Seriously guys, this belongs on reddit somewhere. Who is upvoting this shit.
95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
41–50 of 299 posts
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#42On the flip side. Sometimes you're just not that good at stuff despite your best efforts. In college I really struggled with math. Which was a challenge because computer science has you take a lot of math classes. In my calculus class I studied so hard for the final. Did every problem in the book. And I still just got a B in the class. At the same time my programming classes were really easy. I didn't study at all an…
> Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy. You mentioned faring well in programming classes. Interview performance aside, do you feel that you're a good and perhaps exceptional programmer?
Having transitioned to management some time ago, it wouldn't surprise me that a humble developer might be under-rating themselves.
Once I got my hands off the keyboard, it became pretty clear that the best person for the job was very situational, and that my opinion was often wrong. The technically smartest and most capable person was often the worst choice for many tasks.
One of my best DBA team members was a guy with a history degree with almost no understanding or interest in basic crap like CAP theory, normalization tradeoffs, etc. He was honestly terrible at design.
He was consistently, though, a 10x type resource for production performance problems. But thought of himself as barely qualified for the team because he was a 0.6x resource for many other tasks. I'd hire him every time.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#43well, i don’t buy from sellers with under 98% rating from amazon or ebay. 95% is atrocious if true. for sellers with lower absolute number of feedback responses, i quality it by reading negative feedback because many times it’s the customers that are atrocious. but if you have thousands of responses and only 95%, forget it.
this means almost all amazon marketplace sellers are disqualified for me. it’s gone downhill fast over the last 5 years.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#44>Within the game, the goal of the game is to win. This might be a case of ludonarrative conflict, though I hadn't considered it outside of narrative-driven games. Blizzard wants both mainstream low-entry play, and highly-competitive e-sport bait. And in that way lies madness[0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/11m21k/starcraft...
Man, I remember reading this back then and agreeing with everything he said. And he was largely right. SC2 never really became relevant. By the time they fixed the arcade and implemented coop, both features that were absolutely necessary to capture the casual audience, it was way too late. I love the coop mode, but it's clear that the whole game is getting little investment from Blizzard because they themselves realize it wouldn't be worth the time, money and effort.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#45There is something so depressingly robotic about the obsession with being the best at everything all the time. Career, income, diet, exercise, lifestyle, hobbies; can't even have fun anymore without spending days holed-up researching esoteric hyper-optimizations. Some of you need to relax and stop sucking the fun out of everything.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#46I like that Dan acknowledges that he sometimes get ridiculed for his ideas, but continues to post whatever is on his mind. I think that's admirable, because he might be occasionally very right despite the opprobrium of the world. I sometimes feel that my generation (Millenials and younger) are super cagey and obscure their real views because of a fear of censure.
He literally says the opposite:
> I have about 20 other posts on stupid sounding ideas queued up in my head, but I mostly try to avoid writing things that are controversial, so I don't know that I'll write many of those up.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#47There is something so depressingly robotic about the obsession with being the best at everything all the time. Career, income, diet, exercise, lifestyle, hobbies; can't even have fun anymore without spending days holed-up researching esoteric hyper-optimizations. Some of you need to relax and stop sucking the fun out of everything.
I think some people get their enjoyment out of hyper-optimization rather than the hobby itself, which is also fine.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#48There is something so depressingly robotic about the obsession with being the best at everything all the time. Career, income, diet, exercise, lifestyle, hobbies; can't even have fun anymore without spending days holed-up researching esoteric hyper-optimizations. Some of you need to relax and stop sucking the fun out of everything.
I think it's important to be passionate about your life's work. However, maintaining "good enough" across all dimensions of particular lifestyle or role is actually incredibly challenging.
Even for a standard engineer, think how many you know can code well, be leaders, AND can write good documentation.
For most things, it's always a "pick 2 out of 3" situation.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#49[deleted]
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#50There is something so depressingly robotic about the obsession with being the best at everything all the time. Career, income, diet, exercise, lifestyle, hobbies; can't even have fun anymore without spending days holed-up researching esoteric hyper-optimizations. Some of you need to relax and stop sucking the fun out of everything.
He leaves room for that.
> And for games like Overwatch, I don't think improving is a moral imperative; there's nothing wrong with having fun at 50%-ile or 10%-ile or any rank.