What our clients didn't know was that Joe was terrible at ping pong. But that didn't matter - from memory he was only ever challenged once in the many years I was there.
I want the future back, we were promised hoverboards!
Plus, if the budget has already been approved, someone didn't read the contract before signing it. That's the same as not reading it.
Discounts after the contract is approved are actually a headache in some large orgs. You will have to answer multiple questions each quarter as to why your numbers are off. You won't get to spend the money elsewhere, but will have more work. Plus, you'll never get budget approval for buying or shipping a plant.
I suspect that's because your client's spending their company's money, and it made no difference if the rate were cheaper. They'd rather sign the deal quickly then GTFO. Challenging Joe would only prolong the process.
But that's the part that makes it fun!
Brilliant typo
I would expect someone to be actually good at chess to put down their Elo rating. For someone just putting it as a hobby, I wouldn't expect much, especially when it comes to the "boring" stuff like memorizing openings.
In the same way that there is usually a difference between what high level athletes and hobbyist write. The former usually mention something concrete (champion of..., XXX league, a time or score, ...) while the latter just mention the sport, often among other things.
At the end of the day, anything could be bad if viewed with sufficient cynicism, and you can't control how others will interpret what you present, you can only control the information which is presented.
According to him, it was MBA courses that recommended adding chess to the CV, as it showed strategic thinking and would never be verified.
I just read it a couple of months back because I figured I probably owed reading some Taleb as back table stakes for all the hours I've spent reading HN (and SSC). Picked Black Swan because it seemed to be the most well known and I've never liked jumping into a series with the most recent release. I enjoyed it, will read more of him, but haven't yet.
Do you have an order recommendation?
I highly recommend reading Antifragile next though. It's fairly different from the other two and extremely interesting; probably one of my favorite books.
If you've read the Black Swan already that's fine. My recommendation is mostly addressed to those who have read neither.
If you want to play 800-level chess, you can have fun without knowing any set openings. Well, almost. You'd better be able to recognize and defend scholar's mate at a bare minimum.
But that is a bit like being an amateur programmer who never learns what a function is. You can still enjoy programming at that level, but it's odd to describe functions as crutches.
Besides, once you get into the middlegame, you still need the tactical and positional skills that I suspect you consider opening knowledge a crutch for
In chess (and life) it’s far easier to pattern match a solution for a position rather than coming up with a brand new solution every time
In my opinion, this makes memory and experience far more important than intellect in chess, especially in the faster time formats
Without opening theory you will just get worse middle game against any competent opponent. Furthermore, if you could just calculate everything ab inito your play would be identical to “memorized opening,” alpha zero did learn a lot of standard openings from self-play (without being shown these opening explicitly). If someone plays a “bad” opening in a serious game it’s because not only they don’t know theory but they also can’t calculate well enough.
I would not expect someone who puts chess on a resume to play competitively, which is a whole different beast.
You can put down you’re decent at Java or C++ or Python and actually be not that great at it because you have nothing to measure against. But in chess there is a rating system. So you ought to know if you are truly remarkable or not. If you think you are remarkable enough to put it down and then suck at it, how ignorant must you be?! And more importantly, that ignorance is not at all tempered by humility.
I have a single line on my resume with interests. I don’t list chess, but list cryptography. Because I’m interested in it.
I just have that line to help with chitchat during the interview. If some interviewer interpreted that to mean I was a professional cryptographer and that I sucked at it, that would be dumb of them.
I also list an interest in kayaking, even though I suck at it.
I list kayaking as a hobby not because I’m competitive and awesome but because I think it’s fun to float down a river. I suppose if a company expected me to be good at my hobby and judged me because of it, I wouldn’t want to work with them because their culture probably has other stupid parts to it too.
If you were great as chess for a human, you probably wouldn't be applying for a securities job.
Conversely, there was a period of my life where people would hear me talk through a few problems and later confess their surprise/disappointment upon finding out I'm rubbish at chess. I found more lucrative and/or entertaining puzzles to plow my ample free time into, is all.
I'm always fascinated at the esteem chess is held in for some reason. I don't have a high rating (lichess rapid ~1900) but to me, improving at chess is the same as improving at everything else: practice.
That's 86%ile of weekly active players, with ~70K weekly active players above you.
If someone lists ‘skiing’ as a hobby I’m not expecting them to have Olympic medals to back that up. ‘It says here on your resume that you play guitar. Well, let’s see how you fair in a guitar battle with Slash from accounting’
This is just more of that hyper competitive ‘well rounded college applicant’ performative high school stuff, isn’t it? It’s not enough to just have an interest - you need evidence of performing at a competitive level.
Likewise I wouldn't list chess unless I was good enough to at least entertain a grand master for a few minutes.
Guitar is a performance art. Mediocre people are entertaining. Chess (and skiing) mostly isn't.
I wouldn’t put down ‘travel’ as a hobby if I weren’t prepared to take the interviewer on a quick day trip to Paris.
I wouldn’t list ‘reading’ as a hobby unless I could do a professional audiobook-level reading of a book for the interviewer, including doing all the voices.
I think if you put a hobby on a resume for the purpose of signaling some kind of orthogonal skillset ostensibly related to the job (like in this example, "strategy"), it stops being just about your personality and becomes explicitly performance-oriented. And I would even argue your resume is not the play to round out your personality, because it's such an overly subjective and bias-inducing thing.
It's dumb to lie and say you enjoy chess when you don't, just like it's dumb to put any other lie on a resume, but if you do enjoy it then there's nothing wrong with communicating that you're the type of person who enjoys chess, which means you are probably a person who enjoys somewhat adversarial situations where you need to win with your logic and you are comfortable with taking short term losses for long term gains, a personality which would likely be both comfortable and familiar in a hedge fund environment.
Sure - to which my next question becomes, are you actually good at it? If you're not, I don't professionally care if you personally enjoy it.
Let's say you're hiring people to work a fish market. One candidate loves going out on the boat and fishing in their spare time, the other hates the smell of fish. Both are fully capable of doing the job, which doesn't involve catching fish or being on a boat, but which does involve spending a lot of time with dead fish. Who do you think is more likely to stick with the job for an extended period of time and be pleasant to work alongside?
A Strategy that would backfire quickly.