25 ms·

What to Learn

374 points by pyb 5y ago

WJW 5y ago
> ... I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion that I might turn into another post. Please do! A lot of discussions regarding workplace morale, both here on HN and elsewhere, seem to boil down to "your manager is very good/bad and that explains everything else you mentioned". I tend to agree; having a good manager can make a huge positive difference and having a bad manager a huge negative one. However, I'd be very interested in better ways to detect managerial quality upfront rather than when it is already too late.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  What’s that saying? People don’t quit their company they quit their manager. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.
  - pm90 5y ago
    That’s very true but it also represents one extreme of the spectrum. You may have an ok manager; they’re not that good but they’re not annoying either and you can generally work with them. Ideally you would want to work with a manager who can accelerate your career and learning and that’s not always easy to find. There are socially inept managers who might fail in most places but succeed at certain orgs, or vice versa I.e their success is a combination of personal skills and the org environment. It’s really difficult to know (imo) without working with the person for a little while.
    - _ea1k 5y ago
      I completely agree. The environment that your manager works in often matters at least as much, sometimes even more. I've been at places where manager churn was constant. Almost all of them were good to work for, but the environment for them was really toxic.
  - itsmemattchung 5y ago
    So true. I've been very fortunate to have mostly great managers throughout my 12+ year career, managers that actually care about their staff (as humans, not just fungible resources). In fact, that's why I joined AWS 5.5+ years back, a great manager (plug for @thomas_cantrell). On the flip side, I left because of irreconcilable misalignment with my previous manager.
  - stonemetal12 5y ago
    Yeah, but how much of that is your manager is the face for the faceless bureaucracy behind him? When your manager asks you to work overtime with unrealistic deadlines etc, getting angry at your manager is shooting the messenger, not the actual dumbass making decisions.
    - ranit 5y ago
      > getting angry at your manager is shooting the messenger Well, a manager being (only) messenger (in this situation) is one of the traits of bad manager, isn't it?
      - chucksmash 5y ago
        Indeed. Part of being a good manager is shielding your team from demands that are unreasonable.
- groby_b 5y ago
  Detecting managerial quality up-front is a rather hard problem. I believe it's mostly rooted in the fact that anything meaningful you do as a manager plays on a long timescale (months & years), so you can't directly verify. And it's sufficiently fuzzy that in a short conversation, managers can lay down enough smoke screen to make it hard to see flaws. So, what you need is getting some kind of long-term view on that manager. There are a couple of ways: * If you can get it, data. Retention/Turnover, how well people grow, internal surveys. That's almost exclusively available if you transfer within a company, so limited usefulness. * References. Find people who worked for that manager and ask them. Even better if it's ex-reports, since they tend to be more frank. * Are they listening? When you have a conversation with them, are they paying close attention to what you have to say, or are they busy delivering a message? You want listening :) * Can they communicate clearly? Are they able to express what their team does, and what their main challenges are, in a coherent way? In less than a minute? Communication is a managers main job. If they fail at that, you'll have a horrible time. * And finally, gut check. How do you feel around that manager? If you're in any way uncomfortable, see it as a warning sign. That doesn't even necessarily reflect on their skill as manager - there are just some people we're feeling good around, and some who make us miserable. Skip the miserable part. (If you have a skilled manager, they can minimize the misery somewhat, but you'll still both be miserable.)
  - borroka 5y ago
    "Are they listening? When you have a conversation with them, are they paying close attention to what you have to say, or are they busy delivering a message? You want listening :)" - This is common advice anytime one talks about relationships and communication. Listening is a skill, listen 10, talk 1, almost to the point that is difficult to understand who's doing the talking if everybody is getting the same advice of listening. Then you have those, and some HR people came to my mind--just to keep things professional--, who listen and listen and then you realize they just did not (or did not want to) understand. Now, my question is: if it is common knowledge that listening to your reports is important, along with being pretty cheap and not particularly challenging to do, why so few managers do it? Incompetence or there is an advantage in not listening much?
swsieber 5y ago
The bit about compilers reminds me of this quote about Feyman, but sorry of the inverse where you hold tricks in your head instead of problems. Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!'
- vymague 5y ago
  That's actually on the list of advice from Gian-Carlo Rota. The one linked in the blog article. https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-lessons.html https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-l... No. 7.
itsmemattchung 5y ago
> All of us have strengths and weaknesses and we spend a lot of time talking about ‘areas of improvement.’ It can be easy to feel like the best way to advance is to eliminate all of those I struggle with this. All the time. I always find it difficult to strike a balance between leveraging my strengths and filling gaps in my weaknesses. For the large part of my career, my attention was directed on the latter: constantly trying to improve myself based off of feedback from friends, family, colleagues, managers, etc. But now ... I'm a solo entrepreneur and lately, I've been actually flexing a lot more of my strengths, identifying characteristics about myself that give me an edge. Of course, I'm not blind to my weaknesses (I think about it all the time) but I do agree that we should lean more into our strengths.
- nojs 5y ago
  For a solo entrepreneur I would argue it’s more important to be fairly good at everything than e.g. really good at programming and having no understanding of other things like sales and marketing. Instead of perfecting your Haskell skills, you’re far better off learning the basics of how to construct a good sales funnel, even if it’s not a natural fit for you. Some knowledge is a lot better than none.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    A bit paradoxically, being a generalist is a particular strength, and as the article points out one of the things you can do to do better at work is work in areas that best utilize your strengths. Ergo, if you're the kind of person who is good at quickly superficially learning a wide variety of topics, solo entrepenureship is possibly the best place for you.
    - itsmemattchung 5y ago
      This makes perfect sense. Beyond just writing software and architecting systems, I find the most challenging parts (and rewarding) learning how to build a sales funnel, communicating expectations and deadlines with customers, etc the most rewarding. And as you mentioned, solo entrepreneurship might possibly be the best place to exercise these wide array of skills.
strogonoff 5y ago
Learning ‘everything’ offers the benefit of helping you identify new many things you potentially could easily become (or happen to already be) unusually good at. On one hand, it’s a bit addictive and without certain external factors or compensating techniques it’s possible to get used to it so much that one becomes averse to investing time into learning one thing in depth. On the other hand, at least with the type of mindset I have, the idea of knowing what to learn seems foreign, enviable at times but more often smelling of a local maximum.
ksec 5y ago
>For example, this analysis of world-class judo players found that most rely on a small handful of throws, concluding1 >Judo is a game of specialization. You have to use the skills that work best for you. You have to stick to what works and practice your skills until they become automatic responses. >If you watch an anime or a TV series "about" fighting, people often improve by increasing the number of techniques they know because that's an easy thing to depict but, in real life, getting better at techniques you already know is often more effective than having a portfolio of hundreds of "moves". Which is essentially, I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. Bruce Lee
- borroka 5y ago
  What about, and I say this as a long-term martial arts practitioner, the man who has practiced 3 kicks 3300 times each (with one rep to spare)? And I am not saying it provocatively, the one-10000, 10000-one is a straw-man of course, but how many techniques to add to your competition arsenal is not an easy question to answer. As far as I remember, Ono, one of the most successful judokas of the modern era, has maybe uchi-mata, seoi, osoto, tomoe-nage. Teddy Riner, who had dominated the heavy-weight category for more than 10 years, basically had only uchi-mata, plus refusing to engage, running out of bounds. I remember a clock-choke and a few pins too. On the other hand, in wrestling you had someone like Cael Sanderson, who won the gold medal in 2004 and had one technique, the ankle pick. Saitiev, who won 3 gold medals in different Olympics, had instead a big variety of technique. Let's take judo. While nobody has, say, 15 competition ready techniques, a critical decision needs to be made between 3 or 5, say. So it is not as easy as saying: specialize! In addition to find the right (for you, considering your opponents) techniques to specialize in.
  - yesenadam 5y ago
    This thread reminds me of a joke: What's the difference between a jazz musician and a rock musician? A jazz musician plays 100,000 chords for 3 people. A rock musician plays 3 chords for 100,000 people.
  - codingdave 5y ago
sAbakumoff 5y ago
"I am not afraid of a person who knows 10000 kicks. But I am afraid of a person who knows one kick but practices it for 10000 times." Bruce Lee
- rzzzt 5y ago
  I wonder where the cutoff is. Would it be reasonable to fear someone who knows 2000 kicks, practiced 5 times each?
  - sAbakumoff 5y ago
    and you receive the award for the most nerdy reaction ever to this quote!
xyzelement 5y ago
I believe the thing we often need to learn is the thing we're afraid of learning. We often (always?) have weaknesses that can/do jeopardize our strength and closing those weaknesses is crucial. The famous Scott Galloway (whom I had as a b-school professor) made this point like this: if you are a great guy, great father, great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and hurt people in your life - THAT thing offsets everything else. You won't become better by "doubling down" on what you're already good at, but by fixing this flaw. Another case - I used to manage a C++ developer. If you gave him a tight spec, he'd implement it perfectly. But the world we lived in required him to go talk to people to figure out what the real needs are, and he was bad at that. So his code always solved the wrong problem unless someone was helping him with this stuff. Every year, his own developmental goal was to go learn the next C++ standard. And that would have been useless because he was already a great C++ programmer. Going from 97th percentile to the 98th wouldn't matter. The much bigger bang for the buck would be figuring out how to go sit down with a sales rep and say "OK, what's our client actually trying to do here?" It sounds simple but I believe this held him back not just in work but in life. I happen to know that he didn't have great communication with his wife and kids either - solving this thing would make him so much better at all parts of his life. The thing is - we all have glaring things like this - obstacles in our own trajectory that if we fix, our existing strength would really shine.
- borroka 5y ago
  That is not a weakness that can be scored on a 0-10 scale (say, I am a 9 Python programmers and a 2 Java programmer, that's an either/or, a "threshold" weakness, or an attractor (of evil!).
- premek 5y ago
  > solving this thing would make him so much better at all parts of his life. How do you do that?
  - xyzelement 5y ago
    > How do you do that? Great question. I assume you're asking from the point of view of the person having the challenge rather than someone observing/helping them. There's no easy or painless answer. The reason these deep flaws exist in us is precisely because we have been avoiding dealing with them for some deeply personal and painful reason. But I do think there's a general pattern that I can share from my own experience. The first step is to recognize that the problem exists and be "fed up" with it. To recognize that you're selling yourself short in some way, that you're failing yourself or your relationships. "I don't want to have my work and family life suffer anymore because I am afraid to talk to people." Or even "I don't want to be out of shape and struggle to walk a mile" kind of thing. You can't solve problems like this unless you're seeing them clearly and desperate to get out. They often say that you have to hit "rock bottom" as a requirement for curing yourself. I think this is what they mean. Once you hate the problem, it's good to get some external data. Ask your boss, colleagues, family about how you are (eg: tell me where my communication skills are weak, what am I doing that is so obviously wrong?) and then listen to what they say. They may surprise you? Eg is there a pattern, you are bad at it in some contexts and good in others? What is that about? From the above and other resources, come up with the list of behaviors that would be an improvement. For example: "I would be better at my job if before I dive into a project, I speak to 3 people who understand the problem space" is probably a non-controversial one. Then you ask yourself: why does that feel hard? Why am I just reluctant to get up and ask the sales person what the context of the client need is? What is it about "going up to someone I don't know super well and asking them a question" that terrifies me? What do I think would happen if I did this? Would they mock me? Would I feel like an idiot? Would they tell my boss I don't know something I ought to know? Reflect if the fears are real. Is anyone in the work environment actually going to react the way your fear would suggest? If intellectually you know that the thing is right and safe, then you force yourself to do it. Hyperventilate at your desk and then suck it up and walk over to the sales guy. Ask them, get the information, have a conversation. Reflect in retrospect: was this a helpful activity, and did I get hurt the way I feared I would? Keep doing it. Build up the experience/muscle of doing the thing, and prove to your anxiety that it's not a dangerous thing to do. Talk to others who got good at this thing despite being not good at it originally. Find people who are awesome at the thing and study what they do. Become a nerd on the thing that's scaring you and you will likely see it stop being scary. And I would be remiss not to say that in most cases, our deepest problems (even if they simply manifest in work performance) stem from psychology and childhood experiences. The guy in my story must have had some rough experiences growing up, maybe he was called an idiot or ignored or mocked or whatever, which made it hard for him to be communicative/open later in life, including with his family. Making a little crack in the armor of anxiety through the work process would help, but when something is this deep, seeing someone like a therapist is often helpful as well. But to rewind, the key thing is to recognize a gap between how you are and how you want to be. You fundamentally have to say to yourself "I don't want to be forever limited by this thing, I don't want to hurt myself and others because of this thing" -- everything else is problem-solving.
lukego 5y ago
Forth is an interesting case. It's really unproductive to build complex systems with. If you try, you will probably be frustrated. Instead it forces you to try really hard to find a cheating short-cut to solve the problem as few moving parts as possible. Just one simple example. The 'struct' language feature is 1500 LOC in Lisp but only 10 LOC in FORTH (see below.) Are they equivalent? No, the Lisp one has lots of bells and whistles, while the FORTH one is minimalist in the extreme. If you tried to write the feature-complete Lisp version in FORTH you would probably find it very difficult and unproductive. So you wouldn't do that. And this to me is what FORTH's peculiar brand of efficiency is all about. If FORTH were a bar the only drink on the menu would be tap water. That bar would be extremely efficient to run. Lisp: https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/src/code/defstruct.lisp https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/src/code/defstruct.... FORTH: https://github.com/openbios/openfirmware/blob/master/forth/lib/struct.fth https://github.com/openbios/openfirmware/blob/master/forth/l...
- ipnon 5y ago
  Elixir and Erlang, in my estimation, similarly force simplicity by the nature of its own constraints, in this case massively concurrent processes designed to fail. The difference is constraining the OS interface instead of the bare metal interface. The antithesis is maybe the object orientated model where interfaces are mutable and state is unreliable.
- carapace 5y ago
  Chuck Moore used to carry around a 3D wireframe CAD program on a deck of punchcards that fit in his shirt pocket.
- fouric 5y ago
  I think you've identified one of the essential parts of the design of Forth: it makes it very easy to implement simple systems, and very difficult to implement complex systems. In other words, polynomial O(n^a) complexity, where "a" is large, but the hidden constant k is small. Making good use of Forth seems to be contingent on identifying situations where you want to implement a very small and simple system (embedded systems, firmware, OS bootloaders, tiny IoT devices?), and using Forth there - and avoiding it like the plague in all other cases. I very much doubt that implementing a VLSI CAD program, where you want as many features to help your design as possible (features which necessarily incur a complexity cost), is a good use of Forth, for example.
greenail 5y ago
Because people are social "who knows you" is also important and impacts your learning. Finding the right people who are open to you asking 4 levels of questions is critical. This often requires you offer them something back. How you build those relationships is something to learn.
- crispyambulance 5y ago
  Yes, this is key, so important to NOT have to exclusively deal with sharp-elbow-environments at formative points in your career. Also good to have mentors which not only graciously answer your questions but which also challenge you and ask questions of you. The Socratic method. Old as dirt, but better than Stackoverflow for actual knowledge development.
bla3 5y ago
I think the answer depends on "why do you want to learn?". The implicit answer to that question for this blog post seems to be "to advance your career". That's a fine answer, but not the only answer.
- whoisburbansky 5y ago
  It sounded to me like the answer for the author was "because it's fun!" and then turning around and figuring out how to arrange his career in a way that lets him continue learning, which ends up benefitting his career anyways, almost as a side effect.
- dominotw 5y ago
  i am currently researching cancer due to my diagnosis. Its a fascinating world that will keep me occupied for a long time. I am learning statistics p-values, multi-variate analysis , kaplan-meier ect. A little bit of genetics and cell anatomy, mutations when i am bored of stats and reading about human side of cancer in the book 'emperor of all maladies'. I am really enjoying this part of the journey, learning something from scratch, beginner gains.
  - nick__m 5y ago
    Good luck, I hope every things goes as good as it can and that you and your oncologist take every decision, that maximizes your odds of surviving. The were two positive thing about my wife's cancer 1- She survived 2- The intense learning experiance. P.s. You could add medical imaging to your list of interesting cancer related things to learn. It won't really help you but it is extremely interesting . If you can get the DICOM files of your scans try to interpret them with the full radiologist report. I got started with the trial of radiant viewer¹ (it easy to use but you will probably hit a ceiling before the end of the trial) and then try 3D slicer² (it's a lot harder to use but I feel that I used maybe 10% of that software capability and I was able to cleanly isolate the tumor and make the rest of her body translucent). 1- www.radiantviewer.com 2- slicer.org
hintymad 5y ago
Regarding a few skills, Rota interestingly has similar advice for mathematicians: https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-lessons.html https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-l... "5 Every mathematician has only a few tricks A long time ago an older and well known number theorist made some disparaging remarks about Paul Erdos' work. You admire contributions to mathematics as much as I do, and I felt annoyed when the older mathematician flatly and definitively stated that all of Erdos' work could be reduced to a few tricks which Erdos repeatedly relied on in his proofs. What the number theorist did not realize is that other mathematicians, even the very best, also rely on a few tricks which they use over and over. Take Hilbert. The second volume of Hilbert's collected papers contains Hilbert's papers in invariant theory. I have made a point of reading some of these papers with care. It is sad to note that some of Hilbert's beautiful results have been completely forgotten. But on reading the proofs of Hilbert's striking and deep theorems in invariant theory, it was surprising to verify that Hilbert's proofs relied on the same few tricks. Even Hilbert had only a few tricks!"
- parenthesis 5y ago
  In that same article you quote there is also a bit about Feynman, that "Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: "How did he do it? He must be a genius!" " I've come across this before, but it got reversed in my mind to: every time you come across an unsolved problem, try using all your standard tricks on it. Probably none will help. But perhaps eventually one will and you'll seem like a genius for thinking of applying that trick to that problem.
hintymad 5y ago
I think there's something in the middle. One does not need to learn everything, of course, and it pays to learn many new key concepts. Groundbreaking concepts help us identify new problems and find simple solutions. Another advantage of learning key concepts is that we get to connect all those concepts, and connections beget breakthroughs. As for what concepts to learn first, I think Feynman's method helps: "You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!'"
danuker 5y ago
I believe the tradeoff of how specialized to be is dictated by your work opportunities - specialization of labor AKA division of labor [1]. If you can and want to work in a large corporation, you should be able to get a fairly specific job title. This is advantageous because two specialists with advanced but complementary skills outperform two generalists with intermediate but overlapping skills. Division of labor allows sophistication in processes, which can increase efficiency. The downside is, the job pool is more limited (both for employers and for employees). You need specific employees/positions. A startup might not afford such specialization. For instance, if the finances only afford 3 people on payroll, you're not going to find a job working on a 10th of the pipeline, even with 20x efficiency compared to a generalist doing half of the pipeline with 2x efficiency. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour
willchang 5y ago
This wouldn't be Hacker News if someone didn't comment that ACTUALLY a random walk of n steps will get you sqrt(n) in some direction, which is much better than log(n). I guess my special skill is being pedantic.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  I've come to realize that 'exponential' is so often used to describe anything nonlinear. This would be the exact corollary. Good to pick up on it. I'll look out for this too now.
  - jjtheblunt 5y ago
    corollary : i've come to learn to ignore writers who use "exponential" incorrectly, to your point. i realize this makes me picky, but it seems to be reasonable, as that incorrect usage often is a signal of sloppy thought.
    - sdrabing 5y ago
      What about the usage of capitalization?
- wenc 5y ago
  Just curious, how did you arrive at sqrt(n)? I spent all morning thinking about this in 2 dimensions and I came up with sqrt(n^2 + d^2) where d is the displacement from the original position on the y axis. (Pythagorean theorem)
  - kragen 5y ago
    Central limit theorem. You get to √(n² + d²) if you take n steps to the right and d steps up. But if you take n steps randomly to the left or right, you end up at about α√n steps in one direction or the other, on average, because the distribution of your final position is a Gaussian around your original position whose standard deviation grows as √n. Try it: >>> n=1000; sorted(abs(sum(random.randrange(2) for i in range(n)) - n/2) for j in range(128)) As you increase n you can see the distribution of final distances widen by its square root. As it happens, in two dimensions the distribution is radially symmetric, and its radius is still proportional to the square root of the number of steps. This accounts for the astounding isotropy of lattice-gas automata, whose particles are doing such random walks simultaneously, and for the depressing popularity of Gaussian filtering in image processing, because the Gaussian convolution kernel is the only anisotropic separable kernel, and can be closely approximated in each dimension very cheaply with a different application of the central limit theorem.
mrandish 5y ago
In recent years I've started to apply this idea more and more in my own career and life. I'm focusing much less on adding new skills and instead finding much higher ROI doubling down on improving the "top three things I'm uniquely good at" in meaningful ways.
- FilMo 5y ago
  Agree with the idea. I'm also trying to apply this model in my life. If I don't understand something or just don't have the time or interest in doing smth, I just don't do / learn it or delegate it to someone else. As a great example, was my last essay. I just couldn't finish it myself. So I delegated it to professionals from https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grabmyessay https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grabmyessay, who already have the needed knowledges to write it for me.
throwaway879080 5y ago
>working on a few things and not being particularly well rounded has worked for me in multiple disparate fields arguably "well roundedness" is key to major breakthroughs in science & engineering while most of us work on incremental improvements, the real innovation often happens on intersection of two or more disparate fields that until then were considered weakly related, and it does require knowing a bit of everything the best scientists and engineers I know are "knowledge omnivores" and will digest anything. It does require well developed "filtering" capacity though, picking up signal from a lot of noise, and a sort of information hoarding mentality
sagaro 5y ago
Basically, be one punch man than be Superman. Got it.
ipnon 5y ago
A corollary: Companies are want to hire people who are good at interviewing, not people who are good at their job. The proof of this is that we find a disconnect between the interview process and the day to day job of working at as a software engineer. If you are primarily interested in making money, the best advice would be to become exceedingly proficient at the interview rodeo. Charm your way through the intro call, knock out the algorithmic quiz, and know the best approach for the problem in the technical screen right from the start. Improve your skill at these and your financial gains will be bountiful.
ozim 5y ago
I am big fan of "circle of competence" as Warren Buffet with Charlie Munger describe it. But I stole it to drive my learning approach. Learning is investment so I would say learn mostly in your area of competence to get better. Of course you want to broaden your area with time so you might spend 80-90% of your learning time on things that are directly in your area of competence. Then 10% or 20% to broaden that, when you start using those new things they will become your circle of competence and then you can go deeper with learning about those. If you won't use those - ditch those and go find another 20%. Downside to this approach is that you need a starting point like "should I be a Python dev or Ruby dev" which mostly is asked by new fresh starters - and my answer is pick one, if it sticks and is your 80% (even if it is not really) continue if not go for another one. I had link to article by Kent Beck who advises something similar so I also copied a lot of that approach from his article. Unfortunately I don't have a link now.
- chrislloyd 5y ago
  I hadn't thought of personal learning as a multi-armed bandit problem before! Thank you.
- Zababa 5y ago
  > Downside to this approach is that you need a starting point like "should I be a Python dev or Ruby dev" which mostly is asked by new fresh starters - and my answer is pick one, if it sticks and is your 80% (even if it is not really) continue if not go for another one. I remembering hearing in a podcast something like "If there's a fork in the road, pick it and stick with it. You'll end up in a better place two years later than if you just spend two years weighing the options. And if you stick with something for a period of time, it's usually easier to switch to something else than if you didn't do anything."
wenc 5y ago
I can relate to the “looking at data” as a skill bit, especially the part where he mentions that it’s not a skill most data scientists necessarily have. I have observed that too. (I’m one myself) Many data scientists like to jump into feature extraction and modeling the data with ML/DS tools because for us that’s the fun part. (we might look at some plots and summary statistics but we don’t dwell there for too long.) Few have the patience to just sit with the data for a week just to look at it, checking it against our intuition about the real world and the domain and basically just trying to put 2 and 2 together without models (except a mental model of the world) and just turning the data over in Tableau (or Excel). It’s actually not an easy skill to learn because it requires other meta skills. For one it requires an ability to match numbers to the real world — and for that you need experience and a good intuition of how the world works. My first manager was exceptionally good at doing this. I’ve noticed too that folks in senior management — at least competent ones — tended to be good at looking at data and picking out things too. I suspect this is actually a make or break ability to get to senior management at most companies. Data scientists, not so much. (Unless they worked in the field or came from the business side of things.)
sydthrowaway 5y ago
Synthesis is key to genius.
mym1990 5y ago
There is learning for fun and learning for optimization, and if you're lucky there is overlap! There probably no shortage of things one could learn to optimize for handling +ev situations better in the future, but learning for long periods of time is difficult if you don't enjoy the actual subject. I recently got into learning about hydroponics and tennis coaching and I don't feel the pressure to make those things a part of my career development.
somedudetbh 5y ago
"I don't have a large enough sample nor have I polled enough people to have high confidence that this works as a general algorithm but, for finding groups of world-class experts, what's worked for me is finding excellent managers. The two teams I worked on with the highest density of world-class experts have been teams under really great management. I have a higher bar for excellent management than most people and, from having talked to many people about this, almost no one I've talked to has worked for or even knows a manager as good as one I would consider to be excellent (and, general, both the person I'm talking to agrees with me on this, indicating that it's not the case that they have a manager who's excellent in dimensions I don't care about and vice versa); from discussions about this, I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion that I might turn into another post. @luu-- I'm sure a lot of people on here besides me would be very curious to read your thoughts on what distinguished these managers from the others, and how you would identify one (nevermind find one).
dvsfish 5y ago
Author should learn some modern css (I say this in jest)
- opan 5y ago
  I did find the text to be far too wide to read comfortably, even on a portrait monitor. I ended up reading the article in w3m in my terminal where I put it in a tmux pane next to another empty pane so I could adjust the width manually.
gabkins 5y ago
The best thing to learn right now is how to code. There's a lot of things you'll improve on. You can develop anything that you want, and it will help you think logically.

374 points by pyb 5y ago

WJW 5y ago

> ... I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion that I might turn into another post. Please do! A lot of discussions regarding workplace morale, both here on HN and elsewhere, seem to boil down to "your manager is very good/bad and that explains everything else you mentioned". I tend to agree; having a good manager can make a huge positive difference and having a bad manager a huge negative one. However, I'd be very interested in better ways to detect managerial quality upfront rather than when it is already too late.

elliekelly 5y ago
What’s that saying? People don’t quit their company they quit their manager. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.
- pm90 5y ago
  That’s very true but it also represents one extreme of the spectrum. You may have an ok manager; they’re not that good but they’re not annoying either and you can generally work with them. Ideally you would want to work with a manager who can accelerate your career and learning and that’s not always easy to find. There are socially inept managers who might fail in most places but succeed at certain orgs, or vice versa I.e their success is a combination of personal skills and the org environment. It’s really difficult to know (imo) without working with the person for a little while.
  - _ea1k 5y ago
    I completely agree. The environment that your manager works in often matters at least as much, sometimes even more. I've been at places where manager churn was constant. Almost all of them were good to work for, but the environment for them was really toxic.
- itsmemattchung 5y ago
  So true. I've been very fortunate to have mostly great managers throughout my 12+ year career, managers that actually care about their staff (as humans, not just fungible resources). In fact, that's why I joined AWS 5.5+ years back, a great manager (plug for @thomas_cantrell). On the flip side, I left because of irreconcilable misalignment with my previous manager.
- stonemetal12 5y ago
  Yeah, but how much of that is your manager is the face for the faceless bureaucracy behind him? When your manager asks you to work overtime with unrealistic deadlines etc, getting angry at your manager is shooting the messenger, not the actual dumbass making decisions.
  - ranit 5y ago
    > getting angry at your manager is shooting the messenger Well, a manager being (only) messenger (in this situation) is one of the traits of bad manager, isn't it?
    - chucksmash 5y ago
      Indeed. Part of being a good manager is shielding your team from demands that are unreasonable.
groby_b 5y ago
Detecting managerial quality up-front is a rather hard problem. I believe it's mostly rooted in the fact that anything meaningful you do as a manager plays on a long timescale (months & years), so you can't directly verify. And it's sufficiently fuzzy that in a short conversation, managers can lay down enough smoke screen to make it hard to see flaws. So, what you need is getting some kind of long-term view on that manager. There are a couple of ways: * If you can get it, data. Retention/Turnover, how well people grow, internal surveys. That's almost exclusively available if you transfer within a company, so limited usefulness. * References. Find people who worked for that manager and ask them. Even better if it's ex-reports, since they tend to be more frank. * Are they listening? When you have a conversation with them, are they paying close attention to what you have to say, or are they busy delivering a message? You want listening :) * Can they communicate clearly? Are they able to express what their team does, and what their main challenges are, in a coherent way? In less than a minute? Communication is a managers main job. If they fail at that, you'll have a horrible time. * And finally, gut check. How do you feel around that manager? If you're in any way uncomfortable, see it as a warning sign. That doesn't even necessarily reflect on their skill as manager - there are just some people we're feeling good around, and some who make us miserable. Skip the miserable part. (If you have a skilled manager, they can minimize the misery somewhat, but you'll still both be miserable.)
- borroka 5y ago
  "Are they listening? When you have a conversation with them, are they paying close attention to what you have to say, or are they busy delivering a message? You want listening :)" - This is common advice anytime one talks about relationships and communication. Listening is a skill, listen 10, talk 1, almost to the point that is difficult to understand who's doing the talking if everybody is getting the same advice of listening. Then you have those, and some HR people came to my mind--just to keep things professional--, who listen and listen and then you realize they just did not (or did not want to) understand. Now, my question is: if it is common knowledge that listening to your reports is important, along with being pretty cheap and not particularly challenging to do, why so few managers do it? Incompetence or there is an advantage in not listening much?

swsieber 5y ago

The bit about compilers reminds me of this quote about Feyman, but sorry of the inverse where you hold tricks in your head instead of problems. Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!'

vymague 5y ago
That's actually on the list of advice from Gian-Carlo Rota. The one linked in the blog article. https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-lessons.html https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-l... No. 7.

itsmemattchung 5y ago

> All of us have strengths and weaknesses and we spend a lot of time talking about ‘areas of improvement.’ It can be easy to feel like the best way to advance is to eliminate all of those I struggle with this. All the time. I always find it difficult to strike a balance between leveraging my strengths and filling gaps in my weaknesses. For the large part of my career, my attention was directed on the latter: constantly trying to improve myself based off of feedback from friends, family, colleagues, managers, etc. But now ... I'm a solo entrepreneur and lately, I've been actually flexing a lot more of my strengths, identifying characteristics about myself that give me an edge. Of course, I'm not blind to my weaknesses (I think about it all the time) but I do agree that we should lean more into our strengths.

nojs 5y ago
For a solo entrepreneur I would argue it’s more important to be fairly good at everything than e.g. really good at programming and having no understanding of other things like sales and marketing. Instead of perfecting your Haskell skills, you’re far better off learning the basics of how to construct a good sales funnel, even if it’s not a natural fit for you. Some knowledge is a lot better than none.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  A bit paradoxically, being a generalist is a particular strength, and as the article points out one of the things you can do to do better at work is work in areas that best utilize your strengths. Ergo, if you're the kind of person who is good at quickly superficially learning a wide variety of topics, solo entrepenureship is possibly the best place for you.
  - itsmemattchung 5y ago
    This makes perfect sense. Beyond just writing software and architecting systems, I find the most challenging parts (and rewarding) learning how to build a sales funnel, communicating expectations and deadlines with customers, etc the most rewarding. And as you mentioned, solo entrepreneurship might possibly be the best place to exercise these wide array of skills.

strogonoff 5y ago

Learning ‘everything’ offers the benefit of helping you identify new many things you potentially could easily become (or happen to already be) unusually good at. On one hand, it’s a bit addictive and without certain external factors or compensating techniques it’s possible to get used to it so much that one becomes averse to investing time into learning one thing in depth. On the other hand, at least with the type of mindset I have, the idea of knowing what to learn seems foreign, enviable at times but more often smelling of a local maximum.

ksec 5y ago

>For example, this analysis of world-class judo players found that most rely on a small handful of throws, concluding1 >Judo is a game of specialization. You have to use the skills that work best for you. You have to stick to what works and practice your skills until they become automatic responses. >If you watch an anime or a TV series "about" fighting, people often improve by increasing the number of techniques they know because that's an easy thing to depict but, in real life, getting better at techniques you already know is often more effective than having a portfolio of hundreds of "moves". Which is essentially, I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. Bruce Lee

borroka 5y ago
What about, and I say this as a long-term martial arts practitioner, the man who has practiced 3 kicks 3300 times each (with one rep to spare)? And I am not saying it provocatively, the one-10000, 10000-one is a straw-man of course, but how many techniques to add to your competition arsenal is not an easy question to answer. As far as I remember, Ono, one of the most successful judokas of the modern era, has maybe uchi-mata, seoi, osoto, tomoe-nage. Teddy Riner, who had dominated the heavy-weight category for more than 10 years, basically had only uchi-mata, plus refusing to engage, running out of bounds. I remember a clock-choke and a few pins too. On the other hand, in wrestling you had someone like Cael Sanderson, who won the gold medal in 2004 and had one technique, the ankle pick. Saitiev, who won 3 gold medals in different Olympics, had instead a big variety of technique. Let's take judo. While nobody has, say, 15 competition ready techniques, a critical decision needs to be made between 3 or 5, say. So it is not as easy as saying: specialize! In addition to find the right (for you, considering your opponents) techniques to specialize in.
- yesenadam 5y ago
  This thread reminds me of a joke: What's the difference between a jazz musician and a rock musician? A jazz musician plays 100,000 chords for 3 people. A rock musician plays 3 chords for 100,000 people.
- codingdave 5y ago

sAbakumoff 5y ago

"I am not afraid of a person who knows 10000 kicks. But I am afraid of a person who knows one kick but practices it for 10000 times." Bruce Lee

rzzzt 5y ago
I wonder where the cutoff is. Would it be reasonable to fear someone who knows 2000 kicks, practiced 5 times each?
- sAbakumoff 5y ago
  and you receive the award for the most nerdy reaction ever to this quote!

xyzelement 5y ago

I believe the thing we often need to learn is the thing we're afraid of learning. We often (always?) have weaknesses that can/do jeopardize our strength and closing those weaknesses is crucial. The famous Scott Galloway (whom I had as a b-school professor) made this point like this: if you are a great guy, great father, great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and hurt people in your life - THAT thing offsets everything else. You won't become better by "doubling down" on what you're already good at, but by fixing this flaw. Another case - I used to manage a C++ developer. If you gave him a tight spec, he'd implement it perfectly. But the world we lived in required him to go talk to people to figure out what the real needs are, and he was bad at that. So his code always solved the wrong problem unless someone was helping him with this stuff. Every year, his own developmental goal was to go learn the next C++ standard. And that would have been useless because he was already a great C++ programmer. Going from 97th percentile to the 98th wouldn't matter. The much bigger bang for the buck would be figuring out how to go sit down with a sales rep and say "OK, what's our client actually trying to do here?" It sounds simple but I believe this held him back not just in work but in life. I happen to know that he didn't have great communication with his wife and kids either - solving this thing would make him so much better at all parts of his life. The thing is - we all have glaring things like this - obstacles in our own trajectory that if we fix, our existing strength would really shine.

borroka 5y ago
That is not a weakness that can be scored on a 0-10 scale (say, I am a 9 Python programmers and a 2 Java programmer, that's an either/or, a "threshold" weakness, or an attractor (of evil!).
premek 5y ago
> solving this thing would make him so much better at all parts of his life. How do you do that?
- xyzelement 5y ago
  > How do you do that? Great question. I assume you're asking from the point of view of the person having the challenge rather than someone observing/helping them. There's no easy or painless answer. The reason these deep flaws exist in us is precisely because we have been avoiding dealing with them for some deeply personal and painful reason. But I do think there's a general pattern that I can share from my own experience. The first step is to recognize that the problem exists and be "fed up" with it. To recognize that you're selling yourself short in some way, that you're failing yourself or your relationships. "I don't want to have my work and family life suffer anymore because I am afraid to talk to people." Or even "I don't want to be out of shape and struggle to walk a mile" kind of thing. You can't solve problems like this unless you're seeing them clearly and desperate to get out. They often say that you have to hit "rock bottom" as a requirement for curing yourself. I think this is what they mean. Once you hate the problem, it's good to get some external data. Ask your boss, colleagues, family about how you are (eg: tell me where my communication skills are weak, what am I doing that is so obviously wrong?) and then listen to what they say. They may surprise you? Eg is there a pattern, you are bad at it in some contexts and good in others? What is that about? From the above and other resources, come up with the list of behaviors that would be an improvement. For example: "I would be better at my job if before I dive into a project, I speak to 3 people who understand the problem space" is probably a non-controversial one. Then you ask yourself: why does that feel hard? Why am I just reluctant to get up and ask the sales person what the context of the client need is? What is it about "going up to someone I don't know super well and asking them a question" that terrifies me? What do I think would happen if I did this? Would they mock me? Would I feel like an idiot? Would they tell my boss I don't know something I ought to know? Reflect if the fears are real. Is anyone in the work environment actually going to react the way your fear would suggest? If intellectually you know that the thing is right and safe, then you force yourself to do it. Hyperventilate at your desk and then suck it up and walk over to the sales guy. Ask them, get the information, have a conversation. Reflect in retrospect: was this a helpful activity, and did I get hurt the way I feared I would? Keep doing it. Build up the experience/muscle of doing the thing, and prove to your anxiety that it's not a dangerous thing to do. Talk to others who got good at this thing despite being not good at it originally. Find people who are awesome at the thing and study what they do. Become a nerd on the thing that's scaring you and you will likely see it stop being scary. And I would be remiss not to say that in most cases, our deepest problems (even if they simply manifest in work performance) stem from psychology and childhood experiences. The guy in my story must have had some rough experiences growing up, maybe he was called an idiot or ignored or mocked or whatever, which made it hard for him to be communicative/open later in life, including with his family. Making a little crack in the armor of anxiety through the work process would help, but when something is this deep, seeing someone like a therapist is often helpful as well. But to rewind, the key thing is to recognize a gap between how you are and how you want to be. You fundamentally have to say to yourself "I don't want to be forever limited by this thing, I don't want to hurt myself and others because of this thing" -- everything else is problem-solving.

lukego 5y ago

Forth is an interesting case. It's really unproductive to build complex systems with. If you try, you will probably be frustrated. Instead it forces you to try really hard to find a cheating short-cut to solve the problem as few moving parts as possible. Just one simple example. The 'struct' language feature is 1500 LOC in Lisp but only 10 LOC in FORTH (see below.) Are they equivalent? No, the Lisp one has lots of bells and whistles, while the FORTH one is minimalist in the extreme. If you tried to write the feature-complete Lisp version in FORTH you would probably find it very difficult and unproductive. So you wouldn't do that. And this to me is what FORTH's peculiar brand of efficiency is all about. If FORTH were a bar the only drink on the menu would be tap water. That bar would be extremely efficient to run. Lisp: https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/src/code/defstruct.lisp https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/src/code/defstruct.... FORTH: https://github.com/openbios/openfirmware/blob/master/forth/lib/struct.fth https://github.com/openbios/openfirmware/blob/master/forth/l...

ipnon 5y ago
Elixir and Erlang, in my estimation, similarly force simplicity by the nature of its own constraints, in this case massively concurrent processes designed to fail. The difference is constraining the OS interface instead of the bare metal interface. The antithesis is maybe the object orientated model where interfaces are mutable and state is unreliable.
carapace 5y ago
Chuck Moore used to carry around a 3D wireframe CAD program on a deck of punchcards that fit in his shirt pocket.
fouric 5y ago
I think you've identified one of the essential parts of the design of Forth: it makes it very easy to implement simple systems, and very difficult to implement complex systems. In other words, polynomial O(n^a) complexity, where "a" is large, but the hidden constant k is small. Making good use of Forth seems to be contingent on identifying situations where you want to implement a very small and simple system (embedded systems, firmware, OS bootloaders, tiny IoT devices?), and using Forth there - and avoiding it like the plague in all other cases. I very much doubt that implementing a VLSI CAD program, where you want as many features to help your design as possible (features which necessarily incur a complexity cost), is a good use of Forth, for example.

greenail 5y ago

Because people are social "who knows you" is also important and impacts your learning. Finding the right people who are open to you asking 4 levels of questions is critical. This often requires you offer them something back. How you build those relationships is something to learn.

crispyambulance 5y ago
Yes, this is key, so important to NOT have to exclusively deal with sharp-elbow-environments at formative points in your career. Also good to have mentors which not only graciously answer your questions but which also challenge you and ask questions of you. The Socratic method. Old as dirt, but better than Stackoverflow for actual knowledge development.

bla3 5y ago

I think the answer depends on "why do you want to learn?". The implicit answer to that question for this blog post seems to be "to advance your career". That's a fine answer, but not the only answer.

whoisburbansky 5y ago
It sounded to me like the answer for the author was "because it's fun!" and then turning around and figuring out how to arrange his career in a way that lets him continue learning, which ends up benefitting his career anyways, almost as a side effect.
dominotw 5y ago
i am currently researching cancer due to my diagnosis. Its a fascinating world that will keep me occupied for a long time. I am learning statistics p-values, multi-variate analysis , kaplan-meier ect. A little bit of genetics and cell anatomy, mutations when i am bored of stats and reading about human side of cancer in the book 'emperor of all maladies'. I am really enjoying this part of the journey, learning something from scratch, beginner gains.
- nick__m 5y ago
  Good luck, I hope every things goes as good as it can and that you and your oncologist take every decision, that maximizes your odds of surviving. The were two positive thing about my wife's cancer 1- She survived 2- The intense learning experiance. P.s. You could add medical imaging to your list of interesting cancer related things to learn. It won't really help you but it is extremely interesting . If you can get the DICOM files of your scans try to interpret them with the full radiologist report. I got started with the trial of radiant viewer¹ (it easy to use but you will probably hit a ceiling before the end of the trial) and then try 3D slicer² (it's a lot harder to use but I feel that I used maybe 10% of that software capability and I was able to cleanly isolate the tumor and make the rest of her body translucent). 1- www.radiantviewer.com 2- slicer.org

hintymad 5y ago

Regarding a few skills, Rota interestingly has similar advice for mathematicians: https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-lessons.html https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~cahn/life/gian-carlo-rota-10-l... "5 Every mathematician has only a few tricks A long time ago an older and well known number theorist made some disparaging remarks about Paul Erdos' work. You admire contributions to mathematics as much as I do, and I felt annoyed when the older mathematician flatly and definitively stated that all of Erdos' work could be reduced to a few tricks which Erdos repeatedly relied on in his proofs. What the number theorist did not realize is that other mathematicians, even the very best, also rely on a few tricks which they use over and over. Take Hilbert. The second volume of Hilbert's collected papers contains Hilbert's papers in invariant theory. I have made a point of reading some of these papers with care. It is sad to note that some of Hilbert's beautiful results have been completely forgotten. But on reading the proofs of Hilbert's striking and deep theorems in invariant theory, it was surprising to verify that Hilbert's proofs relied on the same few tricks. Even Hilbert had only a few tricks!"

parenthesis 5y ago
In that same article you quote there is also a bit about Feynman, that "Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: "How did he do it? He must be a genius!" " I've come across this before, but it got reversed in my mind to: every time you come across an unsolved problem, try using all your standard tricks on it. Probably none will help. But perhaps eventually one will and you'll seem like a genius for thinking of applying that trick to that problem.

hintymad 5y ago

I think there's something in the middle. One does not need to learn everything, of course, and it pays to learn many new key concepts. Groundbreaking concepts help us identify new problems and find simple solutions. Another advantage of learning key concepts is that we get to connect all those concepts, and connections beget breakthroughs. As for what concepts to learn first, I think Feynman's method helps: "You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!'"

danuker 5y ago

I believe the tradeoff of how specialized to be is dictated by your work opportunities - specialization of labor AKA division of labor [1]. If you can and want to work in a large corporation, you should be able to get a fairly specific job title. This is advantageous because two specialists with advanced but complementary skills outperform two generalists with intermediate but overlapping skills. Division of labor allows sophistication in processes, which can increase efficiency. The downside is, the job pool is more limited (both for employers and for employees). You need specific employees/positions. A startup might not afford such specialization. For instance, if the finances only afford 3 people on payroll, you're not going to find a job working on a 10th of the pipeline, even with 20x efficiency compared to a generalist doing half of the pipeline with 2x efficiency. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour

willchang 5y ago

This wouldn't be Hacker News if someone didn't comment that ACTUALLY a random walk of n steps will get you sqrt(n) in some direction, which is much better than log(n). I guess my special skill is being pedantic.

karmakaze 5y ago
I've come to realize that 'exponential' is so often used to describe anything nonlinear. This would be the exact corollary. Good to pick up on it. I'll look out for this too now.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  corollary : i've come to learn to ignore writers who use "exponential" incorrectly, to your point. i realize this makes me picky, but it seems to be reasonable, as that incorrect usage often is a signal of sloppy thought.
  - sdrabing 5y ago
    What about the usage of capitalization?
wenc 5y ago
Just curious, how did you arrive at sqrt(n)? I spent all morning thinking about this in 2 dimensions and I came up with sqrt(n^2 + d^2) where d is the displacement from the original position on the y axis. (Pythagorean theorem)
- kragen 5y ago
  Central limit theorem. You get to √(n² + d²) if you take n steps to the right and d steps up. But if you take n steps randomly to the left or right, you end up at about α√n steps in one direction or the other, on average, because the distribution of your final position is a Gaussian around your original position whose standard deviation grows as √n. Try it: >>> n=1000; sorted(abs(sum(random.randrange(2) for i in range(n)) - n/2) for j in range(128)) As you increase n you can see the distribution of final distances widen by its square root. As it happens, in two dimensions the distribution is radially symmetric, and its radius is still proportional to the square root of the number of steps. This accounts for the astounding isotropy of lattice-gas automata, whose particles are doing such random walks simultaneously, and for the depressing popularity of Gaussian filtering in image processing, because the Gaussian convolution kernel is the only anisotropic separable kernel, and can be closely approximated in each dimension very cheaply with a different application of the central limit theorem.

mrandish 5y ago

In recent years I've started to apply this idea more and more in my own career and life. I'm focusing much less on adding new skills and instead finding much higher ROI doubling down on improving the "top three things I'm uniquely good at" in meaningful ways.

FilMo 5y ago
Agree with the idea. I'm also trying to apply this model in my life. If I don't understand something or just don't have the time or interest in doing smth, I just don't do / learn it or delegate it to someone else. As a great example, was my last essay. I just couldn't finish it myself. So I delegated it to professionals from https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grabmyessay https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grabmyessay, who already have the needed knowledges to write it for me.

throwaway879080 5y ago

>working on a few things and not being particularly well rounded has worked for me in multiple disparate fields arguably "well roundedness" is key to major breakthroughs in science & engineering while most of us work on incremental improvements, the real innovation often happens on intersection of two or more disparate fields that until then were considered weakly related, and it does require knowing a bit of everything the best scientists and engineers I know are "knowledge omnivores" and will digest anything. It does require well developed "filtering" capacity though, picking up signal from a lot of noise, and a sort of information hoarding mentality

sagaro 5y ago

Basically, be one punch man than be Superman. Got it.

ipnon 5y ago

A corollary: Companies are want to hire people who are good at interviewing, not people who are good at their job. The proof of this is that we find a disconnect between the interview process and the day to day job of working at as a software engineer. If you are primarily interested in making money, the best advice would be to become exceedingly proficient at the interview rodeo. Charm your way through the intro call, knock out the algorithmic quiz, and know the best approach for the problem in the technical screen right from the start. Improve your skill at these and your financial gains will be bountiful.

ozim 5y ago

I am big fan of "circle of competence" as Warren Buffet with Charlie Munger describe it. But I stole it to drive my learning approach. Learning is investment so I would say learn mostly in your area of competence to get better. Of course you want to broaden your area with time so you might spend 80-90% of your learning time on things that are directly in your area of competence. Then 10% or 20% to broaden that, when you start using those new things they will become your circle of competence and then you can go deeper with learning about those. If you won't use those - ditch those and go find another 20%. Downside to this approach is that you need a starting point like "should I be a Python dev or Ruby dev" which mostly is asked by new fresh starters - and my answer is pick one, if it sticks and is your 80% (even if it is not really) continue if not go for another one. I had link to article by Kent Beck who advises something similar so I also copied a lot of that approach from his article. Unfortunately I don't have a link now.

chrislloyd 5y ago
I hadn't thought of personal learning as a multi-armed bandit problem before! Thank you.
Zababa 5y ago
> Downside to this approach is that you need a starting point like "should I be a Python dev or Ruby dev" which mostly is asked by new fresh starters - and my answer is pick one, if it sticks and is your 80% (even if it is not really) continue if not go for another one. I remembering hearing in a podcast something like "If there's a fork in the road, pick it and stick with it. You'll end up in a better place two years later than if you just spend two years weighing the options. And if you stick with something for a period of time, it's usually easier to switch to something else than if you didn't do anything."

wenc 5y ago

I can relate to the “looking at data” as a skill bit, especially the part where he mentions that it’s not a skill most data scientists necessarily have. I have observed that too. (I’m one myself) Many data scientists like to jump into feature extraction and modeling the data with ML/DS tools because for us that’s the fun part. (we might look at some plots and summary statistics but we don’t dwell there for too long.) Few have the patience to just sit with the data for a week just to look at it, checking it against our intuition about the real world and the domain and basically just trying to put 2 and 2 together without models (except a mental model of the world) and just turning the data over in Tableau (or Excel). It’s actually not an easy skill to learn because it requires other meta skills. For one it requires an ability to match numbers to the real world — and for that you need experience and a good intuition of how the world works. My first manager was exceptionally good at doing this. I’ve noticed too that folks in senior management — at least competent ones — tended to be good at looking at data and picking out things too. I suspect this is actually a make or break ability to get to senior management at most companies. Data scientists, not so much. (Unless they worked in the field or came from the business side of things.)

sydthrowaway 5y ago

Synthesis is key to genius.

mym1990 5y ago

There is learning for fun and learning for optimization, and if you're lucky there is overlap! There probably no shortage of things one could learn to optimize for handling +ev situations better in the future, but learning for long periods of time is difficult if you don't enjoy the actual subject. I recently got into learning about hydroponics and tennis coaching and I don't feel the pressure to make those things a part of my career development.

somedudetbh 5y ago

"I don't have a large enough sample nor have I polled enough people to have high confidence that this works as a general algorithm but, for finding groups of world-class experts, what's worked for me is finding excellent managers. The two teams I worked on with the highest density of world-class experts have been teams under really great management. I have a higher bar for excellent management than most people and, from having talked to many people about this, almost no one I've talked to has worked for or even knows a manager as good as one I would consider to be excellent (and, general, both the person I'm talking to agrees with me on this, indicating that it's not the case that they have a manager who's excellent in dimensions I don't care about and vice versa); from discussions about this, I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion that I might turn into another post. @luu-- I'm sure a lot of people on here besides me would be very curious to read your thoughts on what distinguished these managers from the others, and how you would identify one (nevermind find one).

dvsfish 5y ago

Author should learn some modern css (I say this in jest)

opan 5y ago
I did find the text to be far too wide to read comfortably, even on a portrait monitor. I ended up reading the article in w3m in my terminal where I put it in a tmux pane next to another empty pane so I could adjust the width manually.

gabkins 5y ago

The best thing to learn right now is how to code. There's a lot of things you'll improve on. You can develop anything that you want, and it will help you think logically.