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Craig Silverstein, Google Employee #1, Leaving for Khan Academy
- nchuhoai 15y agoWow, First John resig and then This, salman Khan must have some great charisma
- arkitaip 15y agoI think it's the cause that attracts people. Silicon Valley repeatedly talks about Changing The World and all that people do in the end is to create another web app. Khan Academy gives a lucky few the means to truly change the entire world by working on education, one of the most basic aspects of modern societies.
- thinkdevcode 15y agoOr these high profile people really believe in the idea of KA
- david927 15y agoWhat they're doing is what carries the charisma.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoI think it is more the desire to have an impact. Seriously as you get older and interact with more and more people you see the choices and opportunities that lead them to the current space-time co-ordinates. And you get a little bit sad sometimes that folks who could have been great have become de-railed due to some addressable issue into crime, or poverty, or drug addiction. It is hard to sit at a company working really hard to fill jobs and to listen to all the folks who are out of work but not qualified for your jobs. Its hard to listen to the stories of good, decent people who work hard and are certainly capable, unable to break the chains of poverty because they can't both get an education and stay off the streets. Its hard to listen to young people, now young adults, who suddenly realize that it wasn't learning they hated it was the school and now they are trying to make it as adults without a solid foundation. KA is has three things going for it, the founder is passionate about the cause (so its not going to sell itself suddenly), the technological sub-pieces have finally come into existence across a critical mass, the availability of 'self funded' (which is to say folks who no longer have to work if they don't want to) individuals to volunteer efforts for it. So being remembered for lifting some fraction of the world (no matter how small) out of poverty by providing educational opportunities, or being remembered as someone who worked at one of the companies that formed the Web as we know it. Easy choice.
- nchuhoai 15y agoI get that the cause itself is part of the reason, but there are plenty of opportunities that have great causes that could need help of aforementioned individuals. I really think its Salman Khan, because people believe in him. I can see him being the next leader in SV
- jskopek 15y agoI wonder if the chance to work for a good cause is a natural filter for exceptional engineers. When you've already made millions, or when your reputation allows you to get any job you want, money surely becomes a much smaller work incentive.
- benhatten 15y agoAbsolutely amazing for the edtech space to see high profile, tech elite join the industry.
- SkyMarshal 15y agoDo you want to sell advertising the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world of education?
- ok_craig 15y agoIs that really a fair comparison? Soda literally is just sugar water. Google provides lots of really good and useful products that people genuinely depend on and they push technology forward.
- wavephorm 15y agoFor that matter I bet there's an awful lot of science that goes into that bottle of Pepsi in your fridge. Everything from the chemical formulation of the sweeteners and preservatives, to the purification of water, to the design of the bottles for maximum strength per gram of plastic. And then there's the whole organization of the distribution channels and salesmen to get Pepsi product into every restaurant and convenience store in the entire world.
- exim 15y agoWell, combinging ads and educational content is a whole new area.
- nextparadigms 15y agoIf he's the first employee, doesn't that mean he helped create the Google search engine, and thus changed the world? I think that's a lot closer to the truth than what you're implying. I don't think Google started worrying about advertising until years later.
- kmfrk 15y agoThey also own that thing called YouTube which may or may not have been a part of Khan Academy's success.
- 15y ago
- apl 15y agoI wonder when they'll start hiring, well, educators. While engineering challenges may exist, Khan Academy's biggest scaling problem seems to be Khan's ability to produce solid content. His biology stuff, for instance, is decidedly worse than the mathematics. Other than that: great move.
- jc4p 15y agoDo they need to actually hire educators? I understand that it would raise the level of knowledge but if I remember correctly from the last Google Hangout Khan said that they are currently working on a platform to make it easier for anyone to add things to KhanAcademy without having to do github pull requests.
- gatlin 15y agoYes, they should. However, I think they should hire doctors of education in the same way they're hiring engineers: the engineers are creating the technical infrastructure to deliver lessons, and the educators should be creating the pedagogical standards and informing the engineers about what kinds of tools to create.
- noobface 15y agoI highly doubt they're proceeding in the dark. While they may not have teachers on staff, I'm sure they're consulting with the brightest minds at the best universities to develop optimal delivery.
- iskander 15y agoA doctorate in education is of dubious worth. As an academic field education research doesn't yet have the tools of structures to answer interesting questions. In place of rigorous theories there is currently a swamp of poorly verified or unverifiable notions. Hire teachers, hire experts, hire anyone who either has deep knowledge or experience transferring knowledge. Hopefully both. A doctorate in education, alone, provides neither. (this comment brought to you by small sample size interactions with real-life Ed.D. dunces)
- spicyj 15y agoI'll mention that we're still hiring for both full-timers and interns. Here's the job post: Our mission is to provide a world-class education to anyone, anywhere. We already have millions of students learning every month, and we're growing quickly. Our students answer over 2 million math exercise problems per day, all generated by our open source exercise generation framework (http://github.com/khan/khan-exercises http://github.com/khan/khan-exercises, http://ejohn.org/blog/khan-exercise-rewrite/ http://ejohn.org/blog/khan-exercise-rewrite/), and Sal's videos have been viewed over 117 million times. We're just getting started feeding this data we're collecting back into the product to help our users learn more (http://david-hu.com/2011/11/02/how-khan-academy-is-using-mac... http://david-hu.com/2011/11/02/how-khan-academy-is-using-mac...). If you're interested in data, analytics, and education, this is a dream gig. Plus, it's one of the highest educational impact positions you can imagine. We're hiring all types of devs -- mobile, frontend, backend, whatever you want to call yourself. Big plans ahead. http://www.khanacademy.org/jobs http://www.khanacademy.org/jobs
- kamens 15y agoI'll just add that even though the job ad isn't up yet, we're specifically looking for you quantitative big data folk. Apply through the ordinary software developer position for now -- but we're hunting for some passionate data engineers to do more stuff like this: http://david-hu.com/2011/11/02/how-khan-academy-is-using-machine-learning-to-assess-student-mastery.html http://david-hu.com/2011/11/02/how-khan-academy-is-using-mac...
- mikehuffman 15y agoI am going to make a wild prediction right now. Taking into account that 2012 seems to be the year of the "legit" free online schools. I am going to predict that within 5 years a person will be able to get a high-school or college degree (possibly accredited) from Khan Academy...and it will be recognized as legit by peers and employers alike.
- mdonahoe 15y agoI hope they don't try for traditional accreditation.
- pitt1980 15y agoI think the "recognized as legit by peers and employers alike" is the important part I think an alternative to the current model of getting yourself deep in debt to prove you're employable would do society alot of good
- tomjen3 15y agoWell as I understand it, one could study on Khan Academy and use that to get a GED, right? Then you would only have to be in school when you took whatever test was necessary to get that degree. Although you could conceivably try directly for university and skip High School completely. Or even skip university, learn to code in your basement and be done with it.
- geogra4 15y agoWhy not? I would hope for some sort of certification program.
- mdonahoe 15y agoTo me, Khan Academy represents a break from the traditional educational model. I would rather they focus on innovating than proving themselves as being just like every other school.
- pitt1980 15y ago
- ComputerGuru 15y agoCraig Silverstein is someone I've had the distinct pleasure of interacting with one several opportunities over the years. More important than being Google employee #1 is that he's THE Google open source person. He's always involved in Google Summer of Code and personally maintains a number of very cool open source projects on Google Code. I wish him the best!
- Donch 15y agoI'd like to second this opinion. I've had the pleasure of reading and using a lot of his code in the form of the sparsehash, ctemplate and tcmalloc projects and I know for a fact that my own projects would have been a lot harder to write and test without this code. He's a top notch open source advocate and a great encourager of contributions from non-Google employees, so hat's off and all the best at Khan Academy!
- maeon3 15y agoI hope they can make learning biology, calculus and programming as hours-consuming addictive as modern first person shooters are to teenagers.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nickpinkston 15y agoIs this another sign that the new sought-after perk is meaningful work? The time of beer and ping-pong tables maybe coming to an end?
- sharkweek 15y agoI sort of see this as the natural progression of people's careers
- nickpinkston 15y agoTotally - if the supply of talent becomes more: productive / wide applicable / sought-after - it only makes sense that they'll move up Maslow's Hierarchy into the highest fulfillment: meaning itself.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]