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I've found about how to hack the tests quite early on. I've had straight A's until I no longer cared about the grades. I've also realized that entering and purs

by aex 7y ago

I've found about how to hack the tests quite early on. I've had straight A's until I no longer cared about the grades. I've also realized that entering and pursuing a career at a tech corporations is a game as well. What has been driving me to startups is the fact that creating a profitable business has no place for hacks. Fundraising is a game that could be easily hacked though. I thought it was only possible to hack the fundraising game for a couple of rounds but Adam Neumann et al. changed my mind that hacks could carry a business even to post-IPO.

geofft 7y ago
> What has been driving me to startups is the fact that creating a profitable business has no place for hacks. Not sure that's true. Marketing is a hack, for one. If you have the best product but nobody knows about it, it's no use. More generally, there's a reason that the tech career ladder is hackable: performance reviews are both important and also too expensive to do right. If you want a real evaluation of what I've done over the past year, what you really need is someone following me 40 hours a week, noting how I contributed (positively or negatively) at small meetings, keeping track of whether my projects are late because I helped someone with something truly important or I spent my time on HN, etc. But you can't assign one reviewer per employee, so you make an approximate process where employees self-report what they did and managers report the fraction they've seen. You also can't get rid of the process, because a simple profit motive demands you incentivize employees for actually delivering business value. So you have a process that's vulnerable to exploits like flashy launches that will wither in a year. If you as a business owner aren't evaluating your employees, you won't be profitable. If you're watching each moment of your employees, you're wasting time. If you spend your time developing a fairer review process, you're not working on your actual business. If you don't hire employees and just put yourself out there in the market, your customers certainly aren't evaluating you fairly. (And of course your employees and potential hires are evaluating you on partial data, and it's in your interest to hire and retain good employees.) So whatever you do, it's hackable, and if you don't play the game you'll forfeit it.
dunkelheit 7y ago
> What has been driving me to startups is the fact that creating a profitable business has no place for hacks. I feel that this hack/not hack distinction comes from confusion of goals. If your end goal really is creating a profitable business then hack/not hack is not a useful distinction. Everything you do either gets you closer to your goal (then it is good, hack or not) or not (then it is bad, even if it "feels right"). But suppose your real goal is "doing most good for society" or whatever and you think that you can achieve this goal by building a profitable business. Then if you e.g. create some bullshit product and market the hell of it (thus achieving your proxy goal), it will feel like a hack that doesn't get you closer to your real goal. TLDR: hack/not hack distinction arises when there are two goals: a proxy and the real one. A hack is something that gets you closer to your proxy goal but not the real one.

by aex 7y ago

geofft 7y ago

> What has been driving me to startups is the fact that creating a profitable business has no place for hacks. Not sure that's true. Marketing is a hack, for one. If you have the best product but nobody knows about it, it's no use. More generally, there's a reason that the tech career ladder is hackable: performance reviews are both important and also too expensive to do right. If you want a real evaluation of what I've done over the past year, what you really need is someone following me 40 hours a week, noting how I contributed (positively or negatively) at small meetings, keeping track of whether my projects are late because I helped someone with something truly important or I spent my time on HN, etc. But you can't assign one reviewer per employee, so you make an approximate process where employees self-report what they did and managers report the fraction they've seen. You also can't get rid of the process, because a simple profit motive demands you incentivize employees for actually delivering business value. So you have a process that's vulnerable to exploits like flashy launches that will wither in a year. If you as a business owner aren't evaluating your employees, you won't be profitable. If you're watching each moment of your employees, you're wasting time. If you spend your time developing a fairer review process, you're not working on your actual business. If you don't hire employees and just put yourself out there in the market, your customers certainly aren't evaluating you fairly. (And of course your employees and potential hires are evaluating you on partial data, and it's in your interest to hire and retain good employees.) So whatever you do, it's hackable, and if you don't play the game you'll forfeit it.

dunkelheit 7y ago

> What has been driving me to startups is the fact that creating a profitable business has no place for hacks. I feel that this hack/not hack distinction comes from confusion of goals. If your end goal really is creating a profitable business then hack/not hack is not a useful distinction. Everything you do either gets you closer to your goal (then it is good, hack or not) or not (then it is bad, even if it "feels right"). But suppose your real goal is "doing most good for society" or whatever and you think that you can achieve this goal by building a profitable business. Then if you e.g. create some bullshit product and market the hell of it (thus achieving your proxy goal), it will feel like a hack that doesn't get you closer to your real goal. TLDR: hack/not hack distinction arises when there are two goals: a proxy and the real one. A hack is something that gets you closer to your proxy goal but not the real one.