What to Learn
danluu.com
What to Learn
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Re: What to Learn
#2> ... I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion that I might turn into another post.
Please do! A lot of discussions regarding workplace morale, both here on HN and elsewhere, seem to boil down to "your manager is very good/bad and that explains everything else you mentioned". I tend to agree; having a good manager can make a huge positive difference and having a bad manager a huge negative one. However, I'd be very interested in better ways to detect managerial quality upfront rather than when it is already too late.
Re: What to Learn
#3> ... I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion that I might turn into another post. Please do! A lot of discussions regarding workplace morale, both here on HN and elsewhere, seem to boil down to "your manager is very good/bad and that explains everything else you mentioned". I tend to agree; having a good manager can make a huge posit…
What’s that saying? People don’t quit their company they quit their manager. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.
Re: What to Learn
#4The bit about compilers reminds me of this quote about Feyman, but sorry of the inverse where you hold tricks in your head instead of problems.
Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!'
Re: What to Learn
#5> All of us have strengths and weaknesses and we spend a lot of time talking about ‘areas of improvement.’ It can be easy to feel like the best way to advance is to eliminate all of those
I struggle with this. All the time.
I always find it difficult to strike a balance between leveraging my strengths and filling gaps in my weaknesses. For the large part of my career, my attention was directed on the latter: constantly trying to improve myself based off of feedback from friends, family, colleagues, managers, etc.
But now ... I'm a solo entrepreneur and lately, I've been actually flexing a lot more of my strengths, identifying characteristics about myself that give me an edge. Of course, I'm not blind to my weaknesses (I think about it all the time) but I do agree that we should lean more into our strengths.
Re: What to Learn
#6The bit about compilers reminds me of this quote about Feyman, but sorry of the inverse where you hold tricks in your head instead of problems. Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result,…
That's actually on the list of advice from Gian-Carlo Rota. The one linked in the blog article. https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-l... No. 7.
Re: What to Learn
#7Learning ‘everything’ offers the benefit of helping you identify new many things you potentially could easily become (or happen to already be) unusually good at.
On one hand, it’s a bit addictive and without certain external factors or compensating techniques it’s possible to get used to it so much that one becomes averse to investing time into learning one thing in depth.
On the other hand, at least with the type of mindset I have, the idea of knowing what to learn seems foreign, enviable at times but more often smelling of a local maximum.
Re: What to Learn
#8> ... I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion that I might turn into another post. Please do! A lot of discussions regarding workplace morale, both here on HN and elsewhere, seem to boil down to "your manager is very good/bad and that explains everything else you mentioned". I tend to agree; having a good manager can make a huge posit…
What’s that saying? People don’t quit their company they quit their manager. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.
That’s very true but it also represents one extreme of the spectrum. You may have an ok manager; they’re not that good but they’re not annoying either and you can generally work with them. Ideally you would want to work with a manager who can accelerate your career and learning and that’s not always easy to find. There are socially inept managers who might fail in most places but succeed at certain orgs, or vice versa I.e their success is a combination of personal skills and the org environment. It’s really difficult to know (imo) without working with the person for a little while.
Re: What to Learn
#9> ... I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion that I might turn into another post. Please do! A lot of discussions regarding workplace morale, both here on HN and elsewhere, seem to boil down to "your manager is very good/bad and that explains everything else you mentioned". I tend to agree; having a good manager can make a huge posit…
Detecting managerial quality up-front is a rather hard problem. I believe it's mostly rooted in the fact that anything meaningful you do as a manager plays on a long timescale (months & years), so you can't directly verify. And it's sufficiently fuzzy that in a short conversation, managers can lay down enough smoke screen to make it hard to see flaws.
So, what you need is getting some kind of long-term view on that manager. There are a couple of ways:
* If you can get it, data. Retention/Turnover, how well people grow, internal surveys. That's almost exclusively available if you transfer within a company, so limited usefulness.
* References. Find people who worked for that manager and ask them. Even better if it's ex-reports, since they tend to be more frank.
* Are they listening? When you have a conversation with them, are they paying close attention to what you have to say, or are they busy delivering a message? You want listening :)
* Can they communicate clearly? Are they able to express what their team does, and what their main challenges are, in a coherent way? In less than a minute? Communication is a managers main job. If they fail at that, you'll have a horrible time.
* And finally, gut check. How do you feel around that manager? If you're in any way uncomfortable, see it as a warning sign. That doesn't even necessarily reflect on their skill as manager - there are just some people we're feeling good around, and some who make us miserable. Skip the miserable part. (If you have a skilled manager, they can minimize the misery somewhat, but you'll still both be miserable.)
Re: What to Learn
#10>For example, this analysis of world-class judo players found that most rely on a small handful of throws, concluding1
>Judo is a game of specialization. You have to use the skills that work best for you. You have to stick to what works and practice your skills until they become automatic responses.
>If you watch an anime or a TV series "about" fighting, people often improve by increasing the number of techniques they know because that's an easy thing to depict but, in real life, getting better at techniques you already know is often more effective than having a portfolio of hundreds of "moves".
Which is essentially,
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Bruce Lee