
Sturgeon's Passionate Revelation - raganwald
http://braythwayt.com/2014/02/03/sturgeon%27s-passionate-revelation.html
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raganwald
Mind you, the observation that "90% of the companies advertising for
passionate programmers are crud" is uninformative about the nature of passion
does not mean that Avdi's article was uninformative. It's highly useful to be
reminded that such companies are nothing special, and that working 80+ hour
weeks is nothing special. 90% of all that is crud, and that's ok.

And speaking personally, it's very important to be reminded that being
passionate about programming isn't anything special, it's a personal choice. I
don't believe that in and of itself it makes me necessarily worse than if I
was "moderately enthusiastic," but it doesn't make me any better.

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cgh
So I guess the trick is in identifying the non-crud identifiers, not just for
potential employees but for anything really. How do we do that?

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marcosdumay
Not just any non-crud indentifier. You'll need some very reliable ones. The
more extreme the (un)likeness of something, the more reliable indicators you
need for dealing with it.

For example, say that 90% of your potential emplyees are crud. You have a
position with 100 candidates and 10 are fit for it. Now, you apply a (very
well correlated) identifier, it reduces the candiadtes to 50, keeping 8. You
still have too many candidates, so you apply another filter, reducing them to
25 in total, with 6 good ones... You can see where this is going, with some
luck you'll have: 4/12, 3/6, 2/3, 1/1; you can expect quite often to have:
3/12, 2/6, 1/3, 0/1; with some bad luck you'll have: 3/12, 1/6, 0/3, and no
good candidate will make it even to the last round of selections.

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mattfieldy
By extension, 90% of the internet is crud - this article wasn't. Thanks Reg.

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dredmorbius
No. The Internet's six sigma compliant. 99.99966% of everything is crud.

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badman_ting
Wait, I'm confused. Did anything happen here except for restating the law (OK,
"revelation") a few times?

