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Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

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Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#261

Post by kat »

AYBABTME wrote: post #121
Danihan wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then where are all the "vocational" CS programs at universities?

Canada has ‘software engineering’ degrees which are essentially vocational CS degrees.

To add to this, Canadian Universities also have co-op programs.

You don't have to have an engineering degree to get a co-op job. The student gets paid well over minimum wage (and learns on the job) and the employers get financial incentives from the gov't to hire students. Its win-win for both the student and the employer.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#262

Post by koala_man »

brucephillips wrote: post #172

> Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. This is wrong, and I'm surprised it's repeated so often. Some ideas are better than others. If you doubt this, ask yourself if, when starting a company, you would choose a random idea or your best idea. Of course you would choose your best idea, which implies ideas have different value. EDIT: I'm happy to debate this point with anyone who would other…

>when starting a company

i.e. "when executing"

But yes, other things being equal, the execution of a good idea is more valuable than the execution of a bad idea.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#263

Post by cvwright »

icebraining wrote: post #89
codingdave wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One would never refer to law school or medical school as "vocational". Sure you would. They are 100% vocational schools. Their cost, acceptance rates, time commitment, and difficulty level may be higher than other vocational schools, but that doesn't change what they are -- 100% focused on giving you the knowledge and skills to do a specific job.

That's the point - they are, but are not referred as such.

They are in fact called "professional schools" -- this captures what both of you are saying.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#264

Post by im2nguyen »

brucephillips wrote: post #257
im2nguyen wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it necessarily means "all ideas are the same". You're right -- some ideas may be better than others, but until they're executed successfully, they're just ideas. ie: There were multiple ways that Google could have executed their goal of building a search engine (engineering, sales, etc). Even if you come up with a 'better' idea, it may not be successful/valuable if you execute it poorly and make the wro…

Except google's idea wasn't "search engine". Google's idea was "search engine that uses the PageRank algorithm". PageRank did not encompass all of the value of Google, but it did encompass much of it, and it was unequivocally part of the idea. What you're effectively saying is that ideas have no value without good execution, which is of course true, but this is very different than saying they have no value, because a…

If the value is in "search engine that uses the PageRank algorithm", then theoretically you can take that idea and execute it to get the same value.

The difference isn't in the idea but the execution - hence the value.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#265

Post by otakucode »

I don't believe companies want "hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances." I mean obviously, yes, they would claim to want that, but that sort of employee is fundamentally incompatible with modern business. Modern business is predicated upon the idea of employees being as replaceable and interchangeable as possible. It is a common idea presented in many management books that if an employee becomes important to the company, they should be fired immediately. The thinking is that if your company grows in reliance upon this person, they might one day ask for more money and when you fire them at that point the damage done will be worse so it is better to nip the problem in the bud and bite the bullet and get rid of them when you notice their importance and deal with the smaller amount of disruption. Any hard-working generalist who operates autonomously will, by necessity, be building systems which they have all of the domain knowledge about. And despite companies wishing to believe domain knowledge is not valuable, it has substantial operational and financial impact when lost.

>The hardest problem in B2C is distribution.

This confuses me. Distribution is trivially solved. Anyone can get a product to a customer for quite low cost anywhere in the world now. Is something else meant by "distribution" aside from 'getting things from point A to point B'? If I had a warehouse in my back yard and a customer wanting a product from it, I could ship it to the customer just as easily as Amazon could. Their advantage isn't in being able to distribute things. It's in aggregation and many other different things but not distribution. Distribution was the most valuable economic activity of the past century, but it's commoditized now.

>Weak-form efficients market hypothesis is a good heuristic for evaluating the public markets

The efficient market hypothesis says that profit is an error, an inefficiency which will rapidly go to zero as it will be stripped by underpriced competitors. This is not a good heuristic.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#266

Post by dllthomas »

> Technical literacy in the broader population can be approximated with the Thanksgiving test: what sort of questions do you get at Thanksgiving? That's the ambient level of literacy.

At my Thanksgiving table there's two professional programmers, a CS student, and a CS professor. While I'm doubtless an extreme example, my general point is that "your Thanksgiving table" is still a bubble. That said, sure, for many it will be closer to representative than friends/coworkers.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#267

Post by vilmosi »

Phlarp wrote: post #224
jogjayr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because they are not allowed to use IQ tests There's actual employment law that prohibits using IQ tests? I'd never heard that before

An IQ test can be used during the hiring process but the employer has to be able to defend its use as directly relevant to the work at hand. So most employers aren't willing to spend the legal fees related to defending the use of a direct IQ test... Possibly because the college degree is a good enough litmus test for IQ to satisfy their needs.

If it's difficult to prove that IQ is relevant to the job... Maybe it's not. Also, I doubt that's the reason.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#268

Post by namibj »

pm wrote: post #131
csours wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a massive gulf between hiring and work. There's another massive gulf between what a manager asks for and what HR or recruiters ask for. > "If companies find it hard to reliably staff generalist positions" The process of hiring for this is hard. Finding people like this is also hard.

There's also gulf a between what companies think they need, and what they actually need. Almost everyone hires on technologies and not the abstract skillsets required to learn said technologies.

Any Idea how to find a company that hires on that abstract skillset, potentially by throwing one into cold water to test for it?

~Someone with little resume-driven experience but good grogging skills

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#269

Post by maksimum »

tikhonj wrote: post #216
dsp1234 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your average undergrad program... CS degree never doing anything novel in CS Is this different than any other field? I was under the impression that most BS programs do not require novel research. That doesn't come until post graduate courses.

I don't necessarily mean publishable—that's doable but difficult in CS—but novel in the sense of requiring non-trivial creativity and insight within the field rather than replaying things you were taught directly. An example might be writing a compiler for a language you design with features not covered in the book. It's probably not publishable, but it is doing CS in a way that just following instructions in a book…

So personal projects that extend the material you learn in courses and take 1-2 semesters to complete? I think plenty of schools already do that as part of a BA/BS graduation requirement.

Re: Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already

#270

Post by brucephillips »

im2nguyen wrote: post #264
brucephillips wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except google's idea wasn't "search engine". Google's idea was "search engine that uses the PageRank algorithm". PageRank did not encompass all of the value of Google, but it did encompass much of it, and it was unequivocally part of the idea. What you're effectively saying is that ideas have no value without good execution, which is of course true, but this is very different than saying they have no value, because a…

If the value is in "search engine that uses the PageRank algorithm", then theoretically you can take that idea and execute it to get the same value. The difference isn't in the idea but the execution - hence the value.

I'm sorry, I don't follow.

EDIT: Oh I see what you mean now. By "you", you actually mean me. No, I couldn't, because Google has parlayed their initial good idea into a monopoly based on network effects, specifically the accrual of proprietary data (clicks) which I have no access to.

The idea was valuable in 1997. It's no longer.

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