20% cut? For match-making on private music lessons? Fuck that. Our local music store charges less than that for renting an hour in a soundproof room! And the discoverability/match-making "platform" is a free bulletin board next to the restroom...
Also love how that email described the radical act of checking the local music store's bulletin board (or going and asking a friend/coworker/etc. for a recommendation) as "under-the-table neighborhood activity".
And the existing competitors are apparently charging a 40% cut!
Even more depressingly, good music teachers, once they get established, will typically have as many students as they want through word of mouth alone. So the teachers you'll find who are desperate for students and willing to give up a 20-40% cut are probably mediocre.
Who actually thinks that a(ny) startup is going to be able to provide consistently higher-quality referrals than an actual word of mouth referral from someone you know?
I went to a bad No-Name University for undergraduate and then Top Tier University for phd school, so I have an unusually representative view here.
I do agree that, for CS, the no-name university was... bad. Fortunately, I realized this early and did a lot of self-study. I probably learned more reading taocp and going through MIT open courseware courses in the library during the evenings than I learned in my actual undergraduate courses.
The mathematics courses, even at No Name, definitely provided me with a better education than I could have ever gotten on my own. I'm pretty bad at math, it was my worst subject in high school. So I double-majored in it during undergraduate. This dovetails with your advice to use university as a time to learn things you already tried and failed to learn on your own, or which you otherwise know will be difficult to learn on your own.
The CS education that undergraduates get at Top Tier University is far better than what I got, even though I worked through that Top Tier University's online courseware/lecture notes/exercises during undergraduate on my own.
My hot take: college is always worth it, but only if you intentionally invest in "leveling-up" past your previous potential.
That will happen almost by default at Top Tier unless you're a genius (...but you'll pay a lot for it). But not if you're going to university at No Name. So, in that case, students should definitely a) minor or even double-major in something they're not good at, and b) heavily supplement their CS courses during evenings/weekends.
Also, this is all highly specific to very self-motivated learners -- the sort for whom "self-taught" is a reasonable route. I'm one of those people. Over time, I've realized that we're a very small minority. Our perceptions of what others are capable of learning on their own, and prescriptions for how others should learn, are typically quite warped. Most people probably do need something like a 4 year college degree to become a competent programmer.
From his GH profile looks like he's a competitive applicant for ML engineering positions or perhaps a fellowship/residency/PhD program.
So, a junior researcher at the level of a decent second or third year PhD student. A researcher, maybe someone you'd trust to build a prototype or product, lots of potential, but probably not someone you'd trust to run a research program.
Yeah, assigning open/recently solved problems seems to be relatively common in graduate theory/aglo courses, at least relative to other subfields of CS and math. Not sure why. It always struck me as not the most productive use of problem set time. But then, what do I know about teaching theory :)
These classes often encourage you to collaborate - with others in the class, and also with outside resources. That is: they would encourage you to go read the paper, so long as you cited it as a source and provided a proof in your own words you had reconstructed from memory. The idea is to encourage engagement in the community and teach people to build off of existing results, a skill often overlooked in undergrad where that would have been considered cheating.
> I’m curious about which type of products you have been working on and what type of product decisions the engineers you have been working with have done.
IME: technically-trained PMs are worth their weight in gold. PMs without a technical background are extremely dangerous liabilities.
Context: Mostly b2b products where careful judgement on technical feasibility is the difference between "useless" and "game-changer".
> Engineers who understand anything to business and product management are extremely rare. And people who are good at it and genuinely interested in it usually move to this role
It depends. Only if they don't take a huge paycut by moving into the PM role, and only if the org is willing to let them move into the PM role.
Many business are not willing to lose highly productive engineers with niche skillsets and are not willing to pay PMs as much as they pay their senior engineers.
IME, senior engineer -> executive/founder is a lot more common than senior engineer -> PM. But it's not because engineers can't be product people... sorta the opposite.
> a lot of PMs are actually just projects managers instead of being product managers.
PMs are ideally senior engineers who've learned how to communicate with customers, salespeople, and clients (both senior management and end-users).
Unfortuantely, many companies/projects/teams don't budget properly for the PM role and you end up with MBAs or other non-technical business folk, who are often 1/3 to 1/2 the price of good technical PMs.
> I'm not sure we will still be a society if we eliminate family bonds.
There's a significant difference between not having nepotism and eliminating family bonds.
> We are tribal and protect our families.
Many of virtuous_signal's arguments boiled down to the observation that protecting your family via nepotism or dynastic preference isn't even necessarily good for the effected family member in the long run. I think that poster makes a good argument that dynastic preference in university admissions is a net negative for its beneficiaries.
The negatives of nepotism also show up in business, where, with rare exception, nepotism tends to genereate a huge drain on both productivity and external respect.
Doing something about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act seems way more important than fixing publishing...