I think it is funny that the YC crowd points to "naughty" when it benefits them and says things like "Am I supposed to feel sorry for someone that got caught exploiting online games?" when it doesn't.
When someone will take apart a game for fun, for better or for worse and often both, it is intrinsic. We praise capncrunch and damn this guy?
I'm sorry you lost your parents Scott. Congratulations on your child and marriage. YC is a mixed bag but I feel home here too.
There are a lot of ways to hack the world. I'm not sure if you've picked inconsistent/risky ones because of personality type/thrill or because it is where you landed. If its where you landed, move toward the center.
Sounds like you've got the basic small business skills to sell many things and you don't require permission or motivation to do so.
Consider hacking on your life instead of the games. What do you know that's inefficient where you are and could be interesting?
I hear heavy equipment auctions are big and profitable in rural areas and I know from experience it is a space software hasn't touched.
Pick a product or set of products (wave energy harvesting equipment?) and niche it via PPC. See what the market is like for them on eBay.
Go with the black hat and get picked up by a security consulting firm. I've rarely seen them be degree choosy with people who have the chops.
Don't make the mistake of thinking the only interesting things are on the fringes.
Lastly, ignore the rest of the noise of this thread. Keep your head up. Stay interested. Stay playful.
Thanks for this comment. It's filled with warmth and insight. "We praise capncrunch and damn this guy" is a great point.
I don't think the responses here are a single "YC crowd" being hypocritical. The thread is more interesting than that. It's at least two different groups having polarized responses to the article.
One group is rule-oriented and binary, quickly seizes on any violation of the (personal or social) code they believe in, and extends that into a personal judgment of the violator. Such people often express their judgments harshly. It's worth remembering that the same harshness inevitably applies to themselves; one doesn't get to handle that acid with gloves.
The other group, of course, identifies with the author's pluck and self-motivation and doesn't hold his dodgy beginnings against him. They don't necessarily support the cheating but admire the ingenuity more, and are generally more indulgent. They probably read the story as what PG called being "relentlessly resourceful".
This dichotomy plays out on HN all the time, though rarely so vividly. Both groups are well-represented both on HN and among programmers in general.
I think there's a great point inside your comment, but that the way you have expressed it is unkindly biased against those on what I surmise to be the opposite of your side of the debate.
When describing the first group, you use lots of seemingly negative descriptions: "rule-oriented and binary", "quickly seizes on any violation", "extends that into a personal judgment", "express their judgments harshly", and "that acid".
When describing the other group you use lots of positive language: "pluck and self-motivation", "admire the ingenuity", "generally more indulgent", and "relentlessly resourceful". Plus there is an appeal to PG's authority on this site.
There are positive and negative aspects of both sides here, and I think you're being pretty harsh toward one of the factions.
You're right: I'm biased on this one [1], it affects the words I use, and (most interestingly to me, because I didn't notice it until later), my comment contained some of the quality it was criticizing. If you or anyone wants to write a fairer description, I'd read it with interest. On sunny days I imagine a community in which people would figure these things out together and communication would level up as a result.
1. Originally I wrote that I was a "card-carrying member of the second group", but edited that out after imagining someone taking the joke literally.
I understand his stance, but I don't think the point really stand up.
Articles about SPAM can be engaging. But, that hardly means people support the activity. IMO, duping in online games is the same basic thing as it's a classic free rider problem. People are not going to buy duped items in a single player game it's only the 'non' duping players that make item duping a profitable activity and their game play is harmed by it.
Performance enhancing drugs fall into the same category. The methods/chemistry might be interesting, but clearly 'clean' athletes (and arguably the fans) are harmed by the activity.
PS: Or can you actually see a benefit from doping that I am missing?
I think the problem isn't entirely the badness, but that the author seems so oblivious to it despite its pervasiveness in the piece.
If the guy had said early on, "Ok, now I realize that part of my problem is that my business was essentially parasitical, and I'm trying to learn from that" I would have been able to read the rest of the article with more equanimity.
I really do admire his pluck, and for his age he is learning a lot of hard lessons. But reading this reminded me of watching a horror movie where some goof obliviously walks along with the serial killer right behind them. You just want to shout, "TURN AROUND! LOOK BEHIND YOU!" So I'm not shocked that commenters have to get that off their chests before they can process the rest of it.
It also reminds me of the conversations I had in the mid-1990s with spammers, because back then you could actually track 'em down and get 'em on the phone. They had this same inability to see that they were their own worst enemy. They saw problems on all sides and thought the world was against them. But really, the common factor in the problems was them.
It is for all of us, of course. But it can be hard to watch others struggle with that.
...quickly seizes on any violation of the (personal or social) code they believe in...
I'm in this camp but not for this reason. I disagree with what he did because it made games I paid for no longer fun.
The real world is chock full of secret exploits that get relentlessly ground that then allow people with more money to spend to get ahead of me. I was hoping my games didn't have to be like that too.
Re "They don't support the cheating": this person struggles with debt and death. Great if they made desperately needed money from some gaming corporation's bugs. By playing a metagame which is probably more fun than the intended game.
Unless there's some awful crime I missed, I commend the author's hacking (if they want such a commendation).
> Such people often express their judgments harshly. It's worth remembering that the same harshness inevitably applies to themselves; one doesn't get to handle that acid with gloves.
That's just world theory. The real nature of the thing is, that if they maintain that kind of cognitive dissonance, they never reap the benefits of conquering their own biases. But this sort of "judges judging judges", I always seem to get lost in it as well.
> This dichotomy plays out on HN all the time, though rarely so vividly. Both groups are well-represented both on HN and among programmers in general.
It does, but I think calling it a dichotomy is a misrepresentation. In complex systems, black and white are arbitrary, it just depends on what content you highlight and compose inferences from, and what you discard.
This seems like an oddly reductive take, to me. It's possible to appreciate the pluck and ingenuity while being utterly dismayed by the lack of judgement and self-reflection. And this dismay need not come purely from some misplaced urge for opprobrium.
His broken moral compass and naive sense of entitled victimhood are preventing him from leveraging his talents to find the kind of work that he wants. You can easily be misguidedly "relentlessly resourceful". Just like you can be both fascinated and saddened to see it happen.
I agree with your first paragraph. It's not only possible to see multiple sides to this, it's sane. But you may have missed my point, which is that comments in the thread tended to take one side or the other.
Your second paragraph, I think, goes way too far. I don't believe you have nearly enough information to make that judgment. In fact, you can't have it, because it mostly depends on what the author learns (or doesn't learn) from his mistakes, which means it depends on the future.
On rescanning the thread, you probably right about the first bit.
And we are definitely reacting to each others' notions of how bothered one ought to be by his behaviour.
'Broken moral compass' may be a little harsh but I think you are perhaps swayed too far by the display of resourcefulness and the 'virtualness' and triviality of the setting. I'd see it differently if he were a 14 year old kid, figuring out how the world works. But he's an adult (with a spouse and a mortgage) who more or less tried to extort the developers of the mmorpg into giving him a job. This seems like sufficient information to conclude that he has rather poor ethical judgement or at least, a great deal of ethical obliviousness.
It reminds me a bit of a part of 'Reflections on Trusting Trust' that is rarely cited or recalled - open it up when you have a chance and re-read the last three paragraphs of the last section 'Moral'.
> Thanks for this comment. It's filled with warmth and insight. "We praise capncrunch and damn this guy" is a great point
...
> One group is rule-oriented and binary, quickly seizes on any violation of the (personal or social) code they believe in, and extends that into a personal judgment of the violator. Such people often express their judgments harshly. It's worth remembering that the same harshness inevitably applies to themselves; one doesn't get to handle that acid with gloves.
Captain Crunch, from what I've read, hacked the phone system to make free long distance calls, and used that ability to play around doing things like routing call loops around the world. He probably caused some monetary harm to the phone company, but did not interfere with the use of the system by ordinary users.
Exploiting dupe bugs in MMORPGs and trading game items for non-game currency does interfere with the ordinary players of the games. Most people want games they play to be fair. In an MMORPG, that means what my character achieves in the game world should be determined as much as possible by what I do in the game world. There should be as little spill-over from the real world to the game world.
The real world cannot be completely kept out, of course. Someone with more disposable income can buy better hardware to run the game on, which can give better frame rates and let them turn on more visual effects. This can let them play their character more effectively, and so give them an in-game advantage. Someone who can afford to take time off can do time consuming things in-game that those of who have to go to work cannot.
Still, for the most part it used to be that getting the good stuff in-game came from earning it in-game. The exploiters and the traders of items for dollars changed that. If's frustrating when you are struggling to complete a quest for some rare item, or work you way to some rare monster that drops powerful loot, and you are beaten out by some lower level party that has a huge advantage because they were decked out with rare powerful armor and weapons no one of their level should have been able to obtain but they bought for real-world money from some dupe bug exploiter.
So yes, I can praise (well...I wouldn't go that far..make it "not be bothered by") Captain Crunch but damn running an MMORPG dupe exploiting business.
> The other group, of course, identifies with the author's pluck and self-motivation and doesn't hold his dodgy beginnings against him.
I don't hold his dodgy beginnings against him either. My problem with him is that it sounds like he gave up the dodgy business only because he was down to one exploit and was getting a bit burned out. It sounds like whether is next business is good or is dodgy will likely be determined by whether he happens to come across a good opportunity first or a dodgy opportunity first. There's no sign of repentance for the dodgy business.
I mean if you like breaking things for fun, work for a digital security company and get paid to do it. Be the guy who is paid to do penetration tests and the like.
To be fair, he's more or less already a "black hat" insofar that he's profited off of the arguably illegal use of computer systems.
I wouldn't be so hasty to dismiss HN's attitude towards his previous company -- I think if he tries to get a job and cites his "dupe" work, he's going to be surprised how few folks will be willing to work with him.
I work for a security firm (FireEye, woo we're hiring!) and while I'm not specifically on the consulting side, I get the sense that it's a very straight-laced bunch of folks who take their jobs incredibly seriously.
You don't want to walk into an interview with a guy who works with the FBI on the regular and confess to constantly, repeatedly, and profitably committing a computer crime. It's just not going to work well for you, all moralization aside.
My Dad has been selling heavy equipment. There are plenty of online auction sites but an in person auction is incredibly effective. Also, industry magazines and local publications often advertise heavy equipment. Most rural folks I know don't have reliable internet and a good portion of the demographic doesn't use the internet. I really don't see a good market here.
Thank you very much for your kind and helpful response. I expected this post to get very little attention, but in the overwhelming response it's been amazing to read comments like yours.
Thankfully my mother is still alive, and is enjoying checking off what she still can from her bucket list. We're very grateful she's done well with the chemo so far.
Hacking my life is exactly what I've been up to recently. I'm learning, as fast as I can, everything I'll need to know to be the full stack developer for the project I'm working on. I'm so thankful for the free resources available to learn from.
>When someone will take apart a game for fun, for better or for worse and often both, it is intrinsic.
OP was taking apart a game for profit, not fun. Taking apart a game to because you have an intrinsic drive to understand how things work is one thing. Taking apart a game to exploit glitches to make real life money is completely different - that's why people get irritated at this and I don't think you understand that. In games with markets and limited drops, it's understandable that it pisses people off - introducing duped items lowers the value of every instance of that item in the market, which affects people who legitimately play the game. Hacking a single player game to make yourself a demigod in it is awesome because it doesn't affect other people.
I don't know who capncrunch is and I can't speak to what you perceive as some kind of HN bias, but I'm reading this thread and seeing many different responses posted by individual people. The most hostile comment I've read is yours.
Lastly, ignore the rest of the noise of this thread.
This is really obnoxious. You're essentially dismissing everyone else's opinion in this thread, whether you've read it and understood it or not. You have no idea about what OP is doing, who they are, or what they're capable of and or what their context is and you're saying "ignore all advice but mine." Incredibly arrogant and dismissive towards the rest of the community.
I understand how painful economy-ruining exploits can be as a player who has been through that multiple times when exploiters acted in carelessness or disregard. I didn't express it well enough in the article, but one of the most difficult parts of the business was finding the balance where I could please the maximum number of item-buying players without even putting a dent in the value of those items in the economy. It was just as important to me that the items retain their maximum value.
Due to everyone's obliviousness and doubt about the exploit, I think I was successful in maintaining that balance. I believe I was watching the economies at least as close as the game developer. It wasn't until after foreign gold-selling companies got their hands on a different dupe method years later and acted with complete disregard for the game's economy that anyone had even noticed.
I think you are too wrapped up in the morality of something that doesn't even come close to a real business. It seems a lot of people on here play these games so they find it easy to feed some anger into this topic. I can tell you that most people are probably indifferent to fairness in online games and won't be calling their senator any time soon.
One of many lessons I learned from this overwhelming surge of feedback in such a short period was about how quickly I gave into my instinct to defend myself. Instead of using excuses to justify my mistakes and moral shortcomings, I really should have put more effort into reflecting on the comments that were tough to read. I need to do that better in the future.
I am grateful for all of the perspectives everyone has expressed. It's been a great learning experience, and I've become aware of more of my faults that I can now consciously work to improve.
As the father of a three year old and an English BA holder in his second year professionally programming, I can relate.
As someone who inputs on hiring, I would recommend that you become a serial project completer rather than just a starter. I don't get the impression of follow through, which is unfortunately what the unfinished degree also communicates. The only way to combat this is to choose smaller chunks (don't start with solving energy) and see them through to decisive conclusion.
What is something you can build in six months that does not require government funding and also teaches you something for that bigger project?
It's very typical for people in demanding positions to learn that even really good ideas are quite common and not even that valuable. Good execution of good ideas is however extremely rare and is also extremely valuable.
The above recommendation is really really good. Anyone can start ambitious projects but only a rare few actually can finish them.
Great story. Many parallels to the performance marketing and affiliate worlds, where mostly young people stumble into great opportunities, usually exploiting loopholes or underserved markets such as this, and suddenly start printing a thousand dollars a day in profit. The vast majority of them know, deep down, that it can't last, but somehow still end up getting lulled into a feeling of complacency. That's the feeling I got from your post too. You are definitely not alone in your experience, and you already learned the most important lesson, which is you don't need anyone's permission to start a project and see if it works. If you're ever in a similar situation again, take the money day by day and remind yourself that at some point the ATM machine is going to shut down. Of the dozen or so liquid USD millionaire affiliates I knew in my 20s, I'd say half are bankrupt or close to it today.
Thanks for sharing your story Scott; I've lurked on HN far longer and never had the courage to stick my neck out like you have today. I hope this leads to something amazing for you and your family!
Thank you so much for your kind comment. Like mentioned in another comment, my post was primarily meant to be cathartic. I didn't expect it to get much attention so I've been kind of overwhelmed by the responses.
It's interesting to read the story of someone else who has profited from the exploitation of video games.
I did so from a more human perspective, I sold gold either bought from other player characters or harvested using automation in popular MMOs.
I would have never thought of it as a business. My income was steady for 5 + years, and not a day went by where I didn't consider the possibility of the game company wiping out all of my 'assets' in entirety, leaving me penniless had I not saved, and worst -- jobless.
Fun times. Thanks for writing this, although I think that "I would've been a great employee at..." is too speculative. It's so hard to say without actually doing it, it's not just your own skills/actions that you have to worry about in business.
How does someone get 100k in debt from undergrad? Is that a thing? I know folks with graduate and professional degrees from not-very-cheap institutions who aren't at the 100k mark. That's med school level.
I too haven't graduated from college, and I have had no trouble finding work because of it. AOL wouldn't look at my resumé, and I assume other large companies won't either, but there are a ton of startups and other shops that will beg you to work for them if you demonstrate a clear ability to excel in their environment. This is probably the most non-graduate friendly career industry out there.
Your first step should be to get a job, and QA sounds like a great place for you. You'd be surprised how easy it is to move out of QA and into dev if you can demonstrate aptitude for development tasks. Many people got their foot in the door this way, including myself.
Anyway, I bet this was cathartic to write, but I dunno what I was supposed to take from this. Selling illicit goods is a high-risk endeavor?
In-state price at a good state school is about $22k/year with room and board.
Figure you work a minimum wage 40 hours a week for 12 weeks during the summer. There's $3480. Now, figure you average 10 hours a week for the other 40 weeks of the year. There's $2900. Figure you're an outstanding student, so you got a one-time $2000 scholarship payout from winning a bunch of awards in high school.
There's a good chance at many large state schools that, even if you're focused, you'll need an extra semester or two due to limited course availability. Not counting the possibility of recovery from a leave of absence related to (mental) illness or family emergency, etc. Let's say you do one summer semester and it costs exactly half of a traditional year's net price.
So we're looking at:
+ $99k in bills and spending
- $10k for 3 summers of work
- $13k for 9 semesters of work
- $2k in total merit scholarship payout.
That leaves us with a $74k education. If mom and dad aren't buying, then there's $75k in principal. At 6.8% over 10 years (the federal government's deal, but it's capped; your actual rate from the private sector will be worse) that's $102k in payments.
That's for someone who did the "responsible" thing: went to state school, got scholarships, and worked continuously.
Now imagine that you go to a private school where the price after need-based financial aid is in the $30k-$40k range. Or, worse, that you go to private school and your parents are rich, so you qualify for no need-based financial aid at all, but your parents still don't want to fund your education. Then you're looking at $60k/year.
See where this is going? It's easier than you might think.
I found this a little bit hard to believe. I managed to graduate from a state school with no debt at all (neglible scholarships, small amount of savings, worked as an RA for a bit and did a decently paying 3 semester co-op).
I have to think some of that has to do with the exploding cost of tuition and fees (I started 10 years ago), but I can't be exactly sure. Thanks for the post.
Heh, the comments are piling up, and I'm willing to admit maybe my experience isn't the norm, but what you're saying does make sense.
Like I said though, I know a bunch of post-grad folks who aren't hitting $100k. It's just a big clash with what I've seen, to hear 100k after just four years.
The other thing that matters is when you got your degree. Graduating even 5 years ago means you've likely had to take on less debt than someone who graduated this year.
I went to a school (Middlebury) with pretty generous financial aid and ended up owing ~80K in student loans after four years. I picked Middlebury in part because they were the only school of their type to offer full need-based financial aid. For reference, I graduated in 1997.
100K in American undergraduate debt unfortunately does not sound surprising.
I went to a state school over 15 years ago, and while I haven't done the math, I'm almost positive my total expenses over four years exceeded 100k even then. I was lucky enough to have money from my parents, good paying jobs (for a student) and some scholarships and grants, so I walked away with only about $20k of debt. But I think these days it would be really easy to rack up $100k.
It's pretty easy! It's not hard to find schools where tuition and fees end up at about $20k/yr. Housing in many college towns is expensive, so that's another $5k/yr. Then there's normal cost of living, so lets call it another $2k/yr. Multiply by 4, take interest of lets say 3% into account, and hey presto, you're quite a ways over $100k!
The even sadder thing is that those are fairly conservative numbers. Out of state tuition and fees at many state schools can get up to the $30k range (I went to CU-Boulder, which is apparently up to $33,151 now), $5k for housing is cheap, $2k for expenses is pretty low, and 3% interest is very low.
The average amount of student debt from undergrad is $33k.
How you go to three times that is difficult to comprehend. I'm not doubting the veracity of what he's written, but it's just surprising how different his experience is from what I'm familiar with.
* Most parents with means contribute several tens of thousands, at least. If yours don't, they come from debt.
* Financial aid formulas at excellent schools that are just a step or two below the Ivy league have what we call an "awkward middle." There are lots of rich families for whom $60k/yr is not a significant hardship. There are also a fair number of poor families whose children get full rides (+ allowances for personal expenses.) Where you see huge debt is in the middle class.
Expected Family Contributions for middle and especially upper middle class students (let's say $60k-$100k household income in Midwestern suburbia) are often technically possible, but not actually feasible. The number that Financial Aid gives you will be significantly less than $60k. It might be $50k, or $40k, or even $30k.
But that might selling the house, gutting retirement accounts, forgoing college for younger siblings, or even a combination of the above. So the gap between "actual family contribution" and "expected family contribution" means you will need to cover the difference with loans.
* Financial aid roughly correlates to endowment which roughly correlates to prestige. At lower-prestige but still decent private schools (NYU, GW, etc.) it's not remotely difficult to rack up $200k in your 4 years.
* Some people have trouble adjusting to college life, or to the stress of later semesters. An aborted semester due to (potentially involuntary) leave of absence to deal with mental illness, etc. is really fucking expensive, as is an extra year to make up for classes you failed or a change in major. But if you've already paid in $60k, you're not going to just walk away and write it off; you're going to keep paying whatever it takes to finally get a degree that's worth something.
So what you're more or less saying is there's a sort of middle class gap where aid doesn't cover, and parental income can't contribute enough, so the student is forced to go wholly interest-based debt for their education?
Yikes, that's rough. You're right though, all the folks I know apparently fall on either side of that middle income gap.
accept it and move on. Most of my friends have over 100k worth of debt from undergrad so it seems pretty normal to me. I'm sure your familiar with a lot of things that are different for most people.
> Your first step should be to get a job, and QA sounds like a great place for you. You'd be surprised how easy it is to move out of QA and into dev if you can demonstrate aptitude for development tasks. Many people got their foot in the door this way, including myself.
I suspect scobar's main problem is location. I know most of the West coast focuses more on experience and attitude. The Midwest, East Coast, and South East not so much unless he's close to a big metro (like NY, Boston, Austin, the triangle, or Atlanta) or his degree or course of study was more technical. He may have to move.
Get out of Montana. Seems you already feel you should. Top people in top cities will laugh at the idea of a degree being everything as much as you do, probably more.
I can't believe this has been up for 4 hours and I'm the first person to suggest this.
Well, I actually did that when I went back east to college.
But in today's world, you don't need to be anywhere. It wasn't that long ago that one of the top .net consultants lived in Billings, Montana. He, like many consultants, would fly out Sunday evening, and back on Thursday. And he also wrote a book or two.
So today it is even easier to be remote and be a major contributor. As in 37 signals.
I can't believe this has been up for 4 hours and I'm the first person to suggest this. Perhaps as the comment is a little harsh.
37 signals is an example of a remote company. It isn't an example of the abundance of remote jobs. Without the right experience and connections it will be hard to find a remote job.
> "I know you're full of shit because I have connections in the elite crowd of the game hacking community. These are the two most popular games right now. My connections tell me it's impossible to duplicate items in either game, but you claim to have a dupe method for both. Don't waste my time by contacting me again."
For some reason reading this quote really bothered me. Probably be it reinforces the theme that hacking is some magical art that can grant nuclear access codes to some random 13 year old slamming away on a keyboard, and this site owner bought into that and praises this "elite hacking community".
Even paraphrased, it doesn't make logical sense: It should be really easy to prove that you have a duping exploit in a game, so why didn't the prospective-buyer at least ask for a demonstration, or why didn't the OP offer such a demonstration? It's just too convenient.
It's far more likely that OP was either unable to prove it or refused to do so, and the potential-buyer said "stop wasting my time then".
> Even paraphrased, it doesn't make logical sense: It should be really easy to prove that you have a duping exploit in a game, so why didn't the prospective-buyer at least ask for a demonstration, or why didn't the OP offer such a demonstration? It's just too convenient.
Agreed. Most dupe hacks are not found by report, but by database analytics.
It's an extremely easy phenomena to spot, and in my experience the only games that allow such a problem to exist for any period of time are games that are either operated by a single person and lacking in employee resources to deal with the problem, or games that are so old that they are no longer concerned.
Thank you for explaining how easy it is for a game developer with plenty of resources to identify this type of exploit if used excessively enough to affect the game's economy.
Everyone who's complaining about game exploiters seem to focus on the ones who've caused obvious damage to the game's economy. What about the ones who are subtle enough, and possibly will never be caught?
> I just wished there were some way (beyond a traditional resume) that I could express how I truly would've been a great employee at Google[x].
Well, actually, there is -- the only thing that can express that would be making progress on the problem...
If you're ready for a big dose of realism (and at the risk of fueling some dangerous fires), one can dig deeper into the trust disconnect that fuels acqui-hires here:
There is no malice in my post but the author really needs to think about the world from other peoples perspectives.
> I'm not a fan of your previous methods of making money. Not because I see things in binary or I have a strong desire to follow rules, but because I enjoy the sport of it. When using an exploit, you detract from that sport, whether doing it from the supplier side or whether you play the role of the kid walking about kicking over others sand castles, you are talking a stance that you don't give a toss about the victims and they're pretty well justified in feeling the same way about you.
> If you want someone to give you money for a research grant or another type of funding, or even just a job, you're going to have to give them a reason to believe in you. Your life story may make them feel sad for you but it's not going to land you a well paying job.
> The fact you've built a 'successful business' on a house of cards and either forgot to save or never made enough money to justify it in the first place is not something that reflects amazingly well on you.
> If you want to be employed by someone else, you'll need to build a reputation. You can do that by taking an entry level job and working your way up, or by getting a degree and then taking an entry level job and working your way up. Unless you're doing some pretty prolific and utilised works, you're not gonna skip those entry level jobs.
> You come across as a bit lazy or too cocky, always looking for the quick fix or to skip to the end. Fact is, a lot of people know enough to build things, few know enough to build things well. There's a lot of knowledge that is supposed to be passed down during those junior roles that you want to bypass.
Still, like I said there's no malice here. I wish you all the best and I figure if you really have that much drive, you'll land on your feet eventually. But don't get caught in the trap that you're too good for QA work, you'll find most of your peers eat some dirt climbing the ladder, degree or no.
Thank you for your comment. When I wrote the blog post, I had no idea it would be read by so many people. I wrote it thinking some friends, family, and acquaintances would be the majority of the audience. Those people already know who I am, and would understand that it was not written as a plea for more respect or attention, nor to seek employment.
You are right, I'm not too good for QA work (remember I also delivered newspapers to make ends meet), but I couldn't afford to relocate and pay my monthly expenses on a QA job salary at that point in my life.
Having been born in the US, I have it easy (even if I haven't taken full advantage of my privilege) compared with many others in the world. Your suggestion is to get an entry level job, or finish the degree first, then get an entry level job. I'm curious, is that is the same advice you'd offer to a non-US citizen?
We take for granted how easy it is to climb the corporate ladder or get a degree, and our society values those indicators. It seems as if the objectives behind them have been forgotten though. What should be valued is humility, a good work ethic, and a solid education with curiosity to continue learning and improving. If one meets the objectives but hasn't accomplished the accepted indicators, then that person often faces prejudice (at least in the countries I've lived in).
I'm not trying to imply I've met all of the desired objectives. I just strongly disagree with jumping through the necessary hoops to get ahead because everyone has to do it; especially if jumping through the hoops gets someone no closer to meeting the desired objective.
I'm sorry for the rant. I hope you understand my response is not about me, but about how unfair I think it is that most are so fiercely judged by indicators rather than the characteristics they're meant to imply.
I just strongly disagree with jumping through the necessary hoops to get ahead because everyone has to do it
While I agree with this sentiment in general, I think you have to look at some hoops as just part of hacking life. If you aren't finding the kind of success you seek using alternative strategies, maybe incorporating some conventional approaches could help.
I'm somewhat surprised that you didn't take the QA job. Even if it didn't make immediate economic sense, it was a foot in the door and after a few months you'd likely be doing something more lucrative, especially with tech chops exceeding what I've seen from typical game QA workers in the past. It sounds like this company already has a ladder like this in place. And even if "random employee in a game company" isn't your end goal, it's probably a good step along the way. Think of it as a months-long internship; it can't be worse than delivering newspapers. Speaking of non-US citizens, I can't help but think of the countless immigrants to this country who sailed over alone, working until they could save up enough to send for their families.
My overall feeling from reading both of your (well-written and interesting) blog entries is that you have had the misfortune of hitting upon a startup-type "success" early and that has given you an unrealistic expectation about how easy it is to replicate that kind of success in the future. Also, you're entering a stage in your life at which you need to dial down the amount of risk you can assume. It sounds precarious.
For the record, if you can skip some rungs on the ladder, you should definitely do it as long as you're not overselling yourself into a disaster later on.
My point wasn't that you should be a good little boy and play be the rules, just consider what you offer potential employers and how you convay that to them.
You know how this is typically done, if you can figure out a better way, do it. Just don't spend next 5 years ignoring the beaten path because you could easily be earning that $1000 a day by then.
I've written programs for myself whenever I needed something that didn't exist (or I needed to improve), but I'm pretty certain I don't know as much as I should to consider myself a decent programmer. So, I'm learning as fast as I can. I didn't mean to imply I was still searching for employment; in fact I'm not. I'm working on a startup to help others who are struggling to get employed, and who (with better guidance) can acquire the skills employers want them to have.
I considered the biggest adversity to be losing my father. He'd always been a pillar of support for me, and really showed me what unconditional love meant. I lost him right when I had to become that pillar for my own son. But the thread kind of blew up about how I'd struggled financially.
Ah, thanks for explaining — from the discussion of your job applications for Google and financial situation, I'd thought you were still seeking employment. Glad to hear that you're working on something!
I can't even imagine the pain and adversity of losing your father, especially in such a rough period.
One tip for quick and one time easy money, in similar vein to exploiting dupe bugs (especially when it comes to people dismissing it as impossible :) - sport betting odds arbitrage. Made ~35% in one month. At the end of it, I was banned almost everywhere, which is why it's an one time affair (unless you start to use fake identities - I didn't).
I read the whole post, and it's just left me with a strong sense of unease. A gut-feeling that strongly reminds me of self-stories I've heard from certain people in real life, among them a next-cubicle coworker who was eventually institutionalized.
> When he finally responded, I was so excited that I sent him a long story (like this one) explaining my life, and gave him a link to a website with some of my ideas. After receiving no response, I realized how selfish I was to think he had time to read all of that.
> I still had hope though, so I narrated all of it and sent him .mp3 files so he could listen to it while he was jogging or something.
Putting your autobiography on tape for a prospective employer after already sending a text version... well, I think it's a sign.
In all seriousness, I believe the author could see big personal benefits from some kind of professional counseling about this stuff, as opposed to throwing it all out on the internet.
>I think the author needs some kind of mental help or therapy which I am not qualified to provide.
Maybe, but I doubt it. This just seems like inexperience. It took me a very long time to figure out the transition between worlds that are about you (school) to worlds that are not about you (work). The transition is not one of "selfishness" as much as it's about perspective.
If I were to give you some advice, it would be to:
a)keep working at any job you can find. Wading through sewage for minimum wage? Take it.
b) Spend as little money as possible. Put all your earnings in a big pile on the kitchen table if you have nothing else to do with them. Your wife may be able to help in terms of keeping expenses to a minimum.
c)Since that job will most likely suck, spend off hours looking for a better job. Don't quit the first one until the second one is in the bag. Meanwhile, do good work at the first job. It's not like you're going to stick around for 20 years, so why not do great?
d) Repeat steps a-c until you have enough saved up for EITHER a bachelor's in a technical field + living expenses for the time OR some other boring, predictable, spreadsheet-friendly investment.
e) email me any time at dropit.sphere at google's email service if you need someone to talk to. I earned a perfect SAT score and am working as a valet, so I know how it is.
Yeah, I got the same vibe. Don't forget coming up with a world-changing solar energy breakthrough that nobody responds to simply because he doesn't have credentials. I mean, it's certainly possible. But what is the _likely_ scenario here?
I was expecting some kind of payoff at the end, but nope. Just a whole lot of money lost and little to show for it.
Confidence is important but so is doubt. Not all ideas are good, and just believing in an idea isn't enough to make it a success. And the "safe" corporate jobs can be just as fulfilling in their own way.
Exploiting games for profit is not something to be proud of. It seems like you have some of the necessary skills to run a business, but you need to find a product that is not based on theft.
>>Exploiting games for profit is not something to be proud of.
If a candidate had on their resume a blog link with detailed explanation of a technical exploit in a videogame and how they profited by it... that'd be a +1 in my book.
Throughout my teenage years I taught myself to program by writing bots to play mmorpgs for me then I would sell the gold. I made a fraction of what this guy did, but for a 13-17 year old I was doing quite well.
I have no delusions that what I was doing was "virtuous" or benefiting the world and what have you. But by the same token I don't think what I did was the opposite of that either - I certainly wasn't selling a product based on theft as you put it. And in the end it's the main reason I'm a programmer today, nearly a decade later.
By botting a video game money isn't being created out of thin air like with counterfeiting. Resources are collected which are sold for gold pieces from other players.
The difference may not feel like much - but it's night and day in terms of the practical economic implications.
Your business was based on ruining games for ordinary players by exploiting bugs (in violation of your contract with the game operator) to duplicate items for sale for real-world currency. This messes up the game economy and it messes up the game balance.
Perhaps you are right about the karma, but you should understand that I loved playing those games too. I knew I could have ruined their economies if I were careless or released the hacks publicly. I actually monitored a control group of servers where I did no duplication, and their economies were nearly identical to those where I did. Overall, I used the exploit on only about half the servers. If there had been a glaring difference, the game developer probably wouldn't have thought it impossible to have existed when I asked for a bounty to divulge it.
Hey, it's great that you're trying to find a place for yourself in the world. Unfortunately, you seem to have a malfunctioning moral compass, and you give off a sociopath space-cadet vibe. Making money exploiting in video games and tricking weak-minded people into buying worthless shit is not a path to anything good. Stop trying to bullshit your way through life and if you're lucky you might just be OK.
I definitely agree that there's something in the piece that evokes a gut-feeling I've gotten from being around certain troubled people in real life.
However, I think "narcissist" is probably closer than "sociopath".
While there's a lot of overlap, a narcissist sees people as an audience rather than prey. They are more preoccupied with manipulating people into validating him (or her) as a smart, successful, powerful, rich, etc. individual.
That's really what this blogpost always keeps returning to, IMO. Even the "downer" points are flavored with "but some people believed I had potential" and "the other people were still too blind to notice my potential".
I think the shark-jumping moment is when he sent an impromptu autobiography to a prospective employer... and did it again as an audiobook "in case they didn't have time to read"! While he admits that it was a tactical mistake, he never addresses why it ever seemed like a good idea, and his next sentence basically says "I would have been an amazing employee but their hiring system is broken."
> While he admits that it was a tactical mistake, he never addresses why it ever seemed like a good idea, and his next sentence basically says "I would have been an amazing employee but their hiring system is broken."
It's because he sees the corporate world as a game to be beaten, exploited, and hacked for profit, the same as he did with MMORPGs.
There's truth about the hiring system being inefficient, and there are clever folks who find ways around it to gain entrance to a world that might be otherwise inaccessible. However, it makes me uneasy when those things are done with a narcissistic edge, i.e. to fulfill a grandiose sense of your worth and value.
See: "Until I prove otherwise, consider me a 'nobody' trying to accomplish great things."
It probably does seem more narcissistic because I wrote it recently after having gained back some faith in my competence. When you're at the bottom though, and you feel completely worthless, there is little narcissism left.
I didn't express myself well when I said, "I truly would've been a great employee at Google[x]." What I should have said was something more like, "Even if I weren't great at first, I'd do whatever I could to improve because that was a profession I passionately wanted to try."
Going against the ToS === malfunctioning moral compass?
Please. Games that introduce economies will always have people exploiting them, in various shades of gray. WoW trading sites (gold, accts) are against ToS, but there is no other recourse for a player to "cash out" of WoW when they've decided they've had enough.
How about the other side of the coin? Most ToS in these games reserve the right to cancel your account at any time, and are explicit that you don't actually own any of the stuff that you paid for, either with money or time. Is that kosher according to your, functioning, moral compass?
And to make a more abstract point, I would suspect that the majority of users here have had to make compromises between their moral ideals and what was reasonable/necessary to be done. (example: knowing that if your company fails, your userbase's data could end up with the highest bidder and whatever morals they might have; or growth hacking techniques that are as annoying as they are effective).
Edit* (premature post) ---
Things are rarely black or white. We tend to draw the lines ourselves, and in this case it is interesting that you've put him on the black side because (a) he's gaming the game (albeit without destroying it) and (b) participating in affiliate marketing.
My line would fall far further than yours, it seems.
Sociopath may be a bridge too far, but there's definitely something very, very off about the way the author describes his scam as a business, and the apparent lack of emotion with which he describes the events in his life. It's cold and factual, and all "me, me, me".
How fascinating that we see such different things in the article. In the one I read, a guy puts his life on hold to take care of his dying father:
I spent nearly every day helping him out. I couldn't bear to see him worry about me
That's not "me, me, me", nor does it lack emotion, and certainly it refutes the (already self-refutingly silly) diagnosis of sociopathy. I wonder if there may be some crossed cultural signals here. Montana is not a place where people effuse.
Totally independently (there were 0 comments when I started reading) I've reached a gut feeling which I think closely mirrors WrathOfJay's.
> > I couldn't bare to see him worry about me
> That's not "me, me, me", nor does it lack emotion
Switch the emphasis around, and he couldn't bear his future success being doubted.
The story being told still comes back to the author's same universal preoccupation, which involves his own validation as a famous and successful person, or failing that one who is destined for it.
No, I wouldn't call it sociopathy, but narcissism is definitely in the cards.
Yeah, I too got a really weird vibe from this. I can't really put my finger on it, but something's really quite creepy about this. It's not that he doesn't care, it's the way that he cares - almost like banging out a checklist - treating the symbols as the substance.
I feel bad saying that, but ... I feel like it needs to be called out. Something ain't right.
e.g., in Diablo 2, duped items were known to "poof" or disappear if you were not careful. There is no way to tell if an item is legitimate or not, leading to the obvious situation of oblivious players buying or trading for a dupe and having it vanish.
People who create dupes and sell them for real money are exploiting naive players and putting them at risk while ruining the game for legitimate players. They're human filth.
From his previous article on his "startup" / "business":
> In my online game hacking history to that point, I'd had seven dupe methods patched across four different games, but never had an account closed.
He doesn't specify what the other 3 (or more) games were (other than one is the "next most popular online game"), or if he exploited them as well.
Assuming these posts are even true that is, they come off as quite hokey. I wouldn't be surprised if they turned out to be caricatures to see just what HN readers will celebrate.
The moral compass / exploit is a red herring. The bigger issue is that some guy on the internet, who claims to be driven in all the right ways, isn't talking about doing real life shit to land a job so he can provide for his family. He won't take real college courses because he can learn the subjects on his own so much faster. So instead he majors in Spanish. Huh?
In life you need to know when to jump through hoops to get ahead. But his ego and ideology prevent him from making the choices necessary to be successful.
I've found that a lot of hacker types have this problem. There comes a point where it's really beneficial to put your nose against the grindstone and jump through a few ridiculous hoops. Is it stupid? Sure, but at the end of the day if it benefits you to play the game, you play the game.
No, the post was more therapeutic for myself. I'd never found a crowd that could completely understand what happened that caused the night and day difference in my life at that point. To everyone in my social bubble (except my father and wife), I was simply a victim of the recession that began in 2008.
A solid message you should take away from that post is: Life will throw you curve balls, and I'm genuinely grateful to have found a place like HN.
It does not come off as credible to me without any actual details. The largest online games I can think of do not even have a market for items or do not even have servers/shards. Also why wouldn't you try to sell a dupe exploit to a gold seller like IGE. I know they buy them (and other exploits).
The level of ignorance from your comment is so high I don't even.
The biggest online game from 2008 most certainly had both a market for items and a huge number of servers. It's not hard to figure out exactly what game he was referring to by thinking about it for a minute.
When someone will take apart a game for fun, for better or for worse and often both, it is intrinsic. We praise capncrunch and damn this guy?
I'm sorry you lost your parents Scott. Congratulations on your child and marriage. YC is a mixed bag but I feel home here too.
There are a lot of ways to hack the world. I'm not sure if you've picked inconsistent/risky ones because of personality type/thrill or because it is where you landed. If its where you landed, move toward the center.
Sounds like you've got the basic small business skills to sell many things and you don't require permission or motivation to do so.
Consider hacking on your life instead of the games. What do you know that's inefficient where you are and could be interesting?
I hear heavy equipment auctions are big and profitable in rural areas and I know from experience it is a space software hasn't touched.
Pick a product or set of products (wave energy harvesting equipment?) and niche it via PPC. See what the market is like for them on eBay.
Go with the black hat and get picked up by a security consulting firm. I've rarely seen them be degree choosy with people who have the chops.
Don't make the mistake of thinking the only interesting things are on the fringes.
Lastly, ignore the rest of the noise of this thread. Keep your head up. Stay interested. Stay playful.