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Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

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Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#61

Post by jakelazaroff »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #28
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…

You're like the hospital janitor complaining that the doctor never wipes the floor. He's just off somewhere "looking smart". ... do you realise how ridiculous this sounds? Let me say that I get your point of view: I know of the existence of smart and educated people who are lazy, presumptious, have a superiority complex, talk down on everyone and/or are fakes. Do you understand my point of view though? Are you aware…

The thesis of the article is that most companies are looking for doctors when they actually just run a cleaning service.

This is not a great analogy. "Algorithmic wizardry" and "organizational skills" are two distinct skill sets, and it's perfectly possible to be great at the former but lousy at the latter.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#62

Post by magwa101 »

b1daly wrote: post #10

This is a nicely succinct expression of what I intuit to be almost a universal rule of creating/designing/making. It’s related to what I think of as “coherency” and I’m often surprised at how long it can take. The most recent example is that I was writing up some technical feedback for a reviewer of a product I develop. My first draft was several pages worth of dense prose. I realized I needed to simplify, otherwise…

Timely! I'm on "hiatus" and producing music again after a 10 year break. It's been months of learning. With the new tools I can go so much deeper, so I am. If you want repeatable processes you have to focus on tools and organization. I've integrated github, google docs, Reaper, and bunches of VSTs and I'm just barely starting to see a good organizational approach. This is 1 year later!

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#63

Post by jmartrican »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #28
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…

You're like the hospital janitor complaining that the doctor never wipes the floor. He's just off somewhere "looking smart". ... do you realise how ridiculous this sounds? Let me say that I get your point of view: I know of the existence of smart and educated people who are lazy, presumptious, have a superiority complex, talk down on everyone and/or are fakes. Do you understand my point of view though? Are you aware…

I agree wholeheartedly with your points. Though I must say I am not talking about the hospital industry, I am talking about IT.... where we developers are the doctors. I also think that these PHD's can add immense value, they are in fact very smart and educated.

I'll tell you one anecdote, when big data was starting to bubble up, there were PHD's that were hired at two firms I worked at. Eventually in the long run big data was done, but it was not from their efforts. It was the grunts.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#64

Post by oggyhead »

fantispug wrote: post #46
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.

I sincerely think that the minute you stop thinking that Math cannot be applied to a problem solving situation or Math is too fancy/theoretical, the Tower of Babylon type problems starts

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#65

Post by [deleted] »

racer-v wrote: post #14
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…

I think the massive amount of churn in the web world is the exception rather than the rule. If you learned C programming 40 years ago it would still be relevant today. Even Android is almost 10 years old now.

[deleted]

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#66

Post by hellofunk »

> But it’s hard to have the patience to wrap your head around a disorganized mess that you don’t care about. Only if the disorganized mess is your responsibility, something that means more to you than a case study, can you wrap your head around it and appreciate improvements.

This really hit home for me. I personally find it very difficult to get emotionally invested and therefore effective when working on a codebase that I don't personally like. But that's not very professional, so I tend to phone it in when in that situation, at the expense of really using my talents or dedication. But I know that other professional coders do better than me and somehow find a way to be very interested or invested in things they don't care about, perhaps because for many coders, the code itself is enough to warrant the personal interest, and less so what the actual code is used for? If I don't have a big-picture appreciation of a project, I don't enjoy the small stuff either. Perhaps that means I'm in the wrong profession.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#67

Post by stupidcar »

I was thinking along similar lines the other day. I was thinking about whether I've actually improved as a software developer over my career. It occurred to me that most of the languages and frameworks I use are either less than a few years old, or have been changed or reinvented in substantial ways. As such, not much of the declarative knowledge from my early career is of much use. But have my skills improved?

I came to conclusion that my ability to code on the micro scale, e.g. at the level of an individual method or algorithm, probably stopped improving after 2-3 years of professional experience. I think you could take the 24-year-old me, ask him to work on a narrow problem, and he'd do about as well as I would now.

But where the 24-year-old me struggled a lot was at the macro scale. He didn't know how to compose those individual pieces into a cohesive hole, and instead fell back on a handful of patterns like singletons. I remember horrible days trying to unravel my own code and figure out how component X was going to communicate with component Y, and the result was often a mess.

I think this macro-scale ability really does improve continuously over time, as you are exposed to more and better patterns for integrating components and managing dependencies.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#69

Post by watwut »

groby_b wrote: post #44
serpix wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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.

You don't need to ask "really hard Algorithm puzzles" to figure out whether they can actually write code. You can ask normally hard or even simple algorithm and have them implement it. If your company does object oriented, you can also ask them basic patterns. If you do functional, have them do little bit of that.

It is the "really hard" part that is criticized here, not the "algorithm" or "code something" part.

That being said, asking logical puzzles is fine when you are hiring juniors you expect to train. The question with them is "is this kid smart enough to understand what I will teach" not "does this kid already knows everything". However even there, really hard algorithm is not something I would go for.

Re: Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2015)

#70

Post by slfnflctd »

magwa101 wrote: post #62
b1daly wrote: post #10

This is a nicely succinct expression of what I intuit to be almost a universal rule of creating/designing/making. It’s related to what I think of as “coherency” and I’m often surprised at how long it can take. The most recent example is that I was writing up some technical feedback for a reviewer of a product I develop. My first draft was several pages worth of dense prose. I realized I needed to simplify, otherwise…

Timely! I'm on "hiatus" and producing music again after a 10 year break. It's been months of learning. With the new tools I can go so much deeper, so I am. If you want repeatable processes you have to focus on tools and organization. I've integrated github, google docs, Reaper, and bunches of VSTs and I'm just barely starting to see a good organizational approach. This is 1 year later!

I would love to see a more in-depth description of this process you've gone through, in a blog or reddit post or discussion thread somewhere.

Like many others, I've been playing with digital recording tools off & on since the 90s as a total amateur (wanted to be in a 'cool band' since middle school, still do), and while I know there are a thousand great guides out there, I always seem to find them overwhelming/paralyzing.

Admittedly, I probably don't travel in the right circles for it, but the github and google docs aspects in particular sound like something I haven't read as much about musically inclined people doing before.

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