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It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

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Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(The second definition is also wrong – it's true only for unit vectors.)

If you express your vectors as scalar multiples of unit vectors, it works, right?

Then you'd still multiply those scalars. In your example you just replace 1 and -1 with the product of the vectors length.

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#62

The educated knows that the thing that the CTO asks for is infeasible. Hence the lack of motivation. The Doer in his ignorance, will embark on a trip of endlessly trying satisfy his boss, thinking that they are making progress, but they are not.

I tend to think of "educated" as meaning "having done this before", while do-er is someone who will maintain motivation.

Someone who thrives on novelty will be an uneducated-doer at the start of a project, then convert to an educated-apathetic after completing it. They won't be inspired to do the same thing again because it's not novel. But while it is novel, you can bet they will dedicate a lot of time to it.

Someone who thrives are familiarity will start as an uneducated-apathetic. They will get frozen due to not knowing what to do. But with guidance they can be taught what to do, then will go on to be an educated-doer. These people are happy to keep doing the same projects over and over again. They like what they know.

Most of us fall somewhere in the middle. But I'm sure most of us have worked with both types: the hyper-focused person who works 80 hours a week to get some cool PoC out the door; and the "stick to the process we have in place, please" type. Both are valuable in certain situations, and a liability in others. Carmack and Torvalds appear to be the first kind of person -- granted, I've never met them -- but they do seem to like to build amazing things, then hand them over to someone else to maintain.

I know lots of successful devs who are the latter. They crank out the same kind of code for clients project after project, and will happily work with tools like Wordpress because that's what they know and it makes them money.

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#63

Alternative take: in the hiring process education is often used as a proxy for motivation, when actually it only proves that once upon a time someone was motivated long enough to get educated, but it doesn't actually say anything about their present state in terms of motivation. A 'Do-er' is at least at present motivated, and educating them will get them to the desired combination of education+motivation in the prese…

I hired someone well educated from a Top Ivy League university but they had no motivation whatsoever. I tried my best, gave them everything they wanted (money, work style, tools, training) but they just wouldn't want to be motivated and we failed collectively. They were very smart otherwise and definitely could learn the skills.

When I am hiring, for me the biggest things are motivation, curiosity and caring for your own career. If you don't show me those traits, I am very hesitant to hire you. I meet a lot of candidates who have no idea why they applied, what they want in life for themselves but are just randomly sending their Resume hoping it sticks.

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#64

Alternative take: in the hiring process education is often used as a proxy for motivation, when actually it only proves that once upon a time someone was motivated long enough to get educated, but it doesn't actually say anything about their present state in terms of motivation. A 'Do-er' is at least at present motivated, and educating them will get them to the desired combination of education+motivation in the prese…

This only applies to entry level jobs for new grads. What else do they have to go off of? After 5-10 years they don't care about your formal education.

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#66

Alternative take: in the hiring process education is often used as a proxy for motivation, when actually it only proves that once upon a time someone was motivated long enough to get educated, but it doesn't actually say anything about their present state in terms of motivation. A 'Do-er' is at least at present motivated, and educating them will get them to the desired combination of education+motivation in the prese…

I hired someone well educated from a Top Ivy League university but they had no motivation whatsoever. I tried my best, gave them everything they wanted (money, work style, tools, training) but they just wouldn't want to be motivated and we failed collectively. They were very smart otherwise and definitely could learn the skills. When I am hiring, for me the biggest things are motivation, curiosity and caring for your…

It isn't that people from Ivy League universities are unmotivated, it is that those people has so many options that unless you are a top company you almost surely wont see them unless there is something wrong with them.

> When I am hiring, for me the biggest things are motivation, curiosity and caring for your own career. If you don't show me those traits, I am very hesitant to hire you.

Yet you just explained that you hired this person just because they had a Top Ivy on their resume. You might not repeat that mistake but you did do it once.

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#67

Alternative take: in the hiring process education is often used as a proxy for motivation, when actually it only proves that once upon a time someone was motivated long enough to get educated, but it doesn't actually say anything about their present state in terms of motivation. A 'Do-er' is at least at present motivated, and educating them will get them to the desired combination of education+motivation in the prese…

I hired someone well educated from a Top Ivy League university but they had no motivation whatsoever. I tried my best, gave them everything they wanted (money, work style, tools, training) but they just wouldn't want to be motivated and we failed collectively. They were very smart otherwise and definitely could learn the skills. When I am hiring, for me the biggest things are motivation, curiosity and caring for your…

> I meet a lot of candidates who have no idea why they applied, what they want in life for themselves but are just randoming sending their Resume hoping it sticks.

Yeah, well, while I'm working on that I still need to put food on the table, so I'll apologize ahead of time for faking like I give a rats ass about a career long enough to get through the interview process.

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say there is no way to 100% cover with reading what you need to learn on the job. Also there is no way to cover some concepts with 100% on the job training (much harder to make a HS grad a petroleum engineer by just throwing them on a platform in the gulf without any formal education). You have to have some implicit knowledge of how things work in order first...but that doesn't always come from formal educati…

The challenges are compounded when two people come from very different experiences. The same words mean different things to them and then instead of fostering the transfer of knowledge, "the words get in the way." I suspect this is a root cause of a lot of social and political friction. Doing or showing is sometimes the only hope of getting past that.

This is why most if not all trades have apprenticeships. You have to know what to do and all see what to do...otherwise you could screw something up because you misinterpreted the instructions or design.

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#70

I am increasingly of the opinion that there is little difference between doing and learning. In fact I would argue that anyone who thinks you can learn without doing is simply wrong.

So then you'd default to always pick the educated person since to you they are by definition a doer?
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