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"and a pony"
Aug. 7th, 2005 02:10 amSo, Paul Graham's Tuesday night talk.
There were really two sections to his talk - the first was about the modern office environment, and how it damages productivity. The usual thing - meetings are bad, managers are bad, project schedules are bad, Yahoo is bad. All the intellectual depth of a Dilbert cartoon. Like Dilbert, it had occasional moments of mild funny, but not as many as you might hope. It might have been different if he had anything at all in the way of any new points to make here, but alas, it was all crap you've seen before. Go hire out Office Space, and at least you'll be entertained -- and, as a side benefit, you're likely to have a much more comfortable chair than those at OSCON.
Where things got moronic is when he started on his solution to all this. I realise that in paraphrasing him in this way, I'm potentially doing him a disservice - but I don't really care. His argument was so intensely stupid that any additional damage I can inflict is really in the noise. I'd imagine he'll probably post this talk somewhere on his website, so if you really care you can go and find it and see how I'm butchering it. I'm not going to do this.
In Graham's world, no-one should be an employee - instead, everyone should just be an independent, with investors who pay each person for the "value" that they create.
Look, dude, I'm happy for you that you were lucky enough to produce something that Yahoo wanted to buy, and that this made you wealthy. You should probably be familiar with the line "the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'". Extrapolating in this way from your own experience is just crackful.
(And, while I'm at it -- give up on the constant bashing of Yahoo. At this point, you're like one of those aggressively awful guys who spend all of their time bitching about their ex-girlfriend. It's tedious, and it's utterly lacking in charm or grace. They gave you a large amount of money, you didn't particularly get along with them after that. End of story. You're not giving us any new insights from this, you're just being a dick.)
He also seemed to think that it was the duty of his investee-employees to work 100% of the time, all the time, on their jobs. In his world, the insane hot-house startup environment is the ideal way for people to work. The notion of this gadfly out there lecturing people on how they need to be exploited and crushed in this way irritates me a great deal. (This is particularly the case as he now considers himself a venture capitalist - so, in other words, his solution is that we should all work ourselves to death for his benefit. I can only reply "Fuck you".)
To summarise (and I didn't intend to waste so much time on this) - put down the Ayn Rand. Back away from the keyboard. And no, you can't have a pony.
In addition, I'd also point you to Maciej Ceglowski's evisceration of Graham's Hackers and Painters concept. While it's unrelated to the topics that Graham inflicted on OSCON, it made me feel better to re-read it after suffering through what felt like the four hours he was talking.
There were really two sections to his talk - the first was about the modern office environment, and how it damages productivity. The usual thing - meetings are bad, managers are bad, project schedules are bad, Yahoo is bad. All the intellectual depth of a Dilbert cartoon. Like Dilbert, it had occasional moments of mild funny, but not as many as you might hope. It might have been different if he had anything at all in the way of any new points to make here, but alas, it was all crap you've seen before. Go hire out Office Space, and at least you'll be entertained -- and, as a side benefit, you're likely to have a much more comfortable chair than those at OSCON.
Where things got moronic is when he started on his solution to all this. I realise that in paraphrasing him in this way, I'm potentially doing him a disservice - but I don't really care. His argument was so intensely stupid that any additional damage I can inflict is really in the noise. I'd imagine he'll probably post this talk somewhere on his website, so if you really care you can go and find it and see how I'm butchering it. I'm not going to do this.
In Graham's world, no-one should be an employee - instead, everyone should just be an independent, with investors who pay each person for the "value" that they create.
Look, dude, I'm happy for you that you were lucky enough to produce something that Yahoo wanted to buy, and that this made you wealthy. You should probably be familiar with the line "the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'". Extrapolating in this way from your own experience is just crackful.
(And, while I'm at it -- give up on the constant bashing of Yahoo. At this point, you're like one of those aggressively awful guys who spend all of their time bitching about their ex-girlfriend. It's tedious, and it's utterly lacking in charm or grace. They gave you a large amount of money, you didn't particularly get along with them after that. End of story. You're not giving us any new insights from this, you're just being a dick.)
He also seemed to think that it was the duty of his investee-employees to work 100% of the time, all the time, on their jobs. In his world, the insane hot-house startup environment is the ideal way for people to work. The notion of this gadfly out there lecturing people on how they need to be exploited and crushed in this way irritates me a great deal. (This is particularly the case as he now considers himself a venture capitalist - so, in other words, his solution is that we should all work ourselves to death for his benefit. I can only reply "Fuck you".)
To summarise (and I didn't intend to waste so much time on this) - put down the Ayn Rand. Back away from the keyboard. And no, you can't have a pony.
In addition, I'd also point you to Maciej Ceglowski's evisceration of Graham's Hackers and Painters concept. While it's unrelated to the topics that Graham inflicted on OSCON, it made me feel better to re-read it after suffering through what felt like the four hours he was talking.
