After reaching that percentile the grind begins. And that's when learning begins. And that's when you develop character. The dopamine doesn't flow as freely any more as obstacles to improvement become the rule rather than the exception. Braggadocious anecdote: on December 25th, 2021, I started solving Kattis problems. I set myself a goal to reach a top 1000 rank in 2022. This took me two weeks instead of an entire year. I adjusted the goal to top 100. This is significantly harder, and after two more weeks I was tempted to dismiss the goal through excuses like: "these are just puzzles with limited real-world application". This is obvious bullshit, and I just wanted to avoid doing the work. I caught myself in the act and doubled down on the goal. I bought some books and learned a lot. Currently sitting on #229, and I _will_ reach top 100 this year.
95%-ile isn't that good (2020)
81–90 of 161 posts
Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For a lot of people their career is just a way to get paid. As long as they don't get fired that's enough for them. This was one of my hardest earned lessons when I became a manager. Previously I had worked my way into high-performing teams where everybody really cared about doing a good job. I was so surrounded by people with that mindset that I assumed that’s just how everybody in tech operated. Only later did I…
Curious what steps you took to get the most out of your team when some teammates aren't intrinsically motivated? Did you build a sort of incentive structure?
You give em boring work
Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
You sound a bit bitter? You should re-read the comment you replied to carefully. PragmaticPulp doesn't imply that everyone on a PiP is bad a person and should feel bad. For PragmaticPulp's argument it is more than enough that people on the job market skew towards being worse employees. Similarly, people on a PiP skew towards being lower achievers. > IMO, you and every salaried engineer are someone who's willing to se…
Haha, yeah, I got kinda bitter after learning the hard way that Dilbert wasn't a parody You make good points, about that 90% figure and that I shouldn't imply salaried life as exploitation. There's a reasonably healthy free market and the means of production (a laptop) can be fished out of a trash can I came at 90% since Google had 135k employees in 2020, and $209B in revenue. That's $1.5M per person, and then my men…
Thanks for the explanation!
Yes, I would advise against taking Google as an explanation. As far as I can tell, Google does have some 'secret sauce' that takes in good people and turns that into revenue. And in some sense, the market pays for that secret sauce in the sense that (going by your numbers) they only need to pay out 10% of their revenue as salary. (Though part of that is also just that they have other costs, like actually running data centres.)
I suspect the average employee at Google would find it quite a lot more uncomfortable to get the same total compensation from a company they just founded.
I've worked at Google before, and I've also been on a PIP before.
Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)
#84Trivial to be top 5 percent of the general population at programming Possible to be top 5 percent of the programmers Very difficult to be in the top 5 percent of FANG programmers Nearly impossible to be in the top 5 percent of Google Principal engineers
One way that I've always found ways to skew this is to not restrict yourself strictly to 'programming' however you define it. Always treat the problem as a one-off where everything is 'in bounds' for the solution space. This approach lets me solve problems where the top 5% have not found a solution because they were looking at certain pure problems and not the practical ones at hand.
Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone in the top 5% is definitely that good 1. Overwatch, the competitive ladder, is not a casual game. Everything you mentioned for CS, happens in Overwatch too; it's a esport that had millions invested. 2. The top 5% of CSGO ranked is Legendary Eagle . There is a world of difference between Legendary Eagle and Global Elite (top .75%). And even between those 2 ranks, there are two other ranks . The top 5% isn't t…
At least a few years ago when I was still following the CS:GO scene a lot of pros weren't Global Elite. It takes a different skillset to be able to dominate pubs and to be able to work well in a professional CS team.
A lot of pros aren’t global elite simply because they don’t play matchmaking seriously at all. Absolutely every professional csgo player in a top-20/30/100 team would easily attain that rank if they wanted it.
Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)
#86Seems like their real life was Overwatch
Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Being even 50%-ile among professionals for either would certainly be extremely impressive. I think you'd be surprised at how low the bar is. And how people either 1) don't care about actively improving or 2) don't effectively learn from their mistakes. For a lot of people their career is just a way to get paid. As long as they don't get fired that's enough for them. And for other people they never developed a growt…
> For a lot of people their career is just a way to get paid. As long as they don't get fired that's enough for them. This was one of my hardest earned lessons when I became a manager. Previously I had worked my way into high-performing teams where everybody really cared about doing a good job. I was so surrounded by people with that mindset that I assumed that’s just how everybody in tech operated. Only later did I…
Teams like the one you are talking about are so rare I don't even count them anymore.
Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)
#88Admittedly, I only skimmed this. But within the space of video games, I’m not sure Overwatch is a stunning example since it’s generally a casual game. I’ve been playing various iterations of Counter-Strike and StarCraft for decades. Sometimes with deliberate practice, including reading strategies, playing custom maps to practice certain skills, and watching series aimed at improving level of play. And despite the hun…
> Anyone in the top 5% is definitely that good 1. Overwatch, the competitive ladder, is not a casual game. Everything you mentioned for CS, happens in Overwatch too; it's a esport that had millions invested. 2. The top 5% of CSGO ranked is Legendary Eagle . There is a world of difference between Legendary Eagle and Global Elite (top .75%). And even between those 2 ranks, there are two other ranks . The top 5% isn't t…
Actually, global elite is a few steps below actual pros - above global theres faceit level 10, then open ladders/leagues, then invite only leagues which are at semi-pro level and lastly the pro leagues
EDIT: AFAIK Global Elite starts at about 1600-1700 elo, theres a lot of room above that
Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Being even 50%-ile among professionals for either would certainly be extremely impressive. I think you'd be surprised at how low the bar is. And how people either 1) don't care about actively improving or 2) don't effectively learn from their mistakes. For a lot of people their career is just a way to get paid. As long as they don't get fired that's enough for them. And for other people they never developed a growt…
> For a lot of people their career is just a way to get paid. As long as they don't get fired that's enough for them. This was one of my hardest earned lessons when I became a manager. Previously I had worked my way into high-performing teams where everybody really cared about doing a good job. I was so surrounded by people with that mindset that I assumed that’s just how everybody in tech operated. Only later did I…
> If you’ve been surrounded by high achievers and motivated people who would have chosen programming jobs because that’s what they like to do every day, it can be a shock to work with people who really just hate doing anything that resembles work.
That's a false dichotomy[1]
[1] If I am reading you correctly, you're saying that there's two extremes
1. Programmers who enjoy it.
2. Programmers who hate doing anything that resembles work.
But, honestly, those two classes can't be the extreme ends of the spectrum. "People who enjoy programming" overlap significantly with "people who hate doing the work assigned to them".
You make it sound like people who hate doing the work you assigned to them must be people who hate programming.
IME, it's almost the opposite - people who love programming aren't going to be the least bit excited about mindless CRUD duties on an over-engineered stack that has 27 levels of indirection before it even hits the database record.
> Yet they’re out there, in surprisingly large numbers.
It appears that way to you because you are drawing wrong conclusions from your observations. You're looking at devs who hate working on your stack, for your team and extrapolating that to "These devs hate working as a programmer".
IOW, your observations that people hate working is accurate, your conclusion that it must be because they hate programming is not.
Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)
#90article definitely made me think about what else I could be 95th percentile in. I agree that dedicated practice is very important compared with people that just play casually