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Yeah but then you're too old. Need to be in your 20s with a couple decades of experience.



Calling it now - a leetcode-based kindergarten programme is the next big a16z investment.


"Hit the ground running."


You say this ironically, but someone who’s been working hard 15 hours 7 days a week in a niche, 50 weeks a year, from age 15 to age 29 has clearly a much higher potential than a 45 year old following the normal path in life.

And almost certainly a higher employable value too unless they have catastrophically bad social skills…


Let's say they sleep 6 hours a day, every day.

Someone who works for 15 out of 18 of their waking hours, leaving 3 hours to eat, exercise, and have any semblance of social interactions or secondary interests, for FOURTEEN YEARS is not a genius. They are actually an idiot, wasting their life.


Did they develop those social skills during the free time they had?


Why does this matter?

They can develop it while lying in bed and daydreaming for all the difference it makes.


The implication was that someone who dedicated all of their time as physically possible to working and studying, would not have had time to develop social skills


Talented people can improve in multiple directions at the same time… unless you don’t believe this?

Plus any 29 year old who can actually land a genuine 500k-600k USD compensation job at a big company is a literal genius, at the very least.


Do you honestly believe that an individual who

>… been working hard 15 hours 7 days a week in a niche, 50 weeks a year, from age 15 to age 29…

Developed the same level of social skills as the average individual who lived a more normal schedule?

I have to ask before you even answer that. Do you believe that social skills are something to be practiced and built upon, are they some waste of time they only hormones bother with, or some other option I haven’t considered?


They can develop, in many aspects, far superior to an average individual given the same amount of time.

And develop to a comparable level given a much shorter period of time.

That’s pretty much by definition for literal geniuses.


I think you might be delusional if you think that the people who can do all of this at the same time and don’t come out maladjusted to society is anything beyond a fraction of a fraction of a percent of outliers


Are you confused about what geniuses are? Or did you not finish reading the comment?

Because this reply doesn’t make sense in relation to the previous comment.

They are very much outliers, so they are by definition a very small fraction of society.


This is just magical thinking on your end. I’ve met some of these “literal geniuses” making 500k at faangs and most of them are completely socially maladapted once you’ve taken them out of the pipeline they’ve lived in since high school to getting their first job mid or late 20s after their masters or PhD.

Secondly you started off this chain with talking about how someone working hard for 15 hours a day for decades is going to be more valuable and they’ll just be able to pick up every skill a human could have or need because they’re “geniuses”.

If they’re really geniuses why do they need to grind?

If you’re implying that they are only part of the set of geniuses that grind that long and there is another set of geniuses that didn’t, then how does that track with geniuses being a very small fraction of society?


I never said they are guaranteed to be this or that?

Clearly some fraction do have critically bad social skills which do materially affect their prospects to a significant degree.

But the majority of them do exceed that very low bar, so it’s simply not that critical of a hinderance most of the time.

You appear to be reading absolute implications into my comments, and/or inserting your own conjectures which aren’t there on a plain reading.


> But the majority of them do exceed that very low bar, so it’s simply not that critical of a hinderance most of the time.

Describing not having catastrophically bad social skills as a “very low” bar is not a valid take when it comes to the world of computer science. I remember when visiting Carnegie Mellon as a senior in high school and evaluating their comp sci program, how the guides suddenly got very serious when they informed our parents(not the prospective students) that a course on hygiene was required freshman year and could not be waived. I’ve also worked with near limitless number of engineers who think they have the social skills down and then don’t understand why no one wants to work with them when they will do shit like call someone else’s project they’ve worked on for months pointless or useless in a group setting without even trying to approach said coworker with even a modicum of social awareness.

Those kinds of behaviors don’t show up in a population where having non catastrophically bad social skills is a “very low bar”

> You appear to be reading absolute implications into my comments, and/or inserting your own conjectures which aren’t there on a plain reading.

I think we’re coming at this with different axioms. You seem to believe that social skills are trivial and don’t matter next to the hard sciences that people grind away on. I am coming from one where I have to constantly make excuses or apologies for various people in software engineering or comp sci because they appear to be literally incapable of empathy or understanding that other people might have a different viewpoint than theirs.

Given my axiom I think your are handwaving away a lot, and that’s where you see my statements as inserted conjectures.




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