Where are all the self-directed learners?
saigaddam.medium.com
saigaddam.medium.com
In the 'old' days it was basically up yo you. Assignments during the academic year were few and far between. Each course resulted in an exam at the end of the year. How you passed that was up to you.
This meant you were modtly free gor 90% of your time to attend classes or not. You could use the university as a knowledge buffet attending interesting lectures outside of your own field of study, get straight into the specialization topics that were the real reason you were attracted to field in the first place (AI in my case which was a very niche subject in those days) instead of just slogging through the generalist foundation courses (80% math in those days, physics, economics and some CS).
These days students are bombarded with assignmments all year, with exams pepered throughout. This inflicts nearly full class attendance requirement and constant deadline pressures. Yes, it makes it so credit can be acquired piecemeal instead of pass/failing in one massive shot, but it reduces autonomy to near 0.
Infinitely curious and motivated when there’s a vague and nebulous problem in the future, as long as I can sorta see my improvements along the way.
But assignments, idk, I don’t put as much of my curiosity on it. I was terrible at coursework and wonderful at tests largely for this reason.
Interestingly I think is exactly what the article is arguing against and is saying India is too much like.
> You could use the university as a knowledge buffet attending interesting lectures outside of your own field of study, get straight into the specialization topics that were the real reason you were attracted to field in the first place (AI in my case which was a very niche subject in those days) instead of just slogging through the generalist foundation courses (80% math in those days, physics, economics and some CS).
This sounds great for making academics, but terrible for educating a work force. Sadly, university is now the latter due to it being seen as a way to get ahead. One of the worst things to happen UK in my lifetime is tuition fees.
It's not just that universities are no longer fit places for teaching, learning and research, but something bigger is at play, which I see as "the death of adulthood". HE institutions are leaders in this 'infantilisation' which is toxic to self-development and personal responsibility.
A big factor is the aggressive intrusion of US BigTech; Turnitin, Grammarly etc... violating "proctoring" software, just a pathological and pointless quest systematise and lock-down absolutely everything.
Another reason universities have been morally upended is putting vanity and appearance before substance. They care more about how they are seen, in league tables and in social media, than they care about their students. Self-deluding PR has made universities worse than some of the most cringe corporations.
As a recovered "academic" prof (they are not really academies any longer but holding-pens and "degree vendors") I absolutely would not want my own kids to waste their time or money there.
And don't get me started on the administration which felt its need to weasel into every crevice, only to add unnecessary complexity and difficulty to otherwise simple processes (need to swap exam days with another student? - well, be prepared to start discussing it with admin months in advance with prepared letters from all stakeholders). Seemingly university administration only exists for the sake of having a university administration - and seems to be populated with the utter dregs of what that university put out that the market wouldn't hire (in other words: admin is where you go when you're too far up your own ass for a real business to get value from you).
As a result, after a while most classmates didn't or couldn't think for themselves about anything. It was overall an extremely frustrating experience and I couldn't get out fast enough. I actually landed in hot water because I skipped too many classes (in my last year I only went to uni about 5 times, each for 1 of my 5 exams) but my grades were so much higher than the rest of the cohort they decided to allow me to graduate so as to improve their overall GPA for the class.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Ones_(TV_series)
With closed-book pen & paper exams (e.g. in India), not so much.
> Fewer than 100 filled a form with open-ended questions. About 15 went on to complete a reasonably simple real-world challenge. We are a nation with the cheapest internet and a billion internet users. Where are all the self-directed learners? The eclectic ekalavyas?
Apparently not jumping through corporate drone hoops, for a chance to talk with your company.
> And then to make it worse, our exam system is fundamentally broken. It’s like forcing Serena Williams and Magnus Carlsen (and Gukesh) to compete in 400m hurdles to figure out if they are fit for their respective sports.
Exactly.
I can only see undergrads falling for this.
Maybe if you narrow down the job requirements (and the company mission) you would get less than 2.5k applicants and you wouldn't need to throw challenges to filter out people who value their time.
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, will spend half a day on your application for free.
I would love to find a better way to filter through 2500 applications. What markers do we rely on. AI has made the usual filters even more irrelevant.
- People who will be hired immediately on applying because they're amazing. These people generally don't apply through the usual pipeline, they contact people they know and offer to work with them. Sometimes they get headhunted.
- Everyone else. To these people it is a numbers game where they have maybe a 5% [0] chance of being hired on applying and so need to apply to maybe 20+ jobs. Any challenge is going to be a massive pain for them because it represents a big time investment for little marginal gain.
[0] In the article there are 15 applicants, assuming you only hire 1 there is a 5% chance right there even if they are all obviously qualified and acceptable hires. And then there are a lot of "fake" jobs where the company is not actually going to end up hiring anyone this month.
You have the people who will be directly hired through networking.
Then you have everyone else who will shotgun their resumes and other credentials. Some will have better schools and portfolios than others but it's still basically a numbers game. (And, given it's a numbers game, they may not invest much in a given opportunity unless it looks particularly interesting or a company puts skin in the game--e.g. flies them out for on-site interviews.)
- Ask people to nominate someone else they know as a good resource. - Reach out to the multiply independently recommended person - Ask they who they would recommend and why.
Time is the one resource that none of us can get more of. It is not saved, like money, to be spent on some future endeavors. It does not accumulate interest. It does not grow with market fluctuations. We get what we get and nothing more or less.
When an applicant has already taken the time to develop a resume that illustrates their skills along with a portfolio/repo that proves said skills, you callously dismiss that work and past experience by making them jump through hoops in your application process. This starts the conversation by telling the applicant you do not value their efforts thus far, whether you actually do or not. It's not a good foot to lead with.
Filtering through thousands of applicants is tough, no doubt, but if your company is successful enough to be receiving that many applicants for a position, then it is successful enough to hire and develop a robust HR or recruiting department that can vet these applications with actual human contact. Yes, this costs money, but if you want to make the omelette, you need to crack some eggs. If you cannot afford to take that path, then you cannot afford to grow, making it tougher to find quality applicants.
As with anything of value this is also a supply and demand thing. Perhaps in India, junior candidates' time is simply worth less. The author mentions they got 2.5K applications, so obviously this will affect how picky the company can (and should) be.
Yes. Because there are lots of people with nice looking resumes who code poorly and have at best superficial knowledge of technology.
Nevertheless, every take home I accept I assume the default action of the receiver is to forget the effort and time that went into in, rejecting with no feedback. Horrible, but based on reality.
It is what it is, but I'm on a mission (getting the job) and unfortunately I do not hold all the cards.
If only there was a way to prove one's worth without having to spin plates while reciting 1000 digits of Pi EVERY TIME.
A candidate who had applied for jobs before knows that his chances for getting a reply are in the low single digits. Now you are offering them to waste some time for probably the same. Only the most desperate will go through with this
Maybe. I'd say "motivated" rather than desperate. Desperation might motivate, but another motivation might be that this is a job that is a really good fit for me, or is a company I really want to work with. As opposed to a job I could do but isn't a good fit.
I don't know about India, but, in the US, companies have a credibility problem. I would guess that most of the job-seekers don't trust companies, and think the hiring processes are incompetent.
And we see numerous examples of companies saying they're doing something different with hiring, but these have also generally not left favorable impressions.
US people play along, to varying degrees, with hiring processes they don't trust or respect. But I suspect that their feelings are consequently mercenary and transactional.
Instead of inventing a bullshit pre-job you can make the world a better place. You also get a strong signal on who can deal with real world problems when they take more than 4 hours to solve.
> HIRING CHALLENGE: Find our recenter browser plugin (it is open-source). Understand what it is for and suggest an interesting and personally useful feature you can add to it. Go through the code and share a brief note on how you would go about building this feature, and why. Note: Send us an email once you have thought this through, have put together the design doc, and are ready to start coding.
I am not sure what you mean by better way of filtering. You already got only 15 candidates from 2500 applicants. Next step is to just check what they have done in the challenge which will further reduce the number of candidates. The problem would be if lets say 1000 applicants submit the challenge.
If the culture is at all similar there, then that first step in your process is instantly filtering for people who are extremely compliant with arbitrary processes and bureaucracy. Which in turn will be very likely to instantly filter out the self-directed learners you claim to want.
Stop trying to find the perfect person and find instead someone willing to work and improve themselves. Grow the staff you need.
BTW, I wrote a book on self-directed learning, and at one time was the youngest manager in Apple R&D, when I was 20.
Ok, you're right that the article is contradicting itself. However, the article is correct as well, our last hiring round had the challenge: "tell us your favorite color in your application". Out of hundreds of applications, we had maybe 5 who said anything about a color.
Job seekers are weaponizing applications, and are lamenting that the application process is being weaponized against them. It sucks on both sides of the table.
Concrete suggestions?
Our last hiring round we got probably 200 applicants. At least 95% seemed to just be automated submissions, no cover letter just a resume, despite our application asking specifically for a cover saying why you were a great fit. We had 3 of our most senior people reviewing these applications (our of a company of 8).
Most of the time we were digging through dense resumes trying to pick out the 1 or 2 things that matched our technology stack. We figure the cover is the place you tell us why we should talk to you if you only have 1-2 technology overlap, so most resumes we spent 30-60 seconds on and then ditched.
We interviewed 3 people out of that, and they were both really super junior. We were considering hiring one of them as a "maybe she could learn the position". Then I sent out one more round of "if you know anyone" to my personal network (which I had previously done a few months earlier), and got one personal reference to a guy we ended up hiring.
> What is your age?
> HIRING CHALLENGE: Find our recenter browser plugin (it is open-source). Understand what it is for and suggest an interesting and personally useful feature you can add to it. Go through the code and share a brief note on how you would go about building this feature, and why. Note: Send us an email once you have thought this through, have put together the design doc, and are ready to start coding.
> We don't measure how many hours you are at the office. What matters is whether the work gets done. We are reasonably flexible with hours. Currently, we operate around a 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM work cycle. Some things you work on will require more hours and effort, sometimes intense, and some won't. There may be a fair bit to pick up in your early days. You will likely need to put in more time, and that will pay dividends later.
The "everyone will lie question"
> Do you understand that being authentic and true to yourself in your answers here will help you in the long run?
the "embrace the suck" question
> What do the words gratitude and humility mean to you?
the one stolen from 'Google interviews':
> Here's a fun question: Someone who eats meat often has an allergic reaction. What are some likely reasons for this?
and obviously
> What do you think your annual salary should be?
So they can lowball you.
This is about the most toxic interview process I've seen. No wonder good candidates go elsewhere.
Translated: "We don't count how many hours you work beyond this pretty standard bucket of hours that you better be here for."
Seems there could be all kinds of possible causes here.
(To be fair, of course, I don't know anything about the Indian education system and the author obviously does.)
According to another commenter you’re asking for free labor (familiarizing themselves with your code and writing a design doc). If this is true, discussions of personal agency and creativity might be distracting from the real issues.
So the independent thinkers did some thinking and realized that their expected return from this process wasn't that high.
Here's a question. In a difficult job market with a deluge of candidates, how should a candidate try and stand apart? And we have to answer that for the new AI age where output for many tests can generated very cheaply.
I did this back when I was an intern for an innovation role and got it.
Did a bit of consulting for others on this years ago as well. A remnant of that time:
https://simbi.com/matthew-gaiser/pre-interview-project-help
The project idea is fine, but if everyone does the project, you are still stuck competing against many others on the same field.
When I do this kind of project, I stuff it in with my resume as a single file.
On the employer side, I am not sure what you could do that doesn't deter a lot of people.
I'm not in a position to answer this but I would expect that self directed learners would demand a premium salary and look for a prestigious role.
I would also expect them to have self learned different skills to the ones you might be looking for...
Doing something other than filling out some esoteric BS form. These are possibly the worst kind of job applications in my opinion (coming from someone who has filled some out in my time).
I have the utmost respect, though, for those with degrees who actually manage to use the knowledge they gain to achieve something. I just don't think it's the right path for everyone.
I'm not from India but will be taking the test just for fun
Like my study, based in Germany, combines coding, design and entrepreneurship. With many opportunities for projects that students can initiate themselves, to work on what they value and enjoy. Something that they might make into a real-world product/service. And classes were very hand-ons, focused on actually doing the thing and not just theory. Also helped that there were almost zero typical exams and each class was two weeks long, two weeks of just that class.
So what I want to say is that there are opportunities beyond the concept of university of a 100 years ago. Concepts that might align more with your values and needs.
Feel free to do their work for them for free.
> Here's a fun question: Someone who eats meat often has an allergic reaction. What are some likely reasons for this?
> Please take 2 minutes to read our work culture and principles and answer this question: What do you think is the most intriguing aspect, and why?
Really?
The reason for this questionnaire is culture fit. It's also the very practical matter of weeding through 2500 applications when AI has made all straightforward code-based questions very pointless
If a company wants me to jump through hoops just for the shot at an interview, I'm not doing it because I can go afford to go elsewhere. I'm sure I'm far from alone in that.
But you ask terribly invasive questions, questions that are just frankly garbage, and your AI landmine questions. And this is 100x worse applications than other jobs.
And you admit that if you happen to know about alpha-gal (tick related disease prevalent in the USA) then you probably are using an LLM?! Seriously?
If this is how you treat candidates, how do you treat employees? How many garbage 'tests' do you put them through?
You will lose confident candidates otherwise. I sure as hell would quit halfway through and find other options.
IMHO you risk getting more “desperate” candidates by requiring them to answer all these questions.
I understand your motivation 100%. My company also gets at least 10x as many applications now compared to before ChatGPT, and by far most are garbage. This is OUR problem though, not the applicants'!
Do video interviews, or better yet, in-person interviews. Ask questions there. Request sharing desktop, and share if you ask LLMs and your strategy in doing so.
Academics are dealing with the same problem, with "do they know the material or is it an LLM?". Universities also have access to a potent tool: oral examination. Its also the hardest to implement due to time and 1:1 labor. The answer's right there.
Hard work. From you.
There are two kinds of people who would know this without searching: Medical professionals or people who obsessively follow every health scare in the press, often the yellow press.
This question is useless, unless you want to hear "I googled the question" or "I don't know". Anyway, most people don't care what you want to hear, hence the low application numbers.
My answer would be: "You're asking the wrong Linux SysAdmin." I've taken to this answer whenever I get asked a question that's way outside my area of expertise.
That isn't even some kind of annoying brain teaser estimation problem.
It's literally a question for doctors.
It would make me think you're so bad at your interview process you lazily copied and pasted questions from another source without even looking at them.
Either that, or a crazy person wrote the questions.
In either case, gigantic red warning flags about this company.
First, I'd check the cooking oil and seasonings for common allergens. Then, if they had visited the US recently, check for Alpha-gal Syndrome.
It assumes the problem is that we don't know how to teach better, and that's just wrong. We do know how to teach people, we've done it in the past.
The actual problem is one of subversion of the processes involved. There is no accountability for teachers that harm their students in a specific way (i.e. teaching maladaptive behaviors through torture).
The prussian model of education has from the beginning been about creating loyal unthinking workers. That history has never changed, and the groups involved support that history through the shadows.
Its subtle, but its been happening for almost a hundred years to eliminate rational thought. Torture promotes this outcome, as the experts from the 50s can attest in their written works (Lifton/Meerloo).
There is a classical approach to education where you are taught to be independent and think. It came from the greeks, and stood the test of time. If you see a problem with the existing system that is cascading, you need to go back to what worked. A known working state. Its just that simple.
Doing so would ruffle a lot of feathers because there are a lot of malevolent people out there in the world today, and part of evil and malevolence is a wilful blindness to the consequences of their actions.
How does the author jump from low participation rates to a lack of "self-directed learners"?
This is a total non-sequitur. You're running an interview process, not a MOOC or something.
The more I read the post, the more it looks like an ad for trying to get employees via HN.
OK, technically the absence of genuinely interested applicants is NOT an indication of drive. However, please note the context: It’s a brutal job market at the entry level in India at the moment. That’s why we are flooded with applications. Candidates either know this, or quickly figure this out. And yet, that does not translate into many giving their application serious and creative thought?
It is a problem they have never been asked to solve for: How to stand apart and demonstrate ability without relying on the usual credentials. It needs creativity and independent thinking and some agency. It is the lack of these that baffles me and makes me search for answers.
Learning is not just the know-how and knowledge you acquire for doing a job. It is everything else you need to navigate life and also, in this narrow sense, the skills you need to apply for a job, make your case that you are the right candidate, or at least that demonstrate that your candidature deserves attention. It is a very learnable skill. Especially now. And given the market, a skill anyone with initiative should try to acquire.
> It is the lack of these that baffles me and makes me search for answers.
I think you are making a fundamental mistake about how things work in a bad job market.
In a good job market, let's suppose you have a 10% chance of getting a job you apply for, and you're applying to 10 in this month. Then it's genuinely worth it to spend time and effort chasing those jobs, with "creativity" and "agency" as you put it. Because it's not a numbers game, you're genuinely looking for a good fit.
In a bad job market, let's suppose you have a 0.1% chance of getting a job you apply for. Therefore you apply to 1,000 this month, literally 30 a day. It is not rational to put "creativity" and "agency" into those applications, because it is almost guaranteed to be wasted effort. Because the bad job market makes it a numbers game.
You are making a judgment on people's character, when the reality is a simple question of economics or game theory. I hope you can gain some perspective and start seeing these job applicants with positive empathy rather than negative judgment. It's not about them not being self-directed -- it's about you having unrealistic expectations.
I see that you've gotten a lot of responses like this in the comments. I hope you're able to take it as an opportunity for learning and self-reflection -- there's some valuable stuff here for you, despite your post being flagged.
In cellular networks, you have this very real effect called RNA interference. Its where an area is flooded with a fragment that binds to targets blocking them from binding with specific receptor sites. This is being done at scale through ghost jobs, and fake postings. A candidate has a finite set amount of time they can spend. If you aren't getting applications, either you have a very bad reputation, or they are being blocked before you ever see them.
Independent action and learning depends upon rational frameworks of mind. The prussian model of schooling has always been about eliminating this in exchange for a unthinking, loyal worker.
1. Self-directed learning requires intrinsic motivation. Seems obvious, but I think it's really easy to lose that once you have extrinsic motivation (like a salary, or kids, making rent, a mortgage, etc). In these cases it may still be there, but redirected into things like hobbies, parenting, health, financial management, etc.
2. Self-directed learning is far more likely in a system where there is no (accessible) "existing pipeline" for externally-directed learning.
This was kind of how it was for us 20 years ago - first year university was the natural age you'd be exposed to programming, unless you did it yourself earlier than that because you wanted to, and if you did, there was no easy playbook, you had to RTFM, if there was one, experiment, fail, etc. And "computing" was niche enough that librarians or other non-academic figures couldn't really even tell you what you might want to consider.
These days, coding schools accessible to anyone are not even a dime a dozen, they're free. While I think this is a Good Thing™, it also falls into the trap described by the author where you're no longer creating an environment where students have to learn for themselves, you're creating an environment where they're taught.
Again, I think more teaching is a Good Thing™, but the kind of problem solving the author seems to be describing is not actually related to any of the learned content, whatever that content may be.
It's not about learning how to consume a resource, it's learning how to be resourceful.
This presents a problem both in terms of the learner being tested, and the test maker (who may have formed the questions irrationally and non-deterministically in the first place).
The Greeks knew how to do this best. Information transfer today makes no differentiation between true and false information. Its completely by rote.
I do agree with your points. The criticisms of modern education systems (Sir Ken Robinson and Seymour Papert come to mind, for different reasons) for their rote straight-jacket approaches seem to be coming home to roost at scale.
> the framework for basic rational thought and critical thinking was never taught
Something I'm thinking about (rhetorically) is: can this actually be taught? Or can we only provide environments of play and exploration that allow kids to learn these skills for themselves. Directly "teaching" this seems to fall into a recursive (or maybe Godel-like) situation: teach "how to think" is just another rote lesson.
Yes, it can be taught quite easily, take a deep dive through the classical trivium curriculum which originated in Greece.
The first leg at the start teaches aristotle's logic, history, descartes method, and philosophy which covers the requirements for rigorous reasoning and proof, and critical thought, and this is done in the first 4 years or so, but continually reviewed and improved thereafter in all lessons. Rhetoric and oratory later on includes structured argumentation, and how to deal with fallacy, and abuses of the contrast principle, as well as other blindspots.
Methods like Descarte's method are basic heuristics which can be quickly learned and practiced because they are so simple that the individual can approach and test conjecture and premises very easily with it until they get to the truth (regardless of the subject matter), and discard falsehoods easily on their own.
History and political economy were also taught early when facts can more easily be absorbed. These skills naturally lead towards self-directed learning where you've learned the requirements for such as definition (identity), mixed premises, how to test and spot falsehood and bias, how to decompose mixed statements to first principles discarding fallacy and falsehood such that they are true, and the requirements to communicate and learn.
The modern curriculum today is about torturing the student. Anyone you know that has math PTSD is a prominent example.
In keeping with the generational social contract, you give children the tools they need to make the tasks simple enough for them to do it themselves, and you give them agency to do it. People often mistake intelligence (speed) for cumulative growth over time.
The dumbing down of education, and associated torture both in education and throughout quite a lot of our society as a whole is causing a great number of people to have psychological regression (infantalism), if not outright delusion following a totalitarian bent.
You see these issues in a great number of areas but most prominently in the literature and media, for example, whose primary audience is young boys and girls 7-15 (comic book stories, anime). You see adults being entertained by these in adulthood, such as the isekai reincarnation tropes, or black company tropes in Japanese anime.
There is something truly and inherently disturbing about children's shows where the overarching theme at the beginning is, you die and life was so traumatic, without any redeeming qualities without being able to do anything, and that because of this mistake god gives them a second chance with a charmed life in the next life.
I for one never really cared about grades and would just sit in class and try to understand what it was really about so that it made sense and could be internalized. I don't think this works anymore where the bar is set artificial high using proxy checks (e.g. leetcode) or having to get past recruiting screeners who have no idea what the job entails.
Also wrote about it here https://blog.comini.in/p/what-should-replace-grades
As for AI, it basically allows self-learning on steroids.