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"Yeah, I went to Stanford and got the $200k education so I can work as a JavaScript+HTML+CSS coder at Posterous.com. I'm a real genius."

• rantfoil 18y ago
  Haha, no you can't -- we want people who can do that and Ruby on Rails too. ;-) I know you were just trying to be flip, but JavaScript is a pretty amazing language for writing frontend code.
  • wheels 18y ago
    Well, but if you got a PhD from Stanford with aspirations of being a Javascript developer, it would seem a bit like killing a mosquito with a thermo-nuclear warhead.
    • comatose_kid 18y ago
      I guess it depends on what you're doing with the Javascript.
      • Maro 18y ago
        "I'm writing code that takes pictures from email attachments and displays them as web pages. I did the theoretical research for this at Stanford under Prof. Lewis."
        • marketer 18y ago
          Blogging is a huge market. And it's growing. And the big players are making tons of money. Seems like a great thing for a couple Stanford grads to be doing. If you want to trivialize creating a successful blog platform, I suggest you try it, and let us know how it's doing in 6 months.
          • skalpelis 18y ago
            There are two kinds of untrivial - untrivial as in difficult and hard, and untrivial as in time-consuming and demanding a lot of work. Academic training prepares you for the first kind, professional - for the other one, and, suffice to say, this conversation consists mostly of elitist denigration of academic trivialities whereas you seem to be worked up about some disrespect of work ethic where in reality there is no disrespect.
          • alex_c 18y ago
            If you want to trivialize creating a successful blog platform, I suggest you try it, and let us know how it's doing in 6 months That's a bit of a strawman argument. I am willing to bet hard cash that the majority of web startups that fail do not fail because their programmers don't know enough computer science, or don't know JavaScript well enough (and the two aren't even really related).
    • pg 18y ago
      What is a "Javascript developer" exactly? Do you mean someone like Paul Buchheit?
      • wheels 18y ago
        I feel like there's a topical drift here that wasn't intended. Paul B's done some amazingly clever stuff, but would a PhD have made him better at that? My point wasn't that Javascript developers are dumb, but that a PhD isn't going to make you more qualified to do Javascript application programming.
      • brlewis 18y ago
        Surely not him. The voting button code he wrote for news.yc is a total hack. I know, because I copied it and used it on my own site.
• menloparkbum 18y ago
  It isn't uncommon for highly educated computer scientists to be working in roles "beneath them" in silicon valley. The "softer" stuff is usually more fun, better working environment, potentially impacts far more people, and often pays more.
  • pg 18y ago
    In fact I'd argue that is one of the defining qualities of a startup. At YC we have a tenured MIT CS prof as our sysadmin.
    • Harj 18y ago
      the single most important quality of a founder is having the discipline to do work "beneath" them. at auctomatic we had two oxford grads figuring out what sizes of t-shirt to buy and decorating stalls at ebay live.