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Misidentifying talent

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Re: Misidentifying talent

#71

Post by Frost1x »

MattGaiser wrote: post #17
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.

Are developers really counted on for innovation anyway? We seem like implementation units. Someone else makes decisions and creates tickets for devs to work on.

Depends on your organization. I am but I choose to work in such environments.

Pounding at small broken out tickets under micromanagement structures is a combination of boring and stress ridden, to me.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#72

Post by kqr »

dmurray wrote: post #59
thaumasiotes wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Use "minutes until airborne" as the KPI. Average minutes to airborne? Median? Mode? 90th percentile? 99th percentile? Optimizing for each of those would result in a different process, different outcomes, and quite possibly worse outcomes for the stakeholders than "proportion under 30 minutes" which is just a sixth way to slice the same data.

> Average minutes to airborne? Median? Mode? 90th percentile? 99th percentile?

Facetious answer: yes.

More useful answer: you want to record the full timeseries of individual data points. From this you can derive mean, median, mode, 90th percentile, 99th percentile and any other statistic that is shaped like hole in your cost–benefit calculations. Including trends and changing variance.

For reporting purposes, the upper process behaviour limit is probably a good one as "the" numeric value of the KPI, but the true value is in the timeseries.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#73

Post by bartread »

dijit wrote: post #50
zhdc1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> moreso that Facebook/Meta has very few new innovations and prefers to acquire them.

This isn't unique to facebook/Meta though: plenty of companies switch more toward the acquisition of innovation than the creation of it. Microsoft was like this for a long time. Apple, Google, and Amazon have also made their fair share of acquisitions over the years.

Introducing new products/value propositions is hard, even in adjacent markets, and most will fail. It's often easier to acquire something instead once you reach the point where you can afford to do so.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#74

Post by quadrifoliate »

ewuhic wrote: post #15
kevinmchugh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My takeaway has been that the fastest growing (especially consumer-oriented) tech companies put up the highest bars to hiring, simply because they'll still get enough candidates to end up with enough people. IBM can't be as picky as Roblox.

Does that mean one would find themselves in an environment surrounded by bright innovative minds should they go for IBM?

No, because Facebook and IBM aren't the same in terms of culture. My impression of IBM is that you need to file reports in triplicate every time you use a paperclip.

I have worked with and met people from several smaller, freewheeling startups who were either ex-FB, or turned down an FB offer. In all cases the smaller company had a high initial offer that was lower than FB, but also had a more chilled out culture where promos didn't mean the dog-and-pony show it reportedly is at FB (I wonder if FB is, ironically, more bureaucratic than IBM in this regard?).

Re: Misidentifying talent

#75

Post by kqr »

HelloNurse wrote: post #57
kqr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the one hand, choosing an arbitrary but good enough target avoids wasting effort on overoptimization and ensures a focus on the worst case, not on the best case; on the other hand improvements are not elastic: maybe rearranging parts and supplies to make them more accessible is enough to make 28 minutes as likely as 30 before, but getting to 26 minutes could require expensive tools and 24 minutes would require dif…

Yup. Optimisation is always a trade-off problem that needs to be approached intelligently, not mindlessly. The raw metric of minutes to airborne leads naturally to the intelligent points you raise about what each minute is worth.

The arbitrary target implies a cost function that is infinite below 30 minutes, and zero above it – this, if anything, suppresses intelligent discussion and leads to wasted effort.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#76

Post by [deleted] »

MattGaiser wrote: post #17
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.

Are developers really counted on for innovation anyway? We seem like implementation units. Someone else makes decisions and creates tickets for devs to work on.

[deleted]

Re: Misidentifying talent

#77

Post by quadrifoliate »

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.

You are completely right, but this is much harder to explain to a regular person who doesn't have a math/stats background.

"Get the aircraft in the air in 30 minutes" is much easier to understand, even if the underlying assumption is that the number can be anything – especially when, as you pointed out, there are some reasonable biology-based reasons for 30 minutes.

"Get the aircraft in the air as fast as possible, but then we'll try to optimize that number" is inviting confusion ("Wait, optimize? But we're already working as fast as we can!).

Of course, the tradeoff in the hard threshold is that people might stop improving after hitting the 30 minute threshold. In my opinion this is at least partially based on cultural factors – you should be working in search and rescue at least partly because you want to help people, and should be willing to optimize further to accomplish that goal.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#79

Post by teddyh »

TameAntelope wrote: post #25
jackblemming wrote: post #23

I strongly agree with this. Every programmer who became "upper management" also happened to be 6'1"+. Shocking. Funny enough, the shorter programmers were generally much more competent from having to actually earn their place. If you have to pick a doctor or lawyer on looks alone, I recommend picking the shorter guy (or the woman!)

As someone taller than 6'1", I will say this advantage is, well, shrinking with the advent of WFH culture. Multiple people have told me I surprise them with how tall I am when we finally meet in person, mostly because I keep my camera at the top of my computer, which gives a slightly down-leaning angle, as if they were looking down at me. This could be used to a real advantage by putting the camera under the monitor.…

https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-10-06

Re: Misidentifying talent

#80

Post by 5cott0 »

sampo wrote: post #61

Moneyball (book 2003, movie 2011) describes how Oakland Athletes build their baseball team in 2002 based on statistical analysis of player performance. Then around 2008-2009, Houston Rockets, and Golden State Warriors (Oakland) started to apply similar analysis to basketball, and started to find the value of having quickly moving players who throw precisely, to score 3 point shots, even if these players are not as ta…

Happening in golf now too.
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