271–280 of 588 posts
> Anyone who cares about getting good grades has to play this game, or they'll be surpassed by those who do. And at elite universities, that means nearly everyone, since someone who didn't care about getting good grades probably wouldn't be there in the first place. The result is that students compete to maximize the difference between learning and getting good grades.
It's a race to the bottom.
This is a very interesting thing to think about, I thought about it a bunch of times already, and have a couple of thoughts about it too. First of all, once you're 55, it's easy to say stuff like that, because you won't be tested anymore. And I think there is a good chunk of survivorship bias: "Hey, I made it without worrying about tests, so you can, too!" Although that is probably not true for a big chunk of the pop…
> For example, it would be nice to have tests at university where I can google things, just like in the real world. One of the best professors I had at university for a Linux course always said: “If you don’t know something, google it!” He backed up his words by allowing googling on the actual coding part of his exams. You had to understand the underlying concepts but you never had to memorize syntax. One time, he ha…
When I studied law, all our exams were open book. Bring whatever you want. I brought casebooks and printouts of legislation and important cases. Others also brought headnotes and volumes of Halsbury's (a legal encyclopaedia).
None of this helped if you didn't know the material well enough to identify the legal issues in each question.
Which is why I failed Torts.
The tech industry has unfortunately adopted the methodology of centralized hackable tests as the canonical gatekeeping method in the form of programming interviews. Most big tech companies don't care about how good you have been at delivering some value through creating software: they want to see you deliver a very specific type of performance at a whiteboard. Interviewers are given specific math puzzle questions to…
Being a hiring manager at a big company, I can tell you this is just as frustrating for me as it is for candidates. I hate “leet code” and frankly find algorithmic interviews to be very low signal compared to more practical, open-ended, domain-specific problems. I will say though, the problem is one of “standardization” across an organization where it’s too big for everyone to fit in a room. Suppose you give each tea…
I think you could reduce the 10% to 1% simply by actively firing bad employees, and the easiest way to do that is with a probationary hiring period (let's say 6 months, maybe a year).
I am fully aware of how systemic rot can be, and how hard it can be to remove. The real problem is when you hire a bad manager, because they will not only let the rot fester but encourage it to grow.
I think you could wildly relax hiring standards for ICs and be incredibly successful. What we need are better practices around hiring managers more than anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a hiring manager at a big company, I can tell you this is just as frustrating for me as it is for candidates. I hate “leet code” and frankly find algorithmic interviews to be very low signal compared to more practical, open-ended, domain-specific problems. I will say though, the problem is one of “standardization” across an organization where it’s too big for everyone to fit in a room. Suppose you give each tea…
My solution is smaller companies - that way the underperforming ones can be eliminated more easily.
To be honest, if a large company has multiple departments that essentially govern themselves, perhaps they could just give them proper names, as if they were subsidiary companies? Because it seems to me that the mechanism behind the "best performers leave when they feel the average performance of workers in the company goes down" is really bounded by the company name. I.e. people in department of frobnification leave because of the people in department of foobing bars. But people in Frobnificator perhaps wouldn't leave because of people in FooBars.io, even if legally/administratively the two situations were equivalent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't know about Page and Brin, but according to the Netflix documentary Gates won state-level math Olympiad at a level three grades higher than his own. So he wasn't a modal child. You can't draw any conclusions from that about education at scale.
You actually can: if he had a better level of education than everyone else, why wouldn't he do better than people taking traditional educational paths? As someone who participated in many academic competitions as a child, the winners were consistently weighted 9:1 private:public.
I know that learning how to hack systems is valuable because that's how I got into YCombinator. I set out specifically to hack the application process and succeeded. It wasn't even that difficult to do. If pg believes what he's saying in this essay, I have two questions: 1. why did he design a testing system that was easily hacked? 2. why does YCombinator itself focus so much on hacking the venture capital system, as…
That's also my largest concern with this essay. PG describes the world they way he wants it to be, but not the world the way it is. And I haven't been inside of YC, but everything I've seen is that YC is essentially program that combines some level of "support" with essentially learning to hack VCs. If it were simply build the best product then there wouldn't be a need for YC. If it were simply build the best product…
[1] https://seths.blog/2018/09/education-needs-to-be-inconvenien...
As somebody who has designed some of the tests Paul Graham is complaining about, it really is hard from the other side! For example, it's long been known in the physics education research community that students come away from introductory courses with very little physical understanding, even if they can do the plug and chug problems on typical tests just fine. Students can all recite Newton's third law, but immediat…
Shouldn't that be a sign that trying to come up with standardized measures is a fool's errand?
Short of blatant social engineering, I don't see how we can have a system that could improve people's motivation and drive for education. And if we don't have a way to actually change human nature, why do we keep trying to design this system that would magically work for so many different people?