13 ms·

Talent Is Largely a Myth

161 points by rayrey 6y ago

jussij 6y ago
> 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.
simonh 6y ago
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.
- nradov 6y ago
  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.
- ccortes 6y ago
  > 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! None of these are garantee of top 1% talent
- nottorp 6y ago
  Except most good developers aren't into exhibitionism.
elric 6y ago
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".
lordnacho 6y ago
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.
- slumdev 6y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    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.
    - 6y ago
FlyingSnake 6y ago
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.
- xyzelement 6y ago
  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.
  - FlyingSnake 6y ago
    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.
phenkdo 6y ago
This seems to be an exemplar of "what we wish were true" conclusion.
rvn1045 6y ago
One point that people don’t understand is that your body and mind can change dramatically through training. For example you can be a skinny guy but once you start lifting weights everyday your body goes through dramatic changes and you can have step function increases in personal ability. New neural connections and motor patterns get formed because of intensity. But it’s hard to say how you personally will respond to the training stimulus. Initial talent in anything is not indicoative of future mastery it’s more about how responsive your nervous system is to prolonged effort and Training. How stimulatable are you?
pgsimp 6y ago
The article seems to confuse several things. For example, companies not having a universal test for talent does not imply talent does not exist. The Polgar sisters are interesting. However, their parents were very intelligent, so it is unknown if the same approach would also work for children of "less intelligent" parents (if such a thing exists, as supposedly we can't measure it). And studies in that line of thing seem to point to children starting a specialty at an early age (see Ericsson's book "Peak"). So unless you can repeat the experiment with some older people (make somebody a chess genius at age 30 who has never played chess before), it doesn't really matter what part is nature and what part is nurture. You still have people with different talents applying for your jobs. I mean the Polgar sisters ARE better at chess than other people, and there probably isn't an easy way to hire somebody as a chess player and bring them to the level of the sisters.
- babesh 6y ago
  There have been studies done (but not at extreme levels). They are with identical twins separated at birth and also with comparisons between adopted vs genetic children. They definitely show a large nature component in that the identical twins tend to do more similarly. Nature seems to be a good deal greater than 50%. However, as a society, we need to stop assigning the value to a person to their ability whether natural or developed. We also need to ok that there are some people that are better than others at certain things whether natural or developed.
  - babesh 6y ago
    We also need to provide more equal opportunities.
    - pgsimp 6y ago
      What is an equal opportunity?
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
      The word 'equal' distracts people from providing what people need. What people need is access to appropriate opportunities, opportunities that they can make use of. That's difficult for society because it sometimes costs more than it is 'worth' when worth is measured in money.
treyfitty 6y ago
I think hiring in the US is too broken to acknowledge that it’s an unsustainable subscription to ageism in the workplace. For one, as technology begins to replace “labor,” where labor is defined as human inputs to achieve a product, companies are also caught in a situation that allows them to have their cake and eat it to. They want to hire people with the skill sets already and they want to hire exceptional “talent.” However, a reasonable person can see immediately how unsustainable this is- you’re dedicating your workforce to always know the newest technology and without dedicated training, this is only achieved by hiring fresh kids out of college. Call me cynical, but I always resented the modern corporate mentality of seeking the best without taking the initiative to invest in training and development.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I’ve not generally found that fresh college grads know the newest technology. If anything, many of them were taught impractical languages and all were taught impractical constraints imposed by the problem set plus one or two short project format of college courses. If I picked a random 35, 40, or 50 year old practicing programmer, I’d bet that they know wildly more about practical, day-to-day programming than a 21 year-old whiz from a top 10 comp sci program.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  You are blaming things on a class (or perceived class, young and old), when in reality the culprit is scale. At scale, there will always be lots of good people that know exactly what you need them to know. The only part about all of this that will suck is if we don’t have enough companies to keep this a liquid as fuck market. As for the original topic, again, at scale talent is not a large enough multiple to be noticeable. We are entering, or already entered industrial scale computing. We will absolutely be cogs in the machine and will look back in wonder how this small community once lauded the notion of a 10x developer. Where does this hurt? The same place it hurts in love. That for a brief moment to think you were special to someone somewhere is just, ugh, rough.
- beckingz 6y ago
  Companies like buying 'talent' on the spot market. This gets expensive for some specialist tech areas.
vlovich123 6y ago
> Anyway, if we accept that intelligence is adaptive it should be clear any measurement of current skill is less interesting than the adaptive potential of the individual It’s always been obvious to me that it’s both but adaptivity naturally fades with age. Someone who hasn’t practiced a skill until their 30s is less likely to obtain success at the highest levels. That’s why elite mathematicians are famously said to hit their peak by that time but those people have also generally been practicing math from the earliest age (you can see this on the physical side with limberness and dexterity). I suspect that adaptivity itself starts to fade with age (or at least specializes) because you stop doing it as much if you pursue mastery as mastery often can either mean deep study of 1 field (likely limited to no adaptivity) or related sub fields (some cross adaptivity of related concepts). It’s also likely an exponential curve. So someone who’s been at a skill for a long time, even if they’re learning slowly, might be better anyway than someone who’s extremely quick learner but is starting from way further back (ie potentially a hire in the future once they’ve realized some potential). Interviews can give you only a sense of someone’s level now, but potential doesn’t have a measure right now (beyond a vague “I can have an intelligent conversation with this person about a problem neither of us have tackled yet”). Interviews also measure things other than practical skill.
cryptica 6y ago
Talent is real but software companies are useless at selecting for it. Perhaps they're not actually interested in talent. They don't want talented developers, they want compliant employees who will do exactly what their superior tells them to do no matter what the ethical implications are. I'm a >10x developer in the sense that I've produced better, more reliable, more scalable systems on my own than a typical team of 10+ senior developers working at a large company in the same amount of time. But even that's trivializing it because it would be impossible for that team to match the quality of my work no matter how much time you gave them. That said, I think most people could become a 10x or even 100x developer if they wanted and worked hard, but the problem is that there is no motivation for anyone to do it because companies don't want to hire them anyway. Most people only do things for money so they're not going to waste energy on trying to achieve mastery of the subject. If anything, it's more profitable to work slow and increase the system's complexity to give yourself more work. Making yourself just competent enough to convince your idiot boss to let you keep your job but not so competent that you ever run out of things to fix. Nobody cares about who the best developers in the world are... On the other hand, everybody in the world is interested to know who is the best at kicking a ball inside a net, hitting a ball with a stick, who can jump the highest with the help of a really long stick, ... The closest attempts at identifying coding talent are hackathons but they're a joke because 2 days is not enough time to judge someone's talent. Coding is more like a marathon; unless you're a really good developer yourself, it will take years to evaluate someone's skill. Unfortuantely, big companies have hardly any good developers.
eric_cartman 6y ago
Although there's much talk about hiring processes being completely off I have yet to hear about anyone being happy with hiring people at random. I think terms like talent acquisition, head of talent have little to do with the idea of natural aptitude. It's just a fancy sounding term, likely a temporary trend. Similarly, we have science in data science, but don't say software science for software engineering. I don't think the nurture argument and the Mozart example apply well for hiring. Often a team must be staffed as soon as possible. Nurturing a talent for year doesn't seem like a good way to go. As for recognizing talent in hiring, some companies are doing great with internships - take in students based on their talents and give them full time offers if there's potential. First years of everyone's career are a nurture phase for their talent. When hiring for a senior role - you don't want someone who will become senior in 5 years, you want them to have experience now. In that case they have to have shown their raw talent elsewhere, otherwise you don't need them by definition of senior.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
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.
- raincom 6y ago
  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.
  - musingsole 6y ago
    > every well-paid job doesn't need a genius 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.
karmakaze 6y ago
> One of the repeating motifs of recruiting in the software industry are mantras of “talent”: “We recruit the best talent”, “talent attracts talent”, “we value talent” and so on. As far as I can tell, it's using the word 'talent' because it's flattering and presumably effective. Really, it mostly means skilled. The better employers and their recruiters look for applicants that are highly skilled in something related, and shows an ability and eagerness to learn. The depth to which they've achieve success would be my proxy for their talent. Whether innate or learned doesn't factor much into it. The only thing to watch for is if they spent their entire career doing one thing, even done well might show a lack of flexibility or interest in new things.
GizmoSwan 6y ago
Yes, don't you know: Einstein could have been the best ballet dancer! Michael Phelps could have been the next Tesla! .... NOT Talent is not specific at birth but it has direction. Certain types of processing are more natural for certain brains and the outcomes are random given the opportunities to master a certain skill. Talent and interest go hand in hand. The interest is the driver but it won't exist without the processing ability and opportunity.
pojzon 6y ago
> A genius is not born but is educated and trained….When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius. When opinion is worth more than tens of years of empirical evidence. What a stupid piece of wasted storage (even few kb is a waste).
gnzoidberg 6y ago
Oh please. Why so many people don't want to acknowledge there are such things as intelligence, talent or the so called 10x developers? Just accept it.
- mathgladiator 6y ago
  It has to do with equity, and the narrative is that if everyone had opportunity then things would be better. This the beauty and the paradox of diversity. It's great that we have such a wide array of possible activities to excel at, but it's a tragedy that not all activities are well rewarded by "the system". A great tragedy is the sheer number of activities can cause some people to shuffle between them until they find the one they may have any hope of excelling at (assuming it is even possible or if they have the energy to do it by the time they find it).
deedubaya 6y ago
I wonder if there is a correlation between commenters here who are critical of the article and also consider themselves talented?
- marcinzm 6y ago
  I'd argue that talented and trained people in a field often see how big the gulf is while those who aren't talented and trained underestimate the gulf. Essentially the Dunning–Kruger effect.
WalterBright 6y ago
To be the best at something, you'll need talent. Fortunately, very very few endeavors in life require being the best. Being good is good enough, and is attainable by most everyone with directed effort and practice.
ryandrake 6y ago
Funny how the conclusion that someone is "talented" or "naturally" good at something is always observed in retrospect. It's a mystical attribute we bestow on people after we see them excelling at something. You'd think, if talent was a real physical phenomenon, you'd be able to identify and measure it before it manifests in a skill, and use that measurement to predict future success at that skill, but it never happens this way. When we say someone is talented, we're often overlooking the enormous amount of focus and practice the person did in order to reach their level, and instead just declaring that something supernatural was the cause. I'm a pretty good programmer. I didn't get that way because of some supernatural force or mystical spirit. I wasn't born knowing how to program. But I did practice over and over and over from a young age, spending tens of thousands of hours on it. If someone told me I was just naturally talented, I'd take it as an insult--it totally ignores the amount of hard work and practice I put into the skill.
- centimeter 6y ago
  > you'd be able to identify and measure it before it manifests in a skill We actually have a pretty high degree of predictive power here using genetic testing, and we’ve only just started enumerating these predictors. > the enormous amount of focus Available focus is genetically predicted. > I'm a pretty good programmer. I didn't get that way because of some supernatural force or mystical spirit Genetics aren’t supernatural or mystical. > I wasn't born knowing how to program. You were born with some traits that made you (on expectation) better or worse at it.
  - jhardy54 6y ago
    As usual: it isn't completely natureo or nurture -- it's both.
    - centimeter 6y ago
      Adult intelligence (g, IQ, whatever) (which predicts most of the things we’re taking about) is thought to be about 70-90% genetically heritable. Most of the rest isn’t known (maybe effectively random).
jariel 6y ago
The author immediately confuses 'latent talent' in the general sense, with companies attempt to acquire 'talent' - which are separate things. 'Latent Talent' for special activities, probably does exist, while mastery also necessitates love and labour. 'Hiring Talent' is another thing entirely. You're looking for smart, creative, hard working people who 'accomplish things' and 'get along' and who hopefully have a depth of knowledge. Often this comes from a mix of curiosity, compulsion, raw intelligence, some kind of personality that works, and a lot of hours focused on a variety of things. 'Great Devs' do not have to be super talented in the 'Chess Master' sense, and don't have to be brilliant white boarders, or algorithm designers. It's hard to find but generally you actually do 'know it when you see it'. There's no doubt. You meet a dude who's been coding for a long time, likes to hack on stuff, is really quite familiar in 2-3 core languages, lots of curiosity about the discipline, all the right idioms, can code fairly quickly, see the essence of big problems etc.. In a nutshell 'the developer we all think we ought to be'. They exist, they're just not that common.
chrsw 6y ago
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.
nradov 6y ago
Malcolm Gladwell made the same point back in 2002 with "The Talent Myth". McKinsey & Company helped Enron find the most "talented" employees. It didn't work. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth/amp https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myt...
- Terretta 6y ago
  McKinsey helped them find the most talented — at something else.
pixel_tracing 6y ago
Explain prodigies who excel musically then? This article ignores a lot of factual evidence for talent.
cambalache 6y ago
"Talent is a myth" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87_5I7kRuYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87_5I7kRuYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6ZUeQv2yFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6ZUeQv2yFQ Thank you your honor.
rayiner 6y ago
This post has aged poorly as Tom Brady wins his 7th Super Bowl, in his first year with a new team.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
Companies don't care about theoretical definitions of talent (which for that matter this author fails to provide either, despite tying themselves up in knots to somehow try and discredit the notion of it). Companies do care about performance / output, and anyone who works in a group setting can see that there is often a clear difference in this metric for people, and for many people this difference is consistent (it's not a matter of having high days or low days, their highs are consistently high or above average). In my current team of 8 engineers, 2 are clearly way above average in their overall performance and output. They pay attention to detail, they actually think through their designs, they care about code quality, they are diligent in code reviews (while others mostly just rubber stamp each other's shitty code) and hold each other accountable, they are useful sounding boards for design discussions while the others just nod along, and they are generally proactive with finding bugs and fixing them. As a manager, I want more of these people on my team, except there is just no way to actually find this out by interviewing. All these people did similarly well in their interviews, and in fact one of the so-called 10x candidates did less well, because they are a bit more polite in nature, that causes them to sound non-committal at times. The only way thing works is a direct testimonial from someone who has worked with them, but this is not scalable, and these days we are told we shouldn't rely on that anyway as it favors candidates with 'networks' and disfavors candidates from underrepresented minorities. References rarely talk ill about a candidate, but when you ask a reference about a good candidate, they literally start gushing with praise, while for the average or mediocre ones they say generic things and are relatively muted in their praise. Many industries work this way. In the legal industry, for example, interviews are mostly perfunctory / nominal, because they work through a chain of strong recommendations. Of course, the flip side of that is that it is extremely credentialist. The Tech industry is the opposite. Most generally smart people can get in by doing a few hundred hours of Leetcode but you have no idea how they will actually be on their jobs.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  Fully agreed. My model of engineering productivity (wrt specific tasks like hiring and working with colleagues) has a pretty large coefficient on individual talent, but I was looking to learn from a dissenting view. Unfortunately, while the article is pretty well-written, it's comprised of naked assertion after assertion, with no attempt at justifying them. Not to mention the non sequiturs: even if you accept that we're born blank slates and anyone can be nurtured to any level of (non-physical) achievement, that's only relevant to hiring if companies were buying infants and grooming them for their precise employee needs they'd need in 20 years. In reality, timing matters, and someone who can't be as productive today but will blossom into a productive flower given enough time carries higher costs and higher risks to the employer than someone who meets the mark on day one. In fact, I'd personally call this explore/exploit trade-off the defining struggle of my career: implicit negotiations with my employer over how much unprofitable education they're they're willing to implicitly give me (by allowing me to work on things relatively far from my competency) in exchange for doing work I'm already highly-skilled at (and often bored by), all while compensating me well. I hate how mean-spirited this inevitably sounds, but so much of the discussion around talent's role in engineering that I've seen (largely on HN) falls apart upon the slightest scrutiny and I can't shake the feeling that I'm just dealing with a mountain of cope. I firmly believe that talent isn't everything, and further that there are many who overstate the innateness and immutability of "talent". But "talent isn't everything" is leagues away from "talent doesn't exist", and lazy analysis doesn't justify lazy analysis in the opposite direction.
SunlightEdge 6y ago
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet here is the role of luck in life. I've worked with some people who have been laughably bad and yet have amazingly been promoted as the senior boss while technically brilliant was a terrible judge of character. The 'laughably bad' guys job was so cushy he's still there 5 years later. I've seen other brilliant guys not be promoted when they worked hard and totally deserved it while an incompetent other person got the job instead. Luck is very under appreciated for how far people can go in corporations.
FrozenVoid 6y ago
I'm of the opinion that talent is specialized and misplaced for most jobs(Talented people work at jobs that don't allow their full potential, like e.g. software engineers working to optimize ad exposure - that not being their specialization).
Guest42 6y ago
I think a more accurate title would be something along the lines of “Hiring the most talented is a difficult prospect.”
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
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.
- jm__87 6y ago
  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.
- jchw 6y ago
  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.)
  - atleta 6y ago
    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". See: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliability_and_validity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabil... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r
predaking 6y ago
Anyone have an idea of where the self-reported salary chart in the article is from?
tiagobraw 6y ago
“talent is just pursued interest” Bob Ross
- corysama 6y ago
  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.
  - retsibsi 6y ago
    The causation flows the other way too. You're more likely to develop and sustain an interest in something that you're naturally good at.
Spooky23 6y ago
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.
Swizec 6y ago
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.
- jackcviers3 6y ago
  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.
  - 6y ago
yudlejoza 6y ago
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"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mathgladiator 6y ago
  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.
- volume 6y ago
  > You can focus on the serious tech challenges, or you can be boisterous. You can't be both. There's always a spectrum right? Or I guess you are exaggerating to make a point.
- hobofan 6y ago
  > You can't be both. Why not? It's not like both of those are full time efforts.
  - spideymans 6y ago
    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.
zuhayeer 6y ago
The compensation distribution chart on this article is from Levels.fyi: https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/San-Francisco-Bay-Area/ https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/San-Franci...
dustingetz 6y ago
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
- centimeter 6y ago
  Top 1% developers definitely average about top 1% salary. High-variance returns like startup stock luck don’t count. If you’re not paying your devs substantially more than industry average (like several times more) they’re probably not that abnormally good.
  - dustingetz 6y ago
    or maybe they work at a university for dirt outside the USA
- CM30 6y ago
  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.
- vannevar 6y ago
  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.
- fnbr 6y ago
  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.
cccc4all 6y ago
Talent definitely exists. 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.
caterama 6y ago
This reminds me of "The Mundanity of Excellence" [1] which similarly argues that talent is a useless concept: - 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-ethnographic-report-on-stratification-and-olympic-swimmers https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-mundanity-of-excellence-an-...
simosx 6y ago
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.
Bostonian 6y ago
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.
- Syntonicles 6y ago
  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. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-017-0768-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-017-0768-2
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
mikesabbagh 6y ago
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
rmah 6y ago
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.
pawelmi 6y ago
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.
- ctchocula 6y ago
  There has also been some controversy from others being unable to replicate her work [1], so this should be taken with a grain of salt. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism
  - pawelmi 6y ago
    Thank you, I was not aware. Interesting to read the other side.
- bzbarsky 6y ago
  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...
u678u 6y ago
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.
- frongpik 6y ago
  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.
- spideymans 6y ago
  >You need motivation as well as talent. 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.
- echelon 6y ago
  > 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.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    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.
  - u678u 6y ago
daniel_iversen 6y ago
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.
- planck01 6y ago
  >cultural fit, values alignment 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.
golemiprague 6y ago
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.
planck01 6y ago
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.
- etripe 6y ago
  What makes you draw the conclusion that formal education is required? And what niche do you work in?

161 points by rayrey 6y ago

> 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.

simonh 6y ago

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.

nradov 6y ago
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.
ccortes 6y ago
> 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! None of these are garantee of top 1% talent
nottorp 6y ago
Except most good developers aren't into exhibitionism.

elric 6y ago

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".

lordnacho 6y ago

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.

slumdev 6y ago
> 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. 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.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  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.
  - 6y ago

FlyingSnake 6y ago

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.

xyzelement 6y ago
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.
- FlyingSnake 6y ago
  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.

phenkdo 6y ago

This seems to be an exemplar of "what we wish were true" conclusion.

rvn1045 6y ago

One point that people don’t understand is that your body and mind can change dramatically through training. For example you can be a skinny guy but once you start lifting weights everyday your body goes through dramatic changes and you can have step function increases in personal ability. New neural connections and motor patterns get formed because of intensity. But it’s hard to say how you personally will respond to the training stimulus. Initial talent in anything is not indicoative of future mastery it’s more about how responsive your nervous system is to prolonged effort and Training. How stimulatable are you?

pgsimp 6y ago

The article seems to confuse several things. For example, companies not having a universal test for talent does not imply talent does not exist. The Polgar sisters are interesting. However, their parents were very intelligent, so it is unknown if the same approach would also work for children of "less intelligent" parents (if such a thing exists, as supposedly we can't measure it). And studies in that line of thing seem to point to children starting a specialty at an early age (see Ericsson's book "Peak"). So unless you can repeat the experiment with some older people (make somebody a chess genius at age 30 who has never played chess before), it doesn't really matter what part is nature and what part is nurture. You still have people with different talents applying for your jobs. I mean the Polgar sisters ARE better at chess than other people, and there probably isn't an easy way to hire somebody as a chess player and bring them to the level of the sisters.

babesh 6y ago
There have been studies done (but not at extreme levels). They are with identical twins separated at birth and also with comparisons between adopted vs genetic children. They definitely show a large nature component in that the identical twins tend to do more similarly. Nature seems to be a good deal greater than 50%. However, as a society, we need to stop assigning the value to a person to their ability whether natural or developed. We also need to ok that there are some people that are better than others at certain things whether natural or developed.
- babesh 6y ago
  We also need to provide more equal opportunities.
  - pgsimp 6y ago
    What is an equal opportunity?
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    The word 'equal' distracts people from providing what people need. What people need is access to appropriate opportunities, opportunities that they can make use of. That's difficult for society because it sometimes costs more than it is 'worth' when worth is measured in money.

treyfitty 6y ago

I think hiring in the US is too broken to acknowledge that it’s an unsustainable subscription to ageism in the workplace. For one, as technology begins to replace “labor,” where labor is defined as human inputs to achieve a product, companies are also caught in a situation that allows them to have their cake and eat it to. They want to hire people with the skill sets already and they want to hire exceptional “talent.” However, a reasonable person can see immediately how unsustainable this is- you’re dedicating your workforce to always know the newest technology and without dedicated training, this is only achieved by hiring fresh kids out of college. Call me cynical, but I always resented the modern corporate mentality of seeking the best without taking the initiative to invest in training and development.

sokoloff 6y ago
I’ve not generally found that fresh college grads know the newest technology. If anything, many of them were taught impractical languages and all were taught impractical constraints imposed by the problem set plus one or two short project format of college courses. If I picked a random 35, 40, or 50 year old practicing programmer, I’d bet that they know wildly more about practical, day-to-day programming than a 21 year-old whiz from a top 10 comp sci program.
runawaybottle 6y ago
You are blaming things on a class (or perceived class, young and old), when in reality the culprit is scale. At scale, there will always be lots of good people that know exactly what you need them to know. The only part about all of this that will suck is if we don’t have enough companies to keep this a liquid as fuck market. As for the original topic, again, at scale talent is not a large enough multiple to be noticeable. We are entering, or already entered industrial scale computing. We will absolutely be cogs in the machine and will look back in wonder how this small community once lauded the notion of a 10x developer. Where does this hurt? The same place it hurts in love. That for a brief moment to think you were special to someone somewhere is just, ugh, rough.
beckingz 6y ago
Companies like buying 'talent' on the spot market. This gets expensive for some specialist tech areas.

vlovich123 6y ago

> Anyway, if we accept that intelligence is adaptive it should be clear any measurement of current skill is less interesting than the adaptive potential of the individual It’s always been obvious to me that it’s both but adaptivity naturally fades with age. Someone who hasn’t practiced a skill until their 30s is less likely to obtain success at the highest levels. That’s why elite mathematicians are famously said to hit their peak by that time but those people have also generally been practicing math from the earliest age (you can see this on the physical side with limberness and dexterity). I suspect that adaptivity itself starts to fade with age (or at least specializes) because you stop doing it as much if you pursue mastery as mastery often can either mean deep study of 1 field (likely limited to no adaptivity) or related sub fields (some cross adaptivity of related concepts). It’s also likely an exponential curve. So someone who’s been at a skill for a long time, even if they’re learning slowly, might be better anyway than someone who’s extremely quick learner but is starting from way further back (ie potentially a hire in the future once they’ve realized some potential). Interviews can give you only a sense of someone’s level now, but potential doesn’t have a measure right now (beyond a vague “I can have an intelligent conversation with this person about a problem neither of us have tackled yet”). Interviews also measure things other than practical skill.

cryptica 6y ago

Talent is real but software companies are useless at selecting for it. Perhaps they're not actually interested in talent. They don't want talented developers, they want compliant employees who will do exactly what their superior tells them to do no matter what the ethical implications are. I'm a >10x developer in the sense that I've produced better, more reliable, more scalable systems on my own than a typical team of 10+ senior developers working at a large company in the same amount of time. But even that's trivializing it because it would be impossible for that team to match the quality of my work no matter how much time you gave them. That said, I think most people could become a 10x or even 100x developer if they wanted and worked hard, but the problem is that there is no motivation for anyone to do it because companies don't want to hire them anyway. Most people only do things for money so they're not going to waste energy on trying to achieve mastery of the subject. If anything, it's more profitable to work slow and increase the system's complexity to give yourself more work. Making yourself just competent enough to convince your idiot boss to let you keep your job but not so competent that you ever run out of things to fix. Nobody cares about who the best developers in the world are... On the other hand, everybody in the world is interested to know who is the best at kicking a ball inside a net, hitting a ball with a stick, who can jump the highest with the help of a really long stick, ... The closest attempts at identifying coding talent are hackathons but they're a joke because 2 days is not enough time to judge someone's talent. Coding is more like a marathon; unless you're a really good developer yourself, it will take years to evaluate someone's skill. Unfortuantely, big companies have hardly any good developers.

eric_cartman 6y ago

Although there's much talk about hiring processes being completely off I have yet to hear about anyone being happy with hiring people at random. I think terms like talent acquisition, head of talent have little to do with the idea of natural aptitude. It's just a fancy sounding term, likely a temporary trend. Similarly, we have science in data science, but don't say software science for software engineering. I don't think the nurture argument and the Mozart example apply well for hiring. Often a team must be staffed as soon as possible. Nurturing a talent for year doesn't seem like a good way to go. As for recognizing talent in hiring, some companies are doing great with internships - take in students based on their talents and give them full time offers if there's potential. First years of everyone's career are a nurture phase for their talent. When hiring for a senior role - you don't want someone who will become senior in 5 years, you want them to have experience now. In that case they have to have shown their raw talent elsewhere, otherwise you don't need them by definition of senior.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

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.

raincom 6y ago
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.
- musingsole 6y ago
  > every well-paid job doesn't need a genius 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.

karmakaze 6y ago

> One of the repeating motifs of recruiting in the software industry are mantras of “talent”: “We recruit the best talent”, “talent attracts talent”, “we value talent” and so on. As far as I can tell, it's using the word 'talent' because it's flattering and presumably effective. Really, it mostly means skilled. The better employers and their recruiters look for applicants that are highly skilled in something related, and shows an ability and eagerness to learn. The depth to which they've achieve success would be my proxy for their talent. Whether innate or learned doesn't factor much into it. The only thing to watch for is if they spent their entire career doing one thing, even done well might show a lack of flexibility or interest in new things.

GizmoSwan 6y ago

Yes, don't you know: Einstein could have been the best ballet dancer! Michael Phelps could have been the next Tesla! .... NOT Talent is not specific at birth but it has direction. Certain types of processing are more natural for certain brains and the outcomes are random given the opportunities to master a certain skill. Talent and interest go hand in hand. The interest is the driver but it won't exist without the processing ability and opportunity.

pojzon 6y ago

> A genius is not born but is educated and trained….When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius. When opinion is worth more than tens of years of empirical evidence. What a stupid piece of wasted storage (even few kb is a waste).

gnzoidberg 6y ago

Oh please. Why so many people don't want to acknowledge there are such things as intelligence, talent or the so called 10x developers? Just accept it.

mathgladiator 6y ago
It has to do with equity, and the narrative is that if everyone had opportunity then things would be better. This the beauty and the paradox of diversity. It's great that we have such a wide array of possible activities to excel at, but it's a tragedy that not all activities are well rewarded by "the system". A great tragedy is the sheer number of activities can cause some people to shuffle between them until they find the one they may have any hope of excelling at (assuming it is even possible or if they have the energy to do it by the time they find it).

deedubaya 6y ago

I wonder if there is a correlation between commenters here who are critical of the article and also consider themselves talented?

marcinzm 6y ago
I'd argue that talented and trained people in a field often see how big the gulf is while those who aren't talented and trained underestimate the gulf. Essentially the Dunning–Kruger effect.

WalterBright 6y ago

To be the best at something, you'll need talent. Fortunately, very very few endeavors in life require being the best. Being good is good enough, and is attainable by most everyone with directed effort and practice.

ryandrake 6y ago

Funny how the conclusion that someone is "talented" or "naturally" good at something is always observed in retrospect. It's a mystical attribute we bestow on people after we see them excelling at something. You'd think, if talent was a real physical phenomenon, you'd be able to identify and measure it before it manifests in a skill, and use that measurement to predict future success at that skill, but it never happens this way. When we say someone is talented, we're often overlooking the enormous amount of focus and practice the person did in order to reach their level, and instead just declaring that something supernatural was the cause. I'm a pretty good programmer. I didn't get that way because of some supernatural force or mystical spirit. I wasn't born knowing how to program. But I did practice over and over and over from a young age, spending tens of thousands of hours on it. If someone told me I was just naturally talented, I'd take it as an insult--it totally ignores the amount of hard work and practice I put into the skill.

centimeter 6y ago
> you'd be able to identify and measure it before it manifests in a skill We actually have a pretty high degree of predictive power here using genetic testing, and we’ve only just started enumerating these predictors. > the enormous amount of focus Available focus is genetically predicted. > I'm a pretty good programmer. I didn't get that way because of some supernatural force or mystical spirit Genetics aren’t supernatural or mystical. > I wasn't born knowing how to program. You were born with some traits that made you (on expectation) better or worse at it.
- jhardy54 6y ago
  As usual: it isn't completely natureo or nurture -- it's both.
  - centimeter 6y ago
    Adult intelligence (g, IQ, whatever) (which predicts most of the things we’re taking about) is thought to be about 70-90% genetically heritable. Most of the rest isn’t known (maybe effectively random).

jariel 6y ago

The author immediately confuses 'latent talent' in the general sense, with companies attempt to acquire 'talent' - which are separate things. 'Latent Talent' for special activities, probably does exist, while mastery also necessitates love and labour. 'Hiring Talent' is another thing entirely. You're looking for smart, creative, hard working people who 'accomplish things' and 'get along' and who hopefully have a depth of knowledge. Often this comes from a mix of curiosity, compulsion, raw intelligence, some kind of personality that works, and a lot of hours focused on a variety of things. 'Great Devs' do not have to be super talented in the 'Chess Master' sense, and don't have to be brilliant white boarders, or algorithm designers. It's hard to find but generally you actually do 'know it when you see it'. There's no doubt. You meet a dude who's been coding for a long time, likes to hack on stuff, is really quite familiar in 2-3 core languages, lots of curiosity about the discipline, all the right idioms, can code fairly quickly, see the essence of big problems etc.. In a nutshell 'the developer we all think we ought to be'. They exist, they're just not that common.

chrsw 6y ago

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.

nradov 6y ago

Malcolm Gladwell made the same point back in 2002 with "The Talent Myth". McKinsey & Company helped Enron find the most "talented" employees. It didn't work. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth/amp https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myt...

Terretta 6y ago
McKinsey helped them find the most talented — at something else.

pixel_tracing 6y ago

Explain prodigies who excel musically then? This article ignores a lot of factual evidence for talent.

cambalache 6y ago

"Talent is a myth" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87_5I7kRuYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87_5I7kRuYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6ZUeQv2yFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6ZUeQv2yFQ Thank you your honor.

rayiner 6y ago

This post has aged poorly as Tom Brady wins his 7th Super Bowl, in his first year with a new team.

deleted 6y ago
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kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago

Companies don't care about theoretical definitions of talent (which for that matter this author fails to provide either, despite tying themselves up in knots to somehow try and discredit the notion of it). Companies do care about performance / output, and anyone who works in a group setting can see that there is often a clear difference in this metric for people, and for many people this difference is consistent (it's not a matter of having high days or low days, their highs are consistently high or above average). In my current team of 8 engineers, 2 are clearly way above average in their overall performance and output. They pay attention to detail, they actually think through their designs, they care about code quality, they are diligent in code reviews (while others mostly just rubber stamp each other's shitty code) and hold each other accountable, they are useful sounding boards for design discussions while the others just nod along, and they are generally proactive with finding bugs and fixing them. As a manager, I want more of these people on my team, except there is just no way to actually find this out by interviewing. All these people did similarly well in their interviews, and in fact one of the so-called 10x candidates did less well, because they are a bit more polite in nature, that causes them to sound non-committal at times. The only way thing works is a direct testimonial from someone who has worked with them, but this is not scalable, and these days we are told we shouldn't rely on that anyway as it favors candidates with 'networks' and disfavors candidates from underrepresented minorities. References rarely talk ill about a candidate, but when you ask a reference about a good candidate, they literally start gushing with praise, while for the average or mediocre ones they say generic things and are relatively muted in their praise. Many industries work this way. In the legal industry, for example, interviews are mostly perfunctory / nominal, because they work through a chain of strong recommendations. Of course, the flip side of that is that it is extremely credentialist. The Tech industry is the opposite. Most generally smart people can get in by doing a few hundred hours of Leetcode but you have no idea how they will actually be on their jobs.

wutbrodo 6y ago
Fully agreed. My model of engineering productivity (wrt specific tasks like hiring and working with colleagues) has a pretty large coefficient on individual talent, but I was looking to learn from a dissenting view. Unfortunately, while the article is pretty well-written, it's comprised of naked assertion after assertion, with no attempt at justifying them. Not to mention the non sequiturs: even if you accept that we're born blank slates and anyone can be nurtured to any level of (non-physical) achievement, that's only relevant to hiring if companies were buying infants and grooming them for their precise employee needs they'd need in 20 years. In reality, timing matters, and someone who can't be as productive today but will blossom into a productive flower given enough time carries higher costs and higher risks to the employer than someone who meets the mark on day one. In fact, I'd personally call this explore/exploit trade-off the defining struggle of my career: implicit negotiations with my employer over how much unprofitable education they're they're willing to implicitly give me (by allowing me to work on things relatively far from my competency) in exchange for doing work I'm already highly-skilled at (and often bored by), all while compensating me well. I hate how mean-spirited this inevitably sounds, but so much of the discussion around talent's role in engineering that I've seen (largely on HN) falls apart upon the slightest scrutiny and I can't shake the feeling that I'm just dealing with a mountain of cope. I firmly believe that talent isn't everything, and further that there are many who overstate the innateness and immutability of "talent". But "talent isn't everything" is leagues away from "talent doesn't exist", and lazy analysis doesn't justify lazy analysis in the opposite direction.

SunlightEdge 6y ago

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet here is the role of luck in life. I've worked with some people who have been laughably bad and yet have amazingly been promoted as the senior boss while technically brilliant was a terrible judge of character. The 'laughably bad' guys job was so cushy he's still there 5 years later. I've seen other brilliant guys not be promoted when they worked hard and totally deserved it while an incompetent other person got the job instead. Luck is very under appreciated for how far people can go in corporations.

FrozenVoid 6y ago

I'm of the opinion that talent is specialized and misplaced for most jobs(Talented people work at jobs that don't allow their full potential, like e.g. software engineers working to optimize ad exposure - that not being their specialization).

Guest42 6y ago

I think a more accurate title would be something along the lines of “Hiring the most talented is a difficult prospect.”

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

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.

jm__87 6y ago
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.
jchw 6y ago
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.)
- atleta 6y ago
  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". See: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptitude [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliability_and_validity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabil... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

predaking 6y ago

Anyone have an idea of where the self-reported salary chart in the article is from?

tiagobraw 6y ago

“talent is just pursued interest” Bob Ross

corysama 6y ago
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.
- retsibsi 6y ago
  The causation flows the other way too. You're more likely to develop and sustain an interest in something that you're naturally good at.

Spooky23 6y ago

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.

Swizec 6y ago

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.

jackcviers3 6y ago
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.
- 6y ago

yudlejoza 6y ago

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"

deleted 6y ago
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mathgladiator 6y ago
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.
volume 6y ago
> You can focus on the serious tech challenges, or you can be boisterous. You can't be both. There's always a spectrum right? Or I guess you are exaggerating to make a point.
hobofan 6y ago
> You can't be both. Why not? It's not like both of those are full time efforts.
- spideymans 6y ago
  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.

zuhayeer 6y ago

The compensation distribution chart on this article is from Levels.fyi: https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/San-Francisco-Bay-Area/ https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/San-Franci...

dustingetz 6y ago

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

centimeter 6y ago
Top 1% developers definitely average about top 1% salary. High-variance returns like startup stock luck don’t count. If you’re not paying your devs substantially more than industry average (like several times more) they’re probably not that abnormally good.
- dustingetz 6y ago
  or maybe they work at a university for dirt outside the USA
CM30 6y ago
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.
vannevar 6y ago
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.
fnbr 6y ago
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.

cccc4all 6y ago

Talent definitely exists. 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.

caterama 6y ago

This reminds me of "The Mundanity of Excellence" [1] which similarly argues that talent is a useless concept: - 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-ethnographic-report-on-stratification-and-olympic-swimmers https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-mundanity-of-excellence-an-...

simosx 6y ago

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.

Bostonian 6y ago

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.

Syntonicles 6y ago
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. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-017-0768-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-017-0768-2
- deleted 6y ago
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mikesabbagh 6y ago

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

rmah 6y ago

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.

pawelmi 6y ago

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.

ctchocula 6y ago
There has also been some controversy from others being unable to replicate her work [1], so this should be taken with a grain of salt. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism
- pawelmi 6y ago
  Thank you, I was not aware. Interesting to read the other side.
bzbarsky 6y ago
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...

u678u 6y ago

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.

frongpik 6y ago
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.
spideymans 6y ago
>You need motivation as well as talent. 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.
echelon 6y ago
> 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.
- kbenson 6y ago
  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.
- u678u 6y ago

daniel_iversen 6y ago

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.

planck01 6y ago
>cultural fit, values alignment 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.

golemiprague 6y ago

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.

planck01 6y ago

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.

etripe 6y ago
What makes you draw the conclusion that formal education is required? And what niche do you work in?