“A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept” • Hacker News Board

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#51

Post by pmiller2 » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 8:25 AM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #28

Fishkins wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When hiring, I agree that aptitude is probably a better signal than experience. However, I also think aptitude is much harder to assess during an interview. It's pretty easy to look at someone's work history, github, and ask them a few questions about what they currently know. I'm not sure if I know a truly effective way to figure out their aptitude in a short amount of time.

Teach them something. There was an article about it making the rounds a few days/weeks ago. A guy basically takes on a class of 30+ people for two days when hiring, teaches them something, then hires the one who did best. The rest are still happy to have learned something. Another good approach might be flat out asking "Tell me about the last time you learned something new"

Anyone have a pointer to this submission? My search-fu fails me.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#52

Post by Retric » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 10:45 AM UTC

neumann wrote: post #20

arjie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intriguingly, that's the opposite of what's popular on HN. HN and /r/programming posters prefer the "Look at what I've done. Here are my projects" approach which is the y-intercept because it describes where they are. Asking them a question they've never heard before and observing their approach is a way (albeit imperfect) of seeing how fast one can deal with a novel problem.

Not necessarily, it can also describe the slope, based on the timestamp of the projects. 4 years ago I did this, I did this last year, last month I tried my hand at this. However, it requires the interviewer to have the skill to extract this information during the interview and recognise the slope.

Your assuming equal time and focas for all projects which does not happen.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#53

Post by EGreg » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 12:06 PM UTC

I happen to disagree regarding the hiring. I prefer to put more emphasis on the system itself, and not the developers, who should be replaceable. (I say this as a developer myself, who prefers to be replaceable.)

When a developer forgets to test their code before pushing it to production, we often blame the developer. But the real problem is lack of automated testing, lack of processes, and too much responsibility for the developer.

With a good system in place, you hire people who have all the prerequisite knowledge (the languages, patterns, experience with similar solutions to the ones they'll do, and preferably good team spirit that matches your culture). The rest can be learned on the job. But once again, focus on your onboarding materials!

In short -- you should always look to be optimizing the system. THAT is your "slope" if you will. Except it's not a slope, it's an exponent! Because it builds on itself week after week. And you don't risk that one developer somewhere messing up your code.

We say: people live lives, companies create products.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#54

Post by grkvlt » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 2:04 PM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #4

Why do Quora articles continue to make the front page when we can't read them? I'm greeted with http://i.imgur.com/WTeSt8s.png No, I won't sign in with Google, nor Facebook. How do the people upvoting this read the article? Do they sign in? What possible benefit is there to signing in? They're basically holding content hostage. When I defended Scribd, people came out in droves to point out how wrong it was to hold un…

> No, I won't sign in with Google, nor Facebook.

That's probably your problem. I signed up for Quora and can read the posts fine. Also, there's a 'close' link under that dialog, which you could have clicked without logging in.

> If the HN homepage had a popup saying "Login with Google or Facebook to read all of HN," would you tolerate it?

Yes. Why not? It seems childish to rail against this. If a site is useful, I create an account. I did that for HN, and it doesn't matter if the sign-in mechanism is proprietary, Google based, Facebook or OAuth. In fact, I trust sites that use external, federalised SSO more because I know they didn't roll their own authentication with associated failures.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#55

Post by grkvlt » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 2:11 PM UTC

arasmussen wrote: post #17

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #4

Why do Quora articles continue to make the front page when we can't read them? I'm greeted with http://i.imgur.com/WTeSt8s.png No, I won't sign in with Google, nor Facebook. How do the people upvoting this read the article? Do they sign in? What possible benefit is there to signing in? They're basically holding content hostage. When I defended Scribd, people came out in droves to point out how wrong it was to hold un…

> Why do Quora articles continue to make the front page when we can't read them? We can read them, by signing in. > How do the people upvoting this read the article? Do they sign in? Yes > What possible benefit is there to signing in? We get to read the article. > If the HN homepage had a popup saying "Login with Google or Facebook to read all of HN," would you tolerate it? Yes Btw, dude, there's a close button.

Exactly. I really don't understand what's wrong with signing in to access content, it shows the site owner I'm actually interested in engaging. Facebook isn't going steal my soul when I send them my credentials, you know.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#56

Post by PakG1 » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 2:43 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #52

neumann wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily, it can also describe the slope, based on the timestamp of the projects. 4 years ago I did this, I did this last year, last month I tried my hand at this. However, it requires the interviewer to have the skill to extract this information during the interview and recognise the slope.

Your assuming equal time and focas for all projects which does not happen.

Whether the data presents an exponential curve, parabolic curve, or logarithmic curve, it doesn't change the analysis though.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#57

Post by _delirium » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 3:23 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #42

w1ntermute wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Quora is in YC[0], neither of those things are likely to happen. 0: http://blog.ycombinator.com/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch

So, the Scribd treatment, then? (Scribd links were encouraged despite constant complaints about the difficulty of use relative to PDFs.)

To be fair, when the Scribd links were first implemented, 1) in-browser PDF was much worse than it is now; and 2) Scribd's interface was better than it is now. Over time, browsers got better at showing PDFs, and Scribd got more cluttered and weird.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#58

Post by thrownaway2424 » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 5:28 PM UTC

greenyoda wrote: post #3

One of Ousterhout's examples of this principle is something that comes up frequently on HN: "Before I came back to academia a couple of years ago I was out doing startups. What I noticed is that when people hire they are almost always hire based on experience. They're looking for somebody's resume trying to find the person who has already done the job they want them to do three times over. That's basically hiring bas…

But what if you just need the job done? Sometimes you're hiring for a position you expect to make a deep impact on the success of your startup, sometimes you just need the project written. In the latter case Ms. Intercept might get the job done in a week while Mr. Slope will take six months in some cases. All the aptitude in the world won't compensate for experience when time is a factor. Experience knows how to do the job on day zero, even if they aren't any better at it after they're done. The time you save from hiring Ms. Intercept as your first programmer might even buy you some extra time to find exactly the right person to be your superstar hire.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#59

Post by thrownaway2424 » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 5:38 PM UTC

tfigueroa wrote: post #34

It's a bit of a false dilemma to choose between experience or aptitude. In the start-up period, though, aptitude is a better strategic choice in that you need people who can grow as quickly as the venture. Later, you need the people with experience, even if they're a bit slow. They're the ones that have been bitten by the edge cases, the deadlocks, the XSS openings - and know to avoid them.

Really? I'd rather have the experienced but dull people to put together the minimal product first. Having them onboard gives me more time to find and hire the right aptitude people, and having them there _first_ keeps the inexperienced people from sticking in all the deadlocks and security holes in the first place.

Do people really want their minimally-viable product to be full of deadlocks? I personally do not. And I don't want to hire promising but new-to-the-industry people who have to check stackoverflow to remember the difference between a pointer and a reference, or who spend hours trying to debug why something in their python program is iterating over a string.

Bottom line, I guess I don't see how anyone can want to bring in aptitude in the absence of experience. People with both would be fine, or a combination of both types of people would be fine. Aptitude without experience is not going to work.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#60

Post by vanderZwan » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 5:54 PM UTC

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #58

greenyoda wrote: post #3

One of Ousterhout's examples of this principle is something that comes up frequently on HN: "Before I came back to academia a couple of years ago I was out doing startups. What I noticed is that when people hire they are almost always hire based on experience. They're looking for somebody's resume trying to find the person who has already done the job they want them to do three times over. That's basically hiring bas…

But what if you just need the job done? Sometimes you're hiring for a position you expect to make a deep impact on the success of your startup, sometimes you just need the project written. In the latter case Ms. Intercept might get the job done in a week while Mr. Slope will take six months in some cases. All the aptitude in the world won't compensate for experience when time is a factor. Experience knows how to do t…

Oosterhout had that covered:

> And if the Y-axis is something good, depending on your definition of something good, then I think most people would pick the red trajectory over the blue trajectory (..unless you think you're going to die before you get to the crossing point).