That is the traditional view, the view of those who want to improve their own knowledge and abilities, and presumably the view of those who would like to consider the degree to be a meaningful credential.
However I suspect that there are many who 1) are more concerned about the short term outcome, 2) consider the degree/diploma to be little more than a meal ticket or arbitrary gatekeeping without any connection to learning, 3) view the work as a pointless barrier to being handed said diploma, and/or 4) don't see the value of human learning in a world where jobs are done by AI and AI systems routinely outperform humans on complex tasks.
I'm curious about the objective competence of recent graduates compared to previous cohorts, not just in tech but in basic literacy and numeracy.
A lot of Gen Z are ferociously anti-AI, but for tribal and emotional reasons, not because of a nuanced understanding - which is ironic, because the nuanced reasons for being wary of AI are much stronger than the usual talking points about "stealing art".
Being tribal and emotional is going to make Gen Z easier to replace, because nuanced strategic insight is less common and more useful.
You say that but I was a Class of 2013, aka during the massive hiring boom of the teens. I tutored a friend of mine with a Ds get Degrees mentality who eventually graduated and now works an ass-in-seat job for Booz Allen or one of those types. I used to joke about it with another friend, that his diploma ought to include an asterisk and a half dozen other names for how much we ultimately did on his grades take homes. I’m pretty sure he makes about the same as me by now purely on tenure.
Personally, I dropped out despite a full ride+ becuase why would I put in work for a no name state school when I already has an FTE job as a developer out of high school anyway.
Turns out fraudulent action can still get the bag.
I agree with your premise about why accurate evaluation matters, but your post comes across as pretty bitter. Unless you’re at the job with him, you really don’t know that it’s a “I just need to show up” job he has at Booz Allen. Perhaps he has other great traits like a high social or emotional intelligence that make him good at his job beyond whatever was being evaluated on those projects you helped him with.
I think you're missing the point. The majority of jobs at companies like Booz Allen are sort of like Kabuki theater and don't require any technical competence. The main responsibilities are to show up on time and present a certain image to customers.
Part of the purpose for evaluation is to provide feedback. I'm not going to claim that the form of feedback is great, but it does offer motivation to improve.
The other thing that feedback feeds into is credentials. I realize that some people are dismissive of this aspect of the degree, but it is important to pursue further studies or secure a job. While you can argue that these people are only cheating themselves, and some of them are cheating themselves, a great many will continue to cheat as they advance in academia or the workforce. In other words, they are cheating others out of opportunities.
You can imagine a world where the Corporate or State AI handles education, tailors it to individual student levels and talents, and assigns work based on its own direct experience of a lifetime of interaction.
You can also imagine that in that world where most humans would be redundant - unless the AI was optimising for human-to-human jobs and for evidence of unusual insight and creativity, not managing bullshit work for corporate profit.
The problem is that Universities are no longer institutions where people who want to can go to educate themselves but have instead been turned into the first part of your job interview. In this world, Universities are judged on how well they evaluate their students.
you must never have actually done this. it doesn't work the way you think it does. unless it's self contained (like a pp), you can't expect network access to actually deliver when you need it most.
Crossed 100K MRR as a solo founder for Zigpoll[1] - honestly I never thought I would get this far with the product so now it's all about trying to market and keep growth strong. Doubling YoY gets harder each year so you always have to find new growth channels (or ways to improve existing channels). This is an interesting task especially given the current environment.
I used to think "if you build it they will come" but, as it turns out, it's much more nuanced than that and requires a lot of iterating and stumbling along the way. I hope to break into another vertical this year!
Keeping the servers online for 90 days is a very good thing.
This final donation run doesn't change the timeline unless it gets a big amount of money, in which case is it supposed to be bad for them to change plans?
I solo founded a business and it just crossed 100K MRR (still solo). The trick is:
1. Don't give up after the first month of no traction, if you can get at least 1 customer at this stage that is a good sign.
2. Make contact with every customer you acquire, find out why they installed your product and what they want from it. Build any feature that they say is missing and offer the best customer support possible
3. Repeat this for a period of time. Once you have more customers the circumstances will change but this how you go from 0 -> 1 and get some runway IMO
Good advice. Do you think the part of point two about building every feature request might be a bit risky for some solo folks?
It’s easy to get carried away building every request, especially with early adopters who likely aren’t actually invested yet but may be excited about their own vision for it.
My personal experience is that too much of it leads to the product becoming a sort of shapeless, unwieldy ooze. Or perfect for one customer and few others. Some things can be tough to undo later too, so you might end up supporting them a lot longer than you’d like.
I agree there needs to be a way to fit it into the overall product direction. Solving these on a case-by-case basis is important and part of the job.
When I first started, getting customer reviews was my north star, so i would add any feature and hide them under "advanced" if they were ridiculously long-tail. Still worth it for the review and positive experience even if you hide the feature...
I think at that point founder taste comes in. “Strong opinions loosely held” comes to mind, in that you should already have some pretty strong ideas about where you want your product to go. Otherwise why build it? or maybe, why you specifically?
Being open to being wrong and course correcting when enough people tell you so is the loosely held part.
You've to go into founder mode - solve problems that exist for customers you've already discovered, rather than build something and expect magical "marketing" to find customers. The latter was previously a weak strategy, and is completely gone with the AI era. No alternative to working very closely with customers.
Honestly, I'm still not quite seeing how this fits into marketing. I get that we're focusing on our current customers, but how do we actually bring in new ones?
No magic pill: you can't work backwards. Pivot away from current idea if it's not getting word of mouth or any other traction, and for the next idea start with finding problems for people in your network that they will pay for.
Go looking for them wherever you think they might gather or hang out (online or in person). Reach out to those who seem like a good fit and ask them about the problem(s) they’re having that your product solves. Once you know if your product would actually solve it well for them, tell them about it in earnest.
If you’re doing that honestly, where they really have that problem and you actually have a good solution, you’d be a jerk not to lightly pitch it at that point.
You could probably do that up to 100 or so customers reasonably easily.
I used the shopify app store to get the first customers - i think an app store is still the way to go since they handle a lot of the customer outreach for you. that said, there are a lot of other ways to niche down - discord communities, subreddits, private boards, etc... come to mind as good places to start
I’m working on Zigpoll[https://www.zigpoll.com], a lightweight survey/feedback tool for ecommerce (mostly Shopify).
Built it because most survey tools felt overgrown for what I needed. It focuses on post-purchase and on-site surveys, attribution questions, and getting clean data out.
Lately I’ve been working on:
Simpler targeting + survey logic
Exposing survey data to AI tools
Improving response rates without nagging users
It’s bootstrapped, profitable, and built by one person (me).
My one-person project Zigpoll [https://www.zigpoll.com] I've cracked the eCommerce market (1M ARR as of a couple days ago) but want to spread out more broadly into other verticals (SaaS, Hotels, Restaurants, Home Services, etc...) to reduce sector risk. If anyone is cooking something up please reach out and I'll be happy to hook you up with the service for free. [jason@zigpoll.com]
It’s literally all just context engineering. Just different ways of attempting to give the model the information it needs to complete your task. This is not a significant change to your interaction model with Claude
A lot of our customers use post purchase surveys and on-site surveys to help with this sort of thing. For example a really common use-case is an attribution survey which appears after a sale is made. The survey will ask something like "how did you hear about us?" which helps determine what actually drove the sale so they can get some clear insights outside of Google and Meta. It's not perfectly reliable but it's an additional data point that helps with the mess out there...
reply