Paul Graham Essays Y Combinator

it’s possible that none of them are doing very well. You would have to have a friend who’s a really good programmer. If you don’t have expertise in hiring programmers then you need to get someone who does. but that’s not what you need to do at a startup anyway. I mean, we have had startups writing their code in PHP – and that worries me a little bit. PG: Well people wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t easier.But then, how would you know if your friend was a really good programmer? PG: I would be worried if someone was writing their stuff in COBOL! I don’t think that this is some sign that programmers have fallen from grace. it’s weird for me, but only weird in the way that the future always turns out to be weird. Someone who can program and who also took a class in Automata Theory. A lot of what used to be computer science research is now just happening on Git Hub amongst people who don’t think that what they’re doing is computer science research. There’s niches all up and down the stack: there’s front and and back end hackers, and operating system hackers, right down to hardware hackers.

Graham said his company does not discriminate, and that any gender imbalance can be explained by the fact that girls don't start hacking at the same age boys do.

If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own.

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But it’s very hard to hire programmers if you’re not a programmer yourself, because you can’t judge them. So it’s good to just make yourself smarter in a very general way.

So yes, to some extent you can be a non-technical founder and somehow get programmers to do that stuff for you. Although Bill Gates might be a little bit difficult to have as an employee. Going to college expands your vision of the world: you can learn about all kind of other things that you might not have learned about.Coding is supposed to be the one thing anyone can learn and change their life with. Silicon Valley is supposed to be where bootstraps pick themselves up by the bootstraps and change the world.But apparently that's not an option for women because of they're too busy not being on the computer at 13-years-old. And what you want to do [by talking to users] is get them to use your stuff. So if you can’t build stuff, you have to talk to users.—and he has no clue how to get girls to care about tech," At one point Graham also said startups sometimes don't hire people who did not start hacking until studying computer science in college.This, according to Graham, is why there's some confusion.See, he meant to say "these women," as in the ones who didn't start hacking until college: Graham expanded his defense in emails to Valleywag.He was allegedly misquoted during an interview for a profile on his wife.) To summarize: girls aren't interested in hacking or coding at an early age, but sometimes they start in college, and then they'll have terrible job prospects because they didn't start early enough. That's a rough outlook for any women hoping to break into tech's boys club. Tiku put it best when she said he's merely "justifying the status quo," rather than examining a real problem.That these comments are coming from Graham, an extremely important and influential person in the tech world, is especially troubling."Here is a hacker hero—the figurehead behind Hacker News!