I believe the thing we often need to learn is the thing we're afraid of learning. We often (always?) have weaknesses that can/do jeopardize our strength and closing those weaknesses is crucial.
The famous Scott Galloway (whom I had as a b-school professor) made this point like this: if you are a great guy, great father, great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and hurt people in your life - THAT thing offsets everything else. You won't become better by "doubling down" on what you're already good at, but by fixing this flaw.
Another case - I used to manage a C++ developer. If you gave him a tight spec, he'd implement it perfectly. But the world we lived in required him to go talk to people to figure out what the real needs are, and he was bad at that. So his code always solved the wrong problem unless someone was helping him with this stuff.
Every year, his own developmental goal was to go learn the next C++ standard. And that would have been useless because he was already a great C++ programmer. Going from 97th percentile to the 98th wouldn't matter. The much bigger bang for the buck would be figuring out how to go sit down with a sales rep and say "OK, what's our client actually trying to do here?"
It sounds simple but I believe this held him back not just in work but in life. I happen to know that he didn't have great communication with his wife and kids either - solving this thing would make him so much better at all parts of his life.
The thing is - we all have glaring things like this - obstacles in our own trajectory that if we fix, our existing strength would really shine.
> if you are a great guy, great father, great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and hurt people in your life - THAT thing offsets everything else.
So the Manager Tools podcast had a discussion about this I can't be bothered to find. Their advice, as best I recall it, was that you should focus on two things: fixing absolute deal breakers, and honing your strengths. Imagine you come up with N dimensions you want to rate yourself across on a 1 to 5 scale from worst to best. If you have any 1 out of 5's that are clearly blocking career progress, you should focus on that. If you're sitting at 2s and 3's, you should work on getting a 4 or 5, rather than leveling up across the board.
You have described scenarios that seem to be absolute deal breakers (likely because those are the memorable stories) but in most cases, I think the latter applies.
> Every year, his own developmental goal was to go learn the next C++ standard. And that would have been useless because he was already a great C++ programmer.
Well, those don't come around that often. But more to the point -- situation matters. If you're working on a major C++ product that is expected to last decades, the company is in trouble if _nobody_ is allowed to study improvements. Best case scenario the company has some talent management app that you can query to find out two other people intend to master C++20; worst case, every engineering manager focuses employees on short term wins and the mountain of tech debt becomes unclimbable. I fear though, that the worst case is also the average case!
So I wonder about this a lot. If I have a developer on my team who needs to learn X, or get better at Y, I can always offer that feedback and it is construed as constructive feedback.
But if I tell a developer who can't speak well or communicate lucidly that they need to work on their communication skills, that comes across as offensive.
There was a horrible architect at my previous organization who was universally loathed for his bad communication skills and general lack of empathy. He was a Korean, and his English was abysmal. To him, it felt like something to shrug about. We had to go to HR, multiple times, about his behavior. Nothing much changed because again, they didn't know how to address the core issue, which is he couldn't speak clear English. His lack of empathy became masked with indifference and some of the higher ups (also non native English speakers) supported him saying it was general culture differences. However his lack of communication severely hindered progress and made life difficult.
I once had a colleague who had horrendous body odour and wouldn't wear deodorant. It made working with him really difficult. And he was one of the best developers I've known. I've never told him this because I didn't want to offend him, but stuff like this should also be addressed. Communication, body language, writing skills and general personal skills need to be addressed.
How do you offer feedback in that sense without embarassing them or offending them?
I know a Korean Engineer with terrible English. He is well aware how bad it is, but has no idea how to fix it. I'm a terrible speller (seems to be related to disgraphia - but the diagnosis didn't exist when I was a kid) with no idea how to fix it.
It is one thing to say fix your greatest weakness, if it is easy you should. However for many there is more gain from improving on a strength and avoiding situations where the weakness matters; than improving the weakness, even though a small improvement in the weakness is worth more than an improvement in the strength..
In both of those, it seems that you could hire a professional and ask them how to fix it. English as a second language for professionals is an incredibly common subject, he could easily find a class or hire a tutor. If it's holding him back at work then at least some consultation would be worth the cost.
For your spelling, it's probably not as easy to find someone targeting you as a demographic, but I'd look for someone who does tutoring for kids with dysgraphia/dyslexia etc. There's a lot of quite specific techniques that are used based on increasing understanding of the underlying causes of spelling difficulties - if you've never learned any targeted at your weaknesses, I bet you could make a noticeable improvement quite quickly. I'd aim for someone who is using research-based methods, since there's still a lot of more folklore-based teaching around on core skills like writing.
One day I saw a colleague-to-be with their bare feet on the the desk, I looked at them and I said, "that's a no". He apologized and we moved on. But I also told the guy sitting next to them, "why didn't you say anything to them?".
When you left, they turned to each other and said "his answer to solving problems is to immediately demand you change to do what he wants. No asking, no discussion, not even a 'please'."
To some extent, "you can lead the horse to water but you can't make him drink." In the case if the terrible architect, your big problem was that he didn't want to change / had his head up his ass / didn't see the problem.
If you are a peer, there's not much you can do in this case. If you're a friend, you can try to persuade him of the negative impact this is having on him: eg "you know how you always struggle to get your ideas implemented? This is because people have a hard time following you, so your good ideas die on the vine. Do you see that and does that bother you?"
If you are his manager, then you can make this more of a performance issue "as an architect, you are expected to clearly communicate solutions and you're not doing that."
At the end of the day there's a meta question. Does your company value people who are introspective and will want to evolve? If the answer is yes, they will screen for that in interviews and have it be part of the company culture (so the terrible architect would either not pass the interview because he didn't come across as self aware or he's be pressured to evolve by the culture where everyone else is trying to do better.) If your company doesn't value these traits then you'll end up with people who don't think their shit thinks and that's hard!
The author of the post does address your Scott Galloway example by stating that that is an obvious weakness that needs correcting.
I think if we're starting with an individual with no obvious weaknesses, perhaps they are just average at many things for example, the ROI is better for things one has a natural aptitude in.
Correcting an obvious weakness would generate a better ROI as per your examples.
> I think if we're starting with an individual with no obvious weaknesses, perhaps they are just average at many things for example
I didn't mean that the weaknesses have to be obvious. I agree the first example I used was a blatant one, but in the other case the person had lived 5 decades without recognizing the impact that lack of communication skills had on his life. He always just thought "that's how I am."
So in your case, of someone who is "just average at many things" - perhaps there's a fear of chasing a direction, a reluctance to commit, an inability to focus, etc. that probably got them to "just be ok" and living below their potential, and probably overcoming that thing is a meta-skill that they need to gain.
I think I agree with your argument, directionally, but in the case of the C++ hacker, might it be the case that he needed to find a different role, job, and/or manager to really leverage the power of a 98%tile C++ programmer?
That's a legit option and actually that's what happened with this guy - we moved him to a parser team from a client-facing team. But we both recognized that as a bit of "defeat" - we failed to improve his communication, so as plan B how do we help him not get fired.
The point I am making and that I don't want to get lost is: there's a huge difference between "I am consciously choosing to be a C++ hacker" vs "I am falling into this bucket because I fear doing other stuff". First one is fine, second one means a person is under-living their potential.
Why is that a defeat? Did he think he was good with people, or want to interact with clients? Or at your company was the parser team a professional dead-end or something?
First, are you living your own best life? If you ask him "do you want to be limited by comms skills for the rest of your life, in all the ways it affects you and home and at work" he's say "no, I'd rather not have this problem" but then we couldn't really get it to change. So he fell short of his own recognition of what his life could be.
Second, it just limits you. There's nothing wrong with writing parsers and someone has to do that, but there's a difference between "choosing" that and "being limited to it." Versatility and capability is important. Say he wanted to go work somewhere else, the more skills and versatility you have, the more options you have.
Third, even within such a job you're still limited. EG: are you having a technical debate on your team? The better you can communicate, the more likely you are to advocate well for your solution, the more likely your good ideas will materialize, etc.
There was an older consultant "StrengthFinder" thing. The idea was to systematically identify strengths and weaknesses and, as I recall, one of the ideas was that, assuming no gross deficiencies relative to career, you may want to focus on the things that you may not already be A+ in but you have some level of skill in.
For example, a very good coder who is OK but not great at presenting or writing may want to spend some effort on those areas.
> It sounds simple but I believe this held him back not just in work but in life. I happen to know that he didn't have great communication with his wife and kids either - solving this thing would make him so much better at all parts of his life.
Did he improve? Or do you just think he could improve? Maybe he had already tried to work hard on his communication skills and this was as good as it gets, so to avoid the stress of failing over and over he just stopped trying? There is nothing wrong with that, having a programmer who can write good code is valuable even if you need a technical product manager to talk to him. It might not be as valuable, but at some point life is more important than stressing out about things you can't fix.
Similarly we don't blame all the product managers etc who never improve their technical skills enough to talk with such engineers. People have limits, some have more limits than others, we just have to learn to accept that people are different instead of demanding that they have the same skills as us.
Neurodiversity is a thing. Companies compete with each other on how good diversity stats they have, only taking in count visual appearance while on the behavioral side it is expected that everyone is the same corporate employee archetype.
Neurodiversity is a thing, but not every flaw and limitation can be attributable to an immutable biological fact about a person, and thus we have many opportunities to improve a grow.
If I told myself when I graduated college that I either had no problems or they were all permanent, I'd be a fucking mess of a 40 year today. In reality, so many good things professionally and personally came to me because at some point I looked at what I was/did and said "I don't want to do this anymore"
Pointing at the issues of someone and saying if only they fixed it is very similar to pointing at poor or disabled people and saying the same thing. Its is known as denial of personal responsibility.
You see someone who needs help, either go figure out how to help and help or shut the fuck up and keep walking.
> either go figure out how to help and help or shut the fuck up and keep walking.
No, he's saying that you don't tell someone who is hungry "if you would learn to fish, you wouldn't be hungry" and leave it at that. Especially don't do this if you don't know how to fish yourself. But do, if you know that "learning to fish" is good, team up with the other person and learn to fish together. At the very least, you can help them find an angler to teach them.
That doesn't sound very good in real life scenarios either. I can provide feedback without necessarily knowing how to fix it. For example, if someone I work with consistently have a hard time communicating their ideas, I can and should provide that feedback, even without knowing how they can fix it. At the very least if they realize the issue, they can attempt to go fix it themselves. Providing feedback in general is a gift.
> I can provide feedback without necessarily knowing how to fix it
But at least you provide guidance on how and where to learn the solution as well, yes? I don't imagine anyone going around telling people what they should do but not being able or willing to guide them to where they can find out how to do something. Also, I don't see providing advice that is both unsolicited and uninformed as being a gift. That's the sort of thing that cause most people to react poorly and perhaps say, "mind your own business".
Depends on the relationship I think and how the feedback is delivered as well as the topic. If I just give you unsolicited feedback about a topic that I have nothing to do with, then yea that can be weird. But presumably most feedback would be something where both people are involved to some degree. e.g. if you're chronically late to meetings that I attend, then me telling you that I would think is a good thing.
I get the point you are making and the "hunger" example is obviously a painful one. But I actually think feedback should be shared freely.
EG: if I have bad communication skills, yes ideally someone coaches me. But at least, random feedback of "wow that meeting went badly" - hearing that from many people over and over - may make me aware of the area and look into it myself.
Like, if I am starting to get fat, I want people to tell me when they see it, even if they don't have a diet and training regiment set up for me.
You might want feedback that tells you something new. But if you're steadily gaining weight and several people have told you, I bet you're less interested in hearing it from another five people every day. Especially if you happen to know that the weight gain is due to e.g. a new medication you're on because you've made a calculated decision that the benefits are worth the unavoidable weight gain, or that you have been eating badly because you're rushed and emotional while caring for a sick parent.
> if I am starting to get fat, I want people to tell me
But would you want random people to tell you, unsolicited, "you're fat, you need to lose weight".
Also, I'm obligated to note that the energy balance model of weight gain and loss has come under close scrutiny in recent research, and it is never as simple as eat less, exercise more. https://www.nature.com/articles/ejcn2011132
> it is never as simple as eat less, exercise more
It is probably not an all encompassing model, however it's still one of the best approximations for what the average layperson should do to lose weight.
With dieting and exercise, i went from a weight of 86 kg to 74 kg over a period of about 3 months (weighed myself daily, kept track of what i ate). Since then, with just dieting, i've gone from 74 to 70 kg in about 2 months.
Is it hard to get nutrition right in such circumstances? Sure. Are there more factors that should probably be taken into account? Of course. Can improperly done exercise cause damage to the body? Yes, that's why people repeat that you need good form so often.
However exercise most definitely works to some degree, even though i had to make myself to do a bit of it every day. I went from being able to do about 30 incline pushups to 150. From 30 situps to 150 as well. From being able to do 10 pullups, all the way to around 40, of course, all of the exercises divided into sets of repetitions with some rest inbetween. The numbers and targets could probably be fine tuned, but it was enough for me.
I feel like in this particular case, the first step is to recognize there's a "problem" at all. I don't know the person in this story, but it seems like to them, communication is not that important. Maybe the most important thing for them in their work is technical achievement. (I've definitely been in that boat before.) As a result, they are likely never going to work on the communication aspect.
This is like the quote of "Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget and I'll tell you what you value." Before you go and try and improve yourself, it's good to be honest about what you value and what your goals are. If what you value is moving up the corporate ladder, then learning even more about C++ is not going to help. On the other hand, if it's to be even better technically, then go for it. If you value improving your business all around, then the communication angle is a better place to spend your time.
Great question. I assume you're asking from the point of view of the person having the challenge rather than someone observing/helping them.
There's no easy or painless answer. The reason these deep flaws exist in us is precisely because we have been avoiding dealing with them for some deeply personal and painful reason. But I do think there's a general pattern that I can share from my own experience.
The first step is to recognize that the problem exists and be "fed up" with it. To recognize that you're selling yourself short in some way, that you're failing yourself or your relationships. "I don't want to have my work and family life suffer anymore because I am afraid to talk to people." Or even "I don't want to be out of shape and struggle to walk a mile" kind of thing. You can't solve problems like this unless you're seeing them clearly and desperate to get out.
They often say that you have to hit "rock bottom" as a requirement for curing yourself. I think this is what they mean.
Once you hate the problem, it's good to get some external data. Ask your boss, colleagues, family about how you are (eg: tell me where my communication skills are weak, what am I doing that is so obviously wrong?) and then listen to what they say. They may surprise you? Eg is there a pattern, you are bad at it in some contexts and good in others? What is that about?
From the above and other resources, come up with the list of behaviors that would be an improvement. For example: "I would be better at my job if before I dive into a project, I speak to 3 people who understand the problem space" is probably a non-controversial one.
Then you ask yourself: why does that feel hard? Why am I just reluctant to get up and ask the sales person what the context of the client need is? What is it about "going up to someone I don't know super well and asking them a question" that terrifies me? What do I think would happen if I did this? Would they mock me? Would I feel like an idiot? Would they tell my boss I don't know something I ought to know?
Reflect if the fears are real. Is anyone in the work environment actually going to react the way your fear would suggest?
If intellectually you know that the thing is right and safe, then you force yourself to do it. Hyperventilate at your desk and then suck it up and walk over to the sales guy. Ask them, get the information, have a conversation. Reflect in retrospect: was this a helpful activity, and did I get hurt the way I feared I would?
Keep doing it. Build up the experience/muscle of doing the thing, and prove to your anxiety that it's not a dangerous thing to do. Talk to others who got good at this thing despite being not good at it originally. Find people who are awesome at the thing and study what they do. Become a nerd on the thing that's scaring you and you will likely see it stop being scary.
And I would be remiss not to say that in most cases, our deepest problems (even if they simply manifest in work performance) stem from psychology and childhood experiences. The guy in my story must have had some rough experiences growing up, maybe he was called an idiot or ignored or mocked or whatever, which made it hard for him to be communicative/open later in life, including with his family. Making a little crack in the armor of anxiety through the work process would help, but when something is this deep, seeing someone like a therapist is often helpful as well.
But to rewind, the key thing is to recognize a gap between how you are and how you want to be. You fundamentally have to say to yourself "I don't want to be forever limited by this thing, I don't want to hurt myself and others because of this thing" -- everything else is problem-solving.
Also worth noting that this process is not easy, and having an objective helper who will help you hold yourself accountable, in the form of a "therapist" of some stripe, is super helpful.
That person can help directly with several of these steps: noticing and characterizing the problem; exploring the unspoken assumptions; and formulating alternatives and plans.
That is not a weakness that can be scored on a 0-10 scale (say, I am a 9 Python programmers and a 2 Java programmer, that's an either/or, a "threshold" weakness, or an attractor (of evil!).
The bit about compilers reminds me of this quote about Feyman, but sorry of the inverse where you hold tricks in your head instead of problems.
Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!'
I can relate to the “looking at data” as a skill bit, especially the part where he mentions that it’s not a skill most data scientists necessarily have. I have observed that too. (I’m one myself)
Many data scientists like to jump into feature extraction and modeling the data with ML/DS tools because for us that’s the fun part. (we might look at some plots and summary statistics but we don’t dwell there for too long.) Few have the patience to just sit with the data for a week just to look at it, checking it against our intuition about the real world and the domain and basically just trying to put 2 and 2 together without models (except a mental model of the world) and just turning the data over in Tableau (or Excel). It’s actually not an easy skill to learn because it requires other meta skills. For one it requires an ability to match numbers to the real world — and for that you need experience and a good intuition of how the world works.
My first manager was exceptionally good at doing this. I’ve noticed too that folks in senior management — at least competent ones — tended to be good at looking at data and picking out things too. I suspect this is actually a make or break ability to get to senior management at most companies.
Data scientists, not so much. (Unless they worked in the field or came from the business side of things.)
This wouldn't be Hacker News if someone didn't comment that ACTUALLY a random walk of n steps will get you sqrt(n) in some direction, which is much better than log(n). I guess my special skill is being pedantic.
I've come to realize that 'exponential' is so often used to describe anything nonlinear. This would be the exact corollary. Good to pick up on it. I'll look out for this too now.
Just curious, how did you arrive at sqrt(n)? I spent all morning thinking about this in 2 dimensions and I came up with sqrt(n^2 + d^2) where d is the displacement from the original position on the y axis. (Pythagorean theorem)
Central limit theorem. You get to √(n² + d²) if you take n steps to the right and d steps up. But if you take n steps randomly to the left or right, you end up at about α√n steps in one direction or the other, on average, because the distribution of your final position is a Gaussian around your original position whose standard deviation grows as √n.
Try it:
>>> n=1000; sorted(abs(sum(random.randrange(2) for i in range(n)) - n/2) for j in range(128))
As you increase n you can see the distribution of final distances widen by its square root.
As it happens, in two dimensions the distribution is radially symmetric, and its radius is still proportional to the square root of the number of steps. This accounts for the astounding isotropy of lattice-gas automata, whose particles are doing such random walks simultaneously, and for the depressing popularity of Gaussian filtering in image processing, because the Gaussian convolution kernel is the only anisotropic separable kernel, and can be closely approximated in each dimension very cheaply with a different application of the central limit theorem.
> ... I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion that I might turn into another post.
Please do! A lot of discussions regarding workplace morale, both here on HN and elsewhere, seem to boil down to "your manager is very good/bad and that explains everything else you mentioned". I tend to agree; having a good manager can make a huge positive difference and having a bad manager a huge negative one. However, I'd be very interested in better ways to detect managerial quality upfront rather than when it is already too late.
That’s very true but it also represents one extreme of the spectrum. You may have an ok manager; they’re not that good but they’re not annoying either and you can generally work with them. Ideally you would want to work with a manager who can accelerate your career and learning and that’s not always easy to find. There are socially inept managers who might fail in most places but succeed at certain orgs, or vice versa I.e their success is a combination of personal skills and the org environment. It’s really difficult to know (imo) without working with the person for a little while.
I completely agree. The environment that your manager works in often matters at least as much, sometimes even more. I've been at places where manager churn was constant. Almost all of them were good to work for, but the environment for them was really toxic.
Yeah, but how much of that is your manager is the face for the faceless bureaucracy behind him? When your manager asks you to work overtime with unrealistic deadlines etc, getting angry at your manager is shooting the messenger, not the actual dumbass making decisions.
I've been very fortunate to have mostly great managers throughout my 12+ year career, managers that actually care about their staff (as humans, not just fungible resources). In fact, that's why I joined AWS 5.5+ years back, a great manager (plug for @thomas_cantrell). On the flip side, I left because of irreconcilable misalignment with my previous manager.
Detecting managerial quality up-front is a rather hard problem. I believe it's mostly rooted in the fact that anything meaningful you do as a manager plays on a long timescale (months & years), so you can't directly verify. And it's sufficiently fuzzy that in a short conversation, managers can lay down enough smoke screen to make it hard to see flaws.
So, what you need is getting some kind of long-term view on that manager. There are a couple of ways:
* If you can get it, data. Retention/Turnover, how well people grow, internal surveys. That's almost exclusively available if you transfer within a company, so limited usefulness.
* References. Find people who worked for that manager and ask them. Even better if it's ex-reports, since they tend to be more frank.
* Are they listening? When you have a conversation with them, are they paying close attention to what you have to say, or are they busy delivering a message? You want listening :)
* Can they communicate clearly? Are they able to express what their team does, and what their main challenges are, in a coherent way? In less than a minute? Communication is a managers main job. If they fail at that, you'll have a horrible time.
* And finally, gut check. How do you feel around that manager? If you're in any way uncomfortable, see it as a warning sign. That doesn't even necessarily reflect on their skill as manager - there are just some people we're feeling good around, and some who make us miserable. Skip the miserable part. (If you have a skilled manager, they can minimize the misery somewhat, but you'll still both be miserable.)
"Are they listening? When you have a conversation with them, are they paying close attention to what you have to say, or are they busy delivering a message? You want listening :)"
- This is common advice anytime one talks about relationships and communication. Listening is a skill, listen 10, talk 1, almost to the point that is difficult to understand who's doing the talking if everybody is getting the same advice of listening. Then you have those, and some HR people came to my mind--just to keep things professional--, who listen and listen and then you realize they just did not (or did not want to) understand.
Now, my question is: if it is common knowledge that listening to your reports is important, along with being pretty cheap and not particularly challenging to do, why so few managers do it? Incompetence or there is an advantage in not listening much?
Knowing and doing are two very different things. It might look easy, but it really isn't. Listening is challenging work, and we get little training to do it well.
So, yes, incompetence is one of the reasons. And worse, it's often incompetence we're actively unaware of - "it's listening, how hard can it be".
There are also advantages in not listening, but I really believe this "looks easy, but actually hard to do" split is what creates a lot of the problems. We live in an entire culture that's rooted in aggressively talking (cf. school debate club), with little value attached to patient listening.
Managers, like everybody else, are a product of the surrounding culture. Breaking out from that conditioning is hard. That's why it's rare.
I think there is also a delayed gratification that is coming from listening, while the gratification that comes with talking or expressing oneself is immediate. There is also in the "manager should listen" from the parent comment a bit of asymmetry if not hypocrisy, where the manager is the agent prone to maliciousness and the report is the one who should be listened to. And also, and I have been guilty of it like anybody else, I believe that sometimes we don't feel our manager is listening to us because they are not agreeing with us. They listen, they just happen to have a different opinion, but we prefer to say they don't listen.
I would say that I am not terribly interested in being listened to beyond the obvious, I particularly appreciate managers who are appreciative, decisive, and smart.
Being good at managing largely overlaps with being good at being friends minus the chances of being fired. The manager-report is not the same relationship as friend-friend of course, but I have yet to find a good direct manager who I would not consider good at being friends (reliable, honest, entertaining, decisive etc.), granted, not with me, and viceversa.
Just for the sake of example, I consider solving partial differential equations challenging. Listening is not challenging. One may not do it for a variety of reason, but we call can do it no exception, the act is as easy as it gets. A bit like walking.
Walking is extremely challenging for a lot of people so that argument would contradict your point.
But it is a good analogy, a lot of people who have problems talking to people and listening also have problems walking properly. So just as you say walking is trivial to some but others just can't get it right.
Walking is easy for the vast majority of people who work, let's try not to complicate things for the sake of it. Listening is easy too, what is more complicate is, "listen and do exactly as I say", which one may or may not do for a variety of reasons.
Listening is not "just sit there and let the sound wash over you". That part is easy.
Active listening is much more involved. It involves, among other things, developing empathy for the person talking, trying to understand their emotions and deeper reasons. Not just taking in what they say, but trying to understand what it means, and why they say it.
It is very much a skill you are not exercising in this thread.
I am listening and disagreeing. I don't want you to agree with me, you do. I listen and form my opinion.
It is exactly what I was talking about. To you, listening means the listener agreeing with you. To me, it is the listener understanding your point, which I do.
And I believe you are very wrong. If you come into a conversation expecting other people to "listen" the way that you intend (i.e., agreeing with you), you'll often be unsatisfied.
Now (I am empathetic here, wearing my manager's hat), it may very well be that I am wrong here (I am not), and surely I believe you have great potential (who knows) and the company needs people like you (whatever that means). We'll continue this conversation at the our next 1:1.
> All of us have strengths and weaknesses and we spend a lot of time talking about ‘areas of improvement.’ It can be easy to feel like the best way to advance is to eliminate all of those
I struggle with this. All the time.
I always find it difficult to strike a balance between leveraging my strengths and filling gaps in my weaknesses. For the large part of my career, my attention was directed on the latter: constantly trying to improve myself based off of feedback from friends, family, colleagues, managers, etc.
But now ... I'm a solo entrepreneur and lately, I've been actually flexing a lot more of my strengths, identifying characteristics about myself that give me an edge. Of course, I'm not blind to my weaknesses (I think about it all the time) but I do agree that we should lean more into our strengths.
For a solo entrepreneur I would argue it’s more important to be fairly good at everything than e.g. really good at programming and having no understanding of other things like sales and marketing. Instead of perfecting your Haskell skills, you’re far better off learning the basics of how to construct a good sales funnel, even if it’s not a natural fit for you. Some knowledge is a lot better than none.
100%. One of the conversations I've repeatedly had with my friend, a technical co-founder of his own company, is how difficult and challenging Sales really is. We don't really see eye to eye on this topic.
As a engineer and computer scientist, I appreciate all the work we do to build software that's robust, etc but to be honest, the more challenging parts (and equally rewarding, for me as a solo entrepreneur) is the Sales side of the house, business development, marketing.
A bit paradoxically, being a generalist is a particular strength, and as the article points out one of the things you can do to do better at work is work in areas that best utilize your strengths. Ergo, if you're the kind of person who is good at quickly superficially learning a wide variety of topics, solo entrepenureship is possibly the best place for you.
This makes perfect sense. Beyond just writing software and architecting systems, I find the most challenging parts (and rewarding) learning how to build a sales funnel, communicating expectations and deadlines with customers, etc the most rewarding. And as you mentioned, solo entrepreneurship might possibly be the best place to exercise these wide array of skills.
Well, a weakness is a weakness only to the extent that it neutralizes your strength. Like - is it important to spell? If you become very successful in your field despite not spelling well, then spelling is a waste of your time. On the other hand, if that flaw keeps you from getting jobs/being taken seriously then you need to fix it.
>a weakness is a weakness only to the extent that it neutralizes your strength
Agree wholeheartedly. Floyd Mayweather doesn't know how to read, or so I hear, yet he's one of the very best at what he does, and no one can take that away from him.
Forth is an interesting case. It's really unproductive to build complex systems with. If you try, you will probably be frustrated. Instead it forces you to try really hard to find a cheating short-cut to solve the problem as few moving parts as possible.
Just one simple example. The 'struct' language feature is 1500 LOC in Lisp but only 10 LOC in FORTH (see below.) Are they equivalent? No, the Lisp one has lots of bells and whistles, while the FORTH one is minimalist in the extreme.
If you tried to write the feature-complete Lisp version in FORTH you would probably find it very difficult and unproductive. So you wouldn't do that. And this to me is what FORTH's peculiar brand of efficiency is all about.
If FORTH were a bar the only drink on the menu would be tap water. That bar would be extremely efficient to run.
I think you've identified one of the essential parts of the design of Forth: it makes it very easy to implement simple systems, and very difficult to implement complex systems. In other words, polynomial O(n^a) complexity, where "a" is large, but the hidden constant k is small.
Making good use of Forth seems to be contingent on identifying situations where you want to implement a very small and simple system (embedded systems, firmware, OS bootloaders, tiny IoT devices?), and using Forth there - and avoiding it like the plague in all other cases.
I very much doubt that implementing a VLSI CAD program, where you want as many features to help your design as possible (features which necessarily incur a complexity cost), is a good use of Forth, for example.
Elixir and Erlang, in my estimation, similarly force simplicity by the nature of its own constraints, in this case massively concurrent processes designed to fail. The difference is constraining the OS interface instead of the bare metal interface. The antithesis is maybe the object orientated model where interfaces are mutable and state is unreliable.
A corollary: Companies are want to hire people who are good at interviewing, not people who are good at their job. The proof of this is that we find a disconnect between the interview process and the day to day job of working at as a software engineer. If you are primarily interested in making money, the best advice would be to become exceedingly proficient at the interview rodeo. Charm your way through the intro call, knock out the algorithmic quiz, and know the best approach for the problem in the technical screen right from the start. Improve your skill at these and your financial gains will be bountiful.
>For example, this analysis of world-class judo players found that most rely on a small handful of throws, concluding1
>Judo is a game of specialization. You have to use the skills that work best for you. You have to stick to what works and practice your skills until they become automatic responses.
>If you watch an anime or a TV series "about" fighting, people often improve by increasing the number of techniques they know because that's an easy thing to depict but, in real life, getting better at techniques you already know is often more effective than having a portfolio of hundreds of "moves".
Which is essentially,
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
What about, and I say this as a long-term martial arts practitioner, the man who has practiced 3 kicks 3300 times each (with one rep to spare)?
And I am not saying it provocatively, the one-10000, 10000-one is a straw-man of course, but how many techniques to add to your competition arsenal is not an easy question to answer.
As far as I remember, Ono, one of the most successful judokas of the modern era, has maybe uchi-mata, seoi, osoto, tomoe-nage.
Teddy Riner, who had dominated the heavy-weight category for more than 10 years, basically had only uchi-mata, plus refusing to engage, running out of bounds. I remember a clock-choke and a few pins too.
On the other hand, in wrestling you had someone like Cael Sanderson, who won the gold medal in 2004 and had one technique, the ankle pick. Saitiev, who won 3 gold medals in different Olympics, had instead a big variety of technique.
Let's take judo. While nobody has, say, 15 competition ready techniques, a critical decision needs to be made between 3 or 5, say. So it is not as easy as saying: specialize! In addition to find the right (for you, considering your opponents) techniques to specialize in.
An "uchi-mata" or "ankle pick" or whatever ... to that person becomes it's own martial art or "game" as people normally think of it.
There is incredible breadth to discover once you go 1 level deep into something. Every technique worth specializing in will have a multitude of entries/setups, then you need to know how people defend/counter and how to counter that, there could be slight variants that work better against different body types etc ... really staggering amounts of breadth/depth involved in putting someone on their back.
There will also be some breadth provided by general meta concerns of each combat sport like grip/hand fighting, defense, strategy, conditioning etc ...
So even the people who are hyper-specialized still have to know loads of stuff.
I was a martial arts practitioner for a couple decades, and our answer was "add one at a time". You'd learn the entire system at a basic level, and then practice it all enough to figure out which one technique you wanted to be the strength in your personal flavor of the style. So you'd level that one technique up from just being able to do it, to knowing when and how to apply it to many different situations. Once it became an intuitive response, you started on another technique but tried to find a technique that would cover the gaps where the first technique was not practical.
So a newly minted black belt might have one or two techniques. 10 years later, they might have 5. 20 years later, maybe even a dozen. But it isn't a question of the right number of techniques - it is a matter of constant improvement. The goal is to keep practicing moreso than having a specific end point.
Competition time is 10 years max at the very high level with the usual few exceptions, and sometimes what was working stops to work, either due to injury, changes in weight or power, or competitors "figuring you out". For example, Riner was so physically dominant that as soon as he had the grip, it was flight time. Maybe he had a sasae too, I don't remember. Most players play "opposite" techniques, for example osoto-sasae is a classic one in judo.
For lower level/amateurs/"lifers" the math change, but at that level it is a bit more (or a lot more) about having fun, not destroy one's body and other concerns not related to high-level competitions, so more techniques can bee added to the arsenal.
I bounce between specialization and breadth because on the one hand, I want to "win" also in practice, on the other hand "win" what exactly?
Agreed, completely - I practiced chinese styles, which are far more about lifetime effectiveness and basic defense. It definitely changes the math of how much you can "master" when looking at it as a lifetime practice. It also changes the definition of what it means to "win", because our definition was that you were still strong with working joints in old age.
He injured his right knee very early in his career so he spent the rest of it specializing in kicking with his left leg. There are some pretty amazing videos on YouTube showing the incredible control and range he had with that leg.
I think the answer depends on "why do you want to learn?". The implicit answer to that question for this blog post seems to be "to advance your career". That's a fine answer, but not the only answer.
It sounded to me like the answer for the author was "because it's fun!" and then turning around and figuring out how to arrange his career in a way that lets him continue learning, which ends up benefitting his career anyways, almost as a side effect.
i am currently researching cancer due to my diagnosis. Its a fascinating world that will keep me occupied for a long time. I am learning statistics p-values, multi-variate analysis , kaplan-meier ect. A little bit of genetics and cell anatomy, mutations when i am bored of stats and reading about human side of cancer in the book 'emperor of all maladies'. I am really enjoying this part of the journey, learning something from scratch, beginner gains.
Good luck, I hope every things goes as good as it can and that you and your oncologist take every decision, that maximizes your odds of surviving.
The were two positive thing about my wife's cancer
1- She survived
2- The intense learning experiance.
P.s. You could add medical imaging to your list of interesting cancer related things to learn. It won't really help you but it is extremely interesting .
If you can get the DICOM files of your scans try to interpret them with the full radiologist report. I got started with the trial of radiant viewer¹ (it easy to use but you will probably hit a ceiling before the end of the trial) and then try 3D slicer² (it's a lot harder to use but I feel that I used maybe 10% of that software capability and I was able to cleanly isolate the tumor and make the rest of her body translucent).
Learning ‘everything’ offers the benefit of helping you identify new many things you potentially could easily become (or happen to already be) unusually good at.
On one hand, it’s a bit addictive and without certain external factors or compensating techniques it’s possible to get used to it so much that one becomes averse to investing time into learning one thing in depth.
On the other hand, at least with the type of mindset I have, the idea of knowing what to learn seems foreign, enviable at times but more often smelling of a local maximum.
I am big fan of "circle of competence" as Warren Buffet with Charlie Munger describe it. But I stole it to drive my learning approach.
Learning is investment so I would say learn mostly in your area of competence to get better. Of course you want to broaden your area with time so you might spend 80-90% of your learning time on things that are directly in your area of competence. Then 10% or 20% to broaden that, when you start using those new things they will become your circle of competence and then you can go deeper with learning about those. If you won't use those - ditch those and go find another 20%.
Downside to this approach is that you need a starting point like "should I be a Python dev or Ruby dev" which mostly is asked by new fresh starters - and my answer is pick one, if it sticks and is your 80% (even if it is not really) continue if not go for another one.
I had link to article by Kent Beck who advises something similar so I also copied a lot of that approach from his article. Unfortunately I don't have a link now.
> Downside to this approach is that you need a starting point like "should I be a Python dev or Ruby dev" which mostly is asked by new fresh starters - and my answer is pick one, if it sticks and is your 80% (even if it is not really) continue if not go for another one.
I remembering hearing in a podcast something like "If there's a fork in the road, pick it and stick with it. You'll end up in a better place two years later than if you just spend two years weighing the options. And if you stick with something for a period of time, it's usually easier to switch to something else than if you didn't do anything."
I think there's something in the middle. One does not need to learn everything, of course, and it pays to learn many new key concepts. Groundbreaking concepts help us identify new problems and find simple solutions. Another advantage of learning key concepts is that we get to connect all those concepts, and connections beget breakthroughs.
As for what concepts to learn first, I think Feynman's method helps: "You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!'"
Because people are social "who knows you" is also important and impacts your learning. Finding the right people who are open to you asking 4 levels of questions is critical. This often requires you offer them something back. How you build those relationships is something to learn.
Yes, this is key, so important to NOT have to exclusively deal with sharp-elbow-environments at formative points in your career.
Also good to have mentors which not only graciously answer your questions but which also challenge you and ask questions of you. The Socratic method. Old as dirt, but better than Stackoverflow for actual knowledge development.
A long time ago an older and well known number theorist made some disparaging remarks about Paul Erdos' work. You admire contributions to mathematics as much as I do, and I felt annoyed when the older mathematician flatly and definitively stated that all of Erdos' work could be reduced to a few tricks which Erdos repeatedly relied on in his proofs. What the number theorist did not realize is that other mathematicians, even the very best, also rely on a few tricks which they use over and over. Take Hilbert. The second volume of Hilbert's collected papers contains Hilbert's papers in invariant theory. I have made a point of reading some of these papers with care. It is sad to note that some of Hilbert's beautiful results have been completely forgotten. But on reading the proofs of Hilbert's striking and deep theorems in invariant theory, it was surprising to verify that Hilbert's proofs relied on the same few tricks. Even Hilbert had only a few tricks!"
In that same article you quote there is also a bit about Feynman, that
"Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: "How did he do it? He must be a genius!" "
I've come across this before, but it got reversed in my mind to: every time you come across an unsolved problem, try using all your standard tricks on it. Probably none will help. But perhaps eventually one will and you'll seem like a genius for thinking of applying that trick to that problem.
"I don't have a large enough sample nor have I polled enough people to have high confidence that this works as a general algorithm but, for finding groups of world-class experts, what's worked for me is finding excellent managers. The two teams I worked on with the highest density of world-class experts have been teams under really great management. I have a higher bar for excellent management than most people and, from having talked to many people about this, almost no one I've talked to has worked for or even knows a manager as good as one I would consider to be excellent (and, general, both the person I'm talking to agrees with me on this, indicating that it's not the case that they have a manager who's excellent in dimensions I don't care about and vice versa); from discussions about this, I would guess that a manager I think of as excellent is at least 99.9%-ile. How to find such a manager is a long discussion that I might turn into another post.
@luu-- I'm sure a lot of people on here besides me would be very curious to read your thoughts on what distinguished these managers from the others, and how you would identify one (nevermind find one).
I believe the tradeoff of how specialized to be is dictated by your work opportunities - specialization of labor AKA division of labor [1].
If you can and want to work in a large corporation, you should be able to get a fairly specific job title. This is advantageous because two specialists with advanced but complementary skills outperform two generalists with intermediate but overlapping skills.
Division of labor allows sophistication in processes, which can increase efficiency.
The downside is, the job pool is more limited (both for employers and for employees). You need specific employees/positions.
A startup might not afford such specialization. For instance, if the finances only afford 3 people on payroll, you're not going to find a job working on a 10th of the pipeline, even with 20x efficiency compared to a generalist doing half of the pipeline with 2x efficiency.
There is learning for fun and learning for optimization, and if you're lucky there is overlap! There probably no shortage of things one could learn to optimize for handling +ev situations better in the future, but learning for long periods of time is difficult if you don't enjoy the actual subject. I recently got into learning about hydroponics and tennis coaching and I don't feel the pressure to make those things a part of my career development.
In recent years I've started to apply this idea more and more in my own career and life. I'm focusing much less on adding new skills and instead finding much higher ROI doubling down on improving the "top three things I'm uniquely good at" in meaningful ways.
Agree with the idea. I'm also trying to apply this model in my life. If I don't understand something or just don't have the time or interest in doing smth, I just don't do / learn it or delegate it to someone else. As a great example, was my last essay. I just couldn't finish it myself. So I delegated it to professionals from https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grabmyessay, who already have the needed knowledges to write it for me.
The best thing to learn right now is how to code. There's a lot of things you'll improve on. You can develop anything that you want, and it will help you think logically.
I did find the text to be far too wide to read comfortably, even on a portrait monitor. I ended up reading the article in w3m in my terminal where I put it in a tmux pane next to another empty pane so I could adjust the width manually.
>working on a few things and not being particularly well rounded has worked for me in multiple disparate fields
arguably "well roundedness" is key to major breakthroughs in science & engineering
while most of us work on incremental improvements, the real innovation often happens on intersection of two or more disparate fields that until then were considered weakly related, and it does require knowing a bit of everything
the best scientists and engineers I know are "knowledge omnivores" and will digest anything. It does require well developed "filtering" capacity though, picking up signal from a lot of noise, and a sort of information hoarding mentality
The famous Scott Galloway (whom I had as a b-school professor) made this point like this: if you are a great guy, great father, great boss, etc, but once in a while you get violently drunk and hurt people in your life - THAT thing offsets everything else. You won't become better by "doubling down" on what you're already good at, but by fixing this flaw.
Another case - I used to manage a C++ developer. If you gave him a tight spec, he'd implement it perfectly. But the world we lived in required him to go talk to people to figure out what the real needs are, and he was bad at that. So his code always solved the wrong problem unless someone was helping him with this stuff.
Every year, his own developmental goal was to go learn the next C++ standard. And that would have been useless because he was already a great C++ programmer. Going from 97th percentile to the 98th wouldn't matter. The much bigger bang for the buck would be figuring out how to go sit down with a sales rep and say "OK, what's our client actually trying to do here?"
It sounds simple but I believe this held him back not just in work but in life. I happen to know that he didn't have great communication with his wife and kids either - solving this thing would make him so much better at all parts of his life.
The thing is - we all have glaring things like this - obstacles in our own trajectory that if we fix, our existing strength would really shine.