Talent Is Largely a Myth
blog.nukemberg.com
blog.nukemberg.com
I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results. And I [like to] imagine Tyson could spend as much time programming as I have and not be nearly as good.
Talent is a multiplier. When you’re learning something you have a talent for, you’ll know.
For example: in high school I was very into art and into programming. I could spend 30 hours on a digital painting and it looked okay. But when I spent 30 hours on python, I was fluent in a weekend.
Some folks I knew could take those 30 hours of drawing and produce a painting that would take me 3 months. Even after adjusting for baseline skill.
Their rate of improvement was simply beyond anything I could achieve. Same as my rate of improvement in programming was beyond what they could pull off.
Crucially: Talent isn’t a measure of how good you are now. It’s a measure of how fast you improve with practice.
It can be a trap. I knew a guy in college, “Kevin” who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time. He was doing much better than people like me who could pick things up and be an expert beginner in hours or days, because most of us never worked anywhere near that hard for anything in our lives. I had worked that hard for exactly one thing at this point, which put me at a vantage point of being able to see both groups. None of my other peers really understood Kevin. I confess I didn’t always either.
If you can fill your days with things that you are “talented” at, you never get around to the things that are hard but make you a better person or for a richer life. You can justify quitting before you ever start, and only later figure out that “compensating qualities” simply don’t. Not all the time. Especially in a crisis.
She lives with a broken man
A cracked polystyrene man
Who just crumbles and burns
> Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.
To reach elite levels you need both.
fortune favors the prepared mind
Reframing it into the active voice is a worthy goal, and this version I like better.
Joe Rogan Experience #1080 - David Goggins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tSTk1083VY
Perhaps the ultimate iteration of "Kevin who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time."
This is "the toughest man on earth" ... legit. Highly inspirational story.
Talent measures your intuition level regarding something. So, in your example, Kevin could always reach competence, but Kevin’s afterburner capacity is set to 0% (capped). Some of us have 0-100% intuition on things, on a spectrum.
But as far as what it takes to make it in this world? Competence. Your afterburners can boost depending on it’s capacity, but you can’t run on that unless you are born with a god like afterburner tank (genius, your Einsteins). We are all limited, even the talented.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
and to keep with the other comments I would argue that some people have more taste than others, or more passion, or transferable skills that carry over, which often translates into what we think of as natural talent. But it still takes some work.
I was a very earnest kid, and up until that point I took everything my teachers told me literally. "This is how you learn" and everything felt like pushing boulders up a hill. Once I had 'permission' to build my own mental models from the examples provided by the teacher and dismiss their suggestions for how to organize the information... they could barely talk fast enough for my liking.
These 'models' I would discover later were very like the scientific method. Rote memorization was my absolute nemesis. Hypothesis, attack, defend, revise, repeat. As an adult, people who noticed this about me have asked, "Hey hinkley, I need these people to do <task you've never done before>, can you keep an eye on them?" After the initial panic, within a couple minutes of peppering them with seemingly random questions I can often answer, "sure", and have a sense of what questions I can run through the ersatz model, even go a bit off script, and which ones really require me to interrupt the expert.
When I'm entirely wrong, it's back to pushing boulders uphill again. The ones I remember clearly though are the ones where I was truly awful but motivated to trudge through. If giving myself permission to be a polymath is the best thing I've ever done for myself, giving myself permission to be bad at something for a long time is the second best thing. If I get to the end of my life and find that these turn out to be the things I was best at teaching to others, I won't be surprised at all. "An expert is someone who has made every possible mistake in a narrow field of study." Nothing seems to get me repeat customers like being able to tell someone I came to the same conclusion, and here's a counter example and a better way to think about that problem.
I think this fails to recognise the talents that Mike Tyson has leveraged: the soft skills and gumption to identify the best trainers, the best team, the best opportunities, and to seize those, being motivated to gain fame and plaudits. Plus consistent, world-class training and experience on top - working outside of the 30 hours of class.
These skills are very transferable to other fields. Look, for example, at the George Foreman Grill.
Could you have done the same? Yes, I think it's possible. But, viewing it as only practice and guided training seems like a fundamental error.
Tyson famously lost everything when it turned out his manager/promoter was a crook.
But yes, overall you’re right, talent is useless unless you leverage it and put in the work. My argument is that, if you’re gonna put in that much work, it’s best to leverage it on something you also have a talent for.
No. He just happened to be an explosive beast who could knock out grown men at age 13.
I'll assume you meant nature v. nurture. If so, then the Tyson family is absolutely an edge case in the debate. Mike was famously in and out of trouble in his younger years, having been arrested 38 times as a teenager. He was a bit of a child of the streets, so to speak.
What is fascinating and much lesser known is his older brother, Rodney. (Their sister unfortunately died at 24 from a heart attack)
Rodney Tyson is a pediatric trauma surgeon.
Two men who grew up eating the exact same food, in the exact same rooms, watching the exact same TV shows grew up to have radically different lives and careers. Yet both are accomplished in their choices.
I don't know what to exactly make of the Tyson family in the nature v nurture debate, but the differences between the brothers are some of the widest that I have seen.
For sports you need to work hard, but you cannot compete without the right boost in the first place.
Mike Tyson had an incredible amount of talent and great teachers.
I have a friend who has played Go for years, owns a board, played online often and so on. The closest I've been to playing was reading a Go manga and ignoring all the panels about the rules. I never really played chess or other such games either. First four times we played he beat me soundly even with a handicap. Fourth time I had no handicap. Fifth time I won. And sixth time. And seventh time. His tactical moves were superiors to mine but I could intuitively see the strategic view in ways he simply couldn't. That depressed me for a while because by all rights he should have been winning and not me.
I frequently watch some of them do a really poor job because they are unable to get over the hangup that "more talented person Y" would be able to do it much better, design it more clearly from the start, etc.
When I look at "more talented person Y", sure, they are more talented, but their work is good because of other behaviors (e.g., a breadth of experimentation before locking in one approach) that have nothing to do with their great intuition/vision about the structure of the result.
Now my advice is "don't look around"...
Preoccupation with talent is a trap, for the more and less talented.
Wow, that's a humblebrag taken to the next level.
I am a descendant of fairly strong guys - one grandfather was a rural blacksmith, the other one started as a lumberjack before going to the (still coal powered) railway to coal the engines. I inherited quite a lot of their physique from them, which means that I can do quite good in a gym without trying much.
Yes, that feels unjust. Not that I am depressed about it, but it is definitely something you ponder upon: why this guy who works so much harder than me does not see as much return on his effort?
That traits for fitness are heritable? That is "a thing"? Hmmm, you might be onto something here.
And I am not even surprised, the possibility of governments latching onto this and "streaming" people towards whatever they are found to be gifted at, cannot really be dismissed.
Spot on. Hard work matters, but people stating hard working geniuses as examples without mentioning there are many hardworking individuals without an even close result is just not right.
2. I don't think the article body suggests that at all and the article title specifically modifies its claim with the word "largely".
But my rate of progress just didn’t justify the time investment compared to the results and joy I got out of coding.
Same for poetry (all of high school) and fiction writing (from 1st grade to college). Just didn’t make sense to continue pursuing. Best to focus on the obsession that I also had a huge talent for.
I’ve been able to leverage my writing passion and talent for technical writing. 2/3 not bad imo :)
Physical and psychological traits matter when you undertake certain tasks - how many fast twitch muscle fibers you have, how big and string your lu game and heart is, the angle of your jaw in relation to your brainstem, the distribution of your weight on your body, your personal nerve conduction velocity, your natural aggressiveness and your pain tolerance levels for boxing.
Your natural intelligence, hand-eye coordination, tolerance for failure, and curiosity level for learning programming.
Your hand-eye coordination, imagination, and depth of color vision for painting.
The thing is, while everyone starts with more or less of some physical or mental fitness for a particular task, with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small. Yet o e is Mohammed Ali, and one is Leon Spinks. That difference is not in proportion to the difference in their physical or mental capabilities at the start, and is largely explained in studies by coaching and practice technique.
The ability to follow a trainings regime until you reach success is largely a mental tolerance for failure and determination. If you have lots of success, you tend to continue. But if you were to continue despite failure, you would eventually reach the success you were after if the training regime was correct.
A common training approach for eastern europe gymnastics is to take a bunch of 5 year old kids, train them all the same. Whomever is left standing at 13 gets to compete in international meets.
After 10 years of boxing, I can give a fun round or two even to people prepping for olympic tryouts (I’ve tried). But a talented 14 year old kid training to go pro in a few years ... they smoke me every time. Even my fully developed adult musculature and the years of ring experience can’t compete with their level of focus and talent. I look like a fool every time.
> with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small
At the extreme ends of elite competition everyone works ridiculously hard. Everyone has the perfect nutrition and the training and the coaches and so on. When the difference between olympic silver and gold in swimming is the length of a knuckle ... either we’re seeing random probabilities playing out (the competition is within margin of error for the test), or it’s genetics.
What else could it be?
At that level, it's generally known to be the mental preparation for the given day (along with a bit of luck, as you mentioned).
Indeed, everyone at that level has already been filtered and selected for similar top levels of skill, knowledge, conditioning, equipment, diet, coaches, etc., etc., etc. It comes down to the mental game both internally and between competitors on that particular day.
A classic book to understand some of this is The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey [0]
Source: I formerly competed at international levels for several years in alpine ski racing (mostly DH/Super-G), and studied neuroscience in college as a result of the many fascinating mental phenomena I found in training and competing.
One very interesting fact I came across in neuroscience is that perceptual thresholds for relevant senses, e.g., touch sensitivity for a musician, are about 10X finer than normal people (i.e., they can detect physical differences only 10% the size of that detectable by normal population), and that this is trainable. So yes, this is definitely on the skill/ training side, agreeing with the author.
OTOH, I know some top level musicians who quickly point out that the people with insane levels of desire, motivation, and hard work who will never get to the level to pass a professional audition. But I haven't further data to see what is the issue (does it come to talent, or some genetic shortcoming in their sensory-motor systems, or have they self-sabotaged, or what 20 other factors?)
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance...
What comes closest is some studies on extreme forms of Buddhist meditation. One of the interesting discoveries is that during normal meditation, the parasympathetic system (homeostasis, breathing, etc.) is very dominant, but during the peak enlighentment experiences of the advanced meditators, the sympathetic system (fight-or-flight) system associated with athletic performance also runs at very high levels. Normally, the sympathetic & parasympathetic systems are in opposition, when the sympathetic system is active, parasympathetic is suppressed, and vice-versa. The other situation where both systems activate is during sex (arousal needs paracympathetic, orgasm sympathetic). The interesting connection I made is that I'd noticed these intense flow states sometimes occurring in the most intense times, where everything in my mind was absolute calm - I called it "fast meditation", as in meditating at 85mph. I know others also experience this. I conjecture that this is some of the same phenomenon seen in advanced meditation, just form the opposite end (here, maxing out the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic maybe kicks in, but I have no measurements other than my mental state).
There's also some research on the "flow state" related to accelerated perception, where people feel that they can see insane levels of detail and time slows down, as in accidents. They were trying to recreate it to understand it, and I found the efforts entirely lame and a waste of time. I can tell all kinds of stories about seeing very clearly both important and trivial things at high speed, and having entire trains of thought which I can verify happened in fractions of a second by noting the beginning and end points of the chain of thought and calculating in the distance and speed. These studies catch none of it, and I can say that even with years of training and effort, it is still extremely elusive (which is why I can't really fault the researchers, I don't yet have any great ideas on how to capture it).
I wish I could point you to specific references, but these were all readings from a while back.
BTW, ML and sports training seems like a potentially very fruitful area! I'd love to hear more about it. I found that much of the most interesting areas are at the intersections of different fields, so I wish you good luck in your pursuit!
I discovered I could trigger the state reliably without risk during high-level matched competitive video-game play. (Smash Bros) I had nearly 10 years of low-skilled competitive practice but with infinite online matched games I found I could reach a flow-like state on a nightly basis, so long as I played long enough. (I played for approximately 4 hours per night over a two-year period). I was also able to achieve a flow-like state with near certainty using a very simple piano tile tapping game, given long enough sessions. I had simply been using the game to train my thumbs for speed.
Eventually I left my career in software to pursue flow in Skydiving, which I now consider to be a mistake. After studying meditation and Yoga, it has become clear to me that the state is not triggered by external factors at all, and that it is itself a skill.
Admittedly far fewer of these states stand out as truly peak, quasi-religious experiences. I suspect there is a continuum and the binary classification is a judgement we place on the experience "retroactively". It comes from having enough space in your attention to notice the contrasting state of the body and the mind, the level of current performance, and then to notice the noticing itself. The rush of pleasure and excitement is not pre-existing, it is the result of a positive judgement you place on the situation. Despite its appeal this is undesirable, and tends toward interrupting flow in the precisely the same way as one loses control of a lucid dream after just having reached it. IMHO focusing on the subjective threshold for isolated study is misguided.
My current work focuses on creating an abstract framework which adapts to the athlete in order to create the external conditions which allow the athlete to most easily find the flow state. Rather than teach them how directly I hope to trigger it unexpectedly and allow for it to be sustained indefinitely during training. Of course, I'm not foolish enough to admit this to my benefactors.
Do you suppose I might be able to get a grant for this sort of work?
I totally agree about the continuum - for the most part it is so strange from ordinary experience that it seems like a binary shift, but yes, I think it is important to see it as a continuum (perhaps a bit stepped/quantized, but not sure).
Fascinating that you managed to get there with the tapping game doing speed drills. I often had ideas but it was before common MRIs and other technology that we had for examining brain functions at high resolution. That is something you could get into an MRI, and/or an intense electrode-sensor grid and measure! So, yes, I'd think some funding might be possible. I know academic funding is it's own labrynthine nightmare, so probably best to be in a program supported by an experienced professor/primary researcher who knows the ropes. OTOH, if you can get to show some results that improve performance, perhaps approaching some top pro sports team owners for funding? (I know if I were a billionaire with a team, I'd be interested in something that could give us an edge!) The question is whether you can generate useful results soon, and in what sport. You seem to have made a lot of progress in eSports, there might be some money there... Let me know if you're interested in chatting offline (is there a DM function here to exchange contact info w/o publishing?)
I would like to allow for the possibility that mindset and internal mental models which are learnable rather than innate could account for the particular distribution an athlete belongs to.
For instance someone prepping for Olympic tryouts may be in either the right tail of a lower mode of the distribution, or the left tail of the higher mode of the distribution.
The 14-year old that smokes you may have developed a mental model or learning approach which places him in an entirely different class at the outset. Talent is a label you've placed on him retroactively, but what assurance do you really have that those differences are explained biologically/genetically rather than resulting different mental representations of the sport and training process?
Dude, don't do this. "Mental representations" have nothing to do with how fast we can run or how high we can jump.
The "table stakes" for being an elite athlete in many sports are so far beyond what you can just mentally train yourself to achieve by will. Plenty of amateur athletes have mental focus and work ethic, and train religiously, but this doesn't push them anywhere near elite performance levels.
Let's simplify the model to two distributions to make it easier to see: well-trained vs. poorly-trained individuals, where the variance of each distribution is largely accounted for by physical differences. So long as these two distributions overlap, it is a mathematical certainty that some poorly-trained individuals will outperform some well-trained individuals, due to physical and genetic markers. So far so good.
I'm suggesting that there are several overlapping distributions, and that it's impossible to know with certainty whether you've lost to someone due to their physical advantage or their superior cognitive approach & training - if you are only considering the two of you in isolation. The question must be asked of populations, not of individuals.
Anyone who has experienced breaking through plateaus after a decade of training knows this is true. Whatever seem absurd to you must be due to some other miscommunication. I specifically exempted the top elite performers from consideration because in that restricted case my argument no longer holds. I thought that was clear.
You are totally right that well-exploited sports have established models that are probably optimal, especially at the elite level.
I find these circumstances boring, personally. My interest lies in learning unfamiliar or complex tasks for which no optimal model is known, and also in maximizing the rate of skill acquisition by iterating on the model generation in an abstract way.
However I'm not familiar enough with boxing to understand the example and so you might be saying something else. Can you elaborate on why you chose Ali and Spinks as exemplars, and what you perceive to be their differences?
When Spinks beat Ali, he was the quickest to win the title in history. He also was the only man to take a title from Ali. He was younger, faster, in better shape and had a longer reach than Ali.
However, despite the physical attributes favoring Spinks in every way, and the previous victory, in the rematch Spinks was completely destroyed by Ali, who trained hard for the fight this time.
These two are perfect examples of elite athletes with excellent physical similarities that put their careers on similar trajectories when you compare their early careers. However, Ali's mental talents and training skill so far surpassed Spinks that Ali only lost 5 times and won the title 3 times, while Spinks lost 17 and only held the title once.
Physical prowess matters, but not as much as training at the elite level.
I don't know if there's a connection or it was just the people I came across, but another thing that bothered me was that people who subscribed to an innate talent model tended to be useless at evaluating skills. They'd have no idea what to ask, what to expect as an answer, and they'd have no BS detector.
I think a more healthy approach to talent is comparative advantage. You already have a team, and you want to improve it. Even a person who is not better than anyone at any of the relevant skills can improve a team, because it's opportunity cost that matters. The canonical example of this is the CEO who is better at strategy and grammar than his secretary, it still makes sense to have a secretary write the letters.
The reason sports talent is different from most other talent is that you have a limited number of players on the field. It's then a straight up production-over-replacement calculation, whereas most teams in business don't have that constraint.
It also gives you a floor. If I'm writing a c++ system and the junior on the team eats up time being hand-held, that eats into that opportunity cost savings. I suspect this is actually what people mean with "talent" when hiring, they want someone who doesn't necessarily have all the answers, but will behave in a way that doesn't impede the existing producers.
Growing your team tends to reduce productivity of each person, since each person now needs to spend more time on communication and coordination, and less time on being productive. Depending on the team and the new member, you can end up adding a person and getting a lot more team productivity (great!) or adding a person and losing team productivity. It's not as simple as a sports team, where if you put an extra person on the field, you get a penalty, usually quickly, so the limit is clear; but there's still a limit.
Fun fact: Amazon won't hire you unless your interview panel believes that you're a better fit than 50% of the people already in that role at Amazon.
Is there any evidence for that? The "better-than-average" have to work somewhere, so why should we assume that they change jobs more often? If you are an above-average workplace why should you not be able to retain above-average people?
As I grew older, this didn't sit right with me. By high school I switched my focus to math and science. By college I had chosen engineering, eventually taking all your typical undergrad math classes: differential equations, linear algebra, vector calculus and so on.
I'm still terrible at math. It never got easier. Every step I took I found to be very difficult. I got by with work ethic and sacrifice. I could have easily given up at any point along they way. Why didn't I? Not sure. Maybe I was fueled by resentment.
We need to be careful when we start telling people what they're not good at. We need to be careful when using terms like "talent". Many of us would like to quickly quantify cognitive ability, tie it to our genetics and be done with it. It's easy. But perhaps that's the problem, it's easy.
I don't know how you get that idea unless you are talking about the handful of C-level positions at tech giants. Otherwise switching your job every few years and increasing salary/position each time is generally the more profitable path than staying at a single company and waiting for promotion.
The really valuable skill (from a dollars & cents perspective) is to be able to provide business value to _the business you’re employed at_. That might not transfer anywhere else.
Eg I doubt my skills apply to a young startup- I’m a specialist (ML research), they need a generalist.
If I work at Google on search & get really good at solving political problems related to search, that’s a super valuable skill set _to Google_ but probably not to anyone else. I’d probably get promoted and/or get big bonuses. It also probably means that, _ceteris paribus_, I’m a worse coder, as I’m spending less time focusing on tough coding problems.
If you’re not paying your devs substantially more than industry average (like several times more) they’re probably not that abnormally good.
Just founded NeXT? Well, what you need is a developer with solid experience developing efficient multithreaded virtual memory operating system kernels. Oh look, here’s a project at Carnegie Mellon University doing exactly that. Let’s hire from there. Sorted!
Now we need a solid compiler tool chain fir MacOS. This exciting project at the University of Illinois looks good, let’s hire one of the founders. Bingo!
See, it’s not that hard in theory. You just have to actually know what you’re after, and have the resources to get it. Unfortunately most of us can’t offer top salaries, or the most exciting cutting edge projects that top people will want to work on. We end up trying to hire the top 1% of people who end up applying for jobs at our organisation. That’s a very different problem from hiring a true one percent-er.
> Now we need a solid compiler tool chain fir MacOS. This exciting project at the University of Illinois looks good, let’s hire one of the founders. Bingo!
None of these are garantee of top 1% talent
My older niece was doing a simple puzzle as a toddler - just 7 or 8 pieces of wood in a frame. She was struggling, which is normal at that age.
Her younger sister on the couch, maybe 1, was watching. After a couple of minutes she sighed, crawled to the edge of the couch, slithered off, crawled over to the puzzle. Picked up each piece and put it in its place, perfectly. Crawled back to the couch, pulled herself up and rolled back onto her blanket.
Today she is a top-notch architect. A talented one.
However, this belief that nature matters can bring in negative consequences for many people who look for ordinary jobs. For instance, not every programming job doesn't need a genius; not every well-paid job doesn't need a genius. Once companies start looking for geniuses in the name of tough interviews for average well-paid jobs, it can create problems for the majority of non-geniuses.
This echoes something I've been thinking a lot on recently. It's not just 'not every well-paid job'. It is quite literally most every well-paid job doesn't need a genius. A step further: most well-paid jobs will be impeded by a genius.
Geniuses aren't fun, awesome, let-em-loose-and-profit machines. They're people. Worse, they're necessarily weird people. While we need to cultivate them and give them the resources they need, optimizing society for geniuses would make a society most don't want to live in. Creating narratives where you are a rockstar-whatever or failure only sets us up for failure.
The message is be yourself. The message is that if you are a weird, quirky, feeling-left-out genius, that's ok. If you aren't, well, that's just normal.
When companies like Leetcode, Hackerrank etc try to quantify programmers, none of the evaluations factor for the intangible aspects. No wonder hiring in software is so utterly broken.
Companies which strive to attract and hire excellent developers, by and large, do. Excellent developers end up (or have the option to, certainly) at these companies by and large.
So it seems that the process sorts things out fine. Sure there are always guys on HN who say "oh I'd do super well at a FAANG if only my interview was a take home test" but I don't think that's actually an indication of a break.
Excellent developers do end up at FAANG due to the competitive nature of the entrance exams. However FAANG are just 5 of the millions of other companies, and not all of the rest can use FAANG techniques to hire the developers. None of these companies offer the money, prestige, and perks that FAANG offer so they should not be cargo-culting their hiring practices.
This the beauty and the paradox of diversity. It's great that we have such a wide array of possible activities to excel at, but it's a tragedy that not all activities are well rewarded by "the system". A great tragedy is the sheer number of activities can cause some people to shuffle between them until they find the one they may have any hope of excelling at (assuming it is even possible or if they have the energy to do it by the time they find it).
However, a reasonable person can see immediately how unsustainable this is- you’re dedicating your workforce to always know the newest technology and without dedicated training, this is only achieved by hiring fresh kids out of college.
Call me cynical, but I always resented the modern corporate mentality of seeking the best without taking the initiative to invest in training and development.
If I picked a random 35, 40, or 50 year old practicing programmer, I’d bet that they know wildly more about practical, day-to-day programming than a 21 year-old whiz from a top 10 comp sci program.
The only part about all of this that will suck is if we don’t have enough companies to keep this a liquid as fuck market.
As for the original topic, again, at scale talent is not a large enough multiple to be noticeable. We are entering, or already entered industrial scale computing. We will absolutely be cogs in the machine and will look back in wonder how this small community once lauded the notion of a 10x developer.
Where does this hurt? The same place it hurts in love. That for a brief moment to think you were special to someone somewhere is just, ugh, rough.
Leetcode script kiddies get in, jump from project to project, not spending more than a few months at each, make a filthy mess of every codebase, and leave it to the silent but persevering, a.k.a real, talent to clean up the mess, and steward the ship.
You can focus on the serious tech challenges, or you can be boisterous. You can't be both.
edit: "can't be both" == "improbable/competing-factors, not impossible"
Now, part of my time there was massively refactoring a critical service to maximize test coverage, reduce memory footprint, improve reliability, measure new things, make the system more durable, and introduce new features. It was exceptionally serious and difficult, and if I made any mistake then the internet would effective go down.
After the fact, yes, I can be boisterous because I did serious shit without fucking up.
Why not? It's not like both of those are full time efforts.
Towards the end of university I spent my free time honing my skills as an engineer. I debated whether I should spend my free time leetcoding, or developing a fairly complex distributed application (complex, at least for an individual engineer). I could do one, or the other, or both. But doing both would mean degrading the quality of my learning (there are only so many hours in a day). I decided to focus exclusively on the disturbed application.
The lack of leetcoding experience definitely hurt my job search, because plenty of employers will completely refuse to interview you without a high enough score. However, among the interviews I did get, they were very impressed with my experience developing and architecting applications, and it ultimately helped me land a job.
Long story short, every minute I spent leetcoding was a minute I could've been spending improving my skills as an engineer. I have no regrets about my strategy. It left me better positioned in the long term.
So for your choices of learning to improve quality of knowledge or doing what needs to be done to pass leetcode, my choice is to do a little of both. I am studying for the things they may give me on an interview (work samples to complete, 30 minute coding exercises, whiteboard class design etc.) But I am not doing it in a shallow leetcode way where I just want to know enough to pass the interview.
If I am building something akin to the complexity of a given work sample, I want to understand the architecture of what I am handing in, the language aspects of it, how the unit testing works and what to unit test and all of that. To have a deep understanding of it, or at least more than a surface leetcode understanding of it. If I am new to the topic I try to get some grasp of it, move on, and then sometimes I revisit the topic in the future to deepen my understanding of it.
So the immediate ends of a lot of what I do in my spare time is to prepare for the interviews I may have in a year. But one aspect of it are that I will spend a little time if needed to learn things which may not be asked in an interview, but which would let me do a better job at my current job or next job, or even if I want to write a program on my own. Another aspect of it is that I spend the time to try to get a decent enough understanding of it before moving on, not just enough that would pass over the leetcode bar but not into a slightly deeper understanding. So the main aim is passing an interview, but I will take the time out to learn things to improve my work, not just interviewing, and to deepen my knowledge of the subject as well.
It seems weird to me.
There's always a spectrum right? Or I guess you are exaggerating to make a point.
Is that not one and the same (at least in software)? The so-called "talented" people in the industry were likely just more motivated to learn than their competition.
Sounds like he's not interested in what your job entails. Perhaps he should find a job that does something closer to his interests, or perhaps better, kick off a startup that relates to his passions.
For many people, it's hard to be motivated to do something you're not into. Conditions like ADHD can exacerbate this.
You only get one life. Have an honest conversation with him and ask what he really wants to do with it.
Sometimes the fact that there is no pressure is one of the things that makes it enjoyable, and people are rightly resistant to change that.
I'm a >10x developer in the sense that I've produced better, more reliable, more scalable systems on my own than a typical team of 10+ senior developers working at a large company in the same amount of time. But even that's trivializing it because it would be impossible for that team to match the quality of my work no matter how much time you gave them.
That said, I think most people could become a 10x or even 100x developer if they wanted and worked hard, but the problem is that there is no motivation for anyone to do it because companies don't want to hire them anyway. Most people only do things for money so they're not going to waste energy on trying to achieve mastery of the subject. If anything, it's more profitable to work slow and increase the system's complexity to give yourself more work. Making yourself just competent enough to convince your idiot boss to let you keep your job but not so competent that you ever run out of things to fix.
Nobody cares about who the best developers in the world are... On the other hand, everybody in the world is interested to know who is the best at kicking a ball inside a net, hitting a ball with a stick, who can jump the highest with the help of a really long stick, ...
The closest attempts at identifying coding talent are hackathons but they're a joke because 2 days is not enough time to judge someone's talent. Coding is more like a marathon; unless you're a really good developer yourself, it will take years to evaluate someone's skill. Unfortuantely, big companies have hardly any good developers.
Companies do care about performance / output, and anyone who works in a group setting can see that there is often a clear difference in this metric for people, and for many people this difference is consistent (it's not a matter of having high days or low days, their highs are consistently high or above average).
In my current team of 8 engineers, 2 are clearly way above average in their overall performance and output. They pay attention to detail, they actually think through their designs, they care about code quality, they are diligent in code reviews (while others mostly just rubber stamp each other's shitty code) and hold each other accountable, they are useful sounding boards for design discussions while the others just nod along, and they are generally proactive with finding bugs and fixing them.
As a manager, I want more of these people on my team, except there is just no way to actually find this out by interviewing. All these people did similarly well in their interviews, and in fact one of the so-called 10x candidates did less well, because they are a bit more polite in nature, that causes them to sound non-committal at times.
The only way thing works is a direct testimonial from someone who has worked with them, but this is not scalable, and these days we are told we shouldn't rely on that anyway as it favors candidates with 'networks' and disfavors candidates from underrepresented minorities.
References rarely talk ill about a candidate, but when you ask a reference about a good candidate, they literally start gushing with praise, while for the average or mediocre ones they say generic things and are relatively muted in their praise.
Many industries work this way. In the legal industry, for example, interviews are mostly perfunctory / nominal, because they work through a chain of strong recommendations. Of course, the flip side of that is that it is extremely credentialist.
The Tech industry is the opposite. Most generally smart people can get in by doing a few hundred hours of Leetcode but you have no idea how they will actually be on their jobs.
Unfortunately, while the article is pretty well-written, it's comprised of naked assertion after assertion, with no attempt at justifying them.
Not to mention the non sequiturs: even if you accept that we're born blank slates and anyone can be nurtured to any level of (non-physical) achievement, that's only relevant to hiring if companies were buying infants and grooming them for their precise employee needs they'd need in 20 years. In reality, timing matters, and someone who can't be as productive today but will blossom into a productive flower given enough time carries higher costs and higher risks to the employer than someone who meets the mark on day one. In fact, I'd personally call this explore/exploit trade-off the defining struggle of my career: implicit negotiations with my employer over how much unprofitable education they're they're willing to implicitly give me (by allowing me to work on things relatively far from my competency) in exchange for doing work I'm already highly-skilled at (and often bored by), all while compensating me well.
I hate how mean-spirited this inevitably sounds, but so much of the discussion around talent's role in engineering that I've seen (largely on HN) falls apart upon the slightest scrutiny and I can't shake the feeling that I'm just dealing with a mountain of cope. I firmly believe that talent isn't everything, and further that there are many who overstate the innateness and immutability of "talent". But "talent isn't everything" is leagues away from "talent doesn't exist", and lazy analysis doesn't justify lazy analysis in the opposite direction.
I work or have worked with many different companies in a few different roles. Once you hit a level of competence, none of them stand out as having particularly more talented people.
I think that telling people people that they can achieve _arbitrary_ things through enough effort is just wrong: it sets up unrealistic expectations and makes them blame themselves when things don't work out, because they must not have tried enough. Telling someone who's 5 feet tall as an adult and not particularly athletic that if they just work hard enough they can become a successful Olympic swimmer is not OK.
It's a tough communication problem, because "maybe you can reach this goal if you work really hard and happen to be lucky too" is a much harder concept to communicate and internalize than "you can reach this goal if you just work hard". It's also a tough problem in trying to figure out what expectations ought to be "realistic" for a given child, because of all the biases we bring to such evaluations. So erring somewhat on the side of emphasizing growth mindset can make sense, and should absolutely be done when doing evaluation, but you have to be pretty careful how you communicate the resulting recommendations.
Past that, the unfortunate thing is that Dweck's disciples (and I use the word specifically for its religious connotations) go overboard on the "everything is possible with a growth mindset" thing, in exactly the way that I think is harmful. I see this in a lot of elementary school teachers; they love this book, but end up in the "growth mindset solves everything" trap, at least in their communication.
I should note that unlike many things in that field Dweck's work actually replicates in large pre-registered studies, albeit ones still done by Dweck herself. The effects are quite small on average, but maybe on the margin (i.e. for students who are more likely to doubt themselves for various reasons) might be significant.
That said, I would be happier if someone who is not Dweck were able to reproduce her results, and I have ~0 confidence that "growth mindset as practiced in elementary schools today" is at all useful...
I find the accomplishments people (even young children) want to set out for are mostly reasonable. If you’re wanting to be a Nobel prize winner, mega rich CEO, or be some well regarded author - it’s gonna require a lot of luck. And that should be informed to people that are all about the destination and not the pursuit. There’s no reason to not pursue those things if you want to.
Honestly, I think a growth mindset is amazing for young children. If it wasn’t for people in my childhood having that - even for the shithole I grew up in - I probably wouldn’t have accomplished anywhere near what I have. I had nothing but doubts about myself because I saw no one ever escape the trappings of my surroundings. Yet... I’d get told by some pretty good teachers, “you’re capable of doing anything if you just set your mind to it.” (The kind of growth mindset I was taught)
I see other people severely limiting themselves because they just project whatever societal norms are around into themselves. They assume because they see no one else doing it in their immediate surroundings that it can’t be done. And it’s a shit way to go, dude. People won’t grow with that mindset. It traps them in poverty.
Growth mindset might lead to a few childhood dreams being crushed but who gives a shit. It’s a childhood dream - some kids want to be Goku and there’s no reason to crush that shit so early.
When we say someone is talented, we're often overlooking the enormous amount of focus and practice the person did in order to reach their level, and instead just declaring that something supernatural was the cause. I'm a pretty good programmer. I didn't get that way because of some supernatural force or mystical spirit. I wasn't born knowing how to program. But I did practice over and over and over from a young age, spending tens of thousands of hours on it. If someone told me I was just naturally talented, I'd take it as an insult--it totally ignores the amount of hard work and practice I put into the skill.
Just common sense to evaluate someone based on empirical data.
We're often overlooking the practice ... to reach their level
Not that often. We certainly don't do it when filtering kids for selective schooling or national sports squads.
There's plenty of athletes that were plucked out of relative obscurity and went on to have enormous success. Hakeem Olajuwon, as an example, didn't play basketball until he was 15 but his height and athleticism were recognized. Antonio Gates didn't play football in college but was signed to the NFL. Ultimately he became one of the best TEs ever.
These are unusual cases precisely because it is easy to recognize talent and usually the best talent is put on the path from an early age.
We actually have a pretty high degree of predictive power here using genetic testing, and we’ve only just started enumerating these predictors.
> the enormous amount of focus
Available focus is genetically predicted.
> I'm a pretty good programmer. I didn't get that way because of some supernatural force or mystical spirit
Genetics aren’t supernatural or mystical.
> I wasn't born knowing how to program.
You were born with some traits that made you (on expectation) better or worse at it.
What's the simplest explanation? There's a specific gene for each and every human activity that causes extraordinary natural ability in that activity, or that there isn't and ability/results are more of a function of things like practice, discipline, and immersion at a young age?
When opinion is worth more than tens of years of empirical evidence. What a stupid piece of wasted storage (even few kb is a waste).
I think terms like talent acquisition, head of talent have little to do with the idea of natural aptitude. It's just a fancy sounding term, likely a temporary trend. Similarly, we have science in data science, but don't say software science for software engineering.
I don't think the nurture argument and the Mozart example apply well for hiring. Often a team must be staffed as soon as possible. Nurturing a talent for year doesn't seem like a good way to go.
As for recognizing talent in hiring, some companies are doing great with internships - take in students based on their talents and give them full time offers if there's potential. First years of everyone's career are a nurture phase for their talent.
When hiring for a senior role - you don't want someone who will become senior in 5 years, you want them to have experience now. In that case they have to have shown their raw talent elsewhere, otherwise you don't need them by definition of senior.
And sure, there's a factor of luck and physical/mental ability involved as well, but those aren't really the mysterious part of "talent".
Who's to say wage is a good measure of talent?
I would say circumstance can play a bigger role in setting the wage, more so than actual talent.
For example, a developer working for a company over a long period of time will always creep up the wage scale, a developer with lots of keyword hits on the resume for the latest and greatest framework can always demand a higher pay, niche software skills always pay well, a developer who began work with a startup that then gets bought out by a multi-notational probably hits the jackpot etc. etc.
For example you can be a skinny guy but once you start lifting weights everyday your body goes through dramatic changes and you can have step function increases in personal ability. New neural connections and motor patterns get formed because of intensity.
But it’s hard to say how you personally will respond to the training stimulus. Initial talent in anything is not indicoative of future mastery it’s more about how responsive your nervous system is to prolonged effort and Training. How stimulatable are you?
I thought this mattered, but this mostly leads to more of yourself. When we ignored those factors these didn't seem to matter much for team quality - at least at our company. People find surprising ways to relate to and get along with colleagues. You do get a bigger pond to fish from.
It’s always been obvious to me that it’s both but adaptivity naturally fades with age. Someone who hasn’t practiced a skill until their 30s is less likely to obtain success at the highest levels. That’s why elite mathematicians are famously said to hit their peak by that time but those people have also generally been practicing math from the earliest age (you can see this on the physical side with limberness and dexterity). I suspect that adaptivity itself starts to fade with age (or at least specializes) because you stop doing it as much if you pursue mastery as mastery often can either mean deep study of 1 field (likely limited to no adaptivity) or related sub fields (some cross adaptivity of related concepts).
It’s also likely an exponential curve. So someone who’s been at a skill for a long time, even if they’re learning slowly, might be better anyway than someone who’s extremely quick learner but is starting from way further back (ie potentially a hire in the future once they’ve realized some potential). Interviews can give you only a sense of someone’s level now, but potential doesn’t have a measure right now (beyond a vague “I can have an intelligent conversation with this person about a problem neither of us have tackled yet”). Interviews also measure things other than practical skill.
To start with, when most companies say "we only hire top 1% talent" in the context of software development, they don't really mean talent as some sort innate potential, they mostly just mean skill (combined with a bit of potential to become even more skilled).
Further, the idea that most people think talent is one dimensional, static and linear is just mystifying to me. Does anyone actually thinks this? He takes a literal view of "the 1%" and extrapolates that to derive these assumptions. But no one means that literally, it's just a phrase meant to invoke the idea that they are are highly selective how they hire. That this has to be explained is... odd.
The author then repeatedly carps on about how "talent" cannot be quantified and then, somehow, thinks this means that the interview process is meaningless. Um, that skill cannot be quantified is WHY we have the (admittedly flawed) interview process.
If all of these prevalent assumptions about talent are wrong, what does it say about our hiring and management practices?
It doesn't say anything because assumptions are false. And even if talent can be "developed" (here I think he means ability to learn how to improve skills faster), everyone knows the hiring process is flawed. Because, you know, both people and roles are complex and multi-facetted. So hiring is hard. Hopefully practices will improve to become better, but I'm not holding my breath.
'Latent Talent' for special activities, probably does exist, while mastery also necessitates love and labour.
'Hiring Talent' is another thing entirely. You're looking for smart, creative, hard working people who 'accomplish things' and 'get along' and who hopefully have a depth of knowledge.
Often this comes from a mix of curiosity, compulsion, raw intelligence, some kind of personality that works, and a lot of hours focused on a variety of things.
'Great Devs' do not have to be super talented in the 'Chess Master' sense, and don't have to be brilliant white boarders, or algorithm designers.
It's hard to find but generally you actually do 'know it when you see it'. There's no doubt.
You meet a dude who's been coding for a long time, likes to hack on stuff, is really quite familiar in 2-3 core languages, lots of curiosity about the discipline, all the right idioms, can code fairly quickly, see the essence of big problems etc..
In a nutshell 'the developer we all think we ought to be'.
They exist, they're just not that common.
Einstein could have been the best ballet dancer! Michael Phelps could have been the next Tesla! .... NOT
Talent is not specific at birth but it has direction. Certain types of processing are more natural for certain brains and the outcomes are random given the opportunities to master a certain skill.
Talent and interest go hand in hand. The interest is the driver but it won't exist without the processing ability and opportunity.
As far as I can tell, it's using the word 'talent' because it's flattering and presumably effective. Really, it mostly means skilled.
The better employers and their recruiters look for applicants that are highly skilled in something related, and shows an ability and eagerness to learn. The depth to which they've achieve success would be my proxy for their talent. Whether innate or learned doesn't factor much into it. The only thing to watch for is if they spent their entire career doing one thing, even done well might show a lack of flexibility or interest in new things.
- Talent just obfuscates the qualitative attributes that contribute to excellence.
- Individuals are identified as talented usually after they have invested effort.
- Talent is a quick and spurious "explanation" or admittance of unexplained variance.
[1] https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-mundanity-of-excellence-an-...
The best models I've seen proposed to explain the correlation of chess memory and chess knowledge/performance attribute the memory strength to the results of experience, rather than the other way around. The aspect of your abilities that led to increased motivation is not direct evidence for the direction of causality. In fact, studies on chess grandmasters suggest that they perform no better than novices on memory for randomized board positions. (Unlikely to be encountered in a game)
Here is an interesting study discussing the recent state of the literature which lends some credence to your ideas.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myt...
It comes from the ancient times of rulers and peasants when people actually believed in unspecified innate qualities that differentiate people from each other.
"talent" is so much ingrained into culture that people take its vague existence for granted. I think that "talent" is used as a praise for the purposes of attracting/luring someone to do all the work.
For example, companies not having a universal test for talent does not imply talent does not exist.
The Polgar sisters are interesting. However, their parents were very intelligent, so it is unknown if the same approach would also work for children of "less intelligent" parents (if such a thing exists, as supposedly we can't measure it). And studies in that line of thing seem to point to children starting a specialty at an early age (see Ericsson's book "Peak"). So unless you can repeat the experiment with some older people (make somebody a chess genius at age 30 who has never played chess before), it doesn't really matter what part is nature and what part is nurture. You still have people with different talents applying for your jobs. I mean the Polgar sisters ARE better at chess than other people, and there probably isn't an easy way to hire somebody as a chess player and bring them to the level of the sisters.
They definitely show a large nature component in that the identical twins tend to do more similarly. Nature seems to be a good deal greater than 50%.
However, as a society, we need to stop assigning the value to a person to their ability whether natural or developed. We also need to ok that there are some people that are better than others at certain things whether natural or developed.
Creating jobs for less able people is probably an entrepreneurial skill in itself.
Just imagine you are building a house (your future home), and you have to hire people to build stuff for you.
Perhaps you can get a better deal by hiring less able people, but then you also have to be able to manage them properly, I presume.
What people need is access to appropriate opportunities, opportunities that they can make use of. That's difficult for society because it sometimes costs more than it is 'worth' when worth is measured in money.
However, it takes more than talent to achieve things in life.
Most successful people in any industry leveraged some talent, with drive, persistence and LUCK to become successful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87_5I7kRuYY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6ZUeQv2yFQ
Thank you your honor.