It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated • Hacker News Board

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#211

Post by Cheezemansam » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

m463 wrote: post #60

jacquesm wrote: post #33

Alternative take: in the hiring process education is often used as a proxy for motivation, when actually it only proves that once upon a time someone was motivated long enough to get educated, but it doesn't actually say anything about their present state in terms of motivation. A 'Do-er' is at least at present motivated, and educating them will get them to the desired combination of education+motivation in the prese…

I remember the joel spolsky hiring article. He wants: smart, gets things done EDIT: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid... on the other hand, here was the quote on choosing officers, which might be a different position altogther: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...

I do think Joel has some awfully insightful things to say but:

>You should always try to have at least six people interview each candidate that gets hired

Eh. I think this mindset gets taken too literally. That is not something that most companies should be putting candidates through unless they are actually willing to pay for top end talent, and are a tech company who absolutely requires it. Especially paired with:

>Each interview should consist of one interviewer and one interviewee, in a room with a door that closes and a whiteboard. I can tell you from extensive experience that if you spend less than one hour on an interview you’re not going to be able to make a decision.

Yea, no. I am not going to spend 6 hours of my time just because your company is so indecisive, especially with this current job search environment where companies will drop you like a fucking brick and ghost you even after having used hours of your time. I can't help but think a lot of the general shittiness around the hiring process is people taking parts of this article and internalizing them religiously.

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#212

Post by cloverich » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #66

codegeek wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hired someone well educated from a Top Ivy League university but they had no motivation whatsoever. I tried my best, gave them everything they wanted (money, work style, tools, training) but they just wouldn't want to be motivated and we failed collectively. They were very smart otherwise and definitely could learn the skills. When I am hiring, for me the biggest things are motivation, curiosity and caring for your…

It isn't that people from Ivy League universities are unmotivated, it is that those people has so many options that unless you are a top company you almost surely wont see them unless there is something wrong with them. > When I am hiring, for me the biggest things are motivation, curiosity and caring for your own career. If you don't show me those traits, I am very hesitant to hire you. Yet you just explained that y…

learning from that mistake was the entire point of the preamble to their current views on hiring.

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#213

Post by arcanon » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

But then they become educated and you are back to the initial problem: the motivation!

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#214

Post by maximus-decimus » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

killtimeatwork wrote: post #182

maximus-decimus wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time, When it takes 5 minutes minimum to deploy my code changes to my vms to test, I lose all motivation. Momentum is really the right word and a workflow is just soul sucking.

5 minutes is great, try 3 weeks (due to various "objective issues" aka fuckups across the organization).

5 minutes is actually on the low end. I put it more as a minimum that really disrupts my flow. Below 5 minutes is kinda tolerable... 5 minutes to 5 hours... not so much.

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#215

Post by ChrisLomont » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 8:04 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #48

ChrisLomont wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but it doesn't actually say anything about their present state in terms of motivation If you take the set of all applicants with education and the set of all applicants without, would you claim there is no difference in the distributions of 'do-er'-ness?

Yes, there definitely is - in my experience - but it actually isn't in the direction that you would probably expect it to be in. I don't know how relevant my sample is and of course the sample size is going to be somewhat reduced but in my experience the people without fall into two groups: those that are not motivated at all and those that are highly motivated but in a direction orthogonal to what the education syst…

I've probably done 50 interviews and hired around 10 people. The people doing them with me and I used a decently uniform process to give all applicants the same set of quite varied questions. We also gave the interview process to a decent number of existing employees to see how an existing employee fares.

I started the process thinking education would be quite independent of performance. Our data from the process showed exactly the opposite.

Quality of education, especially at entry level, made a large difference in the process and also in the long term performance of the hires.

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#216

Post by npunt » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 8:25 PM UTC

scns wrote: post #187

npunt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Motion before emotion" is a great little mantra to get you started on whatever - waking up, exercise, writing, working, etc. Emotions are sometimes helpful, but in the case of starting things they're usually wrong.

I like your mantra very much. Hard disagree on emotions being wrong though. I am glad i learned to view emotions as messages from the more archaic parts of my brain. The ones we label as positive come up if we do something that aids the survival of our species. Examples would be pleasure derived from food or sex. The ones we label as negative are very important IMHO. To prevent harm to ourselves we need Fear, it is a…

Agree emotions are critical to understand as they're often signals for deeper unmet needs. RAIN is a great method for understanding emotions.[1]

But sometimes, emotions are also just learned reactions, with little of value underneath. Feelings like 'I want to stay in bed' or 'I don't want to start this report' can be useful to short-circuit through habit and counter-programming with things like this mantra. Practicing these these short-circuiting habits over time can lessen future emotional reactions.

In other words, mastery over emotions and building better habits can happen in multiple ways. The body & mind are a big homeostatic machine and if you update your physical state (e.g. having written a few paragraphs, or gotten up and started a walk), the mind will realize it's somewhere else and change its reaction.

[1]: https://www.mindful.org/tara-brach-rain-mindfulness-practice...

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#217

Post by fouric » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

scns wrote: post #187

npunt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Motion before emotion" is a great little mantra to get you started on whatever - waking up, exercise, writing, working, etc. Emotions are sometimes helpful, but in the case of starting things they're usually wrong.

I like your mantra very much. Hard disagree on emotions being wrong though. I am glad i learned to view emotions as messages from the more archaic parts of my brain. The ones we label as positive come up if we do something that aids the survival of our species. Examples would be pleasure derived from food or sex. The ones we label as negative are very important IMHO. To prevent harm to ourselves we need Fear, it is a…

It's always tricky when people talk about emotions "being wrong", especially because there are at least three different things that one can mean: (a) they're not feeling that emotion, (b) they shouldn't feel that emotion, or (c) they shouldn't take the instinctual action suggested by that emotion. A doesn't make any sense, B is occasionally true, and C is usually true. That is, sometimes your emotions are misplaced (e.g. strong animosity toward a good friend for an innocuous action - maybe you're tired or hungry?), but it's much more often the case that your emotions do signal that someone is wrong, even though the gut reaction to that emotion is inappropriate.

Like you said, emotions are messages - but they're not very contentful messages. The value of most emotional messages is little more than a "mindfulness check" that should cue you engage your thinking skills to determine what to do. Very rarely is "acting on the emotion" the right thing to do - if you're angry, the correct course of action is almost never to cuss out or punch someone.

In many cases, the emotional signals shouldn't have been sent in the first place (e.g. there's no reason for you to get angry because your best friend likes vanilla ice cream (modulo contrived edge cases, of course)), and the correct course of action is to do nothing, other than figure out why the incorrect signal got sent at all.

> Anger might be expressed as (physical/verbal) violence against others. If it does not, it can turn against yourself and lead to depression.

Can you clarify what you're saying here?

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#218

Post by mbrodersen » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 11:33 PM UTC

zeroxfe wrote: post #107

I really think that action changes attitude faster than attitude changes action. Learning this the hard way in my 40s, it's been really life changing for me. Particularly when you're depressed, demotivated, find yourself procrastinating, etc. You can try this yourself -- the next time you're feeling demotivated, start with the smallest amount of tiny measurable action. If you can't get out of bed, move your fingers,…

My experience as well. I am often surprised how effective it is to just get started by doing anything trivial. Fix a spelling error, re-arrange a few lines to make it easier to read, and before you know it you look up and hours have passed and the problem is solved.

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#219

Post by mbrodersen » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 11:40 PM UTC

killtimeatwork wrote: post #182

maximus-decimus wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time, When it takes 5 minutes minimum to deploy my code changes to my vms to test, I lose all motivation. Momentum is really the right word and a workflow is just soul sucking.

5 minutes is great, try 3 weeks (due to various "objective issues" aka fuckups across the organization).

You have my deep sympathy. That sounds crazy!

Re: It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

#220

Post by deterministic » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

Avicebron wrote: post #112

davesque wrote: post #93

I think he's likely to trigger a lot of ire with this tweet. However, given what I know about his history, I think I know where this is coming from. Carmack himself did not finish school and was motivated early on to get involved in the profession of writing software despite lacking official credentials which entitled him to do so. I have a similar story and can relate. Therefore, I think what he's getting at is that…

I'm tired of people signaling themselves as "weird" kids, it wasn't that weird to like computers, there's this fetishization of being "weird", "aspergy", "autistic", that's so tired and sad. no it doesn't make you better or smarter, it's just normal, no no one is a superstar because they were that "hacker" kid, times change, money changes focus and boom, success, it's not smarts, it's timing. and for all the kids out…

Being interested in computers and wanting to learn how to program was completely and totally alien to everybody I grew up with except for a few close friends. However that was 40+ years ago so things have changed.