
Why You Can't Say - lacker
http://lacker.io/tech/2017/04/05/why-you-cant-say.html
======
arjie
Good post.

Since we're contributing taboos, here's my offering: Prolific commenters on
Internet message boards tend to be less professionally capable and not more.
High HN karma is evidence of poorer impulse control and time management, and
most importantly, less time spent on the day job. For each person who is a
prolific commenter, an identically appearing person who comments less is
likely to be the better source of knowledge. Equally importantly, the
perspective of these people is hopelessly skewed by the community they're in.

~~~
nostrademons
Not sure if that's really a taboo, it's been commonly expressed on many
Internet message boards, often self-referentially.

I suspect it's actually more that the _average_ commenter on a forum related
to their field tends to be more skilled than the _average_ worker in that
field, because the average worker spends their workday reading other forums
that are unrelated to their field, but the _very best_ professionals in a
field are usually not found on Internet forums, because they're doing their
job instead of talking about it.

~~~
arjie
Hmm, that's true. But I think message boards simultaneously tend to the "oh,
I'm terrible, wasting time here haha." and to "Oh that guy's got so much
karma, and I see him posting all the time. He probably knows what he's
saying.".

------
vectorpush
> _The most successful companies all use whiteboard interviews_

Not much evidence to demonstrate that this is a significant contributing
factor in their success. The five companies listed are pioneering behemoths
that transcend the boundaries of rote startup analysis.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that whiteboard interviews are fine, but I
think programmers tend to dislike them because the physical act of standing up
to write code on a whiteboard is awkward and disconcerting, especially in the
context of a high pressure interview. The skill of using a large unwieldy
marker to render text by hand on a vertical surface requires a significant
amount of practice and I think many programmers just resent the need to hone
this skill which is mostly useless outside of an interview setting. Something
like a written test or questionnaire with pencil and paper is much more well
received, or more ideally an offline workstation running something like
notepad that's hooked up to a projector or big screen.

------
retrogradeorbit
I totally agree about the hiring process. I've found that those most vocal
against certain hiring techniques that tend to work fairly well in the large
are bitter at their own mediocrity being discovered in such a process, and
that result flying head first into their own over inflated sense of their own
ability.

~~~
eikenberry
I think it is simpler than that. That whiteboard interviews are stressful and
people don't like the additional stress on top of the already stressful
interview process.

------
LouisSayers
I feel like what's discussed here is more controversial than taboo. It's
similar, but slightly different.

While Whiteboard interviews might be controversial, I wouldn't consider this
taboo. Making jokes in the workplace about women however, would be considered
taboo. Even though this may have been considered 'acceptable' just 15 years
back.

It seems like the difference between the two is one of opinion vs offence.
While having a different opinion is fine, raising offence really depends on
how much backlash you get.

------
d3ckard
I do not think you should use really big corporations as example. First of
all, they attract enough talent to use any methods of selection they see fit.
They do not care about false negatives, since they operate on virtually
unlimited pool of resources.

Secondly, the logic against whiteboard interviews is sound. I have never had
to implement complex algorithm at work. Never. Which means that last time I
actually wrote some was at college, about 7 years ago. Obviously, to perform
well, I need to study to remind myself how to use red-black trees for example.
Or how to implement priority queue (hopefully not using Fibonacci Heap, ugh).
Any effort that goes into it is basically wasted, since chances I will have to
actually do this at job are close to zero. So I'm basically reminding myself
how to do something I will never do past interview. Not very effective.

Third and last, good software engineering is, as I believe, not strongly
correlated with algorithms knowledge. People great at hacking quite often get
in trouble when they have to develop readable, predictable system. This is
different set of skills.

------
vacri
> _A confident group doesn’t need taboos to protect it. It’s not considered
> improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English._

The Catholic Church is a pretty confident group, yet it's taken multiple
decades for people to start taking allegations of wrongdoing seriously. It's
been taboo for a long time to cast aspersions against the church, even though
they're a powerful organisation - how can _you_ dare to question _them_!?

Conversely, until quite recently, in Anglo societies being pregnant in public
was somewhat taboo, as was breastfeeding in public or letting a mentally
handicapped child be seen in public. Same with talking about domestic
violence. These are taboos against the weak, not the strong or in-between.

As for "not eating mud because that's what others tell you", the author
clearly hasn't played a field sport in winter.

~~~
lacker
_> As for "not eating mud because that's what others tell you", the author
clearly hasn't played a field sport in winter._

Guilty as charged.

That one was just on my mind because my daughter loves eating mud, and it's
pretty clear she won't listen to reason. Only an Argument From Authority will
do the trick.

~~~
vacri
Wait a year or two and you'll have the opposite problem - getting her to eat
anything that isn't her one favourite food :)

------
bruxis
Does anyone else find it extremely disturbing that one of the examples they
provide for "things you believe not because of logic [thus, it's objectively
true], but because other people told you to" is "Human life is a precious
thing"?

~~~
deadlyllama
It follows from Christian theology (imago dei) but that's increasingly losing
ground in the West. If we're just agglomerations of atoms why should I believe
that all human agglomerations are equally precious?

~~~
edko
> If we're just agglomerations of atoms why should I believe that all human
> agglomerations are equally precious?

If we're just agglomerations of atoms, why would any agglomeration of atoms,
human or not, be precious at all?

~~~
Baeocystin
Because patterns are neat.

(I mean that less flippantly than it reads.)

------
brandnewlow
You should do a blog/tumblr of "startup advice successful founders can't
publicly share" and give founders you know an anonymous way to contribute.

------
thereare5lights
This is a logically incoherent blog post. You go from one point to another
without any logical causation. It's literally ramblings about what you believe
but you don't bother to make the case for it except with the most glib of
arguments.

------
libeclipse
Sure whiteboard interviews are hated by everyone and maybe they aren't so
terrible, but I think there's better alternatives than "just chatting about
their past".

How about a coding exercise to take home?

~~~
thowar2
Are they hated by everyone? Or just by those who can't pass them?

~~~
di4na
I can pass them. Hell i passed them most of the time and i help people pass
them.

They are atrocious.

------
parenthephobia
> _But in practice there are a zillion things you believe not because of
> logic, but because other people told you to._ > _Red lights mean stop_

The author ignores second-order effects. Red lights meaning stop is arbitrary,
but I believe that I should stop at red lights not because I accept the
arbitrary assignment, but because of the objective fact that if I don't I'll
eventually end up in hospital.

> _The most successful companies all use whiteboard interviews_

The most successful companies all use bank accounts with million dollar
balances. One shouldn't confuse cause and effect.

I've worked for a few (arguably) successful companies, and I'm firmly of the
opinion that they are almost invariably pathologically averse to risk and
unwilling to experiment with new ways of doing things, _especially_ when those
ways aren't used by their competitors.

Conversely, every such company seems to believe that their competitors are
doing rigorous scientific analysis of business methods and so if their
competitors are all using whiteboard interviews "there must be something in
it".

> _The most successful companies all use whiteboard interviews_

Do Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Facebook owe their success to the
quality of their developers, though? I would suggest that they do not. They
may be relying on the wrong signals when hiring developers, not hiring the
best, but still succeeding due to other factors.

Heck, Google made a new programming language designed to make it hard to
confuse mediocre programmers. That tells me something about the average skill
of their developers.

> _The most successful companies all use whiteboard interviews_

The most successful companies also have lots and lots of applicants.

Even if whiteboard interviews meant you automatically fail 50% of candidates
because they're no good at them, that's not such a major problem if there are
100 candidates for each job. If ten of the candidates are top-class, you still
have five of them left after half of them flunk the whiteboard.

OTOH, if you have 10 candidates, the likelihood increases that the _actually_
superior candidate will be the one that flunks.

------
aerovistae
About to offer my own personal HN heresy, after reading the original Paul
Graham article: in reading many of his essays, am I the only person who gets
the impression that the author has a major superiority complex about his own
intelligence? Something about the tone, and sometimes the examples he chooses
throughout his essays.

------
jayajay
The beginning of this article is interesting. If I was from the distant
future, maybe I'd ask these questions followed by the answers I'm expecting
from 2017:

Q: Why are people still working? A: You need to work to live.

Q: Why do men and women appear so different? A: They are biologically very
different.

Q: Why are people trying to increase, rather than decrease, the amount of jobs
to be done by humans? A: Idiot, clearly we need more jobs, otherwise everyone
will be poor!

Q: Why are people waiting for signs and lights in metal cages with wheels? A:
Those wheels in metal cages are one of our most prolific forms of
transportation right now.

Q: Why are people eating other animals? A: Who doesn't, meat is tasty!

Q: Why do people have different skin color? A: You are racist.

Q: Why are some people so round? A: Are you making fun of fat people?

Q: Why are some people in a rolling chair all of the time? A: Some people are
born with disabilities or break bones.

Q: Why are people still cutting other people open to fix them? A: How else do
you stop internal bleeding and remove tumors?

Q: Why do 51 people decide what happens to 100 people instead of 1 person
deciding what happens to 1 person? A: Ever heard of democracy, (unfortunately)
the most fair system ever created to date by our founding fathers (who also
owned tons of human slaves)?

Q: What is a border and how come I can't see it? A: Ever heard of the nation
state? You're already subject to it just by being here. Didn't anyone tell you
that?

Q: Why do people get thrown in cages for misbehaving? A: What else would we do
with misfits and dangerous people?

~~~
AstralStorm
Putting in hypothetical answers displays your biases. Better to collect
questions and accept that reality is complicated enough that simple answers do
not work in general and often on average too.

