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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

I've never heard this before and I'd say the exact opposite is true. A good example is that jobs like consulting, finance, and FAANG all have interview processes and selection criteria to hire type A people who will ignore pareto optimization and eke out the extra 1% quality for 50% more effort to get themselves to the top of the class.

And I've never heard of anywhere that's looking for genius slackers, that's absolutely the worst profile to have.

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And yet the people who work 50% harder to eek out 1% quality don't get promoted, and the people who do nothing but game the system for promotions get promoted.

So, I'd say the opposite is true.

Are the people gaming the system being rewarded for innate talent? Or is it hard work at gaming the system (presumably if it was easy to game the system everyone would do it)?

Hmmm I would argue you have to have a certain personality type to game the system. So that falls more into innate talent.

value systems come into play and many a mind revile at the idea of gaming the system, however easy it would be for them.

I think physical attractiveness, both male and female, plays a far larger role in promotion decisions than anyone realizes, including those making the decision. The halo effect is very real. This leads to a case where you have persons who are, in some sense, gaming the system and might not even know that they are.

Yeah and even getting into FAANG is often about gaming the interview system anyway. I don’t think FAANG really manages to select the top 1% of hard workers.

How do you game the interview system? Practice leetcode problems a lot? Sounds like a lot of work.

Yes, and interviewing in general. You think that’s a lot of work to get your foot in the door and $500k+ in a relatively cushy salaried position and top tech brand name on your resume?

You also need to do multiple system design interviews. Yes, you might be able to game it, but I doubt you could game it and still be an incompetent programmer. You also wouldn't be able to keep that job very long, given the way performance reviews tend to be done.

They probably don't have the top 1% of hard workers, but getting and staying there almost certainly requires a certain amount of hard work.

I'll quote Larry Wall here: "We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris."

Those are in service of "getting things done" as Spolsky wrote, not navel gazing.

I genuinely think this is a UK/US thing (limiting to those countries because that's the limited experience I have); in the UK this is absolutely true. There is a definite cultural thing going on where people play down how much effort they put in to things. It's definitely 'uncool', throughout school, higher education and in the workplace, to be super keen.

Contrast to the US: American colleagues I've had have all agreed that it's kind of the reverse on that side of the pond. I've heard people brag about the hours they've put in to work; that would be a complete embarrassment over here, especially if the work turns out not to be top-tier.

False. I have worked at three FAANGs and I am a type B if anything. Having said that, I'm probably under leveled compared to what people think I am, because I don't want to give up my ample free time. If I'm making 400k/yr and work 30hrs/week, why would I want to make say 480k/yr and work 40hrs/week?

When I interview people I tell them, 'You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can't choose two out of three," Bezos wrote in the 1997 letter.

And as Bezos gazes down from space at his domain, I'm sure he appreciates your dedication, or probably would if he knew your name/serial number. I assume he can monitor all from his super-yacht as well, but somehow it just doesn't feel like hard work when done from a super-yacht.

I guess he thinks he is the smart working kind then?

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