I have played couple of games competitively. I have been somewhere in top ten to top three in the world in some of them (we are talking small communities with large number of accidental players, nothing really to brag about).
My observation is it is critical to somehow get a feeling what it is/means to be good at the game. This means identifying where is the focus of a good player.
Having been playing competitively I have noticed ALMOST ALL of people being intent on playing the game well are completely misplacing there focus, effectively wasting their time on stuff that does not matter.
They are stuck being mediocre to good (but not best) players because they dug themselves in their own holes:
- polishing endlessly skills that give diminishing results but are comfortable to the player but avoiding tackling problems that the player is not comfortable with
- repeating the same routine all the time instead of constantly switching up stuff they are training. If you are training well after some time you have trained a skill enough that you should switch to another that now gives best ROI.
- repeating and acting on falsehoods/myths about the game
- complaining about the unfairness of the game which means they would like to play some different game which is governed by their idealized rules instead of trying to understand the real rules of the real game
- not being ruthlessly critical about their abilities which is necessary step to identifying what to work on to progress,
- not being able to spend a moment to consciously reflect on ones progress to identify why it is they are stuck (instead of blaming everybody)
- being focused on winning instead of getting better. Many players play to get a short term kick out of winning the game instead of playing to get some kind of knowledge/skill that will help them get better. Think Starcraft players who find that they can get consistent wins cannon rushing their enemies but are not willing to fail to try other strategies.
etc.
An example would be rookie players on iRacing (I'm nowhere near the top). iRacing requires you to get minimum amount of games but also, more importantly, minimum safety rating to be able to progress from rookies.
Players who are stuck but would want to leave rookies in iRacing are constantly complaining at other players constantly hitting them, effectively ruining their safety raiting.
While it is true that the state of the game in rookies is such that you get hit frequently, there are people who are quickly sailing through rookies. To do that you just need to notice that the critical skill is not hitting other players and avoid getting hit. Instead of focusing on getting to best place, focus on not hitting anything. Yet, so many people do not understand this and are destined to stay in rookies for a long time.
> They are stuck being mediocre to good (but not best) players because they dug themselves in their own holes
Also: they fall into a pit where their current behaviour works at the skill level that they are at, but is detrimental when that behaviour is performed at a higher skill level.
That is true. One way this happens is when somebody tries to progress very quickly, emulating best players, without putting time to understand the basic mechanics of the game.
A good player will be able to adapt their gameplay because they can more or less predict what will happen when they alter the gameplay and/or they can evaluate how their change influenced the result.
A stuck player who skipped basic training may be able to imitate a complicated strategy to some extent but will fail miserably when they change anything and won't be able to evaluate results. They are effectively trained to do one thing from a subset of skills of a pro player and not being able to transition through a valley of failure from their local maximum.
Depends on what their goals are; not all musicians are interested in composition or jamming. I can improvise quite well but can't sight read to save my life.
Totally agree. I also feel that awareness of the meta is increasingly public knowledge, but is not utilitized.
Smash bro’s for instance, has a ton of players who know about advanced techniques, and talk about some of them as easy because they are easy for top players, but cannot actually execute on any of them.
And, like you say, mistake the fact that some of the advanced techniques are done by professional players to mean that utilizing these techniques are an important part of getting there. They’re generally not.
In a nutshell, yes. But deliberate is not enough. You also need to be able to honestly reflect on yourself. Many people are unable to honestly reflect on themselves. They are fooling themselves and made it part of their being so much that they are incapable of being honest.
For example, a person that habitually blames everybody for their failings may undertake a project to write a blog post every day but may be incapable of hearing advice, critical opinions or diagnosing reasons behind non-existing or stagnating readership statistics. They might blame everybody of being stupid or have no taste or not knowing anything about writing.
Yes, there can be emotional ego barriers, which hinder seeing. "It's amazing what you can see by looking."
But I think there's also a genuine non-emotional, cognitive problem with seeing, for a non-expert. An expert coach would help... but how to evaluate expertise? Maybe credentials are enough, for a beginner.
> - being focused on winning instead of getting better. Many players play to get a short term kick out of winning the game instead of playing to get some kind of knowledge/skill that will help them get better.
In difficult projects, it's necessary to improve prerequisite skills before "winning" (completing the project).
But with sufficient layers of prerequisites, the goal becomes distant, the motivation decoupled, until it falls below a threshold.
In addition, for a non-expert, it's difficult to be sure that a prerequisite is really needed, or will be enough, or what the true ROI really is. We don't need precise certainty, but we do need to know well enough.
Do you have any suggestions for getting around this?
Aside from all the other things he said, at least for games — 1 out of 20 people get there, and the vast majority of people who play a game play very casually. So if you put a reasonable amount of effort at all into getting good at a game, you’re likely to make the top 5% of players or close to it.
I play hearthstone about, I dunno, an hour a day or so, while I’m on the train. I’ve never made it to the legend rank, but I make it to rank 5 easily most months, which puts me in the top 6%. A lot of months I’ll end up rank 2 or 1, which puts me in the top 3 or even 1%
I don’t think I’m particularly good at the game, I just play good decks and pay attention to the meta game so I know what to expect from the other decks. I don’t tend to plan multiple turns ahead, I don’t try and figure out what’s in my opponents hand, sometimes I’m barely paying attention to the game at all, and sometimes make just obvious mistakes like missing lethal.
But none of that really matters up until you get to rank 2 or 1, where you start playing against people that basically don’t make mistakes.
In fact one of the hardest transitions for me to make in the game was understanding that when my opponent appeared to be doing something stupid in a higher ranked game, they were probably not, and that I need to spend time thinking about what it meant, rather than just assuming they were bad at the game. That doesn’t happen until you’re already in the top 5%, though.
this is because improving your rank at hearthstone is a matter of playing as many viable games as possible. the outcome of most matches is mostly dependent on randomness as opposed to player error. The largest source of randomness being the order of card draw, which can turn around a highly favorable or unfavorable matchup between decks.
the actions of players have very little impact in hearthstone. in a typical game, the player is presented with somewhere about 2-7 choices every round (increasing in the late-game as the board becomes more full) and most of them are obviously good or obviously bad.
my point is that while being top 95% in most tasks is a matter of practice/repetition in new situations to build skill, achieving legend in hearthstone- while it might require you to build some minimal amount of skill in guessing what cards your opponent has, or estimate the odds of drawing a given card in the next few rounds the difficulty of the game will quickly drop off due to it's low "skill ceiling"- is mostly about repetition for the sake of reaching 15,10,and 5 rank level checkmarks.
hearthstone is a card game played by blizzard, the objective of the game being to make as much money as possible over the course of it's lifespan. the current meta in collectable card games is to make players believe that their actions have consequences over a randomized card game, and that their invaluable collections will continue to exist when blizz unplugs the servers after it stops making money for them.
1) naming yourself "hearthstonebad" isn't conducive to good discussion
2) the commenter stated his time budget: an hour a day. This doesn't seem excessive to make the argument "rank is merely a function of game time"
3) 2-7 choices is an under estimate. Past MtG pros have observed that attack ordering has more tree breadth than MtG attack phases. Saying the choices are straight forward is misguided when top players will consistently make the better choice that weaker top players miss
4) a high amount of randomness doesn't necessarily negate skill. See Poker
Indeed, the skill is designing a deck to be less sensitive to such randomness, adapting a side deck, reading the opponent's tactics to counter them or exploit them and responding correctly to the challenges if things go wrong.
Essentially, making your own luck.
Tree depth in card games is about the same as the deepest card combo times hand size, and for every card you can also hold it or get it burned.
> this is because improving your rank at hearthstone is a matter of playing as many viable games as possible. the outcome of most matches is mostly dependent on randomness as opposed to player error.
I think because of the matching system it seems that way because you quickly get to people at your own skill level so randomness and luck feel like they have more of an impact. You pretty much by definition get to players you’ll lose against half the time pretty quickly. From then you have to figure out how to get just a 1 or 2 percent edge and play a lot of games.
I lose half my games at rank 3, but put me up against rank 20 or even rank 10 players and I’ll win 80 or 90% of my games. I’ve done the climb from the bottom a few times and it’s basically trivial. Even against people playing well tuned net decks. So yeah, skill matters.
Edit: I remembered incorrectly, child comment has a better explanation.
Even if you win exactly 50% of your games, you will still eventually rank up. This is because you gain an extra star when you rank up. For example, let's say you start at rank 3, 4 stars.
* Win: Rank 2, 1 star
* Lose: Rank 2, 0 stars
* Lose: Rank 3, 4 stars
So even though you went 1-2, your rank didn't change.
What do other people who rely on feed readers do in these scenarios? Is there a good service (which will not disappear) which will either convert the thing into rss or alert you when there's a new post?
This has been exactly my experience. When I wrote https://www.jefftk.com/p/record-your-playing few people had heard of my band. We kept recording our playing, listening back to it, and finding places where we didn't sound like we wanted to. Two years after that post we were one of the most booked contra dance bands in the country.
95th percentile for an SAT score is something like 1450. That's fairly impressive to me. Feels like scoring higher might often have more to do with effort than ability.
Is that excluded from the line of thought in the blog post because it's among "people who regularly practice?"
Or is it that effort vs ability thing? Not impressive because you were born smart?
In a totally "no effort" arena, 95th percentile height for a 19 year old US male is 6 feet, 2 inches. Does that feel unusual/impressive or "not that good?" I imagine it brings plenty of life benefits.
Perhaps the 95%-ile is actually good when it is something that almost everyone has to do.
Everyone in school is practicing at least a bit on reading comprehension, and the SAT is across lots of schools, if you are the in 95%-ile of millions of people it might be more impressive than being in the 95%-ile of tens of thousands of people.
That seems like a good observation...sample size matters. Being one the best players in my over-40, non-contact, recreational hockey league is very, very, not meaningful. I could move up a bracket and be an ignored bench warmer. Or move down and be a superstar.
Seems recognized by everyone playing though. We focus little on who has talent. It's more about cool multi-player strategy, and funny stuff. Terrible players that "luck or effort" into something magnificent is way more exciting and celebrated than a known good player scoring/defending. "Goalie didn't show up and here's a dumbass in pads" are the best games, even if it's your goalkeeper and you get destroyed on the scoreboard.
Remember that everyone has different goals. My cousin was heartbroken when she got a 1570 on the old SATs, as her dream of going to some university was crushed, as she was competing with peers in an elite high school. She had to settle for Brown or something, and was convinced that life was over.
For me, I didn't have the desire or resources to do that. I got my 1400 and was able to choose from any of a dozen schools. That meant that being a white shoe attorney or McKinsey consultant was out of my reach. Life is good.
On another note, my son is passionate about little league. He's good, has fun, has a competitive spirit, has made great friends, etc. It's a great thing. He's probably in the 75th percentile of players at his age and region. So unfortunately, major league baseball dreams are unlikely to be fulfilled.
This article is similar. Being in the 95th percentile of people playing some video game is interesting, but isn't something that I would have any desire to do, and probably is a fools errand unless you're looking to compete at a professional level. I'd like to be in the 99th of people having fun playing a game -- the time and mechanics of getting to be an elite player is probably in opposition to that goal!
Are you saying she was heartbroken with a 1570 out of the old 1600 or the slightly-less-old, but still not current 2400? I can't believe that 1570/1600 is going to disqualify you from anywhere.
My understanding is that there is/was an admissions quota at the high school level. I don't recall the gory details, but as a cousin and friend I was sympathetic, but as someone not in the middle of it I was puzzled and kind of horrified at the brutal competition that left a truly brilliant person feeling like some sort of rube.
First, no, it's not that amazing if it's something every 20th person has. Second, height is not something you should fixate on. The benefits of being tall are generally over reported. In certain arenas like basketball it helps. In others, like running, pants shopping or air travel, it hurts. I think it's probably about the 12th most important factor in person to person interactions, after eye contact, body language, eloquence, voice, the elements of physical presentation you can control, etc.
"Second, height is not something you should fixate on."
I'm not convinced. Many studies illustrate the correlation to success. We are still animals and not-merit factors still matter. Good looks, height, gender, race, symmetry, smell, whatever, etc, are a real "thing". You can overcome it all with mitigation, but it isn't imaginary. That stuff drives real outcomes.
Height could be correlated with "thriving" from infancy through childhood.
Also, I have tall children and they are regularly treated as older than they are, setting expectations higher for them in settings outside of school where they aren't grouped by age.
Me too. I have sons that are 6'4" and 6"2". I'm not "short", but am 5 foot whatever. Mostly my view is "thankful for the genetic luck" for the extra benefit of the doubt they get. And those benefits are very clear, despite other strengths both have.
Tinder would seem to contradict you there. How often is an eloquence requirement given vs. height requirement? Sure, height is not something we should fixate on, but it doesn't mean that doesn't happen anyways.
The 95th percentile of SAT seems quite different than the 95th percentile of people taking in the first time and doing no special prep. Sadly that second score is near impossible to measure because it would be useful to help many kids compare their first score with no dedicated prep to a more realistic percentile (and better encourage them to work to improve their score).
I’m Recalling whether it was 96% or 94%, but I got a perfect on my math sat II. And yet the perfect score was only ~95%.
Top 1/20 Can be impressive or unimpressive depending on context.
Top 1/20 is impressive if everyone in the group is competitive. It’s not impressive if it’s 1/20 out of a bunch of randoms who’ve never tried to be good at it.
In your case, I'd say ~95% in Math SAT II is still rather impressive because the group of people taking SAT II is already self-selected as few schools actually require the test.
Height is tricky, because its indirect to real goals. So it would depend what you'd want to achieve. Also, I'd think the 95%-ile of height might actually be better then the 100%-ile. Being too tall comes with its own set of limitations.
So again, its all about the framing. If you just frame ir as taller is better, then ya, 95%-ile starts being impressive, but not as much as 96%-ile.
SAT performance is (largely) determined by intelligence, which is (largely) innate. If you're relatively smart and don't practice at all, you will score higher on the SAT than your less smart friend no matter how long they practice.
This applies even more so to height.
With many learned skills, though, if you invest time and are thoughtful about how you approach your learning, you can get to 95th percentile fairly easily, despite that seeming quite impressive. Many participants don't put the time/effort in, and many of those who do don't do it in a remotely efficient way. If you do both, you are virtually guaranteed to get to a high percentile across a wide range of skills, mostly independent of your innate ability.
this isn't necessarily true, it's around the 25th percentile of students admitted to harvard. probably not gonna happen unless there's something else special about you, though.
I got into a top ten college with a 1470. it was fairly lopsided though (800 critical reading, 670 math; apparently the scores are reported differently now?), I dunno whether that helps or hurts.
I got a 1500 with a 790 CR and 710 Math (Yikes!). Went to my state school and hated it so I just came away with the conclusion that my entire high school career was just a massive waste of time and effort.
well after a few years I ended up transferring to a local state school that accepts ~60% of applicants (iow, a very different world). I didn't like my state school very much either, but honestly the cs program was a good but more rigorous than the "elite" college I had originally gotten into.
ultimately this stuff doesn't matter as much as you might think. the state school I went to turned out to have good relationships with lots of software companies in the area. I ended up getting an internship that lead to a pretty good gig straight after graduation.
I follow the front page just like everyone else. And his comments about "perceived elitism" always stand out. Just comment on whenever I find something interesting in the comment.
On the flip side. Sometimes you're just not that good at stuff despite your best efforts.
In college I really struggled with math. Which was a challenge because computer science has you take a lot of math classes. In my calculus class I studied so hard for the final. Did every problem in the book. And I still just got a B in the class.
At the same time my programming classes were really easy. I didn't study at all and the homework was trivial.
Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy.
The movie Amadeus really nails this idea. Salieri has one goal in life: to create beautiful music. And he achieved some success, but then he meets Mozart - "
a boastful, lustful, smutty infantile boy..." - yet he creates the most amazing music he's ever heard.
> All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing... and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?
I've experienced that frustration many times in my life.
Salieri is a tragic figure though - his response is one of contempt and hostility to the injustice of his life. But he's missed the point. All success and talent in life is a gift.
Maybe your frustrations in life are an opportunity to teach you humility and to be gracious to others.
I learned this at a young age. Leaving my small community where I was the smartest, most educated person I knew. I went to college where there were easily 1/3 of the class doing as well or better.
I came to understand we all stand on a spectrum. For everybody there's someone better, and someone not as good. So what? Do what you can with the skills you have, and you're doing more than 99% of the people who squander what they have.
I learned this while learning chess. I could win against anyone in elementary school. Some years later, I went to a small tournament. I was wrecked by everyone including children half of my age. Humility lesson right here. I still play though. Playing for fun is fine. It is a game after all.
I don't know why this was downvoted, but you're right. Geniuses of that level are rare and extremely lucky. It's like lamenting that you'll never be financially independent because you didn't win the Megamillions lottery. Only a tiny minority of people have that kind of luck and no one has any control over it.
I agree there is a degree of luck in some people, but I'll be wary about the term genius.
Personally, when someone says Genius, in some contexts, I take it like an excuse to justify the existence of people that excel doing something, just because they are born-geniuses.
The fact that some of these geniuses dedicated their entire lives to improve themselves (being it by practicing on an instrument or doing math, for example) is left aside, and the justification for doing practically nothing to achieve excellence is because "that guy/girl is a genius and I am not".
PS: In the office that justification comes as being an expert: when someone doesn't know how about something, it's because some other person is an expert. When the boss asks the lab manager "how does that WiFi module work?" the answer is "let's call X because she is an expert", when the manager should already know how that works.
Genius is, in my experience and from what I know of history, is something people are born with though. I've met (and worked with) exactly one person I would place near the designation of "genius". I wasn't under the impression that he didn't work hard to gain knowledge, but he just had a different way of approaching problems.
I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do, but I could be struggling with something for hours that he could break down in a way that just never occurred to me. So yes, he put in the time, but it was his thought process that made him great, and I'm not convinced that's something that can be taught to great effect.
I've been fortunate to know a number of people that I consider to be true geniuses. My wife's entire family is extremely talented, but that's not the only source.
The thing I've noticed about genius is that it's just part of who you are. It flows out of your pores. You work the kinds of hours and achieve the kinds of things you do, simply because you are driven to do so, and could not be otherwise.
If you're not a genius, then no amount of practice or experience will make you one. You can get better, sure. But to be a genius, you have to start out life as a genius.
Of course, there are many types of genius, in many different areas. But all the geniuses I know fit the above description.
OTOH, our culture does throw around the term much too easily. Many people seem to mistake lots of practice or experience for genius, which is understandable because many geniuses do seem to have a lot of practice and experience. But in a true genius, the cause and effect is reversed for practice and experience versus the results achieved.
I am most definitely not a genius. But I do have a fair amount of practice and experience in certain fields.
This reminds me of a time when a hiring manager said something along the lines of “We’re trying to find Michael Jordan, not Scottie Pippen.” My colleague and I were pretty shocked by this, since Pippen was also a great Hall of Fame basketball player, just not one of the top 3 players of all time.
Continuing the analogy, Michael Jordan doesn't get to display his full Jordan-ness on the court unless he's got a teammate like Pippen who creates opportunities and solves problems that will be huge energy drains on Jordan if only Jordan is there to solve them. (Guarding opponents; salvaging something out of busted plays, etc.)
Finding stars and paying them a lot is pretty easy. It also isn't necessarily the path to great success, especially if you can't build a coherent rest of the team. Just ask Allen Iverson.
All companies want to fill their ranks with the Michael Jordans of the world, but there was only one Michael Jordan (that's why we call him by his name), and he wasn't even drafted first overall, he went third. The people who beat him were another Hall of Famer, and then some guy you've never heard of.
Especially stupid because the company that hired Michael Jordan literally did hire Scottie Pippen.
They are basically saying they want the best performing person in the world but don't want to give them the supporting team that actually makes their exceptional performance possible.
It's true. The hiring market is a market, which means companies compete with each other to attract the best talent they can - and sometimes they lose out on that competition.
This is true but there is also a time dimension to it. I was similar in undergrad, no matter how hard I tried I never really got passed A- while the class genius would ace everything. But as a I got older and I kept studying I began to close the gap with the "market leader". The star burns twice as bright burns half as long.
Sometimes it's not about how well you do at the current point in time, but how you navigate changes in the external environment. Skills and people are always in flux.
Leaving music and working in some other craft, say, a carpenter or a doctor?
This means a lot of sunk cost and further sunk cost of retraining.
Ignoring the injustice? Then it will be perpetuated.
Or attempting to correct it, then hope you're able to?
Hope runs out.
(Actually movie Salieri did some messing with Mozart to correct the injustice in a destructive way. It didn't make him happy.)
> Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy.
You mentioned faring well in programming classes. Interview performance aside, do you feel that you're a good and perhaps exceptional programmer?
Having transitioned to management some time ago, it wouldn't surprise me that a humble developer might be under-rating themselves.
Once I got my hands off the keyboard, it became pretty clear that the best person for the job was very situational, and that my opinion was often wrong. The technically smartest and most capable person was often the worst choice for many tasks.
One of my best DBA team members was a guy with a history degree with almost no understanding or interest in basic crap like CAP theory, normalization tradeoffs, etc. He was honestly terrible at design.
He was consistently, though, a 10x type resource for production performance problems. But thought of himself as barely qualified for the team because he was a 0.6x resource for many other tasks. I'd hire him every time.
I can be very quick and can work diligently (grit my way through a problem) but I struggle with design and some high level concepts.
Interviews ask abstract and theoretical computer sciency type questions and in real life I would usually google my way to a solution on those types of questions, so I do very poorly on the spot. (forget everything or say something dumb)
But in practice I can usually deliver quicker than my teammates on real world problems.
> Interviews ask abstract and theoretical computer sciency type questions and in real life I would usually google my way to a solution on those types of questions, so I do very poorly on the spot.
Fwiw some of us ask abstract questions with the sole purpose of breaking you out of coding mode and into thinking mode. I wanna see how you break down a problem you haven’t encountered before. Not how you google a solution to a known problem. If you’re talkinng to me, I already trust that you can write code and google solutions.
One of my fav questions to ask is “Design a system to protect a skyscraper from flooding in a scifi Manhattan of 2140”
Right. I'm not good at those kinds of questions. I can code quickly but rigorous thought takes time for me. I need to ponder a design question for a while or work on two or three prototypes before I feel like I know what to do.
FWIW I've also seen the opposite. A developer who was a very good thinker and talker, but got stuck for two weeks on an issue with a Google API. It took me five minutes to figure out what was wrong. Not cause I'm smart, actually the opposite, I have to break problems down to things I can understand and it's that process which lends itself well to fixing bugs.
But I'm sure he would've run circles around me when designing an API or architecting out multiple systems.
I know our industry will debate the merits of google-style interviews forever. I think that the system may be a decent way of capturing good programmers, but that it also allows for awesome programmers to fall through the cracks. Don't let performance in interviews dictate your assessment of your on-the-ground performance. You sound like a capable coder in my view of things.
Personally have experienced the "star in a small pool" vs "anonymous in a big pool" thing many times.
I was surprised that the "star" experience wasn't always as personally ego-rewarding. Occasionally surprising people was often superior to the expectation that you always would.
Agreed. What got to me was that no matter how hard you kill it, there’s no one to share it with if you’re the “best” on the team. They’re always looking up to you. Also you need to feel like you have some backup.
I don't know anything about you so I suppose take this with a pinch of salt as I'm probably not best placed to tell you about yourself.
That said, I hold a general belief that attainment in something is not dependent on your "talent" for that thing. Your "talent" determines your ability to progress in that thing without direction and/or poorly specified direction. Genius allows you to push past everything that has come before and effectively discover new things.
Yes I'm sure there are edge-cases it's a loose mental model or rule of thumb.
So I'm sorry that despite your admirable persistence to work through all those problems you didn't achieve the grade you wanted, but if you haven't given up on calculus I would encourage you to seek alternative teachers / materials that will work for you, as it is fundamentally a thing that can be learned just like anything else. And not in a cruel way, but undergrad level calculus should be achievable for anyone given enough effort and good teaching (assuming you actually want to invest this energy and effort in the subject).
Work smart and hard, but working hard in absence can at best be inefficient grind and at worst can crystallise bad habits...
Agreed. The teacher you have is vitally important.
I also had to take a lot of math classes, on my way to a BSCS.
The first time I took Calc I, I got a D. The teacher was the Director of the Math department, and by all reports, he was actually a good teacher. Probably a good teacher for grad students, but his style didn't work well for me.
The second time I took Calc I, I had a grad student as a teacher, and his style and method worked much better, because I really understood the material, and as a result I got an A.
Same thing happened for me with Calc III. Ironically, I got the same grad student as my Calc III teacher as I had for Calc I. And with the same result -- his style and method really worked well for me.
Now, if you really want to have your butt kicked across the room, torn to shreds, and then handed back to you, try Engineering Math, a.k.a, Differential Equations. I only barely escaped that one with my life -- and a very hard fought for C.
>Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy.
This means you aren't high in the 'programming interview' skill set. While related, I consider it distinctly different than the 'programming' skill set. I think it shares more in common with other interview skill sets than it does with programming. I suggest not using this to judge your proficiency in programming, and if you want to improve this (say you plan to be job hunting soon), I would focus more on interviewing skills than programming skills. Especially if you aren't landing on-site interviews.
For starters, improving your resume to have a good UX and working on how to answer interview questions, especially the non-technical ones, would likely help. Things like how to 'correctly' answer "What is your biggest weakness?" or "Why are you looking for a job?". A lot of it comes down to learning how to lie without appearing dishonest (personally I hate how much honesty during interviews is treated as a bad thing, but I have to play the game by the rules that already exist).
Agreed with your points, although I wouldn't use the word "lie". "Marketing yourself" would be a better way to put it. It's not about falsely representing your experience; it's about knowing and emphasizing your strengths, and aligning that with the needs of the team.
I'm talking things like "what is your biggest weakness". You don't answer that honestly, you come up with a 'nice to have' weakness but that still seems enough of a weakness to not appear to be holding the question in contempt.
If it comes to why you are leaving your current job, depending upon why you actually left you could be able to give honest answers, half truths than hide the major reason, and twist the facts enough that it would be best described as a lie.
When asked what you are looking for in a new company, rarely will it be perceived positive to give any importance to money at that stage of the interview. Benefits can be mentioned, but you will have a better interview if you can give an answer closer aligned to the business you are interviewing at.
A major one is when you are asked what your current salary is, lying can be more beneficial than either not answering or telling the truth. You can stretch the truth a bit, say "A little under $130,000" when it is actually "101,000 plus a bonus that the company didn't give out last year". Is 101 a little under 130? It is subjective, and in some cases that wouldn't be a lie, but in this case it definitely stretches the truth.
Now, I'm not advocating lying about stuff on the technical side. Well, not by much. If someone in HR is asking if you have 15+ years experience in Rust (to those not familiar, it has only been about about 10 years), responding with an affirmative style answer is probably reasonable if you are experienced in the language. Don't do something like saying "Yes". More "I am very experienced in Rust and have had 3 large scale Rust products deployed with numerous smaller ones." This ends up being much better than trying to correct the HR rep that the language hasn't been out long enough for someone to have 15 years experience and better than answering no.
The key is to lie about what is your biggest weakness, while still giving an answer that doesn't come across as a lie nor being dismissive of the interviewer/question. The political tool of answering a related but different question that has a more favorable answer plays well here, such as instead answering "What is one of your weaknesses and how are you overcoming it?"
When asked a "what is your biggest X" kind of question, I almost always wonder aloud if I am the best judge of my own biggest X, whatever X might be. I feel that then gives me freedom to answer the question relative to something that I think is a weakness that would be appropriate to the situation, and how I am addressing it.
For example, talking about being somewhat OCD about things can be considered a weakness. But for some jobs in this field, a little OCD is not necessarily a bad thing.
I’ve actually mostly answered honestly, but also follow up with what I’m doing to try to improve on this weakness. For example I know one of my weaknesses is I get impatient and cut people off half way, believing I already know where they are going. Besides being rude I’m also wrong some times. It’s a legitimate short coming, but the key is I’m aware of it and am activity doing something about it. Some interviewers are just looking to see if you are self aware.
But is that your biggest weakness? Or is that a smaller weakness that, while still being a definite weakness, is socially acceptable and something you can show improvement on?
If they asked what is one of your weaknesses and how are you working to overcome it, then that is a perfectly legitimate answer. Perhaps too many interviewers ask for the biggest weakness when they actually mean to ask a question more like that.
But how do you define biggest? To me this is a big weakness that not only applies to work but also other aspects of life. We don’t have a clear ranking system for levels of weakness, so I can only pick one that’s important to me. I don’t think that’s dishonest.
If your biggest weakness is a major problem, then hopefully it is also something you're urgently addressing. If you're unfortunate and have to apply for jobs while you're still working on that aspect of yourself, then you may need to find a way to sell it, but really for most people this shouldn't be something you need to agonize over for very long.
Of course everyone who asks this question is looking for how you reply, and don't necessarily believe you'll tell them the absolute truth.
Learned the hard way that lie is mandatory for some questions.
For example: many companies insist on asking how you did "x" (for example solves a conflict of idea of solution) in situation "y" (for example between two teams in same department) and you are obliged to answer something, even if you never been in that situation (a certain multinational company for example asked me that question three times across two different attempts to join them, both of times I failed because this question, I never worked in a company with many departments).
After a lot of Glassdoor reading found out people that got the jobs I wanted, all lied outright, not just embellishments, but outright inventing things that sound plausible.
I think you're overcorrecting here. I've been on the other side of the table for questions like that, and the intent is to ensure that you have been in the appropriate situations before. At most multinational companies, resolving conflicts between two engineering teams is an everyday occurrence, and any new hires above entry level are expected to know how to do it.
That some people manage to escape the requirement by lying doesn't mean lying is the intended strategy.
Most companies smaller than multinationals are still large enough to have conflicts between teams. The most common failure mode I see is people who simply opt out of those conflicts, preferring to keep their heads down and write code rather than talking about what should be done and how. I'm not familiar with how it works in older companies like IBM, but at the FAANGs of the world, participating in those discussions is what distinguishes entry-level engineers from more senior ones.
If your experience is only in companies with a handful engineers, yes, it can unfortunately be pretty hard to get a senior position at larger companies. It's not impossible, but people will have justified worries about whether you can handle the responsibilities.
Can you blame a company for prioritizing people who have worked in similar environments before?
In large corporations technical responsibility is often more distributed than in startups just due to size, so your technical skills, while important, are typically less important than they would be in small-business/startup land. What fills in the gap is communication skills and your ability to navigate corporate social networks. If you can't conflict resolve issues between engineering teams, well guess what? That engineering team you can't work with is going to hold you up and cost the company money while your superior, who really has better things to do, has to take time out of their day to address the issue you should have been able to handle.
Not saying it should be a mandatory skill, but you can't blame large corporations for filtering for it. It's a factor.
> resolving conflicts between two engineering teams is an everyday occurrence
And how difficult do you think it is to learn this skill?
If it's an everyday occurrence in huge companies, and any new hires above entry level are expected to know how to do it, it sounds like something anyone and everyone will learn. Which sounds like a real easy skill.
If it's a real easy skill, why do you need to have it already when you join? Why can't you learn it on the job, like you learn a bazillion other skills?
This kind of thing comes up a lot with technical stuff... people think that X (something you can look up on wikipedia or SO and teach yourself in an hour or two tops) is really important, therefore they can't hire anyone who hasn't learned X. But whoever they hire must be a person who's super eager to learn new stuff.
I agree it's not tremendously difficult to learn. The problem is that many people don't have the instinct to learn it. If left to their own devices, they'll just write code satisfying whatever requirements they're given, without any impulse to discuss or question what the requirements should be. I've seen many times where another team said "oh you shouldn't do X, you've gotta do Y instead", and a junior teammate of mine just accepted Y as another requirement instead of thinking about whether it was the right way to go.
So you don't want to give people the level of independent responsibility a senior title carries unless they've already learned how to avoid that.
What I've done in with interviews where I don't have the exact situational experience they're looking for, is I recall a situation that was similar, mention that it's not exactly what they asked for, and then go ahead and answer the question relative to that experience.
Many times, when they ask a specific question, they're not hard-locked on getting an exact answer that is 100% directly related to that exact situation. They're also looking to see how you might slightly redirect the question to something that is relevant to your experience, and then how you answer that.
Of course, sometimes they are hard-locked onto an exact answer to that precise situation, and if you don't have that experience, then you're done. You're not likely to know in advance if that's the case, but at least you got more interviewing experience, and you learned of another place that you do not want to work.
Ultimately an interview is about convincing the interviewer that you can solve their problems (and extracting information to determine whether you want to solve them in the first place). Assuming you have the ability to solve their problems, it's a pure exercise in communication.
Take the "Why are you looking for a job?" question. The meme response is "because I need money duh!", but if you look at in a less literal context, you probably have long term goals of some type. Talk about those and how working for the interviewer will help you achieve those. If you don't actually have long term goals and are just in it for an immediate pay-day, well that makes you
1. A person who doesn't plan long-term, and will probably bring that same lack of planning to the job.
2. A less secure investment that will leave the moment they can get a 10% raise elsewhere.
and possibly
3. Someone who doesn't really want the job and would just be miserable all the time/not be a good fit
The non-technical parts of an interview are about unifying stories and themes, and too many engineers seem to think it's "lying" to ignore individual data points. If instead of an interview you were trying to convince someone who knew nothing about the S&P500 to invest in the S&P500, you wouldn't talk about 2008 except maybe in passing as a minor risk. You'd say in the long term it's had an upward trend despite occasional drops and that trend is likely to continue due to reasons X, Y and Z. Assuming the person is looking for a long term investment then nothing about that is a lie.
If I didn’t need a paycheck I wouldn’t be at the interview, or working at all. Getting a consistent paycheck is “planning long term” for 99% of people. Hell, half my social circle probably doesn’t even know what the S&P500 is.
So your long term goal is stability, and you'll be reliable and consistent in addition to the talent they've clearly already noticed by bringing you in for an interview. From a thematic perspective you're a sturdy foundation they can build their company on.
See how much better that sounds? And there are probably better ways of putting it. Granted if an interviewer isn't looking for that mentality it could be an issue, but that's a big sign you probably wouldn't want that job anyway.
Then I'm not sure how you've stomached any interview with a private company. Companies don't give you a consistent
paycheck because you have a natural right to one. They give you one because you wouldn't produce value for them if they didn't.
The S&P500 analogy is truly apt, because as a private employee you are by definition a financial investment for the company. They pay you on the condition you make more money/produce more value for them than you take. Every day at work is you justifying the existence of your paycheck. If you want a bigger paycheck you need to prove a higher valuation to justify it (either by producing more internally or getting a higher external offer). If you become a bad investment you will be treated the same way as an under-performing stock in a portfolio. Maybe held onto in the hopes that you'll improve, maybe held onto for legal reasons (they can't legally fire you due to X law) but eventually losses are cut.
Most interviewers expect you to at least be average so they're not going to insult you by asking you to work for free (that would make you less likely to work for them), but if you walked in and could convince them that you would produce quality work 70 hours a week, for free, until the day you were too medically infirm to work, and that you weren't too good to be true, they'd have no reason not to take you up on that offer.
> Then I'm not sure how you've stomached any interview with a private company.
Here's how: companies look for a professional to perform a job. You, as a professional, offer your skillset in exchange for paycheck. It really is that simple. There's no need to justify or excuse wanting to participate in such a mutually beneficial trade. Likewise, there is no need for the company to excuse or justify their need for a new employee.
Believe it or not, there are some companies out there that just look for someone who can do the job. They don't ask you why you want a job (or, gasp, that job in particular!), because it doesn't matter (and is mostly obvious anyway).
Stop paying salaries and you'll see how many of your employees aren't in it for the paycheck. Made-up stories about long term planning don't change that they're in it for the paycheck.
Getting a paycheck, for a lot of people, is planning for the next time they don't have a paycheck. The people in the former group that you mention might be long term investment, but imo are more likely to promise their future paychecks to a car dealer
> If you don't actually have long term goals and are just in it for an immediate pay-day, well that makes you 1. A person who doesn't plan long-term, and will probably bring that same lack of planning to the job. 2. A less secure investment that will leave the moment they can get a 10% raise elsewhere. and possibly 3. Someone who doesn't really want the job and would just be miserable all the time/not be a good fit
That’s an extremely judgmental way of looking at people. Some people have long terms goals in life, they’re just not related to their jobs. They see their jobs as a means to an end, a way to make money to accomplish those other goals. And some of them are really, really, really good at what they do at work, but really they just want a paycheck in exchange for their skills.
I think you don't get the point of OP's comment. Maybe they are simply not in 95th percentile of interviewees, or maybe they are indeed a middling programmer. Their point was more to accept your skills and talents for what they are rather than getting caught up in being the best, to the detriment of yourself and those around you.
>Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers
I wanted to call out the problem with this logic because it was something I also struggled with at the very beginning of my career. There is more to the response than what I replied to, but my reply is only limited to that specific line of logic and not the reply in whole.
Indeed this is something I've had to learn to do. I'll spend a few weeks working coding problems on whiteboards, practicing answering questions, clean up my resume, try to showcase my best work on GitHub, and spend hours on each cover letter.
It helps a little but I know it will never be something I'm very good at. Sometimes things in life are hard and never get any easier.
I hope you've found success and happiness in life nowadays! Honestly interviewing is in some ways closer to dating than contests of skill. Sometimes your area of expertise is just not what the team is looking for. Sometimes that company just wouldn't be a good culture fit for you. I've had similar experiences with rejection and I've since learned that interviews are really bad at sorting out good engineers from bad engineers, and that networking goes a lot further than raw coding skill (although you still have to know some leetcode, unfortunately).
Having attended a high school with a poor math program, I had a similar struggle with math in university. My understanding would catch up maybe too late for a grade, but I kept progressing. Seven years into my career I got a job working for an extremely gifted scientist/manager who gave me several projects that required me to learn math a couple levels above my education. Because the problems were interesting and the results really mattered, I had sufficient motivation to overcome the frustration of learning things that didn't come naturally. I found a way into a company that needed good programmers that grew more mathematical over time, and I was lucky enough to have a highly motivating and supported learning environment.
I've interviewed mostly at startups. I've worked in Boulder, Menlo Park, Austin and NYC. Once I spent quite a while in NYC trying to get a job only to give up, move back to Boulder and reach out to a friend to get a job. I'm so grateful for what he did for me. If not for him I may not be in this industry anymore.
My first job was for a non-startup web development shop. That interview was entirely non technical, but I fear it was the last of a dying breed.
I did come very close to taking an offer at an insurance company once.
Hah! I often reflect on (the purely fictional Characterization of) Salieri in that movie. Especially when he talks about mediocrity - I am 100% a mediocre developer. And you know what? It’s perfectly fine. Most of the development work out there is LOB apps that don’t require programming Mozart’s.
The movie really distorted what we know about Salieri and Mozart. That doesn’t matter in that Amadeus is just a fun story and doesn’t claim to be any sort of documentary, and such a story made a good case study for your comment.
But Salieri was a very good composer and I personally like more of his work than Mozart’s (though Mozart at his best blew away most of his contemporaries, including Salieri). Mozart appears to have lived a more conventional middle class life and Salieri a more contemporaneously successful one which is kind of henopposite if he film.
"Amadeus" is famously fictitious. In real life Salieri and Mozart were friends. It's good dramatic writing but that's all.
I'm somewhat disappointed that, of all the possible stories and lessons one could tell about Mozart's life, the one that Hollywood chose to immortalize on the silver screen is simultaneously depressing, disparaging, and false.
More recently the movie "Sully" portrayed the NTSB as being some conniving government organization that is out to get airline pilots for some reason. The real world Captain Sullenberger had to release a statement to correct this false injected dramatization of the investigation. There was no reason to do this other than to spice up the story, which is unfortunate especially given most of the people depicted in the movie are alive.
Amadeus is a movie that really resonated for the reasons you mention. However, another movie that really resonated, and offers a counterpoint to you’re-either-born-with-it-or-not fatalism is Gattaca.
(Of course, one could argue that Amadeus is a “true story”, whereas Gattaca is science fiction.)
I think the OP's 'problem' is that they do not sit down and have focused practice properly. They are not good at coding interviews, they were not good at math, and freely admits they "didn't study at all". You get really good at things by practicing them a lot, especially math and leetcode. It's not a criticism, as I am terrible at coding interviews and I can never muster the discipline to sit down and study it. However, its not because I am just innately bad at it, its because I don't practice it.
Amadeus was probably more fiction than it was a true story. Mozart practiced a lot.
The one thing that I've learned by being surrounded by incredibly talented people is that you can't compare yourself to others in a singularly dimensional way. If you do, the odds are against you that you are the best in the world (1 in billions, in fact). This is the quickest path to defeat and nihilism.
What I've chosen to do instead is compare myself across all dimensions that I have interest and passion for. The beauty of this is that the combinatorics of genetics normalized for individual circumstance leads to only one meaningful comparison, yourself. Internalizing this just leads to a more fun game.
The distinction between "people who participate" and "people who practice" is basically impossible to make, even just in video games.
Even the example he gave didn't really work: He says that the top 30% of players in Overwatch can reasonable be expected to want to win. Which I agree with (it's probably an underestimation) - but does this mean that the bottom 70% only "participate"? Because that would mean to get into the 95th percentile of "people who practice", you would have to be in the 1.5th percentile of Overwatch players.
Another layer of this problem exists when you look at people who play the game regularly, but don't play ranked. On average, those players are probably worse - but should they be included in the percentile?
Ultimately the percentile thing just doesn't make much sense, but I still think the overall message of the blog post, that most people could improve at something they do at a much faster rate if they were willing/able to really focus on improving themselves and less on external factors that they can't control, is absolutely true.
I read it differently. My takeaway (and I think he says as much in the article) was, by being bad among those who practice, you can be 95%ile among those who participate.
"I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate."
In this case, "participate" should include casuals, and "practice" should not. Thats not clear in TFA.
I have personally found this to be true in most arenas, esp casual adult sports or music or hobbies like drawing. At one time some in my gym (wrongly) thought I was a great boxer, but sure enough I was abysmal in competitions but stellar compared to gym goers. Among practicing boxers I was mediocre to bad, among participating non-fighters, I appeared much better. And after a very small amount of actual participation, all those gym goers were downright intimidating to non-participants / nonfighters. This is why I tell people to try out self defense classes. A little practice elevates you above 90% of those who might do violence against you in the world.
Oh, I might have misread that - in that case, I completely agree. But I guess "practice makes (almost) perfect!" isn't that controversial of an idea either, lol.
I think this is true. I think it's because we intuitively understand "being good at something" to be relative to "the people who are the absolute best at it," not on the total set of people who do it.
I disagree when the post claims that "advice works". If someone gives you good advice and you manage to take it, you're still missing something. You're mising the intuition that led them to be able to give you that advice, which is the really valuable thing. This is why self-help is so worthless, even if it's good advice.
This entirely depends on the population you sample from and the competition level of the activity.
Looking at high school football in the United States, the top ~5% get a scholarship to play in college[1].
The author's example of Overwatch is one where very few people playing have joined paid leagues, hold regular practices, have paid coaching staff, have training facilities, etc. versus kids playing football.
I think the author's point was that you don't need to have exceptional talent to get into that 5% range. Basically that consistent hard work will get you there.
I think this actually would apply to football scholarships. Remember not all people who win a scholarship are going to become professional players. I suspect that is probably <1% for which exceptional talent is required (in addition to consistent hard work).
Of course it is easier to put in that hard work when the support structures are in place at home/school.
I think high school and college players work really, really hard. Getting ahead of 92.9% of other hard working players, followed by beating 98.5% of this already small group, is certainly a feat. Sure, it's "basically consistent hard work", but distilling years of practice, coaching, diet, personal life sacrifices, into just "so really all it takes is working hard" is an oversimplification that doesn't do justice to the actual reality involved.
It might be a useful approximation but I think some other very important factors are churn, compounding, and natural ability. By churn I mean: take Overwatch. Sure there are people who stay with the game for a long time but many many players play for some time and drop off as they move on to different games or other things in life. In a high churn environment just staying for a long time gives you advantage by practicing, almost automatically. On the other hand, it is much harder to do in things that people practice for decades, like making money or being a doctor.
By compounding I mean that having some amount of something makes it easier to obtain more of it. Money and capital in general is the prime example of it. Fame maybe a subtler example but explain a lot of boom or bust success in industries like acting or pop music. Outside of your own motivation you don’t get much compounding from Overwatch skill.
Natural ability also plays a role in certain occupations. Being “mere” 6 ft tall requires an insane amount of work and dedication to make it in NBA (go Kyle Lowry), and anything under that is basically zero chance. Eye-hand coordination and explosive velocity in baseball. Being big in American football or handsome in acting etc.
Yeah where you sample matters. In over watch you sample everyone from casuals, first timers etc to pro competitors. It if you just sample all pro competitors it will be much harder to reach 95%.
Was really pleasantly surprised to see this included a section about Overwatch. I have watched my Overwatch gameplaye to improve, but never my programming. I'll give it a try.
Here's my read of this. It's pool because I've done some league. Your typical 7 level player (in APA) typically wins most matches. In fact the ranking system is basically how much you win, even with handicaps. Here's a good list of things to think about when playing each and every shot.
The top level players keep all of that in mind automatically. It's practically part of their training data at this point. They barely lose even when a level 2 player needs to just win 2 matches and they need to win like 7 matches.
The "equalizer" system of the APA says that's roughly a fair fight. But it's not. When playing a 7, you know that not only are they going to get pretty much every easy shot, when they don't have a more than 90% chance of making a shot, they leave the 2 a bad bad bad shot, like something the 2 will have a 1% chance of making. They also put the cue ball in a special place - a place where either the 7 will get a ball in hand OR strategically a good shot on their next run.
It's all extremely interesting to watch a true 7 play anyone else. The only fair match-up against a 7 is anyone of rank 4 or above, mostly because they know the tricks. They still make rookie mistakes all the time though, hence the 4.
You're probably in the 95% if you're a 5 or above in APA. People that are six hate being a six. They get kicked off teams because of skill caps in favor of keeping a bunch of 2,3,4 players and their 7.
I was a 4, played in the bay area, south bay APA. Represent. I moved.
That list used to have like 8 places when I played. Sad. Good to see lucky shots is still around my home team from there.
Anyway, your typical 4 thinks he's a 7 inside - but doesn't say it out loud because of the inevitable laughs. They have honed every pool stance. Bridge is near perfect. A decent 4 can hit the cue ball from one side of the 8-foot table to a ball that needs exactly a 30 degree. These crazy 4s think they have a 80% chance of hitting a ball across that table into a pocket (a long shot, with or without angle). Either the cue is travelling a long way to the ball or the hit ball will. Unless the target is "in the pocket", like giving the player a huge degree of error and still make it in. No I'm talking more of a looks hard, is hard, but the 4 is so HONED on these shots they nearly always forget their defense, so silly. The major difference between a 7 and a 4 here is the 7 will try 30% making the ball in, and 70% leaving the cue in a disastrously bad place for the other player (maybe even 10/90). And the funny shit is, the 4 probably is better at hitting the ball in, even if they both put in 80% effort to do so... but that's not the game for a long shot. The game for a long shot is to leave it bad. There are lots of calculations, but that's the gist. The top players win because they get ball in hand, typically planned of course, but you won't even see the smirk on the face when it worked.
What does this have to do with 95%, I don't know it's somewhere in there.
Ok now you're pumped up, go contact APA and get on a team. Start with 8-ball. Meet your future spouse and have fun.
This might be a case of ludonarrative conflict, though I hadn't considered it outside of narrative-driven games. Blizzard wants both mainstream low-entry play, and highly-competitive e-sport bait. And in that way lies madness[0]
Man, I remember reading this back then and agreeing with everything he said. And he was largely right. SC2 never really became relevant. By the time they fixed the arcade and implemented coop, both features that were absolutely necessary to capture the casual audience, it was way too late. I love the coop mode, but it's clear that the whole game is getting little investment from Blizzard because they themselves realize it wouldn't be worth the time, money and effort.
I like that Dan acknowledges that he sometimes get ridiculed for his ideas, but continues to post whatever is on his mind. I think that's admirable, because he might be occasionally very right despite the opprobrium of the world. I sometimes feel that my generation (Millenials and younger) are super cagey and obscure their real views because of a fear of censure.
> I have about 20 other posts on stupid sounding ideas queued up in my head, but I mostly try to avoid writing things that are controversial, so I don't know that I'll write many of those up.
I don't think the fact that Dan posts the least controversial ideas detracts from his point; publishing one of them is admirable in itself. Putting yourself out there is better than not posting anything at all.
well, i don’t buy from sellers with under 98% rating from amazon or ebay. 95% is atrocious if true. for sellers with lower absolute number of feedback responses, i quality it by reading negative feedback because many times it’s the customers that are atrocious. but if you have thousands of responses and only 95%, forget it.
this means almost all amazon marketplace sellers are disqualified for me. it’s gone downhill fast over the last 5 years.
There is something so depressingly robotic about the obsession with being the best at everything all the time. Career, income, diet, exercise, lifestyle, hobbies; can't even have fun anymore without spending days holed-up researching esoteric hyper-optimizations. Some of you need to relax and stop sucking the fun out of everything.
I think it's important to be passionate about your life's work. However, maintaining "good enough" across all dimensions of particular lifestyle or role is actually incredibly challenging.
Even for a standard engineer, think how many you know can code well, be leaders, AND can write good documentation.
For most things, it's always a "pick 2 out of 3" situation.
It seems to me like there's two different things being discussed in this thread. The first one being passion about being better than everyone else as you mentioned and the second one is a desire to work on yourself on different aspects of life, a.k.a. try to be as well-rounded person as possible. When put in action these things are deceptively similar yet the underlying reasons for doing them are very different.
> And for games like Overwatch, I don't think improving is a moral imperative; there's nothing wrong with having fun at 50%-ile or 10%-ile or any rank.
I've gravitated to more random modes in multiplayer games. OW has mystery heroes where hero selection is random. Hostility is almost always met with "dude it's mystery heroes".
> relax and stop sucking the fun out of everything.
Yep. It's important to try new things and put yourself "out there". That means you're going to fumble on a regular basis.
The best way to master something, in the absence of a god-like mentor, is through endless repetitions of effort, failure, reflection and exploration. The concept is as old, tried, and true as the story of Odysseus.
There is some sort of rat race being this obsession, that kind of put me off sometimes. It's like, yes, I'm guilty of it somehow, I want to be better, to be more productive, to do less mistakes etc. I'll do my work better, I can get hired by a company that would choose me over another candidate, nice. But the cost is that it's dragging the all profession into this mindset. The 10x thingy, the hyper productivity competition.
This has also a cost for yourself, you can optimise everything, work on several IDEs, write your documentation as your code compiles, listen to a podcast as you have lunch, a book on the tube as you go back home... But boy oh that's exhausting.
Agreed. My hypothesis is that it's largely due to constrained markets in the Bay Area (housing, dating pool especially) that lead to individuals feeling impoverished despite having enough cash. Like kids in poorer areas wanting to be professional athletes and putting immense energy into street basketball games — they do get better, it's a way to distract yourself from the mess, and it may be good for you, but it doesn't necessarily fundamentally address problems without or within (though it can!).
If you look at the Bay Area before the 2000s, it wasn't like this at all. It was relaxed. For a while, it was said to be one of the best places in the world for dating. Housing was cheap. People had time. You could be a part time dishwasher and a poet in San Francisco. A lot of greatness grew out of that fecund environment — artists like Diebenkorn or luminaries like Alice Waters. Things are changing.
I find it really very frustrating that the author talks about the "95%" percentile and then does very little to actually justify why he's talking about the 95% percentile and how he's measured it. He's got some anecdata about what he views in overwatch, but you actually need some statistical techniques if you want to justify a statistical number. Of the players in the top 5% how many times was it observed that they committed obvious game losing gaffes? How did he screen the reported rankings for the arbitrary subset of players that he considered real competitors.
I don't think the person who wrote this understands statistics because they're not playing a game where randomness is a large influence in the game. If you talk to top poker players about their game they're not going to talk to you about individual mistakes, they're going to talk to you about constructing ranges. A top 5% poker player isn't just going to beat a top 10% player in a single game or single hand, they're going to have a higher expected return over a long period of time. THe point is to come up with strategies that are successful against a large range of opponents. So whilst you can look at a single event and identify whether it was effective in that particular situation, what you're optimizing for is to get the best return over time. So to take the Overwatch example - whilst you may constantly see game losing mistakes at that level, you won't see the same people making the same mistakes constantly.
So basically - for an article that constantly talks about "95 percentile" or "99 percentile" or "moving from 10%-ile to 40%-ile". I just don't even comprehend how you can title something "95%-ile isn't that good" and then not make any effort to actually evaluate how you're measuring 95%-ile. Which, given this is an article about how people generally do things very badly for stupid reasons, I think is rather ironic.
I agree that the author isn't totally rigorous in his methodology, which I understand is frustrating, but I think you're missing the bigger point he's trying to make. As I interpreted it, the article is mostly about self-improvement and the fact that even at 95%, there's still a lot of room for optimization between 95 and 99. He's saying, "hey, even this competitive Overwatch streamer makes game-losing mistakes, but it's very easy to improve on these things, if you have the right mindset". In other words, instead of focusing on your rank, you should be focusing on the low-hanging fruit, no matter where you land on the spectrum of talent.
Overwatch has a competitive ladder which ranks players on a ELO-based rating system. The percentiles were published, by the game developers, at one point and are assumed to be stable.
I play(ed) a lot of Overwatch, enough to get into the top 1% (Grandmaster). The rank he derides on, 90-95%, is Diamond, which is quite famously "ELO Hell", because that is where a lot of naturally talented players end up before deciding that blaming their teammates was the issue instead of reviewing their own gameplay. What irks me is, the top 4% of that game, Masters, I would actually consider "good". Sure there is a gap between the top 4%, top 1% and top .1%, but the mistakes you see between those groups are less about "missing fundamental gameplay mechanics" and more flawless execution, awareness and inference. (For anyone that plays the game I would consider 4250 the top .1%, which is almost entirely pros and very talented streamers).
In other words, while I agree the top 10% of the community isn't all that good, the top 5% of that very game is respectable. My beef is less with the ranking and more with his "definition" of good.
Many of the top 1% of Overwatch do regular scrims in semi-pro leagues. Comparing this to basketball, does this mean the bar for "good" is the NCAA, d-league and NBA?
There seems to be something fundamentally wrong (with the game or with the measurement or with something else) when the top 10% is considered “not good” and the top 5% is “respectable”. I can’t really think of anything where this is true. Games, job performance, educational testing, income & wealth... Top 10% is kind of by definition great!
The game's distribution is a normal distribution - and I think the problem may be with perception. What is the definition of "good"? Personally, I wouldn't claim to be very good at the game despite my past ranking - there are a number of players who would wipe the floor with me where it feels like I'm giving my all and they are barely even trying. At the same time I could probably do the same thing if I dropped down on the ranking. If you watch streams, you commonly hear top players complaining about having to play with "braindead masters players" who are the top 5%. All of this shapes the perception of what good means.
One other area where this is true and might be similarly easy to analyze is competitive running.
A local road race 5k might have a thousand entrants. You might feel bad about occasionally walking and finishing in 500th place, but that's just in the subset of the population that participates in those events. The biggest race in our 1,000,000-person metro area draws about 20,000 entrants (many from outside that area), so the 50th percentile in the race is 99th percentile in the population.
Similarly, there's a big difference between people who participate and people who practice. Every high-school cross-country team will likely have several kids who can run under 18 minutes in the 5k, just because they practice 5 or 6 days a week. Elites peak at about age 28-30 in the 5k, so these 16-year-olds aren't as fast as they could be, but they will likely never run faster than they do in high school because they won't practice as effectively as adults as they do when coached on a school team.
It is true that regular practice can easily put you on very high percentile among participants. So it is easy to be on 95% in one or two things.
On the other hand, for the same reason, it is very hard to be on 95% in multiple things at the same time, because you won't have time to regularly practice on multiple things.
For the same reason, I would also argue that for regular people it is also hard to be on 95% in just one thing outside of work, because people need to take care of their family.
For articles like this, that are just simple text with nothing fancier than some headers and some lists, would something simple like this be a good way to deal with this?
body {
font-size: calc(0.5rem + 2vw);
}
That sets a font size that gets bigger as you make the viewport wider, so that you keep about the same number of characters per line regardless of viewport size.
I'm just a dabbler with CSS. Is there a better way to say "the font size that gives me about N characters per line of random text"?
(It's 0.5rem + 2vw instead of just some multiple of vw so that if you make the viewport narrow the font doesn't get too small. Better would be something like max(0.5rem, 2.5vw) but max() is experimental and not supported well outside of chrome. I found the calc(fixed + variable) hack on Stack Overflow).
Viewport size isn't a great clue to the ideal font size: someone can have a large monitor that they're close to, or a small one that they're father from.
This might be one of those things that only seems true if you live in a world where the bottom quartile or half of people has been chopped off. There are a lot of people out there who are very limited in what they are able to do.
It's maybe not very hard for you or I or Dan Luu to work at something and practice it and reach a level where we are competent or better. But I've seen so many cases of normal people that work incredibly hard at things, and they just never get to that mediocre level. It's frustrating if you are trying to teach or coach or mentor them up, because you can see where things would have to click for them to get over the hump, but there's no keyhole for that key.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadMy observation is it is critical to somehow get a feeling what it is/means to be good at the game. This means identifying where is the focus of a good player.
Having been playing competitively I have noticed ALMOST ALL of people being intent on playing the game well are completely misplacing there focus, effectively wasting their time on stuff that does not matter.
They are stuck being mediocre to good (but not best) players because they dug themselves in their own holes:
- polishing endlessly skills that give diminishing results but are comfortable to the player but avoiding tackling problems that the player is not comfortable with
- repeating the same routine all the time instead of constantly switching up stuff they are training. If you are training well after some time you have trained a skill enough that you should switch to another that now gives best ROI.
- repeating and acting on falsehoods/myths about the game
- complaining about the unfairness of the game which means they would like to play some different game which is governed by their idealized rules instead of trying to understand the real rules of the real game
- not being ruthlessly critical about their abilities which is necessary step to identifying what to work on to progress,
- not being able to spend a moment to consciously reflect on ones progress to identify why it is they are stuck (instead of blaming everybody)
- being focused on winning instead of getting better. Many players play to get a short term kick out of winning the game instead of playing to get some kind of knowledge/skill that will help them get better. Think Starcraft players who find that they can get consistent wins cannon rushing their enemies but are not willing to fail to try other strategies.
etc.
An example would be rookie players on iRacing (I'm nowhere near the top). iRacing requires you to get minimum amount of games but also, more importantly, minimum safety rating to be able to progress from rookies.
Players who are stuck but would want to leave rookies in iRacing are constantly complaining at other players constantly hitting them, effectively ruining their safety raiting.
While it is true that the state of the game in rookies is such that you get hit frequently, there are people who are quickly sailing through rookies. To do that you just need to notice that the critical skill is not hitting other players and avoid getting hit. Instead of focusing on getting to best place, focus on not hitting anything. Yet, so many people do not understand this and are destined to stay in rookies for a long time.
Also: they fall into a pit where their current behaviour works at the skill level that they are at, but is detrimental when that behaviour is performed at a higher skill level.
A good player will be able to adapt their gameplay because they can more or less predict what will happen when they alter the gameplay and/or they can evaluate how their change influenced the result.
A stuck player who skipped basic training may be able to imitate a complicated strategy to some extent but will fail miserably when they change anything and won't be able to evaluate results. They are effectively trained to do one thing from a subset of skills of a pro player and not being able to transition through a valley of failure from their local maximum.
Smash bro’s for instance, has a ton of players who know about advanced techniques, and talk about some of them as easy because they are easy for top players, but cannot actually execute on any of them.
And, like you say, mistake the fact that some of the advanced techniques are done by professional players to mean that utilizing these techniques are an important part of getting there. They’re generally not.
For example, a person that habitually blames everybody for their failings may undertake a project to write a blog post every day but may be incapable of hearing advice, critical opinions or diagnosing reasons behind non-existing or stagnating readership statistics. They might blame everybody of being stupid or have no taste or not knowing anything about writing.
Yes, there can be emotional ego barriers, which hinder seeing. "It's amazing what you can see by looking."
But I think there's also a genuine non-emotional, cognitive problem with seeing, for a non-expert. An expert coach would help... but how to evaluate expertise? Maybe credentials are enough, for a beginner.
In difficult projects, it's necessary to improve prerequisite skills before "winning" (completing the project).
But with sufficient layers of prerequisites, the goal becomes distant, the motivation decoupled, until it falls below a threshold.
In addition, for a non-expert, it's difficult to be sure that a prerequisite is really needed, or will be enough, or what the true ROI really is. We don't need precise certainty, but we do need to know well enough.
Do you have any suggestions for getting around this?
I play hearthstone about, I dunno, an hour a day or so, while I’m on the train. I’ve never made it to the legend rank, but I make it to rank 5 easily most months, which puts me in the top 6%. A lot of months I’ll end up rank 2 or 1, which puts me in the top 3 or even 1%
I don’t think I’m particularly good at the game, I just play good decks and pay attention to the meta game so I know what to expect from the other decks. I don’t tend to plan multiple turns ahead, I don’t try and figure out what’s in my opponents hand, sometimes I’m barely paying attention to the game at all, and sometimes make just obvious mistakes like missing lethal.
But none of that really matters up until you get to rank 2 or 1, where you start playing against people that basically don’t make mistakes.
In fact one of the hardest transitions for me to make in the game was understanding that when my opponent appeared to be doing something stupid in a higher ranked game, they were probably not, and that I need to spend time thinking about what it meant, rather than just assuming they were bad at the game. That doesn’t happen until you’re already in the top 5%, though.
the actions of players have very little impact in hearthstone. in a typical game, the player is presented with somewhere about 2-7 choices every round (increasing in the late-game as the board becomes more full) and most of them are obviously good or obviously bad.
my point is that while being top 95% in most tasks is a matter of practice/repetition in new situations to build skill, achieving legend in hearthstone- while it might require you to build some minimal amount of skill in guessing what cards your opponent has, or estimate the odds of drawing a given card in the next few rounds the difficulty of the game will quickly drop off due to it's low "skill ceiling"- is mostly about repetition for the sake of reaching 15,10,and 5 rank level checkmarks.
hearthstone is a card game played by blizzard, the objective of the game being to make as much money as possible over the course of it's lifespan. the current meta in collectable card games is to make players believe that their actions have consequences over a randomized card game, and that their invaluable collections will continue to exist when blizz unplugs the servers after it stops making money for them.
2) the commenter stated his time budget: an hour a day. This doesn't seem excessive to make the argument "rank is merely a function of game time"
3) 2-7 choices is an under estimate. Past MtG pros have observed that attack ordering has more tree breadth than MtG attack phases. Saying the choices are straight forward is misguided when top players will consistently make the better choice that weaker top players miss
4) a high amount of randomness doesn't necessarily negate skill. See Poker
Essentially, making your own luck. Tree depth in card games is about the same as the deepest card combo times hand size, and for every card you can also hold it or get it burned.
I think because of the matching system it seems that way because you quickly get to people at your own skill level so randomness and luck feel like they have more of an impact. You pretty much by definition get to players you’ll lose against half the time pretty quickly. From then you have to figure out how to get just a 1 or 2 percent edge and play a lot of games.
I lose half my games at rank 3, but put me up against rank 20 or even rank 10 players and I’ll win 80 or 90% of my games. I’ve done the climb from the bottom a few times and it’s basically trivial. Even against people playing well tuned net decks. So yeah, skill matters.
Even if you win exactly 50% of your games, you will still eventually rank up. This is because you gain an extra star when you rank up. For example, let's say you start at rank 3, 4 stars.
* Win: Rank 2, 1 star
* Lose: Rank 2, 0 stars
* Lose: Rank 3, 4 stars
So even though you went 1-2, your rank didn't change.
ranks 3 5 stars and rank 2 0 stars are the same exact rank from different directions.
rank 3, 4 stars + 2 = rank 2, 1 star rank 2, 1 star - 2 = rank 3, 4 stars
You don't get free stars.
You do, however, get free stars on win streaks below rank 5.
The vast majority of people are in the "top 95%" and it's nothing to brag about.
What do other people who rely on feed readers do in these scenarios? Is there a good service (which will not disappear) which will either convert the thing into rss or alert you when there's a new post?
edit: It has an RSS feed, just no link to it in the index.html. https://danluu.com/atom.xml
Is that excluded from the line of thought in the blog post because it's among "people who regularly practice?"
Or is it that effort vs ability thing? Not impressive because you were born smart?
In a totally "no effort" arena, 95th percentile height for a 19 year old US male is 6 feet, 2 inches. Does that feel unusual/impressive or "not that good?" I imagine it brings plenty of life benefits.
Everyone in school is practicing at least a bit on reading comprehension, and the SAT is across lots of schools, if you are the in 95%-ile of millions of people it might be more impressive than being in the 95%-ile of tens of thousands of people.
Seems recognized by everyone playing though. We focus little on who has talent. It's more about cool multi-player strategy, and funny stuff. Terrible players that "luck or effort" into something magnificent is way more exciting and celebrated than a known good player scoring/defending. "Goalie didn't show up and here's a dumbass in pads" are the best games, even if it's your goalkeeper and you get destroyed on the scoreboard.
For me, I didn't have the desire or resources to do that. I got my 1400 and was able to choose from any of a dozen schools. That meant that being a white shoe attorney or McKinsey consultant was out of my reach. Life is good.
On another note, my son is passionate about little league. He's good, has fun, has a competitive spirit, has made great friends, etc. It's a great thing. He's probably in the 75th percentile of players at his age and region. So unfortunately, major league baseball dreams are unlikely to be fulfilled.
This article is similar. Being in the 95th percentile of people playing some video game is interesting, but isn't something that I would have any desire to do, and probably is a fools errand unless you're looking to compete at a professional level. I'd like to be in the 99th of people having fun playing a game -- the time and mechanics of getting to be an elite player is probably in opposition to that goal!
My understanding is that there is/was an admissions quota at the high school level. I don't recall the gory details, but as a cousin and friend I was sympathetic, but as someone not in the middle of it I was puzzled and kind of horrified at the brutal competition that left a truly brilliant person feeling like some sort of rube.
Everything worked out in the end.
1400 is still way above average, at least 95th percentile.
You can do whatever you want in both cases.
I'm not convinced. Many studies illustrate the correlation to success. We are still animals and not-merit factors still matter. Good looks, height, gender, race, symmetry, smell, whatever, etc, are a real "thing". You can overcome it all with mitigation, but it isn't imaginary. That stuff drives real outcomes.
Also, I have tall children and they are regularly treated as older than they are, setting expectations higher for them in settings outside of school where they aren't grouped by age.
Top 1/20 Can be impressive or unimpressive depending on context.
Top 1/20 is impressive if everyone in the group is competitive. It’s not impressive if it’s 1/20 out of a bunch of randoms who’ve never tried to be good at it.
So again, its all about the framing. If you just frame ir as taller is better, then ya, 95%-ile starts being impressive, but not as much as 96%-ile.
SAT performance is (largely) determined by intelligence, which is (largely) innate. If you're relatively smart and don't practice at all, you will score higher on the SAT than your less smart friend no matter how long they practice.
This applies even more so to height.
With many learned skills, though, if you invest time and are thoughtful about how you approach your learning, you can get to 95th percentile fairly easily, despite that seeming quite impressive. Many participants don't put the time/effort in, and many of those who do don't do it in a remotely efficient way. If you do both, you are virtually guaranteed to get to a high percentile across a wide range of skills, mostly independent of your innate ability.
I had a 1500/1600 SAT and I was basically DOA.
I got into a top ten college with a 1470. it was fairly lopsided though (800 critical reading, 670 math; apparently the scores are reported differently now?), I dunno whether that helps or hurts.
ultimately this stuff doesn't matter as much as you might think. the state school I went to turned out to have good relationships with lots of software companies in the area. I ended up getting an internship that lead to a pretty good gig straight after graduation.
In college I really struggled with math. Which was a challenge because computer science has you take a lot of math classes. In my calculus class I studied so hard for the final. Did every problem in the book. And I still just got a B in the class.
At the same time my programming classes were really easy. I didn't study at all and the homework was trivial.
Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy.
The movie Amadeus really nails this idea. Salieri has one goal in life: to create beautiful music. And he achieved some success, but then he meets Mozart - " a boastful, lustful, smutty infantile boy..." - yet he creates the most amazing music he's ever heard.
> All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing... and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?
I've experienced that frustration many times in my life.
Salieri is a tragic figure though - his response is one of contempt and hostility to the injustice of his life. But he's missed the point. All success and talent in life is a gift.
Maybe your frustrations in life are an opportunity to teach you humility and to be gracious to others.
I came to understand we all stand on a spectrum. For everybody there's someone better, and someone not as good. So what? Do what you can with the skills you have, and you're doing more than 99% of the people who squander what they have.
Sure Mozart was better that Salieri, but there is just one Mozart.
Companies are always talking about how they just take the best, but in the end they have to settle with what the market gives them.
Personally, when someone says Genius, in some contexts, I take it like an excuse to justify the existence of people that excel doing something, just because they are born-geniuses.
The fact that some of these geniuses dedicated their entire lives to improve themselves (being it by practicing on an instrument or doing math, for example) is left aside, and the justification for doing practically nothing to achieve excellence is because "that guy/girl is a genius and I am not".
PS: In the office that justification comes as being an expert: when someone doesn't know how about something, it's because some other person is an expert. When the boss asks the lab manager "how does that WiFi module work?" the answer is "let's call X because she is an expert", when the manager should already know how that works.
I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do, but I could be struggling with something for hours that he could break down in a way that just never occurred to me. So yes, he put in the time, but it was his thought process that made him great, and I'm not convinced that's something that can be taught to great effect.
The thing I've noticed about genius is that it's just part of who you are. It flows out of your pores. You work the kinds of hours and achieve the kinds of things you do, simply because you are driven to do so, and could not be otherwise.
If you're not a genius, then no amount of practice or experience will make you one. You can get better, sure. But to be a genius, you have to start out life as a genius.
Of course, there are many types of genius, in many different areas. But all the geniuses I know fit the above description.
OTOH, our culture does throw around the term much too easily. Many people seem to mistake lots of practice or experience for genius, which is understandable because many geniuses do seem to have a lot of practice and experience. But in a true genius, the cause and effect is reversed for practice and experience versus the results achieved.
I am most definitely not a genius. But I do have a fair amount of practice and experience in certain fields.
Finding stars and paying them a lot is pretty easy. It also isn't necessarily the path to great success, especially if you can't build a coherent rest of the team. Just ask Allen Iverson.
(the name is actually on the tip of my tongue, surprisingly)
- whether or not the hiring manager knows the answer:
"You're not him"
They are basically saying they want the best performing person in the world but don't want to give them the supporting team that actually makes their exceptional performance possible.
Sometimes it's not about how well you do at the current point in time, but how you navigate changes in the external environment. Skills and people are always in flux.
This is a gross falsehood spread after Salieri's death.
Leaving music and working in some other craft, say, a carpenter or a doctor?
This means a lot of sunk cost and further sunk cost of retraining.
Ignoring the injustice? Then it will be perpetuated.
Or attempting to correct it, then hope you're able to? Hope runs out. (Actually movie Salieri did some messing with Mozart to correct the injustice in a destructive way. It didn't make him happy.)
You mentioned faring well in programming classes. Interview performance aside, do you feel that you're a good and perhaps exceptional programmer?
Once I got my hands off the keyboard, it became pretty clear that the best person for the job was very situational, and that my opinion was often wrong. The technically smartest and most capable person was often the worst choice for many tasks.
One of my best DBA team members was a guy with a history degree with almost no understanding or interest in basic crap like CAP theory, normalization tradeoffs, etc. He was honestly terrible at design.
He was consistently, though, a 10x type resource for production performance problems. But thought of himself as barely qualified for the team because he was a 0.6x resource for many other tasks. I'd hire him every time.
Interviews ask abstract and theoretical computer sciency type questions and in real life I would usually google my way to a solution on those types of questions, so I do very poorly on the spot. (forget everything or say something dumb)
But in practice I can usually deliver quicker than my teammates on real world problems.
Fwiw some of us ask abstract questions with the sole purpose of breaking you out of coding mode and into thinking mode. I wanna see how you break down a problem you haven’t encountered before. Not how you google a solution to a known problem. If you’re talkinng to me, I already trust that you can write code and google solutions.
One of my fav questions to ask is “Design a system to protect a skyscraper from flooding in a scifi Manhattan of 2140”
FWIW I've also seen the opposite. A developer who was a very good thinker and talker, but got stuck for two weeks on an issue with a Google API. It took me five minutes to figure out what was wrong. Not cause I'm smart, actually the opposite, I have to break problems down to things I can understand and it's that process which lends itself well to fixing bugs.
But I'm sure he would've run circles around me when designing an API or architecting out multiple systems.
I was surprised that the "star" experience wasn't always as personally ego-rewarding. Occasionally surprising people was often superior to the expectation that you always would.
That said, I hold a general belief that attainment in something is not dependent on your "talent" for that thing. Your "talent" determines your ability to progress in that thing without direction and/or poorly specified direction. Genius allows you to push past everything that has come before and effectively discover new things. Yes I'm sure there are edge-cases it's a loose mental model or rule of thumb.
So I'm sorry that despite your admirable persistence to work through all those problems you didn't achieve the grade you wanted, but if you haven't given up on calculus I would encourage you to seek alternative teachers / materials that will work for you, as it is fundamentally a thing that can be learned just like anything else. And not in a cruel way, but undergrad level calculus should be achievable for anyone given enough effort and good teaching (assuming you actually want to invest this energy and effort in the subject).
Work smart and hard, but working hard in absence can at best be inefficient grind and at worst can crystallise bad habits...
I also had to take a lot of math classes, on my way to a BSCS.
The first time I took Calc I, I got a D. The teacher was the Director of the Math department, and by all reports, he was actually a good teacher. Probably a good teacher for grad students, but his style didn't work well for me.
The second time I took Calc I, I had a grad student as a teacher, and his style and method worked much better, because I really understood the material, and as a result I got an A.
Same thing happened for me with Calc III. Ironically, I got the same grad student as my Calc III teacher as I had for Calc I. And with the same result -- his style and method really worked well for me.
Now, if you really want to have your butt kicked across the room, torn to shreds, and then handed back to you, try Engineering Math, a.k.a, Differential Equations. I only barely escaped that one with my life -- and a very hard fought for C.
This means you aren't high in the 'programming interview' skill set. While related, I consider it distinctly different than the 'programming' skill set. I think it shares more in common with other interview skill sets than it does with programming. I suggest not using this to judge your proficiency in programming, and if you want to improve this (say you plan to be job hunting soon), I would focus more on interviewing skills than programming skills. Especially if you aren't landing on-site interviews.
For starters, improving your resume to have a good UX and working on how to answer interview questions, especially the non-technical ones, would likely help. Things like how to 'correctly' answer "What is your biggest weakness?" or "Why are you looking for a job?". A lot of it comes down to learning how to lie without appearing dishonest (personally I hate how much honesty during interviews is treated as a bad thing, but I have to play the game by the rules that already exist).
If it comes to why you are leaving your current job, depending upon why you actually left you could be able to give honest answers, half truths than hide the major reason, and twist the facts enough that it would be best described as a lie.
When asked what you are looking for in a new company, rarely will it be perceived positive to give any importance to money at that stage of the interview. Benefits can be mentioned, but you will have a better interview if you can give an answer closer aligned to the business you are interviewing at.
A major one is when you are asked what your current salary is, lying can be more beneficial than either not answering or telling the truth. You can stretch the truth a bit, say "A little under $130,000" when it is actually "101,000 plus a bonus that the company didn't give out last year". Is 101 a little under 130? It is subjective, and in some cases that wouldn't be a lie, but in this case it definitely stretches the truth.
Now, I'm not advocating lying about stuff on the technical side. Well, not by much. If someone in HR is asking if you have 15+ years experience in Rust (to those not familiar, it has only been about about 10 years), responding with an affirmative style answer is probably reasonable if you are experienced in the language. Don't do something like saying "Yes". More "I am very experienced in Rust and have had 3 large scale Rust products deployed with numerous smaller ones." This ends up being much better than trying to correct the HR rep that the language hasn't been out long enough for someone to have 15 years experience and better than answering no.
Examples of what I mean by deflection:
"My greatest weakness is for Gouda cheese."
"If I knew what my weaknesses were I would already have worked to resolve them."
"Triceps."
"I don't have any weakness, what are you talking about?"
"My biggest weakness is probably job interviews, compared to anything else I do my interviewing skills are really bad..."
More realistically: honestly explaining that some of my greatest strengths are weaknesses in other settings.
For example, talking about being somewhat OCD about things can be considered a weakness. But for some jobs in this field, a little OCD is not necessarily a bad thing.
If they asked what is one of your weaknesses and how are you working to overcome it, then that is a perfectly legitimate answer. Perhaps too many interviewers ask for the biggest weakness when they actually mean to ask a question more like that.
Of course everyone who asks this question is looking for how you reply, and don't necessarily believe you'll tell them the absolute truth.
For example: many companies insist on asking how you did "x" (for example solves a conflict of idea of solution) in situation "y" (for example between two teams in same department) and you are obliged to answer something, even if you never been in that situation (a certain multinational company for example asked me that question three times across two different attempts to join them, both of times I failed because this question, I never worked in a company with many departments).
After a lot of Glassdoor reading found out people that got the jobs I wanted, all lied outright, not just embellishments, but outright inventing things that sound plausible.
That some people manage to escape the requirement by lying doesn't mean lying is the intended strategy.
If your experience is only in companies with a handful engineers, yes, it can unfortunately be pretty hard to get a senior position at larger companies. It's not impossible, but people will have justified worries about whether you can handle the responsibilities.
In large corporations technical responsibility is often more distributed than in startups just due to size, so your technical skills, while important, are typically less important than they would be in small-business/startup land. What fills in the gap is communication skills and your ability to navigate corporate social networks. If you can't conflict resolve issues between engineering teams, well guess what? That engineering team you can't work with is going to hold you up and cost the company money while your superior, who really has better things to do, has to take time out of their day to address the issue you should have been able to handle.
Not saying it should be a mandatory skill, but you can't blame large corporations for filtering for it. It's a factor.
Now, working in a large multinational company would help ensure you have that kind of experience, but that's not your only option.
And how difficult do you think it is to learn this skill?
If it's an everyday occurrence in huge companies, and any new hires above entry level are expected to know how to do it, it sounds like something anyone and everyone will learn. Which sounds like a real easy skill.
If it's a real easy skill, why do you need to have it already when you join? Why can't you learn it on the job, like you learn a bazillion other skills?
This kind of thing comes up a lot with technical stuff... people think that X (something you can look up on wikipedia or SO and teach yourself in an hour or two tops) is really important, therefore they can't hire anyone who hasn't learned X. But whoever they hire must be a person who's super eager to learn new stuff.
So you don't want to give people the level of independent responsibility a senior title carries unless they've already learned how to avoid that.
Many times, when they ask a specific question, they're not hard-locked on getting an exact answer that is 100% directly related to that exact situation. They're also looking to see how you might slightly redirect the question to something that is relevant to your experience, and then how you answer that.
Of course, sometimes they are hard-locked onto an exact answer to that precise situation, and if you don't have that experience, then you're done. You're not likely to know in advance if that's the case, but at least you got more interviewing experience, and you learned of another place that you do not want to work.
Ultimately an interview is about convincing the interviewer that you can solve their problems (and extracting information to determine whether you want to solve them in the first place). Assuming you have the ability to solve their problems, it's a pure exercise in communication.
Take the "Why are you looking for a job?" question. The meme response is "because I need money duh!", but if you look at in a less literal context, you probably have long term goals of some type. Talk about those and how working for the interviewer will help you achieve those. If you don't actually have long term goals and are just in it for an immediate pay-day, well that makes you 1. A person who doesn't plan long-term, and will probably bring that same lack of planning to the job. 2. A less secure investment that will leave the moment they can get a 10% raise elsewhere. and possibly 3. Someone who doesn't really want the job and would just be miserable all the time/not be a good fit
The non-technical parts of an interview are about unifying stories and themes, and too many engineers seem to think it's "lying" to ignore individual data points. If instead of an interview you were trying to convince someone who knew nothing about the S&P500 to invest in the S&P500, you wouldn't talk about 2008 except maybe in passing as a minor risk. You'd say in the long term it's had an upward trend despite occasional drops and that trend is likely to continue due to reasons X, Y and Z. Assuming the person is looking for a long term investment then nothing about that is a lie.
See how much better that sounds? And there are probably better ways of putting it. Granted if an interviewer isn't looking for that mentality it could be an issue, but that's a big sign you probably wouldn't want that job anyway.
The S&P500 analogy is truly apt, because as a private employee you are by definition a financial investment for the company. They pay you on the condition you make more money/produce more value for them than you take. Every day at work is you justifying the existence of your paycheck. If you want a bigger paycheck you need to prove a higher valuation to justify it (either by producing more internally or getting a higher external offer). If you become a bad investment you will be treated the same way as an under-performing stock in a portfolio. Maybe held onto in the hopes that you'll improve, maybe held onto for legal reasons (they can't legally fire you due to X law) but eventually losses are cut.
Most interviewers expect you to at least be average so they're not going to insult you by asking you to work for free (that would make you less likely to work for them), but if you walked in and could convince them that you would produce quality work 70 hours a week, for free, until the day you were too medically infirm to work, and that you weren't too good to be true, they'd have no reason not to take you up on that offer.
Here's how: companies look for a professional to perform a job. You, as a professional, offer your skillset in exchange for paycheck. It really is that simple. There's no need to justify or excuse wanting to participate in such a mutually beneficial trade. Likewise, there is no need for the company to excuse or justify their need for a new employee.
Believe it or not, there are some companies out there that just look for someone who can do the job. They don't ask you why you want a job (or, gasp, that job in particular!), because it doesn't matter (and is mostly obvious anyway).
Stop paying salaries and you'll see how many of your employees aren't in it for the paycheck. Made-up stories about long term planning don't change that they're in it for the paycheck.
That’s an extremely judgmental way of looking at people. Some people have long terms goals in life, they’re just not related to their jobs. They see their jobs as a means to an end, a way to make money to accomplish those other goals. And some of them are really, really, really good at what they do at work, but really they just want a paycheck in exchange for their skills.
I wanted to call out the problem with this logic because it was something I also struggled with at the very beginning of my career. There is more to the response than what I replied to, but my reply is only limited to that specific line of logic and not the reply in whole.
It helps a little but I know it will never be something I'm very good at. Sometimes things in life are hard and never get any easier.
My first job was for a non-startup web development shop. That interview was entirely non technical, but I fear it was the last of a dying breed.
I did come very close to taking an offer at an insurance company once.
The movie really distorted what we know about Salieri and Mozart. That doesn’t matter in that Amadeus is just a fun story and doesn’t claim to be any sort of documentary, and such a story made a good case study for your comment.
But Salieri was a very good composer and I personally like more of his work than Mozart’s (though Mozart at his best blew away most of his contemporaries, including Salieri). Mozart appears to have lived a more conventional middle class life and Salieri a more contemporaneously successful one which is kind of henopposite if he film.
I'm somewhat disappointed that, of all the possible stories and lessons one could tell about Mozart's life, the one that Hollywood chose to immortalize on the silver screen is simultaneously depressing, disparaging, and false.
(Of course, one could argue that Amadeus is a “true story”, whereas Gattaca is science fiction.)
Amadeus was probably more fiction than it was a true story. Mozart practiced a lot.
What I've chosen to do instead is compare myself across all dimensions that I have interest and passion for. The beauty of this is that the combinatorics of genetics normalized for individual circumstance leads to only one meaningful comparison, yourself. Internalizing this just leads to a more fun game.
Even the example he gave didn't really work: He says that the top 30% of players in Overwatch can reasonable be expected to want to win. Which I agree with (it's probably an underestimation) - but does this mean that the bottom 70% only "participate"? Because that would mean to get into the 95th percentile of "people who practice", you would have to be in the 1.5th percentile of Overwatch players.
Another layer of this problem exists when you look at people who play the game regularly, but don't play ranked. On average, those players are probably worse - but should they be included in the percentile?
Ultimately the percentile thing just doesn't make much sense, but I still think the overall message of the blog post, that most people could improve at something they do at a much faster rate if they were willing/able to really focus on improving themselves and less on external factors that they can't control, is absolutely true.
"I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate." In this case, "participate" should include casuals, and "practice" should not. Thats not clear in TFA.
I have personally found this to be true in most arenas, esp casual adult sports or music or hobbies like drawing. At one time some in my gym (wrongly) thought I was a great boxer, but sure enough I was abysmal in competitions but stellar compared to gym goers. Among practicing boxers I was mediocre to bad, among participating non-fighters, I appeared much better. And after a very small amount of actual participation, all those gym goers were downright intimidating to non-participants / nonfighters. This is why I tell people to try out self defense classes. A little practice elevates you above 90% of those who might do violence against you in the world.
I disagree when the post claims that "advice works". If someone gives you good advice and you manage to take it, you're still missing something. You're mising the intuition that led them to be able to give you that advice, which is the really valuable thing. This is why self-help is so worthless, even if it's good advice.
Looking at high school football in the United States, the top ~5% get a scholarship to play in college[1].
The author's example of Overwatch is one where very few people playing have joined paid leagues, hold regular practices, have paid coaching staff, have training facilities, etc. versus kids playing football.
1: http://scholarshipstats.com/football.html
I think this actually would apply to football scholarships. Remember not all people who win a scholarship are going to become professional players. I suspect that is probably <1% for which exceptional talent is required (in addition to consistent hard work).
Of course it is easier to put in that hard work when the support structures are in place at home/school.
I think high school and college players work really, really hard. Getting ahead of 92.9% of other hard working players, followed by beating 98.5% of this already small group, is certainly a feat. Sure, it's "basically consistent hard work", but distilling years of practice, coaching, diet, personal life sacrifices, into just "so really all it takes is working hard" is an oversimplification that doesn't do justice to the actual reality involved.
By compounding I mean that having some amount of something makes it easier to obtain more of it. Money and capital in general is the prime example of it. Fame maybe a subtler example but explain a lot of boom or bust success in industries like acting or pop music. Outside of your own motivation you don’t get much compounding from Overwatch skill.
Natural ability also plays a role in certain occupations. Being “mere” 6 ft tall requires an insane amount of work and dedication to make it in NBA (go Kyle Lowry), and anything under that is basically zero chance. Eye-hand coordination and explosive velocity in baseball. Being big in American football or handsome in acting etc.
https://supremebilliards.com/51-pool-tips-every-player-must-...
The top level players keep all of that in mind automatically. It's practically part of their training data at this point. They barely lose even when a level 2 player needs to just win 2 matches and they need to win like 7 matches.
The "equalizer" system of the APA says that's roughly a fair fight. But it's not. When playing a 7, you know that not only are they going to get pretty much every easy shot, when they don't have a more than 90% chance of making a shot, they leave the 2 a bad bad bad shot, like something the 2 will have a 1% chance of making. They also put the cue ball in a special place - a place where either the 7 will get a ball in hand OR strategically a good shot on their next run.
It's all extremely interesting to watch a true 7 play anyone else. The only fair match-up against a 7 is anyone of rank 4 or above, mostly because they know the tricks. They still make rookie mistakes all the time though, hence the 4.
You're probably in the 95% if you're a 5 or above in APA. People that are six hate being a six. They get kicked off teams because of skill caps in favor of keeping a bunch of 2,3,4 players and their 7.
I was a 4, played in the bay area, south bay APA. Represent. I moved.
http://www.southbayapa.com/bapl_hostlocations.htm
That list used to have like 8 places when I played. Sad. Good to see lucky shots is still around my home team from there.
Anyway, your typical 4 thinks he's a 7 inside - but doesn't say it out loud because of the inevitable laughs. They have honed every pool stance. Bridge is near perfect. A decent 4 can hit the cue ball from one side of the 8-foot table to a ball that needs exactly a 30 degree. These crazy 4s think they have a 80% chance of hitting a ball across that table into a pocket (a long shot, with or without angle). Either the cue is travelling a long way to the ball or the hit ball will. Unless the target is "in the pocket", like giving the player a huge degree of error and still make it in. No I'm talking more of a looks hard, is hard, but the 4 is so HONED on these shots they nearly always forget their defense, so silly. The major difference between a 7 and a 4 here is the 7 will try 30% making the ball in, and 70% leaving the cue in a disastrously bad place for the other player (maybe even 10/90). And the funny shit is, the 4 probably is better at hitting the ball in, even if they both put in 80% effort to do so... but that's not the game for a long shot. The game for a long shot is to leave it bad. There are lots of calculations, but that's the gist. The top players win because they get ball in hand, typically planned of course, but you won't even see the smirk on the face when it worked.
What does this have to do with 95%, I don't know it's somewhere in there.
Ok now you're pumped up, go contact APA and get on a team. Start with 8-ball. Meet your future spouse and have fun.
This might be a case of ludonarrative conflict, though I hadn't considered it outside of narrative-driven games. Blizzard wants both mainstream low-entry play, and highly-competitive e-sport bait. And in that way lies madness[0]
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/11m21k/starcraft...
> I have about 20 other posts on stupid sounding ideas queued up in my head, but I mostly try to avoid writing things that are controversial, so I don't know that I'll write many of those up.
this means almost all amazon marketplace sellers are disqualified for me. it’s gone downhill fast over the last 5 years.
Even for a standard engineer, think how many you know can code well, be leaders, AND can write good documentation.
For most things, it's always a "pick 2 out of 3" situation.
I fact, I don't think the two have anything in common?
> And for games like Overwatch, I don't think improving is a moral imperative; there's nothing wrong with having fun at 50%-ile or 10%-ile or any rank.
Yep. It's important to try new things and put yourself "out there". That means you're going to fumble on a regular basis.
The best way to master something, in the absence of a god-like mentor, is through endless repetitions of effort, failure, reflection and exploration. The concept is as old, tried, and true as the story of Odysseus.
Only problem is that we do not have Bill Murray's 10,000 years to endlessly master everything in Punxsutawney.
We have to pick our fights carefully.
If you look at the Bay Area before the 2000s, it wasn't like this at all. It was relaxed. For a while, it was said to be one of the best places in the world for dating. Housing was cheap. People had time. You could be a part time dishwasher and a poet in San Francisco. A lot of greatness grew out of that fecund environment — artists like Diebenkorn or luminaries like Alice Waters. Things are changing.
I don't think the person who wrote this understands statistics because they're not playing a game where randomness is a large influence in the game. If you talk to top poker players about their game they're not going to talk to you about individual mistakes, they're going to talk to you about constructing ranges. A top 5% poker player isn't just going to beat a top 10% player in a single game or single hand, they're going to have a higher expected return over a long period of time. THe point is to come up with strategies that are successful against a large range of opponents. So whilst you can look at a single event and identify whether it was effective in that particular situation, what you're optimizing for is to get the best return over time. So to take the Overwatch example - whilst you may constantly see game losing mistakes at that level, you won't see the same people making the same mistakes constantly.
So basically - for an article that constantly talks about "95 percentile" or "99 percentile" or "moving from 10%-ile to 40%-ile". I just don't even comprehend how you can title something "95%-ile isn't that good" and then not make any effort to actually evaluate how you're measuring 95%-ile. Which, given this is an article about how people generally do things very badly for stupid reasons, I think is rather ironic.
I play(ed) a lot of Overwatch, enough to get into the top 1% (Grandmaster). The rank he derides on, 90-95%, is Diamond, which is quite famously "ELO Hell", because that is where a lot of naturally talented players end up before deciding that blaming their teammates was the issue instead of reviewing their own gameplay. What irks me is, the top 4% of that game, Masters, I would actually consider "good". Sure there is a gap between the top 4%, top 1% and top .1%, but the mistakes you see between those groups are less about "missing fundamental gameplay mechanics" and more flawless execution, awareness and inference. (For anyone that plays the game I would consider 4250 the top .1%, which is almost entirely pros and very talented streamers).
In other words, while I agree the top 10% of the community isn't all that good, the top 5% of that very game is respectable. My beef is less with the ranking and more with his "definition" of good.
Many of the top 1% of Overwatch do regular scrims in semi-pro leagues. Comparing this to basketball, does this mean the bar for "good" is the NCAA, d-league and NBA?
A diamond player is good to a platinum player is good to a gold player is good to a silver player etc...
A local road race 5k might have a thousand entrants. You might feel bad about occasionally walking and finishing in 500th place, but that's just in the subset of the population that participates in those events. The biggest race in our 1,000,000-person metro area draws about 20,000 entrants (many from outside that area), so the 50th percentile in the race is 99th percentile in the population.
Similarly, there's a big difference between people who participate and people who practice. Every high-school cross-country team will likely have several kids who can run under 18 minutes in the 5k, just because they practice 5 or 6 days a week. Elites peak at about age 28-30 in the 5k, so these 16-year-olds aren't as fast as they could be, but they will likely never run faster than they do in high school because they won't practice as effectively as adults as they do when coached on a school team.
On the other hand, for the same reason, it is very hard to be on 95% in multiple things at the same time, because you won't have time to regularly practice on multiple things.
For the same reason, I would also argue that for regular people it is also hard to be on 95% in just one thing outside of work, because people need to take care of their family.
I'm just a dabbler with CSS. Is there a better way to say "the font size that gives me about N characters per line of random text"?
(It's 0.5rem + 2vw instead of just some multiple of vw so that if you make the viewport narrow the font doesn't get too small. Better would be something like max(0.5rem, 2.5vw) but max() is experimental and not supported well outside of chrome. I found the calc(fixed + variable) hack on Stack Overflow).
It's maybe not very hard for you or I or Dan Luu to work at something and practice it and reach a level where we are competent or better. But I've seen so many cases of normal people that work incredibly hard at things, and they just never get to that mediocre level. It's frustrating if you are trying to teach or coach or mentor them up, because you can see where things would have to click for them to get over the hump, but there's no keyhole for that key.