eszed (u/eszed) - Readit News

eszed commented on Flunking my Anthropic interview again taylor.town/flunking-anth... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

incone123 · a day ago

I once got an emergency call to a theatre where a fight scene mishap left an actress punched out cold. There's less opportunity for harm in entertainment relative to medicine but it does happen sometimes.

eszed · 20 hours ago

You're right, and oh my god: don't get me started on the abysmal safety record of theatres, particularly towards the non-union end of the scale. I never got a fight director credential, but I was competent, and served as fight captain on any number of shows. 1.) Unarmed fights are the most dangerous type of scene, but also the most likely to be treated cavalierly by people who don't know any better. 2.) There are safe ways to do (just about) everything. A company that can't afford to hire a qualified fight director shouldn't stage fight scenes. Period. End of story.

I've literally walked out of shows (as an audience member) where it's been clear that the actors are doing unsafe things, because I didn't want to see happen what you showed up to. Thanks for being there, and I hope that woman was OK.

eszed commented on Flunking my Anthropic interview again taylor.town/flunking-anth... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

latexr · a day ago

> I made it to 40 before I sold out.

Do you mean you sold out in the arts or in the sense that you changed careers? If the former, I’d be curious to hear (well, read) the story since that’s not an admission one typically encounters.

eszed · 20 hours ago

I changed careers. Wrote a bit about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44699388

I never met a professional with a conceptual category of "selling out" within the industry. Scraping together any kind of living in the arts is a massive struggle, so everyone takes "money jobs" when they can get them. During my 10 or 12 years as a working actor I had two consecutive years during which my sole income was from performing, and maybe a couple of other other five or six month periods where I was able to drop restaurant (or whatever other) gigs for a tour. This was in the early-'oughts, and I'd have to look at my social security records to be sure, but my income during those years was somewhere around $30k. I was single, and really, really good at being poor.

By the way, that's like a 98th percentile result for an actor. Most people never come close to making a living, however meagre.

There's an old, old interview (maybe Michael Parkinson? Don't remember) with Joss Ackland - a wonderful mid-twentieth century British character actor, on stage and screen - where the interviewer asks him why the hell he did some crappy science fiction film, and Ackland says something like "that was 1962? Oh, yes. Well, my mother needed a new kitchen." No actor will ever fault him for that!

What does disappoint me is seeing actors with tremendous talent who take nothing but money jobs. I get why they do it - especially for the ones at the top of the commercial heap it'd be awfully hard to say 'no' to an easy gig that comes with a boatload of cash - but I can't help but feel sad that I'll never get to see them working at their best.

Even so, my response when I see a truly bad film is generally a shrug: "a lot of actors [and associated professionals / craft services] got paid." The artists among them will learn from even that experience, and many (many many) among them will invest that income back into doing work that they believe in.

eszed commented on Flunking my Anthropic interview again taylor.town/flunking-anth... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

dreamcompiler · a day ago

I'm a computer engineer, EMT, and firefighter. I have scooped up brain matter from hot asphalt and run into burning buildings (without even getting paid for it). People ask me how I can do this. I dunno. Training and experience I guess. Doesn't bother me.

But the idea of standing on a stage pretending to be someone else fills me with sheer terror. Even worse would be trying out for that job 100 times and getting rejected every time.

I don't know how actors do it. My hat's off to you.

eszed · a day ago

It's all a matter of perspective. My uncle once brought his kids to see a big show I was in, and afterwards said just what you did. I looked at him, genuinely surprised, and said something like "dude, you're a surgeon. If I screw up at work 2,000 people laugh at me, and forget about it five minutes later; if you screw up at work, someone dies. You really think I should be the one feeling nervous?"

You're right about training and experience, though. I screwed up on stage (in loads of tiny ways, not usually perceptible to anyone but me) every time I ever stepped onto one, and in big ways lots and lots of times as well. But, you know, I always knew that I (with my castmates' help) would get out of it. Failure is inevitable, and it doesn't matter. In fact, if you haven't failed somehow, in at least some small way, then you either don't know what you're doing, or you aren't trying hard enough to succeed.

Also, when I was training young actors I always told them that they will never experience such unconditional love as when they first step in front of an audience. Those people have given at least their time and maybe their money to see you - don't you think they want you to succeed? They're rooting for you, none more so.

To bring this back to the larger subject of the thread, I think all of that's also true of every job interview any of us will ever attend, or conference paper we'll ever deliver. It'll never be perfect, and that's just fine.

eszed commented on Flunking my Anthropic interview again taylor.town/flunking-anth... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

ip26 · 2 days ago

It's never personal

You never screened candidates who couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper bag?

eszed · a day ago

Of course I have. I'm thinking of a couple of them right now, and I admire the hell out of them: it took courage to get up there and do what they did. I wasn't going to cast them in that show, right then, but within the limits of the time available I did my best to help them improve. I hoped they did, and I wished them nothing but the best.

I'm glad you brought that up, because it might be the exception that proves the rule. Those auditions did feel more personal, but it was entirely benign: I was rooting for them to succeed, and really felt for them when it became obvious (especially to them) that they had not.

Maybe it's not like that with other fields, or other companies, or other people - but if not, then that's not somewhere anyone should have to work. There's no incompatibility between high standards and human decency.

eszed commented on Flunking my Anthropic interview again taylor.town/flunking-anth... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

wjrb · 2 days ago

Hey, my first "career" was also in theater!

Strong agreement. I can confirm for other readers that the day I realized this --- "Oh, rejection means nothing!" --- was a weird day. It takes a weight off.

And it is true across every other field. There are way more factors external to the "you" of the decision, and they're given more weight than the "you" of the decision. This is one of those cases where you only need to experience the "other side of the table" once for it to click.

Companies that are more humane in their hiring practices (even just actually send a rejection email vs. ghosting) deserve a bit of credit, because caring for the applicant is not a KPI.

eszed · 2 days ago

Hey! Good to meet a fellow artist. I made it to 40 before I sold out. You?

One thing outsiders don't understand is that, for actors, auditioning IS the job. Getting cast, and working on a show, is a joy (some more than others, of course!), but the rest of your life is nothing, nothing but looking for work.

The were two things that made that "it's all cool" shift happen for me. The first is that once I'd been in the industry long enough I could pretty much guarantee that when I went in for an audition I'd see someone I knew, or at least with whom I had an immediate second-degree connection. Auditions stopped being a grind, or mainly about courting rejection - instead, they became an opportunity to hang out with some cool people for a while. I started looking forward to them!

The second was realizing that choosing and performing my audition pieces was the only time that I was in complete control. No one was telling me what to do or how to do it: I could make my own choices, and take whatever creative risks I wanted.

I think both of those approaches made me a much better auditionee than most. My batting average was a lot higher than most of my peers - even some that I thought were better actors.

I don't know how well those insights generalize. I've never (thank god!) had to do leet-code, but I'd hope that (though maybe only in a second screening?) taking a creative approach - if you can talk about it sensibly, and pivot if it doesn't ultimately work - would impress fellow engineers. I strongly believe that adopting a "what can I learn from this experience, and these people?" mindset is a good way to reduce the pressure you'd otherwise put on yourself.

eszed commented on Flunking my Anthropic interview again taylor.town/flunking-anth... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

jp57 · 2 days ago

One great piece of advice an informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection.

That is to say that you cannot draw any conclusions about yourself or your interviewing technique or your skills or anything from the single accept==0 bit that you typically get back. There are so many reasons that a candidate might get rejected that have nothing to do with one's individual performance in the interview or application process.

Having been on the hiring side of the interview table now many more times than on the seeking side, I can say that this is totally true.

One of the biggest misconceptions I see from job seekers, especially younger ones, is to equate a job interview to a test at school, assuming that there is some objective bar and if you pass it then you must be hired. It's simply not true. Frequently more than one good applicant applies for a single open role, and the hiring team has to choose among them. In that case, you could "pass" and still not get the job and the only reason is that the hiring team liked someone else better.

I can only think of one instance where we had two great candidates for one role and management found a way to open another role so we could hire both. In a few other cases, we had people whom we liked but didn't choose and we forwarded their resumes to other teams who had open roles we thought would fit, but most of the time it's just, "sorry."

eszed · 2 days ago

This. I've hired in a number of roles, in several industries, and what they've all had in common is that rejection is never personal.

My first career was in theatre, which a) is (or at least was, back in the day?) much more competitive than tech - par was one callback (ie, second screening) per 100 auditions, and one casting per 10 callbacks; and b) is genuinely, deeply vulnerable - you have to bring your whole self into your work, in a way that you don't in any other field.

It's still never personal, and actors who don't develop thick skins wash out quickly.

I once auditioned three rounds for Romeo, at a company I really liked, and thought I'd killed it. I didn't get the role, and was pretty bummed (particularly since - actors are nothing but petty - I didn't much like the performance by the guy who did). Six months later the casting director button-holed me after seeing another show I was in, and told me I'd been their first choice, and he was sorry they'd not been able to cast me. The trouble was, he said, their only good choice for Juliette was at least a foot shorter than I am, and there was no way that wouldn't have looked awkward.

It's never personal.

Furthermore, that "failed" audition directly led to two later jobs, and I think indirectly to a third. Having a good interview, even in a situation where you don't achieve the immediate goal, can only be good for you - both by developing your own skills, and for creating a reputation for competence within your industry.

eszed commented on How to make things slower so they go faster gojiberries.io/how-to-mak... · Posted by u/neehao

bluedino · 6 days ago

> "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast."

Common to hear this in auto racing and probably a lot of other fields

eszed · 6 days ago

Yeah, the phrase goes back at least to Bill Miliken's monumental Race Car Vehicle Dynamics, where I first encountered it. The specific idea is that going slow(er) into a corner allows you to hit the apex precisely, optimally rotate the car, and get on the power sooner, which gets you a higher exit speed, which compounds all the way to the next corner. It's what fast drivers have done - probably since racing was done with horses - but it's counter-intuitive to beginners.

eszed commented on The theory and practice of selling the Aga cooker (1935) [pdf] comeadwithus.wordpress.co... · Posted by u/phpnode

lostlogin · 8 days ago

> electric heat would have been far more expensive.

Surely that’s only true with a resistive heater? Heat pumps must more more efficient than burning oil.

eszed · 6 days ago

Probably, now? This was a while ago, when heat pumps weren't widely available.

eszed commented on The theory and practice of selling the Aga cooker (1935) [pdf] comeadwithus.wordpress.co... · Posted by u/phpnode

s_dev · 8 days ago

I would say it's a rural item. Plenty of farming households across the British and Irish isles would have them. Not all farmers are not wealthy nor come from old money.

You would throw wet laundry on top of them either and overnight they would dry. They have multiple purposes but ultimately a source of heat that is effcient for long grey wet winters presented by the Atlantic temperate climate.

eszed · 8 days ago

Yes, indeed. In my (at the time) sister-in-law's 17th c. two-up two-down stone cottage an oil-fired Aga was, in fact, the sensible choice. Not to say running it wasn't costly, but electric heat would have been far more expensive. It was also lovely to cook with. Put the drying rack in front of it, and clothes dried so thoroughly they didn't mildew after you put them away; also, you could throw your shoes into the low oven before you went out (amazing!), and again after you came in to get them dry.

My then-partner and I lived in an even older house, whose only sources of heat were a defective boiler and a coal-burning grate in the (genuinely medieval) fireplace in the living room. Our experience was, shall we say, authentic to the time-period in which it was built.

People underestimate how miserable the British climate is in winter, and how energy-intensive those old homes are to heat. An Aga wasn't invented as a status symbol, but as a practical item for a particular circumstance. Moving it outside of its original context is what changes its meaning.

eszed commented on I Hacked India's Biggest Dating App (They Offered Me a $100 Gift Card) bobdahacker.com/blog/indi... · Posted by u/BobDaHacker

eszed · 11 days ago

Obviously the security thing is terrible, but this...

> Want to match two random people? Just swipe right for both of them.

... this could be cool! I kinda think some dating app should add a rate-limited (and probably paid-for) Matchmaking Mode. What could go wrong?