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Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

theguardian.com

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Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#91

Post by friedman23 »

B0btheBuilder wrote: post #38
davnicwil wrote: post #26

I'm always really impressed by young people, early in their careers or without any career experience at all, who intuit this and are confident in their convictions and get stuff done despite their inexperience. When I was young I was convinced that life beyond academia in all fields would be this super serious, mega competitive space where most everyone has everything figured out. That everyone who was there, in any…

Zuckerberg's mom's a psychiatrist and his dad's a dentist. His dad taught him BASIC programming as a kid and then hired a software engineer as his tutor. Gates' dad's a prominent lawyer and his mom was a prominent businesswoman on the board of directors on several different organizations. Not only did Gates learn programming as a kid, but Microsoft only got on IBM computers because his mom knew IBM executives. When y…

Hundreds of millions have had similar privilege and still don't strike out and start there own businesses. There are many levels of success below Gates and Zuckerberg and most fail at even taking the risk.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#92

Post by Jach »

thoughtexplorer wrote: post #74
B0btheBuilder wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg's mom's a psychiatrist and his dad's a dentist. His dad taught him BASIC programming as a kid and then hired a software engineer as his tutor. Gates' dad's a prominent lawyer and his mom was a prominent businesswoman on the board of directors on several different organizations. Not only did Gates learn programming as a kid, but Microsoft only got on IBM computers because his mom knew IBM executives. When y…

Make no mistake, anyone born into an advanced country is privileged. We are very privileged and lucky compared to someone born in the Congo. Beyond that it seems rather meaningless to attribute success to privilege over a multitude of other factors. It helps, but it's not the main component. Indeed those with the most privilege tend not to do so well. Consider rich kids who turn into generally unsuccessful adults. Cl…

Privilege is a useless (for non political purposes) lens to view people through, so don't even grant the idea of privilege by birth country.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#94

Post by wallacoloo »

trendia wrote: post #17
daveguy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have to see that study. It seems to me that experience gives you a lot of information about what is not as important that comes in handy even when you are "winging it" with something related. Also, "experience is one of the worst indicators for job performance...all else being equal" could mean a lot of things: 1) truly everything else being equal i.e. the person with less experience will do better. (surely that…

> In programming specifically, many studies have shown order of magnitude differences in the quality of the programs written, the sizes of the programs written, and the productivity of the programmers. The original study that showed huge variations in individual programming productivity was conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968). They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 ye…

From what I can tell of the quote, it looks to be just the ability of an engineer to successfully code a new program? Does it touch on any of the other roles of a computer programmer, such as the ability to break a large task into smaller, incremental deliverables, arrange those deliverables in a way that allows parallelism, communicating with the rest of the team to actually make use of this parallelism, and before doing any of this actually verifying that the thing you’re planning to implement is really what the customer needs? And of course, such work is usually done within an existing system that you have to navigate and modify in a way that remains maintainable (for example, writing the right types of tests, and creating the appropriate types of abstractions). I would be stunned if one’s ability along those axes plateaus within just a couple years of experience.

I guess, I’m just skeptical of this because I recently switched jobs from a place where nobody seemed to know what was happening to one where everything seems to be very well-polished. At both places, people generally are similar in their ability to write code that does a specific thing, but there’s a night/day difference in how they do these other things. And I’m hesitant to say that it’s because they just fundamentally aren’t good at those things, because that can’t explain how I was also miserable at those other areas but seem to be learning how to do them now that I’m in the right environment. In other words, I feel like my ability to meaningfully contribute to an organization as a computer programmer is increasing with experience, and I can see quite clearly that the people with more seniority at my present job are generally capable of more effectively navigating the problem space than are my coworkers fresh out of college.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#95

Post by wallacoloo »

bitxbit wrote: post #44

Three buckets: (1) people who figured out how to do it right, (2) people who’s yet to figure out how to do it right but can spot the things done right, and (3) everyone else.

No need to bucket like this. Rather split this into a 2-dimensional space where one axis is “ability to do things effectively” and the other is “ability to spot which things lead others to success”. The buckets suggest that there’s a point at which a person is no longer able to learn from others, which is dishonest.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#96

Post by fphhotchips »

ardit33 wrote: post #13

And that is not true at all, especially in sports. When you just starting playing a new sport, you are still learning and going along while making a lot of mistakes. After few years of playing you learn enough (by experience or training), to know what to do and how to act. (think shooting dribling, positioning in soccer). If you played your 'younger' self, you'd run circle around that person. Hence training and exper…

I'd argue sports is the exact example where not only is everyone winging it, but where you must wing it to be successful.

How good you are at winging it is defined by your training, but in a competitive situation, if you're not constantly improvising to match the current state of play, then your play will be entirely predictable and as a result you'll be easily beaten. Think about a football team that runs one of three corners every time. After maybe a match, they'll be beaten by every defense. Now think about a football team that makes subtle improvisations on every corner they run based on the defense they're up against. Much, much harder to study and defend.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#97

Post by swelz »

davidgay wrote: post #64
johnjohnsmith wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to offer a few decades of perspective on your claim. I've been programming for 30+ years. When I sit down to code, most of the time I've thought through it before even typing and am ~99% confident I won't hit a roadblock. I've spent half my life mastering my programming skills. BUT: I'm a high-level technical lead / product lead, so I only get to write code a few times a month and it is more for stress-relea…

> However, because of how corporations work, once you've demonstrated proficiency at "junior level work" you move up to the next big challenge. Yes, that sounds pejorative, but coding is not hard compared to the next levels of competency: programming is junior level, software architecture is senior level, product roadmap is staff level, corporate direction is above that. This viewpoint, that those jobs are harder, is…

I don't think they are implying that people on more junior levels are not at smart. I believe they are attempting to explain that as you go up higher people tend to be less competent due to a lack of experience and proper training tools.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#98

Post by hnuser355 »

manmal wrote: post #53
expertentipp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We often forget that basically always brilliant successful kids have solid fundaments in form of their parents, affluent in the financial and legal domains. Even then they don't always succeed - remember that British kid who sold a recommendation engine to Yahoo? The rags-to-riches in the industry doesn't exist, move along people.

Yes, because poor (or not-well-off) people have this enormous respect of money, and of people who have accumulated lots of it. They don’t want to waste this investor‘s time, and they are scared of asking customers for money. Well-off people don’t have these problems. That random investor is just like their dad, plus or minus the Rolex, and they know their language („Have you been to Martha’s this year?“). Asking for…

It’s so funny when you think about it. People are scouring the globe looking for places to put their money. They’ll hire armies of people to look for places to put their money. If I remember right Felix Dennis talked about this a lot in his book.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#99

Post by hnuser355 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #46
Flozzin wrote: post #40

This article reminds me of a clip from an interview with Obama recently. https://youtu.be/N7ZHDoNhScY?t=716 He states that he expected people in charge would be more informed or smarter as he progressed up the chain from community organizer to world leader. But in his experience they did not. In his words, "It was all the same people." Another person that touches on this idea is Adam Corolla. His often states his obs…

I guess Obama never met people like Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack.

I mean I worked with people at Kmart who had fairly quick intellects and encyclopedic knowledge of some random thing like radios, definitions of words, and every pop hit of the last several decades
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