Coding Horror: Paul Graham's Participatory Narcissism

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001080.html

by sharksandwich • 18 years ago

121 130 18 years ago

codinghorror.com

johns• 18 years ago

Jeff Atwood blogging about another writer's narcissism is the epitome of irony.

murrayh• 18 years ago

It is pretty easy to level the "Participatory Narcissism" attack at most people with extensive, opinionated writing.

Quite often I will look at comments I have made and reflect at how skillful I had been (before being methodically torn to shreds by smart people), so I hope narcissism is a common phenomenon. And I also hope (for my own sake) that for most people the matter at hand is trying to suppress self-gratuity in their writing, rather than not having it in the first place.

whacked_new• 18 years ago

Expressing one's opinion is, to a degree, a narcissistic act. IMO it's more ironic when critics cannot be critical of themselves (not saying it is the case here).

jbyers• 18 years ago

"Participatory Narcissism"

Never have so many syllables been used to incite so many about so little.

noonespecial• 18 years ago

Comment++ for most original re-quote of Churchill I've seen yet.

tel2• 18 years ago

I have to agree with Atwood, sort of. I actually see it as a wider condition.

You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss has a very specific "you" in mind: the kind of people who are aching to become founders (well, obviously). That's in no way a bad thing, but it is worth noting that earlier essays by pg had a wider audience.

It's not narcissism, it's focus. It's a symptom of "nearly all the programmers I know are startup founders".

bumbledraven• 18 years ago

I don't think so. This comment by Peter on the original article summed it up well:

"What gets PG's goat, it seems, is that relatively privileged, smart, hard-working kids should want to participate in this awful existence known as 'the 9 to 5', rather than strike out on their own and attempt to do something great -- possibly something even world-changing. And watching these clones root around some cookie-cutter downtown Palo Alto cafe performing some absurd exercise is more than he can stand. These kids could _be_ something -- they could _do_ something, but instead, some nutjob decided it'd be cool to send them on some wacky easter egg hunt. They could be busy trying to save the world, but instead, they're busying conditioning their brains to be subservient to the dictatorship that is modern corporations."

Alex3917• 18 years ago

Phrased that way, the scenario is reminiscent of Plato's cave allegory.

tel2• 18 years ago

Hah, that's a great quote.

I think we're both looking at it the same way. PG is in a fantastic position where he gets to spend most of his time around some of the smartest, most driven, and most interesting people all the time. He loves it, and with good reason.

His essays are targeted toward those people who could become the kind of person he respects, and they have not a little bit of force behind them because he believes in what he says a whole lot.

Xichekolas4• 18 years ago

As a 9-to-5-er that feels caged, I can attest that I read the 'you' as me (and people like me). It seems like everyone that dislikes working the day job just loved his article, and everyone that likes their day job loves Jeff Atwood's... does it really matter?

sofal2• 18 years ago

Incorrect. I for one hate my day job at a large corporation and will quit soon. Many of the things that PG says about big companies resonates with me. I truly feel like a caged animal and I look around me and I see some of the things that PG describes. I feel so different from people that work here that sometimes I wonder if I'm a different breed of person. I have a rebellious inclination toward all of the rules and traditions here. From this experience I've become more inclined to work in a smaller company or as a researcher (and possibly a startup some day).

However, I found the article to assume too much about what is natural and fulfilling for programmers. I realize that there are reasons for being biased towards creating startups, but the essay really does come across as being very skewed and not very well rounded because of it. Jumping into a startup can come with huge risks and sacrifices that can be anything but natural and fulfilling for some people. Startup companies can vary widely in the actual benefit they have to their customers as well, which is an important criteria for some people's fulfillment. Is the startup just about satisfying the customers' desires for entertainment and socializing, or is it helping people in a much deeper way? Is it just about pandering to the flawed values of the audience, or is it about pushing the state of the art? For many people it can't just be about financial freedom and being bought out. There are so many different aspects of "natural" and "fulfilling" and Paul seems to ignore a lot of them, possibly even misrepresenting some.

cperciva2• 18 years ago

Jeff Atwood could certainly have made his case in a better way, but I think he has a point here.

There are many perfectly legitimate reasons for working at a large company; family responsibilities (yes, there are mid-twenties and early-thirties programmers with a spouse and children), a chronic medical condition (if I were living in the US, my medical bills would be upwards of $20k/year, and I know I'm not alone), or being dedicated to a non-economically-profitable pursuit (if you want to spend 2 months a year volunteering in sub-Saharan Africa, many employers will let you have the time off -- a startup won't) are a few possibilities. Comparing people who decide to work for a large company to caged animals, and suggesting that they are "ten times [less] alive" is condescending, and ignores the fact that they might seem far more lively when they are with their families or pursuing whatever activities they enjoy -- or that if they worked for a startup, they might not be able to afford the medicine which keeps them alive.

I consider myself fortunate that I can do something I enjoy and have a reasonable chance of making money doing it; but not everybody is so lucky, and we should not insult such unfortunates by suggesting that they made poor choices or are somehow behaving unnaturally.

staunch2• 18 years ago

I don't think you're arguing here that they're not caged animals, just that they've elected to work in a cage for some good reason.

cperciva2• 18 years ago

That's one way of looking at it, yes -- except that the comparison to caged animals has misleading connotations. A lion doesn't weigh its options and choose to live in a cage; so to compare someone to a caged lion carries with it the suggestion that they lack agency.

andreyf5• 18 years ago

The essay does take advantage over the common "naturalistic fallacy", where people imply something as being "good" from its being "natural". As a simple counterexample, many diseases are "natural" and many antibiotics, not.

However, I think it's only fair that Paul's motivation for some of his essays is, at least in part, PR work for YC, and hence the fibs (that being the harshest word I'd use) are understandable.

asdflkj• 18 years ago

This is not a "naturalistic fallacy" (more properly called an appeal to nature), because PG uses "natural" in the very narrow sense of "evolutionarily optimal". PG must have thought his target audience is discerning enough to dereference such things without any hand-holding.

andreyf5• 18 years ago

Hm, "appeal to nature" does seem to fit the bill better, as "naturalistic fallacy" means something slightly different:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

It seems funny that I trust wikipedia+random guy on the internet over my economics professors.

icky• 18 years ago

> The essay does take advantage over the common "naturalistic fallacy", where people imply something as being "good" from its being "natural".

The essay avoids that fallacy by making the case that humans, having evolved under certain social conditions, might be much better equipped at present to cope with similar conditions. This itself may be true or false, but it is not fallacious reasoning.

staunch2• 18 years ago

A lot of the comments I've read about this essay remind me of the comments on the idea that being in the silicon valley is an advantage for startups. 98% of the negative comments are from people who are responding defensively out of pure emotion.

> I work with young startup founders in their twenties. They're geniuses, and play by their own rules. Oh... you haven't founded a company? You suck.

The guy that wrote this is saying more about himself than the essay.

lst• 18 years ago

I never read his essays, but if anyone here is able to arc-ify them (say max. 1-3 sentences each), maybe I would start reading (the arc versions).

rms• 18 years ago

You weren't missing anything by skipping this one. Iamelgringo's post in this thread is much more insightful.

edw5193• 18 years ago

It usually is.

davidw3• 18 years ago

I don't really agree with Mr. Horror, but sometimes I do wonder what PG does to, shall we say, "stay challenged". Surrounding yourself with younger, less experienced people (albeit very smart ones) who owe you is not an environment I would think of as one likely to create a lot of pushback. Maybe it shouldn't, either, as that's not what YC is for, but you do need that kind of thing from somewhere in your life if you wish to continue your intellectual growth.

gordianknot• 18 years ago

Arc, obviously. Inventing a programming language is like founding a religion. As history bears witness, that's one hell of a challenge.

pg6• 18 years ago

Surrounding yourself with younger, less experienced people (albeit very smart ones) who owe you is not an environment I would think of as one likely to create a lot of pushback.

Oh yeah? It does when they're the type of people who want to start startups.

The main thing we look for in founders is spirit and determination. We have to, because that's what makes startups succeed. And dealing with the group of people this produces is not like being a professor, believe me.

davidw3• 18 years ago

Well, all I can go by is what I see in the relationship from outside, and occasional comments and fragments of things, like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41257

which perhaps paint an incorrect picture.

Point being, though, is that the group you're dealing with sounds like a great deal of fun, and doubtless provides a lot of intellectual stimulation - no question about that. What they probably don't have, though, is a very dissimilar view of certain things to your own - you hand pick them after all (and vice versa). Also, in the end, to be blunt, you're the guy giving them money, and even if you try to get around it, that conditions relationships between people.

It's sort of like this site - most of us found it and got into it because we like your writing and attitude, so it's not likely to be a source of wildly different opinions either. That's not entirely a bad thing - keeping points of contention to a minimum is probably a good way of keeping the community from imploding.

Anyway, this isn't meant to be a critique of YC in any way, just my hope that you find ways to look at the world from a completely different point of view from time to time. Thinking about my own sources of information, it's probably something that everyone needs to try and do more often.

iamelgringo2• 18 years ago

I've worked in Silicon Valley as an ER nurse for the past 2 years, and I've seen a lot of Software Engineers come and go through my department. And, I'll have to say, at the nurses station, when the patients aren't around, there is a stereotype that we have about Software Engineers, and often snicker at.

If a man in his 20's and 30's comes in to triage looking haunted and complaining of chest pain, problems sleeping, or weird psycho-somatic complaints, one of the first questions we ask is, "Are you a software engineer?" The answer is invariably, "Yes." And, around the nurses station, we all share a chuckle and a "tsk, tsk" at this poor, overworked, overstressed man.

There is a stereotype, and like all generalizations, it has it's exceptions. But, it's enough of a stereotype that the nurses I work with have been very concerned about my going back to school for Computer Science. Most of the nurses that haven worked in the Valley for years thought that being a software engineer was a crap job compared to being an ER nurse. And, that's saying something since a substantial portion of our job involves actual crap. It's wasn't until I explained that I want to start a company that my coworkers became a bit more supportive of the idea. I even had doctors talk to me in concerned tones about the unhealthy levels of stress that engineers work with in the Valley, to try and talk me out of my second career. In the ER, we see the same haunted, caged look that Paul refers to in this article.

I think that what PG was referring to was the idea of a powerful animal who's behavior and demeanor changes markedly in different environments. I don't really think that he was trying to put people down who work at a 9-5 for whatever reason. Paul didn't refer to the 9 to 5'ers as caged monkeys, or caged rats, he called them caged lions for a reason.

I don't think that it just applies to Software engineers, either. I saw the same change in my father when he left his job at 60 to pursue managing his investments 10 years ago. There was a very marked change in the man. A great metaphor for that would be describing as the difference as that of a caged lion vs lion roaming free on the savanna.

I normally like Jeff's writing. I have to disagree with him this time. Perhaps the problem is that maybe Jeff hasn't been on safari. Perhaps he hasn't seen enough men change like lions set free once they don't have to work a 9-5 that they hate. Paul says that he's seen similar changes in a number of founder's they've funded over the past couple of years. As someone who feels rather caged in their day job, I hope I get to see those same changes in myself this fall as I start my first business.

jeroen• 18 years ago

I've had 9-5 jobs (as as software engineer at small companies) for the last 10 years, and I mostly like the work I do. Recently, I've founded a startup with a friend and I work on that in evenings and weekends. From that perspective, PG's article makes a lot of sense to me.

The problem with Atwoods reply is that it has a high level of slashdot-esque "it's not true because it hasn't happened to me".

fugue88• 18 years ago

Maybe a lot of those programmers don't even realize how stressed out they are---they've probably been acclimated to it over a long enough period of time to not really notice.

watmough• 18 years ago

Yeah, and the worst affected people in software are people who have their own determination and drive, but have it subjugated to 'playing by the rules', 'not running too far ahead of the weakest member of the team' etc etc. I'm lucky enough to have a design role in my current position, and have always worked fairly independently, in software deployments and the like.

I think that being an engineer in a large company does get a lot better once you become a manager, in that you gain a bit more control, but obviously it can still suck depending on the overall goals, how smart your superiors are, and how capable your team is.

Obviously, there are people who are very happy to have most responsibility taken from them, and who in return for a regular paycheck, just have to come and sit in a fabric box for 9 hours a day.

Sadly, the box warmers are not something you can put up with if you want to move quickly, and it seems like growth from a few 10's of employees to a few 100's seems to add disproportionately to the wrong category, unless you are very disciplined in hiring.

sbraford4• 18 years ago

It feels a little weird saying it, but I feel exactly like the uncaged lion paul describes.

My "hack" to achieve this:

* quit the job to pursue part-time freelancing

* the idea is to work on a startup / projects the other part of the time

* moved to Bucharest where I can live for $2k / month (I only have to "work" 4 days a month)

* while experiencing a foreign culture, it helps give you perspective, because you see many of their customs/etc. to be silly, which also makes you realize your own are silly as well

* european chicks have sexy accents (if the carrot is big enough...) =)

wallflower• 18 years ago

I think you're living the dream - living where you want, working when you want (4-hr work week style).

How much due diligence did you do before you took the leap? I assume you did consulting before you left the States.

My half-baked plan is to move to a Latin American country, learn Spanish in the mornings, code in the afternoons, party in the evening

h34t2• 18 years ago

Me too. I thought the (un)caged lion metaphor was poignant.

I was so stressed last year that my stomach lining gave out, lost my entire sense of self & found I'd lost all desire to do anything (doesn't help when you actually do live out of your middle-of-nowhere-in-Beijing office -- what a great place to bring home a date!).

Now I'm moving around South East Asia and spend <$30/day to live as I do a few hours of contract work per week (for the company I left) and am teaching myself programming (Earlier I'd sort of hacked my way through web dev w/ html, css, php, and various open-source db tools -- design & sales/marketing/networking were my strong points, not code. Now I'm going through Learning Python, Programming with Python, & Software Engineering for Internet Applications).

Basically I look for quiet, beautiful places with creative, interesting people. When I find such a place or such people, I stay there and work until such qualities evaporate. I find it's not a bad way to spend my time. It won't last forever (I'm hoping some day I find a place I actually want to live), but this sure beats having to get some shit job or take shit contracts to support an expensive, boring (to me) typical lifestyle back in N.America. I may go back when I feel ready or the right sort of opportunity arises (mainly meaning working with the right people), but I'm in no rush. I wouldn't mind living on an island close to Hong Kong -- secluded paradise a 24h/30min ferry to one of the best cities I've ever seen.

If you plan ahead, you can do Vancouver => Hong Kong for $380 with oasis air, and Shenzhen => Bangkok for $80 with Air Asia. Then get by on $1000/mo living expenses as you move around and find a spot that suits you. Not much risk...

david927• 18 years ago

I think all of this is too simplistic. Follow your passion, and take bigger risks while you can (because when you're older it gets harder), is great advice. But Paul needs to understand that his passion is not everyone else's. I know many people who found a start-up for the wrong reasons. There's a get-rich-quick-scheme premise in a lot of Web 2.0 start-ups that I find sad. To look down on employees is to not understand that their passion may lie elsewhere, or that they're waiting for the right moment. I've had three start-ups and was an employee several times as well. None of it defines me.

edw5193• 18 years ago

Observe Something (mostly objective)

Generalize (subjective leap)

Expand (more subjective)

Conclude & Recommend (very subjective)

Let It Go (expose bullseye)

</EssayFormula>

Observe corporate programmers --> zoo animals = small leap

Writing about what you know ---> "Participatory Narcissism" = large leap

Funny, Jeff Atwood does EXACTLY what he accuses pg of doing, albeit with less style.

pg is at a unique intersection to observe that which most never see. We don't have to agree with the leap - that's what makes this a forum instead of a circle jerk.

I, for one, look forward to pg writing about what he knows. If only others did it as well.

ojbyrne9• 18 years ago

While I realize that YCombinator is trying to change this, here's my startup experience.

1. Inspired by PG's rhetoric, go into partnership with semi-famous TV talk show host to build site.

2. Work ass off for 9 months. Site grows like gangbusters, VCs banging on the doors.

3. VCs/Partner bring in new CEO. Partner/CEO fill every position above entry level with new hires.

4. My job is now 9-5, cubicle, no chance of advancement.

5. CEO and partner now described as "founders" in the press.

So I mostly followed PG's advice, only to end up in the exact same mind-numbing job he's saying to avoid.

andreyf5• 18 years ago

When you went "into partnership with semi-famous TV talk show host", how much equity did you get?

ojbyrne9• 18 years ago

I got some equity. Some day it might actually be worth something. I was participating in a conversation about how being a founder is better than being an employee, and pointing out that they often end up exactly the same (except for the equity). I edited the post a little, remembering that I do still have friends there.

allenbrunson2• 18 years ago

of course i know what site you're talking about, since you've been around here for awhile, and so have i.

another thing pg says about startups is that they're very risky. while you might not be getting the respect you deserve in your first startup, perhaps you'll do better in your second, or third.

ojbyrne9• 18 years ago

That is the hope. I pretty well knew what was going to happen the day I met our new CEO. I was not prepared for the extent of the bullshit.

pius• 18 years ago

I just did some quick research into this and all I have to say is WTF?? Why'd they do you like that? Please tell me you've got enough equity to put you in the briar patch if and when the company exits.

ojbyrne9• 18 years ago

Here's one clue. I was 44 when we started. I think that explains some of what happened and also why I put up with for as long as I did (as someone said above, letting the media-attractive people parade before the cameras was good for the company). And yes, I'm waiting (sometime impatiently) for the exit, and if I get what I'm supposed to get, I'll be back here apologizing for every bitchy comment.

sbraford4• 18 years ago

quit?

ojbyrne9• 18 years ago

Is that a question or advice? Either way I did quit.

NewWorldOrder• 18 years ago

This sounds terrible. 1) why couldn't you advance? 2) wasn't the company being deprived of your talents since you were only doing a cubicle job? 3) what would you have preferred to be doing?

h34t2• 18 years ago

I think your example shows the importance of learning how shrewd businesspeople think.

<< example #1 >>

My first business mentor was literally a con artist. I was starting my first business and he, ostensibly a retired lawyer, took me under his wing... while we worked together he helped me a lot, but one day he skipped town and left me (and a few other people) screwed.

It was some of the best money I ever spent on education -- it's not every day you get exposed to deception at that level of sophistication.

Since then I've interacted with some very ethical businesspeople who understand things in a remarkably similar way to that con artist -- they are acutely aware of the mechanics of perception manipulation, which can be applied to good or bad ends in almost any conceivable field of endeavor.

<< example #2 >>

One big reason I burnt out last year is because I didn't pay attention to what I'd learned in example #1 because I started a company with ethical people I knew extremely well (read: even if you're with great people, you still need to know exactly what you're committing to).

I had equity, but I was the youngest & least-experienced founder, and left behind the other founder & founder-investor in N. America to go and manage everything myself on the other side of the world, in China.

A few things that contributed to a living hell:

* I had zero salary (ALL my money came from expense claims) so I couldn't buy as much as a chocolate bar without running a stressful "is-this-worth-the-cost-to-investors" calculation in my head -- I couldn't internalize even a single dollar of "cost" to my own personal budget, and I let this stress me out because my co-founders were people I cared about. I felt like a child who had to ask his parents before buying anything.

* I lived in my office. And let me say that living alone out of an office in a foreign country with a nearly impenetrable culture and language is not the same as sharing an apartment in a hip city with your co-founder/friends.

* Decision-making was terribly slow -- it would take days to go back and forth b/w China and N. America on even the simplest issues. We totally underestimated the cost of this.

* My vesting period was undefined, and we had no official corporate paperwork, despite already having spent $100k+ on startup costs. I didn't realize this was a problem until I burnt out, and found that a simple conversation over dinner was all it took for me to be entirely out of the picture equity-wise.

* My other founder insisted on being the sole interface to the founder-investor. Which meant that information flow, despite being an extremely small startup, was already horribly distorted. There was already a chain of communication this long: Staff (6 people) > Project Manager > Me > Founder #2 > Founder-Investor. And the Founder-Investor was the only person who had any real experience in manufacturing, which was what we got ourselves into.

By the end, I had not even a hint of feeling like a responsible, independent person, let alone leader of a company. Every single aspect of my existence was, technically even if not practically, under the control of "the company" -- the food I ate, the office I lived in, the staff I hired... and I'd agreed to it all, in a trusting sort of way, because I didn't see that "good people" still require "good structure" in order to function properly. It was the least entrepreneurial position I've ever felt myself to be in, despite being the most entrepreneurial from a cursory glance.

Things would've been a lot smoother if I'd let my "shrewd businessperson" self take over initial discussions instead of my more natural "trusting friend" self, which left all the details to some nonexistent universal positive force of social goodness.

revorad• 18 years ago

Brad Bollenbach once wrote: "Complaining and inactionable criticism is the highest form of mental masturbation."

http://30sleeps.com/blog/?s=criticism&x=0&y=0&pa...

Does anyone other than pg even attempt to write essays?

wumi• 18 years ago

so Jeff went through YC? what was his startup?

Xichekolas4• 18 years ago

It seems like everyone is focusing on this 'caged lion' thing just like they focused on the lack of unicode support in Arc at first.

You have a decently sized essay and the entire internet goes berserk over one line. Did Jeff actually read the whole thing or did he get to the lion part, have some overly-emotional gut reaction, and turn on the flame machine?

Talk about blowing something out of proportion.

I guess you can consider the article a huge success by the criteria of 'the more people that you piss off, the closer you are to truth' ... http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

pg6• 18 years ago

This, judging from the fact that it's in bold, appears to be his main gripe:

  "The problem with this particular essay is the way Mr. Graham
  implies the only path to true happiness as a young programmer
  lies in founding a startup."

whereas the essay actually contains the sentence:

  "Working for yourself doesn't have to mean starting a startup,
   of course.

I mean, how much clearer can I be?

As for this point about "participatory narcissism," you can make the same attack on practically every nonfiction writer. Every (good) essayist writes from experience. Most people who have the freedom to work on what they want, work on things they admire. Every book on robotics or carpentry or surfing has woven through it the sinister subtext that robotics or carpentry or surfing is an admirable activity. But to accuse the writer of "participatory narcissism" is to confuse cause and effect: the writer of the robotics book isn't claiming robotics is admirable to make himself look good; it was because he thought it was admirable that he chose to work on it.

A claim you could make with equal justification about any essayist isn't much of a claim. But people will still believe it means something if they disagree with him.

jotto2• 18 years ago

3 people who have had disrupted the normal thinking track: DHH, PH, and AS, and many people hate them for it - defending their hatred or anger by accusing these people of arrogance or narcissism. think about it.

raganwald• 18 years ago

David. Got it. Paul. Got it. AS???

tptacek8• 18 years ago

How much clearer? Well, you could have started by not comparing employees to caged lions.

pg6• 18 years ago

That's a metaphor. The way metaphors work is that they're accurate in some respects and not in others.

The advantage of metaphors is that they help explain things by isomorphism. The disadvantage is that people often take them too literally. Or pretend to if they want to attack the writer.

Strange as it sounds, I expected to be criticized for telling readers what they wanted to hear, not for insulting them. If you actually read the essay, the thesis is that the famous founders who are made to seem like such gods in the press are actually not that different from ordinary programmers-- that the difference, as it says in the last paragraph, is "due mostly to environment." In other words the exact opposite of the summary Atwood quotes: "Oh... you haven't founded a company? You suck."

How can so many people read an essay saying X and come away believing it said not-X? I think what happened in this case was that a lot of people who were already feeling self-conscious about working for big companies read the first section as some kind of criticism of them, and then either read that into the rest of the essay or (this is the Internet) didn't read any more before writing blog posts about it.

logjam2• 18 years ago

Oh my god. Lions.

I'd have compared them to caged gophers.

Since we're talking about animals so much, it's Interesting how some really prefer weasel words. Obviously there are some tender sensibilities here.

aflag• 18 years ago

I think the essay is much more about telling people they should seek freedom than anything else. Of course, the path Graham knows is through opening a startup, so that's what he advises you to do. It doesn't mean there aren't other means to be free, but working for big companies doesn't look like one. Is the author of coding horror saying it is? I don't even think so, actually.

Jeff Atwood is just ranting on Graham, but he's not telling much about Graham's article. He just picks on things that can be seen as polemic or too extreme and trolls away. When you read someone's opinion you have to realise that he's talking about their experience. If Graham had said the only path to true happiness is through a startup -- and he didn't say it like that -- you must acknowledge that he's just saying it's the only path he knows. It's just an opinion, it's not absolut truth. People mix those sometimes.

If Jeff wanted to be more helpful he could have told us what paths one has to follow in order to be free. Does he think working for a big company sets you free? Why is he just ranting instead of giving his say on all this?

allenbrunson2• 18 years ago

i don't agree with the coding horror writer, but i think a lot of people would agree that pg's essays tend to be polarizing.

paul's essays sometimes follow a formula. explain three or four alternatives, present arguments for why all but one of them suck. assume the reader will go with the one remaining option. from there, you've got another choice to make. paul presents another three or four options, and explains why all but one of them suck. and so on.

a lot of times, while reading, i think: hey, he's just eliminated the option i would have taken for reasons that don't apply to me so much.

now, that doesn't mean paul is wrong. but from over here, it seems like he IS somewhat adamant about choosing the One True Way through the sea of the problem he's talking about. whereas other writers might emphasize things like "you could go this way if you want this type of result," or "you could go that way if you've got this type of constraint," etc etc. paul does that sometimes, but his consideration of those constraints almost always leads to dead ends. for example: so you've got a wife and kids to support, therefore you need a steady income. okay then, startups are probably not for you, and you fall off the edge of paul's decision tree. that's got to be maddening for people who buy into paul's philosophy about 80 or 90 percent, except for a few details here and there.

it seems to me like a mistake many readers tend to make. paul's not wrong, he's just describing a path that does not fit their situation exactly.

startingup• 18 years ago

OK, I agree with 70% of pg's essay, but here is something that worried me. Most YC start-ups want to sell to large companies (they pay better!). Is pg saying that they go from being free men/women to caged animals? Or is he telling them "take your money and run?" If so, wouldn't a large company knowing pg's advice assume that people will leave quickly, so put a lesser valuation on a deal? After all, companies like Google acquire companies like Zenter for the talent as much as for the product. If the attitude is "take your money and run", wouldn't that necessarily lower the value of every YC company in the eyes of the large acquirer?

To an extent, there was always an element of start-up founders taking the money and walking, but by making things so explicit ahead of time, isn't pg unwittingly devaluing the very companies he has nurtured?

Second, what should an employee number 18 in a Loopt or a Scribd think? Should they start thinking "I am not a founder, so I am missing something". Apply this recursively ... is pg in effecting talking away the very talent that his companies need to grow?

gruseom5• 18 years ago

Paul Graham's essays have this weird Rorschach quality whereby people see wildly different things in them. Some readers even get infuriated and seek relief in the judgment that Paul Graham is an arrogant asshole. But I don't buy that. (For one thing, if he were, then this site would be more of a personality cult than it is, and many of us would be long gone.) So I'm curious as to why his essays have this effect on people. It is the essays, by the way. You don't hear people saying, "He sold Viaweb to Yahoo? What an asshole!" or "He started a new kind of investment fund, the arrogant prick!"

I've got a little theory. It seems to me that the provocative thing about the essays is their aesthetic. They're governed by a particular style. One principle in it is minimalism: compress the writing until everything extraneous is gone. Another is vividness: whatever is being said, seek the phrase or image that throws the point into the sharpest relief.

The dominant quality of the essays is that they pursue this aesthetic ruthlessly. Anything that would use a few extra words to reassure the reader is thrown out. Anything that would tone down an idea a little bit to make it more palatable is thrown out. There isn't any room for these things because the author is optimizing for something else - say, meaning per word count. In fact, an entire dimension of language, the phatic dimension, is thrown out.

So, Paul Graham's writing is radically aphatic. That's disorienting. People are used to writing that includes, among its threads, one whose purpose is to reassure you that the author is a nice guy, that he might be wrong, you can still get along even if you disagree, and so on. This is not only absent from the essays, it's deliberately excised. On top of that, what is there has been distilled for maximum impact and often touches subjects that people have strong emotions about, such as programming languages and what we're doing with our lives :). Not surprisingly, some readers feel punched in the gut. For them, an obvious explanation is ready at hand: Paul Graham's writing is like this because he is like this. He must be someone who doesn't care how others feel and wants only to magnify his own grandiose ideas.

I think this explains why people project so much emotion into what they read in those essays. "Oh... you haven't founded a company? You suck." But the essays never say anything like that. People don't read them this way because they say such things. They read them this way because they lack the kinds of things writers are expected to put in to stave off provocation. They lack these things not because the author is an asshole but because he cares about a certain style of writing. Enough, in fact, to pursue it ruthlessly... in his writing. To naively map that back to the personality of the writer is an obvious error, a reverse ad hominem. But it's an understandable one. There aren't many people who care that much about an aesthetic. (I mean "aesthetic" in a broad sense, by the way. As much a way of thinking as a cosmetic thing.)

No doubt there is a connection between an author's personality and his style, but it's hardly an isomorphism. I don't know Paul Graham, but I know he doesn't talk the way he writes. For one thing, one can point to examples (like the interview in Founders At Work). For another, nobody talks like that.

pg6• 18 years ago

Wow; I think this is exactly right.

I'm always surprised by how offended people get by things I write. It seems totally unpredictable. I didn't expect people to be so offended by this one. In fact, I thought I was saying something rather smarmily ingratiating, if anything: that the famous startup founders you keep reading about in the press are not that different from you, but that they just have, in effect, a healthier work environment. See the last paragraph.

And yet somehow that message has gotten completely twisted around. It's as if people wanted to misunderstand this essay.

I've been mulling over why this happens, and one reason is certainly the one you suggest. I try to cut every unnecessary word, and I don't say things unless I'm pretty sure of them. The result sounds arrogant, because it doesn't have any of the hedging people usually surround ideas with to make them palatable.

But there's no alternative. People won't read essays if they're too long. If you want to get a lot of ideas into an essay short enough to read, you have to be so curt you sound arrogant.

mightybyte• 18 years ago

I had the same thought when I read gruseom's post. His zooming in on your writing style is right on the money. (By the way, I could have begun that last sentence with "I think", but I thought better of it.) This is one thing I struggle with myself. I find that I tend to want to write things that cannot be disputed, but to do so I usually have to include all the phatic cruft that you take out. I'll have to work on that.

On another note, I also get the impression that you write to a certain type of person. Possibly a type that is similar to you. People like Jeff who take issue with your essays are simply not the target audience (whatever that means). As someone who is currently caged in a 9-5 job with a big company, I have to say that your essay resonated deeply with me...and I loved it. I appreciate the way your essays frequently force me to take a good hard look at what I'm doing, where I want to go, and what I need to do to get there.

brlewis• 18 years ago

I didn't expect people to be so offended either, but in hindsight it does seem predictable. Take the mindset of someone who's an employee and at least slightly insecure. Start reading the "boss" essay with an eye to what it might be saying about you. Does it really matter what's in the last paragraph? You're red in the face by then.

There's a really dense book called "Difficult Conversations" (Stone, Patton, Heen, Fisher) that covers, among other things, how people frame discussions in terms of their identity. I think if I had adsorbed that book better I would have predicted that this essay would deeply offend some people.

Spyckie• 18 years ago

At one point in time I tried to optimize my writing style like this...

One other reason is that you have a touchy subject. Tell anyone they're doing the wrong thing (implicitly or unintentionally) and you'll get the same response. People are very sensitive about their own choices (stubborn), especially ones that are hard to defend rationally (religion, major, job, etc).

kirubakaran• 18 years ago

"I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste people's time telling them things they already knew. It's more efficient just to give them the diffs. But I suppose that's bound to yield an alarming book."

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

kingkongrevenge• 18 years ago

> People are used to writing that includes, among its various threads, one whose purpose is to reassure you that the author is a nice guy, that he might be wrong, you can still get along even if you disagree, and so on.

When you read, say, Mencken, you know it's an op-ed and to take everything with a grain of salt. He would even contradict himself from one piece to the next. You just chew on the points and smirk to yourself when you see the flaws. No, Mencken definitely didn't write like he was trying to be your likable friend.

Graham writes like he's building a legal case or trying to get published in a scientific journal, even though the pieces are really casual observational op-eds. The style invites you to poke holes and take each point too literally.

People are used to writing styles adapted to the format for good reason. The reactions like this to Graham's pieces make a good case for learning and using rhetoric.

pg6• 18 years ago

even though the pieces are really casual observational op-eds

If what you mean by casual is that I haven't thought much about what I'm saying, I disagree. In a typical essay I probably go over every sentence 20-50 times. When I'm unsure of something I'm saying, I try to be precise about the uncertainty. So while I may often be wrong, it's not out of carelessness.

lg• 18 years ago

> The reactions like this to Graham's pieces make a good case for learning and using rhetoric.

No. It's hard to dig out somebody's argument when it's surrounded by self-deprecating rhetorical armor. Presumably pg wants the argument front-and-center. That way if he convinces you, it's definitely the argument and not the rhetoric that's doing it. If you disagree then you know exactly what you're disagreeing with. Ignore the ad-hominem people; they'd just find something else that's wrong with you.

jamesbritt• 18 years ago

Props for a clear, well-reasoned comment.

One of my peeves is the use of "in my opinion ..." since pretty much anything anyone says is, by definition, their opinion.

Yet your mention of the phatic (thanks, too, from teaching me a new term) is interesting. Those little qualifiers, even when not strictly needed, do seem to keep the wolves at bay.

gruseom5• 18 years ago

I remember that when I was taught the phatic function of language, it was a minor epiphany. Prior to that, I thought of small talk (nice weather today, how was your weekend, how about those Broncos) as meaningless bullshit, which was really a problem for me. That concept made me understand that it isn't meaningless, it just has a different kind of meaning than referential language does (which really would be about the weather). Phatic language is about maintaining the connection. It communicates, "I think you're worth communicating with, you're an acceptable interlocutor" and so on. It's used most often with people one doesn't know well because it signals reduced risk. Without it, people feel tense and suspicious. No doubt there are deep-seated reasons for this.

But that doesn't at all mean that it should play the same role in writing.

bayareaguy• 18 years ago

Paul Graham's writing is radically aphatic

What does that mean? No online dictionary I regularly use lists "aphatic". Google turns up a geology term here[1] with a different spelling.

[1] http://www.greengonzo.com/dictionary/Aphantec.html

gruseom5• 18 years ago

I made up "aphatic" to mean "not phatic", by analogy with "aphasia".

hbien• 18 years ago

WTF?

I understood this post about Joel: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000679.html

And this one about DHH: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001065.html

Now it's PG. I need to start writing blog posts attacking people so I can get some more ad revenue.

electric2• 18 years ago

So what happened to the Reddits and the Zenters?

Lions roaming free and now caged lions as well. Okay maybe a little richer than other caged lions ;).

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

There is no One Right Way. Grow up. Paul Graham is helping people by expounding on his way. Why don't you expound upon yours?

Gavin• 18 years ago

The funny thing about all this is that the main criticism of PG's argument is that it is condescending and belittles the huge mass of programmers working for big companies.

As with much criticism, it never quite attempts to prove him wrong. Proving that he's offensive is a very different thing.

danbmil99• 17 years ago

"I don't know Paul Graham, but I know he doesn't talk the way he writes. For one thing, one can point to examples (like the interview in Founders At Work). For another, nobody talks like that."

heh lol

Coding Horror: Paul Graham's Participatory Narcissism

Related Stories