Misidentifying talent • Hacker News Board

Re: Misidentifying talent

#141

Post by closeparen » Tue, Feb 22, 2022, 7:16 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #43

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…

>subjective reception from critics and audiences is exactly the point

Clearly software is aimed at subjective reception by its customers. We also have the adage "programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute" -- to the extent you believe this, subjective reception of the code by maintainers also matters. For these reasons I think subjective evaluations and "taste" for software / software engineers is undersold.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#142

Post by closeparen » Tue, Feb 22, 2022, 7:33 PM UTC

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…

>All that to say KPIs themselves are not the problem. Shitty leaders who choose KPIs improperly are the problem.

Deciding to govern by KPIs presupposes that we have KPIs that are chosen well enough to beat subject-matter-expert judgement. I think if we are talking about anything other than a game with very clear rules and observable outcomes, that's an extraordinary claim.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#143

Post by closeparen » Tue, Feb 22, 2022, 8:06 PM UTC

jkingsbery wrote: post #114

> A complaint I've heard from some folks who are junior is that they can't get promoted because their work doesn't fulfill promo criteria. When they ask to be allowed to do work that could get them promoted, they're told they're too junior to do that kind of work. They're generally stuck at their level until they find a manager who believes in their potential enough to give them work that could possibly result in a p…

A good senior engineer produces a simple solution to a simple problem. People manufacturing complexity for the sake of promo packets is a huge problem, and managers are often complicit in it because of those career-development goals.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#144

Post by eggsmediumrare » Tue, Feb 22, 2022, 10:07 PM UTC

jrumbut wrote: post #134

eggsmediumrare wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hockey has proven somewhat stubborn. Coaches will pull the goalie earlier now, and there is more of an emphasis on skilled players rather than nasty players, but I'm not convinced the latter wouldn't have happened in the absence of analytics. There was a wave of excitement when Kyle Dubas and a few other young GMs started hyping up analytics and new stats like expected goals and possession metrics and stuff, but as f…

I think hockey fans should count their blessings! As a lifelong baseball fan and someone who works with data for a living the analytics revolution is killing the sport. People discovered that sacrifice bunts weren't worthwhile, but they were really fun to watch in a way that walks and strikeouts aren't. There wasn't enough respect for baseball as a cultural game. I'm surprised that the league hasn't pushed harder for…

I find high skill hockey more entertaining than bruiser hockey, so I'm happy for now! Hockey has had terrible eras in the past, like the advent of the neutral zone trap. There was an infamous game in which a defenseman just held on to the puck and skated around his own end for minutes at a time rather than try to get through the trap.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#145

Post by 3pt14159 » Tue, Feb 22, 2022, 10:30 PM UTC

albedoa wrote: post #96

3pt14159 wrote: post #91

I'm sorry if this is off-topic, but why do people make websites with 250+ characters per line? Like, I can copy the link into Safari and press the "Reader View" button there to make it actually readable but I'm more wondering that if someone puts so much effort into writing content why don't they take the ~1 hour for some very basic CSS to get the default experience to be enjoyable?

Literally the reason why he won't fix it is because typographers were condescending to him: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1228042394727149568

Ok, well I'll talk to him personally if he'll listen. I have eye issues and even if I bump the size up 300% it's still really hard to read. I don't know how else to say this but he's inadvertantly destroying the experience of his website for lots of people. Many of whom wouldn't even consider themself as disabled. I think if he could sit next to me and see how I suffer he wouldn't need scientific studies any more than he'd need a scientific study about how cows feel when they get hit by a car. They moo their disappointment about the fact that their ribcare is broken.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#146

Post by MattGaiser » Tue, Feb 22, 2022, 10:50 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #132

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.

This has not been my experience. Everywhere I've worked (a bunch of different kinds of places now) has been hungry for people who can help out with the broader more ambiguous direction-setting and decision-making needs of the company, but most developers I've worked with are not very energized by this kind of work.

Places I have worked have said they wanted these people. I was explicitly chosen for one job because they thought I would provide value there.

Joined the ticket clearing line all the same.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#147

Post by dan-robertson » Tue, Feb 22, 2022, 11:55 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #143

jkingsbery wrote: post #114

> A complaint I've heard from some folks who are junior is that they can't get promoted because their work doesn't fulfill promo criteria. When they ask to be allowed to do work that could get them promoted, they're told they're too junior to do that kind of work. They're generally stuck at their level until they find a manager who believes in their potential enough to give them work that could possibly result in a p…

A good senior engineer produces a simple solution to a simple problem. People manufacturing complexity for the sake of promo packets is a huge problem, and managers are often complicit in it because of those career-development goals.

If you’re in an environment where doing complicated things rather than valuable things is incentivised, I think it’s mostly reasonable to do the incentivised thing or to get into a different environment

Re: Misidentifying talent

#148

Post by dan-robertson » Tue, Feb 22, 2022, 11:59 PM UTC

Kon-Peki wrote: post #129

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…

> 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 enjoy playing around with baseball data. About a year before the pandemic, I went out and presented some research at a Sabermetrics conference hosted by the Boston Red Sox. 90% of the pro teams had their data science teams present, a…

It’s interesting that your anecdote lined up so well with the example from the OP about people claiming that the metrics didn’t change much. Though those people were then giving ‘supporting’ examples that support the opposite of their statement. It may be that the person you talked to worked on eg play strategy which could have been affected totally differently from scouting.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#149

Post by dan-robertson » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 12:16 AM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #53

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 can speak from the chess world, as a coach. I used to believe there was really no such thing as talent largely based on my own experience as I started relatively late, don't consider myself talented, and reached a reasonably high level at the game. I kind of still do think there's no such thing as talent, but that comes with a bunch of asterisks. If you take two people and expose them to normal training regimens, d…

I liked this essay regarding the nature of talent. http://rittersp.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Chambliss-Mun... Like much social science, one should be careful to not assume that any results would generalise to more cases, but I still think some of the ideas are interesting:

- When people talk about talent, it is some relatively immutable quality people have inside themselves that creates excellence. When people talk about observing (eg spotting or wasting) talent, they are really talking about observing excellence or high competency. Talent of the first kind is mostly not a thing (but eg some people may be predisposed to certain kinds of athleticism).

- Being excellent at one thing needn’t come with excellence or deviance at anything else. I think many people on HN will quite easily understand that typical celebrity recommendations (even if unsponsored) have no particular reason to be credible, but another aspect of this is the idea of the weird or eccentric genius which we sometimes see applied to programming (and I think less applied to eg being a lawyer or doctor).

Re: Misidentifying talent

#150

Post by dan-robertson » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 12:24 AM UTC

spupe wrote: post #46

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.

I think that the lesson from baseball is that people spent a long time basing decisions on measurable but irrelevant things like the shape of a player’s bottom, and they thought they were being clever and reasonable and making good decisions. Lots of software development isn’t solving particularly novel problems but it can be quite varied, and certainly performance can be hard to measure and output can be dependent on things outside of one’s control (eg if an experimental project doesn’t pan out). But I don’t think that should mean that one should give up and judge people based on things that seem reasonable but don’t work (eg apparently algorithms style questions) or actually irrelevant things like (probably) height or (presumably) the shape of someone’s bottom.