371–380 of 588 posts
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What about socializing?
That’s the big issue. We‘re thinking about Karate/swimming/chess etc courses, but ideally you would have access to a community of unschoolers. Some big cities have this, but currently not an option for us.
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Add air resistance into the mix, and denser materials do fall faster. Coins vs. napkins. Plums vs. crumpled balls of paper I'd actually take the lesson the other way. It's hilariously tough for model-makers to acknowledge real-world noise that prevents their theoretically precise models from delivering reliable results.
I covered that with terminal velocity. And it isn't just falling, but going down a hill. Folks commonly think heavier bikes will go faster down a hill. That isn't how that works.
I find it especially relevant as my first job was starting my own SAT tutoring company. Anecdotally I found it interesting that immigrant parents & most of the wealthiest US-born parents shared a recognition that this was a game. They were direct and explicit to their kids that this was a system that they must participate in, so they might as well win at it.
I think that is the key: make sure your kids can recognize when something is a bs system they need to hack (like selling enterprise software) and when something is actually about craft and the best will win (like building great products that end-users want to use).
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it's a really simple problem honestly. Make a standardized test, but don't put an hour time limit on it. If you gave the exact same algorithm test with a 24-hour time limit vs. a 1-hour time limit then had a 1-hour interview explaining the solution to the problem you would be testing for something closer to programming acumen than memorization. I have no idea why tech companies find this so challenging.
Cheating? Even with phone screens, some candidates still cheat at these interviews (have some engineer with them answering questions, or looking up similar questions online). I agree a full blown project over 24 hours would be better, but it's more costly to create questions and score them (if you want to do it in a way where cheating is hard/impossible). I've seen startups do this, and it works well for them, but mi…
The thing that had always left me a bit uneasy after my rocky road through education was just how damned certain everyone is about everything. Our education system, at least up through undergraduate unless you dip your toes into undergraduate research (and even sometimes still then!), teaches you things we “know” about the world we live in. Humans have discovered an _incredible_ amount about the world around us, but we have a _tonne_ left to figure out. We don’t lean into the unknown with our education system until late stage. The masses miss out on the beauty of the unknown.
> At this point I've told the founders something you'd think would be completely obvious: that they should make a good company by making a good product. And yet their reaction would be something like the reaction many physicists must have had when they first heard about the theory of relativity: a mixture of astonishment at its apparent genius, combined with a suspicion that anything so weird couldn't possibly be right.
The essay context is students and startup founders, but it turns out most multi-billion dollar enterprises have forgotten this as well.
This notion does not come embedded in the heads of most “senior management” from either world.
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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.
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…
> But as you grow, that ten percent of underperforming people becomes large in absolute numbers, and is very painful to deal with. 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 y…
The effect on morale and real productivity of getting rid of the toxic and worst performers is amazing.
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…
The frustrating thing, is how easy it is to hack the test. After one particular interview, I remember talking to a friend about how hard the technical interview was. He told me that he had already seen the problem and knew it would come up because he bought leetcode premium for the interview. Kind of frustrating to spend hours and hours learning data structures and algorithms when the real key to success is getting lucky and memorizing the problem before hand