I always shot for a “B+” in college. My logic was that in 5 years I’d remember the content at a B+ level, and any incremental effort was better spent socializing or building student organizations.
The Lesson to Unlearn
541–550 of 588 posts
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#542Earlier 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 easiest way to do that is with a probationary hiring period
How often do you actually boot someone though? For juniors we have pretty low expectations so they never fail this.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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).
The only difference between these people and those who pass normally is that the latter group looked up the answers to the problem before you even asked them. Nobody comes up with things like mods of dfs or n-pointer problems on the spot. These problems were the subjects of doctoral dissertations the first times they were solved. We pass them because we've seen problems just like it. The system has been gamed and doesn't work.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#544As 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…
Yes, it's hard in both sides. I'm one of those people who got good grades in high school physics (I was able to solve problems), and still thought that satellites were kept in orbit because "there's not gravity" (or is too small). And I was genuinely interested in learning.
Part of the problem is the lack of time. Both teachers and students need to cover all the topics in one semester/year, and it takes time to assimilate and integrate the knowledge. Add to that that as student, you don't know what's important, even when you're told so, if you're told at all. That's why we can hold contradictory models in our minds. They're good enough to solve some problems, but conceptually wrong.
I think that a possible solution would be to keep the grades open. You get a B in physics-101, since you got a flawed model in your mind, you got to physics-201 where new experiences show the problems in your model and force you to correct it, and now you prove you achieved a knowledge that deserves an A.
I know, that proposal it's impractical, and time consuming, but I think that's how most of us really learn.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily, there are lots of private schools which do things very normally.
And many of those turn out tons of successful people you’ve heard of, too. Bet the ones that do so at the highest rate tend to be among the most expensive.
Yes it has been shown that having successful friends will make yourself more successful. Putting your kid into a school for rich people will more likely lead to rich friends later on.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 easiest way to do that is with a probationary hiring period How often do you actually boot someone though? For juniors we have pretty low expectations so they never fail this.
People got booted from my first place of work a lot - probably something like 1 in 5 didn't survive the probation period. The idea is to make the probation period long enough that the employee can demonstrate value. If they can't demonstrate value in that time period, they are let go.
This was not the practice where I worked, but you could have different probation periods for different roles. So someone who is primarily focused on technical debt might have a longer probation period than someone focused on rapid feature development.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#547This is actually wrong and surprising to hear from PG. For the most part, life is hackable. Sure, being the “real deal,” whatever that is, is great. But most of “success” in life (again, whatever that is) comes from hacking. (And luck.) Look at WeWork, for instance, one of the greatest and most successful hacks of our time. YC itself became a hack as soon as it acquired useful signal. If you’re optimizing for success, you should teach students to hack more not less.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm waiting for the entrepreneur who will say he doesn't care how much money he makes or how many customers he has, only that it's worthwhile and needed doing. This is literally all of open source software. The problem here is that you're waiting for an entrepreneur to say this, which is the wrong kind of person to expect this from.
Possibly. But for a little while, I did hear about "lifestyle businesses", i.e., the idea that you could be financially sustainable in tech without needing massive growth. And these days, I think most of the open source software I use was actually contributed by a corporation.
Be careful of believing what you hear. There are still plenty of lifestyle businesses, they just don't seek out or receive much publicity.
The media buzz is dominated by mostly-not-very-good VCs and mostly-not-very-good startups trying to find and impress each other. The VC market is designed to seek out the "unicorn" companies whose value will grow 1000x, and so the companies that might be that and try to look like that get the most buzz. There's nothing wrong with starting or funding that kind of company, but it's not for everyone, and it certainly isn't all that's out there.
It's still viable to start a smallish lifestyle business that produces enough money for yourself and doesn't take a ton of work to keep going, but will never grow to be 1000x the size. It's just fine if that's what you want to do too, but know that such businesses usually don't market too much, either for customers or investors. They don't want VCs, and VCs don't want them either.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#549As 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…
I do work in a related field and give your answer really sad. The answer is simply that standardised tests are not a suitable measure of learning. They miss most of the important insights and even efforts to open up, like the attempt to measure 'problem solving'in PISA, are damned to stick to very narrow concepts.
Standardized testing is good for:
- measuring system performance against set standards - giving basic insights into student's average level of knowledge of a subject (if you use a thorough theoretical framework to conceptualise learning outcomes and link test items to this) - maybe measuring school performance against standards - maybe measuring teacher performance against standards
But for students this individual measure of an exam is simply not a good measure of learning in any modern education system. Yes it is a useful measure in really bad systems where teachers are bad and teach wrong things, or where eg attendance and exam fraud are huge issues.
But modern pedagogy is not about teaching book knowledge which is easily measured. In any Western education system we are mostly past that point. It's about helping students discover own interests and abilities, develop competence and confidence, experiment, fail and try again. This learning is simply too individual and hard to measure for a standardised test.
The only option is formative assessment (essentially teachers grading students repeatedly throughout the year on things like effort, achievement of general learning aims, additional development, results produced, presentations, support to other students, etc - a bit how you would measure a good office worker). Or maybe let's do like Finland and Estonia and let's mostly eliminate the testing burden.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#550Earlier quoted context omitted.
The heavier bike will reach the terminal velocity of the lighter bike sooner than the lighter bike will. If that's not extra acceleration then I don't think you're looking at the problem from a practical perspective. Yes, acceleration due to gravity is the same, but air resistance has less effect, at all speeds, on the heavier bike. The rate at which the heavier bike gains speed is higher. It accelerates faster.
This is just disagreement over magnitude. And what it means to hit higher acceleration. Take my statements to be, it won't hit a meaningful higher acceleration. Not that it won't necessarily accelerate for longer. In general, you will accelerate down the hill at 9.8 m/s^2 modified by the incline. No matter how heavy the bike is. (Within the realm of realistic weights.). Yes, the points you are raising are true. But w…
The velocity of the bike+rider is proportional to their mass. Realistically this can range over two orders of magnitude, which can be particularly relevant in a racing context.