During the 3 days I wfh, I get the most work done. I can focus and organize my day around executing a plan.
During the 2 days I'm in the office, I can get answers from people much quicker. Some people (new hires in particular) don't know how to describe their problem, or they're just really bad at it. My solution to endless teams convos is to just say "I'll head over to your desk" and then we work it out in person.
I think working with people in person can be very powerful. Is it essential though? No. Most corps don't even bother though. And most managers are bad at management. Working entirely wfh requires good managers with actual project management skills. Most corps are unwilling to train or prioritize hiring for that.
> My solution to endless teams convos is to just say "I'll head over to your desk" and then we work it out in person.
A good replacement for this is a voice or video call with screen sharing. As a bonus, you can rope in folks who are at another site just as easily as you can the first participant. Need to see notes on paper or a whiteboard? Pay the one-time cost to up another camera.
If the folks you work with don't have a "Always respond quickly to urgent messaging requests" habit, then they'll need to develop that. But, IMO, not having that habit is roughly the same as being the type that is rarely at their desk (whether because he's off helping others, or because he prefers to work on a laptop somewhere else in the building).
I find the progress is much faster at the office because me and my coworkers can more easily consult with each other on both major and minor stuff. On chat wfh they might answer immediately or 4 hrs from now. so, I can’t get in a semi flow because of long interruptions waiting for answers. also chat is slow and annoying.
I know someone is going to chime in a claim those conversations break flow. That might be true for some particular deep problems but I’ve never seen it affect any team I’ve been on and I have 40 years of work experience. Not saying my experience fits everyone else but I’ve seen no real evidence of it being an actual problem.
Most writers kinda skip chapters. Instead, on early drafts, they focus on scenes, which might be 1:1 with a chapter, but are often 2:1 or even 3:1 with a chapter. The relationship between paragraphs, scenes, and chapters, is one way of thinking about and manipulating pace in a story.
The ideas in it are fascinating (if also dated). The characters, though, are insanely 1 dimensional. It's very obviously a 1 micron thin story layered over the scaffold of ideas. After looking at it that way, I could get through the series without groaning or laughing a lot.
As a career, working in aviation is extremely hierachical and seniority based. If you're old, chances are you started making an okay amount of money and now are making absolute bank. Years of collective agreements and contracts have seniority king. If you're a new employee though it seems to be really shitty. The system is entirely tipped against you.
Most, if not all, Canadian admissions are holistic. All the universities are pretty easy to get into as long as you have the grades, especially for undergrad. As a result, for undergrad at least, no one really cares what school you went to.
From outside looking in, the American system has a hilariously unequal system. Certain opportunities are hoarded by an insanely small set of schools, almost entirely based on "prestige" and financial dominance. And it's this crazy arms-race/pressure cooker to get in. But once you're in, grade inflation is everywhere and people aren't actually working super hard. No one freaks out about admissions to "mid-tier" schools. It's entirely about a select coterie of schools who people rightly perceive as gatekeeping to an incredible extent.
None of the schools actually emphasize being accessible and hard to graduate from. The incentives are all weird and cater to a small elite population. The name on the degree is more important than earning the degree.
I dunno about other colleges, but Caltech you earned the degree. Many students dropped out because of the workload. There were a couple that were able to coast through, but they had IQs easily over 160.
You should be extremely skeptical of people who claim to have tested IQs above 130 and also believe those tests are not inherently noisy at the top end. Many modern tests lump everyone with 130+ into the same category [1]. An IQ of "easily over 160" is not a clinically valid finding by any standard IQ test that I am aware of.
This is because standard IQ tests are generally designed to measure around the median of the distribution (70-130), and so there is a lot of variance in measurement at the top end. If you happen to have a bad testing day and you make a dumb mistake, your measured IQ might drop by a fairly large number of points -- or, conversely, if you got lucky and guessed right, your measured IQ could be much higher than reality.
For example, the original Raven's Progressive Matrices says [2; page 71]
> For reason's already given, Progressive Matrices (1938) does not differentiate, very clearly between young-children, or between adults of superior intellectual capacity.
where "superior intellectual capacity" is defined as an IQ of ~125 or higher, and (if I am interpreting it correctly), the table on page 79 of [2] says missing a single question could drop a 20-year old from scoring 95 percentile to scoring 90 percentile. That's 5 IQ points on a single question! If you had a bad day, or didn't get enough sleep, you could test significantly worse than your actual "IQ."
Anyone that actually has an IQ of 160 with even a modicum of self awareness should understand that the IQ test they took is inherently noisy at the top end of the scale because sometimes people have off days.
Consider that Hal Finney was next door to me in the dorm. I've never met a smarter fellow.
I agree that actually measuring his IQ would have been a dodgy idea, but there was no doubt he was a unicorn. He himself never made any claims about it. It was just something you realized about him after a while.
I agree with you that smart people exist, and I have met a few in college as well.
The main thing I want to add is that using IQ to quantify intelligence at the top end of the scale is scientifically bogus and in my opinion harmful because it validates depressed / insecure / chronically online people who use their "160 IQ" as a way to put down other people or to peddle pseudo-scientific nonsense. Those people often need genuine psychiatric help and (in my opinion) such validation only harms them.
I'm sure that Hal Finney was exceptionally smart, though. :)
Hal hid his intelligence. You'd never know it until you got to know him. He was well-liked, and even put up with the likes of me. (A lot of techers put up with me, and even generously helped me to not flunk out. I had a lot of growing up to do.)
I would have had a lot less trouble with Quantum Mechanics if I'd realized that nobody understands it, it's just that the math works. I thought it was just me that thought it was crazy.
I've heard MIT was similar. But their graduates have never had quite the prestige and easy in to influential circles as the boys (eventually girls, too) down the street.
It was easily the most work and effort I had to put into anything, tons of peoole dropping/failing out, and the average GPA for most students was not that hot. Definitely not close to the well-known Harvard-tier 3.65+
A classmate dropped out in his sophomore year, and 10 years later asked to come back and finish. Caltech said sure, and aced the courses and earned his degree.
I asked him, were you smarter after 10 years? He laughed and said nope, he was just willing to work this time!
(Another gem about Caltech - once you're admitted, they'll give you endless chances to come back and finish. Your credits did not expire.)
One of my friends finally graduated after 6 years there. He endured endless students mumbling "7 years, down the drain!" as they passed by. (The line was from Animal House.)
Almost all our Canadian hires have been at Waterloo at some point. Even when we do random resume pulls and interviews, Waterloo seems to have the most competent set of candidates when you’re talking about new grads.
> All the universities are pretty easy to get into as long as you have the grades, especially for undergrad.
The is partially true but leaves out an important difference between Canadian and American admissions. In Canada you are admitted to a particular major, not the university as a whole.
E.g. At the University of Waterloo, CS and some of the engineering majors can have < 5% admissions rate and are extremely merit based. At the same time, applying for the general Bachelor of Arts at UWaterloo is uncompetitive and very easy to get admitted.
I was #3 in highschool out of a 550 graduating class. I thought I was bright.
Went to Cal for mechanical engineering, and while I survived the engineering classes, the physics classes wore me out and the math classes were almost impossible for me. I barely made it out of there.
I honestly wish I went somewhere easier so that it wasn't a constant struggle to keep up and survive. I think I would have actually learned more.
I took a Math 1A class (intro to calc) at Cal where the prof turned his back on class at the start of the hour, then proceeded to mumble incoherently for 60 minutes while filling a chalkboard with equations. He’d turn back around at the end of the hour. Many students brought pillows. I learned literally nothing in lecture.
This professor wasn’t demanding, he was just making zero effort to actually teach.
Great researchers are not necessarily great teachers, especially for intro courses. Anecdotally, I think this is a common issue at “prestigious” schools.
I know that feelings but be assured, it’s better to be mediocre when you’re surrounded by amazing people than to be the best in a place where no one cares. I can guarantee you learnt more than other places even if you don’t feel like that at the moment.
I've had 20 years to think about this, and while it was always fun to get the positive vibes telling people I went to Cal, I still think UC Davis or SLO would have been better.
It's not like my only other option was to go to CSU East Bay, although I know people that built decent careers from there too to be honest.
I’ve heard people say this about difficult colleges or degrees before, so you’re not alone. The push to make something overly hard can simply leave some capable people behind by not matching their style or pace of learning. But also I think some of the less famous universities simply care about teaching while the top ones leave that to random grad students and instead brag about their research credentials. The thing is, professors doing research doesn’t help students learning.
I think all that matters is that most if not all professors care about teaching. And my experience at top universities has been that most still care about teaching and the grad students they need to rely on is because of the class size. There were definitely some that were basking in their own glory from the past, but those were few. Can’t tell about all universities, but I’d assume it’s the same everywhere. The reality is that given what it takes to become a tenured professor, you’re bound to have at least a few who generally suck at teaching.
It comes down to the notion that America is a classless society being farcical. There has always been an elite that jealously guards their power and influence. Entrance into it - or the ersatz version that is the bourgeoisie - has always (along with immigration) been modulated based on what was most likely to preserve the existence of that elite.
And it's not a conspiracy; it just shows how much power that elite has, that they're able to make these things happen when they need them to. A sudden turn away from nativism and condoning of proto-anarchy when the black population (first slave, then free) threatened to upend the social order. Socialism lite (and more immigration, but only from preferred European nations) to head off full-blown socialism after capitalism first drove to excess and then blew itself up. Truman getting the VP spot. Bank bailouts (so many bank bailouts). Even the begrudging "opening" of elite institutions to Jews, blacks, Asians (staring down the barrel of their own, rival, institutions).
Anything to prevent their power and influence decentralizing in an enduring manner.
Part of the problem is many academic institutions, even prestigious ones, simply don't prioritize teaching. They don't even really prioritize challenging education. They prioritize prestige and opportunity hoarding. The hardest part about many of these schools is getting in. Once you're in, then grade inflation and the desire for the institution to retain it's prestige brand means the classes aren't particularly hard --- graduating is particularly easy and most students actually barely put in effort. Getting in is the golden ticket more than graduating.
One solution, is for an institution to prioritize accessibility (easier to get in) but also prioritize difficulty (actually hard to graduate). This would reorient incentives around challenging education that pushes students to excel rather than coast after striving just to get in. Unfortunately, the priorities are the exact opposite today.
It's incredible how little interest these ghouls have in the concept of "public good." Things like the conserving the environment or public health or even something as simple as free tax filing, are just seen as aisles for scoring ideological points or maximizing the interests of profit seeking entities.
No it's not. Why are they bragging about tariff income then? There is no coherent ideology guiding the American right wing except centralizing power onto the monarch.
It contains multitudes. The "tear down government" are the Curtis Yarvin - like faction who believes "the State" (including federal government) must be destroyed and replaced by private entities. They use Trump as a tool to reach their goal. Then you have the true Trump believers. Then there are the turncoats (probably the majority). All of them seek power for the monarch.
Right, so the only coherent ideology is their desire for dictatorship, as I said. This makes it extremely difficult if not impossible to interact with and collaborate with "the right" in a democratic system.
The unifying feature is they do not care for the established mechanisms by which we decide what to do, ergo there is no way for us to decide together what to do.
You can use 'circumvent' here, but the meaning is a little odd. That's more like heading from Mars to the Sun and finding a way around the Earth to continue to your destination. Usually, people use 'circumnavigate' instead, which is used to describe vehicles (boats, planes, bicycles, etc.) making their way all the way around Earth.
During the 3 days I wfh, I get the most work done. I can focus and organize my day around executing a plan.
During the 2 days I'm in the office, I can get answers from people much quicker. Some people (new hires in particular) don't know how to describe their problem, or they're just really bad at it. My solution to endless teams convos is to just say "I'll head over to your desk" and then we work it out in person.
I think working with people in person can be very powerful. Is it essential though? No. Most corps don't even bother though. And most managers are bad at management. Working entirely wfh requires good managers with actual project management skills. Most corps are unwilling to train or prioritize hiring for that.