[HN Gopher] What to Learn
___________________________________________________________________
What to Learn
Author : pyb
Score : 279 points
Date : 2021-10-18 10:34 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (danluu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (danluu.com)
| ipnon wrote:
| A corollary: Companies are want to hire people who are good at
| interviewing, not people who are good at their job. The proof of
| this is that we find a disconnect between the interview process
| and the day to day job of working at as a software engineer. If
| you are primarily interested in making money, the best advice
| would be to become exceedingly proficient at the interview rodeo.
| Charm your way through the intro call, knock out the algorithmic
| quiz, and know the best approach for the problem in the technical
| screen right from the start. Improve your skill at these and your
| financial gains will be bountiful.
| hintymad wrote:
| I think there's something in the middle. One does not need to
| learn everything, of course, and it pays to learn many new key
| concepts. Groundbreaking concepts help us identify new problems
| and find simple solutions. Another advantage of learning key
| concepts is that we get to connect all those concepts, and
| connections beget breakthroughs.
|
| As for what concepts to learn first, I think Feynman's method
| helps: "You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems
| constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will
| lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick
| or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to
| see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit,
| and people will say: 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!'"
| mrandish wrote:
| In recent years I've started to apply this idea more and more in
| my own career and life. I'm focusing much less on adding new
| skills and instead finding much higher ROI doubling down on
| improving the "top three things I'm uniquely good at" in
| meaningful ways.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Learning 'everything' offers the benefit of helping you identify
| new many things you potentially could easily become (or happen to
| already be) unusually good at.
|
| On one hand, it's a bit addictive and without certain external
| factors or compensating techniques it's possible to get used to
| it so much that one becomes averse to investing time into
| learning one thing in depth.
|
| On the other hand, at least with the type of mindset I have, the
| idea of _knowing_ what to learn seems foreign, enviable at times
| but more often smelling of a local maximum.
| wenc wrote:
| I can relate to the "looking at data" as a skill bit, especially
| the part where he mentions that it's not a skill most data
| scientists necessarily have. I have observed that too. (I'm one
| myself)
|
| Many data scientists like to jump into feature extraction and
| modeling the data with ML/DS tools because for us that's the fun
| part. (we might look at some plots and summary statistics but we
| don't dwell there for too long.) Few have the patience to just
| sit with the data for a week just to look at it, checking it
| against our intuition about the real world and the domain and
| basically just trying to put 2 and 2 together without models
| (except a mental model of the world) and just turning the data
| over in Tableau (or Excel). It's actually not an easy skill to
| learn because it requires other meta skills. For one it requires
| an ability to match numbers to the real world -- and for that you
| need experience and a good intuition of how the world works.
|
| My first manager was exceptionally good at doing this. I've
| noticed too that folks in senior management -- at least competent
| ones -- tended to be good at looking at data and picking out
| things too. I suspect this is actually a make or break ability to
| get to senior management at most companies.
|
| Data scientists, not so much. (Unless they worked in the field or
| came from the business side of things.)
| ksec wrote:
| >For example, this analysis of world-class judo players found
| that most rely on a small handful of throws, concluding1
|
| >Judo is a game of specialization. You have to use the skills
| that work best for you. You have to stick to what works and
| practice your skills until they become automatic responses.
|
| >If you watch an anime or a TV series "about" fighting, people
| often improve by increasing the number of techniques they know
| because that's an easy thing to depict but, in real life, getting
| better at techniques you already know is often more effective
| than having a portfolio of hundreds of "moves".
|
| Which is essentially,
|
| _I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I
| fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times._
|
| Bruce Lee
| borroka wrote:
| What about, and I say this as a long-term martial arts
| practitioner, the man who has practiced 3 kicks 3300 times each
| (with one rep to spare)? And I am not saying it provocatively,
| the one-10000, 10000-one is a straw-man of course, but how many
| techniques to add to your competition arsenal is not an easy
| question to answer. As far as I remember, Ono, one of the most
| successful judokas of the modern era, has maybe uchi-mata,
| seoi, osoto, tomoe-nage. Teddy Riner, who had dominated the
| heavy-weight category for more than 10 years, basically had
| only uchi-mata, plus refusing to engage, running out of bounds.
| I remember a clock-choke and a few pins too. On the other hand,
| in wrestling you had someone like Cael Sanderson, who won the
| gold medal in 2004 and had one technique, the ankle pick.
| Saitiev, who won 3 gold medals in different Olympics, had
| instead a big variety of technique.
|
| Let's take judo. While nobody has, say, 15 competition ready
| techniques, a critical decision needs to be made between 3 or
| 5, say. So it is not as easy as saying: specialize! In addition
| to find the right (for you, considering your opponents)
| techniques to specialize in.
| vp8989 wrote:
| An "uchi-mata" or "ankle pick" or whatever ... to that person
| becomes it's own martial art or "game" as people normally
| think of it.
|
| There is incredible breadth to discover once you go 1 level
| deep into something. Every technique worth specializing in
| will have a multitude of entries/setups, then you need to
| know how people defend/counter and how to counter that, there
| could be slight variants that work better against different
| body types etc ... really staggering amounts of breadth/depth
| involved in putting someone on their back.
|
| There will also be some breadth provided by general meta
| concerns of each combat sport like grip/hand fighting,
| defense, strategy, conditioning etc ...
|
| So even the people who are hyper-specialized still have to
| know loads of stuff.
| codingdave wrote:
| I was a martial arts practitioner for a couple decades, and
| our answer was "add one at a time". You'd learn the entire
| system at a basic level, and then practice it all enough to
| figure out which one technique you wanted to be the strength
| in your personal flavor of the style. So you'd level that one
| technique up from just being able to do it, to knowing when
| and how to apply it to many different situations. Once it
| became an intuitive response, you started on another
| technique but tried to find a technique that would cover the
| gaps where the first technique was not practical.
|
| So a newly minted black belt might have one or two
| techniques. 10 years later, they might have 5. 20 years
| later, maybe even a dozen. But it isn't a question of the
| right number of techniques - it is a matter of constant
| improvement. The goal is to keep practicing moreso than
| having a specific end point.
| borroka wrote:
| Competition time is 10 years max at the very high level
| with the usual few exceptions, and sometimes what was
| working stops to work, either due to injury, changes in
| weight or power, or competitors "figuring you out". For
| example, Riner was so physically dominant that as soon as
| he had the grip, it was flight time. Maybe he had a sasae
| too, I don't remember. Most players play "opposite"
| techniques, for example osoto-sasae is a classic one in
| judo.
|
| For lower level/amateurs/"lifers" the math change, but at
| that level it is a bit more (or a lot more) about having
| fun, not destroy one's body and other concerns not related
| to high-level competitions, so more techniques can bee
| added to the arsenal.
|
| I bounce between specialization and breadth because on the
| one hand, I want to "win" also in practice, on the other
| hand "win" what exactly?
| codingdave wrote:
| Agreed, completely - I practiced chinese styles, which
| are far more about lifetime effectiveness and basic
| defense. It definitely changes the math of how much you
| can "master" when looking at it as a lifetime practice.
| It also changes the definition of what it means to "win",
| because our definition was that you were still strong
| with working joints in old age.
| yesenadam wrote:
| This thread reminds me of a joke:
|
| What's the difference between a jazz musician and a rock
| musician?
|
| A jazz musician plays 100,000 chords for 3 people. A rock
| musician plays 3 chords for 100,000 people.
| dugmartin wrote:
| See Bill "Superfoot" Wallace for a great example:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Wallace_(martial_artist)
|
| He injured his right knee very early in his career so he spent
| the rest of it specializing in kicking with his left leg. There
| are some pretty amazing videos on YouTube showing the
| incredible control and range he had with that leg.
| throwaway879080 wrote:
| >working on a few things and not being particularly well rounded
| has worked for me in multiple disparate fields
|
| arguably "well roundedness" is key to major breakthroughs in
| science & engineering
|
| while most of us work on incremental improvements, the real
| innovation often happens on intersection of two or more disparate
| fields that until then were considered weakly related, and it
| does require knowing a bit of everything
|
| the best scientists and engineers I know are "knowledge
| omnivores" and will digest anything. It does require well
| developed "filtering" capacity though, picking up signal from a
| lot of noise, and a sort of information hoarding mentality
| sAbakumoff wrote:
| "I am not afraid of a person who knows 10000 kicks. But I am
| afraid of a person who knows one kick but practices it for 10000
| times." Bruce Lee
| rzzzt wrote:
| I wonder where the cutoff is. Would it be reasonable to fear
| someone who knows 2000 kicks, practiced 5 times each?
| lukego wrote:
| Forth is an interesting case. It's really unproductive to build
| complex systems with. If you try, you will probably be
| frustrated. Instead it forces you to try really hard to find a
| cheating short-cut to solve the problem as few moving parts as
| possible.
|
| Just one simple example. The 'struct' language feature is 1500
| LOC in Lisp but only 10 LOC in FORTH (see below.) Are they
| equivalent? No, the Lisp one has lots of bells and whistles,
| while the FORTH one is minimalist in the extreme.
|
| If you tried to write the feature-complete Lisp version in FORTH
| you would probably find it very difficult and unproductive. So
| you wouldn't do that. And this to me is what FORTH's peculiar
| brand of efficiency is all about.
|
| If FORTH were a bar the only drink on the menu would be tap
| water. That bar would be extremely efficient to run.
|
| Lisp:
| https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/src/code/defstruct....
| FORTH:
| https://github.com/openbios/openfirmware/blob/master/forth/l...
| carapace wrote:
| Chuck Moore used to carry around a 3D wireframe CAD program on
| a deck of punchcards that fit in his shirt pocket.
| ipnon wrote:
| Elixir and Erlang, in my estimation, similarly force simplicity
| by the nature of its own constraints, in this case massively
| concurrent processes designed to fail. The difference is
| constraining the OS interface instead of the bare metal
| interface. The antithesis is maybe the object orientated model
| where interfaces are mutable and state is unreliable.
| fouric wrote:
| I think you've identified one of the essential parts of the
| design of Forth: it makes it very easy to implement simple
| systems, and very difficult to implement complex systems. In
| other words, polynomial O(n^a) complexity, where "a" is large,
| but the hidden constant k is small.
|
| Making good use of Forth seems to be contingent on identifying
| situations where you _want_ to implement a very small and
| simple system (embedded systems, firmware, OS bootloaders, tiny
| IoT devices?), and using Forth there - and avoiding it like the
| plague in all other cases.
|
| I very much doubt that implementing a VLSI CAD program, where
| you want as many features to help your design as possible
| (features which necessarily incur a complexity cost), is a good
| use of Forth, for example.
| swsieber wrote:
| The bit about compilers reminds me of this quote about Feyman,
| but sorry of the inverse where you hold tricks in your head
| instead of problems.
|
| Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to
| be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems
| constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will
| lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick
| or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to
| see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit,
| and people will say, 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!'
| vymague wrote:
| That's actually on the list of advice from Gian-Carlo Rota. The
| one linked in the blog article.
| https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-l...
| No. 7.
| sagaro wrote:
| Basically, be one punch man than be Superman. Got it.
| bla3 wrote:
| I think the answer depends on "why do you want to learn?". The
| implicit answer to that question for this blog post seems to be
| "to advance your career". That's a fine answer, but not the only
| answer.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| It sounded to me like the answer for the author was "because
| it's fun!" and then turning around and figuring out how to
| arrange his career in a way that lets him continue learning,
| which ends up benefitting his career anyways, almost as a side
| effect.
| dominotw wrote:
| i am currently researching cancer due to my diagnosis. Its a
| fascinating world that will keep me occupied for a long time. I
| am learning statistics p-values, multi-variate analysis ,
| kaplan-meier ect. A little bit of genetics and cell anatomy,
| mutations when i am bored of stats and reading about human side
| of cancer in the book 'emperor of all maladies'. I am really
| enjoying this part of the journey, learning something from
| scratch, beginner gains.
| willchang wrote:
| This wouldn't be Hacker News if someone didn't comment that
| ACTUALLY a random walk of n steps will get you sqrt(n) in some
| direction, which is much better than log(n). I guess my special
| skill is being pedantic.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I've come to realize that 'exponential' is so often used to
| describe anything nonlinear. This would be the exact corollary.
| Good to pick up on it. I'll look out for this too now.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| corollary : i've come to learn to ignore writers who use
| "exponential" incorrectly, to your point.
|
| i realize this makes me picky, but it seems to be reasonable,
| as that incorrect usage _often_ is a signal of sloppy
| thought.
| xyzelement wrote:
| I believe the thing we often need to learn is the thing we're
| afraid of learning. We often (always?) have weaknesses that
| can/do jeopardize our strength and closing those weaknesses is
| crucial.
|
| The famous Scott Galloway (whom I had as a b-school professor)
| made this point like this: if you are a great guy, great father,
| great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and
| hurt people in your life - THAT thing offsets everything else.
| You won't become better by "doubling down" on what you're already
| good at, but by fixing this flaw.
|
| Another case - I used to manage a C++ developer. If you gave him
| a tight spec, he'd implement it perfectly. But the world we lived
| in required him to go talk to people to figure out what the real
| needs are, and he was bad at that. So his code always solved the
| wrong problem unless someone was helping him with this stuff.
|
| Every year, his own developmental goal was to go learn the next
| C++ standard. And that would have been useless because he was
| already a great C++ programmer. Going from 97th percentile to the
| 98th wouldn't matter. The much bigger bang for the buck would be
| figuring out how to go sit down with a sales rep and say "OK,
| what's our client actually trying to do here?"
|
| It sounds simple but I believe this held him back not just in
| work but in life. I happen to know that he didn't have great
| communication with his wife and kids either - solving this thing
| would make him so much better at all parts of his life.
|
| The thing is - we all have glaring things like this - obstacles
| in our own trajectory that if we fix, our existing strength would
| really shine.
| premek wrote:
| > solving this thing would make him so much better at all parts
| of his life.
|
| How do you do that?
| allenu wrote:
| I feel like in this particular case, the first step is to
| recognize there's a "problem" at all. I don't know the person
| in this story, but it seems like to them, communication is
| not that important. Maybe the most important thing for them
| in their work is technical achievement. (I've definitely been
| in that boat before.) As a result, they are likely never
| going to work on the communication aspect.
|
| This is like the quote of "Don't tell me what you value, show
| me your budget and I'll tell you what you value." Before you
| go and try and improve yourself, it's good to be honest about
| what you value and what your goals are. If what you value is
| moving up the corporate ladder, then learning even more about
| C++ is not going to help. On the other hand, if it's to be
| even better technically, then go for it. If you value
| improving your business all around, then the communication
| angle is a better place to spend your time.
| xyzelement wrote:
| > How do you do that?
|
| Great question. I assume you're asking from the point of view
| of the person having the challenge rather than someone
| observing/helping them.
|
| There's no easy or painless answer. The reason these deep
| flaws exist in us is precisely because we have been avoiding
| dealing with them for some deeply personal and painful
| reason. But I do think there's a general pattern that I can
| share from my own experience.
|
| The first step is to recognize that the problem exists and be
| "fed up" with it. To recognize that you're selling yourself
| short in some way, that you're failing yourself or your
| relationships. "I don't want to have my work and family life
| suffer anymore because I am afraid to talk to people." Or
| even "I don't want to be out of shape and struggle to walk a
| mile" kind of thing. You can't solve problems like this
| unless you're seeing them clearly and desperate to get out.
|
| They often say that you have to hit "rock bottom" as a
| requirement for curing yourself. I think this is what they
| mean.
|
| Once you hate the problem, it's good to get some external
| data. Ask your boss, colleagues, family about how you are
| (eg: tell me where my communication skills are weak, what am
| I doing that is so obviously wrong?) and then listen to what
| they say. They may surprise you? Eg is there a pattern, you
| are bad at it in some contexts and good in others? What is
| that about?
|
| From the above and other resources, come up with the list of
| behaviors that would be an improvement. For example: "I would
| be better at my job if before I dive into a project, I speak
| to 3 people who understand the problem space" is probably a
| non-controversial one.
|
| Then you ask yourself: why does that feel hard? Why am I just
| reluctant to get up and ask the sales person what the context
| of the client need is? What is it about "going up to someone
| I don't know super well and asking them a question" that
| terrifies me? What do I think would happen if I did this?
| Would they mock me? Would I feel like an idiot? Would they
| tell my boss I don't know something I ought to know?
|
| Reflect if the fears are real. Is anyone in the work
| environment actually going to react the way your fear would
| suggest?
|
| If intellectually you know that the thing is right and safe,
| then you force yourself to do it. Hyperventilate at your desk
| and then suck it up and walk over to the sales guy. Ask them,
| get the information, have a conversation. Reflect in
| retrospect: was this a helpful activity, and did I get hurt
| the way I feared I would?
|
| Keep doing it. Build up the experience/muscle of doing the
| thing, and prove to your anxiety that it's not a dangerous
| thing to do. Talk to others who got good at this thing
| despite being not good at it originally. Find people who are
| awesome at the thing and study what they do. Become a nerd on
| the thing that's scaring you and you will likely see it stop
| being scary.
|
| And I would be remiss not to say that in most cases, our
| deepest problems (even if they simply manifest in work
| performance) stem from psychology and childhood experiences.
| The guy in my story must have had some rough experiences
| growing up, maybe he was called an idiot or ignored or mocked
| or whatever, which made it hard for him to be
| communicative/open later in life, including with his family.
| Making a little crack in the armor of anxiety through the
| work process would help, but when something is this deep,
| seeing someone like a therapist is often helpful as well.
|
| But to rewind, the key thing is to recognize a gap between
| how you are and how you want to be. You fundamentally have to
| say to yourself "I don't want to be forever limited by this
| thing, I don't want to hurt myself and others because of this
| thing" -- everything else is problem-solving.
| b3morales wrote:
| Also worth noting that this process is not easy, and having
| an objective helper who will help you hold yourself
| accountable, in the form of a "therapist" of some stripe,
| is super helpful.
|
| That person can help directly with several of these steps:
| noticing and characterizing the problem; exploring the
| unspoken assumptions; and formulating alternatives and
| plans.
| zerr wrote:
| Neurodiversity is a thing. Companies compete with each other on
| how good diversity stats they have, only taking in count visual
| appearance while on the behavioral side it is expected that
| everyone is the same corporate employee archetype.
| xyzelement wrote:
| I don't understand your point.
|
| Neurodiversity is a thing, but not every flaw and limitation
| can be attributable to an immutable biological fact about a
| person, and thus we have many opportunities to improve a
| grow.
|
| If I told myself when I graduated college that I either had
| no problems or they were all permanent, I'd be a fucking mess
| of a 40 year today. In reality, so many good things
| professionally and personally came to me because at some
| point I looked at what I was/did and said "I don't want to do
| this anymore"
| Jensson wrote:
| > It sounds simple but I believe this held him back not just in
| work but in life. I happen to know that he didn't have great
| communication with his wife and kids either - solving this
| thing would make him so much better at all parts of his life.
|
| Did he improve? Or do you just think he could improve? Maybe he
| had already tried to work hard on his communication skills and
| this was as good as it gets, so to avoid the stress of failing
| over and over he just stopped trying? There is nothing wrong
| with that, having a programmer who can write good code is
| valuable even if you need a technical product manager to talk
| to him. It might not be as valuable, but at some point life is
| more important than stressing out about things you can't fix.
|
| Similarly we don't blame all the product managers etc who never
| improve their technical skills enough to talk with such
| engineers. People have limits, some have more limits than
| others, we just have to learn to accept that people are
| different instead of demanding that they have the same skills
| as us.
| MA6 wrote:
| Pointing at the issues of someone and saying if only they fixed
| it is very similar to pointing at poor or disabled people and
| saying the same thing. Its is known as denial of personal
| responsibility.
|
| You see someone who needs help, either go figure out how to
| help and help or shut the fuck up and keep walking.
| xyzelement wrote:
| So basically your approach to life is to "not teach a man to
| fish" ?
| cratermoon wrote:
| > either go figure out how to help and help or shut the
| fuck up and keep walking.
|
| No, he's saying that you don't tell someone who is hungry
| "if you would learn to fish, you wouldn't be hungry" and
| leave it at that. Especially don't do this if you don't
| know how to fish yourself. But do, if you know that
| "learning to fish" is good, team up with the other person
| and learn to fish together. At the very least, you can help
| them find an angler to teach them.
| yibg wrote:
| That doesn't sound very good in real life scenarios
| either. I can provide feedback without necessarily
| knowing how to fix it. For example, if someone I work
| with consistently have a hard time communicating their
| ideas, I can and should provide that feedback, even
| without knowing how they can fix it. At the very least if
| they realize the issue, they can attempt to go fix it
| themselves. Providing feedback in general is a gift.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > I can provide feedback without necessarily knowing how
| to fix it
|
| But at least you provide guidance on how and where to
| learn the solution as well, yes? I don't imagine anyone
| going around telling people what they should do but not
| being able or willing to guide them to where they can
| find out how to do something. Also, I don't see providing
| advice that is both unsolicited and uninformed as being a
| gift. That's the sort of thing that cause most people to
| react poorly and perhaps say, "mind your own business".
| yibg wrote:
| Depends on the relationship I think and how the feedback
| is delivered as well as the topic. If I just give you
| unsolicited feedback about a topic that I have nothing to
| do with, then yea that can be weird. But presumably most
| feedback would be something where both people are
| involved to some degree. e.g. if you're chronically late
| to meetings that I attend, then me telling you that I
| would think is a good thing.
| xyzelement wrote:
| I get the point you are making and the "hunger" example
| is obviously a painful one. But I actually think feedback
| should be shared freely.
|
| EG: if I have bad communication skills, yes ideally
| someone coaches me. But at least, random feedback of "wow
| that meeting went badly" - hearing that from many people
| over and over - may make me aware of the area and look
| into it myself.
|
| Like, if I am starting to get fat, I want people to tell
| me when they see it, even if they don't have a diet and
| training regiment set up for me.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > if I am starting to get fat, I want people to tell me
|
| But would you want random people to tell you,
| unsolicited, "you're fat, you need to lose weight".
|
| Also, I'm obligated to note that the energy balance model
| of weight gain and loss has come under close scrutiny in
| recent research, and it is never as simple as eat less,
| exercise more.
| https://www.nature.com/articles/ejcn2011132
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| You might want feedback that tells you something new. But
| if you're steadily gaining weight and several people have
| told you, I bet you're less interested in hearing it from
| another five people every day. _Especially_ if you happen
| to know that the weight gain is due to e.g. a new
| medication you 're on because you've made a calculated
| decision that the benefits are worth the unavoidable
| weight gain, or that you have been eating badly because
| you're rushed and emotional while caring for a sick
| parent.
| stonecharioteer wrote:
| So I wonder about this a lot. If I have a developer on my team
| who needs to learn X, or get better at Y, I can always offer
| that feedback and it is construed as constructive feedback.
|
| But if I tell a developer who can't speak well or communicate
| lucidly that they need to work on their communication skills,
| that comes across as offensive.
|
| There was a horrible architect at my previous organization who
| was universally loathed for his bad communication skills and
| general lack of empathy. He was a Korean, and his English was
| abysmal. To him, it felt like something to shrug about. We had
| to go to HR, multiple times, about his behavior. Nothing much
| changed because again, they didn't know how to address the core
| issue, which is he couldn't speak clear English. His lack of
| empathy became masked with indifference and some of the higher
| ups (also non native English speakers) supported him saying it
| was general culture differences. However his lack of
| communication severely hindered progress and made life
| difficult.
|
| I once had a colleague who had horrendous body odour and
| wouldn't wear deodorant. It made working with him really
| difficult. And he was one of the best developers I've known.
| I've never told him this because I didn't want to offend him,
| but stuff like this should also be addressed. Communication,
| body language, writing skills and general personal skills need
| to be addressed.
|
| How do you offer feedback in that sense without embarassing
| them or offending them?
| borroka wrote:
| One day I saw a colleague-to-be with their bare feet on the
| the desk, I looked at them and I said, "that's a no". He
| apologized and we moved on. But I also told the guy sitting
| next to them, "why didn't you say anything to them?".
| bo1024 wrote:
| Maybe it didn't bother that guy.
| xyzelement wrote:
| Great questions/points.
|
| To some extent, "you can lead the horse to water but you
| can't make him drink." In the case if the terrible architect,
| your big problem was that he didn't want to change / had his
| head up his ass / didn't see the problem.
|
| If you are a peer, there's not much you can do in this case.
| If you're a friend, you can try to persuade him of the
| negative impact this is having on him: eg "you know how you
| always struggle to get your ideas implemented? This is
| because people have a hard time following you, so your good
| ideas die on the vine. Do you see that and does that bother
| you?"
|
| If you are his manager, then you can make this more of a
| performance issue "as an architect, you are expected to
| clearly communicate solutions and you're not doing that."
|
| At the end of the day there's a meta question. Does your
| company value people who are introspective and will want to
| evolve? If the answer is yes, they will screen for that in
| interviews and have it be part of the company culture (so the
| terrible architect would either not pass the interview
| because he didn't come across as self aware or he's be
| pressured to evolve by the culture where everyone else is
| trying to do better.) If your company doesn't value these
| traits then you'll end up with people who don't think their
| shit thinks and that's hard!
| bluGill wrote:
| I know a Korean Engineer with terrible English. He is well
| aware how bad it is, but has no idea how to fix it. I'm a
| terrible speller (seems to be related to disgraphia - but the
| diagnosis didn't exist when I was a kid) with no idea how to
| fix it.
|
| It is one thing to say fix your greatest weakness, if it is
| easy you should. However for many there is more gain from
| improving on a strength and avoiding situations where the
| weakness matters; than improving the weakness, even though a
| small improvement in the weakness is worth more than an
| improvement in the strength..
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| In both of those, it seems that you could hire a
| professional and ask them how to fix it. English as a
| second language for professionals is an incredibly common
| subject, he could easily find a class or hire a tutor. If
| it's holding him back at work then at least some
| consultation would be worth the cost.
|
| For your spelling, it's probably not as easy to find
| someone targeting you as a demographic, but I'd look for
| someone who does tutoring for kids with dysgraphia/dyslexia
| etc. There's a lot of quite specific techniques that are
| used based on increasing understanding of the underlying
| causes of spelling difficulties - if you've never learned
| any targeted at your weaknesses, I bet you could make a
| noticeable improvement quite quickly. I'd aim for someone
| who is using research-based methods, since there's still a
| lot of more folklore-based teaching around on core skills
| like writing.
| joyeuse6701 wrote:
| The author of the post does address your Scott Galloway example
| by stating that that is an obvious weakness that needs
| correcting.
|
| I think if we're starting with an individual with no _obvious_
| weaknesses, perhaps they are just average at many things for
| example, the ROI is better for things one has a natural
| aptitude in.
|
| Correcting an obvious weakness would generate a better ROI as
| per your examples.
| ghaff wrote:
| There was an older consultant "StrengthFinder" thing. The
| idea was to systematically identify strengths and weaknesses
| and, as I recall, one of the ideas was that, assuming no
| gross deficiencies relative to career, you may want to focus
| on the things that you may not already be A+ in but you have
| some level of skill in.
|
| For example, a very good coder who is OK but not great at
| presenting or writing may want to spend some effort on those
| areas.
| xyzelement wrote:
| > I think if we're starting with an individual with no
| obvious weaknesses, perhaps they are just average at many
| things for example
|
| I didn't mean that the weaknesses have to be obvious. I agree
| the first example I used was a blatant one, but in the other
| case the person had lived 5 decades without recognizing the
| impact that lack of communication skills had on his life. He
| always just thought "that's how I am."
|
| So in your case, of someone who is "just average at many
| things" - perhaps there's a fear of chasing a direction, a
| reluctance to commit, an inability to focus, etc. that
| probably got them to "just be ok" and living below their
| potential, and probably overcoming that thing is a meta-skill
| that they need to gain.
| ihodes wrote:
| I think I agree with your argument, directionally, but in
| the case of the C++ hacker, might it be the case that he
| needed to find a different role, job, and/or manager to
| really leverage the power of a 98%tile C++ programmer?
| xyzelement wrote:
| That's a legit option and actually that's what happened
| with this guy - we moved him to a parser team from a
| client-facing team. But we both recognized that as a bit
| of "defeat" - we failed to improve his communication, so
| as plan B how do we help him not get fired.
|
| The point I am making and that I don't want to get lost
| is: there's a huge difference between "I am consciously
| choosing to be a C++ hacker" vs "I am falling into this
| bucket because I fear doing other stuff". First one is
| fine, second one means a person is under-living their
| potential.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Why is that a defeat? Did he think he was good with
| people, or want to interact with clients? Or at your
| company was the parser team a professional dead-end or
| something?
| xyzelement wrote:
| Good question. It's a three part defeat:
|
| First, are you living your own best life? If you ask him
| "do you want to be limited by comms skills for the rest
| of your life, in all the ways it affects you and home and
| at work" he's say "no, I'd rather not have this problem"
| but then we couldn't really get it to change. So he fell
| short of his own recognition of what his life could be.
|
| Second, it just limits you. There's nothing wrong with
| writing parsers and someone has to do that, but there's a
| difference between "choosing" that and "being limited to
| it." Versatility and capability is important. Say he
| wanted to go work somewhere else, the more skills and
| versatility you have, the more options you have.
|
| Third, even within such a job you're still limited. EG:
| are you having a technical debate on your team? The
| better you can communicate, the more likely you are to
| advocate well for your solution, the more likely your
| good ideas will materialize, etc.
| borroka wrote:
| That is not a weakness that can be scored on a 0-10 scale (say,
| I am a 9 Python programmers and a 2 Java programmer, that's an
| either/or, a "threshold" weakness, or an attractor (of evil!).
| ozim wrote:
| I am big fan of "circle of competence" as Warren Buffet with
| Charlie Munger describe it. But I stole it to drive my learning
| approach.
|
| Learning is investment so I would say learn mostly in your area
| of competence to get better. Of course you want to broaden your
| area with time so you might spend 80-90% of your learning time on
| things that are directly in your area of competence. Then 10% or
| 20% to broaden that, when you start using those new things they
| will become your circle of competence and then you can go deeper
| with learning about those. If you won't use those - ditch those
| and go find another 20%.
|
| Downside to this approach is that you need a starting point like
| "should I be a Python dev or Ruby dev" which mostly is asked by
| new fresh starters - and my answer is pick one, if it sticks and
| is your 80% (even if it is not really) continue if not go for
| another one.
|
| I had link to article by Kent Beck who advises something similar
| so I also copied a lot of that approach from his article.
| Unfortunately I don't have a link now.
| chrislloyd wrote:
| I hadn't thought of personal learning as a multi-armed bandit
| problem before! Thank you.
| Zababa wrote:
| > Downside to this approach is that you need a starting point
| like "should I be a Python dev or Ruby dev" which mostly is
| asked by new fresh starters - and my answer is pick one, if it
| sticks and is your 80% (even if it is not really) continue if
| not go for another one.
|
| I remembering hearing in a podcast something like "If there's a
| fork in the road, pick it and stick with it. You'll end up in a
| better place two years later than if you just spend two years
| weighing the options. And if you stick with something for a
| period of time, it's usually easier to switch to something else
| than if you didn't do anything."
| hintymad wrote:
| Regarding a few skills, Rota interestingly has similar advice for
| mathematicians: https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-
| carlo-rota-10-l...
|
| "5 Every mathematician has only a few tricks
|
| A long time ago an older and well known number theorist made some
| disparaging remarks about Paul Erdos' work. You admire
| contributions to mathematics as much as I do, and I felt annoyed
| when the older mathematician flatly and definitively stated that
| all of Erdos' work could be reduced to a few tricks which Erdos
| repeatedly relied on in his proofs. What the number theorist did
| not realize is that other mathematicians, even the very best,
| also rely on a few tricks which they use over and over. Take
| Hilbert. The second volume of Hilbert's collected papers contains
| Hilbert's papers in invariant theory. I have made a point of
| reading some of these papers with care. It is sad to note that
| some of Hilbert's beautiful results have been completely
| forgotten. But on reading the proofs of Hilbert's striking and
| deep theorems in invariant theory, it was surprising to verify
| that Hilbert's proofs relied on the same few tricks. Even Hilbert
| had only a few tricks!"
| parenthesis wrote:
| In that same article you quote there is also a bit about
| Feynman, that
|
| "Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how
| to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite
| problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large
| they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a
| new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve
| problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there
| will be a hit, and people will say: "How did he do it? He must
| be a genius!" "
|
| I've come across this before, but it got reversed in my mind
| to: every time you come across an unsolved problem, try using
| all your standard tricks on it. Probably none will help. But
| perhaps eventually one will and you'll seem like a genius for
| thinking of applying that trick to that problem.
| itsmemattchung wrote:
| > All of us have strengths and weaknesses and we spend a lot of
| time talking about 'areas of improvement.' It can be easy to feel
| like the best way to advance is to eliminate all of those
|
| I struggle with this. All the time.
|
| I always find it difficult to strike a balance between leveraging
| my strengths and filling gaps in my weaknesses. For the large
| part of my career, my attention was directed on the latter:
| constantly trying to improve myself based off of feedback from
| friends, family, colleagues, managers, etc.
|
| But now ... I'm a solo entrepreneur and lately, I've been
| actually flexing a lot more of my strengths, identifying
| characteristics about myself that give me an edge. Of course, I'm
| not blind to my weaknesses (I think about it all the time) but I
| do agree that we should lean more into our strengths.
| nojs wrote:
| For a solo entrepreneur I would argue it's more important to be
| fairly good at everything than e.g. really good at programming
| and having no understanding of other things like sales and
| marketing. Instead of perfecting your Haskell skills, you're
| far better off learning the basics of how to construct a good
| sales funnel, even if it's not a natural fit for you. Some
| knowledge is a lot better than none.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| A bit paradoxically, being a generalist is a particular
| strength, and as the article points out one of the things you
| can do to do better at work is work in areas that best
| utilize your strengths. Ergo, if you're the kind of person
| who is good at quickly superficially learning a wide variety
| of topics, solo entrepenureship is possibly the best place
| for you.
| itsmemattchung wrote:
| This makes perfect sense. Beyond just writing software and
| architecting systems, I find the most challenging parts
| (and rewarding) learning how to build a sales funnel,
| communicating expectations and deadlines with customers,
| etc the most rewarding. And as you mentioned, solo
| entrepreneurship might possibly be the best place to
| exercise these wide array of skills.
| itsmemattchung wrote:
| 100%. One of the conversations I've repeatedly had with my
| friend, a technical co-founder of his own company, is how
| difficult and challenging Sales really is. We don't really
| see eye to eye on this topic.
|
| As a engineer and computer scientist, I appreciate all the
| work we do to build software that's robust, etc but to be
| honest, the more challenging parts (and equally rewarding,
| for me as a solo entrepreneur) is the Sales side of the
| house, business development, marketing.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| "Selling is easy", until you try to do it, then it's
| brutally hard. You should ask your friend to do a cold-call
| with you.
| xyzelement wrote:
| Well, a weakness is a weakness only to the extent that it
| neutralizes your strength. Like - is it important to spell? If
| you become very successful in your field despite not spelling
| well, then spelling is a waste of your time. On the other hand,
| if that flaw keeps you from getting jobs/being taken seriously
| then you need to fix it.
| brezelgoring wrote:
| >a weakness is a weakness only to the extent that it
| neutralizes your strength
|
| Agree wholeheartedly. Floyd Mayweather doesn't know how to
| read, or so I hear, yet he's one of the very best at what he
| does, and no one can take that away from him.
| xyzelement wrote:
| Yup _and_ that may change. For example, if he decided he
| wanted to write an autobiography sometime down the road,
| this may become something to fix!
| WJW wrote:
| > ... I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at
| least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion
| that I might turn into another post.
|
| Please do! A lot of discussions regarding workplace morale, both
| here on HN and elsewhere, seem to boil down to "your manager is
| very good/bad and that explains everything else you mentioned". I
| tend to agree; having a good manager can make a huge positive
| difference and having a bad manager a huge negative one. However,
| I'd be very interested in better ways to detect managerial
| quality upfront rather than when it is already too late.
| elliekelly wrote:
| What's that saying? People don't quit their company they quit
| their manager. I think there's a lot of truth to that.
| pm90 wrote:
| That's very true but it also represents one extreme of the
| spectrum. You may have an ok manager; they're not that good
| but they're not annoying either and you can generally work
| with them. Ideally you would want to work with a manager who
| can accelerate your career and learning and that's not always
| easy to find. There are socially inept managers who might
| fail in most places but succeed at certain orgs, or vice
| versa I.e their success is a combination of personal skills
| and the org environment. It's really difficult to know (imo)
| without working with the person for a little while.
| jsight wrote:
| I completely agree. The environment that your manager works
| in often matters at least as much, sometimes even more.
| I've been at places where manager churn was constant.
| Almost all of them were good to work for, but the
| environment for them was really toxic.
| itsmemattchung wrote:
| So true.
|
| I've been very fortunate to have mostly great managers
| throughout my 12+ year career, managers that actually care
| about their staff (as humans, not just fungible resources).
| In fact, that's why I joined AWS 5.5+ years back, a great
| manager (plug for @thomas_cantrell). On the flip side, I left
| because of irreconcilable misalignment with my previous
| manager.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Yeah, but how much of that is your manager is the face for
| the faceless bureaucracy behind him? When your manager asks
| you to work overtime with unrealistic deadlines etc, getting
| angry at your manager is shooting the messenger, not the
| actual dumbass making decisions.
| ranit wrote:
| > getting angry at your manager is shooting the messenger
|
| Well, a manager being (only) messenger (in this situation)
| is one of the traits of bad manager, isn't it?
| chucksmash wrote:
| Indeed. Part of being a good manager is shielding your
| team from demands that are unreasonable.
| groby_b wrote:
| Detecting managerial quality up-front is a rather hard problem.
| I believe it's mostly rooted in the fact that anything
| meaningful you do as a manager plays on a long timescale
| (months & years), so you can't directly verify. And it's
| sufficiently fuzzy that in a short conversation, managers can
| lay down enough smoke screen to make it hard to see flaws.
|
| So, what you need is getting some kind of long-term view on
| that manager. There are a couple of ways:
|
| * If you can get it, data. Retention/Turnover, how well people
| grow, internal surveys. That's almost exclusively available if
| you transfer within a company, so limited usefulness.
|
| * References. Find people who worked for that manager and ask
| them. Even better if it's ex-reports, since they tend to be
| more frank.
|
| * Are they listening? When you have a conversation with them,
| are they paying close attention to what you have to say, or are
| they busy delivering a message? You want listening :)
|
| * Can they communicate clearly? Are they able to express what
| their team does, and what their main challenges are, in a
| coherent way? In less than a minute? Communication is a
| managers main job. If they fail at that, you'll have a horrible
| time.
|
| * And finally, gut check. How do you feel around that manager?
| If you're in any way uncomfortable, see it as a warning sign.
| That doesn't even necessarily reflect on their _skill_ as
| manager - there are just some people we 're feeling good
| around, and some who make us miserable. Skip the miserable
| part. (If you have a skilled manager, they can minimize the
| misery somewhat, but you'll still both be miserable.)
| borroka wrote:
| "Are they listening? When you have a conversation with them,
| are they paying close attention to what you have to say, or
| are they busy delivering a message? You want listening :)"
|
| - This is common advice anytime one talks about relationships
| and communication. Listening is a skill, listen 10, talk 1,
| almost to the point that is difficult to understand who's
| doing the talking if everybody is getting the same advice of
| listening. Then you have those, and some HR people came to my
| mind--just to keep things professional--, who listen and
| listen and then you realize they just did not (or did not
| want to) understand.
|
| Now, my question is: if it is common knowledge that listening
| to your reports is important, along with being pretty cheap
| and not particularly challenging to do, why so few managers
| do it? Incompetence or there is an advantage in not listening
| much?
| groby_b wrote:
| Knowing and doing are two very different things. It might
| _look_ easy, but it really isn 't. Listening is challenging
| work, and we get little training to do it well.
|
| So, yes, incompetence is one of the reasons. And worse,
| it's often incompetence we're actively unaware of - "it's
| listening, how hard can it be".
|
| There are also advantages in not listening, but I really
| believe this "looks easy, but actually hard to do" split is
| what creates a lot of the problems. We live in an entire
| culture that's rooted in aggressively talking (cf. school
| debate club), with little value attached to patient
| listening.
|
| Managers, like everybody else, are a product of the
| surrounding culture. Breaking out from that conditioning is
| hard. That's why it's rare.
| borroka wrote:
| Those are some good points.
|
| I think there is also a delayed gratification that is
| coming from listening, while the gratification that comes
| with talking or expressing oneself is immediate. There is
| also in the "manager should listen" from the parent
| comment a bit of asymmetry if not hypocrisy, where the
| manager is the agent prone to maliciousness and the
| report is the one who should be listened to. And also,
| and I have been guilty of it like anybody else, I believe
| that sometimes we don't feel our manager is listening to
| us because they are not agreeing with us. They listen,
| they just happen to have a different opinion, but we
| prefer to say they don't listen.
|
| I would say that I am not terribly interested in being
| listened to beyond the obvious, I particularly appreciate
| managers who are appreciative, decisive, and smart.
|
| Being good at managing largely overlaps with being good
| at being friends minus the chances of being fired. The
| manager-report is not the same relationship as friend-
| friend of course, but I have yet to find a good direct
| manager who I would not consider good at being friends
| (reliable, honest, entertaining, decisive etc.), granted,
| not with me, and viceversa.
| WJW wrote:
| What make you think it is not particularly challenging to
| do, especially given your earlier acknowledgement that
| almost nobody is a good listener?
| borroka wrote:
| Just for the sake of example, I consider solving partial
| differential equations challenging. Listening is not
| challenging. One may not do it for a variety of reason,
| but we call can do it no exception, the act is as easy as
| it gets. A bit like walking.
| Jensson wrote:
| > A bit like walking.
|
| Walking is extremely challenging for a lot of people so
| that argument would contradict your point.
|
| But it is a good analogy, a lot of people who have
| problems talking to people and listening also have
| problems walking properly. So just as you say walking is
| trivial to some but others just can't get it right.
| [deleted]
| greenail wrote:
| Because people are social "who knows you" is also important and
| impacts your learning. Finding the right people who are open to
| you asking 4 levels of questions is critical. This often requires
| you offer them something back. How you build those relationships
| is something to learn.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Yes, this is key, so important to NOT have to exclusively deal
| with sharp-elbow-environments at formative points in your
| career.
|
| Also good to have mentors which not only graciously answer your
| questions but which also challenge you and ask questions of
| you. The Socratic method. Old as dirt, but better than
| Stackoverflow for actual knowledge development.
| danuker wrote:
| I believe the tradeoff of how specialized to be is dictated by
| your work opportunities - specialization of labor AKA division of
| labor [1].
|
| If you can and want to work in a large corporation, you should be
| able to get a fairly specific job title. This is advantageous
| because two specialists with advanced but complementary skills
| outperform two generalists with intermediate but overlapping
| skills.
|
| Division of labor allows sophistication in processes, which can
| increase efficiency.
|
| The downside is, the job pool is more limited (both for employers
| and for employees). You need _specific_ employees /positions.
|
| A startup might not afford such specialization. For instance, if
| the finances only afford 3 people on payroll, you're not going to
| find a job working on a 10th of the pipeline, even with 20x
| efficiency compared to a generalist doing half of the pipeline
| with 2x efficiency.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour
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