The Oversimplification of Results and Hard Work | Hacker News Reader

The Oversimplification of Results and Hard Work

code.likeagirl.io

107 pointsCodeLikeAJedi36 comments

There are going to be some people who read this and assume she must have interviewed poorly, or have really bad grades or something. I read this and go “yep, luck is a huge factor in whether or not your hard work will pay off”.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work hard — you’re essentially playing the lottery otherwise. You also have to decide how much of an asshole you’re willing to be (hate to say it, but if you’re willing to behave without morals, your chances of making money go up in the short term). I’m personally not wired to behave like an asshole, so it’s been hard work and a few lucky breaks that could be parlayed into more opportunities that in turn paid off, sometimes handsomely.

Looking back over 25 years, I can point at exactly where and how I got lucky many times. I needed to be in position to take advantage of those lucky breaks, and I needed to make the most of them (I didn’t always succeed at that!), but some essentially stochastic event has almost always been straight-line connected to an eventual outcome.

> There are going to be some people who read this and assume she must have interviewed poorly, or have really bad grades or something.

There's a paragraph in there dedicated to just that; in that case, the HR person that handled her application was fired / quit and the whole application apparently went down the shitter.

“Aish, after much discussion, we realised we really want you in the team. But the HR who was handling your papers had to quit and therefore we will no longer be pursuing your application. I am very sorry that we have taken so long to respond”.

This is the freaking CEO talking. Here's my translation:

"Aish, we want you, but we can't have you because someone quit, and we're too incompetent to follow up."

I suspect even worse: the HR person kept asking why this woman wasn't being hired and preference to was being given to a German male candidate, and was therefore removed or driven out.

(although it can't be trivial to fire people in Germany?)

Yep. Sounds like that company did her a huge favor in hind sight for not hiring her. If that is how HR is handled, cannot imagine the rest of that operation being much better.

Sure. Luck plays a big part in this. But we also have to acknowledge that someone who carries less privilege than you do is going to have both less of those opportunities to get lucky, and less luck when those opportunities do arrive.

After all, luck favors the privileged.

True in general. In my case I have the privilege of being white, male, and being born in the US. Pretty good stuff, but also: homeless, single mom without a high school education, living in crappy parts of the country for that kind of thing (Texas). There are (as the British would say) knock-on effects from that -- it took me a long time to learn effective spending habits. When you're poor, you spend money when you have it, because it will be going away somehow regardless of what you do. Also bad teeth, which, you know, I shouldn't be sensitive about, but I sometimes am. :)

Anyway, you're right, the privileges we're born into affect a lot of potential success. At the risk of sounding like an asshole, I'm trying to give my children all the advantages I didn't have, and genetically they're picking up the ones I did. They'd better damn well solve hunger or figure out world peace! :)

luck favors prepared.

> or have really bad grades

This has been my pet peeve. Couple of years ago, I interviewed for a job. I had completed over 6 years of IT by that time. The company for some reason was interested in knowing my grades. Because my college gave out CGPA, it was easy to quantify the same. Now they wanted to talk about my performance in high school or my SAT scores.

Now while I got the job. I was peeved about having to answer about my grades obtained 6 years later. The interviewing manager's had a theory - everyone needed to show an "intelligent" spark sometime in their life. He wasn't happy with me because I had been "average" performer all through my studies.

I think the lottery analogy is a good one. I look at success as winning a lottery. Hard work doesn't guarantee a win, but it does buy more tickets. Likewise, all of the various privileges you may be born into (right nationality, race, gender, etc.) are basically a batch of tickets handed to you for free.

You can argue about the total number of tickets, and about the amount of extra tickets work/race/gender confers upon you in different contexts, but in essence this is the most realistic way to model 'success' and how it happens. The model works for health issues too - eating badly, smoking, being sedentary, being male ... all of these give you extra tickets in the death lottery

(I first came across the lottery/tickets analogy in mixerman's posts on prosoundweb years ago, always assumed he had coined it but maybe not)

What's neat about the analogy is that it easily models one of the most fundamental tensions in human society: how much privilege should we be able to pass on to our children?

In a perfectly fair world, we would all be born with the same number of lottery tickets, the same equal opportunity. But one of the primary goals of being successful is to be able to ensure better opportunities for our children, in essence giving them lottery tickets.

I believe there are studies that show people overestimate how much control they have over getting cancer.

It's the old "Just World Fallacy" thing, where the thought of randomly getting cancer no matter how "good" you are, while objectively accurate, is hard to cope with, so blaming the people with cancer for their predicament serves as a way to ward off the bad luck and feel in control of your life.

Actually, with cancer, you do have a lot of control over whether or not you get it based on lifestyle. Up to 90% of cancers are preventable.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/

Edit: 90% sounded way too high, so I dug up a more recent article on this, which claims it is 50%.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/healthy-l...

> "I said no because their new team lead said during the interview, “I know Indians, I have worked with them. One thing I cannot take from Indians is dishonesty. If you lie to me, I will not bear you. I am only taking you on the team because the company says you did a very exceptional job!”"

This is what people mean by intersectionality; despite having "a Masters in Power Engineering with an honors in Digital Technology Management from a very well known German university", being a woman and being an Indian immigrant means that the odds are stacked against her.

I think of intersectionality as being the examination of different experiences from specific segments of the population. Multiple traits co-exist to contribute to a particular experience.

For example, many people make generalizations by simply splitting an observation by male and female. Men do this. Women do that.

When in reality it could easily be the case that a woman of x ethnicity observes particular observation in that realm versus a man of y ethnicity.

Or a homosexual man of a visible minority has a much different experience than a heterosexual woman of an ethnic majority.

I am not sure where you pulled your definition of intersectionality, but doesn't sound like anything related. I am not sure neithee why you added the fact that she was a woman to the equation when the comment clearly was targeted at her race / culture. It's annoying cause it somewhat implies that the million of immigrant men don't go through so similar if not worst experiences

That's the opposite of what I was trying to say: that she gets comments targeted at race / culture, and also the discrimination against women in engineering.

Again I am not sure that's how social intersectionality is supposed to work. You seems to see it as a relatively simple algebra : women have it worst than men , Immigrant worst than non immigrant so immigrant women have it "super worst". IMHO this is too simplistic, the way social identities blend together can't be predict thsst way. The authors decided to relate her experience as an immigrant, let's just respect that and not try to pull gender into when we d ont have enough information to have a meaningful conclusion

"No matter how much you try, things will sometimes not work at all, and some other times, things will work with no effort."

If you keep flipping a coin, eventually you'll get 3 heads in a row. That particular instance will be luck. But if you don't flip the coin at all, 3 heads in a row will never happen.

"I got the job."

You also completely changed your attitude in the job interview. There are things in my life that I repeatedly and inexplicably (to me) failed at, and when I changed my attitude, suddenly it started working. Was it randomness, or was it my attitude change? Hard to say.

The ability to continue to flip the coin is generally it's own kind of luck, though.

The article makes an extraordinarily valuable point: It's never going to be only about hard work. But as an outside observer I also look at what she's done and think "This is such a good example of perseverance and grit."

As Seneca supposedly said, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity". Sometimes opportunity is shy and you have to look a lot longer than you'd prefer. But I fully believe that if someone keeps at it, they can find their luck.

> It's never going to be only about hard work.

The hard work idea is another manifestation of the Labor Theory of Value. Working hard at the wrong thing will get one absolutely nowhere. It's really about working smart, not necessarily hard.

> I am still here at this job, and I love it a lot. I love the people and the work I do a lot. And my mom is fine. I still am in Germany, I have a wonderful boyfriend and I live in a very cute house. All of this, despite my effort, may have never happened, who knows?

So hard work did pay off...

Completely relatable about going into interviews stone cold after having an emotional meltdown. I often wonder if this forced emotional distance is favorable to interviewers, and perhaps, the successful interviews i have in this mindset appear to be luck/chance because of the distance itself.

The more emotionally detached i am from an opportunity, the less i am thinking about all the work ive done and the associated emotional/mental stress that surmounted to each moment. As a result i probably appear less desperate, less anxious, more confident, and more easygoing.

I also consider the fact that displaying less emotion is more relatable to men. It's a tough spot to be in, but very interesting to reflect on nonetheless.

I do believe that hard work is not always sufficient for professional success, but I think the author here actually makes a pretty good case for why hard work pays off. Yes, timing is so important, but being ready to take advantage of when the right time comes can be just as crucial as having "good luck".

The reality is there are always externalities that are not under one's control. That's a given. Being prepared, for the good and the bad, is all we can really do to increase our chances of succeeding.

fortune favors the prepared mind. The converse is not guaranteed.

Luck, privilege, talent[1], and hard work - all typically contribute to success. Any one alone is very unlikely (but not impossible) to lead to it.

Obviously you can only have direct impact on some of these, so it's worth concentrating effort there.

[1] "talent" here is somewhat hand-wavy mix of skill and experience

One of things I feel which should be covered in colleges are interviewing skills. Lot of times I see people who have the right mindset but their answers doesn't reflect their abilities too well.

I can attest to perseverance and luck having been crucial to my success as a developer. Getting in the door for an internship was a numbers game, as I was still in community college and most companies don’t take candidates like that seriously.

After getting in though, personality and hard work factored more in carrying me through to better opportunities (luck was still involved though).

I suspect your journey will be the same from here on out, and you don’t seem to lack perseverance and personality. So good luck!

The oversimplification of cancer and smoking:

Smoking has been overly simplified to “If you smoke hard, you will achieve cancer.” But I've been smoking hard for 20 years and no cancer yet! My grandfather smoked his lungs till he was 82 and never had any cancer either. Whenever I hear that smoking kills I get triggered!

Well the P53 gene is kind of know, as long as all your lungs cells' chromosome 17 don't get hit you will be fine. Good luck with your habit.

__I am average at my studies, what seemed to be super easy to my peers seemed strenuous for me.__

This is probably going to controversial, but her core problem seems to be an insufficiently high g-factor. She could have contributed to a prominent open source project like the Linux kernel or the C++ compiler. The only barriers to entry are technical competency and ability to focus.

__Hard work has been overly simplified to “If you work hard, you will achieve your dreams.”__

This is true assuming your dreams are calibrated to your capabilities. I presume the problem was her map was not in sync with the territory. Elon Musk can dream about going to Mars. I can't because I simply lack the willpower/drive/intelligence to achieve that.

We need to stop perpetuating the egalitarian fantasy. All men are not created equal.

So you think someone with Masters in Power Engineering and Digital Technology Management should contribute to the Linux kernel as a way to improve their chance for work?

Really?

No. I simply pointed out that someone with sufficiently high intellect would have found other ways to get a job. Unless she is a statistical anomaly people in her situation would have similar experiences. I see no evidence that she was particularly unlucky, and even if she was ― bad things happen to people all the time.

The central point I was trying to make was that hard work pays off, if you are smart enough.

For example, Jeff Dean currently heads Google Brain despite having not having a PhD in machine learning (his PhD was on whole program optimization of object oriented languages). Or John Carmack starting Armadillo Aerospace would be another example.

I expect to be downvoted again, but I stand by what I said.

It's impossible to tell from this post whether there is a "real" skill gap. It is very easy to look around you in college and think everything is coming easily to everyone else, because you feel the work you're putting into something, but you don't really know or feel how much work other people are putting in. The higher you get into a good engineering program, the fewer of your peers are getting by just on raw talent and not much work. In fact there's a mass exodus every year from engineering programs as freshman who cruised through high school on natural raw talent and not much work encounter their first instance of needing to work in their life, and they can't handle that. The author certainly passed that bar which a lot of others do not, which puts her in the ~50% of those who start an engineering program at all right off the bat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com