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95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

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Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#111

Post by flr03 »

5cott0 wrote: post #45

There 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.

There is some sort of rat race being this obsession, that kind of put me off sometimes. It's like, yes, I'm guilty of it somehow, I want to be better, to be more productive, to do less mistakes etc. I'll do my work better, I can get hired by a company that would choose me over another candidate, nice. But the cost is that it's dragging the all profession into this mindset. The 10x thingy, the hyper productivity competition. This has also a cost for yourself, you can optimise everything, work on several IDEs, write your documentation as your code compiles, listen to a podcast as you have lunch, a book on the tube as you go back home... But boy oh that's exhausting.

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#112

Post by pixelperfect »

It's not that difficult to get to the 95th percentile in Overwatch or Bridge because no one at the 95th percentile receives much compensation, monetary or otherwise.

When significant compensation is awarded to the 95th percentile of some field, attaining the 95th percentile is much more difficult.

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#113

Post by 0027 »

krick wrote: post #57

Yeah, no, that's just about lousy definitions. The premise suggests that it's easy to become 95%-ile in anything, say, deadlifting among men who deadlift and not just entire population of the planet Earth. Before I can suggest author to try, he hastily corrects himself, that it doesn't mean "95%-ile among people who practice regularly", so "men who deadlift" is invalid domain after all. Rather, it should be... "peopl…

Agreed. 95th percentile of Olympic pole vaulter's? 95th percentile of horse jockey's? If you limit your scope the scope of what you are trying to achieve it gets much more competitive.

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#114

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

speeder wrote: post #103
eshyong wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed with your points, although I wouldn't use the word "lie". "Marketing yourself" would be a better way to put it. It's not about falsely representing your experience; it's about knowing and emphasizing your strengths, and aligning that with the needs of the team.

Learned the hard way that lie is mandatory for some questions. For example: many companies insist on asking how you did "x" (for example solves a conflict of idea of solution) in situation "y" (for example between two teams in same department) and you are obliged to answer something, even if you never been in that situation (a certain multinational company for example asked me that question three times across two dif…

I think you're overcorrecting here. I've been on the other side of the table for questions like that, and the intent is to ensure that you have been in the appropriate situations before. At most multinational companies, resolving conflicts between two engineering teams is an everyday occurrence, and any new hires above entry level are expected to know how to do it.

That some people manage to escape the requirement by lying doesn't mean lying is the intended strategy.

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#115

Post by ryandrake »

nemothekid wrote: post #93
Traster wrote: post #51

I find it really very frustrating that the author talks about the "95%" percentile and then does very little to actually justify why he's talking about the 95% percentile and how he's measured it. He's got some anecdata about what he views in overwatch, but you actually need some statistical techniques if you want to justify a statistical number. Of the players in the top 5% how many times was it observed that they c…

Overwatch has a competitive ladder which ranks players on a ELO-based rating system. The percentiles were published, by the game developers, at one point and are assumed to be stable. I play(ed) a lot of Overwatch, enough to get into the top 1% (Grandmaster). The rank he derides on, 90-95%, is Diamond, which is quite famously "ELO Hell", because that is where a lot of naturally talented players end up before deciding…

There seems to be something fundamentally wrong (with the game or with the measurement or with something else) when the top 10% is considered “not good” and the top 5% is “respectable”. I can’t really think of anything where this is true. Games, job performance, educational testing, income & wealth... Top 10% is kind of by definition great!

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#116

Post by PNT510 »

j7ake wrote: post #92

The definition of 95th percentile is confusing. I think if you scored top 95th at a National exam in high school you would be competitive to choose the university you want. That is impressive. Being 95 percentile in college sports would probably allow you play the sport professionally. Having a website in the 95th percentile in terms of traffic would probably be extremely impressive. Having a 95 percentile restaurant…

You're totally off with your numbers. I don't know anything about college entrance exams so I won't comment on them.

If you play football in the NCAA you need to be closer to the 98th percentile to have a shot in the NFL. And to even got a shot in the NCAA you needed to be in the 95th percentile of high school players. In the NFL even the never gonna make it cut from the practice squad guys are in the 99th percentile of all people playing football.

There are over 600,000 restaurants in the US alone and less than 3000 Michelin star restaurants world wide. So we're definitely in the well over 99th percentile there.

As for websites. There are an estimated 1.5 billion websites in existence. That means to be in the 95th percentile you only need to be in the top 750 million websites.

So yeah, the example you give are a actually a pretty strong case for the 95th percentile not being that impressive.

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#117

Post by speeder »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #114
speeder wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learned the hard way that lie is mandatory for some questions. For example: many companies insist on asking how you did "x" (for example solves a conflict of idea of solution) in situation "y" (for example between two teams in same department) and you are obliged to answer something, even if you never been in that situation (a certain multinational company for example asked me that question three times across two dif…

I think you're overcorrecting here. I've been on the other side of the table for questions like that, and the intent is to ensure that you have been in the appropriate situations before. At most multinational companies, resolving conflicts between two engineering teams is an everyday occurrence, and any new hires above entry level are expected to know how to do it. That some people manage to escape the requirement by…

So you mean, that to work in a large multinational company above entry level, it is mandatory to have worked for one in the past?

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#118

Post by [deleted] »

merrywhether wrote: post #82
k__ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing you to some geniuses in the field isn't gonna help. Sure Mozart was better that Salieri, but there is just one Mozart. Companies are always talking about how they just take the best, but in the end they have to settle with what the market gives them.

This reminds me of a time when a hiring manager said something along the lines of “We’re trying to find Michael Jordan, not Scottie Pippen.” My colleague and I were pretty shocked by this, since Pippen was also a great Hall of Fame basketball player, just not one of the top 3 players of all time.

[deleted]

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#119

Post by papreclip »

ErikAugust wrote: post #94

Overwatch is a mass participation activity that is casual for most. Performance at the 95% is a joke to a professional. Just like a marathon. 95% of all runners is something like 3:15. That’s more than an hour slower than a decent pro. It really means nothing and people aren’t competing with each other in this way. A pro doesn’t care about a recreational participant. Usually the people who are pretty good at least ha…

OP is also being really misled by survivorship bias, ie. the bias that since he was able to accomplish this by what felt like "putting in the time to fix his mistakes", so must others be. There is such a thing as natural talent in gaming and it accounts for a huge portion of success. It's talent specific to that game or genre of games, it's not "the ability to learn" or "the ability to effectively review one's mistakes" or some other broad skill

I had this discussion with a former pro-gamer who didn't believe that someone with high intelligence (e.g. successful professor, lawyer, etc) could be skill-capped at an average level in his video game. This was a guy who found himself dead in the water after his gaming career died and ended up working in a call center

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#120

Post by scottLobster »

SkyBelow wrote: post #59
cdoxsey wrote: post #12

On 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. This means you aren't high in the 'programming interview' skill set. While related, I consider it distinctly different than the 'programming' skill set. I think it…

Why lie?

Ultimately an interview is about convincing the interviewer that you can solve their problems (and extracting information to determine whether you want to solve them in the first place). Assuming you have the ability to solve their problems, it's a pure exercise in communication.

Take the "Why are you looking for a job?" question. The meme response is "because I need money duh!", but if you look at in a less literal context, you probably have long term goals of some type. Talk about those and how working for the interviewer will help you achieve those. If you don't actually have long term goals and are just in it for an immediate pay-day, well that makes you 1. A person who doesn't plan long-term, and will probably bring that same lack of planning to the job. 2. A less secure investment that will leave the moment they can get a 10% raise elsewhere. and possibly 3. Someone who doesn't really want the job and would just be miserable all the time/not be a good fit

The non-technical parts of an interview are about unifying stories and themes, and too many engineers seem to think it's "lying" to ignore individual data points. If instead of an interview you were trying to convince someone who knew nothing about the S&P500 to invest in the S&P500, you wouldn't talk about 2008 except maybe in passing as a minor risk. You'd say in the long term it's had an upward trend despite occasional drops and that trend is likely to continue due to reasons X, Y and Z. Assuming the person is looking for a long term investment then nothing about that is a lie.

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