A career decision influenced by Nassim Taleb
clipperhouse.com
clipperhouse.com
Losing your job (eventually) if you become obsolete isn't tail risk, it's the most likely scenario. And losing your job right when everybody else is losing their job is also not tail risk, it's the most likely scenario. So, if you're not learning anything new, you aren't at risk from a black swan, you're doomed.
If anything, it relates more to the idea of "Antifragility"; many small shocks strengthen you. The small shock of learning a new technology (and feeling underproductive while you're on the steep side of the learning curve) is the small shock that makes you stronger. Don't let yourself avoid those small shocks for too long.
Besides the problems I have with Taleb I'm happy that the OP had the courage to quit his job and that it worked out. Courage is a good charater trait, and in this case it got rewarded.
It's funny; but it's an uncharitable summary if you're going to use that as a basis for evaluating Taleb's ideas.
But you should of course take it with a grain of salt, since I used this word itself to mock Taleb, implying that his work can be summarised in a short Guardian parody piece.
1) We know one of the Roman governors was from Africa, but don't know his ethnicity
2) Maybe [something about recessive genes I think] the DNA aged out of the record
3) Maybe most of the Romans went home at the end of the occupation!!!!!!! This one made me think of that Feymnan trait of complete skepticism. Taleb seemed to struggle with the idea that there is not much firm proof of anything that happened in Roman Britain, but not having firm evidence to back up your claim doesn't make you wrong.
It seemed to me, and this is only an impression, that the main problem Taleb had with her is that she was a woman, and a smart one too.
And it also seems that people like Pinker don't take him serious anymore (which seems to aggravate him even more).
PS: http://quixoticfinance.com/empty-statistics/ talks about the Taleb-Pinker feud and rebukes Taleb.
Feuds between intellectuals have been a staple for decades.
You are letting personality problems obscure insights.
This said, that doesn't mean he won't offer insight. It just that since I don't have time to read everything, I'll use my heuristic method to look for potential places for insight. In this case it would rather lead me to Pinker et al.
Then my question to you would be why do you feel that? Is it based on evidence?
Many of the worlds greatest scientists and philosophers have been jerks e.g. Aristotle was a massive sexist.
Or look at the long list of geniuses who were unstable like Galois.
Taleb has always put his money where his mouth is - to me that's a better indicator than poor manners.
Well signaling is a thing thats been developed since humanity exists. For me thats evidence enough. If singaling would be inefficent, it would not still be such an important factor in human interaction.
It's the same with job interviews. No matter how smart you are, you better be on time and show some manners. Because if you don't, you'll be asked: "If you are that smart, why don't you understand that you are not getting a job this way?" and frankly, there's not a good anwser to that.
That really depends.
If you avoid a bad hire 10% of the time by rejecting everyone who is late then that can be a good trade off for you even though you have rejected many great candidates. There is a significant cost to a bad hire.
On the other hand you can read a chapter of a book at your local library for free and for a minimal time investment and then decide if you want to keep reading it.
I'd rate Talebs work as significantly more influential and insightful than Pinkers although I agree with Pinker more often.
And here's an article about the debate/noise: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/dna-roma...
Beard's point seems to be that ethnic and geographic diversity of some sort did exist and the kind of thing portrayed in the show is not entirely impossible, while Taleb's point seems to be that a family of “black” and “white” people would not be a typical one and that these modern racial categories are different from those of the time. The Atlantic article puts this in context and says why the positions are not inconsistent.
Talebs point is the public is being mislead by taking an incredibly unlikely scenario and treating it as likely and common.
Mary's rebuttal was that it's not an impossible scenario.
I've lost track of the times ive heard "you have a math degree? Not CS?"
Aside from that, you may well be getting filtered by the HR department’s recruiter who is just going down a checklist. Smaller companies/start ups are more likely to have actual developers looking at candidates and more likely to be more flexible in requirements.
Now I'm looking to jump to JavaScript or Elixir and analysis paralysis has set in. Unlike the previous transitions, I couldn't have these as my primary focus. I have to resort to personal projects or get very lucky to work with Vue from time to time. Proving myself to myself or other people seems much harder without a very current Github profile and gearing up for interviews requires a form of study that's difficult. I use these techniques consistently enough to be highly proficient but it's not easy to keep that breadth of knowledge on hand to answer most interview questions. I feel like this matters more than a degree at all tbh but there seems to be a bit of selection bias if they're specifically commenting on the type of degree you have. When CS is largely rooted in mathematics and a math degree tends to cover way more advanced topics that I feel are largely applicable.
The industry is so self-defeating.
One is like the other comment pointed out, having personal endeavors that you can show off is huge for showing that you can build something and that language and degree are less relevant than creatively being able to solve problems. I had built a commercial CMS tailored for artists all in PHP, built my own theming framework, ORM as well as the payment process and all of the visual design for the system, themes and website. Mind you this was from 2004-2006, and had a lot to learn as I went. I say that not to brag, though I am proud of it, but it's a big part of how I got noticed at the company I'm with. It showed that I could handle multiple areas and solve a domain specific problem (this product formulated when Movable Type was the way to get a blog going, and visual artists, including me, didn't understand all the weird unixy stuff like the command line and the PATH, etc). So I'd recommend finding an itch you'd like to scratch and see if others have that itch as well and build something. Another upside is you are actually making your life easier in some way.
The second factor that led me to joining this company (I still hate Java and .Net, though I understand their strengths), was because of the company culture itself.
Not only had I technically shown that I had value, but they actually saw my background as a good way of avoiding a monoculture where innovation can't happen. The company was young and it was a risk (we were about 20 people then, now over 800), but it was one that I took mainly because the company's cultural and work values mirrored mine.
If you're getting rejected because of your background and the type of degree, you may just not even wish to work there. I've had interns and hires come in with degrees ranging from math, electrical engineering, and biology to music and even intercultural outreach, and they became amazing software developers. Heck the original creator of normalize.css and svg4everybody was one of those with a very non traditional background.
So also think of the place you'd like to work for.
I'm not saying those companies are wrong per se, they gotta do what they need to, but personally, I value pragmatism, creativity, transparency and flexibility more than boxes that are just checked on a piece of paper.
There's a somewhat similar dynamic with PHP; when people aren't simply outright going by their own language preferences, they may assume that your caliber as a dev is roughly equivalent to the highest quality PHP codebase they've encountered & groked. And not only has there been an awful lot of low-quality PHP code written, the most commonly deployed PHP code probably doesn't fit the most common web MVCish architecture choices that've coalesced over the years.
You can, of course, use both kinds of judgment in a form of reverse-discrimination.
I think the other solution is to get more concrete about the kinds of problems you've studied/solved. If your Math degree brought you to lots of material about matrix & numerical analysis, hey, you studied machine learning foundations. :) PHP? Maybe you're now partly a domain expert in content management systems.
(But also, probably best to add a language Java/C# folks look at with respect...)
Like the acronym though.
Have you tried Python?
I made a killing when a certain blockchain company traded on NASDAQ was investigated by the SEC and soon faced delisting.
With those winnings, I went all in-purchasing near expiry far far far OTM put options, expecting imminent OTCBB quotes.
It took 2 months for it to happen and my put options expired worthless.
So what I learned is that I suck at trading and I should not gamble.
he's still living off that FU money....not sure how rich he is but I estimate 20MM
I recently signed an offer with a company, US bank with large python community. Now I am counter offered with more pay and promotion and internal transfer to a new team. Conventional wisdom is never accept counter offer. but this one I am giving second thought as it is not for original role but transferred to new team. I will be only one in my location and I will be building MVP for business users. it will be exposed to a lot of tech stack but it won't be scale as large as new company.
However to join a new company, there is always uncertainties like team and project. I had bad experience before. It is difficult to find it out through interview only. It seems to confirm this as I find that hiring process is a bit not taken seriously. It is greenfield project but no coding tests. There is no front end expertise in the team so I was only got asked things like "you worked with angularjs right?". Hiring manager is recruiting three altogether which he thinks will be good team.
risk is about managing uncertainties. I hope decision like this can be priced so it is easier to decide.
I would simply sum what the author is trying to say in one word "Complacency". Having a decent well-paying job can blind you to whether you're on a good career path.
A good career path is one where you are challenging yourself, you learn something new everyday and you position yourself to take on new projects or new leadership roles (if that's your thing).
We don't have a really great theory of this kind of boil-the-frog-by-inches phenomenon yet (unless Jon Elster has buried one somewhere in one of his many books, which wouldn't surprise me... and honestly it wouldn't surprise me if Elster anticipated a lot of Taleb somewhere, he's done so so much work on rationality over time), but latent risk probably isn't it.
The BMI formula is (lbs/height_inches^2)*703. Allegedly, average male height in the us is just shy of 5'10, female 5'4, so let's just run with 5'7, or 67 inches, as a canonical height. So doing a tiny bit of algebra and taking a derivative, you get ~.16 bmi per pound. A person with 25bmi is classified as normal; 30 as obese. That means that in a little bit over a year you can go from normal to obese on one donut a day.
Broad answer: the number of people who struggle with their weight is pretty good evidence that the main challenge is, in fact, to not overeat for millions of people.
Then by taking the first job, there is an opportunity cost of $20K/year, because you can only have one job at a time, and you had a "better" offer.
But there could be a different latent risk in the 2 jobs. So using that model leads you to evaluate the two opportunities differently. You need another concept to explain the choice; opportunity cost alone doesn't do it.