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Misidentifying talent

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Re: Misidentifying talent

#131

Post by Asooka »

gspetr wrote: post #109
somenameforme wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's fascinating to me is that the article makes no mention of female performance in chess whatsoever, which has historically been underwhelming compared to men, seeing how the strongest female player ever never made it into even top-4 of the Candidates tournament, let alone played for the Championship. Since height and athletic ability plays almost no role in chess, can you perhaps explain why women have underperf…

I wouldn't say they have "underperformed", the best women chess players would absolutely wipe the floor with me and other casual players. However, historically women don't reach quite the same top level as men in some mathematical tasks, even though their median performance is on par or even better sometimes. You can visualise it as two normal distributions with the same mode, but one is slightly wider.

For now the WGM title exists, because if it didn't, there would be no women Grandmasters. While you see it as a consolation prise, I see it as an encouraging step to build a tradition of unisex chess participation so that one day we can have truly equal tournaments.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#132

Post by sanderjd »

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.

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.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#133

Post by drpgq »

gspetr wrote: post #109
somenameforme wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's fascinating to me is that the article makes no mention of female performance in chess whatsoever, which has historically been underwhelming compared to men, seeing how the strongest female player ever never made it into even top-4 of the Candidates tournament, let alone played for the Championship. Since height and athletic ability plays almost no role in chess, can you perhaps explain why women have underperf…

There's a bigger difference between men and women than between short and tall men?

Re: Misidentifying talent

#134

Post by jrumbut »

eggsmediumrare wrote: post #111
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…

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 optimizing fan enjoyment in the same way that they optimized for winning.

I know less about basketball but I hear the same thing there, that 3 point shots have replaced a lot of interesting dynamics at mid range.

Interestingly, in football the analytics playstyle is more dynamic and exciting. A lot riskier and more explosive offensive plays compared to the traditional style. I wonder whether the league guided that (in terms of what data was made available, or by learning from the mistakes of baseball) or if they just got lucky.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#136

Post by softwarebeware »

There is actual peer-reviewed research about what makes a good software engineer which you can find easily with the right tools. This 2015 paper using a sample set of 59 Microsoft engineers across different divisions is one such study: https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Li2015GreatEngine...

My experience in the industry is that no one in charge of either hiring or promotion is aware of the research, and have chosen to structure the systems that support them without data and prone to biases. The most bizarre aspect of our industry is that there is a high emphasis on work output, whether that be measured in LOC, number of PRs, number of releases, number of "story points," etc. or another measure, and yet low value of those same metrics in promotion processes.

I don't actually think those are great metrics to base career advancement on, but the contradiction is egregious.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#137

Post by screye »

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.

> most extreme leetcode interviews

> They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.

My personal experience is that there leetcode prep decreases as you go 1 std. deviation beyond the 'median FANG employee' level of talent. [footnote 1] This doesn't matter for the absolute best [footnote 3], who comfortably hop over any generic interview filter and tend to be heavily scouted even before they step into an interview.

The rub comes with the almost-best (think 1-4 percentile) candidates that that I know. (Many) Almost best candidates are busy working on their primary projects and end up insufficiently prepared for leetcode style interviews. A bunch of these brilliant engineers are falling through the cracks. (into slightly less prestigious jobs, but still)

This gets amplified once they join a job. They rise up the ranks fast, owing to their talent. But they're doing too much to find time for interview prep. 'Senior' interviews can be a difficult nut to crack, because they still use extreme leetcode style interviews when the interviewee has not used any of it in the last few years on the job. I find that such people only switch jobs when they are forced to; either by bad management or life circumstances.

Such people excel at projects, take-home assignments, system design interviews, SME domain interviews and any skill that is relevant to everyday job work. But, these are usually the final or pen-ultimate round. By that point, the decision is already made. Additionally, as long as leetcode interviews are the norm, there is no option between preparing for practical interviews vs leetcode interviews. So without consensus movement, the 'fix' would exacerbate the problem of time constrainted near-best performers vs stagnating [footnote 2] median performers.

[footnote 1] : I am beginning to see the utility in 'not so impressive 95th percentile' as a useful yardstick in discussions. Bugger, you got me.

[footnote 2] : That's not to say that those who excel at leetcode are stagnating median performers. Not a symmetric analogy.

[footnote 3] : think smartest kid in a top CS program, multiple standard deviations beyond

Re: Misidentifying talent

#138

Post by gspetr »

Asooka wrote: post #131
gspetr wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's fascinating to me is that the article makes no mention of female performance in chess whatsoever, which has historically been underwhelming compared to men, seeing how the strongest female player ever never made it into even top-4 of the Candidates tournament, let alone played for the Championship. Since height and athletic ability plays almost no role in chess, can you perhaps explain why women have underperf…

I wouldn't say they have "underperformed", the best women chess players would absolutely wipe the floor with me and other casual players. However, historically women don't reach quite the same top level as men in some mathematical tasks, even though their median performance is on par or even better sometimes. You can visualise it as two normal distributions with the same mode, but one is slightly wider. For now the W…

>there would be no women Grandmasters.

Why bother commenting at all without bothering to put in effort for even a cursory search?

There are 39. Including 2 last year. Full GMs, no prefixes.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#139

Post by nlowell »

ryanSrich wrote: post #6
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.

It makes sense. How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process? It’s easily one of the top turn offs for me when it comes to FAANG companies. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s utterly boring, and useless. It seems these companies are far more interested in hiring very intelligent and analytical type…

>How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process‽

I may be posting this defensively, since I practice leetcode to prepare for tech interviews. But I disagree with the assertion that creative and innovative people don't have to put up with process and procedure. Pretty much everyone has to do grunt work sometimes, and it's especially important to "prove your worth" when first meeting a new person or company. The leetcode problems are far from useless, speaking as someone who has given more than my fair share of different types of interview problems. And furthermore the fact that you're willing to put in hours on a skill you don't particularly care about carries valuable signal to employers.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#140

Post by gspetr »

drpgq wrote: post #133
gspetr wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's fascinating to me is that the article makes no mention of female performance in chess whatsoever, which has historically been underwhelming compared to men, seeing how the strongest female player ever never made it into even top-4 of the Candidates tournament, let alone played for the Championship. Since height and athletic ability plays almost no role in chess, can you perhaps explain why women have underperf…

There's a bigger difference between men and women than between short and tall men?

The article omits any discussion of this point, that is why I asked the person familiar with the field whether they have insights to share.
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