The main message is becoming 95%-ile is EASY. I disagree. It’s not. One of the most common discipline is (school) math. You have everything to help you improve: constant feedback, guided resources, a unlimited mass of problems to practice and arguably plenty of time but to reach the 95%-ile is still hard.
95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
281–290 of 299 posts
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very good point and wise. I find this more applicable as a leader when reviewing designs. It's so easy to poke holes and complain, but it is hard to find the good and value that. It is worth it because I can then focus my comments on what is essential and then drive accountability to get all the details done well enough.
Is there a review system (code, design, writing, whatever) that allows you to color code chunks of what you're reviewing and has a well defined color scheme? E. G. Shades of green for mildly to very good, shades of red for mildly to very bad, and some other colors to denote confusion, etc. It would be useful to see feedback of where you did stuff right, but allow you to focus on where you did stuff wrong. Making sure…
So, the best way to provide feedback is via good questions.
This is why tools like quip/gdocs can be great for design documents because I can pinpoint a detail and then ask a good question.
Most junior engineers are bright, and they can solve the (or a) problem at hand. However, the lack both experience in the field and within the domain. Questions are a great way to express concern and share experience.
For software, if they can reasonable code, then it is not so much an issue of right/wrong but "hey, what problem are you solving?" and then aligning on the right problem via questions.
The power of good questions work at every level, and you can drive a lot of good growth and progress via them.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
95th percentile of the Overwatch ladder is also not the same thing as 95th percentile of competitive tournament players. This entire article is just full of category fallacies to try to support a vague subjective assertion. Gaming ladders with automated ELO systems are also not run like tournament ELO systems in more controlled environments like competitive chess. Games like Overwatch, WoW, Starcraft, Hearthstone, et…
Last I played, overwatch does indeed drop your elo once you are diamond and above (approx top 10%). Though I disagree with the author as one who climbed from bottom 25% to top 10% - it was quite hard and took months of deliberate, regular practice (~1000 matches). I found it nearly comparable to improving at medical school. I think the author underestimated the complexity of being good at overwatch.
It's all subjective based on how people vary in their natural competence at the skills required for the game.
Some people play Overwatch and in their first 1000 games they get to grandmaster. Others get to platinum.
People tend to assume it's easy to get to whatever level they got to, regardless of where they are on the skill curve.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#284On 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…
In what sense would your interviewing history reflect your programming skills?
Probably modest correlation between acceptance rate and skill
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#285I 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…
Good is largely subjective to your own level of competence.
A diamond player is good to a platinum player is good to a gold player is good to a silver player etc...
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a review system (code, design, writing, whatever) that allows you to color code chunks of what you're reviewing and has a well defined color scheme? E. G. Shades of green for mildly to very good, shades of red for mildly to very bad, and some other colors to denote confusion, etc. It would be useful to see feedback of where you did stuff right, but allow you to focus on where you did stuff wrong. Making sure…
So, the best way to provide feedback is via good questions. This is why tools like quip/gdocs can be great for design documents because I can pinpoint a detail and then ask a good question. Most junior engineers are bright, and they can solve the (or a) problem at hand. However, the lack both experience in the field and within the domain. Questions are a great way to express concern and share experience. For software…
I'm not suggesting this in lieu of questions, but in addition to. The problem with questions by themselves is sometimes it's ambiguous if it applies to a small portion or a larger portion. Also, questions are not always a good way to indicate doing something right, and any good review will also highlight what was done well.
In the end, it's an additional channel of information, which may expose miscommunication on either side. I don't think it's that uncommon to have a comment next to something that the reviewer might think should cover a larger portion of the work than the creator thinks, either because it's unclear, or the creator slightly misinterpreted what the reviewer meant and didn't see how it applied.
Providing structure that requires active categorization of all of a work (or all of it that's being reviewed), even if it's just to mark it the equivalent of "eh, no real comment" removes ambiguity. If for nothing else than because different reviewers have different standards, and some will mark and question everything, and you can assume anything left unmarked is good or better, and some will only mark egregious stuff, and the rest can be considered to range from mediocre to excellent, which isn't as useful if you goal is also to foster improvement.
> The power of good questions work at every level, and you can drive a lot of good growth and progress via them.
Good questions means well defined questions, and I think anything that could make those easier to output by default (or reduce the minimum quality) might be extremely beneficial.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's very hard to be a 95th percentile soccer, basketball, or track athlete without a decent amount of innate athleticism. Completely not true. Having absolute solid basics that you drill every single day (dribble with both hands or both feet, run your conditioning, shoot free throws, etc.) puts you in the 95th percentile until probably Division 1-A college level (at which point, yes, innate size and body type star…
Yeah I could be wrong on basketball. I don't play it much but now that I think about it you can be a great shooter without being a great athlete, and that alone can make you quite valuable.
I was talking about all sports.
You have to have at least an average amount of athleticism for any sport.
After that, simply drilling the fundamentals over and over and over and over ad nauseam probably puts you into the 95th percentile. This also has the advantage that it improves your endurance and athleticism DRAMATICALLY.
There are regularly articles about middle school teams that are ferociously drilled on fundamentals beating significantly older and physically larger teams that don't have the fundamentals down cold.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I could be wrong on basketball. I don't play it much but now that I think about it you can be a great shooter without being a great athlete, and that alone can make you quite valuable.
I was talking about all sports. You have to have at least an average amount of athleticism for any sport. After that, simply drilling the fundamentals over and over and over and over ad nauseam probably puts you into the 95th percentile. This also has the advantage that it improves your endurance and athleticism DRAMATICALLY . There are regularly articles about middle school teams that are ferociously drilled on fund…
I actually disagree in both directions. Have you played or coached many sports? I have, and I'm not trying to be an asshole with the question, but it just seems so clearly untrue to me that I wonder if you haven't or if we're somehow talking about different things. For some sports/positions, you can become 95th percentile even with below average athleticism, and for others it's essentially impossible even if you have average or even slightly-above-average athleticism. It's all on a spectrum depending on how reliant that sport or position is on innate vs trainable attributes.
Let me know if you disagree with any of these, or if you think the examples I'm choosing are not within the scope of your argument: -No matter how much you drill, you will never be a 95th percentile center in basketball if you're 5'8" or whatever the average male height is. -Slightly further down the innate vs. trainable spectrum, I have never seen an average athlete become even close to a 95th percentile sprinter, long jumper, football wide receiver, or soccer winger. Speed is too important for these, and speed is largely innate. -I have seen below-average athletes become 95th percentile power lifters, football linemen, archers, grapplers, climbers, long distance swimmers, etc. That's because these sports/positions depend on more trainable attributes like strength, flexibility, endurance, technique, and mental focus/resilience.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was talking about all sports. You have to have at least an average amount of athleticism for any sport. After that, simply drilling the fundamentals over and over and over and over ad nauseam probably puts you into the 95th percentile. This also has the advantage that it improves your endurance and athleticism DRAMATICALLY . There are regularly articles about middle school teams that are ferociously drilled on fund…
I actually disagree in both directions. Have you played or coached many sports? I have, and I'm not trying to be an asshole with the question, but it just seems so clearly untrue to me that I wonder if you haven't or if we're somehow talking about different things. For some sports/positions, you can become 95th percentile even with below average athleticism, and for others it's essentially impossible even if you have…
- No matter how much you drill, you will never be a 95th percentile center in basketball if you're 5'8" or whatever the average male height is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265197
- Slightly further down the innate vs. trainable spectrum, I have never seen an average athlete become even close to a 95th percentile sprinter, long jumper, football wide receiver, or soccer winger.
You're looking at this the wrong way. You're thinking about pro players. For most sports, if you're paid to play, you're probably in the top 1% or even 0.5%. Top 5% is much, much bigger and it's usually semi-pros and even amateurs. You can definitely be a half decent player in an amateur team for almost any sport, as long as you're not actually disabled. And even then, it depends on the disability.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is true. One way this happens is when somebody tries to progress very quickly, emulating best players, without putting time to understand the basic mechanics of the game. A good player will be able to adapt their gameplay because they can more or less predict what will happen when they alter the gameplay and/or they can evaluate how their change influenced the result. A stuck player who skipped basic training ma…
A similar analogy: talented musicians who can only read music but completely lack the ability to improvise.
Depends on what their goals are; not all musicians are interested in composition or jamming. I can improvise quite well but can't sight read to save my life.