[HN Gopher] Athletes and musicians pursue virtuosity in fundamen...
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Athletes and musicians pursue virtuosity in fundamental skills
Author : JustinSkycak
Score : 127 points
Date : 2024-09-01 14:10 UTC (1 days ago)
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| dave4420 wrote:
| Comparing top-tier athletes and top-tier musicians against
| average knowledge workers will lead to this sort of result.
|
| I suspect that top-tier athletes at least are not spending 40
| hours a week on training and performing. Writers, too. Musicians
| I am not sure about.
| cjbenedikt wrote:
| Speaking from personal experience: tt depends on what level of a
| musician you aim to become. If you intend to be one of the top
| classical solo musicians (violin, cello, piano, flue etc.) you
| will have to practice 8h a day - every day - for years. Even if
| you "only" aim for a top position on a major orchestra.
| naveen99 wrote:
| Where are we with robot solo musicians ?
| aithrowaway1987 wrote:
| If you care about music: at least 100 years, almost certainly
| much longer. I don't think any of us in this comment section
| will live to see an AI that truly understands human music.
|
| If you care about money and don't mind making the world a
| more terrible place: humiliate a few dozen human classical
| pianists by making them record hundreds of hours of motion
| capture, invest in engineering a good robo-arm, and I would
| guess in 5 years you'd have something passable.
| naveen99 wrote:
| I would think self play and record would be enough to
| iterate. chess engines don't really need any human games
| any more and can learn from self play from scratch. I don't
| see why music would be different.
| necubi wrote:
| Games are "easy" for reinforcement learning because they
| have win conditions that can be automatically evaluated.
| Music isn't really like that.
| Lewton wrote:
| record players are perfect
| KaiserPro wrote:
| robot lips are pretty poor. They exist, but not at the point
| of making brass/wind instruments practical.
|
| most other things can be operated adequately by robots.
|
| But then, you're better off with either synthesisers or
| direct genAI synthesis.
|
| However I do wonder what the point of offloading the
| distillation of human emotion to robots is. The whole point
| of music is that it contains what someone _feels_.
| magnetowasright wrote:
| Some new Steinway pianos have a 'high resolution player
| piano' feature where the performances of concert pianists can
| be played back on your Steinway. Not really a robot soloist,
| but I thought it was interesting. Not interesting enough that
| if I suddenly came into Steinway money I'd get one with that
| feature, though.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| For athletes, everything is less subjective. Diet, gear, tactics,
| strategies either produces results or they don't.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| I disagree. "Results" can pretty hard to quantify in athletics,
| especially in team athletics. Sure, there is a binary result
| for a win or loss, but are so many confounders that it can be
| pretty difficult to determine if a given strategy, diet, or
| gear is optimal, or even better than another.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| When athletes exercise they keep track of series,
| repetitions, weight, how many miles you are running,
| distance, times, etc.
|
| If you make an adjustment that enhances your performance you
| may notice it.
|
| Tactics and strategies are more situational and harder to
| track because they are not universally superior but rather
| situational. You can still see results if the athletic
| performance of the team is enhanced... you can see it in
| metrics like ball possession and such.
| jitl wrote:
| The force of competition at work. There are vanishingly few
| desirable opportunities in music and sport, and many potential
| contenders who will be selected on their individual skills and
| performance vying for those spots. Often to put in the hours
| needed to be competitive you have to also love the game; in all
| fields including knowledge work I'd speculate the top performers
| are more likely to enjoy the activity for its own sake than the
| median performer.
|
| Knowledge work like programming is just much less competitive. In
| a graduating class of 5000 computer science majors at a good
| university, I'd be surprised if the majority _fail_ to "make it"
| to a 100k job and be able to support themselves. Once you secure
| a spot in the workforce it's pretty easy to hang onto it as an
| average contributor without much objective measure or comparison
| against your peers.
|
| Compare to sport, at the same university maybe there are 50 spots
| on a sports team, and 10 good teams at the school. What percent
| of kids who start out playing a sport at 10 years old get to have
| one of those spots, and what percent of those who make the
| college team go on to make 100k, support their family etc playing
| the sport?
|
| That competition forces rigor - if I had to compete like that to
| get a software job, maybe I'd be "practicing scales" on the
| weekend too, not just when gearing up for interviews.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| They also tend to need objectively measured skills more than
| knowledge workers. We know what a good batting looks like but
| we still can't say what good code is in any reasonably
| objective way.
| wryoak wrote:
| Since code is primarily for communication between humans, I
| suppose we should look to the humanities and ask them what
| good writing is, but therein lay a parallel exercise to one
| suggested in the article.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Well written code in one language looks nothing like good
| code in a different family. They won't even share a similar
| syntax, grammar or idioms.
|
| The only real lesson to be learned is "write for your
| audience" in my humble opinion.
| wryoak wrote:
| A good analogy for how good prose looks different in
| different languages, to different cultures or
| professions, etc.
| bluepizza wrote:
| Code is primarily for execution. It is very important that
| it also communicates to people, for the sake of the
| business that the code supports, but the main thing is the
| execution.
| Gorath wrote:
| Not intended to be pedantic or contrarian, but I think
| this falls apart when the code is making sure a signal is
| sent somewhere (aka communication). If I write a module
| that allows IPC am I focusing on execution or
| communication? I understand one can say they were
| "executing the communication" but at that point we ought
| to remove execute from the phrase if it has to preface
| anything you do.
|
| To fully disprove my point, at what point do we never
| execute something with code so the distinction is even
| worth mentioning?
| bluepizza wrote:
| OP talks about asking humans what good code looks like,
| and that's the scope of my response. Code as a
| communication tool between developers is not its primary
| reason to exist.
| wryoak wrote:
| Then why do we keep code after it has been compiled to a
| functional executable? Why do we (those of us working on
| teams) have rules limiting how code is written, or even
| in what language? Why do we study abstraction strategies
| like OOP and FP? Codifying and then storing a solution is
| not a necessity essential to a solution, it's a necessity
| satisfying an external pressure. My conjecture is that
| that external pressure is the authors' need to transmit
| solutions across time (eg to oneself when it stops
| running for w/e reason) and space (eg to collaborators),
| so the solution can be read and understood, revised and
| extended, in the same way we transmit other ideas in
| natural language prose or other symbolic systems. If we
| want to treat this outside of the humanities, we need to
| abandon high level languages like bash and C and return
| to manipulating registers and memory directly.
| Dove wrote:
| I say this often. Code is for people, and the qualities of
| great code parallel those of great writing: clarity,
| efficiency, and a sort of profound obviousness and
| inevitability.
|
| The job of software architects is the role Heidegger
| ascribes to man when he calls us "shepherds of Being". To
| understand the world as it is, and find the right
| abstractions to describe it. To constantly evolve those
| abstractions toward better ones, clearer ones, to seek out
| ways to represent things that make solutions seem obvious
| and inevitable.
|
| A mathematics professor once said to me that as time went
| by, the definitions in mathematics became more complex
| while the theorems became simpler. "Why is that?", I asked,
| and he replied, "It's progress!" This is the sort of
| progress that the software architect seeks as well: to set
| up the problem so excellently that the solutions are smooth
| and the process is enlightening.
|
| Great writing, and great code, are first and foremost about
| great ideas. About brilliant ideas that change how you view
| the world for the better.
| dbtablesorrows wrote:
| No. It needs to be treated as engineering if we want any
| stability and maturity in this field. Humanities are too
| subjective.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Sure we do.
|
| * execution performance time
|
| * build time
|
| * regression frequency
|
| * defect quantity
|
| * code size
|
| * dependency quantity
|
| * test automation coverage
|
| * test automation execution duration
|
| The problem isn't that we don't know. The problem is that
| developers don't measure things and simultaneously bitch
| about strong opinions.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| At the same time, those criteria are very context-
| dependent. Thus, great developers are usually only
| identified as such because of how they perform relatively
| to others working under a similar context--not because of
| the above criteria in any universal or objective sense.
| michaelt wrote:
| Lynx is a lean, efficient, fast-to-compile, low-dependency
| browser - and has the fewest open defect reports of any
| major browser.
|
| I'm not sure the metrics you propose capture what makes
| good software good.
| tjr wrote:
| Would you say that Lynx is not good software?
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Absolutely: "good software" has to be useful for its
| intended purpose. Lynx may be well-written, but it's
| useless if you want to do most things on the modern web:
| it just isn't capable of doing them. If you want to use a
| web browser to, for instance, use your bank's web
| interface, a buggy browser that can do this is infinitely
| more useful than a non-buggy browser that simply doesn't
| have the technical capacity to do so.
| tjr wrote:
| Is the intended purpose of Lynx to access the "modern
| web"?
| bravetraveler wrote:
| +1 it worked well when I required it, eg: reading manuals
| while recovering a system that lacked a GUI
| bigtex88 wrote:
| Ok, but then what game is being played according to these
| metrics? There is no game of "code" like there is a game of
| "football" or "golf".
|
| Perhaps these metrics matter in some small fields but
| overall most places that need software could care less
| about most of these, as long as the business objectives are
| reached. And the business "winning" relies on more than
| just the code running its software.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Some measures are better than no measures. Crying about
| what measures to use when you currently have none is just
| crying. That crying is the biggest distinction between
| software and all other examples these comments mention.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Measuring the wrong metrics is as good as not
| understanding the sport. It's best if the person
| advocating the wrong metrics step down.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| When used to evaluate employee performance (the context
| here), no objective measures are better than bad
| measures.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| You missed the most important ones: how much business
| benefit does it provide, and how overall expensive is it?
| Dove wrote:
| These are good attributes for code to have, but I would
| strenuously disagree that they are what _makes code good_.
| Harder to measure, but I would say more important, are
| softer qualities like being clear to read, safe to modify,
| easy to learn, and above all, solving a valuable problem.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Sure, those are important too. Now that you have some
| application written that solves a valuable problem then
| how do you assess quality/value objectively? The keyword
| is objectivity. You have to measure something and compare
| those measures against something else.
|
| This is why non-developers believe developers are
| generally hyper-autistic. For most developers everything
| must be about clear, easy, simple, safe. These are all
| super subjective self-serving opinions that don't do
| anything for the product or the labor that builds that
| product. Product owners will scream about this,
| developers will pretend to hear it, will immediately
| discard it, and then repeat the same insanity where they
| find comfort.
|
| Step back, take a deep breath, understand that it's not
| about you or what you want, and finally discard the self-
| serving circular insanity and only focus on measuring
| your time to complete a task, time for the application to
| do things, and frequency of user engagement.
| peremptor wrote:
| I get your point you are being pragmatic, but the reason
| why I sometimes behave exactly in the way, that you just
| criticized are those very same product owners.
|
| Example: I have a talk with the PO where we agreed on
| certain features and certain things that do NOT have to
| work. Often times when I make decisions during
| development that rest on the asumption that these certain
| things dont have to work I later on get told to
| incorporate them anyways. So I have lost a lot of trust
| in POs or anyone that is not a developer that tells me
| how a piece of software is supposed to function.
|
| Example 2: I am currently dealing in my department with a
| case where a Product Manager talked to a Product Owner
| and they contractually aggreed with a customer to deliver
| one of our internal development tools, that are
| absolutely not ready for production or were ever meant
| for any customer.
|
| Yes I will be "hyper-autistic" about my code because
| sometimes I do not have a choice.
| euroderf wrote:
| Your metric is a laundry list. (Somewhat unavoidably, at
| this stage in the development of software development.)
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > execution performance time
|
| * build time
|
| * regression frequency
|
| * defect quantity
|
| * code size
|
| * dependency quantity
|
| * test automation coverage
|
| * test automation execution duration
|
| Why would these metrics be measured against human engineers
| when a large amount of these issues should be used to
| inform how to improve our systems and tooling to help devs?
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Yet weighing all these factors is decidedly a subjective
| call. Unless it's something stupid like half an hour for an
| app that's considerably simpler than a web browser or OS, I
| would fire any manager who prioritized build time or test
| execution time over live performance.
|
| Also, "dependency quality" just recursively moves the
| entire quality criteria to the next level.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| You didn't even include "solve the customer's problem" or
| "has features people care about" or portability. Electron
| apps are not taking over the world because "execution
| performance time" is the one true metric by which all code
| should be judged.
| Kinrany wrote:
| The first two are product quality, not code quality
| jowdones wrote:
| >> In a graduating class of 5000 computer science majors at a
| good university
|
| Jezus Krisztus and people are wondering why there is a job
| crisis underway. I had to attend my nephew's university
| graduation this summer and was shocked to see some 500 computer
| science majors, thinking where will all these people find a
| job? And you're talking of 5000 as a "sure thing".
|
| Well it ain't no sure thing anymore and graduate inflation
| surely don't make things better.
| jitl wrote:
| It's a totally made up number
| jcranmer wrote:
| Doing some rough numbers:
|
| There are ~2400 NFL players in the US, which means about 1 in
| 140k people.
|
| If you figure that 10% of the people care enough about football
| to make an attempt, then someone who is in the 99th percentile
| of that group of people--someone I think many people would call
| undeniably good at the game, then they still have to be at
| least 99th percentile among _those_ people to actually have a
| go of making it as a career.
| Retric wrote:
| You're off by an order of magnitude.
|
| There's ~165 million males in the US, but many ex
| professional football players still alive and some kids who
| will eventually become football players. I doubt 10% of boys
| try out for high school or college football, but let's say
| 10% make even some vague attempt.
|
| Many people play professionally for a very short period, but
| arbitrarily suppose 1/7th of men are in the age range to play
| professionally. 165,000,000 / 2400 / 7 / 10 ... So something
| like 1 out of 1,000 guys who make even a vague attempt end up
| in the NFL.
|
| More realistically I doubt even 1% of boys ever approached
| football with serious intentions. Still horrible odds, except
| there's a lot more athletic scholarships than openings in the
| NFL.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| No, your math is cockeyed and the parent is much closer.
|
| "Roughly speaking, there were 1,083,308 high school
| football players competing, and eventually 251 made it to
| pro. After simple calculation, we can get that the
| percentage of student-athletes going pro is approximately
| 0.023%."
|
| https://u.osu.edu/groupbetaengr2367/junran-add-things-
| here-f...
| hooloovoo_zoo wrote:
| That 1M is a 4 year rate and the 250 is a 1 year rate.
| Additionally you don't have to be drafted to play in the
| NFL. So it's about 5x that.
| Retric wrote:
| High school lasts 4 years. Some people play for all 4
| years but if the average is 2 years you're looking at 0.5
| million people playing for the first time each year.
|
| Most players aren't drafted. The average NFL career lasts
| 3.3 years. 2400 / 3.3 = 727 new players per year.
|
| 500,000 / 727 would be 1 in 687 or 0.15%.
| biggc wrote:
| Does a single university with a good reputation graduate 5,000
| new CS majors per year? Or is that number just for the sake of
| example?
| jitl wrote:
| Totally random number, based vaguely around there being 2000
| enrollments in US Berkeley CS61A per semester. Not nearly
| that many graduate in CS or EECS, but I couldn't easily find
| a number.
|
| UIUC awarded 500 ish CS degrees in 2023, so 10x less!
| bigiain wrote:
| > Once you secure a spot in the workforce it's pretty easy to
| hang onto it as an average contributor without much objective
| measure or comparison against your peers.
|
| There's also the weird "success path" that goes from developer
| to manager. It's as though the end goal of learning to be a
| concert pianist was becoming a conductor, or perhaps a concert
| hall manager.
|
| If your "success metric" is earnings, then "The force of
| competition at work" for knowledge work doesn't necessarily
| drive you to practice your Rust development "scales" every day,
| or to be the best Javascript dev in the team - it is probably a
| better use of your time to be "good enough" at your developer
| job, and hone your schmoozing and office politics skills to
| make the jump to better paid non development roles like "chief
| architect" of "VP in charge of {whatever}" or ultimately CTO or
| something.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| That's selection bias, not competitive pressure raising the top
| level. It's not that professional positions being so few and
| far between for artists raise the bar. It's that you are only
| looking at the top of the competent musicians which are
| actually far more numerous but keep music as a hobby because
| there is no job there. Take a similar sample of the "best" at
| anything and you will find similar traits.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| It varies. If doing quantitative or research work, there is a
| better pursuit of fundamentals, but even so, it's no more than is
| necessary. Yet, it is fundamentals that push boundaries, as for
| example with innovative neural network architectures.
| adelineJoOs wrote:
| This is something I am currently thinking about. I am a software
| engineer who also happens to be a amateur musician. I used to do
| at least 2h of exercise on my instrument for a year, and then not
| less than that for many years after that. Lots of time I did
| allocate to fundamentals and standard songs I did not want to
| lose - and even today, more than a decade after my peak and
| active time, I have a feeling of where I am skillwise when I
| comes to those things I practised.
|
| But for software engineering? This seems a lot harder to me. What
| seems to make most sense to me currently is really high-level
| stuff like "build up a local dev environment from scratch",
| "implement a minimal change than is visible in the frontend, but
| results in a change to the data storage in backend" and "write an
| integration test". Those seem to touch on many areas of skill and
| should be "trainable" in some sense, making them a good target of
| deliberate practice.
|
| Thoughts or experiences anyone? :)
| norir wrote:
| While learning to write compilers, I would memorize small, but
| critical, programs like converting a char range, like [a-zA-
| Z_], in string format into a table or reporting an error if the
| range was invalid. At my peak, I could implement the function
| that did this in about 60 lines of Lua in about 3 minutes.
|
| I haven't done exercises like that recently, but I found it
| helpful at the time.
| galkk wrote:
| 20-30 years ago that was a role in competitive programming
| team - fast typer with knowledge of data structures, whose
| job was exactly that: very fast and bug less writing of them
| during competition
| StefanBatory wrote:
| I came to a belief recently that memorization is way too
| underrated of a skill. Most of programmers, myself included
| believe that why you should memorize something if you can
| look it up, but... I'm not really sure by now.
|
| Perhaps we rely too much on our ego that we can come up with
| everything on the fly where we should instead look into how
| other crafts did it in the past?
| stavros wrote:
| I've spent maybe 40-60 hours a week on average programming
| since I was 15 or so (42 now, but I don't program as much
| nowadays). I'm very logical in general, so I was naturally
| drawn to programming, but that's a ton of work to put into
| something. Software engineering comes easily to me now, from
| the very high level to the very low level.
|
| I don't know tons of stuff about tons of stuff, but I do have a
| fairly good sense for how computers work at all levels of the
| stack, which helps.
| djaouen wrote:
| The article starts with a legitimate problem but meanders to
| false or suboptimal solutions. It is true that, for example, when
| I read a text, I can usually only (consciously) remember a few
| high-level points. But the solution is not note-taking, spaced
| repetition, or "Inbox Zero". This might be anecdotal, but I have
| tried all these and failed to discern any noticeable
| improvements. One technique the article mentions that might work
| is Ben Franklin's practice of rewriting a previously read text in
| one's own words.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah that was probably my primary disagreement. There's no
| universal fundamental that fits all. And it's been established
| for a while that generally, continuous active practice (funny,
| just like athletes and Musicians) will generally yield better
| results than studying theory and then trying to "perfectly"
| approach a problem.
|
| Your fundamentals will change per field, and even per-domain. A
| back and front end web dev will have very different
| fundamentals.
| Jordan_Pelt wrote:
| This doesn't seem to take into account that professional athletes
| and musicians work very few hours in a year. Imagine if
| programmers were like NFL players, working for four 15-minute
| sessions, seventeen times a year.
| rrradical wrote:
| I'm having a lot of trouble understanding your definition of
| work. Even if you meant perform- most athletes have to perform
| continuously outside out of games in order to earn minutes in
| game. And touring musicians are performing way more hours than
| you cite.
|
| Imagine if programmers were like NFL players, constantly
| measured on their performance against their peers.
| ychen306 wrote:
| NFL players wouldn't have time to do drills if their games
| last 8 hours and they need to play everyday.
| Qem wrote:
| I think a great example of the point you're trying to make
| is taxi drivers and motorsport pilots.
| norir wrote:
| I can't tell if this is meant to be sarcastic or not.
| NegativeK wrote:
| If you interpret OP's term "work" as "perform on the public
| stage", then it comes across as non-sarcastic.
|
| I don't think they meant to say that NFL players loafs around
| all year except for a cumulative 17 hours.
| Jordan_Pelt wrote:
| Yes, by "work" I meant "do what they are specifically paid
| to do, i.e., perform in front of an audience.
| NegativeK wrote:
| I think it was confusing people because pro sports
| players are often paid by an org or team that will fire
| them if they don't show up for the endless hours of
| training. They also get huge amounts of resources to make
| that training more effective.
|
| Versus, say, a touring rock band that gets a cut of the
| performance revenue. I don't think there's anyone paying
| them a multi-year contract salary.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| saying training is work is also confusing, because just
| doing your work is not training either. I'm kinda angry
| at the school system for never teaching me about
| dedicated practice. For the longest time, I did believe
| practicing something was just doing it over and over.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I don't think it is. A NFL player is hired to perform well
| for just a few hours a year, the rest doesn't matter. A live
| musician needs to play well during the few hours of concert
| they have each year, what they do when the public is not
| there doesn't matter.
|
| It means all of their job is concentrated in a few hours per
| year, so they have to be damn good at it. In order to do
| that, they need training, which is most of their working
| time. For most other jobs, there is much less time to train,
| and it doesn't matter as much because what counts is the
| average performance, not just a few key moments.
|
| For programming, the parallel would be competitive
| programming. A competitive programmer will spend days
| studying algorithms like no one else, because it will matter
| for the hour or two of the competition. For typical
| programmers the loss of productivity for not knowing the
| algorithms is less than the time spent studying them.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| What an odd thing to say. How is practice and training not
| work?
| ychen306 wrote:
| Training is work but their main "events" are just much
| shorter than say that of a programmers. Even the longest
| athletic event like TdF lasts only several weeks. A
| programmer or lawyer worker 9 to 5 (at a minimum) doesn't
| have time after work to practice.
| Juliate wrote:
| Practice and training are work.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| He separates those from "performance".
| Juliate wrote:
| Yes, but that's still a peculiar separation.
|
| Learning, training, practicing, teaching, rehearsing,
| performing are just several different modalities of (the)
| work, with distinct proportions depending on the job and
| the role(s).
|
| It's not because one's not in a 9-5 office job that it's
| not work either.
|
| Your plumber, or locksmith, or carpenter, or physician is
| also often performing for you only a few minutes/hours.
| You may think you're watching/paying for this performance
| only, but you're really watching all the experience that
| goes into this performance, that is the result of their
| previous studies, training, and practice and other
| performances.
|
| The "difference" with a "typical" office job is that you
| don't get to have them in the single same place all the
| time, and watch/see them work through all those
| modalities, sanctioned by some manager. It's much more
| open than that.
|
| What is amazing is how normalised the "controlling"
| factory/office work culture has become.
| gwd wrote:
| Imagine if you told your boss you were only going to
| actually write code or investigate bugs from 1pm-5pm on
| Fridays, and the rest of the week you were going to
| practice "fundamentals". Your boss would think it
| completely ridiculous, but it's still a larger ratio of
| performance to practice / training than a professional
| musician or athlete.
| Juliate wrote:
| The nature of the work is not the same, hence, the
| proportion of the modalities of your work are not
| identical.
|
| The problem is considering that only your office boss
| work view is the one that qualifies as work.
|
| The problem is also considering that a software engineer
| performance is in writing code/investigating bugs,
| whereas it is in the whole process/intellectual pursuit.
| In some cases, you will need to spend a whole week of
| going back to fundamentals or training or other, to be
| able to solve your issue in a few hours on Friday.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >The nature of the work is not the same, hence, the
| proportion of the modalities of your work are not
| identical.
|
| I guess we solved that problem then. We're comparing
| apples to oranges and wondering why oranges don't have
| edible skin.
|
| >The problem is considering that only your office boss
| work view is the one that qualifies as work.
|
| So you're suggesting that more programmers should
| practice in their free time?
|
| >The problem is also considering that a software engineer
| performance is in writing code/investigating bugs,
| whereas it is in the whole process/intellectual pursuit.
|
| You can argue we're always performing or never performing
| in that case. Or perhaps our "performance" is crunch for
| a deadline, or right after a product shislps.
|
| Either way, it's fundamentally different from
| practice/performance scheduling of athletes or musicians.
| Performance should be a place where you put 110% into an
| act, often in a burst. Physically or mentally, we can't
| afford to operate at 110% every day. That's why there's
| often a rest day for musicians/athletes. Knowledge
| workers is much more spotty.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| And how much of that 9 to 5 is writing code?
|
| This whole line of reasoning is ridiculous and smells like
| something said by people who know fuck all about athletics
| and musicianship.
| ychen306 wrote:
| Not writing code doesn't equate to not working. Thinking,
| documenting, designing, discussing, etc are all important
| parts of their job. I don't understand why you seem
| offended by my take on this. This line of reasoning
| doesn't by any means diminish athletes/musician's work.
| Sakos wrote:
| Because the identical logic works when used on athletes
| and musicians. You're just being obtuse and refusing to
| recognize it. I don't know if you get off on feeling
| superior to people who aren't developers, but I think
| it's weird you're trying to argue this angle so hard.
|
| In all these professions, and many more, we're expected
| to maintain a certain level of performance (or capacity
| for performance) whether we're officially given the time
| for it at work and whether we're paid for it or not.
|
| I also don't see how you can possibly in good faith
| compare "public performance" to whatever you think the
| equivalent "performance" is as a developer.
|
| It sounds disrespectful and unnecessary, honestly.
| ychen306 wrote:
| My main point is that these jobs are fundamentally
| different and people spend their time differently as a
| consequence. At this point, I am more curious about how
| what I argue even comes across as me feeling superior or
| being disrespectful to people who aren't developers. (I
| am not a developer and would rather spent all my time
| running if I could)
| exe34 wrote:
| I think that's the point - you're practising at your desk
| everyday.
| Qem wrote:
| Taxi drivers practice at their car everyday, but we don't
| see many stock car teams poaching experienced taxi drivers
| to compete as pilots.
| necubi wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they mean that NFL players (and musicians)
| have dedicated practice time separate from their
| "performance" time (games for athletes,
| concerts/recording/writing sessions/etc. for musicians),
| whereas software engineers are (generally) expected to
| produce useful output during all of their work time, and
| aren't generally allotted time in the schedule for self-
| improvement.
| Juliate wrote:
| > and aren't generally allotted time in the schedule for
| self-improvement.
|
| I never met a company that didn't expect to have this in
| the schedule and budget for their employees.
|
| Given the breadth of technologies and the pace of the
| industry, I don't get how a tech-dependent company could
| afford not to.
| yunohn wrote:
| In contrast, I have only met companies that don't invest
| in real training nor schedule/budget for any knowledge
| gains.
|
| The only exceptions so far have been FAAMG, but all of
| them also have it as optional not mandatory and rarely
| encourage it tbh.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Same here. The _only_ time I 've seen a company
| schedule/budget for training was when I worked at Intel
| in the early 2000s. They were very serious about sending
| people for training classes in various technologies.
| After I left that company because of a big downturn, I
| never saw this kind of support for training at all.
| tom306 wrote:
| But even then the training to "performance" ratio is not
| even close (and for good reason) for developers vs
| athletes/musicians.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Ask 3/4 of my last studios. Not even much introductory
| training. Just sat down and given a task after the first
| week of setting up authentications.
|
| Also, contracting doesn't usually let you bill training
| as part of the work. That's just "research" for the
| problem.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| With how good WLB is for the intelligent in tech, many of them
| do perform at about that exact amount per year!
|
| Seriously, this is the source of "rest and vest" as a mentality
| and why some companies, I.e Microsoft, are seen as tech
| retirement homes. They hire the brilliant lazy.
|
| Yes, there really are a lot of FAANG caliber engineers who
| don't work much harder than you described. Yes really.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| What is the underlying technology for notes.andymatuschak.org?
| Seems like a nice note-taking application.
| steezeburger wrote:
| I believe he uses Bear notes and exports them for this closed
| source web app. I think he has mentioned that he just wasn't
| ready for it to be open sourced.
| ychen306 wrote:
| Athletes and musicians pursue fundamentals because they have
| time; their "work" occurs in intense but short bursts of
| performances, leaving them the rest of their days to practice.
| Knowledge workers don't "practice" because their job (long-term
| research or whatever) demands much more time and commitment.
| abletonlive wrote:
| perhaps if you have a very narrow definition of what a
| "musician" is.
|
| a modern music producer will literally spend 700 hours on a
| single song.
| ychen306 wrote:
| In this instance what would qualify as "pursing fundamentals"
| for a producer as defined by the author?
| Juliate wrote:
| Resting ears. Ear training. Doing your scales. Training
| your taste. (re)learning old/new
| tech/tools/instrument/history/theory of music.
| (re)listening to known/new music from separate
| styles/periods/cultures. Listening to artists you work
| for/with. Training/mentoring others.
| nradov wrote:
| Some of this is covered in the book "The Creative Act" by
| noted producer Rick Rubin.
|
| https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/717356/the-
| creative...
| jameshart wrote:
| Does that kind of musician also spend time practicing?
|
| Because the comparison we're being offered is to a concert
| musician, and their work routine is likely very different to
| a music producer.
| FractalHQ wrote:
| I would argue the process of producing a song falls under
| "practice" of the craft.
| Jensson wrote:
| Programming also falls under "practice" of the craft, but
| we aren't talking about that kind of practice, we are
| talking about training sessions.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's all relative of course. But keep on mind that 700 hours
| is about 4.5 months of full time work. I sure have had epics
| lasting much longer than that. And the "concert" is just
| shipping/launching whole I'm already working on the next
| epic. Maybe later on we bug fix, but we never truly get to
| "own" a feature the way a musician owns a song and gets to
| re-perform it in their repertoire.
|
| I'm not really trying to establish which is harder or easier.
| Just that the pipelines and layoffs differ immensely.
|
| And
| Fricken wrote:
| Many top-tier knowledge workers are also teachers, who review
| their fundamentals every time they teach them, and whose ideas
| are regulary vetted students in class discussions.
| loxs wrote:
| I have been suffering of this lately, ironically because I'm
| venturing into business.
|
| I find huge gaps in my ability to rigorously read (and push
| through) boring (but important) paperwork. Take notes and do the
| required work afterwards (or take an important decision because
| of what I have read).
|
| I find it very difficult to organize myself (and others) to do
| chores especially ones that are very disruptive and not
| technical.
|
| I'm starting to see the value of project managers and other non-
| technical or semi-technical people in the companies. Their work
| now seems much more difficult than I imagined previously. Their
| skills are much less "interesting" and maybe "easier" in
| isolation, but in the same time they need to perform at high
| levels constantly.
| JALTU wrote:
| Former customer success manager with a technical SaaS company
| here. Formerly very much in the practical intersection of
| support, consulting, and sales. Always interesting to me that
| "not everyone" understands the value streams delivered by
| functional teams/roles. Human orgs really do need the technical
| and non-technical and everyone in between.
| fredgrott wrote:
| I'm curious....
|
| How many of you use ZettelKasten note taking?
| whartung wrote:
| The saying goes "smooth and slow to go fast". It applies to all
| sorts of physical abilities: playing an instrument, driving,
| motorcycle riding, shooting, and athletics.
|
| There's a lot of neural and muscle learning and tuning involved
| to specialize in those skills. But in order to start, you need to
| learn and tune the right things. As they also say, it very hard
| to unlearn things.
|
| It what amazes men when I watch baseball (I'm a nut for
| baseball). We watch these guys perform "routine" stuff on the
| field every day, but we also watch them bumble, slip, drop
| things, miss the balls, etc. And these are the REALLY GOOD
| players. There's 10,000 other players in the minor leagues. They
| try to make it look easy, but demonstrably, it's not.
|
| But if you watch how they train, it's all about fundamentals. Arm
| angle, foot placement, where to look, when to look, and that's
| even before you talk about "baseball" knowledge -- knowledge of
| the game itself, field awareness, etc. This is just getting the
| ball in the mitt or the bat on the ball.
|
| In our field?
|
| Not so much. It's far less important.
|
| My favorite anecdote was when a junior programmer at work came to
| me and we were talking about his project, a little GUI front end
| to a SQL database. He was done with the project, and I asked him
| how it went. He said it went fine, but he was confused about
| something. He wasn't sure what the difference was between RAM and
| disk.
|
| So, here was a fellow, who accomplished something, using then
| modern tools while essentially ignorant of how a computer even
| works. This is a testament to the tools and platforms of the day.
| How with just some syntax knowledge, and a bit of a logical head
| on his shoulders, he can accomplish productive work.
|
| For many, computer work is borderline blue collar work. It's
| assembly line stuff, know what to do, not necessarily how or why
| it's done. Drag and drop, cut and paste, commit it and ship it.
| And now, of course, we have the AIs to help.
|
| This is not a bad thing.
|
| I've managed to get through my entire career without a deep
| understanding of networking, firewalls, BGP, routing, all of that
| stuff. Can I configure a DNS server? Nope. Despite the Petabytes
| of information I've shipped hither and yon across such things,
| when it comes down to the core level? The lower layers of the
| stack? "Contact your Network Administrator" because that's not
| me.
|
| I am ignorant of cache lines and such like that. I know they
| exist, I certainly understand what they do, but I've never given
| them any consideration in my work. None of that has ever been
| necessary.
|
| It's certainly valuable to get exposure to all of the parts of
| puzzle, even if you don't have a full understanding of them. I
| know I resort to core fundamentals about how things work to
| understand problems all the time. But the truth is, for a lot of
| the work available, and that needs to be done, that level of
| detail is unnecessary.
|
| I've worked with folks who are fascinated with the craft and
| field, always learning and growing. And I've worked with the 9-5
| folks, who learn precisely what they need to accomplish the job,
| and just...stop. Do the work, but just the work. They have other
| interests elsewhere.
|
| Doesn't mean they can't do the job though. These are not bad
| people.
| jheriko wrote:
| this fits... i'm constantly amazed by how bad most programmers
| are at maths and problem solving, and how few of them do anything
| in their own time to improve their skills.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| Do musicians do any practice in their free time on top of 8
| hours of daily work?
|
| Their job is to practice, they don't need to use their free
| time for that.
| darkwater wrote:
| I'm probably missing the forest for the trees but elite player
| and world class musician are the p99 in their fields. I'm pretty
| sure some top notch at FAANG, medical research etc do at very
| least teaching/mentoring other people, which makes them go
| through "the basics" often enough.
|
| Also, muscle coordination is something completely different from
| "knowledge work", unless the knowledge worker needs to learn by
| heart the Hamlet.
| dathinab wrote:
| Slightly off topic.
|
| But I feel for a lot of "knowledge work" what is proclaimed to be
| the fundamentals and what the actually fundamentals are diverge
| quite a bit.
|
| E.g. if automata theory a fundamental of (generic) software
| development. IMHO it's not. Sure it's a fundamental of many
| things you use for software development (e.g. programming
| languages, compilers, various "foundation libraries" like regex
| etc.). It's also a neat tool to have from time to time. But
| definitely not a fundamental for most software development jobs.
|
| Through it's also a bit a question about what you define as
| "fundamentals". E.g. there are "fundamentals somewhat needed to
| understand at least somewhat to _effectively_ improve yourself"
| at least if you want to improve above a certain (often medium
| skill level) point. E.g. how colors work (physically and
| mentally) for painting and/or graphics design. And "fundamentals
| the science is technically based on but it kinda doesn't matter
| much for using it". E.g. a lot of things related to Chomsky-
| Hierarchie and grammars is for most software developers most
| times irrelevant. Not always, sure. But most times you end up
| needing this stuff at work you should pause and wonder "is that a
| good idea?". Because lets be honest while it's often fun, most
| times you are reinventing a wheel or making things more
| complicated then it should be or less maintainable etc. Sometimes
| in a subtle way. (E.g. custom config file format instead of
| leveraging existing formats like json, toml, etc.).
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Comparing top tier anything to normal people is apples to
| oranges.
|
| I am a knowledge worker, but I don't often take notes in
| meetings, because the purpose of meetings to to get agreement,
| not to forge new knowledge. Sure there are minutes and actions.
| But a meeting notes is not a "kata" that I practice to be better
| at my job.
|
| I work in a research org at a FAANG, which supposedly puts me in
| the "top tier". I do not have a doctorate, or a masters. The
| thing that makes me "good" is that I am able to communicate how
| to do x with y, and direct people to use z with building blocks
| omega and theta. the thing I practice every day is working out
| how to translate an infrastructure problem to a researcher who
| couldn't give a shit and just wants put what they have running
| locally on the GPU farm, but faster.
|
| That is my kata, that is what I strive to be better at.
|
| I write to explain, not remember. that's just a nice side effect.
| Is that writing perfect prose? fuck no, but its a fucksite better
| than most of my peers. It has to be because I'm a shit engineer
| otherwise.
|
| > People seem to forget most of what they read
|
| Yes, and musicians forget music. Sure they have a repertoire of
| core pieces that they can pull out, but they are often learning
| one off pieces, or semi-sight reading stuff (session musicians
| are fucking ace by the way. Some are able to read music like a
| news reader does an autocue.) That core repertoire is kept alive
| because they need to play it often. For me, my professional
| repertoire is threading, message passing, and large scale
| dataflow. But my sight reading is computer vision shit.
|
| In the same way a phd student will master and expand a tiny part
| of human knowledge, a musician will tend to specialise in a few
| composers, styles or periods.
|
| > confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable
| understanding
|
| Again, thats not what a knowledge worker does. Learning for fun
| is not the same as core knowledge/skill required for someone to
| perform a job. Thats someone pissing about and learning new
| things for enjoyment, and they should fucking do it regardless of
| the snobbery from people who want "completeness"
|
| One of the amusing things about this whole argument is that the
| writer must have been able to write, spell and read well from a
| young age. The ancient greeks would have been very suspicious of
| that kind of working, because they thought that writing was the
| death of memory, deliberation and debate. Socrates would have
| particularly pissed off with the assertions on memory.
|
| I couldn't write meaningfully until I learnt to touch type. So
| for me, everything was memory. I work differently to most people,
| so I'm not arrogant enough to produce sources and say that I have
| the best way to be a knowledge worker. I don't but it works for
| me. The author would do well to remember that untested assertions
| are not science. (yes, even if you cite papers.)
| massysett wrote:
| The piece compares exceptional athletes with average knowledge
| workers.
|
| It's not interesting to compare an extraordinary athlete - fill
| in your favorite professional hall-of-famer or multiple Olympic
| gold medalist here - to your average knowledge worker. Of course
| the extraordinary person does things differently.
|
| More interesting to compare an extraordinary knowledge worker
| instead: top-tier CEO, famed author, Noam Chomsky, Einstein,
| whatever.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You're explicitly choosing the basis of comparison on the
| grounds that it will deliver the answer you prefer to hear. The
| piece compares professions. Professions are a way you make
| money to live. They should compare programmers who make
| $150K/yr to musicians who make $150K/yr.
|
| Ironically, the fact that you think it is obvious that you
| would only compare the 0.1% of "knowledge workers" to musicians
| and athletes means that you find the conclusions obvious. _Of
| course knowledge workers, at the same salary as athletes and
| musicians, are far worse in quality._
|
| Not that it's an injustice. Athletes and musicians are paid to
| be passively watched and listened to; it's a demand thing.
| Who's going to pay to watch or listen to someone average? The
| average programmer (and the average garbageman, who also
| doesn't put a lot of time into the fundamentals) gets stuff
| done.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Your second paragraph is a refutation of your first.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| So are we comparing million dollar software architects to the
| average or below average athlete in that case?
|
| I just don't think salary is a good metric or comparison
| here. Concert musician as a paid professions as fallen for
| decades. Tech is a multi trillion dollar industry, and even
| outside of tech there's a need for every business to
| establish basic IT and security.
|
| It's a mix of demand, supply of cash, supply or workers,
| general respect, and a few other factors. Everyone needs
| school teachers but how do we treat them (outside of the
| whole "essential worker" schtick the one time they really
| should have stayed home)? Child care, on the other hand,
| pretty much lacks the funds to compensate any better given
| all the regulations that need to be upheld.
| ilaksh wrote:
| If you want to look at something specific like software
| engineering, it is not even a little bit similar to being an
| athlete or musician.
|
| Athletes and musicians are performers. They are repeating a set
| sequence of movements over and over. They are reacting to the
| same situation with minor variations over and over.
|
| If your knowledge work is in any way similar to that, then it
| should have already been automated. Probably by you, if not
| someone else before.
|
| And there is no live requirement for doing programming while
| someone watches in a particular time frame. In fact, it's better
| to take your time. That will allow you to solve more difficult
| problems more robustly.
|
| I would almost say that programming is just about the opposite of
| something performative like a sport or playing music.
|
| You can get better at reading and solving problems by practicing
| that. But I don't see how toy exercises are usually important at
| all for professional programmers. Much less something like
| reading for the sake of practice.
| nradov wrote:
| Healthcare is at least somewhat similar to sports and music, in
| the sense of performing complex tasks under tight time
| constraints. Certain aspects of healthcare have been automated
| but it's still mostly humans performing hands-on procedures.
| danielvf wrote:
| Programming is a fractal of tasks. There's big stuff like how
| you architect a program, then down to how you write functions,
| and then down even further into grit below that.
|
| And one of the joys of programing is that at each level,
| there's not one right answer. But even with there being
| different things you can optimize for, there's also a ton of
| poor choices that could be made as well.
|
| Practice lets you focus on one aspect at one level, and
| improves your ability there. If you were to practice writing a
| function focused on correctness, another time on readability,
| and lastly writing the function based on performance
| optimization, you would almost certainly be able to write a
| better function later. You've expanded your tools, you've
| learned new techniques, and you've consciously evaluated your
| work from different perspectives.
| somethoughts wrote:
| I think knowledge work perhaps is more similar to being a
| composer rather than a musician.
|
| Musicians performing existing pieces add touches of nuance but
| are penalized if deviating too much from the original.
|
| A composer on the other hand should be adding significantly new
| components to the existing body of works and is measured on how
| much they are deviating from the existing body of works.
|
| A sports analogy (although a bit weaker) would be
| Olympic/NBA/NFL/MLB/FIFA sports which have known rules and
| limits versus X-game/RedBull type sports which are pushing
| boundaries of non-existent rules.
|
| Tech activities more similar to athletes/musicians that benefit
| from repetition would probably be like timed competitive
| leetcode or competitive Excel tournaments[1].
|
| [1] Financial Modeling Worldcup https://fmworldcup.com/excel-
| esports/
| AyyEye wrote:
| > Athletes and musicians are performers. They are repeating a
| set sequence of movements over and over. They are reacting to
| the same situation with minor variations over and over.
|
| This is peak hacker news.
| Jensson wrote:
| My grandparent was a big organist, he practiced the same
| movements over and over on new organs before big
| performances. How do you think musicians learn to play every
| note close to perfectly?
|
| If you mean a musician working with a DAW, then yeah it is
| much closer, but such musicians works much more like a
| knowledge worker and doesn't need to focus on the
| fundamentals that much, just like programmers, at least not
| more than the equivalent of an undergrad that programmers
| gets.
| watwut wrote:
| Musicians who play in orchestra may play the difficult
| sequence a lot, but they do not get to play whole concert
| again and again. They also need to be able to react to
| other sections, because otherwise whole orchestra
| desynchronized. Sometimes play unexpectedly something
| different.
|
| The big groups of musicians are massive chaos.
| AyyEye wrote:
| Not all musicians consider "close to perfect" a virtue. I
| suspect that outside of western classical and pop music
| it's quite rare. Certainly the music I listen to isn't
| anything like that.
| antod wrote:
| Extra points if they can compare to bridge engineering too.
| jameshart wrote:
| This is the fundamental distinction yes.
|
| Performance is about doing something exactly right the first
| time on the night. Concert musicians, sportspeople,
| firefighters, surgeons, airline pilots, and military personnel
| all operate to a greater extent under this kind of constraint.
| When you are called upon to perform, you need to get it right.
| So you train and practice and drill to make sure you have all
| the basics down, and you rehearse and prepare for the specific
| performance you expect to do next.
|
| Knowledge work is specifically work that is not like that. It's
| work that will involve evaluating information and making
| decisions and incorporating novel insights and it doesn't have
| to be right first time - there's room for iteration and
| experimentation and bouncing ideas around.
|
| Now, there are parts of some of those performance oriented jobs
| that require improvisation and creativity and evaluation on the
| fly - and there are parts of more knowledge-work jobs that
| require well drilled fundamentals (think about incident
| response in software operations). So the reality is these jobs
| all fall on a spectrum between structured performance and
| freewheeling discovery.
|
| But asking 'why don't we rehearse how to do knowledge work?' is
| nonsensical, knowledge work is precisely that work that
| _involves incorporating and applying knowledge to do_ - the
| only way learn how to do it is by doing it.
| bsder wrote:
| This is simply a case of "How good do you need/want to be?"
|
| This is _everywhere_. Humans can get remarkably competent at lots
| of things with a small investment of time (100 hours or so) and
| some intermittent practice.
|
| The problem is that reaching the _next_ layer almost always takes
| a _big_ jump in time commitment. Want to be better at that
| foreign language? Yeah, 1000+ hours of practice and memorization
| incoming. Want to play something on guitar other than Wonderwall?
| Yeah, 1000+ hours of scales and metronome work. Want to win more
| at Chess. Yep, 1000+ hours of tactics along with some basic
| opening memorization.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Other problem is modern society gives us less time even if we
| do want to put that time in. Especially now that bosses expect
| to be able to ping you at any time on your mobile pocket pc we
| call a phone.
|
| So that leaves the idea to "practice" as your job. And that
| works for a few years. Then you realize you're mostly pencil
| pushing after that and not truly pushing to the next layer
| smrtinsert wrote:
| +1 for hard columns. I can't stand fluid web interfaces, it makes
| it really hard for mind my to remember the placement/visualize
| the words I've previously read. I did not have this problem with
| text books.
| danielvf wrote:
| I agree that practice can be tremendously valuable in knowledge
| work, but at some point in the skill curve, once you have built
| up a the ability to accurately self-evaluate the value of
| practice goes down because the work itself is the practice.
|
| Benjamin Franklin was referenced in the article, and there are
| far more examples in his life than just the writing exercises
| where he employed deliberate practice to improve his ability in
| an area. But he didn't continue these once we was rocking these
| skills at a world class skill level - instead he switched to
| practicing new skills he wanted to add.
|
| But if you haven't tried doing so deliberate practice - I'd
| highly recommend it.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| As a knowledge worker who went from math academia to software
| engineering to management, it turns out the fundamentals of each
| job haven't actually mattered that much for the next job.
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