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Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

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Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#41

Post by fwdpropaganda »

serpix wrote: post #34
fwdpropaganda wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggest they should ask instead?

- what do you like doing? - how are you as a person, a coworker - are you able to ask for help? - can you hold a conversation? - how do you learn? - describe a failure in your career and how it went from there all this is for the interviewer and the interviewee to get to know each other each other and see if the candidate is a good fit for the company culture and values. If the recruitment lets in a narcissist or tox…

Isn't that just really vague and easy stuff that requires no knowledge of any kind?

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#42

Post by watwut »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #39
watwut wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not nearly accurate analogy. Note that doctors in hospital do more then just looking smart. And know multiple people who are like he described: generally keep aura of looking smart are are good in few selected areas and generally don't really do much work. And they always get absurd amount of benefit of doubt the same way you do here. Meanwhile anyone who criticize them is assumed to be stupid hospital janito…

Right, so we both know both types. But the person I was responding to either doesn't, or chose to omit one to try and make a point about it. > That is not nearly accurate analogy. Note that doctors in hospital do more then just looking smart. That's precesily my point. Doctors in hospital do more than just looking smart, even though janitors may or may not realise it. It's really an excellent analogy.

Pretty much all janitors realize that doctors do work.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#43

Post by fsloth »

jmartrican wrote: post #4

This reminds me of the PHD in the office, who was hired because of some mathematical related skill they specialize in, is never getting their hands dirty. They are off somewhere looking smart and protecting their allure, while us grunts are keeping the lights on. Broad stereotype here, but it is what I have experienced. To be very honest, being on Google searching constantly has been the most important skill. In this…

"In this face paced IT environment, if you stay too long becoming an expert on something, it's replacement is coming right around the corner..."

Depends what the value adding function is. I work in a field (essentially CAD) where getting anything done takes years at best and if a technology does not have an estimated lifespan of at least a decade we don't invest in it.

Web stuff is of course starting to spill in.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#44

Post by groby_b »

serpix wrote: post #34
fwdpropaganda wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggest they should ask instead?

- what do you like doing? - how are you as a person, a coworker - are you able to ask for help? - can you hold a conversation? - how do you learn? - describe a failure in your career and how it went from there all this is for the interviewer and the interviewee to get to know each other each other and see if the candidate is a good fit for the company culture and values. If the recruitment lets in a narcissist or tox…

These would be perfect questions, if candidates didn't lie.

They do. All the time. More often than you'd think about something as trivial as "can you actually write code".

And so, you'll need to demonstrate your skills. Find a better way with an extremely low false positive rate, and you can make a fortune consulting and implementing that. It's not like anybody likes doing these interviews.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#45

Post by fwdpropaganda »

watwut wrote: post #42
fwdpropaganda wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so we both know both types. But the person I was responding to either doesn't, or chose to omit one to try and make a point about it. > That is not nearly accurate analogy. Note that doctors in hospital do more then just looking smart. That's precesily my point. Doctors in hospital do more than just looking smart, even though janitors may or may not realise it. It's really an excellent analogy.

Pretty much all janitors realize that doctors do work.

Are you guessing, or have you actually asked?

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#46

Post by fantispug »

oggyhead wrote: post #12

I don't understand this! Math is a super set of algorithmic wizardry and if you include heuristics in algorithmic wizardry (why would you not?),isn't organizational skills a part of the Algorithmic Wizardry? So he's saying that knowing all skills in the subset is better than knowing all the skills in the set? And that's just the headline

Math is a clean room where you don't need to worry about the concrete representation. Often the details of the representation and how they connect are more to do with human psychology (keeping things understandable) than with algorithmic heuristics.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#47

Post by loxs »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #45
watwut wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much all janitors realize that doctors do work.

Are you guessing, or have you actually asked?

I have been a janitor (or pretty much that) during my MD studies, then I have been a nurse, then a doctor, then a programmer. I didn't know a janitor who thought that nurses or doctors didn't do valuable work (greatly more valuable than their own).

In the IT field it's different though. Every junior is absolutely sure they are better than their team lead (been there, done that, also been the team lead). Every QA thinks that programmers are lazy brats. Every PM too. Every programmer thinks QAs and PMs are stupid and can't grok their (programmers') work (which, so far I think that it's indeed true (maybe not the stupid part, but the 'can't' part), and that's why the industry suffers).

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#49

Post by henrik_w »

This is exactly my experience too. When I started working as a SW developer, I expected to use a lot of the clever algorithms I had studied at university. That didn't happen. Instead, the tricky problem was having lots and lots of simple features aggregated together - complexity from aggregation.

These were my top 2 surprises when I started working as a programmer:

https://henrikwarne.com/2012/08/22/top-5-surprises-when-star...

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#50

Post by CodeArtisan »

we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

This is from the preface of SICP[1] which taught me that abstraction is the most important concept of programming (and computer science?). Do you need to know how sqrt() has been implemented to being able to use it? no. A programmer shall first have a good knowledge of the abstraction techniques. He shall know how, when, and the cost to use them. Then, if you are illiterate when it come to algorithm design and analysis, it shall not be a problem because replacing a bad algorithm/implementation by another would be easy due to the correct application of abstraction. "The cleaner and nicer the program, the faster it's going to run. And if it doesn't, it'll be easy to make it fast." — Joshua Bloch

[1] https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/

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