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Misidentifying talent

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Re: Misidentifying talent

#121

Post by erehweb »

zhdc1 wrote: post #92
ssharp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the comment as being critical of Facebook. "Not being able to innovate" seems like a critical statement, indicating a failure on their part. However, they are an incredibly successful company. If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators? Their hiring process should be specifically geared towards hiring the people that will execute the way Facebook wants to execute. Given th…

> If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators? There's a larger question that I'm still trying to work out. Meta has something like 71K employees at this point and spends over $21B a year in research and development. They don't give head counts for how many personnel are performing R&D work, but if you assume that most of their R&D costs go to employee salaries and that the mean s…

This seems like the perennial HN "I could build this app with 5 engineers" comment. Every visible FB feature (NewsFeed ranking, ads, Marketplace, ...) has a team, as well as less visible ones like Infra and Trust & Safety. Multiply that by all the different apps you've mentioned, and add people working on the new Metaverse, and 20-30K doesn't seem unreasonable.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#122

Post by whatshisface »

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.

There are so few executives that not even the most arbitrary and idiosyncratic rules about who gets to be an executive would prove to be a windwall for anyone you know. There are about 6,000 exchange-listed corporations on NYSE + NASDAQ. If the government passed a law that every single listed company had to have a Cherokee Indian as CEO, the vast majority of the 400,000 or so Cherokees alive today would not win anything.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#123

Post by ghaff »

tanjtanjtanj wrote: post #117
ren_engineer wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

happening in American Football as well with more aggressive play calling on 4th down and in the red zone due to analytics. There are also teams using tools to calculate "game speed" vs traditional testing to help scouting be more accurate

What's crazy to me is that the more modern 4th down play-calling statistics has been known for at least two decades now; I first heard about it from my stats teacher in high school. The issue is that making the right call and it not working out would reflect more poorly on a coach than making the more traditional call and playing worse. It reminds me of the saying "No one ever got fired for buying IBM".

Five Thirty Eight has written a bit about this in the past. That's pretty much what they said. No one remembers the risky play that paid off or the safe/expected play; they remember the risky play that didn't pay off.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#124

Post by jacobr1 »

zhdc1 wrote: post #92
ssharp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the comment as being critical of Facebook. "Not being able to innovate" seems like a critical statement, indicating a failure on their part. However, they are an incredibly successful company. If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators? Their hiring process should be specifically geared towards hiring the people that will execute the way Facebook wants to execute. Given th…

> If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators? There's a larger question that I'm still trying to work out. Meta has something like 71K employees at this point and spends over $21B a year in research and development. They don't give head counts for how many personnel are performing R&D work, but if you assume that most of their R&D costs go to employee salaries and that the mean s…

This isn't relevant to the question you raise - but as an accounting matter - plenty of "keep the lights on" type engineering work is almost certainly identified as R&D in those figures. I suspect there is much smaller amount going to what most people would consider more transformative innovation or basic/applied research.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#125

Post by jacobr1 »

rightbyte wrote: post #29
thaumasiotes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure they're getting the idea that they can look down at you from the fact that your camera looks down on you from above your screen, as opposed to the fact that they themselves literally look down on you as you appear on their screen?

Good point, if they use laptops? Most people have their desktop screens at eye hight right.

I suspect (without any data) that laptop use dominates external monitors among the post-2020 WFH crowd.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#126

Post by na85 »

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…

30 minutes is what the 4-Star General who runs NORAD had decided s/he wants to see as a response time.

It's also just about the fastest you can get a Hercules airborne and still include time for flight planning. It takes almost exactly 22 minutes to start a Hercules by the book, and that leaves 8 minutes for taxi and takeoff.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#127

Post by blaser-waffle »

mhb wrote: post #86
re6fae5Wied5tha wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .

There was an academic, Mercur Olsen, who had a point that a lot of human ills, be it capitalism, race riots, instability in the Byzantine Empire (and feudalism in general), et al, were mostly due to rent seeking behavior.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#128

Post by ryandrake »

MattGaiser wrote: post #40
TulliusCicero wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're working at a more traditional company then: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/what-silicon-valley-gets-... > In "traditional" companies, developers get work items assigned to them - most often JIRA tickets. These tickets are vetted by the product - or project - manager, and they have most key details to do the work. And they're expected to do just that. There's little need for questions unless it'…

> Sounds like you're working at a more traditional company then: Yes and I apparently always have, despite working for tech startups in several cases. Never thought that they would be considered "traditional", but they evidently are. Quite interesting.

I've worked at both types of companies, and it's funny: People who have only worked in one style are surprised to learn the other style exists. I actually made a career switch out of engineering because I wanted to have more input into the product, rather than just sit at my desk getting showered with JIRA tickets. Of course, I switched out of engineering, and moved into a company with the other style--where the features were engineering-led. Just my luck.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#129

Post by Kon-Peki »

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, and I spoke with many of them (FYI - working in baseball is like working in video games: long hours and low pay).

Anyway... The Red Sox (at that time, at least) divide their analytics department into 3 subject matters, and I spoke to the lead of one of those 3. I asked how different their analysis is compared to all the old baseball knowledge developed over the last 150 years.

He said that it's not different! All the intuition about the game built up by the old-timers spending decades in the industry still holds! The analytics is all about tweaking things and making slight improvement in the odds. If they can improved the odds of a beneficial outcome by 2-3%, they consider it a success, and if they can do that consistently over the course of a season they will win 5-10 extra games. That's it! (SPOILER ALERT) Remember that in the movie Moneyball, the Oakland A's didn't win the World Series. They didn't even make it to the World Series. They were beaten in the first round of the playoffs by another small market team (Minnesota) with a similarly small payroll that wasn't doing the moneyball thing ;)

Re: Misidentifying talent

#130

Post by JSeymourATL »

> Basically everyone wants to hire talented folks. But even in baseball, where returns to hiring talent are obvious and high and which is the most easily quantified major U.S. sport, people made fairly obvious blunders for a century due to relying on incorrectly honed gut feelings that relied heavily on unconscious as well as conscious biases.

Brilliant food for thought! Thank you

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