[HN Gopher] Talent Is Largely a Myth
___________________________________________________________________
Talent Is Largely a Myth
Author : rayrey
Score : 50 points
Date : 2021-02-07 21:40 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.nukemberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.nukemberg.com)
| elric wrote:
| I think that what people perceive as "talent" is for a large part
| just intrinsic motivation which leads to an "early start". Many
| of us got early starts in computers because we were interested in
| them and were intrinsically motivated. By the time we went to
| college, we already had a decade of experience under our belts.
| That experience is obviously flawed, and you can't compare it
| with a decade of "real" experience, but it's still a head start.
| This can make you seem really talented in the eyes of people who
| have yet to start making the mistakes you made 10 years ago. Does
| that mean you'll have this edge forever? Of course not.
|
| And sure, there's a factor of luck and physical/mental ability
| involved as well, but those aren't really the mysterious part of
| "talent".
| mikesabbagh wrote:
| it depends on the position you are hiring for. Is it a position
| that needs solving problems with new technology? or is it to
| maintain a 5 years old application used by 1 million paying
| customer? each needs a different personality and maybe a
| different type of talent
| Guest42 wrote:
| I think a more accurate title would be something along the lines
| of "Hiring the most talented is a difficult prospect."
| rmah wrote:
| It feels to me like the article just sets up a bunch of straw men
| to knock down.
|
| To start with, when most companies say "we only hire top 1%
| talent" in the context of software development, they don't really
| mean talent as some sort innate potential, they mostly just mean
| skill (combined with a bit of potential to become even more
| skilled).
|
| Further, the idea that most people think talent is one
| dimensional, static and linear is just mystifying to me. Does
| anyone actually thinks this? He takes a literal view of "the 1%"
| and extrapolates that to derive these assumptions. But no one
| means that _literally_ , it's just a phrase meant to invoke the
| idea that they are are highly selective how they hire. That this
| has to be explained is... odd.
|
| The author then repeatedly carps on about how "talent" cannot be
| quantified and then, somehow, thinks this means that the
| interview process is meaningless. Um, that skill cannot be
| quantified is WHY we have the (admittedly flawed) interview
| process.
|
| _If all of these prevalent assumptions about talent are wrong,
| what does it say about our hiring and management practices?_
|
| It doesn't say anything because assumptions are false. And even
| if talent can be "developed" (here I think he means ability to
| learn how to improve skills faster), everyone knows the hiring
| process is flawed. Because, you know, both people and roles are
| complex and multi-facetted. So hiring is hard. Hopefully
| practices will improve to become better, but I'm not holding my
| breath.
| pawelmi wrote:
| There is a great book by Carol Dweck - Minset. She distinguishes
| two types of minset in people. Fixed - who believe their
| capabilities are static and even when they have some success they
| are afraid to do more in order to not ruin the impression; and
| growth mindset - who believe almost everything can be developed
| and are not afraid to learn and try. There is a lot of research
| and interesting examples from businesses, social and sport in the
| book on the topic of thise different understandings of talent.
| pawelmi wrote:
| Not to mention that success is often fair dose of luck. But if
| you know it and try multiple times while correcting your
| mistakes, the chance is only increasing.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I think denial of differences in people's mental abilities is as
| unscientific as climate change denial, and both come from the
| same place where scientific evidence that a person thinks weakens
| their world view is rejected.
| jchw wrote:
| Presenting no significant evidence, I have no idea why this
| position is more scientific than the opposite position (that
| most of the time, "talent" is actually just thousands of hours
| of work.)
| nasalgoat wrote:
| I'm fairly confident that there's more to it than just
| studying something for a long time. Some people simply never
| grasp a concept despite years of study.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| A key factor is confidence, anecdotally speaking. The
| difference is leader vs follower. The same psychological
| principles apply. Tech isn't special.
| Blahah wrote:
| Talent is at least partly the ability and propensity to put
| in thousands of hours of dedicated work. People differ in
| complex, often stochastic, ways in their specific learned and
| genetic propensities to be good at things or motivated to do
| them.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Because it accounts for the relationship between intelligence
| and talent.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Probably because everyone knows people who "show talent"
| without having put in thousands of hours of work, and aren't
| aware of anyone who put in that work without having
| identified as having talent first.
| atleta wrote:
| Most of the time, maybe. But it depends on what you are
| measuring against (even if this is just anecdotic). My guess
| is that your intuition comes from what you see around
| yourself or even in the industry in general with
| accomplished, successful developers: they have worked a lot.
| But that doesn't mean that they don't have talent, i.e. what
| GP says, special abilities that they were born with (and/or
| acquired during early childhood).
|
| The fact that what we see is that hard work is required, is
| just the result of competition and survivorship bias. Those,
| who are not talented enough will leave the field, or never
| even get in. If we are talking about 'top' developers at
| 'top' companies, then it's essentially the same. They all
| work hard, but you ignore those who work hard but don't get
| there.
|
| Indeed it does seem like, as GP says, at least some mental
| abilities do have both genetic and environmental factors (and
| those environmental factors mostly count around being born
| and in childhood). And by the time you are a grown up
| professional, those are basically both circumstances you
| can't do anything about. So you can call them talent.
|
| It's enough if you think about intelligence, or to be more
| specific, IQ. It's demonstrated that it behaves like I
| described above. It has a hereditary and an environmental
| component, it stabilizes pretty early (relative to becoming a
| working professional) and it remains a stable measure during
| your life _relative to your cohort_. We also know that higher
| IQ correlates with better problem solving ability which is an
| important skill if you want to be successful in the field.
|
| Fun fact, the blog post mentions Laszlo Polgar (a fellow
| Hungarian), father and trainer of Judit Polgar the strongest
| female chess player (wrt Elo points) so far. He had the idea
| that given good enough education any child can become a
| prodigy (and thus 'talent' doesn't exist). And to prove
| himself he started experimenting with his own children, his
| three daughters. All of them would become professional and
| accomplished chess players (this was the field Polgar chose
| to prove his theory). But of course one can argue that being
| a psychologist he himself must have had above average
| intelligence which his children could have inherited. So a
| sample size of 3 is not a strong argument besides the
| original claim, but of course it's a strong demonstration
| that at least early education matters a lot. (His 3 children
| has all learned and trained chess from a very early
| childhood, IIRC from around the age of 3, and were all home
| schooled.)
|
| Now why did I say fun fact? Because this at the same time
| underlies what I said above: that early childhood effects
| count a lot and that later you can't do much about it. Also,
| if you asked Judit Polgar why Magnus Carlsen is a better
| player than she was at her best (2882 vs 2735) I doubt she'd
| say "well, he just worked harder and put in more hours".
|
| See: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude [2] https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabil... [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r
| sebmellen wrote:
| I don't think this article denies that people have different
| mental abilities, just that "talent" is a vague and hard to
| quantify term (as evidenced by how -- as mentioned in the
| article -- nearly every SV company is convinced they hire the
| top 1% of developers).
| antidocker wrote:
| SV companies put more weight to design ...
| u678u wrote:
| You need motivation as well as talent. I have a friend who's one
| of the smartest guys I know, he has incredible side projects but
| at work does the bare minimum. Meanwhile I know guys that dont
| have talent but can grind, can code well but just steady output,
| can hit deadlines and are generally motivated.
| echelon wrote:
| > I have a friend who's one of the smartest guys I know, he has
| incredible side projects but at work does the bare minimum.
|
| Sounds like he's not interested in what your job entails.
| Perhaps he should find a job that does something closer to his
| interests, or perhaps better, kick off a startup that relates
| to his passions.
|
| For many people, it's hard to be motivated to do something
| you're not into. Conditions like ADHD can exacerbate this.
|
| You only get one life. Have an honest conversation with him and
| ask what he really wants to do with it.
| u678u wrote:
| He's my friend not my colleague. He really doesn't care about
| money, I think he probably would rather not have it. I should
| have added his side projects are just every now and again,
| most of the time he hangs out with friends.
| kbenson wrote:
| There are many, _many_ people in all sorts of professions
| that work to pay the bills and have interesting hobbies they
| are devoted to and exceed at. Sometimes this is because they
| haven 't found a way to be paid for their hobby, other times
| it's because they don't want to.
|
| Sometimes the fact that there is no pressure is one of the
| things that makes it enjoyable, and people are rightly
| resistant to change that.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| The article makes some decent points but I think the premise is
| altogether wrong. It's always good to remind ourselves that
| hiring the "right" people is actually less (but not by a lot,)
| about raw talent as it is cultural fit, values alignment, being
| motivated by what they do (hopeful a combination of personal
| growth, contributing to something meaningful, feeling you're
| "goos" at your job, and money) and clicking with the rest of the
| team(s). In fact, I've seen a lot of extremely talented people
| being very unsuccessful and unhappy because the job just wasn't
| right for them.
| planck01 wrote:
| >cultural fit, values alignment
|
| I thought this mattered, but this mostly leads to more of
| yourself. When we ignored those factors these didn't seem to
| matter much for team quality - at least at our company. People
| find surprising ways to relate to and get along with
| colleagues. You do get a bigger pond to fish from.
| golemiprague wrote:
| Title should be "Talent is not measurable in the field of
| software development". I don't see anything in the article that
| shows talent is a myth in general. Even in the software
| development the fact that it is hard to gauge talent doesn't mean
| it doesn't exist.
| predaking wrote:
| Anyone have an idea of where the self-reported salary chart in
| the article is from?
| planck01 wrote:
| In software development I always see 'talent' as correlating to a
| combination of three things: iq, conscientiousness (personality
| trait) and a formal education in computer science / mathematics
| or adjacent like physics.
| tiagobraw wrote:
| "talent is just pursued interest" Bob Ross
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Talent isn't a myth, but exclusively attracting it is.
|
| I work or have worked with many different companies in a few
| different roles. Once you hit a level of competence, none of them
| stand out as having particularly more talented people.
| Swizec wrote:
| Talent isn't a myth, it's a prerequisite. Same for hard work.
|
| I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into
| boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn't get nearly the same results.
| And I [like to] imagine Tyson could spend as much time
| programming as I have and not be nearly as good.
|
| Talent is a multiplier. When you're learning something you have a
| talent for, you'll know.
|
| For example: in high school I was very into art and into
| programming. I could spend 30 hours on a digital painting and it
| looked _okay_. But when I spent 30 hours on python, I was fluent
| in a weekend.
|
| Some folks I knew could take those 30 hours of drawing and
| produce a painting that would take me 3 months. Even after
| adjusting for baseline skill.
|
| Their rate of improvement was simply beyond anything I could
| achieve. Same as my rate of improvement in programming was beyond
| what they could pull off.
|
| Crucially: Talent isn't a measure of how good you are _now_. It's
| a measure of _how fast you improve with practice_.
| andybak wrote:
| I agree with most of what your say but I'm not sure how it
| relates to the points in the article?
| jaspax wrote:
| The author suggests that talent "doesn't exist", which is
| pretty clearly false.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| My read was that talent, as discussed in bullshit mba
| speak, is meaningless. Which I can easily get behind. Most
| MBA speak is just a cloak for confirmation biases.
| sanp wrote:
| I look at swizec's reply as defining some attributes of
| talent (something the article says is not generally defined
| when people talk about talent)..
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| Or, programming is simply easier than painting or boxing, and
| boring and tedious for most people.
|
| Physical and psychological traits matter when you undertake
| certain tasks - how many fast twitch muscle fibers you have,
| how big and string your lu game and heart is, the angle of your
| jaw in relation to your brainstem, the distribution of your
| weight on your body, your personal nerve conduction velocity,
| your natural aggressiveness and your pain tolerance levels for
| boxing.
|
| Your natural intelligence, hand-eye coordination, tolerance for
| failure, and curiosity level for learning programming.
|
| Your hand-eye coordination, imagination, and depth of color
| vision for painting.
|
| The thing is, while everyone starts with more or less of some
| physical or mental fitness for a particular task, with enough
| proper training the difference between two trained
| professionals is very, very small. Yet o e is Mohammed Ali, and
| one is Leon Spinks. That difference is not in proportion to the
| difference in their physical or mental capabilities at the
| start, and is largely explained in studies by coaching and
| practice technique.
|
| The ability to follow a trainings regime until you reach
| success is largely a mental tolerance for failure and
| determination. If you have lots of success, you tend to
| continue. But if you were to continue despite failure, you
| would eventually reach the success you were after if the
| training regime was correct.
| Swizec wrote:
| Yep all those things you describe fall under talent. A big
| one in sports is your genetic predisposition to how fast you
| can recover. Or how much punishment you can take before your
| body breaks.
|
| A common training approach for eastern europe gymnastics is
| to take a bunch of 5 year old kids, train them all the same.
| Whomever is left standing at 13 gets to compete in
| international meets.
|
| After 10 years of boxing, I can give a fun round or two even
| to people prepping for olympic tryouts (I've tried). But a
| talented 14 year old kid training to go pro in a few years
| ... they smoke me every time. Even my fully developed adult
| musculature and the years of ring experience can't compete
| with their level of focus and talent. I look like a fool
| every time.
|
| > with enough proper training the difference between two
| trained professionals is very, very small
|
| At the extreme ends of elite competition everyone works
| ridiculously hard. Everyone has the perfect nutrition and the
| training and the coaches and so on. When the difference
| between olympic silver and gold is the length of a knuckle
| ... either we're seeing random probabilities playing out (the
| competition is within margin of error for the test), or it's
| genetics.
|
| What else could it be?
| hinkley wrote:
| Talent _is_ a multiplier, but the needle can go negative.
|
| It can be a trap. I knew a guy in college, "Kevin" who was not
| naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his
| ass off all the time. He was doing much better than people like
| me who could pick things up and be an expert beginner in hours
| or days, because most of us never worked anywhere near that
| hard for anything in our lives. I had worked that hard for
| exactly one thing at this point, which put me at a vantage
| point of being able to see both groups. None of my other peers
| really understood Kevin. I confess I didn't always either.
|
| If you can fill your days with things that you are "talented"
| at, you never get around to the things that are hard but make
| you a better person or for a richer life. You can justify
| quitting before you ever start, and only later figure out that
| "compensating qualities" simply don't. Not all the time.
| Especially in a crisis. She lives with a
| broken man A cracked polystyrene man Who just
| crumbles and burns
|
| Today a couple of the things that people think I'm talented at,
| I simply believe are possible when everyone else has given up.
| The Talent, if there is one, is a better sense of possibility,
| and a belief that at least a few people could figure things out
| if they could be arsed to do so. If there's a second Talent,
| it's in figuring out that not only are people fundamentally the
| same, century after century, but in many cases so are the
| problems they struggle with. Much like there is some underlying
| quality of NP-complete problems that makes them
| interchangeable. Solving problems is itself a thing you can
| study, and it can make you "talented" in whatever you care to
| be arsed to try.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| > I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training
| into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn't get nearly the same
| results.
|
| I think this fails to recognise the talents that Mike Tyson has
| leveraged: the soft skills and gumption to identify the best
| trainers, the best team, the best opportunities, and to seize
| those, being motivated to gain fame and plaudits. Plus
| consistent, world-class training and experience on top -
| working outside of the 30 hours of class.
|
| These skills are very transferable to other fields. Look, for
| example, at the George Foreman Grill.
|
| Could you have done the same? Yes, I think it's possible. But,
| viewing it as only practice and guided training seems like a
| fundamental error.
| yudlejoza wrote:
| Perception of talent is also a function of how boisterous the
| claimant is.
|
| Leetcode script kiddies get in, jump from project to project, not
| spending more than a few months at each, make a filthy mess of
| every codebase, and leave it to the silent but persevering, a.k.a
| real, talent to clean up the mess, and steward the ship.
|
| You can focus on the serious tech challenges, or you can be
| boisterous. You can't be both.
|
| _edit_ : "can't be both" == "improbable/competing-factors, not
| impossible"
| spideymans wrote:
| The skills involved in actual software engineering and
| leetcoding are completely orthogonal to each other. Being a top
| leetcoder tells me nothing about your ability to architect
| software (something that is infinitely more critical than
| writing a binary tree from scratch ever will be).
| volume wrote:
| > You can focus on the serious tech challenges, or you can be
| boisterous. You can't be both.
|
| There's always a spectrum right? Or I guess you are
| exaggerating to make a point.
| hobofan wrote:
| > You can't be both.
|
| Why not? It's not like both of those are full time efforts.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| The compensation distribution chart on this article is from
| Levels.fyi: https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-
| Engineer/San-Franci...
| dustingetz wrote:
| Main assumption here is that a top 1% developer costs top 1%
| salary, but that is probably not correlated at all, bc the real
| way to make money is to attach yourself you the largest possible
| business and then climb, and the real way to get good is to hack
| a lot on the most interesting unsolved problems ... these are not
| just orthogonal but possibly even diametrically opposed
| fnbr wrote:
| I think the question is also, "good in what sense?"
|
| The really valuable skill (from a dollars & cents perspective)
| is to be able to provide business value to _the business you're
| employed at_. That might not transfer anywhere else.
|
| Eg I doubt my skills apply to a young startup- I'm a specialist
| (ML research), they need a generalist.
|
| If I work at Google on search & get really good at solving
| political problems related to search, that's a super valuable
| skill set _to Google_ but probably not to anyone else. I'd
| probably get promoted and/or get big bonuses. It also probably
| means that, _ceteris paribus_, I'm a worse coder, as I'm
| spending less time focusing on tough coding problems.
| hobofan wrote:
| > bc the real way to make money is to attach yourself you the
| largest possible business and then climb
|
| I don't know how you get that idea unless you are talking about
| the handful of C-level positions at tech giants. Otherwise
| switching your job every few years and increasing
| salary/position each time is generally the more profitable path
| than staying at a single company and waiting for promotion.
| cccc4all wrote:
| Talent definitely exists.
|
| However, it takes more than talent to achieve things in life.
|
| Most successful people in any industry leveraged some talent,
| with drive, persistence and LUCK to become successful.
| caterama wrote:
| This reminds me of "The Mundanity of Excellence" [1] which
| similarly argues that talent is a useless concept:
|
| - Talent just obfuscates the qualitative attributes that
| contribute to excellence.
|
| - Individuals are identified as talented usually after they have
| invested effort.
|
| - Talent is a quick and spurious "explanation" or admittance of
| unexplained variance.
|
| [1] https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-mundanity-of-excellence-
| an-...
| jussij wrote:
| > In other words, there is no way for a startup to pay a top 1%
| developer (but perhaps they can offer some other incentive, and I
| don't mean stock options because that's crap).
|
| Who's to say wage is a good measure of talent?
|
| I would say circumstance can play a bigger role in setting the
| wage, more so than actual talent.
|
| For example, a developer working for a company over a long period
| of time will always creep up the wage scale, a developer with
| lots of keyword hits on the resume for the latest and greatest
| framework can always demand a higher pay, niche software skills
| always pay well, a developer who began work with a startup that
| then gets bought out by a multi-notational probably hits the
| jackpot etc. etc.
| simonh wrote:
| If you want to hire a top 1% programmer you look at achievement.
| What have they been doing fur the last few years, and how does it
| relate to what you need to get done.
|
| Just founded NeXT? Well, what you need is a developer with solid
| experience developing efficient multithreaded virtual memory
| operating system kernels. Oh look, here's a project at Carnegie
| Mellon University doing exactly that. Let's hire from there.
| Sorted!
|
| Now we need a solid compiler tool chain fir MacOS. This exciting
| project at the University of Illinois looks good, let's hire one
| of the founders. Bingo!
|
| See, it's not that hard in theory. You just have to actually know
| what you're after, and have the resources to get it.
| Unfortunately most of us can't offer top salaries, or the most
| exciting cutting edge projects that top people will want to work
| on. We end up trying to hire the top 1% of people who end up
| applying for jobs at our organisation. That's a very different
| problem from hiring a true one percent-er.
| simosx wrote:
| talent (talanto) is a Greek word to describe some quality or
| charisma that some people may possess when they do something.
|
| It comes from the ancient times of rulers and peasants when
| people actually believed in unspecified innate qualities that
| differentiate people from each other.
|
| "talent" is so much ingrained into culture that people take its
| vague existence for granted. I think that "talent" is used as a
| praise for the purposes of attracting/luring someone to do all
| the work.
| Bostonian wrote:
| This is wrong. Here is a counterexample from my experience. At
| sports I have no talent. At chess I have considerable talent and
| can remember large fragments of games I played decades ago. It's
| easy for me to remember opening variations I study. When I teach
| others some opening moves, they soon forget. I worked hard at
| chess to become an international master, but the ability to
| remember and apply what I learned motivated me to study. Most
| people do not have the talent to become a chess master.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-07 23:02 UTC)