The price of gold – how bad do you want it? (2016)
allaboutperformance.wordpress.com
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So really, did I want to be among the best that bad?
And I realized I didn't.
The price is too high.
So you can also look at these "sacrifices" as "investments".
Even if it could have happen at a certain time, today's competitions are such high-level precision things that everybody is at the top of their game, every parameter is taken in consideration.
If you are not, you don't even get at the top.
I was surprised to chat with a few e-sport competitors a few years ago and learn that they are using drugs to maintain focus.
But everything is non-equal. Best of the best have everything aligned in the same direction (family, wealth, genetics...). Even the "sacrifice" does not hurt, because that is just the way they do it.
Believe in "Great sacrifice" does not work in long term, and just builds resentment over time. People who promote it are usually drug addicts and broken in their personal lives!
Dropping off a box in a river could be considered littering, or something along those lines. Basically ask yourself “could a complete piece of shit do what I want to do in such a selfish and destructive way that forces someone to make a law against it?” And you’ll start to realize it may mot be so simple, anymore.
For gold what you want to do is find spots where gold has likely accumulated due to falling out of the stream, fill buckets and then work through them.
It’s more something to do for fun than for money. An excuse to get outdoors, learn local geology and engage in the very addictive activity of “searching for something”. Prefer agates and plants myself.
I think I spent too many years in fintech, because I had to read this twice to make sure I understood it :)
Wait, I could have gone for a gold medal instead of learning how to program?
Reading this hurts. I’ve been mentoring young people for a while and one increasingly common theme is that some of them don’t want to give up anything to advance their careers. I can barely convince them to update their resumes after I spend time reviewing them and writing feedback. They refuse to practice any coding problems. They are disgusted by the idea of doing any work to prep for interviews.
An increasingly common problem is that I’ll recommend one thing but then they’ll go on Reddit and see 20 comments from people telling them not to do it. Some of them will get job interviews, receive a short take home problem (less than 60 minutes of work. They copy paste them to Slack so I know they’re not excessive) but then they’ll refuse to do it because Reddit told them they should never do any work for a job interview. Then they’re shocked when they’re dismissed from the interview process.
On the other hand, some of the mentees will take any opportunity to get ahead and run with it. They practice LeetCode in moderation. They customize resumes for each job application. They do practice interviews and ask for more feedback. And not surprisingly, it pays off. They get jobs quickly.
I wish I was better at highlighting this difference to people, but the current social media trends are pushing people toward thinking laziness is a virtue, or that working hard on anything is for suckers.
It takes shockingly little to out-slope 90% of the population. Even for people who pre-select into competitive fields, if you read 1 relevant book per month outside work, you’re waaaaay ahead of almost everyone. Add 1 interesting paper per month and you’re “that weirdo”.
Add 1 interesting paper per month and you’re “that weirdo”.I mentor engineers and everyone thinks I'm the weirdo when I loan out a engineering text book to help them solve a problem. Others seem think learning is just for students. I can't see this ending well for my employer.
It's so stupid to spend months preparing for interviews just to learn something that you will never, ever use. There are libraries for a reason.
What you think is good and commendable to me views as a horrible practice in our industry.
That clearly says to potential players that the organization doesn't care about chess, and won't have the best chess players in the tournament. Instead, the only people playing are those willing to jump through hoops on command.
First, I agree bad interviews are bad.
That said, bad or un-necessarily difficult hiring processes dont automatically mean there is a better company out there.
IF there is, it isn't a given that the better company will hire you.
Similarly, it is not even a given the employees jump through hoops and get in are inferior to those that do. This is a numbers game, and can go many different ways.
On one hand, I appreciate the uncompromising nature of refusing to play the game, but on the other, I dont think that everyone is doing it with open eyes to the costs they are paying.
I have seen a few people progress from: 1) being uncompromising to 2) worse outcomes than if they compromised, to 3) bitterness and anger.
Back to the analogy: If your life dream is to play chess but you refuse to play poker to get in the door, you may end up bitter and playing with mud in the street.
As a rule of thumb (not quite _always_ true), if you couldn’t implement the lib yourself you will be showing some skills gap in some way or other
I agree as a candidate it can be demoralizing, but thats the exchange usually - prove you can do the job (or something close to it) and you get hired for it. It's just that your job isn't street sweeping or generalized labor -- and it's helpful to know if you're going to be the type who: Couldn't write leftpad without a library, would depend on leftpad as a library, or would understand the implications of using a library like leftpad and rely solely on trusted functions like isEven instead.
Yes, you're a programmer, you will get libraries in your day job - but as your hiring manager, I don't have the time to tell you you won't have access to most of the ones you're familiar with because we're doing real-time or large-scale compute or javascript widgets on embedded devices - I just wanna see you do as asked.
If you decline - I've seen what I needed.
ChatGPT is a really good junior programmer who can write basic functions per best practices, and when it makes a mistake or does something weird, a senior SWE will spot it, and can fix it with much less mental effort than writing the function.
Job's are not a popularity contest - it's about if you'll do what's asked of you, or if you'll spend more time arguing about the right way to code something rather than solving the business need -- and for my purposes, I need the business problems solved, not someone who gets self-righteous when asked to show an example of them working when applying for, ya know, work.
You don't have time to explain the job requirements or stack?
Many cannot, and those that argue the premise don't even get a chance to try.
If you think you're being evaluated on your knowledge of the stdlib's sort(), you misunderstand the purpose. You're being tested not because you can hit compile and it passes, but you're being tested on if you're able to follow directions, work within scope, solve problems and explain your thinking. If your thinking stops at "I'd never do that", so does mine.
That applies to any interview test though, you don't need to contrive an absurd scenario to do it.
Tangent — how is isEven trusted? It seems people usually categorize leftpad and isEven pretty similarly (e.g. pointless bloat deps waiting to be next supply-chain attack), so I don’t follow the distinction you’re making.
Laziness as a habit that damages your life or ruins it for others who depend on you isn't a virtue, but strategic laziness in the sense of not wasting your precious time on idiotic make-work or needlessly difficult things is indeed a virtue.
We have one single precious life with however many unpredictable years there are to it, a quantity of time that we can never in advance know the length of, and we should make a philosophy of spending large parts of it working hard on things we don't enjoy just for the sake of doing so?
If someone wants to work hard regardless, despite all the above, they always can, but it's better that they should do this once they first arrange their life so that the hard work in question is freely dedicated to what they take satisfaction from.
I disagree entirely with the implicit emphasis you place on the work aspect of "finding gold". If success can be had more easily, it should be pursued that way and is no less deserved as a result. The time we have absolutely should be spent actually doing as much as possible of what we want to do while maximizing the benefit of any work we have to do.
How many generations of authority figures have preached a dogma of "working hard" for its own sake, for the particularly cynical reason of wanting to keep another under their thumb, for their benefit.
What I think the parent post was highlighting was how some people self sabotage because they don't like the effort or expectations to achieve their own goals. It is not that they are quitting to optimize their satisfaction elsewhere, but quitting without an alternative for satisfaction- essentially overvaluing their time, while spending it unsatisfied.
In some sense, it is like a protest vote against reality.
From my perspective, I think that one of the difficulties of being young is not yet knowing what exactly you should be working hard at. And in the knowledge economy where many of us must make significant career changes every few years, kicking off that new trajectory is somewhat analogous to youth. If you are working hard at the wrong thing, it will certainly feel like everything is stacked against you. I see some of my friends doing just this- trying to become something that just isn’t a good fit for them. How do you provide mentorship for people to help them identify what’s the best area to apply their efforts to?
Then upon finding the comment completely off-topic, post it anyway with the disclaimer, "hehe, I thought this would be about <topic they had always intended to talk about>".
Sometimes it'll just be a way to show off they know about some obscure other meaning. In other cases like this one it's just because they want to rant about something else entirely.
I'm sure someone will dig through my post history to find I've done the same, but I have earnestly tried to cut down on it, because it's a very frustrating experience for anyone who did want to engage with the article as written, not the article as imagined.
It would be impossible to reach mass popularity, but I can see it gaining a following among people like us who see it as a positive.
Heck, some might think it's a fair trade-off even if you get caught. Just ask Elizabeth Holmes and her millionaire husband.
And the miner towns had ridiculous prices, like a breakfast was in the $2-$5 dollars at some point.
The problem is that the value of gold is not fixed. It may have gone up or down quite a bit since then relative to everything else (not just relative to dollars)
Well one can take consolation with the thought that with the recession and all, very likely a lot of them imbeciles having free time to comment and downvote here are actually rightfully unemployed. Hope it stays that way, they definitely deserve it!