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The Lesson to Unlearn

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#351

Post by graycat »

walterbell wrote: post #321
graycat wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Open Object Rexx on Windows (3.1, 2000, XP, now 7, 10). I'm not sure what is available on Linux but maybe the same thing. Rexx can be used as a macro language for nearly any software, but I use it just for command line scripting. I have 200+ Rexx scripts I regard as serious and write more for one-shot applications a few times a week. E.g., I have several Rexx scripts for running Robocopy, and each script has VE…

Thanks for the enthusiastic pitch :) There was once an internal IBM editor called E3, with many Rexx extensions. It was amazing.

I don't recall E3. But there really WAS an IBM editor XEDIT, written on his own by an IBM guy in Paris. He understood elegance. Its macro language was Rexx. KEdit is a PC version of XEDIT.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#352

Post by ken »

knzhou wrote: post #264

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…

Science education is hard. I was constantly frustrated in science classes, especially physics, because every 2 minutes I wanted to say "but then why ___?" Every new thing you learn seems to contradict either common sense (this rock clearly falls faster than this paper!), or something else you've been taught (you mean F=ma was never actually true? and which other equations might turn out to need correcting?).

I recognize it's not feasible for a class of students to constantly interrupt a lecture. The questions that other students had were never the same ones that I had, either. The problem is indeed scale, but I don't think motivation is a primary factor. Eventually you learn to be quiet and accept what the teacher and the textbook say.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#353

Post by vinniejames »

burlesona wrote: post #253
pavlov wrote: post #240

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…

"do something like pay candidates to come on site and work for a week" by doing this you've essentially cut your hiring pool down to 3 categories: new graduates; mediocre engineers who were fired from their last job; or terrible engineers who can't find a job.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#354

Post by marcosdumay »

burlesona wrote: post #253
pavlov wrote: post #240

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…

If you can't stop bad people from accumulating, you will have a problem no matter how selective is your hiring process.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#355

Post by mwfunk »

knzhou wrote: post #307
rglullis wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the people aren't motivated, any standardized measure will miss the mark 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…

We have to try, because the alternative to standardized testing isn't some egalitarian utopia, it's nepotism.

Yeah. I love HN and many of the thoughts expressed on it, but if there's one thing that always jumps out at me as being an incredibly widely held cognitive bias in the tech community, it's a tendency to view certain things in a very black and white, binary fashion, and to treat certain very complicated, messy problems with lots of social nuances as if they were simple problems, if only everyone could be rational about it. Grades and hiring are obvious examples, but you can also see plenty of it in discussions about open source business models and codes of conduct and copyright and so on.

Throughout my life and career I've seen so many statements of this nature from my peers: "the status quo will only ever be a 90% solution at best, therefore we should throw all of that away and just do everything on a case-by-case basis in isolation from one another, then we'd all live in an ideal meritocracy (or something)".

See also any discussion about flat management. "Explicit management hierarchies obviously aren't perfect, therefore let's get rid of them altogether and assume that everyone is awesome and will magically self-organize and do the right thing."

I guess the common theme is, someone is greatly overestimating their own rationality, and projects it onto other people, and ends up with an almost religious faith in the self-organizing competencies of unmanaged people, or the natural inclination of unregulated schools or industries to always do the right thing even when it's not in their own self-interest.

IME there are lots of fundamentally messy or imperfect things in life, where any choice you make has negative consequences. There's also a personality type that is repelled by this sort of messiness and will always be drawn towards throwing everything away and starting from scratch, often with a childlike belief that things they don't understand aren't important, and why can't everyone see how obvious and elegant their solution is? IME they're usually wrong about those situations, but I guess I'm still glad people less pessimistic than I am are tilting at those windmills.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#356

Post by knzhou »

rglullis wrote: post #343
knzhou wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to try, because the alternative to standardized testing isn't some egalitarian utopia, it's nepotism.

Wait, what?! Why?! I am not asking for any utopia. What I am asking is "Instead of setting ourselves for failure every time coming up with some scheme for testing performance, why can't we just use actual performance on the activity that we want to evaluate candidates"? It works for people in sports. It works for trade professions. It works for traders. It works for performers, entertainers, even entrepreneurs. Why c…

Because proper evaluation takes time and a bad choice carries a huge cost. In the absence of any objective measures, an employer gets around this by just hiring the son of the guy they golf with. Connections.

Sports works, but only because sports are extremely popular, with tens of millions of people enthusiastically participating on a regular basis, and accessible to anybody no matter their age and income. This is not true for, say, working at a law firm. You can’t take the best clerk from a pool of a thousand kids who have been clerking since elementary school. It’s either who you know, or who got good grades and test scores.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#357

Post by paulsutter »

chubot wrote: post #243
paulsutter wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg’s articles are all about how to build a great product (Startup=Growth, for example). Are these VC tips-and-tricks secret insider-only info? They don’t publish anything like that > YCombinator was (in 2008) oriented around learning what magic words to say to investors and exactly when to time techcrunch launch articles, etc. There seemed to be no time given to "how to make a great product”

Check out their advice on startup school, e.g. the "fundraising" section: https://www.startupschool.org/library I've watched many of the videos on YouTube. I would say that each speaker consistently emphasizes the need to "build something users want" before making a big press launch, before applying growth hacking techniques, before talking to investors, etc. They always say that in the first 5 minutes of the talk, a…

Thanks for the link looks great

“Startup = Growth” is pure actionable advice and probably the most useful document i’ve ever seen on starting companies (I say that as someone who has founded 3 venture funded startups and two bootstrapped before that)

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#358

Post by dreamcompiler »

taeric wrote: post #341
dreamcompiler wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a larger gravitational force on heavier things because they're heavier. Trouble is, they also have more inertia, which exactly counteracts the larger force (because of the principle of equivalence) and so they fall at the same acceleration as lighter objects.

That feels wrong. You can say that two larger things attract each other more than smaller things. Especially as they get closer to each other. Catch, of course, is all things on the earth are in the noise range compared to, you know, the earth. If you are talking about gravity and acceleration on the earth, you are talking about 9.8 m/s^2. Pretty much period. And yes, there are terminal velocities that impact maximum…

It's correct. Terminal velocity is irrelevant here; it's true outside the atmosphere too. I really am talking about force and acceleration.

It's clear that there's more force on a heavier object. How much force do you have to apply to counteract a bucket full of rocks from falling to the ground, vs. an empty bucket? Your arm is certainly applying more force to the former.

So then the question becomes Why doesn't the full bucket fall faster? Because it has more inertia, and thus it's more difficult to accelerate. But there's also more force, which overcomes this difficulty. The amount of greater force is exactly identical to the greater inertia, so the acceleration remains the same. The "exactly identical" here is no coincidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#359

Post by Izkata »

kccqzy wrote: post #323
pavlov wrote: post #240

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…

I think testing algorithmic questions is certainly evil, but it's a necessary evil because all other methods are either too time-consuming or unrealistic. You wouldn't believe in a big company how many clearly unqualified applicants there are, and there has to be some quick and dirty rule to run a filter through them. Perhaps it's the aura of FANG companies that make unqualified applicants try because they have nothi…

> I think testing algorithmic questions is certainly evil, but it's a necessary evil because all other methods are either too time-consuming or unrealistic.

> write a depth first search and explain its time complexity.

Part of our test goes "here's a function, in plain English what does it do?", and then "there's a few bugs in this implementation, what are they and how can they be fixed?"

I think there's a lot of alternatives to traditional algorithmic questions that just don't usually get considered. This one I liked because it involves things you'd actually do day-to-day: Reading other people's code, figuring out intent, and finding/fixing bugs.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#360

Post by xvector »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #299
burlesona wrote: post #253

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…

I was a hiring manager at a big company for years. We never did coding tests, and I like to think that I made good choices every time. I kept a high-functioning team together, under fairly humble pay, and stressful, sometimes demoralizing, conditions, for decades. I'm mediocre, at best, at these tests. I don't come from a traditional CS background (started as an EE). I tend to take unusual, hybrid approaches to solvi…

Unfortunately portfolios would make finding jobs very difficult for myself and my colleagues. We aren’t really allowed to talk about what we work on outside of what could easily fit in a vague, 1-sentence summary on LinkedIn.

This is actually frustrating me quite a bit because as I look for new jobs people like to ask, in detail, what I worked on, and I can’t really tell them.

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