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Misidentifying talent

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Re: Misidentifying talent

#41

Post by inglor_cz »

onion2k wrote: post #31

I wonder if some small part of the problem lies in the word "talent" . The implication is that developers are born with some sort of innate ability to write software well rather than coding being something you can learn with practise. Calling people "talent" suggests recruitment is a hunt for some person with a rare underlying ability rather than just looking for someone with a skill they've learned. This could also…

I think it is pretty clear that we aren't complete tabulas rasas either. The exact "nature vs. nurture" split isn't known, but it very certainly isn't 0:100.

But the field of software talent is pretty wide. Someone can have a knack for identifying the core of the issue fast (intuition), someone can come up with unorthodox solutions (creativity), someone may be able to see possible security implications sooner than others, yet another is fast learner in general but not very creative etc. These may not be the same people.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#42

Post by goodcanadian »

onion2k wrote: post #31

I wonder if some small part of the problem lies in the word "talent" . The implication is that developers are born with some sort of innate ability to write software well rather than coding being something you can learn with practise. Calling people "talent" suggests recruitment is a hunt for some person with a rare underlying ability rather than just looking for someone with a skill they've learned. This could also…

I wouldn't read too much into the word choice. Not so long ago, I learned that my wife uses the word differently than I do. For her, a talent is simply a learned skill.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#43

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

closeparen wrote: post #4

It’s striking that so many stories about the triumph of metrics over intuition involve games. I’m convinced that you should put statisticians in charge if your goal is to win a game. I’m not convinced that related behaviors, like constructing a game adjacent to the problem you’re actually trying to solve and treating game performance as a proxy (like LeetCode interviews! Or KPIs!) are helpful. It’s also interesting t…

You don't need an algorithmic way to decide how good an orchestra is, because subjective reception from critics and audiences is exactly the point.

And there's a fair amount of innovation in that. Audiences want novel-but-not-too-novel interpretations.

So not only there is no way to define a definitive objective metric for musical interpretation, it's even harder to conjure up an objective metric space for "possible but unusual good" interpretations.

As go orchestras, so go individual players. You absolutely are going to listen to the opinion of an experienced conductor, because being able to tell good from bad and having some insight into compatibility with existing players in the rest of the team is exactly what the job involves.

To make it worse, it's culturally dependent, and it shifts. Good today is not the same as good fifty years ago.

This actually makes it easier than software, because it very much is just about informed opinion, with external subjective feedback from audiences and critics.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#44

Post by trabant00 »

onion2k wrote: post #31

I wonder if some small part of the problem lies in the word "talent" . The implication is that developers are born with some sort of innate ability to write software well rather than coding being something you can learn with practise. Calling people "talent" suggests recruitment is a hunt for some person with a rare underlying ability rather than just looking for someone with a skill they've learned. This could also…

After a couple of decades I have decided for myself talent is real and not something that can be replaced with practice. I've had juniors surpass me in 2 years and I've worked with seniors that learned very little despite working mode decades than me. In my definition of talent I take into consideration not only intelligence but also drive, enthusiasm, work ethic, etc.

Talent becomes more and more important as you require actual design and architectural thinking. For the average code monkey not so much.

As for why a lot of companies refuse to hire juniors: they think practice is more valuable than it actually is and they don't want to spend resources on juniors getting that practice on the time they pay for. And the people involved in the early stages of recruitment are also not technical or passionate about tech so they can't recognize when somebody is or isn't.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#45

Post by tonyedgecombe »

na85 wrote: post #22
closeparen wrote: post #4

It’s striking that so many stories about the triumph of metrics over intuition involve games. I’m convinced that you should put statisticians in charge if your goal is to win a game. I’m not convinced that related behaviors, like constructing a game adjacent to the problem you’re actually trying to solve and treating game performance as a proxy (like LeetCode interviews! Or KPIs!) are helpful. It’s also interesting t…

>I’m not convinced that related behaviors, like constructing a game adjacent to the problem you’re actually trying to solve and treating game performance as a proxy (like LeetCode interviews! Or KPIs!) are helpful. The devil is as always in the details. At least as far as KPIs go, they can be very useful if they are chosen appropriately and if the senior team members have all bought in to the concept. Example: I used…

>Getting that KPI as close to 0 as possible (and we did hit zero every few months) was a goal that everyone had bought into

So what corners used to get cut to meet that target? What extra costs were incurred?

Re: Misidentifying talent

#46

Post by spupe »

Pure stats work in circumstances that are repeatable, easily quantifiable and where you have a huge dataset to learn from past experience. That's why baseball is such a perfect example. It's just not so easy to measure how good someone is at solving novel problems, compared to how well they can hit or throw a ball in perfectly repeatable circumstances.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#47

Post by thaumasiotes »

kqr wrote: post #38
na85 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I’m not convinced that related behaviors, like constructing a game adjacent to the problem you’re actually trying to solve and treating game performance as a proxy (like LeetCode interviews! Or KPIs!) are helpful. The devil is as always in the details. At least as far as KPIs go, they can be very useful if they are chosen appropriately and if the senior team members have all bought in to the concept. Example: I used…

I agree with everything you say except the bit where the failure rate is a fantastic KPI. It has room for improvement. > they have a requirement in most areas to be airborne within 30 minutes when called. [...] "percentage of the time where maintenance can't get an aircraft ready to be flying missions in less than 30 minutes". The problem with this KPI is that it's completely arbitrary. Why does it have to be 30 minu…

> Instead of comparing yourself to arbitrary thresholds, use the raw metric as a KPI instead. Use "minutes until airborne" as the KPI. That you can optimise indefinitely, and it is an honest representation of your current process, not how it compares to a number someone threw out at some time.

This is an example of a more general phenomenon - when you have outcome buckets, it's generally better to do your modeling on raw outcomes ["it took us 32 minutes"] than to try to do it on the bucketed outcomes ["we didn't make it in 30 minutes"]. Bucketing throws most of your information away.

Andrew Gelman talks about this all the time in the context of election modeling, where it's better to predict how many votes something will get, which is a continuous variable (and then, based on the predicted vote, predict whether the thing will win or not), rather than trying to predict whether the thing will win, which is a discrete variable.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#48

Post by zhdc1 »

greatpostman wrote: post #5

Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.

Why are we assuming that short term changes in share price have anything to do with underlying fundamentals?

Meta prints money. They brought in $40B in net income off of $115B in revenue last year. Income attributable to Facebook + WhatsApp + Instagram doubled from 2019 to 2021. They spend more on research and development than they do on expenses attributable to their core business.

Yes, they're no longer growing. That was going to happen eventually. Yes, they're going to be targeted by extensive regulatory action. Yes, they're losing space - and users - to competitors.

It's going to take a lot to kill them off. The social media scene changes fast and they're going into decline, but it doesn't change the fact that Meta is an extremely large advertising company with a lot of money and talent. This isn't MySpace 2.0.

A $380B market valuation was likely unreasonable. A $200B market valuation for a company that earns $40B a year and is used by more than a third of the global population sounds very reasonable.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#50

Post by dijit »

zhdc1 wrote: post #48
greatpostman wrote: post #5

Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.

Why are we assuming that short term changes in share price have anything to do with underlying fundamentals? Meta prints money. They brought in $40B in net income off of $115B in revenue last year. Income attributable to Facebook + WhatsApp + Instagram doubled from 2019 to 2021. They spend more on research and development than they do on expenses attributable to their core business. Yes, they're no longer growing. Th…

> Why are we assuming that short term changes in share price

I don't think the parent is making a strong claim in this direction, moreso that Facebook/Meta has very few new innovations and prefers to acquire them.

Other companies are also quite profitable or have strong market caps but are also not innovating and prefer to acquire new innovations (Oracle being a prime example).

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