning is maximized in an academic setting.

With what end goal? I could also never leave a library, ever, and maximize my learning that way. And I'd die alone and inexperienced. Of course there's some give and take...

I trade my "pure learning" opportunities to be able to still grow and develop while earning an income that empowers me to live my life as I desire. I get to solve real world problems and challenges, rather than open ended ones.

I'm not trying to take anything from academics, but the most useful result will always come from a combination of academia and business. Neither would exist without the other, and there's and endless amount to learn from either side.

Any end goal. The fact that there are no distractions to purely pursue a specific goal is what makes an academic setting special. There are no managers and business specialists hovering over every single decision being made.

That doesn't jive with everything I've read - some of which here on HN - about universities. Grants, tenure, cost-cutting by administrators, ego, are all said to be sources of politics and distractions. And teaching, of course. Are they wrong?

They are not wrong. If I were to go back then the situation for me would be quite different. If your intent is to go for a tenure track position then you have to put up with all sorts of stuff but if your goal is to learn and write a thesis with the intent of going back to industry then you'll have a much easier time. The usual teaching and class load is easy to handle and you don't have to worry about grants and all the other stuff especially if you have a bit of savings.

The difference is between maximizing tenure-track job prospects vs learning. Surprisingly those two goals can sometimes be at odds and that is usually what you hear about on HN. People that were trying to maximize for both learning and future job prospects inadvertently running up against academic bureaucracy. If you have a clear goal then you'll have a much easier time.

This is laughably inaccurate. There are a ton of politics in an academic setting. Pressure to publish, to get grants and raise funding, grades and the financial pressures of being a grad student. You make it sound like people in school have unlimited time to sit back and think about big problems. It just replaces quarterly profits and management goals with conference paper deadlines and academic departmental goals.

It may sound horribly depressing, but it rings true to my own experiences. That said, I think it also depends on what you consider to be "learning."

Most engineering jobs require a lot of horizontal learning: develop enough knowledge of a topic to do something useful for the company then move on. While academic learning revolves around developing depth in a particular subject.

If you'd like to learn enough about a topic to contribute something truly new to the field, 99.9% of engineering jobs will not satisfy you.

I actually agree with both you and the person you are replying to.

You can learn in both academia and industry, but you learn completely different things. In industry, you typically learn more about business and current "trends" in technology, whereas in school you improve your fundamentals and have the opportunity to learn more hard skills, like machine learning, programming languages, etc.

I'd argue there is a lot more opportunity to learn in school than industry though, if only because you can go at your own rate in school so if you wanted to learn about current technology in school you could easily do so on your own. Still, I think a lot of it really boils down to having responsibilities that you are getting paid for vs not being paid but having the freedom to do what you want.

I certainly have learned a lot since leaving school, but the majority of it has not been due to being in industry but learned on my own time.

The way I see it is like this:

So-called "programming" jobs can be science, engineering, a trade, or a completely different job masquerading as "programming."

Science is what tends to happen in research divisions and academia. These jobs revolve around the invention of novel algorithms, research into theory, and so on, sometimes without even having a practical application in mind. The work product is often papers, but is also sometimes new languages or proofs of concept.

Software engineering jobs tend to be what you see in "senior developer" positions in industry. They're about applying known concepts (i.e., existing languages, implementations of approaches from the literature, and so on) to build a defined system in sometimes-novel ways. The work output is usually a product or service that you have some degree of responsibility for.

Software as a trade is what most junior programmers and general employees at larger companies do. This is the application of very specific learned skills to implement pre-solved problems (i.e., a ticket to "make X work like Y using Z method"). The final product is closed tickets / implemented features.

And still another large group of "programming" jobs are actually more about knowing the problem than the solution. These are really jobs about using programming to do something else. Process and product optimization as well as a lot of engineering support jobs fall into this category. The work product is an improved process or system that happens to use a computer.

You can learn in any of these jobs. In the science job, you learn the fundamentals and then think of advancements to the field. In the engineering job, you study the fundamentals to apply them to solving a problem. In the trade job, you build the biggest possible toolbox of code to apply to each solution you're given to implement. And in the non-programming job you learn a whole new field and then apply code to it.

All of these jobs can be lucrative, fulfilling, educational, and fun, but you need to know which one you're getting into ahead of time. "Programming" and "industry setting" are awfully vague and useless terms.

"academia is the only place that true learning happens." That is one of the most delusional perspectives I have ever encountered my good sir. I'm saying this after spending time in academia.

> one day she will realize academia is the only place that true learning happens.

I'd love to hear you defend that statement.

Look at the historical precedent and the people that have contributed the most to human knowledge. There is no shortage of examples. Even Google would not have been possible without academics. If you want to argue the opposite side then we can agree on definitions and you can bring up examples of industry leaders that have contributed in some significant way to human knowledge.

You have not even come close to defending your point that 'academia is the only place that true learning happens'.

All you did was give a justification that academia is a place that learning happens. In fact all that is needed to prove you incorrect is ONE counterexample.

By her own admission she will then move on to the next learning experience until one day she will realize academia is the only place that true learning happens.

Ummm.... Academics spend a lot of time in non-learning activities. As do students. Learning is a state of mind. You can learn wherever you are if you want.

I agree that it is a state of mind but maintaining it is much easier when you don't have to bow down to quarterly earnings and your manager isn't breathing down your neck about shipping that new shiny feature.

I'm not an expert, but my views of faculty was that many spend much less than one would think on research. According to 1 study [0] "Research – 'and the external funding and recognition it brings' – makes up just 17 percent of the work week and 27 percent of weekend work,"

Based on personal experience, I gave up the idea of a Phd when I saw how much time the professors spent begging for grants. And I've learned the most within the first 6 months of a new position. (This is also why jobs that offer a lot of variety are nice)

[0] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/09/research-show...

Grinding is okay and sometimes necessary for a startup, but it was during this time that I realized I was not passionate about ours. ...

I tried convincing myself that "changing people’s behavior and making delivery the default way to get food" was a mission important to me. That revelation along with the fact that my learning had slowed meant that it was time to quit.

If that's really your feeling, you should be in college. Any job is like this.

It might be that 'making delivery the default way to get food' is just an uninteresting goal to dedicate your life to working on.

I'm unconvinced Quora is much better.

Not to mention, what the hell is she doing at Quora, a stack overflow knockoff? Seems to be the wrong direction along the gradient of 'meaningful service'.

It is rare to get one infinitesimal chance (CMU), then another (Thiel Fellowship), and move on from both. She is either a genius or squandering opportunity.

Opportunities can become what you make them if you go all in, hopefully she is doing that at Quora, there are only so many opportunities in life.

Actually this will enable her to get more opportunities.

>She is either a genius or squandering opportunity.

what a ridiculous meme. I guess if it works out we should praise her and if it doesn't we should lambast her. you know, for being a genius or squandering opportunity, respectively.

I would lambast anyone who leaves a top-tier university for the Thiel fellowship, regardless of whether they are financially successful or not.

Why?

CMU provides a good education that's very heavy on theory. I knew a lot of people in CS who didn't really think theory had much bearing on what they wanted to do after undergrad, and for the majority of them this will probably be true. The sad reality is that anything more interesting than having an idea and building the next social x, or ephemeral y over app-engine will probably require understanding that boring stuff from parallel or distributed quite well. I really wish the school could find a better way to provide for people mainly interested in joining industry after graduation without watering down the difficult systems/theory courses that are the foundation of a good CS education.

The real benefit of a good education should be giving you the initial knowledge and desire to become an outstanding contributor to your area of interest whether you end up in academia or industry. I know a lot of folks who missed this and viewed the specialized classes they had to take as one more roadblock before being handed a pretty piece of paper and going off to work at fb/google/etc.

"However, we continued our attempts at possibly making our product work but by mid-February, we realized that we were grinding through our days. Grinding is okay and sometimes necessary for a startup, but it was during this time that I realized I was not passionate about ours."

Five months in, grinding is pretty much the job. Everybody’s passion wanes when faced with (potentially) years of hard work. It’s legit to decide you don’t want that for yourself, but it’s sad to see someone abandon a viable funded business.

As an aside, I dislike the criticism “doing a startup for the sake of a startup.” It implies that someone needs a special calling, and provides an easy out in the absence of one. “Starting a business thinking it looks easy,” might be closer to the truth.

I find it odd that anyone respects Quora when they do the horrifically annoying bullshit of hiding answers to questions you Google until you log in. They also require you to log in to view their front page (coming from Google) which is another extremely annoying trend. They are a step below Yahoo Answers in my opinion.

I think passion is a function of success. If you are not seeing any signs of "success" it is really easy to lose "passion." I think if you keep a bigger picture in focus and can bare the pain from short-term failed experiments things will work out in the future. And a good thing is you can make decisions to change your direction. :)

From Thiel Fellowship to Quora??

If you've never heard the phrase "from charybde to scylla", now is the time to look it up.

I'm trying to figure out if I find the focus on Learning refreshing or self-centered. I've worked with a lot of folks who optimize their lives around short term money and title. A focus on Learning will help grow both in the long term, and it is good to work with curious people. Is the highest level a commitment to customers, team and mission? Will someone optimizing for learning drop those three at the first sign of a shiny new toy?

Either college has gotten way less fun or Quora is a lot more fun than other tech companies

I am little sad that she choose to accept her fellowship just for the sake of doing a startup. She probably took the spot of someone really interested in making a difference rather than hanging out at mundane events, branding yourself as "thiel fellow and startup CEO".

Good luck to her but that kind of people make me sick to my stomach.

Sick to your stomach? Such outrage!

Thiel Fellowship is all about startup-for-startup's-sake. The premise is you get more out of startup than school, or joining a company. Now this person decided Nope, I followed a lame idea with no huge biz potential, and it's time to get out. Kudos for NOT sticking to the startup for its own sake!

Maybe Thiel, with his experience, could have seen that food delivery is an insanely hard operations challenge?

I am not sure how familiar you are with the Thiel fellowship but the application process is designed to make sure that applicants think twice about what they want to accomplish. You can't realistically get accepted without convincing the admission committee that you are not this kind of person.

If she made it to the fellowship she must have lied on her intentions to be an Entrepreneur. Don't be naive.

She gamed the system, fair enough. Let's just not pretend that all of this happened by chance and that she did not know what was going on.

Hi! Id just like to clarify a few things:

a) I have never actually introduced myself as a Thiel Fellow because I didn't want to immediately be associated with the stereotypes that come along with the title. It's not on my resume nor my LinkedIn.

b) I completed my application the night it was due. I told the foundation & mentors it was rushed. They noticed this too because my responses were pretty incomplete.

c) I had full intentions, and still do, of becoming an entrepreneur and working on my own startup. However, I don't think now is the time. I thought I had all the skills I needed, but I realize that I have a lot more to learn. In a few years, I'll be much better equipped. I also need time to come up with something I'm really passionate about. There are lots of successful startups that solve first world problems, but I don't think I can dedicate the rest of my life to one.

Thank you for posting so admirably level-headed a response! I wish all HN users would respond so well when treated poorly.

Best of luck going forward, and please feel more than welcome to participate in Hacker News discussions.

> Good luck to her but that kind of people make me sick to my stomach.

> she must have lied

jak0bbbb,

These kinds of comments are not permitted on Hacker News. Since your other comment in the thread indicates that you're an undergrad who is eager to learn, we're going to assume that you posted them from an excess of passion, combined with ignorance of how this site works.

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