Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you?

Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by Maro on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @12:26PM (#313686)

"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."

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Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by menloparkbum on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @03:00PM (#313898)

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.

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Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by pg on Thursday September 25, 2008 @04:27AM (#314667)

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.

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Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by Harj on Monday September 29, 2008 @11:33PM (#319233)

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.

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Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by rantfoil on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @12:58PM (#313743)

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.

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Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by wheels on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:06PM (#313833)

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.

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Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by pg on Thursday September 25, 2008 @04:25AM (#314666)

What is a "Javascript developer" exactly? Do you mean someone like Paul Buchheit?

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Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by wheels on Thursday September 25, 2008 @03:33PM (#315274)

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.

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Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by brlewis on Friday September 26, 2008 @02:55PM (#316383)

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.

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Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by comatose_kid on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:14PM (#313844)

I guess it depends on what you're doing with the Javascript.

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Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by Maro on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:28PM (#313858)

"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."

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Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by marketer on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @03:58PM (#313991)

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.

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Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by skalpelis on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @08:35PM (#314289)

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.

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Re:Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? by alex_c on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @11:48PM (#314494)

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).

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