Why are your friends more popular than you? (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Why are your friends more popular than you? (2013)

economist.com

120 pointsmiraj94 comments

Related effect observed by J Spolsky here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html

Tldr: everyone thinks they hire the top 1% of applicants because some applicants spam hundreds of jobs (and never get hired) while others (typically the better ones) apply for very few and get hired immediately. Your 99% rejected pile is the same as other employers' while your 1% accepted pile is unique to you.

A more entertaining (and oddly intuitive) variant is the slut paradox: your average partner has been more promiscuous than you.

As someone who spent yesterday firing off 38 job applications (with personalized cover letters!), this terrifies me.

Cover letters are the worst. Do hiring managers really read them?

Some do.

I have a colleague who gets really annoyed with bad cover letters when we're interviewing and considers not taking the effort to make it good enough of a reason to reject someone (or at least count is severely against them).

Personally I don't care much about your ability to write something that sounds good. So write them and make them good, because you don't know who of us you're interviewing with I guess (metaphorically).

When I was doing recruiting I absolutely read the cover letters. If you can't describe why I should consider your background, why should I consider hiring you? I think it is an important indicator on how a developer communicates.

Do I really have to spell out the answer to your question?

You should consider hiring people because good candidates are hard to find. And if you want to know whether or not they're a good fit for the position, engage them in a conversation and ask. Don't expect applicants to do your job for you, the good candidates have better things to do than write you a letter before you even bother to talk to them.

Good candidates are especially hard to find if they're not willing to identify themselves.

I consider the cover letter important when I'm a hiring manager. It shows that you're interested enough in the job to try for it, to make a bit of effort. I've never been in a position where there were few enough applicants that I could have a conversation with every one of them - the cover letter is a brief of their half of that first 'why should you work here' discussion.

My opinion goes the opposite way when I am being aggressively recruited. So, I think it's on the person asking for something (to be offered a job, or to leave a current job) that should be showing their willingness to make the sale.

> Good candidates are especially hard to find if they're not willing to identify themselves.

Again. That is your problem to solve, not theirs. Good candidates don't need to worry about making sure you see them, they'll either just work for a different company where they happen to have more friends or they'll bypass the first line hiring process entirely by calling up a colleague and telling them to make sure whoever is doing the hiring bothers to call them back.

One characteristic of a good applicant is a sincere interest in working for the company. A resume with no cover letter is a sign of a candidate who is blindly spraying out resumes.

You can increase your chances of getting hired at a specific company by tenfold of you focus your efforts. Usually this means getting to know people at the company, understanding which departments and projects you may fit.

Are you honestly telling me you can't tell the difference between a candidate spraying out resumes and a candidate worth talking to without a cover letter?

Are you honestly sure that writing a cover letter is a good signal?

The standard advice is to submit a cover letter, so many standard candidates spraying applications do. There's someone just a few comments over who wrote 53 cover letters when applying to jobs.

You still think cover letters are about focus?

I absolutely agree with your last sentence though. Bypassing the initial resume screen by talking to an actual engineer makes far more sense, but frankly you don't want to be too aggressive about it because then random people will start pestering your engineers all the time just to be considered.

>There's someone a few comments over

That's me, we're in the comment chain for it right now. I don't understand what else I can do to get a job as someone a.) new to the city and b.) a graduate software engineer with no prior experience other than personal and group projects. None of my "passion about" companies will take me - dropbox rejected me in 30 minutes flat, probably automatically. What can I do but spray out absurd amount of resumes? What can I do but have an auto-generated cover letter that swaps out COMPANY_NAME and JOB_TITLE so I can crank out enough resumes a day to ensure I get a job before my bills swamp me?

A good applicant is someone who has the skills to do the job well. Full stop.

You can increase your chances of an interview marginally through a significant investment of time, but you'll get more interviews by spraying resumes. Especially good candidates with valuable skills.

Of course, but you can't tell a good candidate by just asking them. You have to pick up signs they are a good candidate. One of them is a good cover letter.

What positions do you have that a good cover letter is a strong positive signals indicating that the person will be good at the job? If it's a writing or communications position, I fully understand. If it's for software engineering, cover letters serve more to stroke corporate egos than they do to provide critical job skill information.

Can you clarify "focus your efforts?"

For example, I am a graduate software engineer. There are a lot of companies that I have a more than sincere interest in working for - I have a near obsession for working for, say, Google, Amazon, Dropbox, or Facebook. I also have a desire to pay my bills. All 4 of the above have rejected me for "lack of years of experience," and so now what? Find more companies I sincerely want to work for? At this point, a company with a software engineering team I can learn from fits the bill, of which there's probably 3,000 in the Bay Area alone. So, I don't understand how my options at this point are anything other than literally sending out 3,000 resumes (I'm at 80 now). Other than, of course, extensive networking, which I also do.

Your attitude will change when the market does. Trust me it will.

If mine will change to deal with a market we're not in right now, yours should change to deal with the market we are in right now. :)

I've included a few lines into my resume that serve as a microscopic cover letter. They did get noticed a lot last time I changed jobs.

And no, I did not write cover letters. A short phone / email exchange usually told the company if I'm an on-site interview material, and equally told me whether the company is worth being interviewed with.

My resume spells out, in thorough detail, why someone would consider hiring me. A cover letter is, for the most part, redundant and anecdotal. The one time I submitted a cover letter was to indicate that I had some experience with a very particular field that wasn't reflected in my resume.

> My resume spells out, in thorough detail, why someone would consider hiring me.

I always thought that the resume should explain why someone would want to hire me ("look, I'm smart, know some stuff, and did some cool things!"), while the cover letter explains why you in particular want to hire me.

I had very good look writing cover letters where I pulled apart the job description and explained how my experience (described on the attached resume) fit with each of the requirements.

Exactly. Plus it's a way in a few paragraphs to show you understand what the company does, tie in your related experience to that company and how you would benefit them, and generally pitch yourself as a suitable candidate to the company.

When I was recruiting programmers I always read them, though maybe 1 out of every 10 applicants included one.

Most companies (including the one I was hiring for) cannot compete on price[1], so they only way they can hire a particularly desirable candidate is if they find a particular fit between candidate and company/role. A strong cover letter is a strong leading indicator of a potential fit, so it is very desirable.

[1] - I think the money is there and the economics probably work out to "just pay programmers more" but there are social factors that make this strategy unviable. In particular, most firms are very averse to paying programmers more than the non-technical staff to whom they report so the wage ceiling for programmers at a firm end up being capped to the market-clearing price for those business professionals.

> When I was recruiting programmers I always read them, though maybe 1 out of every 10 applicants included one.

So few? Just to make sure, does the body of the email counts as a cover letter? I always put mine there, surely that doesn't make it invisible?

>surely that doesn't make it invisible?

It makes it perfectly visible, to the person who receives your email. After that only your attached resume is printed or passed on to other decision makers.

Putting your "cover letter" in body of an email is anywhere from bad to worse practice, depending on the initial recipient of your email (hiring manager vs low level recruiter).

> Putting your "cover letter" in body of an email is anywhere from bad to worse practice

So, the onus is on me to put this information in a place that is less convenient to reach than the body of the email?

This is ridiculous. The onus should be on them not to lose information. Sure, if I need that job badly, I may have to work around their stupidity. Hopefully I have more leeway than that.

The body of an email with a resume attached is an explanation to the person you are emailing about why you're sending them a resume and what you want them to do with it, no more. If the company is bigger than 80-or-so people and the person you're mailing is a recruitment inbox, then they are not going to be particularly interested in anything the email says other than which job you're applying for. Your heartfelt explanations about why the company is the place where you have always dreamed of working will never make it to anybody who has hiring decision authority.

So basically, the first person who receives my email will lose relevant information. It's like they don't even know how email works. Often at a technology company.

Such blatant stupidity is hard do fathom.

> most firms are very averse to paying programmers more than the non-technical staff to whom they report

Why? Management is just a different kind of skilled labor, not a more important one, and certainly not a less scarce one.

Who makes the decision?

The same applies to technical managers. It also applies to the managers of those managers- in general, if you're higher up the org chart you expect to get paid more than the people that report to you. If you get promoted, and are given more responsibilities, you expect to get more money. If you get promoted, and are given more responsibilities but are not given a higher salary, then you can probably get that higher salary for the same job by going elsewhere.

I don't see this as a management vs. engineering situation (especially since in there are plenty of companies that prefer to promote engineers to management rather than hire MBAs or external hires in general). It's more just a human hierarchy situation. The people higher up the hierarchy are held accountable for everything that happens below them in the org chart, even though they are by definition not doing the work of all of those individuals.

That's a functional hierarchy, of course. In a dysfunctional hierarchy, it's more like a pyramid scheme and the higher up you are, the easier it is for you to escape scrutiny by blaming those below you. All orgs I've worked in have been somewhere on the functional/dysfunctional spectrum, nothing's 100% good or 100% bad. There really are no ideal ways to get groups of people to work together towards a shared goal without introducing things which are injustices when seen in isolation, whether there's a hierarchy or a flat org or what have you. I hope someone figures out a better solution but I'm not holding my breath- like democracy and capitalism, it's the worst system in the world except for every other system that humans have been able to come up with.

Corporations are organized internally as command economies, not markets. There are other social logics at play.

That's interesting, because in Switzerland, and I expect the rest of europe too(?), cover letters are the norm, not the exception.

It varies in the US. Some require it, some have it as optional, some don't ask for it at all.

Here in Poland they were the norm about 10-15 years ago (for programmers), now it is unique if someone attaches it.

I'm a programmer not a writer, give me a system to create, don't make me write books :)

They do when the cover letter and the CV is short and to the point. When either is not, you're really testing the recruiter's patience. (Recruiters spend 5-7 second on average on a resume.) Much like a brochure, your CV/cover letter is there you to land you a meeting:

https://steveblank.com/2011/08/05/bonfire-of-the-vanities/

Is that number really true?

Humans move their eyes every few hundred milliseconds and you can only read a handful of words after each eye movement, so this suggests that they read about a hundred words total, and probably a lot less if you factor in "seeking" time (e.g., to find the section headings).

Eye tracking study on the topic:

http://cdn.theladders.net/static/images/basicSite/pdfs/TheLa...

People typically read ~200-300 words per minute. 100 words is a lot more than what you end up reading on most CVs when you go through a pile. You basically scan a CV for a few seconds and move on to the next unless something caught your interest. When so you actually spend a few minutes reading the whole thing - bringing the average to, indeed, under 10s per CV. If HR did its job before sending CVs your way the average is much higher of course.

Anecdotal point of evidence: I got interviewed and subsequently hired because of a cover letter for my first programming job out of college. It probably works a lot better when the company you're applying to is small and passionate.

Why are they the worst? I absolutely read them, especially when so many resumes look exactly the same.

Three people in the thread say they often read them. For an alternative, I'll say that I often skim them, but they're generally not very significant in my decision making process.

The candidate is generally forced to take the job description and riff from that about how their skills/experience are applicable. The problem is two-fold, first they lack deep context on the situation so land-up writing either off-base or just 'marketing' stuff about how they're the solution to the problem. It's not the candidates fault (or the job description) that the implications of assumptions will be wrong - it's just too early on.

Second, if I can't work out how their skills/expertise might be applicable to the actual problems I have (since I know the context), then I probably shouldn't be the hiring manager!

I read them because I recognise the effort that candidates are putting into creating them, and on occasion you get a clearer picture of the career arc behind the titles.

Where it may help more is for entry level roles where by the nature of the stage of career/life there's not much in a CV. In those circumstances providing some insight and background helps to clear the first hurdle, basically the "why would I spend an hour with you?" question.

They are the most important thing you can send in. In one page, you should summarize why you are a good fit for the role.

IMO, the way to get the best jobs at the best company is to find someone who works there or some one who knows someone that works there and express interest.

If you have a good convo, your resume goes in and you will get an interview. A cover letter is a massive waste of time vs sending a 3 sentence cold email to someone that works for the company to line up a coffee.

Also, you see lots of crazy drivers: if you drive with the flow of traffic, you only see a few other cars, but if you drive 30 miles an hour faster than the flow of traffic, you see tons of cars.

Because my friends code in python and JavaScript whilst I code in lisp and try to get everyone to convert to functional programming?

Ah, this is not the quality content I like to see on HN but was written with such... charm?

It's the me_irl charm.

Edit: before anyone else downvotes me for — what, being superficially too meme-y? — I'll clarify that the purpose of this comment was to point out that the "charm" that personjerry found in the toplevel comment can be found all over the place, and that it's down to a formula. Personally, I'm fond of it regardless.

edit: lol nevermind, I always forget the nerd collective doesn't like humor on their precious HN.

Did you stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night?

Is lisp functional programming ?

Its most direct influence is lambda calculus itself, yes I'd consider it a functional programming language.

It doesn't even support OOP unless you layer CLOS on top of it, and you won't get anywhere if you try imperative programming with it.

You can create any DSL you like on lisp. Though with lisp you generally choose something better than the above mentioned paradigms.

Reminds me of the surveys that found that men have more partners on average than women. Mathematicians then jump in and show that's not mathematically possible.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/weekinreview/12kolata.html

Consider that there might be more casual sexual male-male encounters than female-female.

According to the linked article the survey was limited to heterosexual individuals.

https://m.mic.com/articles/132129/a-surprising-number-of-str...

Parent slightly misspoke. They asked about heterosexual partners, and not asked heterosexuals about their partners. So homosexual partners would not me included in any counts.

Contrary to popular belief sexual orientation is not a matter of "choice", or temporary mood changes, so it's not like phrasing of the question asked in the survey matters at all. 99% of people have either only heterosexual partners or homosexual partners, not both.

Even if homosexuals were included in that survey, and asked about "how many heterosexual partners you had", them answering "0" wouldn't matter at all (provided that there were roughly the same number of gays and lesbians surveyed)

> 99% of people have either only heterosexual partners or homosexual partners, not both.

Source? Or is this just guesswork? Because the stats I've seen in the past, while varying in numbers, have pretty consistently been that, in the population, from most to least common is:

Opposite sex partners only > Both same and opposite sex partners > Same sex partners only. (Don't have any sources handy, but I'll try to find and post some later.)

As a warning to others: this article has a fairly NSFW background image.

MIT OCW Maths for CS does the proof for this here[0]

Think the key takeaway really is to frame your question precisely and draw the right conclusions. That you always perceive your friends to be more popular than you, or that surveys of number of sexual partners seem to always suggest men have more partners than women are still interesting - only the actual conclusion may be more nuanced than the superficial takeaway.

In the case of sexual promiscuity, my questions are: what social trends are causing the skew in survey results and/or what flaws are pervasive in modern survey taking methodology. We're able to logically prove the fallacy of this particular question, but how many other inferences are we drawing from survey data which are incorrect?

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9wxtqoa1jY

Before going any further, can we agree that this effect, whatever it is, is not due to sampling bias?

The devil is definitely in the details. What do people mean when they say "average". In your paper, the "average" has a denominator of all people, whereas I think some people think the denominator is the number of people of each gender.

Imagine a scenario where there was 1 man on earth, and 100 woman. Say that the man slept with half the woman. Now he has slept with 50 women, the male average is 50 partners / 1 male or 50. Half the woman had 1 partner, so 50 woman / 100 total woman slept with 1 man, average 0.5 partners.

Easy to show that the average could be swayed one way or another with this average.

Cue the mathematicians to show me pedantically why I'm wrong, but it's not about that. It's about the imprecision of English in Buzzfeed articles when using math terms.

The difference I believe in this average partner case is that the approximate population is split more evenly than your 1:100 ratio. So if you can show an example with different averages and the same population on both sides. I bet you'd win over more people

Isn't it actually a sampling problem?

Take your 1:50 50:1 ratio, and now only sample 5 people out of the entire group. If those 5 questioned were women which only had one partner you would miss the 'black swan' that had 50. I would think the question comes if your sample size is large enough to encompass all the outliers that can significantly influence the results.

For example in Parent comment a few female sex workers could have sex with hundreds of men, but if not questioned they would be missed. The article 'hand waving' the prostitute effect away without further details is disingenuous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

I apologize in advance for this scenario, but: You have a population of 100 males and 100 females. All the guys have sex with one of the girls, so males' average partners is 1. She then gets a particularly bad rug burn and dies of sepsis. Average females' partners is now 0. Now hold on, fella, don't click that down arrow just yet. It might just be that real life works that way. In our modern society, I would guess that it's rare for a woman to have a hundred sexual partners and end up moving on to a long and prosperous life, but the guy who does the same, unfair as it is, might end up being one of those sociopathic CEOs we all read about. If you do the numbers at any given time, in the real world, there might be more slutty guys currently living than women of the same ilk.

Yes, if the gender ratio is very imbalanced, it wouldn't be impossible for men to have had more partners on average than women. In fact it couldn't be equal, since the total number of partners would have to match.

But the ratio of heterosexual men to heterosexual women is close to 1:1 and not 7:4. Therefore the disparity in reported numbers is impossible.

tl;dr

people with many friends are overrepresented in social networks (because many people have them as friends) so people who are friends with you have more friends than the average.

In other words, everyone is friend with Tom from MySpace so you have a hugely popular friend, but you don't know any loner with no friend (because they're not your friend).

its highly probable that most of your(average person) friends are your friend because they easily accept anyone's friend request and hence have lots of friends

In other words, the friendship paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox

Lesson learned: When you set up the equation's terms to get the most dramatic results, you get dramatic results.

Yeah, they actually took this one step further than "my friends have more friends than me on average" to "my friends have more friends than me total." As f somebody were going to compare their friendship network with the sum total of all their friends' as a means of comparison. It really took a legitimate mathematical point and distorted it.

Same reason all the other lines at the supermarket go faster than the one you're in?

I never made the connection between me being a loser and supermarket line speed before!

> "Remarkably, the friends became ill about two weeks before the random undergraduates, probably because they were, on average, better connected. With the world only imperfectly prepared for a pandemic, being able to spot trends in this way could be useful."

Isn't this just because you have a larger sample (N people * Y friends) than if you are looking at just N people? In which case it's more likely that one's friends will get sick before the randomly selected person. If so what's suprising about that?

Does anyone have a link to the original paper?

I think it's saying that peoples' friends are better predictors of illness than just people.

But isn't that just a function of the larger distribution that gives you more resolution on the tail? I assume I'm missing something here because that seems obvious.

I assume they meant that _on average, per person_, friends became ill before the random people. Because friends have more contacts on average, and contacts give you a higher chance of becoming infected.

No, it samples a different probability distribution

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

When you introduce two people to each other, your own network page-rank increases as both of them get one extra connection.

Page-rank is based on eigenvalues, so it is more complicated.

But an interesting question still is: do your friends have, on average, a higher page-rank than you?

There is also a Number Hub video where Hannah Fry talks about this exact phenomenon. This also gets into applications of this result to limiting the spread of diseases.

https://youtu.be/Z_15zbgNpHk

Basically in a social graph, you are more likely to be in the edge (because there are more vertices in the edge) than in the center (visualize how in a balanced binary tree there are more leaf nodes than inner vertices).

Coupled with the fact that your friends are likely to be in the center.

People's social connections are far more concentrated than they seem. Someone that appears to have a great life often is as bored as anyone else.

Aside from club promoters, most people's social circle is small. Even rich people who'd you think would be happy, often have mostly transactional unfulfilling relationships.

Your job, by far, determines your social circle. And if you happen to work in tech, you likely know a far greater number of intelligence and nice people vs some trendy scene of high finance or entertainment.

Saw the title, asked my boss: "Why are my friends more popular than me?".

The cold hard truth came back quickly: "Cause' you're not very social".

Here's your tl;dr.

"You have friends?"

Isn't this obvious because if you are friends with someone, it's likely they have more friends? A friends graph would end up with many branches and just a few roots, right?

What is the root of a graph?

If you have to ask you're probably a root/leaf.

Sampling bias, or rather, experience/observer bias, is another aspect of this.

In 2015 I explored the question of how much user activity there was on Google+. My initial approach was to look at the public posting activity (which is most visible), but a criticism was that there might be some massive amount of private sharing going on (apparently by accounts which had never posted publicly). I did a follow-up analysis looking at the listed followers ("friends" in FB parlance) of publicly inactive and publicly active profiles.

The most overwhelming impression was how many profiles -- publicly active or otherwise, had a shockingly small number of followers.

The median for publicly inactive profiles: 2. For publicly active ones: 5.

The 95%ile: 33.5 for inactives, 69 for actives.

This jarred with the experiences of those I was hearing criticism from simply because they were, virtually by definition, extreme outliers.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq

Public vs. non-publicly posting profiles summary data

Publicly Inactive

Followers:

n: 88, sum: 561, min: 1, max: 53, mean: 6.375000, median: 2, sd: 10.953730

%-ile: 5: 1, 10: 1, 15: 1, 20: 1, 25: 1, 30: 1, 35: 1, 40: 2, 45: 2, 55: 2, 60: 3, 65: 4, 70: 4.5, 75: 6.5, 80: 7, 85: 10, 90: 19.5, 95: 33.5

Views:

n: 88, sum: 638656, min: 265, max: 119442, mean: 7257.454545, median: 1012.5, sd: 17720.702361

%-ile: 5: 298.5, 10: 335, 15: 368.5, 20: 408.5, 25: 477.5, 30: 503, 35: 570.5, 40: 689, 45: 912, 55: 1211, 60: 1340, 65: 2027.5, 70: 2824.5, 75: 5245, 80: 7893.5, 85: 12777.5, 90: 21663, 95: 48144.5

Publicly Active

Followers:

n: 1890, sum: 125539, min: 1, max: 67855, mean: 66.422751, median: 5, sd: 1579.404405

%-ile: 5: 1, 10: 1, 15: 1, 20: 1, 25: 2, 30: 2, 35: 2, 40: 3, 45: 4, 55: 6, 60: 7, 65: 8, 70: 10, 75: 13, 80: 18, 85: 24, 90: 34, 95: 69

Views:

n: 1890, sum: 66647773, min: 252, max: 21088213, mean: 35263.371958, median: 3419.5, sd: 522757.797486

%-ile: 5: 576.5, 10: 855.5, 15: 1076, 20: 1311, 25: 1566.5, 30: 1847.5, 35: 2153.5, 40: 2518, 45: 2947, 55: 4045, 60: 4890, 65: 5982.5, 70: 7645, 75: 10157, 80: 13468, 85: 18576, 90: 27814.5, 95: 54290

More: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/RhnK...

From 2013 behind a paywall.

Web link circumvents the paywall.

Web -> First link in results.

What friends?

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