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You Have to Feel It

mitchellh.com

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Re: You Have to Feel It

#141

Post by bonoboTP »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #28

I went through a longer quest, called "getting naturalized in another country". Went through the grind of getting visa, then the work permit, then the different visa, then the short-term residence permit. Changed jobs, had to go to the immigration department again, because these residence permits are tied to the employer. Kept a spreadsheet with dates of each exit and entry. Had to keep all my paperwork ducks in a ro…

It would help to know what your reason was to go through with that. Relief and joy can be more expected if it changes your life circumstances in a way that you were looking forward to. Something related to family etc. Easier travel to some places that you couldn't go before etc.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#142

Post by mock-possum »

henrebotha wrote: post #117
hakunin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew to believe that feelings have hard-to-recognize rationales that can be explained if you dig deep enough. Very few people ever do however. Recognizing the rationale is a great skill to have in many circumstances where you give feedback, like code reviews for example. It's also a skill that makes you a better teacher.

Various studies have shown that trying to explain the reasons for a decision can often cause people to make worse decisions. I remember there was one where lay people were able to taste and rate jams with a high degree of correlation to the ratings of expert tasters; but when asked to explain _why_ they rate one jam better than another, their ratings suddenly drastically disagreed with experts'.

Interesting that you’d count disagreeing with an expert as a ‘worse’ decision, particularly in such a subjective space as the taste of jam.

If I taste something, and carefully critically consider my experience, I would count that as a better decision, and the opinion of experts don’t really factor into it, because they’re not me.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#143

Post by mosselman »

mitchellh wrote: post #36
mosselman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Measuring and feeling are not mutually exclusive. This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece. I wouldn’t normally even comment something like this about someone’s article, but I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me and I am worried that if we don’t point it out, we will lose our ability to spot nonsense…

(Author of the linked blog post). Look at my other posts and you'll see I'm not like an "influencer content" person. I purposely made this piece shallow to encourage more people to read it and discuss the core idea, rather than get distracted by specific examples or points. I've blogged long enough on a personal level, done corporate PR long enough at a professional level, to know that the more words there are, the m…

Thanks for your response.

My point isn't that you can't write whatever you want because of course you can.

The audience of my comment is the consumer of any online content to be careful about projecting too much into it.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#144

Post by Wowfunhappy »

kibwen wrote: post #119
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something like the iPhone was inevitable given all the experimentation going on in the market. I agree, but I don't think it would have been as polished as the iPhone out of the gate. > Apple also made the Newton. But folks don't call back to it or praise its makers very often. As a sibling comment mentioned, I think the Newton was perhaps better than you're giving it credit for, but my point isn't that Apple makes…

> as polished as the iPhone out of the gate I think people are forgetting how extremely unpolished the iPhone was out of the gate. No app store. Even something as fundamental as copy/paste took until years later.

There's a difference between polished and feature-rich. I'd actually argue the iPhone was more "polished" before they introduced the app store—their vision was pure.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#145

Post by pixelready »

WhiteNoiz3 wrote: post #122
mcdeltat wrote: post #51

I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it comes down to feelings... Life choices? Business decisions? Who gets promoted? It's all vibes and feelings. People will deliberate and argue over facts but ultimately there will be some "weighting" factor which is feelings and will make or break the outcome. Yo…

Another way to look at it is parallel processing vs sequential processing.. our brains can make a judgement call about a thousand subtle variables and data points that we can't exactly put our fingers on unless we really dig into it, which we usually label as 'feelings', using the parallel part of our brain. The sequential (logical) part can only consider a limited number of variables at a time. I don't think either…

I always like to say we aren’t rational, we _rationalize_. Much of our decision making process is subconscious / vibes / “system 2”, but we also have a strong need for a sensible narrative structure to our lives. So what hack did nature come up with? Let us make the gut decision based on a bunch of soft heuristics, then rationalize it and wrap it into a sensible narrative before it reaches our conscious mind. Lets us use our efficient system 2 thinking most of the time while avoiding all that messy cognitive dissonance that would arise from a conscious awareness of how chaotic such a system would be at the scale of… oh, say, a global civilization of such creatures ;)

Re: You Have to Feel It

#146

Post by ghaff »

underlipton wrote: post #127
Aurornis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can have a perfectly argued decision that fails some vibe check and is hence discarded One of the worst hires I ever worked with was excellent on paper, came with good credentials, had an impressive resume, and did objectively well on the interview questions. However, everyone who interviewed him felt uneasy about him. He failed the vibe check, even though he checked all of the boxes and knew all the right thin…

This is why recruitment as it exists now is a farce. If everything is ultimately vibes-based, there's no point in portraying the process as objective. I'd say that it's even a sort of fraud to do so. Set base credentials, lottery of everyone who passes the post, full hire or fire after a short (1 month, at most) probationary period where vibes are considered. There's no reason to go through rounds and rounds of inter…

The problem with probationary periods is that, especially if relocation is involved, it's really expensive/disruptive to the employee. I'm reasonably confident that I'd have cleared the bar but I probably wouldn't have taken a job when there was a clear short-term probationary period that required me moving across the country. Just too much risk unless it's an incredible opportunity.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#147

Post by underlipton »

ghaff wrote: post #146
underlipton wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why recruitment as it exists now is a farce. If everything is ultimately vibes-based, there's no point in portraying the process as objective. I'd say that it's even a sort of fraud to do so. Set base credentials, lottery of everyone who passes the post, full hire or fire after a short (1 month, at most) probationary period where vibes are considered. There's no reason to go through rounds and rounds of inter…

The problem with probationary periods is that, especially if relocation is involved, it's really expensive/disruptive to the employee. I'm reasonably confident that I'd have cleared the bar but I probably wouldn't have taken a job when there was a clear short-term probationary period that required me moving across the country. Just too much risk unless it's an incredible opportunity.

I'm of two minds on this.

1) If such a short probationary period is involved, there's no reason to permanently move during it. A short-term rental will do. If the position works out, then move. (I have done this, it is doable.)

2) Then maybe the job isn't right for you.

The point is to strip the desperation to find The One True Candidate/Job On The First Try, from both sides. Companies are already hiring based on vibes, so this just formalizes it. Employees are already subject to swift termination, based on their employers' whims; this just makes that expectation transparent. From both sides: if it isn't going to work out, we get there quickly and move on. Little is worse than being on a job for half a year, only to get sacked because it took that long for the company to decide that it doesn't like you.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#148

Post by ghaff »

tempodox wrote: post #82
paulryanrogers wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is some survival bias in the analysis, and that something like the iPhone was inevitable given all the experimentation going on in the market. Apple also made the Newton. But folks don't call back to it or praise its makers very often.

> the Newton I found the idea fascinating, but it was too clunky and heavy for the features it offered. I think the concept was too far ahead of its time, it couldn’t be implemented well in available tech.

For that matter, the Palm Pilot was beloved of a lot of techies at the time but neither the input nor synchronization technology/infrastructure were really there. I won one at a trade show and even upgraded it later but, honestly, it wasn't all that useful.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#149

Post by ghaff »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #144
kibwen wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as polished as the iPhone out of the gate I think people are forgetting how extremely unpolished the iPhone was out of the gate. No app store. Even something as fundamental as copy/paste took until years later.

There's a difference between polished and feature-rich. I'd actually argue the iPhone was more "polished" before they introduced the app store—their vision was pure.

On the other hand, it was really the third-party apps that arguably distinguished the iPhone from the manufacturer-centric phones previously.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#150

Post by ghaff »

underlipton wrote: post #147
ghaff wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with probationary periods is that, especially if relocation is involved, it's really expensive/disruptive to the employee. I'm reasonably confident that I'd have cleared the bar but I probably wouldn't have taken a job when there was a clear short-term probationary period that required me moving across the country. Just too much risk unless it's an incredible opportunity.

I'm of two minds on this. 1) If such a short probationary period is involved, there's no reason to permanently move during it. A short-term rental will do. If the position works out, then move. (I have done this, it is doable.) 2) Then maybe the job isn't right for you. The point is to strip the desperation to find The One True Candidate/Job On The First Try, from both sides. Companies are already hiring based on vib…

>Employees are already subject to swift termination, based on their employers' whims

Except in practice, they mostly aren't because onboarding takes time and cost and relocating employees (if applicable) has costs.

Of course, if you're a pro football player, here today/gone tomorrow is the norm. But I'm not sure that is or should be the expectation for an engineer. In part, because I doubt there is a "One True Candidate" for the the most part.

Yes, roles shift/requirements shift and both companies and employees move on but there's generally some value to stability on both sides. Even if an employee can get an employer-paid rental for a month, thy've still presumably left their prior job and will have to scramble in various ways.

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