[plinkplonk]

D'oh I am somewhat embarrassed that my rants land up on HN.

On HN I try to have a measured tone. On my personal blog,I just write(rant!) without regard to "voice" and so on. It doesn't help that, while I enjoy meeting people and parties and such, I am equally content to stay in the shadows and don't care about "personal brand" or building a group to bring change and so on.

I just got frustrated at receiving the nth "please mentor me and send me some code so I can do a cool AI project for my bachelor's degree requirements. I need this next week." email.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=670453 is the original thread , with many nice comments.

[Vivtek]

Pfft. Don't be embarrassed. It was a great post. Fwiw, every other place I've lived was also full of people who want to talk instead of doing; I don't think it's Bangalore in specific.

[kls]

I don't think that is location based, I think that there is just a natural subset of people who are dreamers but do not have motivation to follow through. The valley may skew the distribution a little, the dreamer who are also doers set out for it and the mere action of setting out for it puts you in the do'er camp. So one may find a larger portion of do'ers in that specific geographical location. For the rest of us, I would imaging that you would find a similar distribution than any other point on the map.

On the note of mentoring, I resolved in my mind that if a request came from a HN member I would say yes no matter what. When joining HN, I was extremely impressed with the don't be a jerk mantra that was an overarching theme. Many of the other sites that I had been contributing to had devolved into a typical technical arrogance contents. Upon see a community of technical people that treated each other with respect (a rarity), I decided that not only would I like to be associated with the group, but that I would resolve to help any member in any way possible. Mentoring is part of that. I have to say, I have helped 3 people who where looking for mentorship on this site and all of them have been pleasant experiences. Some of them I did not see the value in what they where working on (that means nothing we all don't get why something went big at some point) but I did see the passion and even though I did not see the usefulness of there vision when applied to my life, it does not mean that I could not offer advice in other areas that I had run into similar pain point in my start-ups. For the individuals that I helped mentor on a pure "learning programming" basis from this site they where all pleasant, greatfull and considerate of my time. I am glad that I did each and every one of them, as I believe not only did it help them progress but it help me as well. Transitioning from a gatherer of wisdom to a giver takes practice and each of them gave me the opportunity to practice. For that I am greatfull.

[redthrowaway]

Is there any truth to Silicon Valley (or Boston, or Waterloo, or any of the other small cities surrounding top tech schools) being an exception to this? I've heard both that Silicon Valley is full of Doers, and that it's full of Talkers. I'm sure it's not a binary choice.

[sayrer]

I liked it. I was expecting to read yet another "entrepreneur" post by some khaki-wearing dickhead. This post was actually interesting, and contained data!

[lionhearted]

I thought it was brilliant, liked the uncensored honest tone, and will link to it in the future.

[sunkan]

Thanks to this article, I had the opportunity to read your other articles on your blog related to programming and sundry. You sir, are my new hero :). No, I am not going to ask you to mentor me, but after ten years in the Enterprise world, went from a not-so-good developer/techie to a paper-pushing, email-sending Ninja of a manager(good one at that) :).

Got tired of it and am back to doing something on my own, which involves actually writing code. There are days that I have doubts about whether I am really any good at this. But I need to work harder and persist, which I never did before.