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Misidentifying talent

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Re: Misidentifying talent

#81

Post by TigeriusKirk »

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.…

Someone will write an article on how it's a power move to scale your Zoom background to make you look taller.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#82

Post by dijit »

durnygbur wrote: post #70

I'm white and above the usual height limit set by ladies on dating apps. Despite this with history of grunt dev roles and no managerial roles. TIL I'm the baddie.

You're not the baddie.

The baddie is preconceived notions based on genetic markers.

and anyway it's possible to have a +3 respect marker and still be under respected by being black, female, wearing ill-fitting/unfashionable clothes or displaying poor hygiene.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#83

Post by gyulai »

fhe wrote: post #51

the one theory i read about on the correlation between height and managerial position is that, people's confidence correlate highly with height when they were teenagers (I am assuming that people's height when they are teenagers also highly correlate with their final, adult height), and in a corporate environment, marginally more confident goes a long way -- way more than marginally better at programming or building…

> marginally more confident goes a long way

...not sure. My own piece of anecdata here is that healthy self confidence is not really correlated with better career opportunities at all in our industry. If anything, maybe even the opposite is true. In my mind, companies promote people who have internalized the pre-existing power structure and perpetuate it [1]. These tend to be of the "insecure overachiever" [2] type, rather than independent thinkers with healthy self-confidence.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Critical-Profession...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Leading-Professionals-Power-Politics-...

Re: Misidentifying talent

#84

Post by TrackerFF »

caffeine wrote: post #62
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…

Has this revolution happened in European football yet? It seems like a harder to quantify sport (less episodic, more flowing, so harder to quantify positions)

There's been much more data-driven decision making / data science applied to the sport, but no huge watershed moment like in baseball or basketball.

I think that has to do with the fact that compared to the mentioned sports, soccer doesn't really have any single pivotal roles, that can make or break a match, which you can then optimize for/around.

Fundamentally speaking, soccer is a pretty slow moving game as far as scoring goes. One goal can be enough, and teams either play defensive or offensive games - while the other team tries to find weaknesses around their plays.

From what I've seen, a lot of the data science around soccer goes on things like player condition, predicting what players to swap out around games, analyzing weak / strong patterns in the strategy / playing style, and similar. I've seen this been done via camera usage and machine learning, analyzing ball position, player position - player performance on and off the field, and similar stuff. But this is 5-6-7 years ago, so probably outdated information...the info came from a guy that worked for a ML research group, who in turn had people that consulted for certain European clubs.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#85

Post by treis »

5cott0 wrote: post #80
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.

How is it applied to golf?

Re: Misidentifying talent

#86

Post by mhb »

re6fae5Wied5tha wrote: post #36
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.

> They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company. I am starting to think this is a broader trend in human societies and is probably the primary failure mode of human enterprise more broadly. People who aren't inclined to creative rational problem solving must still produce labors for the masters if they do not want to starve in the street like the examples we leave there to suffer pub…

In two words, rent seeking.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#88

Post by Blahah »

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 convinced that you should put statisticians in charge if your goal is to win a game.

Not just you - this is the concept of a casino, bookmakers, etc. You can make consistent profit by having good stat/prob models of games that people play for money but are irrational about.

More generally having accurate models gives you an advantage in almost any important situation.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#89

Post by gedy »

Frost1x wrote: post #71
MattGaiser wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same here, I resigned recently from a company (nominally a startup) that behaves like a traditional company described here. After working in SV-like companies for 20 years, it was very difficult to be a leader in that environment, with heavy micromanagement and information filtering.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#90

Post by typon »

TrackerFF wrote: post #84
caffeine wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has this revolution happened in European football yet? It seems like a harder to quantify sport (less episodic, more flowing, so harder to quantify positions)

There's been much more data-driven decision making / data science applied to the sport, but no huge watershed moment like in baseball or basketball. I think that has to do with the fact that compared to the mentioned sports, soccer doesn't really have any single pivotal roles, that can make or break a match, which you can then optimize for/around. Fundamentally speaking, soccer is a pretty slow moving game as far as…

I would say that the Pep Guardiola led Barcelona already had this watershed moment, with their possession and passing focused play, built around tiki taka and dependence on phenomenonal playmakers like Xavi, Iniesta and Messi. No other team has managed to replicate this success so far though, not even Barcelona itself after Guardiola left and Xavi/Iniesta retired.
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