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The Lesson to Unlearn

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#391

Post by kudokatz »

alien_ wrote: post #329
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My solution is smaller companies - that way the underperforming ones can be eliminated more easily.

At Amazon, perhaps one of the largest and most successful employers, the solution to this is that when interviewing, everyone's main goal is to hire people better than the current average of the team. To ensure this, someone experienced with interviewing from outside the team/organization, so called bar raiser, is always added to the interviewing team. This person is there to ensure high quality hires and has hiring…

> At Amazon, perhaps one of the largest and most successful employers, the solution to this is that when interviewing, everyone's main goal is to hire people better than the current average of the team.

At this point it's Kool-aid. In practice bar raisers have so much more interview experience that you can very easily pick them out, but so much of their behavior results in simply weeding out the bad.

I have received LOTS of offers from Amazon over more than a decade (only one accepted at one point), and my friend used to be a bar raiser. In his first interview at a new company he was both rude to an interviewee and flat-out wrong technically on multiple points along with it.

You can't raise the bar if you can't pick the bar raisers.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#392

Post by anon9001 »

dominotw wrote: post #309
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…

Haha here is the email i have from my facebook interview thats coming up. "Your initial Facebook interview is coming up and we want you to ace it! Here are some tips and resources so you know what to expect and can prepare adequately. Preparing is key. Our initial interview determines whether to continue with a full series of onsite interviews. This initial interview is primarily a coding interview that will take pla…

> Write a function to return if two words are exactly "one edit" away, where an edit is: Inserting one character anywhere in the word (including at the beginning and end) Removing one character Replacing exactly one character

I've been writing code my entire life, and I've been employed as a software developer for longer than I'd care to admit. I don't have a quick answer to that problem. I know there's an algorithm for computing the "distance" between two strings, so this is probably about that. I have no idea how to write it, and it would never come up in my job, and if it did I'm sure I'd import a library to do it.

After searching it, this is what they're talking about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

That means my only chance of getting this problem correct was either:

1) I prepared for it by studying the bank of questions and memorized the formula for Levenshtein distance.

or

2) I considered this problem for the first time during the interview, was immediately struck by the same insight that mathematician Vladimir Levenshtein had in 1965, and developed the algorithm on a white board in real-time.

At least they're transparent that if I do lots of HackerRank, LeetCode, and CodeLab then I'll be able to pass their test. I suppose that's better than only those "in the know" realizing how to be employed at FB.

I really hope I never have to do another job interview again.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#393

Post by kudokatz »

halflings wrote: post #390
alien_ wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Amazon, perhaps one of the largest and most successful employers, the solution to this is that when interviewing, everyone's main goal is to hire people better than the current average of the team. To ensure this, someone experienced with interviewing from outside the team/organization, so called bar raiser, is always added to the interviewing team. This person is there to ensure high quality hires and has hiring…

FWIW this wasn't my experience when interviewing with Amazon; I felt the bar was much lower than other companies I interviewed with, even when I wasn't that good at algorithmic problems. That's just one data point, and maybe what you're describing is for more senior hires?

I've found a generally higher bar than places like Microsoft but definitely a much lower bar than other FAANG companies, unicorns, and even tiny-but-potentially-elite startups run by people who know what they're doing.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#394

Post by marccarre »

The problem might be a lot bigger.

Possibly most of one's life is spent (over?) fitting to some "test" in a system, or "expectation" someone else has, instead of doing what they truly want: trying to pass a test at school, trying to land that job (you think) you want, trying to be socially acceptable in the schoolyard, at a party, or in the office, trying to please a parent, a friend, a partner, trying to conform to some unconsciously shared vision of "success", trying to conform to your own vision of "success", etc.

The list is long.

Fairer, unhackable systems would definitely help in reducing the amount of such "tests" we artificially created as a society. We should strive for this.

However is it possible to solve human nature? To solve "affinity bias", "confirmation bias", "psychological needs", etc.? Is it possible to create a society in which everyone is truly free? Or at least as free as possible from all this? Is it possible to solve freedom & wisdom? :-)

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#395

Post by hirundo »

> When I was a kid, you could either become an engineer and make cool things, or make lots of money by becoming an "executive." Now you can make lots of money by making cool things.

Software is outrageously accessible. The threshold cost for make-lots-of-money-by-making-cool-things has fallen to a used laptop and a wifi password. The prerequisite talent is mostly the ability to focus relentlessly while illegitimi non carborundum.

But since those are rare talents the laptop can only elevate rare people. It's a path to relative wealth for only a pareto distribution of people, like pretty much anything else. But it's a path to absolute wealth for most of the rest of us. Cool things that make money tend to make our lives better.

Make-lots-of-money-by-making-cool-things is a recipe for both more absolute and unequal wealth.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#396

Post by TeMPOraL »

rglullis wrote: post #320
TeMPOraL wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a trust issue. It comes from grades being used to evaluate people outside the particular schools they attend. We could give more autonomy to individual schools or teachers in terms of designing tests, but then we'd be facing two problems. One, the grades given by different schools/teachers would not be directly comparable. An A in one school could be awarded only for exceptional circumstances, and in another jus…

> It comes from grades being used to evaluate people outside the particular schools they attend. Are they really, or is just this elaborate illusion supported by most decision makers to give some rationalization to their own selection processes? When you have Harvard being sued for discriminating against Asians, how can we keep a straight face and tell the kids that they need to study hard because the grades matter?…

> why do we actually care about grades at all?

Because jobs are at a premium and evaluating prospective hires is hard, so employers look for anything they could use to filter and sort the stream of candidates. Education - both the what and the where is somewhat correlated, so that's what's being used.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#397

Post by dunkelheit »

aex wrote: post #157

I've found about how to hack the tests quite early on. I've had straight A's until I no longer cared about the grades. I've also realized that entering and pursuing a career at a tech corporations is a game as well. What has been driving me to startups is the fact that creating a profitable business has no place for hacks. Fundraising is a game that could be easily hacked though. I thought it was only possible to hac…

> What has been driving me to startups is the fact that creating a profitable business has no place for hacks.

I feel that this hack/not hack distinction comes from confusion of goals. If your end goal really is creating a profitable business then hack/not hack is not a useful distinction. Everything you do either gets you closer to your goal (then it is good, hack or not) or not (then it is bad, even if it "feels right"). But suppose your real goal is "doing most good for society" or whatever and you think that you can achieve this goal by building a profitable business. Then if you e.g. create some bullshit product and market the hell of it (thus achieving your proxy goal), it will feel like a hack that doesn't get you closer to your real goal.

TLDR: hack/not hack distinction arises when there are two goals: a proxy and the real one. A hack is something that gets you closer to your proxy goal but not the real one.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#398

Post by johnm »

xvector wrote: post #360
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure you can. You can talk about the hard problems that have nothing to do with the fact that it was part of a missile guidance system or whatever. If you worked on anything non-trivial there are always some interesting problems you had to deal with be they algorithmic, engineering, human, or whatever. If people press for inappropriate details when you've given them plenty of other interesting bits then that's telling you more about them (and whether you want to work with them).

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#400

Post by TeMPOraL »

kaens wrote: post #368
TeMPOraL wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What matters is not whether one starts a company, but why . A company is a way to get money and manpower to help one realize their goals. The important question is, what are their goals? Making money? Or building a product? Unfortunately, most companies are about the former (despite what their marketing copy says).

Pretty hard for companies to not skew very heavily towards being about making money when people require money for food, shelter, and healthcare (at least in the states). Unless the people involved are in a financial state where they are not dependent on revenue from the company, or we divorce survival from capital, I doubt it's really possible for "not making money" to disappear as a terrifying core motivator for eve…

I'm not saying companies should not make money. I'm talking about instrumental vs. terminal values. Money can and should be viewed as means to an end, as instrumental for achieve the company's purpose - be it feeding people, making good tools or getting them to space. But very often it becomes terminal - the company's purpose becomes making money, and what they do becomes means to an end. The entire structure becomes reversed.
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