I am impressed by his determination. The Pando article says it best:
"Sayman's experience is one that perhaps could only be entirely appreciated here in Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurship, ingenuity, and building something out of nothing, or rather, out of lines of code, still holds cult-like status, for good or ill. Sayman doesn’t even seem to understand the power of his story.
He got his app where it is today not with millions or even thousands in venture capital. He didn’t get it where it is with Silicon Valley connections or hookups to the magic elves who pick what’s featured in the iOS app store. He didn’t get it with a team of developers or designers or a co-founder or even an incorporated company. He didn't even get it there with natural technical talent. Instead, it took sheer force of will and a refusal to back down to any of the obstacles he faced. That, and an unholy faith in the power of Google to answer his questions."
"“I watch my son, every night and every single day, staying up until 4 or 5 am, working on the app, doing his homework, sleeping two or three hours, and then going to school,” Cristina Sayman says. "
I'm sad to say, I don't do this :( , I struggle to find that much willpower, even though I believe in what I'm building.
> > “I watch my son, every night and every single day, staying up until 4 or 5 am, working on the app, doing his homework, sleeping two or three hours, and then going to school,” Cristina Sayman says. "
> I'm sad to say, I don't do this :( , I struggle to find that much willpower, even though I believe in what I'm building.
It's great to have ambition and follow through with a project but staying up all night, sleeping 3 hours and going to school completely tired isn't the way to do it, not healthy at all and it shouldn't be encouraged.
No reason to be sad - save your willpower for reasonable hours.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that insane productivity == success though. Remember this article that was posted last week on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10423455
I bet they could if they put the time into it and had the same level of interest. Being able to do that stuff isn't a magical attribute you're born with...
He worked hard at it. The innate aspect is that he has a natural interest and drive to make apps, and put his time into that as opposed to other things. Which I think a lot of us here can relate to. :)
> Being able to do that stuff isn't a magical attribute you're born with...
> The innate aspect is that he has a natural interest and drive to make apps, and put his time into that as opposed to other things.
Sure, many people fail due to a lack of effort but pretending everyone is equally intelligent is little more than an easily perpetuated self deception.
Genetics and early development [i.e. the first few years of a child's life] play a very large role in a person's ability to achieve things by the age of 20.
I hope young people reading that article realize it's talking about someone winning the lottery. There's statistically zero chance that will happen to you, so you'd better work on your exams than code through the night and fail them.
The second time around he gambled a bit, but he also put in the work to give his app the right amount of polish, struck a partnership with a marketing company, found a way to haggle with Parse, etc.
Sure, I won't dismiss luck as a factor, luck is always a factor when it comes to games, about a third of it probably, but the chance of someone just getting lucky from their game is, well, statistically zero (and probably the most offensive thing someone could ever tell you).
Statistically speaking, the chance of creating a successful game is slim, the chance of creating a successful startup (or even a small company) is slim, the chance of getting promoted to a really high level within the company is slim, the odds of a lot of nice thoughts happening within our lives are slim. The thing is that these odds are just averages, it's definitely within the realm of possibility to beat the averages. Having a rich uncle helps, but not nearly as much as having a better strategy than average, developing better partnerships than average, putting in more work than average, and being more determined than average.
And I will agree that you really shouldn't choose exams over app, but I can kinda relate with the kid, when your family loses their home and is struggling to make ends meet with their downsized apartment, thinking about acing your exams just isn't something you think about. Survival is on your mind and sometimes you come up with some pretty crazy ideas to make that happen.
Haven't ever had any teacher telling you to do something you didn't like to do, and then once you've done it, you realize how much better you've become at a given subject ?
That's also a part of learning, and a part of the advantage of having a teacher. Sometimes, you need to do things you don't like in the short term, that will prove to be an excellent thing in the long term.
Now i'm not saying someone shouldn't code in their spare time. Just don't trash your exams for it. Keep a balance. Maybe in a few years you'll realize you'll want to become a doctor and save lives rather than create video games. Keep the doors open.
>Haven't ever had any teacher telling you to do something you didn't like to do,
This is an important point. Let's face it, kids are socially stupid and inexperienced. They don't know what they want, what they need, what's good for them or even what's out there. Their worlds are small. 15 year old me would eat pizza every meal if it were my choice.
Allowing for the freedom of exploration is important, but so is a little bit of steering.
>There needs to be more people chasing their dreams rather then being cranked through the academia process.
I am reminded of the following story I experienced in my first year chemistry class. The class was being taught by the head of undergraduate studies for science and he asked us (a room of 500 students) how many people wanted to become chemists and maybe 20 or so people put up their hand. How many people want to become physicists? Maybe 30 or so put up their hand. How many people want to become doctors? A good 400 people put up their hand. He then said "only 20 of you will make it to med school, I hope you have a back-up plan."
The problem is that we only hear about the success stories not the vast amount of people who fail. That isn't to say don't follow your dreams, but be realistic about them and have other options available when things don't go your way.
TL;DR: imho there should be a balance between catching your passionate goals and broadening your knowledge pool by getting 'normal' education. Many success stories are marginal cases and can be compared to winning a lottery ticket.
Well I should agree with both of you.
Many success stories must be taken with a grain of salt. Some of them are truly like winning a lottery. Also making idols out of college/school dropouts is not very healthy for society over all.
I agree that today you can make descent money by making web/mobile applications, but do not think that you will be a millionaire or be hired by google/facebook/apple/etc within a year.
But if you are passionate about something you should (or even must) pursue it. IMHO marginal cases should not be idolised. I have seen too many people who believe that every one can code, though ignoring that software development requires great knowledge and education (formal or informal).
My school does not require any math for the CS program, aside from very basic discrete math (very very basic). While I wish we did more math, the people that graduate get jobs and seem to do just fine without the math background.
I mean, they're not working at Google, Facebook, or the NSA (though a lot go work for the CIA for some reason), but it doesn't seem like it sucks for them.
Linear algebra is incredibly useful and, when you know how to spot its shape, is just about everywhere.
A (long) while ago, one of my coworkers spent months putting together an enormous framework for processing some data. It was really well done - simple API, good error messages, verification at various steps, and reliable results. It was a little slow though. It was pushing 1 hour to complete a cycle, which was bumping up against other processes. A senior guy had a look at it, noticed that we could encode the data as a vector and apply some linear transformations to it, then decode afterwards. Thanks to lucky cache hits and BLAS, it took about 25 seconds to run.
I see. I think you hit an interesting point with that story: You may not need math to write an application, but it helps a lot when making it efficient and knowing which abstractions to use.
Personally, I'm going to spend some time after graduation teaching myself math. I think it can be incredibly helpful, even if it's just to improve my thinking.
Same for my school, though our discrete might be a bit less basic. I talked to the department head about it, specifically about calculus, and his answer was that in 30+ years of industry experience, getting a CS PhD (from an engineering university), etc. he had never used calculus in programming except as a type of problem to solve. He suggested people looking to go into fields that might require it to do a math or physics minor, but he saw no need to have everyone do it to get the major.
I find calculus to be a very useful set of mental models for framing problems, even if I'm not doing actual calculations with it. Understanding things like continuity, convergence, boundary conditions, gradients, etc... Almost everything you learn in a calculus course is a general problem-solving technique. (I'll say the same thing about Topology.)
Linear Algebra is almost worthless to most programmers. I challenge you to demonstrate otherwise. Of course it has use in specific industry. So what?
There's a lot of thinking that math is a fundamental part of software development. That was true when the problems were coming up with abstractions that required specific solutions. That hasn't been the focus of development, for decades. Welcome to the world of data processing and presentation (the vast majority of time and effort is in UI).
Yes, but for math to be really important few of those are a developer doing e.g. cryptography, it's a cryptographer doing programming. I worked in one of those fields and it would be at least ten times the developers to people "doing math" and they where highly educated in that field.
Cryptographers are computer scientists/developers, though. If you want to do something "real," other than make pretty buttons, that is, you're going to have to do some math.
Most business and web programmers would find it useless, perhaps, but if you're wanting to go into video games, simulation, physics, aerospace, robotics/internet of things (i.e. sensors), or the about to explode virtual reality field, you will most likely benefit quite a bit from linear algebra.
I've found it much more useful than my calculus classes, personally (although calculus is also useful to know for most of these industries).
Yes, those are specific industries, but that's quite a few specific industries. There's probably others that could benefit from it as well.
That's more because math is important to those fields though. If you're making e.g. a video game math is a very small part of the overall work. It's cool as a hobby if you can go "I know math and I know programming, therefor I can make this game like thing". But if you wanna work as a game programmer your better off focusing on that and figuring out whatever math you need along the way.
Studying and coding aren't mutually exclusive. Most people who program for a living did so by studying and exams. It's not sexy but then real life mostly isn't.
There are plenty of people "chasing their dreams" but a lot (most?) of them will have to settle for less because of the way the world works.
you can chase all the dreams you want. It doesn't change the fact that chances this happening to someone else is almost 0. He's not the only person with a passion. Many superb software engineers to be won't get the opportunity he got.
>There needs to be more people chasing their dreams rather then being cranked through the academia process.
That's really bad advice. Going through a formal learning process is going to help you to understand not only technology but also processes. And you are also going to meet there a lot of people with similar interests. Not studying when you want a job in the industry is taking an extremely hard path (that's why is news that some on achieves it) for the sake of it.
And you always can do both. I know a lot of people that goes to University and develop software in their spare time.
getting an app to the top of the app store is probably mostly luck in this context. But landing a good job at a respected technology company was the result of some serious hard work and dedication. Not failing exams is nonetheless good advice for anyone
Exams can be retaken. If you fail because you are dumb there's not much you can do but if you fail because you were building something cool then that's fixable.
Is this sarcasm? I suppose if you fail and have to retake the class, then you can "retake" the exam, but that closes a lot of doors when trying to get in to a good college. And most likely if you're "not dumb", you'll end up with a C on the exam and pass the class with a low grade, rather than outright failing it. In which case you would not be able to retake the exam.
Somewhat funny coincidence that the top picture on your twitter (linked from your profile) is of the former prime minister of Sweden who changed the rules for student loans so they can be suspended after failing just one exam.
If I'd read this "pre-teen" (when the article said he started) I'm pretty sure I would have been like, "that's what I'm going to do".
I remember a friend and I had grandiose plans for a Harry Potter themed MMO. We never got past the 'loading' screen because, y'know, we were ~12 and having a loading screen seemed like a prior job to having anything to load..
Wow, the original article uses proper English. The version the OP posted seems like a rough derivative. For example, confusing Hustle version:
"The next great idea came when Michael watched his younger sister, Mariana, play on her phone. She was basically playing a hacked iOS charades game that Michael had created. The game was to take four photos, slap them into a collage, and make her friends guess the word she was acting out."
The much better original...
'Inspiration struck one day while he watched his younger sister Mariana playing on her phone with a friend. She was taking pictures and giggling. “I was texting my friend one day and we were bored so I started sending her a collage of four pictures and making her guess the word and she would do the same,' Mariana Sayman told me. 'Michael saw what I was doing and thought it would be a great idea for an app.'
Michael Sayman explained his thinking, 'I knew this was going to be a huge app. I knew it because my sister liked it before it even existed.'"
Yes, and a reason why they only hire very young people is that they haven't yet learned that saying yes to everything or putting employer before the private life won't help them in the long run.
It's difficult to know without more specifics of why he got the full-time position. It's a great accomplishment for him but his app didn't sound as technically rigorous as the interview or job requirements Facebook would give a 30-something. It's probably the same reason the news finds teenagers passing college calculus/physics fascinating but not so with 30 year olds. His app could have also solved a lot of technical problems that 30 year olds couldn't in interviews and maybe he blew through Facebook's technical interviews easily.
If part of a sufficiently well-connected seed funded startup team that didn't have a business plan beyond hitting the top ten in the App Store, there's a realistic prospect they'd be acqui-hired at a cost of >£1m per person to Facebook.
Getting a teenager who's done it the hard way, probably for a fraction of that outlay, sounds like a smart move.
"Sayman's experience is one that perhaps could only be entirely appreciated here in Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurship, ingenuity, and building something out of nothing, or rather, out of lines of code, still holds cult-like status, for good or ill. Sayman doesn’t even seem to understand the power of his story.
He got his app where it is today not with millions or even thousands in venture capital. He didn’t get it where it is with Silicon Valley connections or hookups to the magic elves who pick what’s featured in the iOS app store. He didn’t get it with a team of developers or designers or a co-founder or even an incorporated company. He didn't even get it there with natural technical talent. Instead, it took sheer force of will and a refusal to back down to any of the obstacles he faced. That, and an unholy faith in the power of Google to answer his questions."
"“I watch my son, every night and every single day, staying up until 4 or 5 am, working on the app, doing his homework, sleeping two or three hours, and then going to school,” Cristina Sayman says. "
I'm sad to say, I don't do this :( , I struggle to find that much willpower, even though I believe in what I'm building.