
Early-career setback and future career impact - hhs
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3
======
lioeters
> ..Early-career setback appears to cause a _performance improvement_ among
> those who persevere.

> ..These findings are consistent with the concept that “what doesn’t kill me
> makes me stronger,” which may have broad implications for identifying,
> training and nurturing junior scientists.

Good to hear, as someone who (is not a scientist but) has had a fair share of
early-career setbacks, from external causes, bad luck, as well as self-
inflicted in youthful ignorance. :)

At least from an anecdotal retrospective of my current blessed situation,
surviving and overcoming these setbacks have indeed made me more resilient and
persistently motivated.

~~~
mirimir
I like "We are the sum of our scars." And OK, it's from Stover's Caine novels.

Also, we wouldn't have fingers and toes if intervening cells in the early limb
bugs hadn't died.

~~~
mirimir
Damn. I meant "buds".

------
verelo
Funny personal story:

In 2008 i applied for an IT role at News Corp in Sydney Australia, i didn’t
get the job. In 2015 they (one of their subsidiary companies) acquired the
company that i founded with two other partners. A much better outcome.

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mch82
I’m sure I’ll feel silly when someone finds them, but are the concepts of
“narrow win” and “near miss” defines in the context of this paper? Is “career
setback” defined?

~~~
laser
In the abstract “Here we examine junior scientists applying for National
Institutes of Health R01 grants. By focusing on proposals fell just below and
just above the funding threshold, we compare near-miss with narrow-win
applicants”

In other words, scientists who just barely missed funding “near miss” versus
scientists who just barely were over the threshold to receive it “narrow win”.

~~~
mch82
Thank you

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jl2718
Or it’s just a filter for perseverance.

~~~
salmonellaeater
The paper tests this hypothesis and finds that there's probably a causal
effect:

 _"...these results demonstrate that the screening effect may have played a
role, but it appears insufficient to entirely account for the observed
difference between near misses and narrow wins."_

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domnomnom
Code and data is here:

[https://yang-wangnu.github.io/setback/](https://yang-
wangnu.github.io/setback/)

------
throwawayy98121
Come work at Amazon. If you can survive at Amazon, you can literally work
anywhere afterwards (assuming they hire you and you’re not an asshole).

------
jammygit
I like the conclusion but I have to dispute it: there is a snowball effect for
motivated (and resilient) people. Maybe this shows that most people are not
motivated and need a kick in the pants, but if you are clever and you get
ahead, you can use that to get more ahead (otherwise you were not really ahead
at all)

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pazimzadeh
Figure 2 and 3 legends don't start at zero. What in the world?

------
kshacker
Another funny personal story: since someone shared one.

Started developing a taste for studying and computers at age 12-13. Did not
hit a stumbling block till 40. Oh yes there were bad times but it was always
one valley to another peak and at 40 the tide turned. I would not say it was
the Midas touch, it was not, there were others way more successful but I look
at my growth based on my aspirations and capabilities.

And then the fall. Took 5 years to realize the fubar situation and then maybe
6 years of perseverance with a course correction ;) Even before the article I
realized that the lack of failures in early days probably hurt me in the long
run.

Once again, this is a very simplified version. Even I could find flaws in my
presentation of details if I needed to.

------
jar_cup_bowl
Anecdote: My company has recently passed on a few early career candidates who
pretty clearly hadn't been mentored.

We have a take-home assignment as part of our interview process and they were
able to get a working solution, but missed on design patterns that would make
their code more maintainable and extensible, things that are usually learned
from code-reviews by people who have had the experience of working with bad
code.

This was more common in candidates who came to us from the tech departments of
non-tech focused companies.

We lamented not being able to hire otherwise smart and personable candidates,
but at the end of the day we only had headcount for 1 employee and we went
with a different smart and personable candidate who had better early career
opportunities.

~~~
jschwartzi
> Anecdote: My company has recently passed on a few early career candidates
> who pretty clearly hadn't been mentored.

Either that or the candidates you passed on simply didn't want to spend
several hours making enterprise-grade software for a take-home test that
they're not getting paid for.

~~~
noobiemcfoob
This. This. This.

Everyone thinks they can interpret their tests perfectly. Ultimately, the
candidates are likely better off. The coded message here is not that they
didn't use obvious design patterns but that they didn't code in the way the
employer wanted. Which...I suppose is a perfectly fine reason to pass on a
candidate.

