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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
We had tiered classes when I was a kid. Stupid, normal, smart. They weren't called that, but that was basically what was going on. I was put in slow math classes and still my grades were poor. My teachers, my parents and even myself, we were all convinced the subject was beyond me. I had no talent for it.
As I grew older, this didn't sit right with me. By high school I switched my focus to math and science. By college I had chosen engineering, eventually taking all your typical undergrad math classes: differential equations, linear algebra, vector calculus and so on.
I'm still terrible at math. It never got easier. Every step I took I found to be very difficult. I got by with work ethic and sacrifice. I could have easily given up at any point along they way. Why didn't I? Not sure. Maybe I was fueled by resentment.
We need to be careful when we start telling people what they're not good at. We need to be careful when using terms like "talent". Many of us would like to quickly quantify cognitive ability, tie it to our genetics and be done with it. It's easy. But perhaps that's the problem, it's easy.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
People are different; talents exist. But of course its a seed, and must grow to something.
My older niece was doing a simple puzzle as a toddler - just 7 or 8 pieces of wood in a frame. She was struggling, which is normal at that age.
Her younger sister on the couch, maybe 1, was watching. After a couple of minutes she sighed, crawled to the edge of the couch, slithered off, crawled over to the puzzle. Picked up each piece and put it in its place, perfectly. Crawled back to the couch, pulled herself up and rolled back onto her blanket.
Today she is a top-notch architect. A talented one.
I used to believe in the thesis that "all are almost equal, only nurturing accounts for differences in talents". After reading various cases in the works of the late Dr. Oliver Sacks, nature (parents/genetics) also matters.
However, this belief that nature matters can bring in negative consequences for many people who look for ordinary jobs. For instance, not every programming job doesn't need a genius; not every well-paid job doesn't need a genius. Once companies start looking for geniuses in the name of tough interviews for average well-paid jobs, it can create problems for the majority of non-geniuses.
This echoes something I've been thinking a lot on recently. It's not just 'not every well-paid job'. It is quite literally most every well-paid job doesn't need a genius. A step further: most well-paid jobs will be impeded by a genius.
Geniuses aren't fun, awesome, let-em-loose-and-profit machines. They're people. Worse, they're necessarily weird people. While we need to cultivate them and give them the resources they need, optimizing society for geniuses would make a society most don't want to live in. Creating narratives where you are a rockstar-whatever or failure only sets us up for failure.
The message is be yourself. The message is that if you are a weird, quirky, feeling-left-out genius, that's ok. If you aren't, well, that's just normal.
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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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Mike Tyson had an incredible amount of talent and great teachers.
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.
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.
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 :)
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
As I grew older, this didn't sit right with me. By high school I switched my focus to math and science. By college I had chosen engineering, eventually taking all your typical undergrad math classes: differential equations, linear algebra, vector calculus and so on.
I'm still terrible at math. It never got easier. Every step I took I found to be very difficult. I got by with work ethic and sacrifice. I could have easily given up at any point along they way. Why didn't I? Not sure. Maybe I was fueled by resentment.
We need to be careful when we start telling people what they're not good at. We need to be careful when using terms like "talent". Many of us would like to quickly quantify cognitive ability, tie it to our genetics and be done with it. It's easy. But perhaps that's the problem, it's easy.
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.
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.
If you’re not paying your devs substantially more than industry average (like several times more) they’re probably not that abnormally good.
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
My older niece was doing a simple puzzle as a toddler - just 7 or 8 pieces of wood in a frame. She was struggling, which is normal at that age.
Her younger sister on the couch, maybe 1, was watching. After a couple of minutes she sighed, crawled to the edge of the couch, slithered off, crawled over to the puzzle. Picked up each piece and put it in its place, perfectly. Crawled back to the couch, pulled herself up and rolled back onto her blanket.
Today she is a top-notch architect. A talented one.
However, this belief that nature matters can bring in negative consequences for many people who look for ordinary jobs. For instance, not every programming job doesn't need a genius; not every well-paid job doesn't need a genius. Once companies start looking for geniuses in the name of tough interviews for average well-paid jobs, it can create problems for the majority of non-geniuses.
This echoes something I've been thinking a lot on recently. It's not just 'not every well-paid job'. It is quite literally most every well-paid job doesn't need a genius. A step further: most well-paid jobs will be impeded by a genius.
Geniuses aren't fun, awesome, let-em-loose-and-profit machines. They're people. Worse, they're necessarily weird people. While we need to cultivate them and give them the resources they need, optimizing society for geniuses would make a society most don't want to live in. Creating narratives where you are a rockstar-whatever or failure only sets us up for failure.
The message is be yourself. The message is that if you are a weird, quirky, feeling-left-out genius, that's ok. If you aren't, well, that's just normal.
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.