95th percentile isn't that hard to reach | Hacker News Reader

95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

danluu.com

444 pointsjanvdberg286 comments

This is a great post, and it's unfortunate that so many people are missing the point. You may not like the writing, or the layout, or the title, and you may be able to pick holes in the argument, but who cares? That's an easy, boring game to play. Take it from a reformed cynic -- you will grow so much more from trying to figure out what's right about someone's argument rather than what's wrong.

The key insight in the article is: For many skills, becoming highly proficient is easier than most people realize. That is both true and highly under-appreciated, in my experience. Any time you can combine those two attributes, you're writing something important. Keep the "ridiculable" posts coming Dan!

> Take it from a reformed cynic

So one extreme to another?

> you will grow so much more from trying to figure out what's right about someone's argument rather than what's wrong.

Isn't this how we get flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, religious zealots, etc? They focus on "what's right" rather than looking at "what's wrong"? Don't cult leaders or tyrants encourage people to do the same. Look at what's right about my leadership rather than what's wrong?

> The key insight in the article is: For many skills, becoming highly proficient is easier than most people realize.

Maybe I'd agree with "becoming proficient" is easier than most people realize. I'm not so sure about "highly proficient". But then again, that's a subjective rather than an objective characteristic.

> Keep the "ridiculable" posts coming Dan!

The Levine fan club is going to be jealous.

Well, if you listen to anti-vaxxers, at the very least - then you’ll learn how many times the governments actually fucked up vaccination practices in the world?

It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vaccinate, but they have _something_ to say.

> Well, if you listen to anti-vaxxers, at the very least - then you’ll learn how many times the governments actually fucked up vaccination practices in the world?

You don't have to listen to anti-vaxxers to learn that, any more than you have to listen to Alex Jones' rants to learn that corporations dump toxic chemicals into the water supply that can affect the ecosystem. Fringe conspiracy theorists and extremists are not the sole arbiters or guardians of hidden knowledge or suppressed truths.

Very good point and wise. I find this more applicable as a leader when reviewing designs. It's so easy to poke holes and complain, but it is hard to find the good and value that. It is worth it because I can then focus my comments on what is essential and then drive accountability to get all the details done well enough.

Is there a review system (code, design, writing, whatever) that allows you to color code chunks of what you're reviewing and has a well defined color scheme? E. G. Shades of green for mildly to very good, shades of red for mildly to very bad, and some other colors to denote confusion, etc.

It would be useful to see feedback of where you did stuff right, but allow you to focus on where you did stuff wrong. Making sure you're aware of what you did well is important both for being able to repeat it and psychologically, and as a reviewer it can help you make sure you are providing that positive feedback (a bunch of red with no green should be obvious).

Thats bit to say it shouldn't include specific comments, but sometimes there's not a lot to say about a large chunk of what you're reviewing that you're generally pleased with, but the person that produced it could definitely benefit from knowing that.

So, the best way to provide feedback is via good questions.

This is why tools like quip/gdocs can be great for design documents because I can pinpoint a detail and then ask a good question.

Most junior engineers are bright, and they can solve the (or a) problem at hand. However, the lack both experience in the field and within the domain. Questions are a great way to express concern and share experience.

For software, if they can reasonable code, then it is not so much an issue of right/wrong but "hey, what problem are you solving?" and then aligning on the right problem via questions.

The power of good questions work at every level, and you can drive a lot of good growth and progress via them.

I'm not suggesting this in lieu of questions, but in addition to. The problem with questions by themselves is sometimes it's ambiguous if it applies to a small portion or a larger portion. Also, questions are not always a good way to indicate doing something right, and any good review will also highlight what was done well.

In the end, it's an additional channel of information, which may expose miscommunication on either side. I don't think it's that uncommon to have a comment next to something that the reviewer might think should cover a larger portion of the work than the creator thinks, either because it's unclear, or the creator slightly misinterpreted what the reviewer meant and didn't see how it applied.

Providing structure that requires active categorization of all of a work (or all of it that's being reviewed), even if it's just to mark it the equivalent of "eh, no real comment" removes ambiguity. If for nothing else than because different reviewers have different standards, and some will mark and question everything, and you can assume anything left unmarked is good or better, and some will only mark egregious stuff, and the rest can be considered to range from mediocre to excellent, which isn't as useful if you goal is also to foster improvement.

> The power of good questions work at every level, and you can drive a lot of good growth and progress via them.

Good questions means well defined questions, and I think anything that could make those easier to output by default (or reduce the minimum quality) might be extremely beneficial.

Corollary: the more you try to explain an idea to someone who doesn't understand it (or doesn't like it - usually one in the same) the more they will try to disagree.

Coming to key insights requires either good faith or investigation, coming to true ones requires both. You can also challenge everything and wait for the really smart people to embarrass you, which, as a lazy person, I find an attractive option :)

I think it's kind of a 'secret' that it's possible to become really quite good at something with just a little bit of practice and an internet connection. Most people are still unaware of this, or think that it isn't for them.

In the future, perhaps this realization will become commonplace, and skills will no longer be impressive things to have. Or, conversely, the internet will disappear, and we'll think back to the era when it was possible to learn anything under the sun from the comfort of our bedrooms, and realize that we mostly squandered it.

It seems like most of the top level responses are responding to the title and not the actual argument. The argument Dan is making is that you can easily get relatively good at most activities. This is because most of the people doing those activities aren't actively trying to get to get better.

95th percentile is probably not the best way to put it since there are tons of activities where nearly everyone is trying to actively get better such as competitive sports. Dan's thesis doesn't hold true for those activities and he knows that. That doesn't change the fact that there are a ton of activities out there where you can easily get better than most people by practicing.

There are plenty of sports for which I find this still holds true. A lot of it comes down to how much the required skills to be great are around more innate skills (e.g. speed, height, jumping ability) vs acquirable skills (technique, flexibility, problem solving, mental fortitude). It's very hard to be a 95th percentile soccer, basketball, or track athlete without a decent amount of innate athleticism. But I've seen plenty of not-particularly-athletic people get to 95th percentile in things like climbing, grappling, long-distance running, etc.

One of the big factors in outdoor sports is how you define participants. Advocacy groups are usually the ones who bother to do this, and they have a vested interest in making it look as big as possible (so as to better advocate for friendly policy). I think at one point the American Canoe Association defined a boater as anyone who had been in a canoe or kayak at least once within the past year.

Obviously if this is your universe of participants, it makes it a lot easier to get to 95%.

If you define it as anyone who spends time in a canoe or kayak at least once per week, in comparison, that 95% level of ability goes way way up.

> It's very hard to be a 95th percentile soccer, basketball, or track athlete without a decent amount of innate athleticism.

Completely not true.

Having absolute solid basics that you drill every single day (dribble with both hands or both feet, run your conditioning, shoot free throws, etc.) puts you in the 95th percentile until probably Division 1-A college level (at which point, yes, innate size and body type start to matter).

Yeah I could be wrong on basketball. I don't play it much but now that I think about it you can be a great shooter without being a great athlete, and that alone can make you quite valuable.

I was talking about all sports.

You have to have at least an average amount of athleticism for any sport.

After that, simply drilling the fundamentals over and over and over and over ad nauseam probably puts you into the 95th percentile. This also has the advantage that it improves your endurance and athleticism DRAMATICALLY.

There are regularly articles about middle school teams that are ferociously drilled on fundamentals beating significantly older and physically larger teams that don't have the fundamentals down cold.

I actually disagree in both directions. Have you played or coached many sports? I have, and I'm not trying to be an asshole with the question, but it just seems so clearly untrue to me that I wonder if you haven't or if we're somehow talking about different things. For some sports/positions, you can become 95th percentile even with below average athleticism, and for others it's essentially impossible even if you have average or even slightly-above-average athleticism. It's all on a spectrum depending on how reliant that sport or position is on innate vs trainable attributes.

Let me know if you disagree with any of these, or if you think the examples I'm choosing are not within the scope of your argument: -No matter how much you drill, you will never be a 95th percentile center in basketball if you're 5'8" or whatever the average male height is. -Slightly further down the innate vs. trainable spectrum, I have never seen an average athlete become even close to a 95th percentile sprinter, long jumper, football wide receiver, or soccer winger. Speed is too important for these, and speed is largely innate. -I have seen below-average athletes become 95th percentile power lifters, football linemen, archers, grapplers, climbers, long distance swimmers, etc. That's because these sports/positions depend on more trainable attributes like strength, flexibility, endurance, technique, and mental focus/resilience.

- No matter how much you drill, you will never be a 95th percentile center in basketball if you're 5'8" or whatever the average male height is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265197

- Slightly further down the innate vs. trainable spectrum, I have never seen an average athlete become even close to a 95th percentile sprinter, long jumper, football wide receiver, or soccer winger.

You're looking at this the wrong way. You're thinking about pro players. For most sports, if you're paid to play, you're probably in the top 1% or even 0.5%. Top 5% is much, much bigger and it's usually semi-pros and even amateurs. You can definitely be a half decent player in an amateur team for almost any sport, as long as you're not actually disabled. And even then, it depends on the disability.

This is the author's failure, not the commenters'.

In the article he's saying that a lot of people fail to improve because they're practicing wrong. Now that's probably a valid point, and it should have been his thesis. In fact, he probably considers it to be his thesis, but he muddied the waters by providing it with a debatable introduction and title.

> This is the author's failure, not the commenters'.

Putting all the blame on the author is oversimplifying things. Yes the introduction and title could be made better, but that's not an excuse to interpret the post in a way the author obviously didn't intend it to be interpreted.

It's not about fault, it's about actionability. Telling hoards of people they should interpret things differently isn't actionable feedback. You aren't likely to change the behavior of so many people.

But the author is just one person. If that author learned to structure their work better they can singlehandedly improve the comprehension of across the entire mass of readers.

If you're communicating to the masses and they're not getting it, it's your fault. It may not be 100% true, but it's 100% useful to think of things that way.

To give the opposing argument some form of development, reading comprehension is the responsibility of the reader as well.

Some authors are hard to understand, but the message they are trying to convey could be worth extracting.

As a reader it is preferable for you to be able to extract value out of opaque text. The author owes you nothing. And, presumably you are reading because you think there might be something of value underneath.

If you fail to capture that value (If there is any) that's your loss, not the author's.

Certainly, it would be best if the message were communicated in such a fashion that people would not misunderstand it to begin with. But if, and when things are poorly communicated, if you misunderstand the underlying message the person taking a loss is not the author, but you.

To think otherwise would be to focus too deeply on some sort of exposure, or monetary loss on the part of the author, rather than the failure to capture a nugget of wisdom that might be of utility to your life.

There's a theory that most people sand-bag on activities as an ego-protecting maneuver. That we are terrified to know, with absolute certainty, that we are just rubbish at a particular task.

I think we'd rather see ourselves as lazy than incompetent. Even though objectively speaking, "lazy" is probably just as damaging a hit to your self image. Because admitting to yourself that you're a shit basketball player isn't necessarily going to dissuade you from learning piano, but feeling stuck certainly will.

> This is because most of the people doing those activities aren't actively trying to get to get better.

This is true. Most people put the absolute minimum amount of effort in every aspect of their lives – often times even in things they actually care about. Once you realize this and pay attention to people you'll start to notice this everywhere. Some attention to detail and you instantly jump ahead – may be not to 95%, but considerably ahead. The rest tends to be practice, as you point out.

Yeah, no, that's just about lousy definitions. The premise suggests that it's easy to become 95%-ile in anything, say, deadlifting among men who deadlift and not just entire population of the planet Earth. Before I can suggest author to try, he hastily corrects himself, that it doesn't mean "95%-ile among people who practice regularly", so "men who deadlift" is invalid domain after all. Rather, it should be... "people who lifted a thing from the ground at any point of their lives"? Not that impressive. And, sure, just converting yourself from "people who lifted a thing" to "people [of the same sex] who actually go to the gym regularly and deadlift" will get you into 95%-ile of the first, broader domain within a couple of years, because people who regularly deadlift would already be less than 5% of the population.

The thing is, it isn't that easy to actually train for deadlifting for a couple of years, it assumes dedication, some health requirements and basically is the difference between people who do some sport and people who don't. This is obviously ridiculous comparision to anyone talking about anything but playing Overwatch.

So, sure, this surprising life lesson will turn out to be true if you continue to craft the domains you compare in such way that you match competitive ice skaters vs people who were on the ice rink one or twice, MMA fighters vs guys who were in a streetfight once back at school, etc.

And while I don't play Overwatch, I don't think it's actually different than that, it's just that "people, who both can and want to waste significant portions of their life time in a dedicated attempt to become better Overwatch players" are less than 5% of people, who created an account on the Overwatch server (or whatever).

"Waste" is a bit harsh for a hobby that trains for high levels of coordination, reaction times, communication, teamwork and tactics. In fact, the benefits of competitive video games are wide ranging and often surprising.

See https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201502...

On the other hand, I think its absurd to construct your comparison group as

> significant portions of their life time in a dedicated attempt to become better [at X]

If you look at the deadlifting example a little differently: you can get to the 95th percentile of 'people who go to the gym and actually deadlift' in terms of form and being able to lift relative to your height/weight/size/sex/muscle mass/etc.

All of the examples in this post perfectly apply to this situation: people don't record themselves and check form, don't upload those videos to the internet and get feedback, and don't get help from a personal trainer (one who actually knows something about form). This is why you see people in the gym all the time making basic mistakes: rounded back, non-vertical bar path, bending over too much/not enough.

They have more injuries, don't make progress, or don't get the results they want. Yes, you're not going to get to the top 5% in terms of weight lifted without a lot of dedication and time. But that's more of achievement over time/a career than your ability to execute the skill.

Agreed. 95th percentile of Olympic pole vaulter's? 95th percentile of horse jockey's? If you limit your scope the scope of what you are trying to achieve it gets much more competitive.

95th percentile of the Overwatch ladder is also not the same thing as 95th percentile of competitive tournament players. This entire article is just full of category fallacies to try to support a vague subjective assertion.

Gaming ladders with automated ELO systems are also not run like tournament ELO systems in more controlled environments like competitive chess. Games like Overwatch, WoW, Starcraft, Hearthstone, etc. will not dynamically update when the player is inactive in order to not discourage players. You have to lose games to lose your ELO category rank, although obviously you can go up and down the leaderboard without playing games. There are some gaming rank systems like CSGO that have some rank decay for inactivity but it is just at a flat rate.

So, "95th percentile" in these systems is not actually indicative of that unless it is based on the precise rank on the leaderboard. In many of these seasonal games rank inflation happens towards the end of the season because of this lack of passive decay. It means that at the beginning of the season, the top rank is very competitive, but as people become less active as the season goes on, it becomes easier to attain rank.

In a lot of domains, if you are 95th percentile, you are extremely competitive. You may be noncompetitive with the 99%ile cohort and the bottom of the 99%ile may be noncompetitive with the 0.1%ile, but to argue that that's not "very good" is just goofy perfectionism. The fact that the author is using goofy noncontrolled systems as an example to support his weakly-defined subjective argument only undermines his own case.

> [Unlike chess] Games like Overwatch, WoW, Starcraft, Hearthstone, etc. will not dynamically update when the player is inactive in order to not discourage players

Elo (as used in chess) does not update if you aren't playing games. It's a common criticism of it.

Ranked and unranked already exist to address your insight

There was a recent example of one player at the top of one ELO system becoming the top ranked player of another [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen#Personal_life

Last I played, overwatch does indeed drop your elo once you are diamond and above (approx top 10%). Though I disagree with the author as one who climbed from bottom 25% to top 10% - it was quite hard and took months of deliberate, regular practice (~1000 matches). I found it nearly comparable to improving at medical school. I think the author underestimated the complexity of being good at overwatch.

It's all subjective based on how people vary in their natural competence at the skills required for the game.

Some people play Overwatch and in their first 1000 games they get to grandmaster. Others get to platinum.

People tend to assume it's easy to get to whatever level they got to, regardless of where they are on the skill curve.

Top 5% deadlifting normalized by body weight is not hard at all. It just requires consistency.

> Rather, it should be... "people who lifted a thing from the ground at any point of their lives"? Not that impressive. And, sure, just converting yourself from "people who lifted a thing" to "people [of the same sex] who actually go to the gym regularly and deadlift" will get you into 95%-ile of the first, broader domain within a couple of years, because people who regularly deadlift would already be less than 5% of the population.

I deeply disagree. Taking the whole population is the only sensible interpretation. Answering like "duh, you actually go to the gym, of course you're better than 95% of guys on Earth, that's so unimpressive, anyone could do it if they did it." entirely misses the point. The point is precisely that you actually did it, while 95% did NOT do it and now you are ahead of 95% of people in this thing.

If you always had to be 95th percentile in your current peer group (general couch potatoes, high school championship participants, world championship participants, Olympians, Olympic medalists, Olympic champions, Olympic champions twice in a row), then the 95 just doesn't mean anything. Then you just have to be the single very best according to your logic.

The point is not about "impressive" or not. It's about 95th percentile or not.

> Note that when I say 95%-ile, I mean 95%-ile among people who participate, not all people (for many activities, just doing it at all makes you 99%-ile or above across all people).

This is the start of the second paragraph of the article, so it sounds like you disagree with the premise of what we're discussing

Depends on how interpret participation. Unless someone participates, you cannot know their score, so I guess a bare minimum participation is indeed required to be able to make comparisons. Theoretically there may be a guy who can already deadlift more than you, he just never tried.

He gave another example which I think is more illustrative -- Overwatch. There it's clear he's referring to 95%ile of people who play Overwatch, not any video games, and even less so everyone on Earth. My guess is, though, that he would include the people who play the casual modes in Overwatch, not just the competitive modes.

> If you always had to be 95th percentile in your current peer group (general couch potatoes, high school championship participants, world championship participants, Olympians, Olympic medalists, Olympic champions, Olympic champions twice in a row), then the 95 just doesn't mean anything. Then you just have to be the single very best according to your logic.

This is the typical experience for the ivy league types common on HN though.

They had to beat their way into the 95% of their zone school, then 95% of their magnet high school, then 95% of their elite college's graduating class, then 95% of their big N corporate ladder, etc.

Despite the filtering at every step of the way, the curve is always bellshaped! And it feels like shit if you find yourself on the left side of that curve among your peers.

But I guess it's healthier to think along the lines of: "What do you call a medical student who finished last in their class? Doctor."

The typical HNer passed 95 in all those things you listed?

I think you're vastly overestimating the readers of this forum. Just by the numbers, you can't have so many people who aced through top-5% in Ivy League schools and darted through the corporate ladder in a top SV company. Not to mention that not everyone is American here.

We probably managed to be the 5% a few times but then we came here to settle down as the 95% in our current bracket.

I think this is a deliberate misreading of what Dan wrote. I think it's obvious he's not talking about physical characteristics, or activities where learned skill has little influence on the outcome.(reaction speed, IQ, deadlifting, sprinting speed, endurance)

And it seems like most of the activities we care about rely on learned skills more than physical traits.

Now also his explanation also relies on how dedicated and competitive the average player is.

But the overall point of the piece is that we probably don't try to systematically improve on nearly as many life skills as we should which I think is a valuable and true insight.

Much respect for Dan's minimalist site (can't say I've ever waited for it to load) but this much CSS makes it so much more readable:

  html {
      display: flex;
      flex-direction: column;
      align-items: center;
      line-height: 1.2em;
      font-size: 1.1em;
  }
  
  body {
      width: 650px
  }

As for the actual content, I agree with it a lot. I suspect most people are quite bad at learning. It's not something that's taught in schools, and when it is, it's probably lost upon kids due to their lack of executive decision making skills.

For instance, I tutor kids in math. I don't think I'm an amazing tutor. My limited bag of tricks are stolen from my teachers. But what I do provide is a fully concentrated hour long study time with feedback. Which is more effective than 10 hours of slightly distracted studying with little to no feedback.

Basically, improvement is a combo of concentration and feedback. Sounds facile but it does work.

There's a great Donald Glover^[1] quote about this:

> “I realized, if I want to be good at P.E., I have to be good at basketball. So I went home and shot baskets in our driveway for six hours, until my mother called me in. The next day, I was good enough that you wouldn’t notice I was bad. And I realized my superpower.”

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/donald-glover-...

Oh man. I can't unsee this now.

Why is the text so close to the edge of the screen? It's the same feeling when the gravy is about to touch my dessert.

I always end up hitting Firefox’s readability mode button when reading Dan’s site. Normal browser width is just too wide for wall-to-wall text.

looks perfect on mobile.

Thanks for the reminder, reads much easier on mobile Safari reader mode.

Any Donald Glover quote is great.

There's something similar with programmers - if you're ever the smartest person in the room, find a new room. If nobody is around thats either better than you or interested enough in order to give you good feedback, then its easy to stagnate. Just being around people who are all pushing hard can lead to a huge increase in skill - I think this is one of the reasons being at a top tier school helps, its the peers you're around who are all doing their best at any point, and the institution that pushes on you as well.

Exactly. That's also what deliberate practice means in the ten thousand hours rule. You keep push yourself or getting pushed and you improve really quickly. People like Carmack can push themselves rigorously so they are the first tier. After all it's bery expensive to hire someone to keep pushing you.

You posted

> I suspect most people are quite bad at learning. It's not something that's taught in schools, and when it is, it's probably lost upon kids due to their lack of executive decision making skills.

And then you said tutor kids. Do you find your previous statement to be true? Are most of the kids quite bad a learning and do most of the kids lack executive decision making skills?

Or did I mis-understand? I was expecting that after you said "most people are ..." and that you tutor kids that you find the kids match your statement about "most people"

Yeah totally. I don't mean that as a slight against the kids, but they do have poor executive decision making skills and they are not amazing at learning. As did I in high school and middle school. Brain development plays a factor. The commonly cited fact is that executive function is still developing in teenagers and young adults. I'd also argue that teenagers are often sleep deprived or facing other challenges that make school hard to prioritize (dating, drama in social life, change in familial dynamics, etc).

I think schools and many adults have it completely backwards when they see that kids struggle to get their homework done, get enough sleep, handle extracurriculars and have some sort of social life, and blame the kids' lack of organization or lack of proper education. Blaming a teenager's lack of organization is like blaming a toddler struggling to walk. They're still developing the necessary coping mechanisms and discipline to handle adult life.

But what should be the skin in the game for the teenagers then in order for them to actually learn something from that experience?

They may be blamed for the wrong reasons; but blame is what’s supposed to push them

I don't know. But I don't believe blame is a good impetus. I spent a lot of my high school experience stressed and blaming myself for my inability to work inhuman and inhumane hours. Only in retrospect have I realized that I was not at fault. Only now have I understood that working so hard with so little sleep on tasks I find so uninteresting is not admirable in the slightest.

This will only get worse. It's becoming harder and harder for students to get accepted to colleges, which in turn means the bar for them is rising, often to ridiculous levels. The students who make it to the high levels are not the smart, charismatic future leaders of tomorrow. They are neurotic, depressed, sleep deprived and scared. They are pushing themselves to ridiculous, unhealthy limits for whatever reasons. And by selecting them and placing them in the same school, the same room, we are only concentrating these qualities.

I don't know what we should use to push students forward. But I know that teenagers these days could use less blame.

> Dan's minimalist site (can't say I've ever waited for it to load)

He has an article[1] about speeding up his site, too, with the summary:

"I'm not sure what to think about all this. On the one hand, I'm happy that I was able to get a 25x-50x speedup on my site. On the other hand, I associate speedups of that magnitude with porting plain Ruby code to optimized C++, optimized C++ to a GPU, or GPU to quick-and-dirty exploratory ASIC. How is it possible that someone with zero knowledge of web development can get that kind of speedup by watching one presentation and then futzing around for 25 minutes? I was hoping to maybe find 100ms of slack, but it turns out there's not just 100ms, or even 1000ms, but 10000ms of slack in a Octopress setup. According to a study I've seen, going from 1000ms to 3000ms costs you 20% of your readers and 50% of your click-throughs. I haven't seen a study that looks at going from 400ms to 10900ms because the idea that a website would be that slow is so absurd that people don't even look into the possibility. But many websites are that slow!4"

[1] https://danluu.com/octopress-speedup/

the width of the body should be like the following so that it behaves nicely on mobile phones

body { max-width: 650px; }

Good catch. I just wrote this CSS for my computer but I suppose for other devices you'd need to adjust that

Computers too fwiw. I tried your CSS on my PC, but I had the page up side-by-side with something else and the text overflowed the page.

edit: that didn't entirely make sense, so I looked again and I was zoomed it a couple of notches.

95th percentile for an SAT score is something like 1450. That's fairly impressive to me. Feels like scoring higher might often have more to do with effort than ability.

Is that excluded from the line of thought in the blog post because it's among "people who regularly practice?"

Or is it that effort vs ability thing? Not impressive because you were born smart?

In a totally "no effort" arena, 95th percentile height for a 19 year old US male is 6 feet, 2 inches. Does that feel unusual/impressive or "not that good?" I imagine it brings plenty of life benefits.

Perhaps the 95%-ile is actually good when it is something that almost everyone has to do.

Everyone in school is practicing at least a bit on reading comprehension, and the SAT is across lots of schools, if you are the in 95%-ile of millions of people it might be more impressive than being in the 95%-ile of tens of thousands of people.

That seems like a good observation...sample size matters. Being one the best players in my over-40, non-contact, recreational hockey league is very, very, not meaningful. I could move up a bracket and be an ignored bench warmer. Or move down and be a superstar.

Seems recognized by everyone playing though. We focus little on who has talent. It's more about cool multi-player strategy, and funny stuff. Terrible players that "luck or effort" into something magnificent is way more exciting and celebrated than a known good player scoring/defending. "Goalie didn't show up and here's a dumbass in pads" are the best games, even if it's your goalkeeper and you get destroyed on the scoreboard.

Remember that everyone has different goals. My cousin was heartbroken when she got a 1570 on the old SATs, as her dream of going to some university was crushed, as she was competing with peers in an elite high school. She had to settle for Brown or something, and was convinced that life was over.

For me, I didn't have the desire or resources to do that. I got my 1400 and was able to choose from any of a dozen schools. That meant that being a white shoe attorney or McKinsey consultant was out of my reach. Life is good.

On another note, my son is passionate about little league. He's good, has fun, has a competitive spirit, has made great friends, etc. It's a great thing. He's probably in the 75th percentile of players at his age and region. So unfortunately, major league baseball dreams are unlikely to be fulfilled.

This article is similar. Being in the 95th percentile of people playing some video game is interesting, but isn't something that I would have any desire to do, and probably is a fools errand unless you're looking to compete at a professional level. I'd like to be in the 99th of people having fun playing a game -- the time and mechanics of getting to be an elite player is probably in opposition to that goal!

Are you saying she was heartbroken with a 1570 out of the old 1600 or the slightly-less-old, but still not current 2400? I can't believe that 1570/1600 is going to disqualify you from anywhere.

This was the 90s, so the old 1600 based exam.

My understanding is that there is/was an admissions quota at the high school level. I don't recall the gory details, but as a cousin and friend I was sympathetic, but as someone not in the middle of it I was puzzled and kind of horrified at the brutal competition that left a truly brilliant person feeling like some sort of rube.

Everything worked out in the end.

Your cousin is probably exaggerating. 1570 is still 99th percentile (assuming out of 1600 obviously.)

1400 is still way above average, at least 95th percentile.

You can do whatever you want in both cases.

First, no, it's not that amazing if it's something every 20th person has. Second, height is not something you should fixate on. The benefits of being tall are generally over reported. In certain arenas like basketball it helps. In others, like running, pants shopping or air travel, it hurts. I think it's probably about the 12th most important factor in person to person interactions, after eye contact, body language, eloquence, voice, the elements of physical presentation you can control, etc.

"Second, height is not something you should fixate on."

I'm not convinced. Many studies illustrate the correlation to success. We are still animals and not-merit factors still matter. Good looks, height, gender, race, symmetry, smell, whatever, etc, are a real "thing". You can overcome it all with mitigation, but it isn't imaginary. That stuff drives real outcomes.

Height could be correlated with "thriving" from infancy through childhood.

Also, I have tall children and they are regularly treated as older than they are, setting expectations higher for them in settings outside of school where they aren't grouped by age.

Me too. I have sons that are 6'4" and 6"2". I'm not "short", but am 5 foot whatever. Mostly my view is "thankful for the genetic luck" for the extra benefit of the doubt they get. And those benefits are very clear, despite other strengths both have.

Tinder would seem to contradict you there. How often is an eloquence requirement given vs. height requirement? Sure, height is not something we should fixate on, but it doesn't mean that doesn't happen anyways.

Usain Bolt is 6'5"

The 95th percentile of SAT seems quite different than the 95th percentile of people taking in the first time and doing no special prep. Sadly that second score is near impossible to measure because it would be useful to help many kids compare their first score with no dedicated prep to a more realistic percentile (and better encourage them to work to improve their score).

I’m Recalling whether it was 96% or 94%, but I got a perfect on my math sat II. And yet the perfect score was only ~95%.

Top 1/20 Can be impressive or unimpressive depending on context.

Top 1/20 is impressive if everyone in the group is competitive. It’s not impressive if it’s 1/20 out of a bunch of randoms who’ve never tried to be good at it.

SAT II Chinese listening test has 800 at 61%ile: https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/sat/pdf/sat-subject-te...

In your case, I'd say ~95% in Math SAT II is still rather impressive because the group of people taking SAT II is already self-selected as few schools actually require the test.

Height is tricky, because its indirect to real goals. So it would depend what you'd want to achieve. Also, I'd think the 95%-ile of height might actually be better then the 100%-ile. Being too tall comes with its own set of limitations.

So again, its all about the framing. If you just frame ir as taller is better, then ya, 95%-ile starts being impressive, but not as much as 96%-ile.

The point is about improving skills.

SAT performance is (largely) determined by intelligence, which is (largely) innate. If you're relatively smart and don't practice at all, you will score higher on the SAT than your less smart friend no matter how long they practice.

This applies even more so to height.

With many learned skills, though, if you invest time and are thoughtful about how you approach your learning, you can get to 95th percentile fairly easily, despite that seeming quite impressive. Many participants don't put the time/effort in, and many of those who do don't do it in a remotely efficient way. If you do both, you are virtually guaranteed to get to a high percentile across a wide range of skills, mostly independent of your innate ability.

A 1450 is not a very good SAT score. Its not good enough to get into top schools.

I had a 1500/1600 SAT and I was basically DOA.

1540/1600 here + National Merit (1520/1520). I applied last admissions cycle, and was DOA for top schools, but mainly because of my 3.8 GPA.

this isn't necessarily true, it's around the 25th percentile of students admitted to harvard. probably not gonna happen unless there's something else special about you, though.

I got into a top ten college with a 1470. it was fairly lopsided though (800 critical reading, 670 math; apparently the scores are reported differently now?), I dunno whether that helps or hurts.

I got a 1500 with a 790 CR and 710 Math (Yikes!). Went to my state school and hated it so I just came away with the conclusion that my entire high school career was just a massive waste of time and effort.

well after a few years I ended up transferring to a local state school that accepts ~60% of applicants (iow, a very different world). I didn't like my state school very much either, but honestly the cs program was a good but more rigorous than the "elite" college I had originally gotten into.

ultimately this stuff doesn't matter as much as you might think. the state school I went to turned out to have good relationships with lots of software companies in the area. I ended up getting an internship that lead to a pretty good gig straight after graduation.

I think I got pretty great gigs out of undergrad, but I don't think the HN crowd would agree!

What gigs did you get ? How does it matter what the HN crowd thinks ?

you seem to be following this person around and harassing them on all their posts. why?

I follow the front page just like everyone else. And his comments about "perceived elitism" always stand out. Just comment on whenever I find something interesting in the comment.

Well they sure are great at proving me right ‾\_(ツ)_/‾

You didn't answer the question I asked.

The distinction between "people who participate" and "people who practice" is basically impossible to make, even just in video games.

Even the example he gave didn't really work: He says that the top 30% of players in Overwatch can reasonable be expected to want to win. Which I agree with (it's probably an underestimation) - but does this mean that the bottom 70% only "participate"? Because that would mean to get into the 95th percentile of "people who practice", you would have to be in the 1.5th percentile of Overwatch players.

Another layer of this problem exists when you look at people who play the game regularly, but don't play ranked. On average, those players are probably worse - but should they be included in the percentile?

Ultimately the percentile thing just doesn't make much sense, but I still think the overall message of the blog post, that most people could improve at something they do at a much faster rate if they were willing/able to really focus on improving themselves and less on external factors that they can't control, is absolutely true.

I read it differently. My takeaway (and I think he says as much in the article) was, by being bad among those who practice, you can be 95%ile among those who participate.

"I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate." In this case, "participate" should include casuals, and "practice" should not. Thats not clear in TFA.

I have personally found this to be true in most arenas, esp casual adult sports or music or hobbies like drawing. At one time some in my gym (wrongly) thought I was a great boxer, but sure enough I was abysmal in competitions but stellar compared to gym goers. Among practicing boxers I was mediocre to bad, among participating non-fighters, I appeared much better. And after a very small amount of actual participation, all those gym goers were downright intimidating to non-participants / nonfighters. This is why I tell people to try out self defense classes. A little practice elevates you above 90% of those who might do violence against you in the world.

Oh, I might have misread that - in that case, I completely agree. But I guess "practice makes (almost) perfect!" isn't that controversial of an idea either, lol.

This has been exactly my experience. When I wrote https://www.jefftk.com/p/record-your-playing few people had heard of my band. We kept recording our playing, listening back to it, and finding places where we didn't sound like we wanted to. Two years after that post we were one of the most booked contra dance bands in the country.

I like that Dan acknowledges that he sometimes get ridiculed for his ideas, but continues to post whatever is on his mind. I think that's admirable, because he might be occasionally very right despite the opprobrium of the world. I sometimes feel that my generation (Millenials and younger) are super cagey and obscure their real views because of a fear of censure.

He literally says the opposite:

> I have about 20 other posts on stupid sounding ideas queued up in my head, but I mostly try to avoid writing things that are controversial, so I don't know that I'll write many of those up.

I don't think the fact that Dan posts the least controversial ideas detracts from his point; publishing one of them is admirable in itself. Putting yourself out there is better than not posting anything at all.

On the flip side. Sometimes you're just not that good at stuff despite your best efforts.

In college I really struggled with math. Which was a challenge because computer science has you take a lot of math classes. In my calculus class I studied so hard for the final. Did every problem in the book. And I still just got a B in the class.

At the same time my programming classes were really easy. I didn't study at all and the homework was trivial.

Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy.

The movie Amadeus really nails this idea. Salieri has one goal in life: to create beautiful music. And he achieved some success, but then he meets Mozart - " a boastful, lustful, smutty infantile boy..." - yet he creates the most amazing music he's ever heard.

> All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing... and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?

I've experienced that frustration many times in my life.

Salieri is a tragic figure though - his response is one of contempt and hostility to the injustice of his life. But he's missed the point. All success and talent in life is a gift.

Maybe your frustrations in life are an opportunity to teach you humility and to be gracious to others.

I learned this at a young age. Leaving my small community where I was the smartest, most educated person I knew. I went to college where there were easily 1/3 of the class doing as well or better.

I came to understand we all stand on a spectrum. For everybody there's someone better, and someone not as good. So what? Do what you can with the skills you have, and you're doing more than 99% of the people who squander what they have.

I learned this while learning chess. I could win against anyone in elementary school. Some years later, I went to a small tournament. I was wrecked by everyone including children half of my age. Humility lesson right here. I still play though. Playing for fun is fine. It is a game after all.

Comparing you to some geniuses in the field isn't gonna help.

Sure Mozart was better that Salieri, but there is just one Mozart.

Companies are always talking about how they just take the best, but in the end they have to settle with what the market gives them.

I don't know why this was downvoted, but you're right. Geniuses of that level are rare and extremely lucky. It's like lamenting that you'll never be financially independent because you didn't win the Megamillions lottery. Only a tiny minority of people have that kind of luck and no one has any control over it.

I agree there is a degree of luck in some people, but I'll be wary about the term genius.

Personally, when someone says Genius, in some contexts, I take it like an excuse to justify the existence of people that excel doing something, just because they are born-geniuses.

The fact that some of these geniuses dedicated their entire lives to improve themselves (being it by practicing on an instrument or doing math, for example) is left aside, and the justification for doing practically nothing to achieve excellence is because "that guy/girl is a genius and I am not".

PS: In the office that justification comes as being an expert: when someone doesn't know how about something, it's because some other person is an expert. When the boss asks the lab manager "how does that WiFi module work?" the answer is "let's call X because she is an expert", when the manager should already know how that works.

Genius is, in my experience and from what I know of history, is something people are born with though. I've met (and worked with) exactly one person I would place near the designation of "genius". I wasn't under the impression that he didn't work hard to gain knowledge, but he just had a different way of approaching problems.

I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do, but I could be struggling with something for hours that he could break down in a way that just never occurred to me. So yes, he put in the time, but it was his thought process that made him great, and I'm not convinced that's something that can be taught to great effect.

Exactly. Some people just have it. I was referring to easy-labeling people genius.

Agreed, it's thrown around way too frequently.

I've been fortunate to know a number of people that I consider to be true geniuses. My wife's entire family is extremely talented, but that's not the only source.

The thing I've noticed about genius is that it's just part of who you are. It flows out of your pores. You work the kinds of hours and achieve the kinds of things you do, simply because you are driven to do so, and could not be otherwise.

If you're not a genius, then no amount of practice or experience will make you one. You can get better, sure. But to be a genius, you have to start out life as a genius.

Of course, there are many types of genius, in many different areas. But all the geniuses I know fit the above description.

OTOH, our culture does throw around the term much too easily. Many people seem to mistake lots of practice or experience for genius, which is understandable because many geniuses do seem to have a lot of practice and experience. But in a true genius, the cause and effect is reversed for practice and experience versus the results achieved.

I am most definitely not a genius. But I do have a fair amount of practice and experience in certain fields.

This reminds me of a time when a hiring manager said something along the lines of “We’re trying to find Michael Jordan, not Scottie Pippen.” My colleague and I were pretty shocked by this, since Pippen was also a great Hall of Fame basketball player, just not one of the top 3 players of all time.

The company has to settle for the fact that they're not the top 3 companies of all time, too. XD

As an nba fan I find that qoute really misplaced. It's not like you "settle" for a Pippen? He's probably a top 50 player ever.

And Basketball is team game you need a full squad not just one star

Continuing the analogy, Michael Jordan doesn't get to display his full Jordan-ness on the court unless he's got a teammate like Pippen who creates opportunities and solves problems that will be huge energy drains on Jordan if only Jordan is there to solve them. (Guarding opponents; salvaging something out of busted plays, etc.)

Finding stars and paying them a lot is pretty easy. It also isn't necessarily the path to great success, especially if you can't build a coherent rest of the team. Just ask Allen Iverson.

All companies want to fill their ranks with the Michael Jordans of the world, but there was only one Michael Jordan (that's why we call him by his name), and he wasn't even drafted first overall, he went third. The people who beat him were another Hall of Famer, and then some guy you've never heard of.

"Who coached the majority of Michael Jordan's championship winning teams?"

(the name is actually on the tip of my tongue, surprisingly)

- whether or not the hiring manager knows the answer:

"You're not him"

Especially stupid because the company that hired Michael Jordan literally did hire Scottie Pippen.

They are basically saying they want the best performing person in the world but don't want to give them the supporting team that actually makes their exceptional performance possible.

It's true. The hiring market is a market, which means companies compete with each other to attract the best talent they can - and sometimes they lose out on that competition.

This is true but there is also a time dimension to it. I was similar in undergrad, no matter how hard I tried I never really got passed A- while the class genius would ace everything. But as a I got older and I kept studying I began to close the gap with the "market leader". The star burns twice as bright burns half as long.

Sometimes it's not about how well you do at the current point in time, but how you navigate changes in the external environment. Skills and people are always in flux.

> Salieri is a tragic figure though - his response is one of contempt and hostility to the injustice of his life. But he's missed the point.

This is a gross falsehood spread after Salieri's death.

GP is describing Salieri in Amadeus. It is an absolutely correct description of the character.

So what is the non-tragic response?

Leaving music and working in some other craft, say, a carpenter or a doctor?

This means a lot of sunk cost and further sunk cost of retraining.

Ignoring the injustice? Then it will be perpetuated.

Or attempting to correct it, then hope you're able to? Hope runs out. (Actually movie Salieri did some messing with Mozart to correct the injustice in a destructive way. It didn't make him happy.)

In what sense would your interviewing history reflect your programming skills?

Probably modest correlation between acceptance rate and skill

> Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy.

You mentioned faring well in programming classes. Interview performance aside, do you feel that you're a good and perhaps exceptional programmer?

Having transitioned to management some time ago, it wouldn't surprise me that a humble developer might be under-rating themselves.

Once I got my hands off the keyboard, it became pretty clear that the best person for the job was very situational, and that my opinion was often wrong. The technically smartest and most capable person was often the worst choice for many tasks.

One of my best DBA team members was a guy with a history degree with almost no understanding or interest in basic crap like CAP theory, normalization tradeoffs, etc. He was honestly terrible at design.

He was consistently, though, a 10x type resource for production performance problems. But thought of himself as barely qualified for the team because he was a 0.6x resource for many other tasks. I'd hire him every time.

I can be very quick and can work diligently (grit my way through a problem) but I struggle with design and some high level concepts.

Interviews ask abstract and theoretical computer sciency type questions and in real life I would usually google my way to a solution on those types of questions, so I do very poorly on the spot. (forget everything or say something dumb)

But in practice I can usually deliver quicker than my teammates on real world problems.

> Interviews ask abstract and theoretical computer sciency type questions and in real life I would usually google my way to a solution on those types of questions, so I do very poorly on the spot.

Fwiw some of us ask abstract questions with the sole purpose of breaking you out of coding mode and into thinking mode. I wanna see how you break down a problem you haven’t encountered before. Not how you google a solution to a known problem. If you’re talkinng to me, I already trust that you can write code and google solutions.

One of my fav questions to ask is “Design a system to protect a skyscraper from flooding in a scifi Manhattan of 2140”

Right. I'm not good at those kinds of questions. I can code quickly but rigorous thought takes time for me. I need to ponder a design question for a while or work on two or three prototypes before I feel like I know what to do.

FWIW I've also seen the opposite. A developer who was a very good thinker and talker, but got stuck for two weeks on an issue with a Google API. It took me five minutes to figure out what was wrong. Not cause I'm smart, actually the opposite, I have to break problems down to things I can understand and it's that process which lends itself well to fixing bugs.

But I'm sure he would've run circles around me when designing an API or architecting out multiple systems.

I know our industry will debate the merits of google-style interviews forever. I think that the system may be a decent way of capturing good programmers, but that it also allows for awesome programmers to fall through the cracks. Don't let performance in interviews dictate your assessment of your on-the-ground performance. You sound like a capable coder in my view of things.

Personally have experienced the "star in a small pool" vs "anonymous in a big pool" thing many times.

I was surprised that the "star" experience wasn't always as personally ego-rewarding. Occasionally surprising people was often superior to the expectation that you always would.

Agreed. What got to me was that no matter how hard you kill it, there’s no one to share it with if you’re the “best” on the team. They’re always looking up to you. Also you need to feel like you have some backup.

I don't know anything about you so I suppose take this with a pinch of salt as I'm probably not best placed to tell you about yourself.

That said, I hold a general belief that attainment in something is not dependent on your "talent" for that thing. Your "talent" determines your ability to progress in that thing without direction and/or poorly specified direction. Genius allows you to push past everything that has come before and effectively discover new things. Yes I'm sure there are edge-cases it's a loose mental model or rule of thumb.

So I'm sorry that despite your admirable persistence to work through all those problems you didn't achieve the grade you wanted, but if you haven't given up on calculus I would encourage you to seek alternative teachers / materials that will work for you, as it is fundamentally a thing that can be learned just like anything else. And not in a cruel way, but undergrad level calculus should be achievable for anyone given enough effort and good teaching (assuming you actually want to invest this energy and effort in the subject).

Work smart and hard, but working hard in absence can at best be inefficient grind and at worst can crystallise bad habits...

Agreed. The teacher you have is vitally important.

I also had to take a lot of math classes, on my way to a BSCS.

The first time I took Calc I, I got a D. The teacher was the Director of the Math department, and by all reports, he was actually a good teacher. Probably a good teacher for grad students, but his style didn't work well for me.

The second time I took Calc I, I had a grad student as a teacher, and his style and method worked much better, because I really understood the material, and as a result I got an A.

Same thing happened for me with Calc III. Ironically, I got the same grad student as my Calc III teacher as I had for Calc I. And with the same result -- his style and method really worked well for me.

Now, if you really want to have your butt kicked across the room, torn to shreds, and then handed back to you, try Engineering Math, a.k.a, Differential Equations. I only barely escaped that one with my life -- and a very hard fought for C.

>Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy.

This means you aren't high in the 'programming interview' skill set. While related, I consider it distinctly different than the 'programming' skill set. I think it shares more in common with other interview skill sets than it does with programming. I suggest not using this to judge your proficiency in programming, and if you want to improve this (say you plan to be job hunting soon), I would focus more on interviewing skills than programming skills. Especially if you aren't landing on-site interviews.

For starters, improving your resume to have a good UX and working on how to answer interview questions, especially the non-technical ones, would likely help. Things like how to 'correctly' answer "What is your biggest weakness?" or "Why are you looking for a job?". A lot of it comes down to learning how to lie without appearing dishonest (personally I hate how much honesty during interviews is treated as a bad thing, but I have to play the game by the rules that already exist).

Agreed with your points, although I wouldn't use the word "lie". "Marketing yourself" would be a better way to put it. It's not about falsely representing your experience; it's about knowing and emphasizing your strengths, and aligning that with the needs of the team.

I'm talking things like "what is your biggest weakness". You don't answer that honestly, you come up with a 'nice to have' weakness but that still seems enough of a weakness to not appear to be holding the question in contempt.

If it comes to why you are leaving your current job, depending upon why you actually left you could be able to give honest answers, half truths than hide the major reason, and twist the facts enough that it would be best described as a lie.

When asked what you are looking for in a new company, rarely will it be perceived positive to give any importance to money at that stage of the interview. Benefits can be mentioned, but you will have a better interview if you can give an answer closer aligned to the business you are interviewing at.

A major one is when you are asked what your current salary is, lying can be more beneficial than either not answering or telling the truth. You can stretch the truth a bit, say "A little under $130,000" when it is actually "101,000 plus a bonus that the company didn't give out last year". Is 101 a little under 130? It is subjective, and in some cases that wouldn't be a lie, but in this case it definitely stretches the truth.

Now, I'm not advocating lying about stuff on the technical side. Well, not by much. If someone in HR is asking if you have 15+ years experience in Rust (to those not familiar, it has only been about about 10 years), responding with an affirmative style answer is probably reasonable if you are experienced in the language. Don't do something like saying "Yes". More "I am very experienced in Rust and have had 3 large scale Rust products deployed with numerous smaller ones." This ends up being much better than trying to correct the HR rep that the language hasn't been out long enough for someone to have 15 years experience and better than answering no.

Has anyone ever had success with simply deflecting that question? I've never been asked but I wouldn't lie or start a therapy session if I was.

Examples of what I mean by deflection:

"My greatest weakness is for Gouda cheese."

"If I knew what my weaknesses were I would already have worked to resolve them."

"Triceps."

"I don't have any weakness, what are you talking about?"

You made me smile, here's my best attempt at something similar:

"My biggest weakness is probably job interviews, compared to anything else I do my interviewing skills are really bad..."

More realistically: honestly explaining that some of my greatest strengths are weaknesses in other settings.

The key is to lie about what is your biggest weakness, while still giving an answer that doesn't come across as a lie nor being dismissive of the interviewer/question. The political tool of answering a related but different question that has a more favorable answer plays well here, such as instead answering "What is one of your weaknesses and how are you overcoming it?"

When asked a "what is your biggest X" kind of question, I almost always wonder aloud if I am the best judge of my own biggest X, whatever X might be. I feel that then gives me freedom to answer the question relative to something that I think is a weakness that would be appropriate to the situation, and how I am addressing it.

For example, talking about being somewhat OCD about things can be considered a weakness. But for some jobs in this field, a little OCD is not necessarily a bad thing.

"Sometimes I'm too focused on creating shareholder value."

It's illegal in the State of California for an employer to ask you your current salary.

I’ve actually mostly answered honestly, but also follow up with what I’m doing to try to improve on this weakness. For example I know one of my weaknesses is I get impatient and cut people off half way, believing I already know where they are going. Besides being rude I’m also wrong some times. It’s a legitimate short coming, but the key is I’m aware of it and am activity doing something about it. Some interviewers are just looking to see if you are self aware.

But is that your biggest weakness? Or is that a smaller weakness that, while still being a definite weakness, is socially acceptable and something you can show improvement on?

If they asked what is one of your weaknesses and how are you working to overcome it, then that is a perfectly legitimate answer. Perhaps too many interviewers ask for the biggest weakness when they actually mean to ask a question more like that.

But how do you define biggest? To me this is a big weakness that not only applies to work but also other aspects of life. We don’t have a clear ranking system for levels of weakness, so I can only pick one that’s important to me. I don’t think that’s dishonest.

If your biggest weakness is a major problem, then hopefully it is also something you're urgently addressing. If you're unfortunate and have to apply for jobs while you're still working on that aspect of yourself, then you may need to find a way to sell it, but really for most people this shouldn't be something you need to agonize over for very long.

Of course everyone who asks this question is looking for how you reply, and don't necessarily believe you'll tell them the absolute truth.

Learned the hard way that lie is mandatory for some questions.

For example: many companies insist on asking how you did "x" (for example solves a conflict of idea of solution) in situation "y" (for example between two teams in same department) and you are obliged to answer something, even if you never been in that situation (a certain multinational company for example asked me that question three times across two different attempts to join them, both of times I failed because this question, I never worked in a company with many departments).

After a lot of Glassdoor reading found out people that got the jobs I wanted, all lied outright, not just embellishments, but outright inventing things that sound plausible.

I think you're overcorrecting here. I've been on the other side of the table for questions like that, and the intent is to ensure that you have been in the appropriate situations before. At most multinational companies, resolving conflicts between two engineering teams is an everyday occurrence, and any new hires above entry level are expected to know how to do it.

That some people manage to escape the requirement by lying doesn't mean lying is the intended strategy.

So you mean, that to work in a large multinational company above entry level, it is mandatory to have worked for one in the past?

Most companies smaller than multinationals are still large enough to have conflicts between teams. The most common failure mode I see is people who simply opt out of those conflicts, preferring to keep their heads down and write code rather than talking about what should be done and how. I'm not familiar with how it works in older companies like IBM, but at the FAANGs of the world, participating in those discussions is what distinguishes entry-level engineers from more senior ones.

If your experience is only in companies with a handful engineers, yes, it can unfortunately be pretty hard to get a senior position at larger companies. It's not impossible, but people will have justified worries about whether you can handle the responsibilities.

Can you blame a company for prioritizing people who have worked in similar environments before?

In large corporations technical responsibility is often more distributed than in startups just due to size, so your technical skills, while important, are typically less important than they would be in small-business/startup land. What fills in the gap is communication skills and your ability to navigate corporate social networks. If you can't conflict resolve issues between engineering teams, well guess what? That engineering team you can't work with is going to hold you up and cost the company money while your superior, who really has better things to do, has to take time out of their day to address the issue you should have been able to handle.

Not saying it should be a mandatory skill, but you can't blame large corporations for filtering for it. It's a factor.

You can get that same kind of experience elsewhere. It doesn't have to come from working in a large multinational company.

Now, working in a large multinational company would help ensure you have that kind of experience, but that's not your only option.

> resolving conflicts between two engineering teams is an everyday occurrence

And how difficult do you think it is to learn this skill?

If it's an everyday occurrence in huge companies, and any new hires above entry level are expected to know how to do it, it sounds like something anyone and everyone will learn. Which sounds like a real easy skill.

If it's a real easy skill, why do you need to have it already when you join? Why can't you learn it on the job, like you learn a bazillion other skills?

This kind of thing comes up a lot with technical stuff... people think that X (something you can look up on wikipedia or SO and teach yourself in an hour or two tops) is really important, therefore they can't hire anyone who hasn't learned X. But whoever they hire must be a person who's super eager to learn new stuff.

I agree it's not tremendously difficult to learn. The problem is that many people don't have the instinct to learn it. If left to their own devices, they'll just write code satisfying whatever requirements they're given, without any impulse to discuss or question what the requirements should be. I've seen many times where another team said "oh you shouldn't do X, you've gotta do Y instead", and a junior teammate of mine just accepted Y as another requirement instead of thinking about whether it was the right way to go.

So you don't want to give people the level of independent responsibility a senior title carries unless they've already learned how to avoid that.

What I've done in with interviews where I don't have the exact situational experience they're looking for, is I recall a situation that was similar, mention that it's not exactly what they asked for, and then go ahead and answer the question relative to that experience.

Many times, when they ask a specific question, they're not hard-locked on getting an exact answer that is 100% directly related to that exact situation. They're also looking to see how you might slightly redirect the question to something that is relevant to your experience, and then how you answer that.

Of course, sometimes they are hard-locked onto an exact answer to that precise situation, and if you don't have that experience, then you're done. You're not likely to know in advance if that's the case, but at least you got more interviewing experience, and you learned of another place that you do not want to work.

Why lie?

Ultimately an interview is about convincing the interviewer that you can solve their problems (and extracting information to determine whether you want to solve them in the first place). Assuming you have the ability to solve their problems, it's a pure exercise in communication.

Take the "Why are you looking for a job?" question. The meme response is "because I need money duh!", but if you look at in a less literal context, you probably have long term goals of some type. Talk about those and how working for the interviewer will help you achieve those. If you don't actually have long term goals and are just in it for an immediate pay-day, well that makes you 1. A person who doesn't plan long-term, and will probably bring that same lack of planning to the job. 2. A less secure investment that will leave the moment they can get a 10% raise elsewhere. and possibly 3. Someone who doesn't really want the job and would just be miserable all the time/not be a good fit

The non-technical parts of an interview are about unifying stories and themes, and too many engineers seem to think it's "lying" to ignore individual data points. If instead of an interview you were trying to convince someone who knew nothing about the S&P500 to invest in the S&P500, you wouldn't talk about 2008 except maybe in passing as a minor risk. You'd say in the long term it's had an upward trend despite occasional drops and that trend is likely to continue due to reasons X, Y and Z. Assuming the person is looking for a long term investment then nothing about that is a lie.

If I didn’t need a paycheck I wouldn’t be at the interview, or working at all. Getting a consistent paycheck is “planning long term” for 99% of people. Hell, half my social circle probably doesn’t even know what the S&P500 is.

So your long term goal is stability, and you'll be reliable and consistent in addition to the talent they've clearly already noticed by bringing you in for an interview. From a thematic perspective you're a sturdy foundation they can build their company on.

See how much better that sounds? And there are probably better ways of putting it. Granted if an interviewer isn't looking for that mentality it could be an issue, but that's a big sign you probably wouldn't want that job anyway.

I don’t think I’d be able to pass/stomach an interview where I need to justify the need for a consistent paycheck.

Then I'm not sure how you've stomached any interview with a private company. Companies don't give you a consistent paycheck because you have a natural right to one. They give you one because you wouldn't produce value for them if they didn't.

The S&P500 analogy is truly apt, because as a private employee you are by definition a financial investment for the company. They pay you on the condition you make more money/produce more value for them than you take. Every day at work is you justifying the existence of your paycheck. If you want a bigger paycheck you need to prove a higher valuation to justify it (either by producing more internally or getting a higher external offer). If you become a bad investment you will be treated the same way as an under-performing stock in a portfolio. Maybe held onto in the hopes that you'll improve, maybe held onto for legal reasons (they can't legally fire you due to X law) but eventually losses are cut.

Most interviewers expect you to at least be average so they're not going to insult you by asking you to work for free (that would make you less likely to work for them), but if you walked in and could convince them that you would produce quality work 70 hours a week, for free, until the day you were too medically infirm to work, and that you weren't too good to be true, they'd have no reason not to take you up on that offer.

> Then I'm not sure how you've stomached any interview with a private company.

Here's how: companies look for a professional to perform a job. You, as a professional, offer your skillset in exchange for paycheck. It really is that simple. There's no need to justify or excuse wanting to participate in such a mutually beneficial trade. Likewise, there is no need for the company to excuse or justify their need for a new employee.

Believe it or not, there are some companies out there that just look for someone who can do the job. They don't ask you why you want a job (or, gasp, that job in particular!), because it doesn't matter (and is mostly obvious anyway).

Stop paying salaries and you'll see how many of your employees aren't in it for the paycheck. Made-up stories about long term planning don't change that they're in it for the paycheck.

Getting a paycheck, for a lot of people, is planning for the next time they don't have a paycheck. The people in the former group that you mention might be long term investment, but imo are more likely to promise their future paychecks to a car dealer

> If you don't actually have long term goals and are just in it for an immediate pay-day, well that makes you 1. A person who doesn't plan long-term, and will probably bring that same lack of planning to the job. 2. A less secure investment that will leave the moment they can get a 10% raise elsewhere. and possibly 3. Someone who doesn't really want the job and would just be miserable all the time/not be a good fit

That’s an extremely judgmental way of looking at people. Some people have long terms goals in life, they’re just not related to their jobs. They see their jobs as a means to an end, a way to make money to accomplish those other goals. And some of them are really, really, really good at what they do at work, but really they just want a paycheck in exchange for their skills.

I think you don't get the point of OP's comment. Maybe they are simply not in 95th percentile of interviewees, or maybe they are indeed a middling programmer. Their point was more to accept your skills and talents for what they are rather than getting caught up in being the best, to the detriment of yourself and those around you.

>Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers

I wanted to call out the problem with this logic because it was something I also struggled with at the very beginning of my career. There is more to the response than what I replied to, but my reply is only limited to that specific line of logic and not the reply in whole.

Indeed this is something I've had to learn to do. I'll spend a few weeks working coding problems on whiteboards, practicing answering questions, clean up my resume, try to showcase my best work on GitHub, and spend hours on each cover letter.

It helps a little but I know it will never be something I'm very good at. Sometimes things in life are hard and never get any easier.

I think "What Color is your Parachute" is very insightful on what interviewers are looking for - or should be - and in what order:

  1. why us?
  2. can you basically do the job?
  3. what extra specials can you bring?
  4. will you fit in here?
  5. can we afford you?

Before all that, know what you want, will suit you, and your strengths - then select somewhere appropriate, where you can help.

I hope you've found success and happiness in life nowadays! Honestly interviewing is in some ways closer to dating than contests of skill. Sometimes your area of expertise is just not what the team is looking for. Sometimes that company just wouldn't be a good culture fit for you. I've had similar experiences with rejection and I've since learned that interviews are really bad at sorting out good engineers from bad engineers, and that networking goes a lot further than raw coding skill (although you still have to know some leetcode, unfortunately).

The last two interviews I had involved no coding at all. I got an offer from both companies..

Having attended a high school with a poor math program, I had a similar struggle with math in university. My understanding would catch up maybe too late for a grade, but I kept progressing. Seven years into my career I got a job working for an extremely gifted scientist/manager who gave me several projects that required me to learn math a couple levels above my education. Because the problems were interesting and the results really mattered, I had sufficient motivation to overcome the frustration of learning things that didn't come naturally. I found a way into a company that needed good programmers that grew more mathematical over time, and I was lucky enough to have a highly motivating and supported learning environment.

Have you interviewed as places like Epic (Health Care) or Accenture or Knoxville Microsoft Certified Solution Providers, or only at Bay Area webtech?

I've interviewed mostly at startups. I've worked in Boulder, Menlo Park, Austin and NYC. Once I spent quite a while in NYC trying to get a job only to give up, move back to Boulder and reach out to a friend to get a job. I'm so grateful for what he did for me. If not for him I may not be in this industry anymore.

My first job was for a non-startup web development shop. That interview was entirely non technical, but I fear it was the last of a dying breed.

I did come very close to taking an offer at an insurance company once.

Hah! I often reflect on (the purely fictional Characterization of) Salieri in that movie. Especially when he talks about mediocrity - I am 100% a mediocre developer. And you know what? It’s perfectly fine. Most of the development work out there is LOB apps that don’t require programming Mozart’s.

(This is a side point to your excellent comment)

The movie really distorted what we know about Salieri and Mozart. That doesn’t matter in that Amadeus is just a fun story and doesn’t claim to be any sort of documentary, and such a story made a good case study for your comment.

But Salieri was a very good composer and I personally like more of his work than Mozart’s (though Mozart at his best blew away most of his contemporaries, including Salieri). Mozart appears to have lived a more conventional middle class life and Salieri a more contemporaneously successful one which is kind of henopposite if he film.

"Amadeus" is famously fictitious. In real life Salieri and Mozart were friends. It's good dramatic writing but that's all.

I'm somewhat disappointed that, of all the possible stories and lessons one could tell about Mozart's life, the one that Hollywood chose to immortalize on the silver screen is simultaneously depressing, disparaging, and false.

More recently the movie "Sully" portrayed the NTSB as being some conniving government organization that is out to get airline pilots for some reason. The real world Captain Sullenberger had to release a statement to correct this false injected dramatization of the investigation. There was no reason to do this other than to spice up the story, which is unfortunate especially given most of the people depicted in the movie are alive.

Amadeus is a movie that really resonated for the reasons you mention. However, another movie that really resonated, and offers a counterpoint to you’re-either-born-with-it-or-not fatalism is Gattaca.

(Of course, one could argue that Amadeus is a “true story”, whereas Gattaca is science fiction.)

I think the OP's 'problem' is that they do not sit down and have focused practice properly. They are not good at coding interviews, they were not good at math, and freely admits they "didn't study at all". You get really good at things by practicing them a lot, especially math and leetcode. It's not a criticism, as I am terrible at coding interviews and I can never muster the discipline to sit down and study it. However, its not because I am just innately bad at it, its because I don't practice it.

Amadeus was probably more fiction than it was a true story. Mozart practiced a lot.

Indeed. That scene where he's running on the treadmill with a recorded heartbeat is so true to life.

The one thing that I've learned by being surrounded by incredibly talented people is that you can't compare yourself to others in a singularly dimensional way. If you do, the odds are against you that you are the best in the world (1 in billions, in fact). This is the quickest path to defeat and nihilism.

What I've chosen to do instead is compare myself across all dimensions that I have interest and passion for. The beauty of this is that the combinatorics of genetics normalized for individual circumstance leads to only one meaningful comparison, yourself. Internalizing this just leads to a more fun game.

Unimpressed with the argument. Different people play competitive games with completely different mindsets and you are also not just competing against your peers, for example, you may be playing someone with much less free time to dedicate to the game. Same goes for some real life hobbies.

That's significantly different than getting to the top 5% in your class, where everyone is supposed to be peers and dedicated.

I think this really comes down to the level of competition for each particular activity. Getting "Legend" in Hearthstone for example means pretty much nothing (can be achieved while playing quite casually), while getting top 5% in a cellular biology class with 80% premed students is very impressive.

I strongly disagree with your opinions on premed students, but that's based off my experience as a Biochemistry major at a large state school. So much partying, so little reading of assigned materials.

It's funny, because I started to play Spelunky again after a long absence, which is arguably one of the hardest games to master on your own. I'm not particularly good, played for about 28 hours and have not yet finished the game. (I rarely reach the ice caves...)

The thing with this game is: It needs a lot of awareness, patience and you need to know all different kinds of game mechanics. It's not terribly complicated, but uncovering everything by yourself is madness. I was so frustrated that I started to watch videos and was enlightened by some of the tactics (yeah, around the shopkeeper...)

So the blog post has some correct points: To improve, you need to inform yourself and maybe try to get feedback. But is it fun? Is it fun to read everything about the game, potentially spoiling it, simply to own? I'm not sure. I believe you can have a lot of fun without being the best for quite some time, but I have to admit that there's a point, where it starts to hurt your ego..

So then you start to read everything about it and then what? I think, there are personal and environmental limits, which learning cannot fix. You cannot simply fix the patience you need to play the same level again and again just to improve. In FPS games, you cannot get to the 95% without investing in your hardware. And you simply cannot compete with people having too much time on their hand, while you juggle your job, family and household.

The thing is, maybe going for the 95%-tile is futile? But who cares? Simply enjoy to be average. Support your teammates as good as you can. Have fun walking into that spike trap for the 100th time. Don't take everything too serious.

Spelunky is an absolutely terrific and soul-crushing game. Though I'm not sure if it's a good example here because most of the mechanics (apart from the absolutely ridiculously arcane series of things you need to do to go Hell) are designed around being amenable to self-discovery. The shortcuts system for each world is very useful for learning all the weird situations which can result in death.

It's the same with every kind of roguelike game:

a) Either you try to go for as long as you can, enjoy dying and discover the endless amount of content and interactions.

b) You bite the bullet, start to read everything there is in forums, wikis or on youtube and see yourself progress further.

To decide, which way to take, there are two questions: Can you play the game just for fun and accept losing a lot? Or do you want to compete with other players?

You can play each game both ways and I think, there must be a place for simply playing for fun. But if you really want to get into the 95%th percentile, there is no other way than go for b) I believe. You won't discover everything there is to know simply on your own. And this is the same for a game like Overwatch as it is for Spelunky or most other deep games. You cannot compete against a community of players.

And even if you know everything there is to know: you could soon learn, that the highscore table is a lot higher than you first thought... Maybe a) was the better way to play the game after all?...

Overwatch is a mass participation activity that is casual for most. Performance at the 95% is a joke to a professional. Just like a marathon. 95% of all runners is something like 3:15. That’s more than an hour slower than a decent pro.

It really means nothing and people aren’t competing with each other in this way. A pro doesn’t care about a recreational participant. Usually the people who are pretty good at least have awareness of how good the best are and may be fans but that’s kind of it.

OP is also being really misled by survivorship bias, ie. the bias that since he was able to accomplish this by what felt like "putting in the time to fix his mistakes", so must others be. There is such a thing as natural talent in gaming and it accounts for a huge portion of success. It's talent specific to that game or genre of games, it's not "the ability to learn" or "the ability to effectively review one's mistakes" or some other broad skill

I had this discussion with a former pro-gamer who didn't believe that someone with high intelligence (e.g. successful professor, lawyer, etc) could be skill-capped at an average level in his video game. This was a guy who found himself dead in the water after his gaming career died and ended up working in a call center

To your second point, I find that people who have a "natural" knack for something have a very hard time understanding it's not easy or even physically possible for others to do what they do.

It might be a useful approximation but I think some other very important factors are churn, compounding, and natural ability. By churn I mean: take Overwatch. Sure there are people who stay with the game for a long time but many many players play for some time and drop off as they move on to different games or other things in life. In a high churn environment just staying for a long time gives you advantage by practicing, almost automatically. On the other hand, it is much harder to do in things that people practice for decades, like making money or being a doctor.

By compounding I mean that having some amount of something makes it easier to obtain more of it. Money and capital in general is the prime example of it. Fame maybe a subtler example but explain a lot of boom or bust success in industries like acting or pop music. Outside of your own motivation you don’t get much compounding from Overwatch skill.

Natural ability also plays a role in certain occupations. Being “mere” 6 ft tall requires an insane amount of work and dedication to make it in NBA (go Kyle Lowry), and anything under that is basically zero chance. Eye-hand coordination and explosive velocity in baseball. Being big in American football or handsome in acting etc.

The Overwatch example reminds me of Playing to Win (http://www.sirlin.net/ptw), and in particular, "the scrub" section (http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub). "A scrub is a player who is handicapped by self-imposed rules that the game knows nothing about. A scrub does not play to win."

I always liked the Scrub post by Sirlin, but I think it's too confrontational and likely to generate a negative reaction in the person you're mentioning it to. Nobody wants to be called a scrub.

I'm not into card or videogames, but I like tabletop miniatures wargames (like Warhammer et al) and if you're familiar with them, you'll know there is this stereotype of a gamer derisively called a "WAAC" -- a "Win At All Costs" competitive gamer who will crush you and play in an unsportsmanlike manner and laugh while you lose, because he only cares about winning while you tried to play "thematically" and with honor. If you exclude outright cheaters (which this WAAC thing confusingly includes, even though I think that's a different thing), I think this falls well within the Scrub phenomenon Sirlin mentioned. Non-cheating WAAC players are playing the actual game, "thematic" players are playing a different game under self-imposed limitations not prescribed by the actual rules, and this mismatch results in a lot of grief.

The few times I mentioned Sirlin.net to Warhammer players, it was not well received though. So don't try it...

As a final word, I don't think the Overwatch example fits this phenomenon. The Overwatch thing is players who don't know they are playing badly because they don't get feedback, not players willingly playing under self-imposed limitations and complaining about others playing the actual game ;)

If you're part of a community that expects newbies to adhere to rules that aren't published or articulated... where's the blame really lie? I have social handicaps, I could join your group and never realize that I upset people by failing to adhere to unwritten rules (its the story of my life, really)...

I can't really tell when the "unwritten rules" are unwritten so that they may apply to some but not others, and when they're unwritten because everybody actually did agree they're good ideas, but prefers not to share that revelation.

To be clear -- and I see maybe my post wasn't -- I think many Warhammer* players are too trigger-happy about labeling other players "WAAC" simply because they don't follow the unwritten rules of what they consider "sportsmanlike" behavior. In the extreme case, they'll call WAAC anyone who plays to win using the actual written rules instead of playing thematically rich but underperforming armies or strategies, which they consider The Right Way To Play (but which is not what the actual rules dictate). That is, they are playing an arbitrarily different game where the objective is not to win, and dislike people who play to win.

* I say Warhammer but I mean Warhammer, Age of Sigmar, Warhammer 40K and the whole family of games.

I think the post is both accurate and easily ignored, because it lives from within its own wisdom. Of course you can do better if you work at it - but, why aren't you?

And that's not even a question of personal responsibility and virtue and utilitarian maximization preference. That's - what on Earth is the world doing to discourage you, to make you grind at Overwatch in an ineffective way, then try to compete without appropriate prep? How did your ego get into such a fragile state that asking questions and getting advice feels so difficult?

And with at least some of these questions, the answer is that the intent of the person is different from a genuine competitor in a way that keeps them in a state of self-sabotage. They may be turning to the game as a way of gambling for a dopamine rush, in which case they can't believe in their skill(or anyone else's) - since they want fate to do the work.

But then you probe further and it gets more nuanced. Many people have trauma getting in the way, a whole bunch of stereotypes and expectations beat into them from an early age, which prevent them from reaching out and grasping at the prize. Many are trying not to get too deep into their hobby, because they have a lot of other stuff going on. And so on.

And so the question of why there is a 95% is related to our tendencies around resource allocation as a society and what skills and beliefs go along with that, which creates preferences, which then acts to enable or limit people.

It's never quite as simple as "you could just practice." Finding the way in which practice works for you, lets you set goals you can agree with - that's the trick.

This entirely depends on the population you sample from and the competition level of the activity.

Looking at high school football in the United States, the top ~5% get a scholarship to play in college[1].

The author's example of Overwatch is one where very few people playing have joined paid leagues, hold regular practices, have paid coaching staff, have training facilities, etc. versus kids playing football.

1: http://scholarshipstats.com/football.html

I think the author's point was that you don't need to have exceptional talent to get into that 5% range. Basically that consistent hard work will get you there.

I think this actually would apply to football scholarships. Remember not all people who win a scholarship are going to become professional players. I suspect that is probably <1% for which exceptional talent is required (in addition to consistent hard work).

Of course it is easier to put in that hard work when the support structures are in place at home/school.

A quick search shows there's ~1M high school players, and only 7.1% become college players https://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/football-proba... and then from these ~73k college players, only 1.6% become professionals https://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/estimated-prob...

I think high school and college players work really, really hard. Getting ahead of 92.9% of other hard working players, followed by beating 98.5% of this already small group, is certainly a feat. Sure, it's "basically consistent hard work", but distilling years of practice, coaching, diet, personal life sacrifices, into just "so really all it takes is working hard" is an oversimplification that doesn't do justice to the actual reality involved.

I find it really very frustrating that the author talks about the "95%" percentile and then does very little to actually justify why he's talking about the 95% percentile and how he's measured it. He's got some anecdata about what he views in overwatch, but you actually need some statistical techniques if you want to justify a statistical number. Of the players in the top 5% how many times was it observed that they committed obvious game losing gaffes? How did he screen the reported rankings for the arbitrary subset of players that he considered real competitors.

I don't think the person who wrote this understands statistics because they're not playing a game where randomness is a large influence in the game. If you talk to top poker players about their game they're not going to talk to you about individual mistakes, they're going to talk to you about constructing ranges. A top 5% poker player isn't just going to beat a top 10% player in a single game or single hand, they're going to have a higher expected return over a long period of time. THe point is to come up with strategies that are successful against a large range of opponents. So whilst you can look at a single event and identify whether it was effective in that particular situation, what you're optimizing for is to get the best return over time. So to take the Overwatch example - whilst you may constantly see game losing mistakes at that level, you won't see the same people making the same mistakes constantly.

So basically - for an article that constantly talks about "95 percentile" or "99 percentile" or "moving from 10%-ile to 40%-ile". I just don't even comprehend how you can title something "95%-ile isn't that good" and then not make any effort to actually evaluate how you're measuring 95%-ile. Which, given this is an article about how people generally do things very badly for stupid reasons, I think is rather ironic.

I agree that the author isn't totally rigorous in his methodology, which I understand is frustrating, but I think you're missing the bigger point he's trying to make. As I interpreted it, the article is mostly about self-improvement and the fact that even at 95%, there's still a lot of room for optimization between 95 and 99. He's saying, "hey, even this competitive Overwatch streamer makes game-losing mistakes, but it's very easy to improve on these things, if you have the right mindset". In other words, instead of focusing on your rank, you should be focusing on the low-hanging fruit, no matter where you land on the spectrum of talent.

Overwatch has a competitive ladder which ranks players on a ELO-based rating system. The percentiles were published, by the game developers, at one point and are assumed to be stable.

I play(ed) a lot of Overwatch, enough to get into the top 1% (Grandmaster). The rank he derides on, 90-95%, is Diamond, which is quite famously "ELO Hell", because that is where a lot of naturally talented players end up before deciding that blaming their teammates was the issue instead of reviewing their own gameplay. What irks me is, the top 4% of that game, Masters, I would actually consider "good". Sure there is a gap between the top 4%, top 1% and top .1%, but the mistakes you see between those groups are less about "missing fundamental gameplay mechanics" and more flawless execution, awareness and inference. (For anyone that plays the game I would consider 4250 the top .1%, which is almost entirely pros and very talented streamers).

In other words, while I agree the top 10% of the community isn't all that good, the top 5% of that very game is respectable. My beef is less with the ranking and more with his "definition" of good.

Many of the top 1% of Overwatch do regular scrims in semi-pro leagues. Comparing this to basketball, does this mean the bar for "good" is the NCAA, d-league and NBA?

There seems to be something fundamentally wrong (with the game or with the measurement or with something else) when the top 10% is considered “not good” and the top 5% is “respectable”. I can’t really think of anything where this is true. Games, job performance, educational testing, income & wealth... Top 10% is kind of by definition great!

The game's distribution is a normal distribution - and I think the problem may be with perception. What is the definition of "good"? Personally, I wouldn't claim to be very good at the game despite my past ranking - there are a number of players who would wipe the floor with me where it feels like I'm giving my all and they are barely even trying. At the same time I could probably do the same thing if I dropped down on the ranking. If you watch streams, you commonly hear top players complaining about having to play with "braindead masters players" who are the top 5%. All of this shapes the perception of what good means.

Good is largely subjective to your own level of competence.

A diamond player is good to a platinum player is good to a gold player is good to a silver player etc...

Aside from all the other things he said, at least for games — 1 out of 20 people get there, and the vast majority of people who play a game play very casually. So if you put a reasonable amount of effort at all into getting good at a game, you’re likely to make the top 5% of players or close to it.

I play hearthstone about, I dunno, an hour a day or so, while I’m on the train. I’ve never made it to the legend rank, but I make it to rank 5 easily most months, which puts me in the top 6%. A lot of months I’ll end up rank 2 or 1, which puts me in the top 3 or even 1%

I don’t think I’m particularly good at the game, I just play good decks and pay attention to the meta game so I know what to expect from the other decks. I don’t tend to plan multiple turns ahead, I don’t try and figure out what’s in my opponents hand, sometimes I’m barely paying attention to the game at all, and sometimes make just obvious mistakes like missing lethal.

But none of that really matters up until you get to rank 2 or 1, where you start playing against people that basically don’t make mistakes.

In fact one of the hardest transitions for me to make in the game was understanding that when my opponent appeared to be doing something stupid in a higher ranked game, they were probably not, and that I need to spend time thinking about what it meant, rather than just assuming they were bad at the game. That doesn’t happen until you’re already in the top 5%, though.

this is because improving your rank at hearthstone is a matter of playing as many viable games as possible. the outcome of most matches is mostly dependent on randomness as opposed to player error. The largest source of randomness being the order of card draw, which can turn around a highly favorable or unfavorable matchup between decks.

the actions of players have very little impact in hearthstone. in a typical game, the player is presented with somewhere about 2-7 choices every round (increasing in the late-game as the board becomes more full) and most of them are obviously good or obviously bad.

my point is that while being top 95% in most tasks is a matter of practice/repetition in new situations to build skill, achieving legend in hearthstone- while it might require you to build some minimal amount of skill in guessing what cards your opponent has, or estimate the odds of drawing a given card in the next few rounds the difficulty of the game will quickly drop off due to it's low "skill ceiling"- is mostly about repetition for the sake of reaching 15,10,and 5 rank level checkmarks.

hearthstone is a card game played by blizzard, the objective of the game being to make as much money as possible over the course of it's lifespan. the current meta in collectable card games is to make players believe that their actions have consequences over a randomized card game, and that their invaluable collections will continue to exist when blizz unplugs the servers after it stops making money for them.

1) naming yourself "hearthstonebad" isn't conducive to good discussion

2) the commenter stated his time budget: an hour a day. This doesn't seem excessive to make the argument "rank is merely a function of game time"

3) 2-7 choices is an under estimate. Past MtG pros have observed that attack ordering has more tree breadth than MtG attack phases. Saying the choices are straight forward is misguided when top players will consistently make the better choice that weaker top players miss

4) a high amount of randomness doesn't necessarily negate skill. See Poker

Indeed, the skill is designing a deck to be less sensitive to such randomness, adapting a side deck, reading the opponent's tactics to counter them or exploit them and responding correctly to the challenges if things go wrong.

Essentially, making your own luck. Tree depth in card games is about the same as the deepest card combo times hand size, and for every card you can also hold it or get it burned.

> this is because improving your rank at hearthstone is a matter of playing as many viable games as possible. the outcome of most matches is mostly dependent on randomness as opposed to player error.

I think because of the matching system it seems that way because you quickly get to people at your own skill level so randomness and luck feel like they have more of an impact. You pretty much by definition get to players you’ll lose against half the time pretty quickly. From then you have to figure out how to get just a 1 or 2 percent edge and play a lot of games.

I lose half my games at rank 3, but put me up against rank 20 or even rank 10 players and I’ll win 80 or 90% of my games. I’ve done the climb from the bottom a few times and it’s basically trivial. Even against people playing well tuned net decks. So yeah, skill matters.

Edit: I remembered incorrectly, child comment has a better explanation.

Even if you win exactly 50% of your games, you will still eventually rank up. This is because you gain an extra star when you rank up. For example, let's say you start at rank 3, 4 stars.

* Win: Rank 2, 1 star

* Lose: Rank 2, 0 stars

* Lose: Rank 3, 4 stars

So even though you went 1-2, your rank didn't change.

except to get back to your original rank you need to win 2 more games.

ranks 3 5 stars and rank 2 0 stars are the same exact rank from different directions.

rank 3, 4 stars + 2 = rank 2, 1 star rank 2, 1 star - 2 = rank 3, 4 stars

You don't get free stars.

You do, however, get free stars on win streaks below rank 5.

You can become a 95th percentile commenter on this post by reading the article for comprehension. (A link to the article is provided near the top of this page; clicking it yourself is a helpful deliberate practice activity, so I won't reproduce it here.)

It doesn't help that he seems to mix up practice, participate, and try. I got lost trying to re-read it for comprehension, then just closed the window when he went off about video games.

This might be one of those things that only seems true if you live in a world where the bottom quartile or half of people has been chopped off. There are a lot of people out there who are very limited in what they are able to do.

It's maybe not very hard for you or I or Dan Luu to work at something and practice it and reach a level where we are competent or better. But I've seen so many cases of normal people that work incredibly hard at things, and they just never get to that mediocre level. It's frustrating if you are trying to teach or coach or mentor them up, because you can see where things would have to click for them to get over the hump, but there's no keyhole for that key.

You can look at the rank distribution of every competitive game and this concept becomes obvious.

I've played Dota for many years. Managed to reach the Divine rank last year which at the time iirc started at the 95th percentile (maybe 98th?).

Any player who has played Dota for some time knows that while Divine players are good for average player standards, compared to any semi-pro or top 1000 player (not even pro) they are god-awful. To the point where they basically cannot compete in any aspect of the game.

As they say: "there are levels to this shit". It is very noticeable in most individual games and sports that as you go to the top the difference between skill level is huge, even between top 5 percentile of people or between top 1 percentile of people. So in a way not only 95 percentile is no good, a lot of times even 99th percentile may not be that good either in grand scheme of things.

If we take two examples of chess and boxing. In boxing there is huge difference between top 5 level fighter in a weight class, compared to top 20 level fighter, and huge difference between top 20 and top 100, and another huge difference between top 100 and regular pro boxers. And there can be 1000s of pro boxers for a weight class. And there is another huge difference between a pro boxer and random guy who trains boxing in a gym, and another huge difference between random guy who trains boxing and just a random Joe from the street.

The level differences are so huge that, if a top 5 fighter is fighting someone from top 20 it is generally considered a one sided beat down and a mismatch, with 10:1 odds for a favourite.

There is very similar situation in chess. A Fide Master can crush people who have studied chess and play as a hobby while just playing blind folded. (Not even talking about average Joe, even I can beat most average people playing blind folded, and I am not any kind of Master). International masters (IM) crush Fide Masters like its nobodies business. At next level, Grand Masters are a level above most IMs. Being a Grand Master is considered a huge accomplishment, not just top 1% but probably top 0.001%. No matter how hard you work and how dedicated you are, unless you are also an exceptional talent, you can't become a GM in chess. However top 10 players will crush below average GMs with ease. That is how crazy the level difference is in this sport.

I think this type of phenomenon is more prevalent in individual sports/games compared to team sports. (Especially larger team sports). I think that is another reason why this phenomenon is not always as visible in "real life" situations, because most of the real work is done in groups and sometimes in very large groups which averages out potential huge differences between individual abilities. In a team/group environment there are faster diminishing returns on how much more a single individual can do as part of a group. Of course there are still big differences but in that case top 95th percentile is probably good enough to get you in the top team, especially if you have other skills to complement your abilities (like better communication, better team work, etc)

I fully agree with this. I wrote a related post a few years ago called The 100-Hour Rule (in contrast to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-Hour Rule). It's at https://www.codingvc.com/the-100-hour-rule/.

It takes tons and tons of time to be world class at something, but very little time to go from newbie to better than almost everyone else. The key is wanting to get better and then pursuing that in a deliberate, thoughtful way. A hundred hours of tennis lessons or of reading books on negotiation will quickly place you in the top 5-10% of the general population in those things -- and possibly even the top 1%.

Speaking of gaming, I passed the 95th percentile in 2 games. It takes a lot of work. You don’t feel that good when you do it because you have learned about all the weaknesses in your own play. However, put yourself in a team with some 60th percentile players and you can carry pretty hard.

It felt like the 80-85th group (diamond) is where people actually start knowing how to play properly. Lots of mechanics to practice before then though - you only get to that point by automating the lower level skills

I pulled the Fide player database for standard play ratings. The set of ratings had a minimum of 1001, maximum of 2862 (Carlsen), an average of 1663, and a standard deviation of 349. The 25th percentile had a rating of 1428, 50th percentile: 1663, 95th percentile: 2237, and top percentile: 2862.

Given those ratings, the 95th percentile has a ~100% chance of beating the 25th percentile, a 96.75% chance of beating the 50th percentile, and a 0.38% chance of beating Magnus Carlsen.

I think 1 in 20 is fairly rare. It's just that something being rare and something being hard to reach aren't always the same thing. It's likely just a matter of "trying hard to reach x" is the fairly rare thing. That doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile accomplishment. Sure, only having a 0.38% chance of beating Carlsen doesn't look great, but then you're comparing yourself only to the top players and not looking at the whole picture.

There's such a focus on being proficient in our society... but being bad at stuff is not all bad. It's only bad if you don't accept it and move forward more strategically.

The ability to recognize and admit the areas where we struggle / are mediocre actually allows us to better accomplish our goals.

It took me a long time to realize this... I don't need to be good at anything to make and sell an app, for example. I can outsource the app development, outsource the website design, outsource the marketing... basically - hire people to do all of the work for me. You might say - that takes money! I don't even need to have the money or know how to write a business plan. All I need is an idea - then I outsource the writing of the business plan and use that business plan to attract investors.

There are a lot of very skilled people out there - why not just borrow their skills to accomplish what you want to accomplish?

You mean being a VC? But angel investment is a skilled job.

Even more so if you are trying to sell people on some idea.

There's a stringency to the barrier to participation that's missing here. To be in the 95%-ile of heart surgeons, may still mean that you make seemingly obvious mistakes, but I kind of doubt it. To be in the 95%-ile of machine-learning engineers ... what does it even mean?

In addition to the stringency of the barrier to participation, there's a stringency of the barrier to opportunity for practice. If you take a brilliant heart surgeon out of New York City, and plop them in the middle of Wichita, Kansas, she's going to find a hard upper limit on the number of mitral valve repairs she can do on any given weekend.

Similarly, if you take a machine learning engineer who spent the last 10 years at Google and give him a a few thousand data points from a heart health study, his main challenge will be staying busy and his skills will surely degrade without other work.

I have played couple of games competitively. I have been somewhere in top ten to top three in the world in some of them (we are talking small communities with large number of accidental players, nothing really to brag about).

My observation is it is critical to somehow get a feeling what it is/means to be good at the game. This means identifying where is the focus of a good player.

Having been playing competitively I have noticed ALMOST ALL of people being intent on playing the game well are completely misplacing there focus, effectively wasting their time on stuff that does not matter.

They are stuck being mediocre to good (but not best) players because they dug themselves in their own holes:

- polishing endlessly skills that give diminishing results but are comfortable to the player but avoiding tackling problems that the player is not comfortable with

- repeating the same routine all the time instead of constantly switching up stuff they are training. If you are training well after some time you have trained a skill enough that you should switch to another that now gives best ROI.

- repeating and acting on falsehoods/myths about the game

- complaining about the unfairness of the game which means they would like to play some different game which is governed by their idealized rules instead of trying to understand the real rules of the real game

- not being ruthlessly critical about their abilities which is necessary step to identifying what to work on to progress,

- not being able to spend a moment to consciously reflect on ones progress to identify why it is they are stuck (instead of blaming everybody)

- being focused on winning instead of getting better. Many players play to get a short term kick out of winning the game instead of playing to get some kind of knowledge/skill that will help them get better. Think Starcraft players who find that they can get consistent wins cannon rushing their enemies but are not willing to fail to try other strategies.

etc.

An example would be rookie players on iRacing (I'm nowhere near the top). iRacing requires you to get minimum amount of games but also, more importantly, minimum safety rating to be able to progress from rookies.

Players who are stuck but would want to leave rookies in iRacing are constantly complaining at other players constantly hitting them, effectively ruining their safety raiting.

While it is true that the state of the game in rookies is such that you get hit frequently, there are people who are quickly sailing through rookies. To do that you just need to notice that the critical skill is not hitting other players and avoid getting hit. Instead of focusing on getting to best place, focus on not hitting anything. Yet, so many people do not understand this and are destined to stay in rookies for a long time.

This sounds like some great advice for real life...

> They are stuck being mediocre to good (but not best) players because they dug themselves in their own holes

Also: they fall into a pit where their current behaviour works at the skill level that they are at, but is detrimental when that behaviour is performed at a higher skill level.

That is true. One way this happens is when somebody tries to progress very quickly, emulating best players, without putting time to understand the basic mechanics of the game.

A good player will be able to adapt their gameplay because they can more or less predict what will happen when they alter the gameplay and/or they can evaluate how their change influenced the result.

A stuck player who skipped basic training may be able to imitate a complicated strategy to some extent but will fail miserably when they change anything and won't be able to evaluate results. They are effectively trained to do one thing from a subset of skills of a pro player and not being able to transition through a valley of failure from their local maximum.

A similar analogy: talented musicians who can only read music but completely lack the ability to improvise.

This is great advice that is translatable to a lot of skills. For one, this is perfectly applicable to playing musical instrument/being a musician.

Totally agree. I also feel that awareness of the meta is increasingly public knowledge, but is not utilitized.

Smash bro’s for instance, has a ton of players who know about advanced techniques, and talk about some of them as easy because they are easy for top players, but cannot actually execute on any of them.

And, like you say, mistake the fact that some of the advanced techniques are done by professional players to mean that utilizing these techniques are an important part of getting there. They’re generally not.

In a nutshell - you have to do deliberate practice or you stagnate. Musicians know this for ages.

In a nutshell, yes. But deliberate is not enough. You also need to be able to honestly reflect on yourself. Many people are unable to honestly reflect on themselves. They are fooling themselves and made it part of their being so much that they are incapable of being honest.

For example, a person that habitually blames everybody for their failings may undertake a project to write a blog post every day but may be incapable of hearing advice, critical opinions or diagnosing reasons behind non-existing or stagnating readership statistics. They might blame everybody of being stupid or have no taste or not knowing anything about writing.

> unable to honestly reflect on themselves

Yes, there can be emotional ego barriers, which hinder seeing. "It's amazing what you can see by looking."

But I think there's also a genuine non-emotional, cognitive problem with seeing, for a non-expert. An expert coach would help... but how to evaluate expertise? Maybe credentials are enough, for a beginner.

> - being focused on winning instead of getting better. Many players play to get a short term kick out of winning the game instead of playing to get some kind of knowledge/skill that will help them get better.

In difficult projects, it's necessary to improve prerequisite skills before "winning" (completing the project).

But with sufficient layers of prerequisites, the goal becomes distant, the motivation decoupled, until it falls below a threshold.

In addition, for a non-expert, it's difficult to be sure that a prerequisite is really needed, or will be enough, or what the true ROI really is. We don't need precise certainty, but we do need to know well enough.

Do you have any suggestions for getting around this?

It's not that difficult to get to the 95th percentile in Overwatch or Bridge because no one at the 95th percentile receives much compensation, monetary or otherwise.

When significant compensation is awarded to the 95th percentile of some field, attaining the 95th percentile is much more difficult.

In the case of Overwatch no awards are given to the 95th percentile. The 99.9999th percentile though at least have an opportunity to get paid for playing the game.

Relevant to the article, but more on the tooling side, a question (especially for you consultants):

What tool do you use to track where your time is spent?

This can either be for the "film study" of how I work or for billing clients in 15 minute increments. I've tried apps that take screenshots every 60s and others that track accumulated time on foreground application.

The end result being, same as Dan's friend, I'd like to know where I'm wasting time and how to improve. Forget the 95/99% numbers, I just want +10% this week, +8% next week, etc.

For me, learning art has broken all of the rules I thought I knew about how to correctly go about getting better. I've made several serious efforts to get better at it with VERY limited results. Either my brain is not wired for it somehow, or my approach to learning it has been incorrect in some way.

And just FYI my attempts included slowly going through all of 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain'.

Have you tried taking classes or otherwise getting 1:1 coaching?

Not yet, but I am planning on re-visiting learning how to draw. I've been looking at some different approaches and the one that seems to address my weaknesses the best is an online course named 'Draw a Box'.

I like most of danluu's posts but I abandoned this one early on. Mining Overwatch rankings for general truths seems like a basic mistake.

One other area where this is true and might be similarly easy to analyze is competitive running.

A local road race 5k might have a thousand entrants. You might feel bad about occasionally walking and finishing in 500th place, but that's just in the subset of the population that participates in those events. The biggest race in our 1,000,000-person metro area draws about 20,000 entrants (many from outside that area), so the 50th percentile in the race is 99th percentile in the population.

Similarly, there's a big difference between people who participate and people who practice. Every high-school cross-country team will likely have several kids who can run under 18 minutes in the 5k, just because they practice 5 or 6 days a week. Elites peak at about age 28-30 in the 5k, so these 16-year-olds aren't as fast as they could be, but they will likely never run faster than they do in high school because they won't practice as effectively as adults as they do when coached on a school team.

It is true that regular practice can easily put you on very high percentile among participants. So it is easy to be on 95% in one or two things.

On the other hand, for the same reason, it is very hard to be on 95% in multiple things at the same time, because you won't have time to regularly practice on multiple things.

For the same reason, I would also argue that for regular people it is also hard to be on 95% in just one thing outside of work, because people need to take care of their family.

> An example of something my editor helped us with was giving us a vocabulary we could use to discuss structural problems.

Does anyone know what he's referring to when he mentions the vocabulary for structural problems? Is there a book/blog to learn about this?

I have the same problem. I feel like something is off with my writing but I can't describe it.

Consider the purpose of one of your essays. Pretend you are a member of the target audience. Read it.

Your experience of your essay will tell you a lot, and is all the guidance you need to become the best according to your judgment/taste.

Though it will not enable you to improve beyond... For that, you need to read expert writing, and perhaps an expert-coach of some kind.

> It's known that having laypeople try to figure out how to improve among themselves is among the worst possible ways to learn something, direct instruction is more effective and having a skilled coach or teacher give one-on-one instruction is more effective still.

Is this actually true? Does anyone have citations for this?

This blog is in the bottom 5%-ile for readability and layout.

At least on mobile I find it much easier to read and faster than almost anything else I see on the web. Plain HTML with a bit of CSS goes a long way!

On desktop the type is sooooo tiny!

You're right: on desktop it would benefit from a narrower column width and somewhat larger text

For articles like this, that are just simple text with nothing fancier than some headers and some lists, would something simple like this be a good way to deal with this?

  body {
    font-size: calc(0.5rem + 2vw);
  }

That sets a font size that gets bigger as you make the viewport wider, so that you keep about the same number of characters per line regardless of viewport size.

I'm just a dabbler with CSS. Is there a better way to say "the font size that gives me about N characters per line of random text"?

(It's 0.5rem + 2vw instead of just some multiple of vw so that if you make the viewport narrow the font doesn't get too small. Better would be something like max(0.5rem, 2.5vw) but max() is experimental and not supported well outside of chrome. I found the calc(fixed + variable) hack on Stack Overflow).

I usually stick in some css like:

    body {
       max-width: 45em;
    }

Viewport size isn't a great clue to the ideal font size: someone can have a large monitor that they're close to, or a small one that they're father from.

The question is always, 95th percentile of what? I'm involved with a series of physics competitions, that winnows ~5 million high schoolers down to 5.

- 10% of high schoolers learn calculus well in high school

- 10% of those also learn calculus-based physics well in high school

- 10% of those sign up for the first round competition

- top 10% of those qualify for the second round

- top 5% of those qualify for the final round

- top 20% of those end up on the final five

Which of these stages is supposed to be "easy"? Because the conjunction of all six certainly isn't.

I think this is true. I think it's because we intuitively understand "being good at something" to be relative to "the people who are the absolute best at it," not on the total set of people who do it.

I disagree when the post claims that "advice works". If someone gives you good advice and you manage to take it, you're still missing something. You're mising the intuition that led them to be able to give you that advice, which is the really valuable thing. This is why self-help is so worthless, even if it's good advice.

Yeah where you sample matters. In over watch you sample everyone from casuals, first timers etc to pro competitors. It if you just sample all pro competitors it will be much harder to reach 95%.

>Within the game, the goal of the game is to win.

This might be a case of ludonarrative conflict, though I hadn't considered it outside of narrative-driven games. Blizzard wants both mainstream low-entry play, and highly-competitive e-sport bait. And in that way lies madness[0]

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/11m21k/starcraft...

Man, I remember reading this back then and agreeing with everything he said. And he was largely right. SC2 never really became relevant. By the time they fixed the arcade and implemented coop, both features that were absolutely necessary to capture the casual audience, it was way too late. I love the coop mode, but it's clear that the whole game is getting little investment from Blizzard because they themselves realize it wouldn't be worth the time, money and effort.

Was really pleasantly surprised to see this included a section about Overwatch. I have watched my Overwatch gameplaye to improve, but never my programming. I'll give it a try.

    asciinema

The definition of 95th percentile is confusing. I think if you scored top 95th at a National exam in high school you would be competitive to choose the university you want. That is impressive.

Being 95 percentile in college sports would probably allow you play the sport professionally.

Having a website in the 95th percentile in terms of traffic would probably be extremely impressive.

Having a 95 percentile restaurant quality in the world would probably result in Michelin stars

> I think if you scored top 95th at a National exam in high school you would be competitive to choose the university you want.

Maybe at a small country (like Germany?) that doesn't have near-100% high school / exam attendance. In the US where 2 million take the SAT and there are less than 100,000 seats at the "top tier" universities, 99%ile is closer to the bar for choosing the university what you want.

Of course if you calibrate your 'want' wisely, then anyone at any percentile can choose the university they want.

https://theconversation.com/lets-get-real-with-college-athle...

"Fewer than 2% of college student-athletes ever play professional sports at any level for any amount of time."

Bing tells me that France (the home of Michelin) has 30,000 restaurants and 600 (2%) Michelin stars. Other nations have far far lower ratio.

You're totally off with your numbers. I don't know anything about college entrance exams so I won't comment on them.

If you play football in the NCAA you need to be closer to the 98th percentile to have a shot in the NFL. And to even got a shot in the NCAA you needed to be in the 95th percentile of high school players. In the NFL even the never gonna make it cut from the practice squad guys are in the 99th percentile of all people playing football.

There are over 600,000 restaurants in the US alone and less than 3000 Michelin star restaurants world wide. So we're definitely in the well over 99th percentile there.

As for websites. There are an estimated 1.5 billion websites in existence. That means to be in the 95th percentile you only need to be in the top 750 million websites.

So yeah, the example you give are a actually a pretty strong case for the 95th percentile not being that impressive.

This blog is excellent. But there's no RSS feed.

What do other people who rely on feed readers do in these scenarios? Is there a good service (which will not disappear) which will either convert the thing into rss or alert you when there's a new post?

edit: It has an RSS feed, just no link to it in the index.html. https://danluu.com/atom.xml

His main example is video game playing, which is something many people do at an extremely casual level because engaging in it is so easy (turning on your computer). Reaching the 95th percentile in activities where just showing up requires a level of effort (team-sports, rock climbing, etc) is way more difficult, as people who just want to be entertained for 30 minutes are not present.

Main point is it's common to practice wrong.

It's hard for non-experts to assess expertise, needed to find a coach to give feedback.

Though, probably for a beginner in many fields, an even minimally credentialed "expert" will be extremely helpful.

(This is apart from fields lacking agreement on advice, like the article's public speaking example).

The main message is becoming 95%-ile is EASY. I disagree. It’s not. One of the most common discipline is (school) math. You have everything to help you improve: constant feedback, guided resources, a unlimited mass of problems to practice and arguably plenty of time but to reach the 95%-ile is still hard.

Cut back to 10 years from now, insert "99.99th% percentile isn't that good" article on Hacker News. Someone tag me then.

No percentiles are good IMO. Often, the overall shape matters, in some cases, like in latency.

And in many other cases, it often becomes the way to go, due to practical challenges in sourcing.

Get better at something if it feels good to you, but gamification of life is poison.

Competitiveness is a mental trap that keeps you in a box where someone else defines the rules. If you’re doing something new, the questions of “winning” and percentiles and whatnot become meaningless.

'Practice makes perfect' is certainly true for the 95th percentile.

In the 99th percentile, on the other side, talent and determination are more important (since everybody is practicing regularly already).

If you’re actually trying to do anything, and you are diligent, you’re really only competing with 10% of the pool. Now, you just have to beat 50% of your real competitors.

You can do this...only if you compare yourself to everyone. If you compare yourself to those who are actively trying to get good, it's much, much harder.

Once my ass was saved by my Korean immigrant optical coating technician, who fixed an electron beam power supply loaded with MSI IC’s using a multimeter, after the manafacturer couldn’t. (He put two kids through college, owns a dry cleaner shop with packed racks now, and drives a Mercedes.) I initially got him cheap because he could barely speak English.

I wonder what percentile he was?

Everyone's talking about his arguments and ideas (which is great, love you all), but it just made me want to play some overwatch.

Here's my read of this. It's pool because I've done some league. Your typical 7 level player (in APA) typically wins most matches. In fact the ranking system is basically how much you win, even with handicaps. Here's a good list of things to think about when playing each and every shot.

https://supremebilliards.com/51-pool-tips-every-player-must-...

The top level players keep all of that in mind automatically. It's practically part of their training data at this point. They barely lose even when a level 2 player needs to just win 2 matches and they need to win like 7 matches.

The "equalizer" system of the APA says that's roughly a fair fight. But it's not. When playing a 7, you know that not only are they going to get pretty much every easy shot, when they don't have a more than 90% chance of making a shot, they leave the 2 a bad bad bad shot, like something the 2 will have a 1% chance of making. They also put the cue ball in a special place - a place where either the 7 will get a ball in hand OR strategically a good shot on their next run.

It's all extremely interesting to watch a true 7 play anyone else. The only fair match-up against a 7 is anyone of rank 4 or above, mostly because they know the tricks. They still make rookie mistakes all the time though, hence the 4.

You're probably in the 95% if you're a 5 or above in APA. People that are six hate being a six. They get kicked off teams because of skill caps in favor of keeping a bunch of 2,3,4 players and their 7.

I was a 4, played in the bay area, south bay APA. Represent. I moved.

http://www.southbayapa.com/bapl_hostlocations.htm

That list used to have like 8 places when I played. Sad. Good to see lucky shots is still around my home team from there.

Anyway, your typical 4 thinks he's a 7 inside - but doesn't say it out loud because of the inevitable laughs. They have honed every pool stance. Bridge is near perfect. A decent 4 can hit the cue ball from one side of the 8-foot table to a ball that needs exactly a 30 degree. These crazy 4s think they have a 80% chance of hitting a ball across that table into a pocket (a long shot, with or without angle). Either the cue is travelling a long way to the ball or the hit ball will. Unless the target is "in the pocket", like giving the player a huge degree of error and still make it in. No I'm talking more of a looks hard, is hard, but the 4 is so HONED on these shots they nearly always forget their defense, so silly. The major difference between a 7 and a 4 here is the 7 will try 30% making the ball in, and 70% leaving the cue in a disastrously bad place for the other player (maybe even 10/90). And the funny shit is, the 4 probably is better at hitting the ball in, even if they both put in 80% effort to do so... but that's not the game for a long shot. The game for a long shot is to leave it bad. There are lots of calculations, but that's the gist. The top players win because they get ball in hand, typically planned of course, but you won't even see the smirk on the face when it worked.

What does this have to do with 95%, I don't know it's somewhere in there.

Ok now you're pumped up, go contact APA and get on a team. Start with 8-ball. Meet your future spouse and have fun.

There is something so depressingly robotic about the obsession with being the best at everything all the time. Career, income, diet, exercise, lifestyle, hobbies; can't even have fun anymore without spending days holed-up researching esoteric hyper-optimizations. Some of you need to relax and stop sucking the fun out of everything.

I think some people get their enjoyment out of hyper-optimization rather than the hobby itself, which is also fine.

I think it's important to be passionate about your life's work. However, maintaining "good enough" across all dimensions of particular lifestyle or role is actually incredibly challenging.

Even for a standard engineer, think how many you know can code well, be leaders, AND can write good documentation.

For most things, it's always a "pick 2 out of 3" situation.

There's a difference between being passionate about your own work, and being passionate about being better than everyone else.

I fact, I don't think the two have anything in common?

It seems to me like there's two different things being discussed in this thread. The first one being passion about being better than everyone else as you mentioned and the second one is a desire to work on yourself on different aspects of life, a.k.a. try to be as well-rounded person as possible. When put in action these things are deceptively similar yet the underlying reasons for doing them are very different.

He leaves room for that.

> And for games like Overwatch, I don't think improving is a moral imperative; there's nothing wrong with having fun at 50%-ile or 10%-ile or any rank.

I've gravitated to more random modes in multiplayer games. OW has mystery heroes where hero selection is random. Hostility is almost always met with "dude it's mystery heroes".

Leaving room for being less competitive in games is not the same as doing so for non-games.

> relax and stop sucking the fun out of everything.

Yep. It's important to try new things and put yourself "out there". That means you're going to fumble on a regular basis.

The best way to master something, in the absence of a god-like mentor, is through endless repetitions of effort, failure, reflection and exploration. The concept is as old, tried, and true as the story of Odysseus.

That is good advice.

Only problem is that we do not have Bill Murray's 10,000 years to endlessly master everything in Punxsutawney.

We have to pick our fights carefully.

I personally find it fun to become better or trying to see how close I can get to being the best at my hobbies.

There is some sort of rat race being this obsession, that kind of put me off sometimes. It's like, yes, I'm guilty of it somehow, I want to be better, to be more productive, to do less mistakes etc. I'll do my work better, I can get hired by a company that would choose me over another candidate, nice. But the cost is that it's dragging the all profession into this mindset. The 10x thingy, the hyper productivity competition. This has also a cost for yourself, you can optimise everything, work on several IDEs, write your documentation as your code compiles, listen to a podcast as you have lunch, a book on the tube as you go back home... But boy oh that's exhausting.

Agreed. My hypothesis is that it's largely due to constrained markets in the Bay Area (housing, dating pool especially) that lead to individuals feeling impoverished despite having enough cash. Like kids in poorer areas wanting to be professional athletes and putting immense energy into street basketball games — they do get better, it's a way to distract yourself from the mess, and it may be good for you, but it doesn't necessarily fundamentally address problems without or within (though it can!).

If you look at the Bay Area before the 2000s, it wasn't like this at all. It was relaxed. For a while, it was said to be one of the best places in the world for dating. Housing was cheap. People had time. You could be a part time dishwasher and a poet in San Francisco. A lot of greatness grew out of that fecund environment — artists like Diebenkorn or luminaries like Alice Waters. Things are changing.

Where did the goal of 95 percentile come from?

well, i don’t buy from sellers with under 98% rating from amazon or ebay. 95% is atrocious if true. for sellers with lower absolute number of feedback responses, i quality it by reading negative feedback because many times it’s the customers that are atrocious. but if you have thousands of responses and only 95%, forget it.

this means almost all amazon marketplace sellers are disqualified for me. it’s gone downhill fast over the last 5 years.

This is not related. 95th percentile means the top 5% of a group compared with everything else in the group.

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