The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
tech.mit.edu
The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
1–10 of 215 posts
Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
#2I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d fill up a bathtub and scream into it.
Eh, what? Do (normal) people do this? Is it because it absorbs the sounds or something?
Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
#3He invokes Excel as an analytical engine several times in this story. I am trying to figure out if he actually considers it to be a powerful statistical engine, or if he is merely using it synecdochically for the benefit of non-technical readers, in order to represent statistical software more generally.
Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
#4He invokes Excel as an analytical engine several times in this story. I am trying to figure out if he actually considers it to be a powerful statistical engine, or if he is merely using it synecdochically for the benefit of non-technical readers, in order to represent statistical software more generally.
It actually is the de-facto-standard modeling engine in a lot of areas, even some scientific areas, but mainly economics/finance. There are some pretty nuttily complex simulations written entirely in Excel, with the visualization part of the simulation done by popping up a chart--- you can even make it animated by popping up a new chart at a certain time interval. There's even a market in commercial spreadsheets, which you buy and load sort of like libraries: http://www.palisade.com/RISK/
Not necessarily a good idea, but somehow it caught on. One possible reason is that it was one of the earlier widely available pieces of software for doing declarative, dependency-based modeling that auto-propagates updates: if box A and box B are linked by a "B = 2*A", then B auto-updates whenever A changes, without you manually writing a propagate-updates loop. You can now do stuff like that in a lot of languages, but it's relatively recent (e.g., it's one of the new features JavaFX variables have).
Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
#5Great description of burnout: "What I learned is that burning out isn’t just about work load, it’s about work load being greater than the motivation to do work."
Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
#6I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d fill up a bathtub and scream into it. Eh, what? Do (normal) people do this? Is it because it absorbs the sounds or something?
I'd never heard of it before. I too assumed that muting the sound was the idea, he mentioned he was staying at a hotel, so I guess screaming would have raised some serious suspicion. I wonder if the sound would travel down the drainpipe, though.
Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
#7I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d fill up a bathtub and scream into it. Eh, what? Do (normal) people do this? Is it because it absorbs the sounds or something?
Maybe he meant that he got into the bathtub and then screamed underwater?
Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
#8The author's first two articles on Dubai:
Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
#9I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d fill up a bathtub and scream into it. Eh, what? Do (normal) people do this? Is it because it absorbs the sounds or something?
hmm... while I was backpacking on the PCT the term 'scream into a lake' was used (for when you got really mad).
Ever talk or scream in a pool? Muffled, distant sound, but is still there.
Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
#10He invokes Excel as an analytical engine several times in this story. I am trying to figure out if he actually considers it to be a powerful statistical engine, or if he is merely using it synecdochically for the benefit of non-technical readers, in order to represent statistical software more generally.
The 'Solver' (http://www.solver.com/) tool in Excel is widely used for many business optimization problems. If you have x & y quantities of two raw materials and products A and B consume different proportions of each raw material, then you can use the solver to determine the most optimal production strategy that maximizes your profit (or minimizes your labor requirements etc.)