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jseban commented on Apple Interview – 1995   engineersneedart.com/blog... · Posted by u/iloverss
twawaaay · 3 years ago
I think you have some good understanding of parts of the problem but the ease with which you generalise is dangerous.

Getting from "I have too many bad experiences with highly intelligent, but myopic and immature software developers" to "I just think it's a really bad idea to try to hire 'extra smart' people (..) because it won't work" is pretty poor logic.

I think much better and productive statement would be "Hiring intelligent people is not enough to solve the problem."

It is much more productive because from there you can go to actually discussing what else is needed to make good use of highly intelligent people.

jseban · 3 years ago
What I'm trying to say is: it's a bad idea to hire extra smart individual contributors as a solution to managing complexity, because nobody is smart enough. The cult of genius makes the workplace dysfunctional and inefficient.

That extra intelligence is mostly irrelevant, and sometimes negative.

Managing complexity is done with hierarchy, specialisation and careful organisation of work from accountable managers. You want this organisation to work well, and then you want to hire people who can do an acceptable job and function well within that organisation. And if you are still finding yourself in a chaos of unmanageable complexity, the organisation of the team is to blame.

The hierarchy, specialisation and organisation of the work is not done well enough, and must be fixed. You don't need more horsepower when the steering of your car has broken, that's just going to get you in the ditch faster.

jseban commented on Apple Interview – 1995   engineersneedart.com/blog... · Posted by u/iloverss
twawaaay · 3 years ago
> You are probably in a much bigger need of accountable management

> Your hiring process is not optimised to further business goals,

That's a lot of things you were able to figure out based on my comments.

jseban · 3 years ago
Yeah, I'm speaking in general terms of the software industry, and common hiring processes, which according to your comments you seem to fit into pretty well.

I don't mean to criticise you but rather suggest that the hiring process should focus less on intelligence and coding skills, and try to hire people that have intellect. That can pair judgement with intelligence. That can relate decisions to goals beyond their own personal preferences.

I have too many bad experiences with highly intelligent, but myopic and immature software developers who are left to "self organise" and just end up being lose cannons of raw intelligence, that does much more harm than good.

Software development, is more an organisational problem than a technical one.

The organisation itself is already so vastly complex that no human being can comprehend it, and that's why you have a hierarchy of information and specialisation of roles. Even if your system by some miracle has zero accidental complexity, it's still going to overwhelm even the most intelligent person, just by the amount of essential complexity. So you will need an organisation of hierarchy and/or specialisation to manage this. And the biggest determining factor for how successful you are, is this organisation and how it works as a whole, rather than any individuals superior capacity.

I just think it's a really bad idea to try to hire "extra smart" people to try to solve these issues, because it won't work.

jseban commented on Apple Interview – 1995   engineersneedart.com/blog... · Posted by u/iloverss
twawaaay · 3 years ago
I am not pretending to be unicorn by keeping high hiring standards.

It is a reflection on our strategy. Our strategy is that, long term, is better to have smaller, tight knit community of highly intelligent, capable and motivated people than try to throw masses of lower paid employees at the problem.

We are fighting complexity and having large team of constantly rotating people that never seem to bear responsibility for their decisions is one of the worst things you can do.

I prefer to spend more time on hiring, find people I am satisfied with and then pay them well so that they are not looking to change their job in two years as most IT seems to be doing nowadays. Retention is a hugely underestimated success factor.

jseban · 3 years ago
Highly intelligent, (technically) capable and motivated people are probably not in any way correlated with the amount of complexity you are needing to fight with. And if it is, it's most likely negative.

Lack of intelligence is probably not your problem, the computer genius who swoops in and saves the day only exists in movies. You are probably in a much bigger need of accountable management who actually structures the work and aligns the team by making decisions.

There are plenty of reliable, mature, productive people with great team work and communication skills, who will get rejected because they say that they are actually passionate about playing guitar, not programming, and because they can't solve esoteric programming problems on whiteboards.

Your hiring process is not optimised to further business goals, it's optimised for acting out the big bang theory in the workplace.

jseban commented on Apple Interview – 1995   engineersneedart.com/blog... · Posted by u/iloverss
twawaaay · 3 years ago
No, people were not.

What changed is the demand grew enormously and in response, as in every other business of life, a lot of people who only have passing interest in it got into it because it pays well.

So now you have companies have to sort through huge pile of mediocre candidates. This causes the process to be very noisy, a lot of screwed incentives and a lot of false positives and negatives.

Applicants are now hedging their bets and applying to multiple places means that they are unwilling to spend entire day in each one. And companies (those that do not understand how important hiring is) also have incentives to spend less effort on hiring.

And developers became much more cynical. Partly because of high demand they are aware of. Partly because companies do not treat them well (like not giving raises at a rate their potential salary is appreciating as the market and their experience changes). And partly because new generations are just much more disillusioned.

I had a person recently refuse to come to 2h interview. Apparently it was too much effort. Good riddance and thank you for saving my time.

Good news is that good developers can still easily find a good job wherever they want.

Bad news is that most people are not good developers and they don't even know about it because really good developers are so few and concentrated in relatively few places. In effect, most developers will never have a chance to work with one.

jseban · 3 years ago
> Bad news is that most people are not good developers and they don't even know about it because really good developers are so few and concentrated in relatively few places. In effect, most developers will never have a chance to work with one.

Yeah and having an outstanding skill or performance is not important in an average company/organisation, and will most likely give you only trouble. Larger organisations are risk averse, optimised for stability and longevity. Not short term performance. It's not a sports team.

jseban commented on Apple Interview – 1995   engineersneedart.com/blog... · Posted by u/iloverss
twawaaay · 3 years ago
> telling someone to interview for two hours, having them decide that of all the offers of interviews they had yours was least interesting with the highest barrier to entry, and you deciding they were at fault isn’t going to help you deal with the modern realities of software

But that is not my goal.

My goal is hire as good developers as I can retain.

I don't care about people bitching and moaning that the process is too arduous. Actually, I am happy about it because I can efficiently swipe left on them. If somebody does not care enough to work for us to put in couple of hours of work then they are very likely not a good candidate anyway.

And if they have to apply to a huge number of companies to get a job there is probably some problem with them. I mean... a lot of companies are happy to put a warm body in a chair. If you can't find a job as a developer in this economy then you have to take a serious look at what you are doing wrong.

jseban · 3 years ago
Your goal is to enable your business to make more money, that requires hiring enough competent people that can do the work that needs to be done, to make that money.

Sometimes that work is really not especially interesting, or challenging. Nobody is going to love it, or be passionate about it, and it really doesn't require a person to be more than average in terms of skill, because it's just not that technically difficult.

And that sometimes is the majority of all salaried work, so statistically speaking, that's probably also you and your company.

Why pretend to be a unicorn and only insist on hiring passionate self motivated people who will be a bad fit anyway, and be bored after two weeks.

The hiring process is not for stroking the egos of middle managers who want to feel special.

jseban commented on Hinge and Its Implementation of the Gale–Shapley algorithm   blogs.cornell.edu/info204... · Posted by u/kaashmonee
Arkhaine_kupo · 3 years ago
> I don't think this is universally true

You can easily google it. Women rate looks as the 4th most important attribute in dating. as always, its an average, there are some vain people who only care about looks. They are by no means common or enough to make 95% of men undateable.

> And looks will always win past a certain level

pretty people who are single say the same thing about people with money. People with money say this about younger people. Turns out its never their fault, and its just something unattainble someone else has.

I guess blaming women is easier than working on yourself but that doesn't make it true.

jseban · 3 years ago
> Women rate looks as the 4th most important attribute in dating.

You can't ask women this, see instead who the men are that get the most girls, there's your answer. Actions speak louder than words, and women are infamous for their cognitive dissonance in the field of mating.

> pretty people who are single say the same thing about people with money. People with money say this about younger people. Turns out its never their fault, and its just something unattainble someone else has.

And the young, pretty and rich people don't say anything, because they do in fact get first choice.

jseban commented on Hinge and Its Implementation of the Gale–Shapley algorithm   blogs.cornell.edu/info204... · Posted by u/kaashmonee
BlargMcLarg · 3 years ago
The fertility thing is far worse than that. Modern society is actively teaching women that their value as a partner comes from things which they would normally select men for. Ambition, money, etc. So women are gaining things men don't really care for, while losing the things men do select for. On top, their higher socioeconomic status generally translates into a smaller dating pool, as they select equal or higher socioeconomic men. The surface of the bell curve only grows smaller as you go further.

And the answer to this? Trying to shame men into liking something else instead of being honest and admitting women are sabotaging themselves listening to the "work is life" mantra.

jseban · 3 years ago
> So women are gaining things men don't really care for, while losing the things men do select for. On top, their higher socioeconomic status generally translates into a smaller dating pool, as they select equal or higher socioeconomic men.

Yeah it's as if it's been decided suddenly that men are attracted to highly educated high earning women, which really doesn't work. Men are attracted to the prospect of having children, which means youth and health, and there are very real practical matters that have limits to their flexibility.

jseban commented on Hinge and Its Implementation of the Gale–Shapley algorithm   blogs.cornell.edu/info204... · Posted by u/kaashmonee
baron816 · 3 years ago
Someone should build an app where women have to create an “application” form, and men have to fill it out. If women are the choosy ones, let them be upfront with their choosiness and adjust the level of friction that men have to go through to contact them.
jseban · 3 years ago
It would make sense to just not allow men to swipe first at all, it was an obvious improvement when they only let the women start conversations. I think the issue is it will lower engagement.
jseban commented on Hinge and Its Implementation of the Gale–Shapley algorithm   blogs.cornell.edu/info204... · Posted by u/kaashmonee
DeathArrow · 3 years ago
>Ask why.

Why?

jseban · 3 years ago
Because of the biological asymmetry between the sexes. A man can have thousands of children, and women can only have a small amount. It's what drives natural selection and evolution of the species. Some part of the men are supposed to get rejected.
jseban commented on Hinge and Its Implementation of the Gale–Shapley algorithm   blogs.cornell.edu/info204... · Posted by u/kaashmonee
armchairhacker · 3 years ago
Dating apps are so bad, the ratio of men:women matches would impress a red-pilled 4channer.

Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life.

People say “the 20% top men get 80% of matches” but it’s worse than that. The 20% top men may get something reasonable like 3-4 matches a day, but your average women is getting something crazy like 1 match every 15 minutes.

Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes. And most women get extremely choosy and swipe right on only the super handsome nearly-perfect men, but you can’t even blame them when they have literally 1,000 matches.

On top of that, the bios suck. Even on Hinge. You can’t base someone off of 6 pictures and 3 quotes. If you’re not judging them on plain attractiveness / photogenics, you’re judging them on one random quote or minor character trait you relate to.

Online dating sucks. You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women, you can learn more about people then their favorite vacation spots, and the people have a lot more time to learn more about you too.

Or, you can try meeting people online but not in a surface-level dating-oriented site. Plenty of people formed couples through discord or their favorite video games. Unfortunately my understanding is that most online places are still male-dominated, but hopefully that’s changing as we are becoming a more tech-oriented and women-inclusive society.

jseban · 3 years ago
Dating after the online part also sucks, where you pretend to be so busy that you can only meet once a week and only on weekdays, and you can never answer a message in under 24 hours. Don't really see how two people can start to like each other when it's so standoffish.

Who has every hour of their weekend booked? Who doesn't have two minutes to look at their phone in a whole day? It's such bullshit, this game is so exhausting and just zaps out any positive energy you get during a date.

u/jseban

KarmaCake day886December 19, 2010View Original