I think denial of differences in people’s mental abilities is as unscientific as climate change denial, and both come from the same place where scientific evidence that a person thinks weakens their world view is rejected.
Presenting no significant evidence, I have no idea why this position is more scientific than the opposite position (that most of the time, “talent” is actually just thousands of hours of work.)
I'm fairly confident that there's more to it than just studying something for a long time. Some people simply never grasp a concept despite years of study.
The most appealing explanation of talent I found in buddhism, that all talent is just many hours of pursued interest, millions of hours sometimes, so when someone is born unusually smart, it's because of prior efforts.
Talent is at least partly the ability and propensity to put in thousands of hours of dedicated work. People differ in complex, often stochastic, ways in their specific learned and genetic propensities to be good at things or motivated to do them.
Probably because everyone knows people who "show talent" without having put in thousands of hours of work, and aren't aware of anyone who put in that work without having identified as having talent first.
Most of the time, maybe. But it depends on what you are measuring against (even if this is just anecdotic). My guess is that your intuition comes from what you see around yourself or even in the industry in general with accomplished, successful developers: they have worked a lot. But that doesn't mean that they don't have talent, i.e. what GP says, special abilities that they were born with (and/or acquired during early childhood).
The fact that what we see is that hard work is required, is just the result of competition and survivorship bias. Those, who are not talented enough will leave the field, or never even get in. If we are talking about 'top' developers at 'top' companies, then it's essentially the same. They all work hard, but you ignore those who work hard but don't get there.
Indeed it does seem like, as GP says, at least some mental abilities do have both genetic and environmental factors (and those environmental factors mostly count around being born and in childhood). And by the time you are a grown up professional, those are basically both circumstances you can't do anything about. So you can call them talent.
It's enough if you think about intelligence, or to be more specific, IQ. It's demonstrated that it behaves like I described above. It has a hereditary and an environmental component, it stabilizes pretty early (relative to becoming a working professional) and it remains a stable measure during your life relative to your cohort. We also know that higher IQ correlates with better problem solving ability which is an important skill if you want to be successful in the field.
Fun fact, the blog post mentions Laszlo Polgar (a fellow Hungarian), father and trainer of Judit Polgar the strongest female chess player (wrt Elo points) so far. He had the idea that given good enough education any child can become a prodigy (and thus 'talent' doesn't exist). And to prove himself he started experimenting with his own children, his three daughters. All of them would become professional and accomplished chess players (this was the field Polgar chose to prove his theory). But of course one can argue that being a psychologist he himself must have had above average intelligence which his children could have inherited. So a sample size of 3 is not a strong argument besides the original claim, but of course it's a strong demonstration that at least early education matters a lot. (His 3 children has all learned and trained chess from a very early childhood, IIRC from around the age of 3, and were all home schooled.)
Now why did I say fun fact? Because this at the same time underlies what I said above: that early childhood effects count a lot and that later you can't do much about it. Also, if you asked Judit Polgar why Magnus Carlsen is a better player than she was at her best (2882 vs 2735) I doubt she'd say "well, he just worked harder and put in more hours".
Mr. Polgar would know he's wrong if he tried to make just 100 geniuses out of average children. Most people are unable to hold their attention on the same object for longer than a minute.
Agreed. That's one of the things I was trying to say. (Not the attention thing, because that's, for most people, a learned deficiency for sure.) OTOH, he is probably right if you take a less extreme version of his claim: given a very good education (probably following his method to some extent) most people would end up being a lot more adept than what you see today.
I don't think this article denies that people have different mental abilities, just that "talent" is a vague and hard to quantify term (as evidenced by how — as mentioned in the article — nearly every SV company is convinced they hire the top 1% of developers).
Author implicitly redefines "talent" to mean "workplace efficacy," which of
course is a composite and altogether different metric from what we generally
mean by "talent," which is raw mathematical, artistic, or athletic capacity,
something that's all too real for us untalented folk.
I think there are a number of intelligent, successful people who don't want to believe that they are successful due to luck of birth, more than anything else. Especially because they usually worked really hard and made a bunch of good decisions to get where they are - they just fail to realize others may be working even harder for much worse outcomes. I say this as someone who makes decent money and worked hard to get where I am - but I also accept that I more lucky than anything else.
Every time I've paid attention to a "talented" person what I've found is some quirk in their personality/history that gives them an intense interest in the subject. That interest drives them to practice the subject far more than most people would bother with.
Talent isn’t a myth, but exclusively attracting it is.
I work or have worked with many different companies in a few different roles. Once you hit a level of competence, none of them stand out as having particularly more talented people.
Talent isn’t a myth, it’s a prerequisite. Same for hard work.
I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results. And I [like to] imagine Tyson could spend as much time programming as I have and not be nearly as good.
Talent is a multiplier. When you’re learning something you have a talent for, you’ll know.
For example: in high school I was very into art and into programming. I could spend 30 hours on a digital painting and it looked okay. But when I spent 30 hours on python, I was fluent in a weekend.
Some folks I knew could take those 30 hours of drawing and produce a painting that would take me 3 months. Even after adjusting for baseline skill.
Their rate of improvement was simply beyond anything I could achieve. Same as my rate of improvement in programming was beyond what they could pull off.
Crucially: Talent isn’t a measure of how good you are now. It’s a measure of how fast you improve with practice.
My read was that talent, as discussed in bullshit mba speak, is meaningless. Which I can easily get behind. Most MBA speak is just a cloak for confirmation biases.
Or, programming is simply easier than painting or boxing, and boring and tedious for most people.
Physical and psychological traits matter when you undertake certain tasks - how many fast twitch muscle fibers you have, how big and string your lu game and heart is, the angle of your jaw in relation to your brainstem, the distribution of your weight on your body, your personal nerve conduction velocity, your natural aggressiveness and your pain tolerance levels for boxing.
Your natural intelligence, hand-eye coordination, tolerance for failure, and curiosity level for learning programming.
Your hand-eye coordination, imagination, and depth of color vision for painting.
The thing is, while everyone starts with more or less of some physical or mental fitness for a particular task, with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small. Yet o e is Mohammed Ali, and one is Leon Spinks. That difference is not in proportion to the difference in their physical or mental capabilities at the start, and is largely explained in studies by coaching and practice technique.
The ability to follow a trainings regime until you reach success is largely a mental tolerance for failure and determination. If you have lots of success, you tend to continue. But if you were to continue despite failure, you would eventually reach the success you were after if the training regime was correct.
Yep all those things you describe fall under talent. A big one in sports is your genetic predisposition to how fast you can recover. Or how much punishment you can take before your body breaks.
A common training approach for eastern europe gymnastics is to take a bunch of 5 year old kids, train them all the same. Whomever is left standing at 13 gets to compete in international meets.
After 10 years of boxing, I can give a fun round or two even to people prepping for olympic tryouts (I’ve tried). But a talented 14 year old kid training to go pro in a few years ... they smoke me every time. Even my fully developed adult musculature and the years of ring experience can’t compete with their level of focus and talent. I look like a fool every time.
> with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small
At the extreme ends of elite competition everyone works ridiculously hard. Everyone has the perfect nutrition and the training and the coaches and so on. When the difference between olympic silver and gold in swimming is the length of a knuckle ... either we’re seeing random probabilities playing out (the competition is within margin of error for the test), or it’s genetics.
At that level, it's generally known to be the mental preparation for the given day (along with a bit of luck, as you mentioned).
Indeed, everyone at that level has already been filtered and selected for similar top levels of skill, knowledge, conditioning, equipment, diet, coaches, etc., etc., etc. It comes down to the mental game both internally and between competitors on that particular day.
A classic book to understand some of this is The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey [0]
Source: I formerly competed at international levels for several years in alpine ski racing (mostly DH/Super-G), and studied neuroscience in college as a result of the many fascinating mental phenomena I found in training and competing.
One very interesting fact I came across in neuroscience is that perceptual thresholds for relevant senses, e.g., touch sensitivity for a musician, are about 10X finer than normal people (i.e., they can detect physical differences only 10% the size of that detectable by normal population), and that this is trainable. So yes, this is definitely on the skill/ training side, agreeing with the author.
OTOH, I know some top level musicians who quickly point out that the people with insane levels of desire, motivation, and hard work who will never get to the level to pass a professional audition. But I haven't further data to see what is the issue (does it come to talent, or some genetic shortcoming in their sensory-motor systems, or have they self-sabotaged, or what 20 other factors?)
I have a very deep interest in this topic and nearly went into neuroscience for similar reasons but instead ended up blazing my own trail at the intersection of machine learning and sports training. I am very cognizant of my own strong bias toward these conclusions and want to avoid confirmation seeking. Have you encountered any research, literature or reputable programs that I could investigate further?
You ask a really good question, and it seems there is a deficit there, at least in my current knowledge
What comes closest is some studies on extreme forms of Buddhist meditation. One of the interesting discoveries is that during normal meditation, the parasympathetic system (homeostasis, breathing, etc.) is very dominant, but during the peak enlighentment experiences of the advanced meditators, the sympathetic system (fight-or-flight) system associated with athletic performance also runs at very high levels. Normally, the sympathetic & parasympathetic systems are in opposition, when the sympathetic system is active, parasympathetic is suppressed, and vice-versa. The other situation where both systems activate is during sex (arousal needs paracympathetic, orgasm sympathetic). The interesting connection I made is that I'd noticed these intense flow states sometimes occurring in the most intense times, where everything in my mind was absolute calm - I called it "fast meditation", as in meditating at 85mph. I know others also experience this. I conjecture that this is some of the same phenomenon seen in advanced meditation, just form the opposite end (here, maxing out the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic maybe kicks in, but I have no measurements other than my mental state).
There's also some research on the "flow state" related to accelerated perception, where people feel that they can see insane levels of detail and time slows down, as in accidents. They were trying to recreate it to understand it, and I found the efforts entirely lame and a waste of time. I can tell all kinds of stories about seeing very clearly both important and trivial things at high speed, and having entire trains of thought which I can verify happened in fractions of a second by noting the beginning and end points of the chain of thought and calculating in the distance and speed. These studies catch none of it, and I can say that even with years of training and effort, it is still extremely elusive (which is why I can't really fault the researchers, I don't yet have any great ideas on how to capture it).
I wish I could point you to specific references, but these were all readings from a while back.
BTW, ML and sports training seems like a potentially very fruitful area! I'd love to hear more about it. I found that much of the most interesting areas are at the intersections of different fields, so I wish you good luck in your pursuit!
We have had similar experiences. I discovered meditation and flow state accidentally - at first I thought it required intensity, and so I would ride my motorcycle in increasingly dangerous situations and down mountain trails in order to trigger it. This led me to take up skydiving (angle tracking, wing-suiting) and BASE jumping as I believed it was merely adrenaline that I was seeking.
I discovered I could trigger the state reliably without risk during high-level matched competitive video-game play. (Smash Bros) I had nearly 10 years of low-skilled competitive practice but with infinite online matched games I found I could reach a flow-like state on a nightly basis, so long as I played long enough. (I played for approximately 4 hours per night over a two-year period). I was also able to achieve a flow-like state with near certainty using a very simple piano tile tapping game, given long enough sessions. I had simply been using the game to train my thumbs for speed.
Eventually I left my career in software to pursue flow in Skydiving, which I now consider to be a mistake. After studying meditation and Yoga, it has become clear to me that the state is not triggered by external factors at all, and that it is itself a skill.
Admittedly far fewer of these states stand out as truly peak, quasi-religious experiences. I suspect there is a continuum and the binary classification is a judgement we place on the experience "retroactively". It comes from having enough space in your attention to notice the contrasting state of the body and the mind, the level of current performance, and then to notice the noticing itself. The rush of pleasure and excitement is not pre-existing, it is the result of a positive judgement you place on the situation. Despite its appeal this is undesirable, and tends toward interrupting flow in the precisely the same way as one loses control of a lucid dream after just having reached it. IMHO focusing on the subjective threshold for isolated study is misguided.
My current work focuses on creating an abstract framework which adapts to the athlete in order to create the external conditions which allow the athlete to most easily find the flow state. Rather than teach them how directly I hope to trigger it unexpectedly and allow for it to be sustained indefinitely during training. Of course, I'm not foolish enough to admit this to my benefactors.
Do you suppose I might be able to get a grant for this sort of work?
Wow - totally cool - you've definitely gone wild with this! Reminds me of a quote I read from the great weight-lifter Vasily Alekseyev, who talked about what he called the "white zone", and how amazing it was, and how you would work for years to get into it again.
I totally agree about the continuum - for the most part it is so strange from ordinary experience that it seems like a binary shift, but yes, I think it is important to see it as a continuum (perhaps a bit stepped/quantized, but not sure).
Fascinating that you managed to get there with the tapping game doing speed drills. I often had ideas but it was before common MRIs and other technology that we had for examining brain functions at high resolution. That is something you could get into an MRI, and/or an intense electrode-sensor grid and measure! So, yes, I'd think some funding might be possible. I know academic funding is it's own labrynthine nightmare, so probably best to be in a program supported by an experienced professor/primary researcher who knows the ropes. OTOH, if you can get to show some results that improve performance, perhaps approaching some top pro sports team owners for funding? (I know if I were a billionaire with a team, I'd be interested in something that could give us an edge!) The question is whether you can generate useful results soon, and in what sport. You seem to have made a lot of progress in eSports, there might be some money there... Let me know if you're interested in chatting offline (is there a DM function here to exchange contact info w/o publishing?)
Hacker news is pretty bare bones - I don't even seen reply notifications. I've temporarily added some contact info to my "bio" if you'd like to discuss in more depth.
For my purposes the extreme end of elite competition is less interesting. My intuition tells me that the distribution of all athletes is multimodal, and that whatever attributes contribute the most to ending up in the normally distributed pool of elite individuals are present in all of them, and so I would expect a lower variance as you've indicated.
I would like to allow for the possibility that mindset and internal mental models which are learnable rather than innate could account for the particular distribution an athlete belongs to.
For instance someone prepping for Olympic tryouts may be in either the right tail of a lower mode of the distribution, or the left tail of the higher mode of the distribution.
The 14-year old that smokes you may have developed a mental model or learning approach which places him in an entirely different class at the outset. Talent is a label you've placed on him retroactively, but what assurance do you really have that those differences are explained biologically/genetically rather than resulting different mental representations of the sport and training process?
> what assurance do you have that those differences are explained biologically/genetically rather than resulting from different mental representations of the sport and training process?
Dude, don't do this. "Mental representations" have nothing to do with how fast we can run or how high we can jump.
You are basing this assertion on what, precisely? Attention, posture, pattern memory and state-estimation all strongly impact every level of athletic performance. This has been studied extensively. If I had a better term to describe these aspects of neural organization I would use it. I like mental representation because a coach on the ground can impact development of an athlete by providing a picture of what to focus on during performance, and this representative picture directly improves the signal to noise ratio for the athlete.
This is absurd. Physical attributes.. size, strength, fast-twitch muscle, jumping ability, endurance, sprinting power and speed, these all have massive genetic differences amongst people. You can look up on 23andme they even display genetic markers for sprinting ability.
The "table stakes" for being an elite athlete in many sports are so far beyond what you can just mentally train yourself to achieve by will. Plenty of amateur athletes have mental focus and work ethic, and train religiously, but this doesn't push them anywhere near elite performance levels.
I don't know what you're arguing against, exactly. If you take two athletes with similar physical qualities, and one receives appropriate training while the other does not, the former will outcompete the latter. I'm assuming that everyone in the far right tail of elite performance has the biological advantages you mentioned.
Let's simplify the model to two distributions to make it easier to see: well-trained vs. poorly-trained individuals, where the variance of each distribution is largely accounted for by physical differences. So long as these two distributions overlap, it is a mathematical certainty that some poorly-trained individuals will outperform some well-trained individuals, due to physical and genetic markers. So far so good.
I'm suggesting that there are several overlapping distributions, and that it's impossible to know with certainty whether you've lost to someone due to their physical advantage or their superior cognitive approach & training - if you are only considering the two of you in isolation. The question must be asked of populations, not of individuals.
Anyone who has experienced breaking through plateaus after a decade of training knows this is true. Whatever seem absurd to you must be due to some other miscommunication. I specifically exempted the top elite performers from consideration because in that restricted case my argument no longer holds. I thought that was clear.
Given that humanity has been competing in athletics events for thousands of years and that athletic event optimization is a massive industry (including state actors) if there was a learnable mental approach you'd assume they'd have found it by now (and everyone would be using it). Moreover I'd argue the ability to relatively quickly come up with a mental model that the rest of humanity is unable to replicate would itself be a form of innate talent.
Have you read about the Fosbury Flop? This is an example of changing the model in order to push the boundaries of what was considered possible. Also, I agree that there is likely a talent component to establishing the best models for training - but it's also a skill. Imparting these models is what world class coaches do, after all.
You are totally right that well-exploited sports have established models that are probably optimal, especially at the elite level.
I find these circumstances boring, personally. My interest lies in learning unfamiliar or complex tasks for which no optimal model is known, and also in maximizing the rate of skill acquisition by iterating on the model generation in an abstract way.
I think you are indicating by example that initial differences normally attribute to "talent" or "biological advantage" are greatly diminished at the level of peak performance, which results from dedication and practice. This is in line with the literature that I've read.
However I'm not familiar enough with boxing to understand the example and so you might be saying something else. Can you elaborate on why you chose Ali and Spinks as exemplars, and what you perceive to be their differences?
Yes, that is what I was asserting. I chose Spinks because he defeated Ali in a split decision in the biggest upset of the sport. However, their overall careers were so different. Ali is considered to be the greatest of all time by many.
When Spinks beat Ali, he was the quickest to win the title in history. He also was the only man to take a title from Ali. He was younger, faster, in better shape and had a longer reach than Ali.
However, despite the physical attributes favoring Spinks in every way, and the previous victory, in the rematch Spinks was completely destroyed by Ali, who trained hard for the fight this time.
These two are perfect examples of elite athletes with excellent physical similarities that put their careers on similar trajectories when you compare their early careers. However, Ali's mental talents and training skill so far surpassed Spinks that Ali only lost 5 times and won the title 3 times, while Spinks lost 17 and only held the title once.
Physical prowess matters, but not as much as training at the elite level.
Talent is a multiplier, but the needle can go negative.
It can be a trap. I knew a guy in college, “Kevin” who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time. He was doing much better than people like me who could pick things up and be an expert beginner in hours or days, because most of us never worked anywhere near that hard for anything in our lives. I had worked that hard for exactly one thing at this point, which put me at a vantage point of being able to see both groups. None of my other peers really understood Kevin. I confess I didn’t always either.
If you can fill your days with things that you are “talented” at, you never get around to the things that are hard but make you a better person or for a richer life. You can justify quitting before you ever start, and only later figure out that “compensating qualities” simply don’t. Not all the time. Especially in a crisis.
She lives with a broken man
A cracked polystyrene man
Who just crumbles and burns
Today a couple of the things that people think I’m talented at, I simply believe are possible when everyone else has given up. The Talent, if there is one, is a better sense of possibility, and a belief that at least a few people could figure things out if they could be arsed to do so. If there’s a second Talent, it’s in figuring out that not only are people fundamentally the same, century after century, but in many cases so are the problems they struggle with. Much like there is some underlying quality of NP-complete problems that makes them interchangeable. Solving problems is itself a thing you can study, and it can make you “talented” in whatever you care to be arsed to try.
Is a very similar sentiment but suffers from use of the passive voice. It is a thing that is very obvious in hindsight, but isn't very, I don't know, motivational?
Reframing it into the active voice is a worthy goal, and this version I like better.
I’ll give a slightly different take, but I think your general anecdote and life experience is on point.
Talent measures your intuition level regarding something. So, in your example, Kevin could always reach competence, but Kevin’s afterburner capacity is set to 0% (capped). Some of us have 0-100% intuition on things, on a spectrum.
But as far as what it takes to make it in this world? Competence. Your afterburners can boost depending on it’s capacity, but you can’t run on that unless you are born with a god like afterburner tank (genius, your Einsteins). We are all limited, even the talented.
I feel like what you refer to as intuition other's refer to as taste, to quote Ira Glass:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
and to keep with the other comments I would argue that some people have more taste than others, or more passion, or transferable skills that carry over, which often translates into what we think of as natural talent. But it still takes some work.
This is a fantastic comment. I agree 100%. The smartest things I have achieved came from not giving up and not being too lazy to just do the hard work the hard way when I couldn’t find a shortcut.
I had the somewhat cliched experience of a teacher wanting to bump me into the special needs class, and then testing out of their class entirely.
I was a very earnest kid, and up until that point I took everything my teachers told me literally. "This is how you learn" and everything felt like pushing boulders up a hill. Once I had 'permission' to build my own mental models from the examples provided by the teacher and dismiss their suggestions for how to organize the information... they could barely talk fast enough for my liking.
These 'models' I would discover later were very like the scientific method. Rote memorization was my absolute nemesis. Hypothesis, attack, defend, revise, repeat. As an adult, people who noticed this about me have asked, "Hey hinkley, I need these people to do <task you've never done before>, can you keep an eye on them?" After the initial panic, within a couple minutes of peppering them with seemingly random questions I can often answer, "sure", and have a sense of what questions I can run through the ersatz model, even go a bit off script, and which ones really require me to interrupt the expert.
When I'm entirely wrong, it's back to pushing boulders uphill again. The ones I remember clearly though are the ones where I was truly awful but motivated to trudge through. If giving myself permission to be a polymath is the best thing I've ever done for myself, giving myself permission to be bad at something for a long time is the second best thing. If I get to the end of my life and find that these turn out to be the things I was best at teaching to others, I won't be surprised at all. "An expert is someone who has made every possible mistake in a narrow field of study." Nothing seems to get me repeat customers like being able to tell someone I came to the same conclusion, and here's a counter example and a better way to think about that problem.
> I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results.
I think this fails to recognise the talents that Mike Tyson has leveraged: the soft skills and gumption to identify the best trainers, the best team, the best opportunities, and to seize those, being motivated to gain fame and plaudits. Plus consistent, world-class training and experience on top - working outside of the 30 hours of class.
These skills are very transferable to other fields. Look, for example, at the George Foreman Grill.
Could you have done the same? Yes, I think it's possible. But, viewing it as only practice and guided training seems like a fundamental error.
If you read Tyson’s story, it’s more that he was extremely talented and people with a talent for the business of boxing took him under their wing. Because they spotted an opportunity.
Tyson famously lost everything when it turned out his manager/promoter was a crook.
But yes, overall you’re right, talent is useless unless you leverage it and put in the work. My argument is that, if you’re gonna put in that much work, it’s best to leverage it on something you also have a talent for.
Just want to reiterate this. Tyson, in no uncertain terms, was a pure physical phenom. He in no way satisfies the nature vs nature debate (more or less makes it undebatable in his case, as it’s pure nature at work there).
I mean for sports that’s a given. Most sports requires a very special body type. A short person cannot win Olympic gold in swimming or basketball. A large person cannot win cycling over mountains. I’m sure there are tons more but I don’t have the knowledge.
For sports you need to work hard, but you cannot compete without the right boost in the first place.
This doesn't hold only for sport. Take a person with an IQ of 90. He will never become a fields medalist. I don't see how that is different then a small player not being able to win olympic gold in basketball.
> He in no way satisfies the nature vs nature debate
I'll assume you meant nature v. nurture. If so, then the Tyson family is absolutely an edge case in the debate. Mike was famously in and out of trouble in his younger years, having been arrested 38 times as a teenager. He was a bit of a child of the streets, so to speak.
What is fascinating and much lesser known is his older brother, Rodney. (Their sister unfortunately died at 24 from a heart attack)
Rodney Tyson is a pediatric trauma surgeon.
Two men who grew up eating the exact same food, in the exact same rooms, watching the exact same TV shows grew up to have radically different lives and careers. Yet both are accomplished in their choices.
I don't know what to exactly make of the Tyson family in the nature v nurture debate, but the differences between the brothers are some of the widest that I have seen.
Loved it. I was seriously into sketching and later digital painting from 6th grade to freshman year of college. Almost went to study art (or try the entrance exam at least).
But my rate of progress just didn’t justify the time investment compared to the results and joy I got out of coding.
Same for poetry (all of high school) and fiction writing (from 1st grade to college). Just didn’t make sense to continue pursuing. Best to focus on the obsession that I also had a huge talent for.
I’ve been able to leverage my writing passion and talent for technical writing. 2/3 not bad imo :)
I have a friend who has played Go for years, owns a board, played online often and so on. The closest I've been to playing was reading a Go manga and ignoring all the panels about the rules. I never really played chess or other such games either. First four times we played he beat me soundly even with a handicap. Fourth time I had no handicap. Fifth time I won. And sixth time. And seventh time. His tactical moves were superiors to mine but I could intuitively see the strategic view in ways he simply couldn't. That depressed me for a while because by all rights he should have been winning and not me.
I frequently watch some of them do a really poor job because they are unable to get over the hangup that "more talented person Y" would be able to do it much better, design it more clearly from the start, etc.
When I look at "more talented person Y", sure, they are more talented, but their work is good because of other behaviors (e.g., a breadth of experimentation before locking in one approach) that have nothing to do with their great intuition/vision about the structure of the result.
Now my advice is "don't look around"...
Preoccupation with talent is a trap, for the more and less talented.
No, it's accurately conveying the sadness and the loneliness when you see the right moves (in life, in work) and people being oblivious to them and ending up poor/unhappy/etc.
I am a descendant of fairly strong guys - one grandfather was a rural blacksmith, the other one started as a lumberjack before going to the (still coal powered) railway to coal the engines. I inherited quite a lot of their physique from them, which means that I can do quite good in a gym without trying much.
Yes, that feels unjust. Not that I am depressed about it, but it is definitely something you ponder upon: why this guy who works so much harder than me does not see as much return on his effort?
The level of heritability of many traits is far from settled, AFAIK, and given the long shadow of Nazi racial pseudoscience, there is a certain air of suspicion around anyone who researches the topic of heritability too eagerly, at least in the West; China does not seem to have this particular taboo.
And I am not even surprised, the possibility of governments latching onto this and "streaming" people towards whatever they are found to be gifted at, cannot really be dismissed.
Yes, I am just a crappy 3k on kgs after several thousand games, so that puts
me in the untalented category. If GP can consistently beat me after playing
just four games, I'd recommend him to consider going pro as well. I know after my
thousandth game I was still figuring out elementary subtleties.
As you're describing it, talent seems like having developed a set of cognitive skills that fit better with a particular task. Or maybe it's about personality traits.
>I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results.
I imagine you could do this if you start training from the childhood and it will be the only thing you're doing.
> Talent isn’t a measure of how good you are now. It’s a measure of how fast you improve with practice.
Spot on. Hard work matters, but people stating hard working geniuses as examples without mentioning there are many hardworking individuals without an even close result is just not right.
Perception of talent is also a function of how boisterous the claimant is.
Leetcode script kiddies get in, jump from project to project, not spending more than a few months at each, make a filthy mess of every codebase, and leave it to the silent but persevering, a.k.a real, talent to clean up the mess, and steward the ship.
You can focus on the serious tech challenges, or you can be boisterous. You can't be both.
edit: "can't be both" == "improbable/competing-factors, not impossible"
It's definitely an exaggeration. But there's some truth to what they said.
Towards the end of university I spent my free time honing my skills as an engineer. I debated whether I should spend my free time leetcoding, or developing a fairly complex distributed application (complex, at least for an individual engineer). I could do one, or the other, or both. But doing both would mean degrading the quality of my learning (there are only so many hours in a day). I decided to focus exclusively on the disturbed application.
The lack of leetcoding experience definitely hurt my job search, because plenty of employers will completely refuse to interview you without a high enough score. However, among the interviews I did get, they were very impressed with my experience developing and architecting applications, and it ultimately helped me land a job.
Long story short, every minute I spent leetcoding was a minute I could've been spending improving my skills as an engineer. I have no regrets about my strategy. It left me better positioned in the long term.
I don't think it ends at university. I have been in IT a while but am somewhat new to my stack, and had trouble two years ago when interviewing, a number of companies passed on me. I got hired at a decent salary but don't want that to happen again so I have been studying. I am more in control of my timeline, and have been studying, but I want to be in a better place if I want to look around in a year.
So for your choices of learning to improve quality of knowledge or doing what needs to be done to pass leetcode, my choice is to do a little of both. I am studying for the things they may give me on an interview (work samples to complete, 30 minute coding exercises, whiteboard class design etc.) But I am not doing it in a shallow leetcode way where I just want to know enough to pass the interview.
If I am building something akin to the complexity of a given work sample, I want to understand the architecture of what I am handing in, the language aspects of it, how the unit testing works and what to unit test and all of that. To have a deep understanding of it, or at least more than a surface leetcode understanding of it. If I am new to the topic I try to get some grasp of it, move on, and then sometimes I revisit the topic in the future to deepen my understanding of it.
So the immediate ends of a lot of what I do in my spare time is to prepare for the interviews I may have in a year. But one aspect of it are that I will spend a little time if needed to learn things which may not be asked in an interview, but which would let me do a better job at my current job or next job, or even if I want to write a program on my own. Another aspect of it is that I spend the time to try to get a decent enough understanding of it before moving on, not just enough that would pass over the leetcode bar but not into a slightly deeper understanding. So the main aim is passing an interview, but I will take the time out to learn things to improve my work, not just interviewing, and to deepen my knowledge of the subject as well.
you can do both, but generally when you take on serious tech challenges it humbles you. As an example, I used to work on Amazon S3, and that was a humbling experience. Unlike a lot of people that bounce after a year, I stuck it out for 3.5 years which is the shortest term on my c.v.
Now, part of my time there was massively refactoring a critical service to maximize test coverage, reduce memory footprint, improve reliability, measure new things, make the system more durable, and introduce new features. It was exceptionally serious and difficult, and if I made any mistake then the internet would effective go down.
After the fact, yes, I can be boisterous because I did serious shit without fucking up.
Main assumption here is that a top 1% developer costs top 1% salary, but that is probably not correlated at all, bc the real way to make money is to attach yourself to the largest possible business and then climb, and the real way to get good is to hack a lot on the most interesting unsolved problems ... these are not just orthogonal but possibly even diametrically opposed
I think the question is also, “good in what sense?”
The really valuable skill (from a dollars & cents perspective) is to be able to provide business value to _the business you’re employed at_. That might not transfer anywhere else.
Eg I doubt my skills apply to a young startup- I’m a specialist (ML research), they need a generalist.
If I work at Google on search & get really good at solving political problems related to search, that’s a super valuable skill set _to Google_ but probably not to anyone else. I’d probably get promoted and/or get big bonuses. It also probably means that, _ceteris paribus_, I’m a worse coder, as I’m spending less time focusing on tough coding problems.
> bc the real way to make money is to attach yourself you the largest possible business and then climb
I don't know how you get that idea unless you are talking about the handful of C-level positions at tech giants. Otherwise switching your job every few years and increasing salary/position each time is generally the more profitable path than staying at a single company and waiting for promotion.
Wouldn't the real way to make money to be a founder/cofounder at the next Google/Facebook/Amazon/whatever? Which I'm guessing would also not require being a great programmer.
Yes, the author is assuming for the sake of argument that salary is dictated by talent. But if talent is distributed on a normal distribution and compensation is fat-tailed, that might mean that there is a non-linear relation between talent and compensation, or it might mean that other factors entirely are at play. My guess is that the compensation graph shown is skewed by the presence of executive salaries, which have been shown to be uncorrelated to corporate financial performance, suggesting talent is not a significant factor at the fat end of the distribution; more likely, the fat tail is a social network effect. To be fair, the author concedes this possibility in a footnote.
talent (τάλαντο) is a Greek word to describe some quality or charisma that some people may possess when they do something.
It comes from the ancient times of rulers and peasants when people actually believed in unspecified innate qualities that differentiate people from each other.
"talent" is so much ingrained into culture that people take its vague existence for granted. I think that "talent" is used as a praise for the purposes of attracting/luring someone to do all the work.
This is wrong. Here is a counterexample from my experience. At sports I have no talent. At chess I have considerable talent and can remember large fragments of games I played decades ago. It's easy for me to remember opening variations I study. When I teach others some opening moves, they soon forget. I worked hard at chess to become an international master, but the ability to remember and apply what I learned motivated me to study. Most people do not have the talent to become a chess master.
At a surface level, this may seem like a counter-example. However you are making a very strong statement about the particular quality you've identified as being critical to your success. You're also discounting the possibility that there is some other quality "B", which you may not possess, that would allow another player who lacks your chess memory to be competitive with you. You may be right, but your hypothesis is both clear and testable.
The best models I've seen proposed to explain the correlation of chess memory and chess knowledge/performance attribute the memory strength to the results of experience, rather than the other way around. The aspect of your abilities that led to increased motivation is not direct evidence for the direction of causality. In fact, studies on chess grandmasters suggest that they perform no better than novices on memory for randomized board positions. (Unlikely to be encountered in a game)
Here is an interesting study discussing the recent state of the literature which lends some credence to your ideas.
it depends on the position you are hiring for. Is it a position that needs solving problems with new technology? or is it to maintain a 5 years old application used by 1 million paying customer? each needs a different personality and maybe a different type of talent
It feels to me like the article just sets up a bunch of straw men to knock down.
To start with, when most companies say "we only hire top 1% talent" in the context of software development, they don't really mean talent as some sort innate potential, they mostly just mean skill (combined with a bit of potential to become even more skilled).
Further, the idea that most people think talent is one dimensional, static and linear is just mystifying to me. Does anyone actually thinks this? He takes a literal view of "the 1%" and extrapolates that to derive these assumptions. But no one means that literally, it's just a phrase meant to invoke the idea that they are are highly selective how they hire. That this has to be explained is... odd.
The author then repeatedly carps on about how "talent" cannot be quantified and then, somehow, thinks this means that the interview process is meaningless. Um, that skill cannot be quantified is WHY we have the (admittedly flawed) interview process.
If all of these prevalent assumptions about talent are wrong, what does it say about our hiring and management practices?
It doesn't say anything because assumptions are false. And even if talent can be "developed" (here I think he means ability to learn how to improve skills faster), everyone knows the hiring process is flawed. Because, you know, both people and roles are complex and multi-facetted. So hiring is hard. Hopefully practices will improve to become better, but I'm not holding my breath.
There is a great book by Carol Dweck - Minset. She distinguishes two types of minset in people. Fixed - who believe their capabilities are static and even when they have some success they are afraid to do more in order to not ruin the impression; and growth mindset - who believe almost everything can be developed and are not afraid to learn and try. There is a lot of research and interesting examples from businesses, social and sport in the book on the topic of thise different understandings of talent.
Not to mention that success is often fair dose of luck. But if you know it and try multiple times while correcting your mistakes, the chance is only increasing.
I think it's important to believe you can improve, and that most people can improve with practice. This avoids the very real problem of people self-limiting in unnecessary ways.
I think that telling people people that they can achieve _arbitrary_ things through enough effort is just wrong: it sets up unrealistic expectations and makes them blame themselves when things don't work out, because they must not have tried enough. Telling someone who's 5 feet tall as an adult and not particularly athletic that if they just work hard enough they can become a successful Olympic swimmer is not OK.
It's a tough communication problem, because "maybe you can reach this goal if you work really hard and happen to be lucky too" is a much harder concept to communicate and internalize than "you can reach this goal if you just work hard". It's also a tough problem in trying to figure out what expectations ought to be "realistic" for a given child, because of all the biases we bring to such evaluations. So erring somewhat on the side of emphasizing growth mindset can make sense, and should absolutely be done when doing evaluation, but you have to be pretty careful how you communicate the resulting recommendations.
Past that, the unfortunate thing is that Dweck's disciples (and I use the word specifically for its religious connotations) go overboard on the "everything is possible with a growth mindset" thing, in exactly the way that I think is harmful. I see this in a lot of elementary school teachers; they love this book, but end up in the "growth mindset solves everything" trap, at least in their communication.
I should note that unlike many things in that field Dweck's work actually replicates in large pre-registered studies, albeit ones still done by Dweck herself. The effects are quite small on average, but maybe on the margin (i.e. for students who are more likely to doubt themselves for various reasons) might be significant.
That said, I would be happier if someone who is not Dweck were able to reproduce her results, and I have ~0 confidence that "growth mindset as practiced in elementary schools today" is at all useful...
Growth mindset might lead people to realizing they can’t accomplish something later due to some innate thing but that happens all the time. Even if you were stupidly talented at chess, only one person can be the best chess player in the world. So, if another person is even more talented than you (all other things equal) then you’re fucked anyway. And that’s life - it happens. Why tell kids that they can’t be the greatest? They don’t know until they really try. So what if they waste time on it, as long as they are enjoying the journey then that’s all that matters. Life isn’t a destination.
I find the accomplishments people (even young children) want to set out for are mostly reasonable. If you’re wanting to be a Nobel prize winner, mega rich CEO, or be some well regarded author - it’s gonna require a lot of luck. And that should be informed to people that are all about the destination and not the pursuit. There’s no reason to not pursue those things if you want to.
Honestly, I think a growth mindset is amazing for young children. If it wasn’t for people in my childhood having that - even for the shithole I grew up in - I probably wouldn’t have accomplished anywhere near what I have. I had nothing but doubts about myself because I saw no one ever escape the trappings of my surroundings. Yet... I’d get told by some pretty good teachers, “you’re capable of doing anything if you just set your mind to it.” (The kind of growth mindset I was taught)
I see other people severely limiting themselves because they just project whatever societal norms are around into themselves. They assume because they see no one else doing it in their immediate surroundings that it can’t be done. And it’s a shit way to go, dude. People won’t grow with that mindset. It traps them in poverty.
Growth mindset might lead to a few childhood dreams being crushed but who gives a shit. It’s a childhood dream - some kids want to be Goku and there’s no reason to crush that shit so early.
You need motivation as well as talent. I have a friend who's one of the smartest guys I know, he has incredible side projects but at work does the bare minimum. Meanwhile I know guys that dont have talent but can grind, can code well but just steady output, can hit deadlines and are generally motivated.
> I have a friend who's one of the smartest guys I know, he has incredible side projects but at work does the bare minimum.
Sounds like he's not interested in what your job entails. Perhaps he should find a job that does something closer to his interests, or perhaps better, kick off a startup that relates to his passions.
For many people, it's hard to be motivated to do something you're not into. Conditions like ADHD can exacerbate this.
You only get one life. Have an honest conversation with him and ask what he really wants to do with it.
He's my friend not my colleague. He really doesn't care about money, I think he probably would rather not have it. I should have added his side projects are just every now and again, most of the time he hangs out with friends.
There are many, many people in all sorts of professions that work to pay the bills and have interesting hobbies they are devoted to and exceed at. Sometimes this is because they haven't found a way to be paid for their hobby, other times it's because they don't want to.
Sometimes the fact that there is no pressure is one of the things that makes it enjoyable, and people are rightly resistant to change that.
He just knows that doubling his output won't nearly double his pay. I doubt he would be slacking if he could make $10M by completing a big project in a year.
Is that not one and the same (at least in software)? The so-called "talented" people in the industry were likely just more motivated to learn than their competition.
The article makes some decent points but I think the premise is altogether wrong. It’s always good to remind ourselves that hiring the “right” people is actually less (but not by a lot,) about raw talent as it is cultural fit, values alignment, being motivated by what they do (hopeful a combination of personal growth, contributing to something meaningful, feeling you’re “goos” at your job, and money) and clicking with the rest of the team(s). In fact, I’ve seen a lot of extremely talented people being very unsuccessful and unhappy because the job just wasn’t right for them.
I thought this mattered, but this mostly leads to more of yourself. When we ignored those factors these didn't seem to matter much for team quality - at least at our company. People find surprising ways to relate to and get along with colleagues. You do get a bigger pond to fish from.
Title should be "Talent is not measurable in the field of software development". I don't see anything in the article that shows talent is a myth in general. Even in the software development the fact that it is hard to gauge talent doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
In software development I always see 'talent' as correlating to a combination of three things: iq, conscientiousness (personality trait) and a formal education in computer science / mathematics or adjacent like physics.
> In other words, there is no way for a startup to pay a top 1% developer (but perhaps they can offer some other incentive, and I don’t mean stock options because that’s crap).
Who's to say wage is a good measure of talent?
I would say circumstance can play a bigger role in setting the wage, more so than actual talent.
For example, a developer working for a company over a long period of time will always creep up the wage scale, a developer with lots of keyword hits on the resume for the latest and greatest framework can always demand a higher pay, niche software skills always pay well, a developer who began work with a startup that then gets bought out by a multi-notational probably hits the jackpot etc. etc.
If you want to hire a top 1% programmer you look at achievement. What have they been doing fur the last few years, and how does it relate to what you need to get done.
Just founded NeXT? Well, what you need is a developer with solid experience developing efficient multithreaded virtual memory operating system kernels. Oh look, here’s a project at Carnegie Mellon University doing exactly that. Let’s hire from there. Sorted!
Now we need a solid compiler tool chain fir MacOS. This exciting project at the University of Illinois looks good, let’s hire one of the founders. Bingo!
See, it’s not that hard in theory. You just have to actually know what you’re after, and have the resources to get it. Unfortunately most of us can’t offer top salaries, or the most exciting cutting edge projects that top people will want to work on. We end up trying to hire the top 1% of people who end up applying for jobs at our organisation. That’s a very different problem from hiring a true one percent-er.
This is not good advice for most hiring managers. There's no good way to look for achievement by experienced developers because the best achievements are kept secret by corporations.
> Oh look, here’s a project at Carnegie Mellon University doing exactly that. Let’s hire from there. Sorted!
> Now we need a solid compiler tool chain fir MacOS. This exciting project at the University of Illinois looks good, let’s hire one of the founders. Bingo!
I think that what people perceive as "talent" is for a large part just intrinsic motivation which leads to an "early start". Many of us got early starts in computers because we were interested in them and were intrinsically motivated. By the time we went to college, we already had a decade of experience under our belts. That experience is obviously flawed, and you can't compare it with a decade of "real" experience, but it's still a head start. This can make you seem really talented in the eyes of people who have yet to start making the mistakes you made 10 years ago. Does that mean you'll have this edge forever? Of course not.
And sure, there's a factor of luck and physical/mental ability involved as well, but those aren't really the mysterious part of "talent".
I think one thing that stood out to me when interviewing people was whether they were interested in what they were applying for. People who seemed interested also seemed to actually know how to do things, what was going on in the field, and they'd know other similar people.
I don't know if there's a connection or it was just the people I came across, but another thing that bothered me was that people who subscribed to an innate talent model tended to be useless at evaluating skills. They'd have no idea what to ask, what to expect as an answer, and they'd have no BS detector.
I think a more healthy approach to talent is comparative advantage. You already have a team, and you want to improve it. Even a person who is not better than anyone at any of the relevant skills can improve a team, because it's opportunity cost that matters. The canonical example of this is the CEO who is better at strategy and grammar than his secretary, it still makes sense to have a secretary write the letters.
The reason sports talent is different from most other talent is that you have a limited number of players on the field. It's then a straight up production-over-replacement calculation, whereas most teams in business don't have that constraint.
It also gives you a floor. If I'm writing a c++ system and the junior on the team eats up time being hand-held, that eats into that opportunity cost savings. I suspect this is actually what people mean with "talent" when hiring, they want someone who doesn't necessarily have all the answers, but will behave in a way that doesn't impede the existing producers.
And Amazon should be thankful that they're terrible at interviewing. Else given just the normal churn of employees they'd have very quickly been unable to keep growing.
Except the better-than-average people move on, and the worse-than-average people stick around. So you have to hire above 50% just to keep quality static, and you don't every raise your bar to the point where it's hard to meet it just by hiring this way.
> the better-than-average people move on, and the worse-than-average people stick around.
Is there any evidence for that? The "better-than-average" have to work somewhere, so why should we assume that they change jobs more often? If you are an above-average workplace why should you not be able to retain above-average people?
> The reason sports talent is different from most other talent is that you have a limited number of players on the field. It's then a straight up production-over-replacement calculation, whereas most teams in business don't have that constraint.
Growing your team tends to reduce productivity of each person, since each person now needs to spend more time on communication and coordination, and less time on being productive. Depending on the team and the new member, you can end up adding a person and getting a lot more team productivity (great!) or adding a person and losing team productivity. It's not as simple as a sports team, where if you put an extra person on the field, you get a penalty, usually quickly, so the limit is clear; but there's still a limit.
Software development is a game of the mind. Companies come up with lots of metrics as if it's a Moneyball strategy to predict winning developers. However the quality of the outcome of my work is highly dependent on several undervalued aspects like my emotional level, how distracted I'm, my hunger level, time of the year/day etc. All of these intangible aspects make a huge impact on my productivity, but I don't see no one talking about them.
When companies like Leetcode, Hackerrank etc try to quantify programmers, none of the evaluations factor for the intangible aspects. No wonder hiring in software is so utterly broken.
I was with you until the end. It's hard for me to say hiring is broken because of the outcomes I see:
Companies which strive to attract and hire excellent developers, by and large, do. Excellent developers end up (or have the option to, certainly) at these companies by and large.
So it seems that the process sorts things out fine. Sure there are always guys on HN who say "oh I'd do super well at a FAANG if only my interview was a take home test" but I don't think that's actually an indication of a break.
Hiring is broken for non-FAANG companies, which is rest of the software world.
Excellent developers do end up at FAANG due to the competitive nature of the entrance exams. However FAANG are just 5 of the millions of other companies, and not all of the rest can use FAANG techniques to hire the developers. None of these companies offer the money, prestige, and perks that FAANG offer so they should not be cargo-culting their hiring practices.
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[ 19.5 ms ] story [ 4963 ms ] threadThe fact that what we see is that hard work is required, is just the result of competition and survivorship bias. Those, who are not talented enough will leave the field, or never even get in. If we are talking about 'top' developers at 'top' companies, then it's essentially the same. They all work hard, but you ignore those who work hard but don't get there.
Indeed it does seem like, as GP says, at least some mental abilities do have both genetic and environmental factors (and those environmental factors mostly count around being born and in childhood). And by the time you are a grown up professional, those are basically both circumstances you can't do anything about. So you can call them talent.
It's enough if you think about intelligence, or to be more specific, IQ. It's demonstrated that it behaves like I described above. It has a hereditary and an environmental component, it stabilizes pretty early (relative to becoming a working professional) and it remains a stable measure during your life relative to your cohort. We also know that higher IQ correlates with better problem solving ability which is an important skill if you want to be successful in the field.
Fun fact, the blog post mentions Laszlo Polgar (a fellow Hungarian), father and trainer of Judit Polgar the strongest female chess player (wrt Elo points) so far. He had the idea that given good enough education any child can become a prodigy (and thus 'talent' doesn't exist). And to prove himself he started experimenting with his own children, his three daughters. All of them would become professional and accomplished chess players (this was the field Polgar chose to prove his theory). But of course one can argue that being a psychologist he himself must have had above average intelligence which his children could have inherited. So a sample size of 3 is not a strong argument besides the original claim, but of course it's a strong demonstration that at least early education matters a lot. (His 3 children has all learned and trained chess from a very early childhood, IIRC from around the age of 3, and were all home schooled.)
Now why did I say fun fact? Because this at the same time underlies what I said above: that early childhood effects count a lot and that later you can't do much about it. Also, if you asked Judit Polgar why Magnus Carlsen is a better player than she was at her best (2882 vs 2735) I doubt she'd say "well, he just worked harder and put in more hours".
See: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabil... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r
I work or have worked with many different companies in a few different roles. Once you hit a level of competence, none of them stand out as having particularly more talented people.
I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results. And I [like to] imagine Tyson could spend as much time programming as I have and not be nearly as good.
Talent is a multiplier. When you’re learning something you have a talent for, you’ll know.
For example: in high school I was very into art and into programming. I could spend 30 hours on a digital painting and it looked okay. But when I spent 30 hours on python, I was fluent in a weekend.
Some folks I knew could take those 30 hours of drawing and produce a painting that would take me 3 months. Even after adjusting for baseline skill.
Their rate of improvement was simply beyond anything I could achieve. Same as my rate of improvement in programming was beyond what they could pull off.
Crucially: Talent isn’t a measure of how good you are now. It’s a measure of how fast you improve with practice.
2. I don't think the article body suggests that at all and the article title specifically modifies its claim with the word "largely".
Physical and psychological traits matter when you undertake certain tasks - how many fast twitch muscle fibers you have, how big and string your lu game and heart is, the angle of your jaw in relation to your brainstem, the distribution of your weight on your body, your personal nerve conduction velocity, your natural aggressiveness and your pain tolerance levels for boxing.
Your natural intelligence, hand-eye coordination, tolerance for failure, and curiosity level for learning programming.
Your hand-eye coordination, imagination, and depth of color vision for painting.
The thing is, while everyone starts with more or less of some physical or mental fitness for a particular task, with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small. Yet o e is Mohammed Ali, and one is Leon Spinks. That difference is not in proportion to the difference in their physical or mental capabilities at the start, and is largely explained in studies by coaching and practice technique.
The ability to follow a trainings regime until you reach success is largely a mental tolerance for failure and determination. If you have lots of success, you tend to continue. But if you were to continue despite failure, you would eventually reach the success you were after if the training regime was correct.
A common training approach for eastern europe gymnastics is to take a bunch of 5 year old kids, train them all the same. Whomever is left standing at 13 gets to compete in international meets.
After 10 years of boxing, I can give a fun round or two even to people prepping for olympic tryouts (I’ve tried). But a talented 14 year old kid training to go pro in a few years ... they smoke me every time. Even my fully developed adult musculature and the years of ring experience can’t compete with their level of focus and talent. I look like a fool every time.
> with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small
At the extreme ends of elite competition everyone works ridiculously hard. Everyone has the perfect nutrition and the training and the coaches and so on. When the difference between olympic silver and gold in swimming is the length of a knuckle ... either we’re seeing random probabilities playing out (the competition is within margin of error for the test), or it’s genetics.
What else could it be?
At that level, it's generally known to be the mental preparation for the given day (along with a bit of luck, as you mentioned).
Indeed, everyone at that level has already been filtered and selected for similar top levels of skill, knowledge, conditioning, equipment, diet, coaches, etc., etc., etc. It comes down to the mental game both internally and between competitors on that particular day.
A classic book to understand some of this is The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey [0]
Source: I formerly competed at international levels for several years in alpine ski racing (mostly DH/Super-G), and studied neuroscience in college as a result of the many fascinating mental phenomena I found in training and competing.
One very interesting fact I came across in neuroscience is that perceptual thresholds for relevant senses, e.g., touch sensitivity for a musician, are about 10X finer than normal people (i.e., they can detect physical differences only 10% the size of that detectable by normal population), and that this is trainable. So yes, this is definitely on the skill/ training side, agreeing with the author.
OTOH, I know some top level musicians who quickly point out that the people with insane levels of desire, motivation, and hard work who will never get to the level to pass a professional audition. But I haven't further data to see what is the issue (does it come to talent, or some genetic shortcoming in their sensory-motor systems, or have they self-sabotaged, or what 20 other factors?)
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance...
What comes closest is some studies on extreme forms of Buddhist meditation. One of the interesting discoveries is that during normal meditation, the parasympathetic system (homeostasis, breathing, etc.) is very dominant, but during the peak enlighentment experiences of the advanced meditators, the sympathetic system (fight-or-flight) system associated with athletic performance also runs at very high levels. Normally, the sympathetic & parasympathetic systems are in opposition, when the sympathetic system is active, parasympathetic is suppressed, and vice-versa. The other situation where both systems activate is during sex (arousal needs paracympathetic, orgasm sympathetic). The interesting connection I made is that I'd noticed these intense flow states sometimes occurring in the most intense times, where everything in my mind was absolute calm - I called it "fast meditation", as in meditating at 85mph. I know others also experience this. I conjecture that this is some of the same phenomenon seen in advanced meditation, just form the opposite end (here, maxing out the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic maybe kicks in, but I have no measurements other than my mental state).
There's also some research on the "flow state" related to accelerated perception, where people feel that they can see insane levels of detail and time slows down, as in accidents. They were trying to recreate it to understand it, and I found the efforts entirely lame and a waste of time. I can tell all kinds of stories about seeing very clearly both important and trivial things at high speed, and having entire trains of thought which I can verify happened in fractions of a second by noting the beginning and end points of the chain of thought and calculating in the distance and speed. These studies catch none of it, and I can say that even with years of training and effort, it is still extremely elusive (which is why I can't really fault the researchers, I don't yet have any great ideas on how to capture it).
I wish I could point you to specific references, but these were all readings from a while back.
BTW, ML and sports training seems like a potentially very fruitful area! I'd love to hear more about it. I found that much of the most interesting areas are at the intersections of different fields, so I wish you good luck in your pursuit!
I discovered I could trigger the state reliably without risk during high-level matched competitive video-game play. (Smash Bros) I had nearly 10 years of low-skilled competitive practice but with infinite online matched games I found I could reach a flow-like state on a nightly basis, so long as I played long enough. (I played for approximately 4 hours per night over a two-year period). I was also able to achieve a flow-like state with near certainty using a very simple piano tile tapping game, given long enough sessions. I had simply been using the game to train my thumbs for speed.
Eventually I left my career in software to pursue flow in Skydiving, which I now consider to be a mistake. After studying meditation and Yoga, it has become clear to me that the state is not triggered by external factors at all, and that it is itself a skill.
Admittedly far fewer of these states stand out as truly peak, quasi-religious experiences. I suspect there is a continuum and the binary classification is a judgement we place on the experience "retroactively". It comes from having enough space in your attention to notice the contrasting state of the body and the mind, the level of current performance, and then to notice the noticing itself. The rush of pleasure and excitement is not pre-existing, it is the result of a positive judgement you place on the situation. Despite its appeal this is undesirable, and tends toward interrupting flow in the precisely the same way as one loses control of a lucid dream after just having reached it. IMHO focusing on the subjective threshold for isolated study is misguided.
My current work focuses on creating an abstract framework which adapts to the athlete in order to create the external conditions which allow the athlete to most easily find the flow state. Rather than teach them how directly I hope to trigger it unexpectedly and allow for it to be sustained indefinitely during training. Of course, I'm not foolish enough to admit this to my benefactors.
Do you suppose I might be able to get a grant for this sort of work?
I totally agree about the continuum - for the most part it is so strange from ordinary experience that it seems like a binary shift, but yes, I think it is important to see it as a continuum (perhaps a bit stepped/quantized, but not sure).
Fascinating that you managed to get there with the tapping game doing speed drills. I often had ideas but it was before common MRIs and other technology that we had for examining brain functions at high resolution. That is something you could get into an MRI, and/or an intense electrode-sensor grid and measure! So, yes, I'd think some funding might be possible. I know academic funding is it's own labrynthine nightmare, so probably best to be in a program supported by an experienced professor/primary researcher who knows the ropes. OTOH, if you can get to show some results that improve performance, perhaps approaching some top pro sports team owners for funding? (I know if I were a billionaire with a team, I'd be interested in something that could give us an edge!) The question is whether you can generate useful results soon, and in what sport. You seem to have made a lot of progress in eSports, there might be some money there... Let me know if you're interested in chatting offline (is there a DM function here to exchange contact info w/o publishing?)
I would like to allow for the possibility that mindset and internal mental models which are learnable rather than innate could account for the particular distribution an athlete belongs to.
For instance someone prepping for Olympic tryouts may be in either the right tail of a lower mode of the distribution, or the left tail of the higher mode of the distribution.
The 14-year old that smokes you may have developed a mental model or learning approach which places him in an entirely different class at the outset. Talent is a label you've placed on him retroactively, but what assurance do you really have that those differences are explained biologically/genetically rather than resulting different mental representations of the sport and training process?
Dude, don't do this. "Mental representations" have nothing to do with how fast we can run or how high we can jump.
The "table stakes" for being an elite athlete in many sports are so far beyond what you can just mentally train yourself to achieve by will. Plenty of amateur athletes have mental focus and work ethic, and train religiously, but this doesn't push them anywhere near elite performance levels.
Let's simplify the model to two distributions to make it easier to see: well-trained vs. poorly-trained individuals, where the variance of each distribution is largely accounted for by physical differences. So long as these two distributions overlap, it is a mathematical certainty that some poorly-trained individuals will outperform some well-trained individuals, due to physical and genetic markers. So far so good.
I'm suggesting that there are several overlapping distributions, and that it's impossible to know with certainty whether you've lost to someone due to their physical advantage or their superior cognitive approach & training - if you are only considering the two of you in isolation. The question must be asked of populations, not of individuals.
Anyone who has experienced breaking through plateaus after a decade of training knows this is true. Whatever seem absurd to you must be due to some other miscommunication. I specifically exempted the top elite performers from consideration because in that restricted case my argument no longer holds. I thought that was clear.
You are totally right that well-exploited sports have established models that are probably optimal, especially at the elite level.
I find these circumstances boring, personally. My interest lies in learning unfamiliar or complex tasks for which no optimal model is known, and also in maximizing the rate of skill acquisition by iterating on the model generation in an abstract way.
However I'm not familiar enough with boxing to understand the example and so you might be saying something else. Can you elaborate on why you chose Ali and Spinks as exemplars, and what you perceive to be their differences?
When Spinks beat Ali, he was the quickest to win the title in history. He also was the only man to take a title from Ali. He was younger, faster, in better shape and had a longer reach than Ali.
However, despite the physical attributes favoring Spinks in every way, and the previous victory, in the rematch Spinks was completely destroyed by Ali, who trained hard for the fight this time.
These two are perfect examples of elite athletes with excellent physical similarities that put their careers on similar trajectories when you compare their early careers. However, Ali's mental talents and training skill so far surpassed Spinks that Ali only lost 5 times and won the title 3 times, while Spinks lost 17 and only held the title once.
Physical prowess matters, but not as much as training at the elite level.
It can be a trap. I knew a guy in college, “Kevin” who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time. He was doing much better than people like me who could pick things up and be an expert beginner in hours or days, because most of us never worked anywhere near that hard for anything in our lives. I had worked that hard for exactly one thing at this point, which put me at a vantage point of being able to see both groups. None of my other peers really understood Kevin. I confess I didn’t always either.
If you can fill your days with things that you are “talented” at, you never get around to the things that are hard but make you a better person or for a richer life. You can justify quitting before you ever start, and only later figure out that “compensating qualities” simply don’t. Not all the time. Especially in a crisis.
Today a couple of the things that people think I’m talented at, I simply believe are possible when everyone else has given up. The Talent, if there is one, is a better sense of possibility, and a belief that at least a few people could figure things out if they could be arsed to do so. If there’s a second Talent, it’s in figuring out that not only are people fundamentally the same, century after century, but in many cases so are the problems they struggle with. Much like there is some underlying quality of NP-complete problems that makes them interchangeable. Solving problems is itself a thing you can study, and it can make you “talented” in whatever you care to be arsed to try.> Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.
To reach elite levels you need both.
Reframing it into the active voice is a worthy goal, and this version I like better.
Talent measures your intuition level regarding something. So, in your example, Kevin could always reach competence, but Kevin’s afterburner capacity is set to 0% (capped). Some of us have 0-100% intuition on things, on a spectrum.
But as far as what it takes to make it in this world? Competence. Your afterburners can boost depending on it’s capacity, but you can’t run on that unless you are born with a god like afterburner tank (genius, your Einsteins). We are all limited, even the talented.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
and to keep with the other comments I would argue that some people have more taste than others, or more passion, or transferable skills that carry over, which often translates into what we think of as natural talent. But it still takes some work.
Joe Rogan Experience #1080 - David Goggins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tSTk1083VY
Perhaps the ultimate iteration of "Kevin who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time."
This is "the toughest man on earth" ... legit. Highly inspirational story.
I was a very earnest kid, and up until that point I took everything my teachers told me literally. "This is how you learn" and everything felt like pushing boulders up a hill. Once I had 'permission' to build my own mental models from the examples provided by the teacher and dismiss their suggestions for how to organize the information... they could barely talk fast enough for my liking.
These 'models' I would discover later were very like the scientific method. Rote memorization was my absolute nemesis. Hypothesis, attack, defend, revise, repeat. As an adult, people who noticed this about me have asked, "Hey hinkley, I need these people to do <task you've never done before>, can you keep an eye on them?" After the initial panic, within a couple minutes of peppering them with seemingly random questions I can often answer, "sure", and have a sense of what questions I can run through the ersatz model, even go a bit off script, and which ones really require me to interrupt the expert.
When I'm entirely wrong, it's back to pushing boulders uphill again. The ones I remember clearly though are the ones where I was truly awful but motivated to trudge through. If giving myself permission to be a polymath is the best thing I've ever done for myself, giving myself permission to be bad at something for a long time is the second best thing. If I get to the end of my life and find that these turn out to be the things I was best at teaching to others, I won't be surprised at all. "An expert is someone who has made every possible mistake in a narrow field of study." Nothing seems to get me repeat customers like being able to tell someone I came to the same conclusion, and here's a counter example and a better way to think about that problem.
I think this fails to recognise the talents that Mike Tyson has leveraged: the soft skills and gumption to identify the best trainers, the best team, the best opportunities, and to seize those, being motivated to gain fame and plaudits. Plus consistent, world-class training and experience on top - working outside of the 30 hours of class.
These skills are very transferable to other fields. Look, for example, at the George Foreman Grill.
Could you have done the same? Yes, I think it's possible. But, viewing it as only practice and guided training seems like a fundamental error.
Tyson famously lost everything when it turned out his manager/promoter was a crook.
But yes, overall you’re right, talent is useless unless you leverage it and put in the work. My argument is that, if you’re gonna put in that much work, it’s best to leverage it on something you also have a talent for.
No. He just happened to be an explosive beast who could knock out grown men at age 13.
For sports you need to work hard, but you cannot compete without the right boost in the first place.
I'll assume you meant nature v. nurture. If so, then the Tyson family is absolutely an edge case in the debate. Mike was famously in and out of trouble in his younger years, having been arrested 38 times as a teenager. He was a bit of a child of the streets, so to speak.
What is fascinating and much lesser known is his older brother, Rodney. (Their sister unfortunately died at 24 from a heart attack)
Rodney Tyson is a pediatric trauma surgeon.
Two men who grew up eating the exact same food, in the exact same rooms, watching the exact same TV shows grew up to have radically different lives and careers. Yet both are accomplished in their choices.
I don't know what to exactly make of the Tyson family in the nature v nurture debate, but the differences between the brothers are some of the widest that I have seen.
Mike Tyson had an incredible amount of talent and great teachers.
But my rate of progress just didn’t justify the time investment compared to the results and joy I got out of coding.
Same for poetry (all of high school) and fiction writing (from 1st grade to college). Just didn’t make sense to continue pursuing. Best to focus on the obsession that I also had a huge talent for.
I’ve been able to leverage my writing passion and talent for technical writing. 2/3 not bad imo :)
I have a friend who has played Go for years, owns a board, played online often and so on. The closest I've been to playing was reading a Go manga and ignoring all the panels about the rules. I never really played chess or other such games either. First four times we played he beat me soundly even with a handicap. Fourth time I had no handicap. Fifth time I won. And sixth time. And seventh time. His tactical moves were superiors to mine but I could intuitively see the strategic view in ways he simply couldn't. That depressed me for a while because by all rights he should have been winning and not me.
I frequently watch some of them do a really poor job because they are unable to get over the hangup that "more talented person Y" would be able to do it much better, design it more clearly from the start, etc.
When I look at "more talented person Y", sure, they are more talented, but their work is good because of other behaviors (e.g., a breadth of experimentation before locking in one approach) that have nothing to do with their great intuition/vision about the structure of the result.
Now my advice is "don't look around"...
Preoccupation with talent is a trap, for the more and less talented.
Wow, that's a humblebrag taken to the next level.
I am a descendant of fairly strong guys - one grandfather was a rural blacksmith, the other one started as a lumberjack before going to the (still coal powered) railway to coal the engines. I inherited quite a lot of their physique from them, which means that I can do quite good in a gym without trying much.
Yes, that feels unjust. Not that I am depressed about it, but it is definitely something you ponder upon: why this guy who works so much harder than me does not see as much return on his effort?
That traits for fitness are heritable? That is "a thing"? Hmmm, you might be onto something here.
And I am not even surprised, the possibility of governments latching onto this and "streaming" people towards whatever they are found to be gifted at, cannot really be dismissed.
Spot on. Hard work matters, but people stating hard working geniuses as examples without mentioning there are many hardworking individuals without an even close result is just not right.
Leetcode script kiddies get in, jump from project to project, not spending more than a few months at each, make a filthy mess of every codebase, and leave it to the silent but persevering, a.k.a real, talent to clean up the mess, and steward the ship.
You can focus on the serious tech challenges, or you can be boisterous. You can't be both.
edit: "can't be both" == "improbable/competing-factors, not impossible"
There's always a spectrum right? Or I guess you are exaggerating to make a point.
Why not? It's not like both of those are full time efforts.
Towards the end of university I spent my free time honing my skills as an engineer. I debated whether I should spend my free time leetcoding, or developing a fairly complex distributed application (complex, at least for an individual engineer). I could do one, or the other, or both. But doing both would mean degrading the quality of my learning (there are only so many hours in a day). I decided to focus exclusively on the disturbed application.
The lack of leetcoding experience definitely hurt my job search, because plenty of employers will completely refuse to interview you without a high enough score. However, among the interviews I did get, they were very impressed with my experience developing and architecting applications, and it ultimately helped me land a job.
Long story short, every minute I spent leetcoding was a minute I could've been spending improving my skills as an engineer. I have no regrets about my strategy. It left me better positioned in the long term.
So for your choices of learning to improve quality of knowledge or doing what needs to be done to pass leetcode, my choice is to do a little of both. I am studying for the things they may give me on an interview (work samples to complete, 30 minute coding exercises, whiteboard class design etc.) But I am not doing it in a shallow leetcode way where I just want to know enough to pass the interview.
If I am building something akin to the complexity of a given work sample, I want to understand the architecture of what I am handing in, the language aspects of it, how the unit testing works and what to unit test and all of that. To have a deep understanding of it, or at least more than a surface leetcode understanding of it. If I am new to the topic I try to get some grasp of it, move on, and then sometimes I revisit the topic in the future to deepen my understanding of it.
So the immediate ends of a lot of what I do in my spare time is to prepare for the interviews I may have in a year. But one aspect of it are that I will spend a little time if needed to learn things which may not be asked in an interview, but which would let me do a better job at my current job or next job, or even if I want to write a program on my own. Another aspect of it is that I spend the time to try to get a decent enough understanding of it before moving on, not just enough that would pass over the leetcode bar but not into a slightly deeper understanding. So the main aim is passing an interview, but I will take the time out to learn things to improve my work, not just interviewing, and to deepen my knowledge of the subject as well.
It seems weird to me.
Now, part of my time there was massively refactoring a critical service to maximize test coverage, reduce memory footprint, improve reliability, measure new things, make the system more durable, and introduce new features. It was exceptionally serious and difficult, and if I made any mistake then the internet would effective go down.
After the fact, yes, I can be boisterous because I did serious shit without fucking up.
The really valuable skill (from a dollars & cents perspective) is to be able to provide business value to _the business you’re employed at_. That might not transfer anywhere else.
Eg I doubt my skills apply to a young startup- I’m a specialist (ML research), they need a generalist.
If I work at Google on search & get really good at solving political problems related to search, that’s a super valuable skill set _to Google_ but probably not to anyone else. I’d probably get promoted and/or get big bonuses. It also probably means that, _ceteris paribus_, I’m a worse coder, as I’m spending less time focusing on tough coding problems.
I don't know how you get that idea unless you are talking about the handful of C-level positions at tech giants. Otherwise switching your job every few years and increasing salary/position each time is generally the more profitable path than staying at a single company and waiting for promotion.
If you’re not paying your devs substantially more than industry average (like several times more) they’re probably not that abnormally good.
However, it takes more than talent to achieve things in life.
Most successful people in any industry leveraged some talent, with drive, persistence and LUCK to become successful.
- Talent just obfuscates the qualitative attributes that contribute to excellence.
- Individuals are identified as talented usually after they have invested effort.
- Talent is a quick and spurious "explanation" or admittance of unexplained variance.
[1] https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-mundanity-of-excellence-an-...
It comes from the ancient times of rulers and peasants when people actually believed in unspecified innate qualities that differentiate people from each other.
"talent" is so much ingrained into culture that people take its vague existence for granted. I think that "talent" is used as a praise for the purposes of attracting/luring someone to do all the work.
The best models I've seen proposed to explain the correlation of chess memory and chess knowledge/performance attribute the memory strength to the results of experience, rather than the other way around. The aspect of your abilities that led to increased motivation is not direct evidence for the direction of causality. In fact, studies on chess grandmasters suggest that they perform no better than novices on memory for randomized board positions. (Unlikely to be encountered in a game)
Here is an interesting study discussing the recent state of the literature which lends some credence to your ideas.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-017-0768-2
To start with, when most companies say "we only hire top 1% talent" in the context of software development, they don't really mean talent as some sort innate potential, they mostly just mean skill (combined with a bit of potential to become even more skilled).
Further, the idea that most people think talent is one dimensional, static and linear is just mystifying to me. Does anyone actually thinks this? He takes a literal view of "the 1%" and extrapolates that to derive these assumptions. But no one means that literally, it's just a phrase meant to invoke the idea that they are are highly selective how they hire. That this has to be explained is... odd.
The author then repeatedly carps on about how "talent" cannot be quantified and then, somehow, thinks this means that the interview process is meaningless. Um, that skill cannot be quantified is WHY we have the (admittedly flawed) interview process.
If all of these prevalent assumptions about talent are wrong, what does it say about our hiring and management practices?
It doesn't say anything because assumptions are false. And even if talent can be "developed" (here I think he means ability to learn how to improve skills faster), everyone knows the hiring process is flawed. Because, you know, both people and roles are complex and multi-facetted. So hiring is hard. Hopefully practices will improve to become better, but I'm not holding my breath.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism
I think that telling people people that they can achieve _arbitrary_ things through enough effort is just wrong: it sets up unrealistic expectations and makes them blame themselves when things don't work out, because they must not have tried enough. Telling someone who's 5 feet tall as an adult and not particularly athletic that if they just work hard enough they can become a successful Olympic swimmer is not OK.
It's a tough communication problem, because "maybe you can reach this goal if you work really hard and happen to be lucky too" is a much harder concept to communicate and internalize than "you can reach this goal if you just work hard". It's also a tough problem in trying to figure out what expectations ought to be "realistic" for a given child, because of all the biases we bring to such evaluations. So erring somewhat on the side of emphasizing growth mindset can make sense, and should absolutely be done when doing evaluation, but you have to be pretty careful how you communicate the resulting recommendations.
Past that, the unfortunate thing is that Dweck's disciples (and I use the word specifically for its religious connotations) go overboard on the "everything is possible with a growth mindset" thing, in exactly the way that I think is harmful. I see this in a lot of elementary school teachers; they love this book, but end up in the "growth mindset solves everything" trap, at least in their communication.
I should note that unlike many things in that field Dweck's work actually replicates in large pre-registered studies, albeit ones still done by Dweck herself. The effects are quite small on average, but maybe on the margin (i.e. for students who are more likely to doubt themselves for various reasons) might be significant.
That said, I would be happier if someone who is not Dweck were able to reproduce her results, and I have ~0 confidence that "growth mindset as practiced in elementary schools today" is at all useful...
I find the accomplishments people (even young children) want to set out for are mostly reasonable. If you’re wanting to be a Nobel prize winner, mega rich CEO, or be some well regarded author - it’s gonna require a lot of luck. And that should be informed to people that are all about the destination and not the pursuit. There’s no reason to not pursue those things if you want to.
Honestly, I think a growth mindset is amazing for young children. If it wasn’t for people in my childhood having that - even for the shithole I grew up in - I probably wouldn’t have accomplished anywhere near what I have. I had nothing but doubts about myself because I saw no one ever escape the trappings of my surroundings. Yet... I’d get told by some pretty good teachers, “you’re capable of doing anything if you just set your mind to it.” (The kind of growth mindset I was taught)
I see other people severely limiting themselves because they just project whatever societal norms are around into themselves. They assume because they see no one else doing it in their immediate surroundings that it can’t be done. And it’s a shit way to go, dude. People won’t grow with that mindset. It traps them in poverty.
Growth mindset might lead to a few childhood dreams being crushed but who gives a shit. It’s a childhood dream - some kids want to be Goku and there’s no reason to crush that shit so early.
Sounds like he's not interested in what your job entails. Perhaps he should find a job that does something closer to his interests, or perhaps better, kick off a startup that relates to his passions.
For many people, it's hard to be motivated to do something you're not into. Conditions like ADHD can exacerbate this.
You only get one life. Have an honest conversation with him and ask what he really wants to do with it.
Sometimes the fact that there is no pressure is one of the things that makes it enjoyable, and people are rightly resistant to change that.
Is that not one and the same (at least in software)? The so-called "talented" people in the industry were likely just more motivated to learn than their competition.
I thought this mattered, but this mostly leads to more of yourself. When we ignored those factors these didn't seem to matter much for team quality - at least at our company. People find surprising ways to relate to and get along with colleagues. You do get a bigger pond to fish from.
Who's to say wage is a good measure of talent?
I would say circumstance can play a bigger role in setting the wage, more so than actual talent.
For example, a developer working for a company over a long period of time will always creep up the wage scale, a developer with lots of keyword hits on the resume for the latest and greatest framework can always demand a higher pay, niche software skills always pay well, a developer who began work with a startup that then gets bought out by a multi-notational probably hits the jackpot etc. etc.
Just founded NeXT? Well, what you need is a developer with solid experience developing efficient multithreaded virtual memory operating system kernels. Oh look, here’s a project at Carnegie Mellon University doing exactly that. Let’s hire from there. Sorted!
Now we need a solid compiler tool chain fir MacOS. This exciting project at the University of Illinois looks good, let’s hire one of the founders. Bingo!
See, it’s not that hard in theory. You just have to actually know what you’re after, and have the resources to get it. Unfortunately most of us can’t offer top salaries, or the most exciting cutting edge projects that top people will want to work on. We end up trying to hire the top 1% of people who end up applying for jobs at our organisation. That’s a very different problem from hiring a true one percent-er.
> Now we need a solid compiler tool chain fir MacOS. This exciting project at the University of Illinois looks good, let’s hire one of the founders. Bingo!
None of these are garantee of top 1% talent
And sure, there's a factor of luck and physical/mental ability involved as well, but those aren't really the mysterious part of "talent".
I don't know if there's a connection or it was just the people I came across, but another thing that bothered me was that people who subscribed to an innate talent model tended to be useless at evaluating skills. They'd have no idea what to ask, what to expect as an answer, and they'd have no BS detector.
I think a more healthy approach to talent is comparative advantage. You already have a team, and you want to improve it. Even a person who is not better than anyone at any of the relevant skills can improve a team, because it's opportunity cost that matters. The canonical example of this is the CEO who is better at strategy and grammar than his secretary, it still makes sense to have a secretary write the letters.
The reason sports talent is different from most other talent is that you have a limited number of players on the field. It's then a straight up production-over-replacement calculation, whereas most teams in business don't have that constraint.
It also gives you a floor. If I'm writing a c++ system and the junior on the team eats up time being hand-held, that eats into that opportunity cost savings. I suspect this is actually what people mean with "talent" when hiring, they want someone who doesn't necessarily have all the answers, but will behave in a way that doesn't impede the existing producers.
Fun fact: Amazon won't hire you unless your interview panel believes that you're a better fit than 50% of the people already in that role at Amazon.
Is there any evidence for that? The "better-than-average" have to work somewhere, so why should we assume that they change jobs more often? If you are an above-average workplace why should you not be able to retain above-average people?
Growing your team tends to reduce productivity of each person, since each person now needs to spend more time on communication and coordination, and less time on being productive. Depending on the team and the new member, you can end up adding a person and getting a lot more team productivity (great!) or adding a person and losing team productivity. It's not as simple as a sports team, where if you put an extra person on the field, you get a penalty, usually quickly, so the limit is clear; but there's still a limit.
When companies like Leetcode, Hackerrank etc try to quantify programmers, none of the evaluations factor for the intangible aspects. No wonder hiring in software is so utterly broken.
Companies which strive to attract and hire excellent developers, by and large, do. Excellent developers end up (or have the option to, certainly) at these companies by and large.
So it seems that the process sorts things out fine. Sure there are always guys on HN who say "oh I'd do super well at a FAANG if only my interview was a take home test" but I don't think that's actually an indication of a break.
Excellent developers do end up at FAANG due to the competitive nature of the entrance exams. However FAANG are just 5 of the millions of other companies, and not all of the rest can use FAANG techniques to hire the developers. None of these companies offer the money, prestige, and perks that FAANG offer so they should not be cargo-culting their hiring practices.