“A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-profound-life-lessons-from-Stanford-Professor-John-Ousterhout?share=1

by vvijay03 • 12 years ago

245 62 12 years ago

quora.com

thmorton• 12 years ago

Link without the annoying Quora-login pop-over: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-profound-life-lesson...

greenyoda• 12 years ago

One of Ousterhout's examples of this principle is something that comes up frequently on HN:

"Before I came back to academia a couple of years ago I was out doing startups. What I noticed is that when people hire they are almost always hire based on experience. They're looking for somebody's resume trying to find the person who has already done the job they want them to do three times over. That's basically hiring based on Y-intercept.

Personally I don't think that's a very good way to hire. The people who are doing the same thing over and over again often get burnt out and typically the reason they're doing the same thing over and over again is they've maxed out. They can't do anything more than that. And, in fact, typically what happens when you level off is you level off slightly above your level of competence. So in fact you're not actually doing the current job all that well.

So what I would always hire on is based on aptitude, not on experience. You know, is this person ready to do the job? They may never have done it before and have no experience in this area, but are they a smart person who can figure things out? Are they a quick learner? And I've found that's a much better way to get really effective people."

arjie3• 12 years ago

Intriguingly, that's the opposite of what's popular on HN. HN and /r/programming posters prefer the "Look at what I've done. Here are my projects" approach which is the y-intercept because it describes where they are. Asking them a question they've never heard before and observing their approach is a way (albeit imperfect) of seeing how fast one can deal with a novel problem.

neumann• 12 years ago

Not necessarily, it can also describe the slope, based on the timestamp of the projects.

4 years ago I did this, I did this last year, last month I tried my hand at this. However, it requires the interviewer to have the skill to extract this information during the interview and recognise the slope.

Furzel• 12 years ago

"Look at what I've done. Here are my projects" is definitely not the Y-intercept "Look I went to <fancy school>" is the Y-intercept. With projects and experiences you can start to plot someone's work according to it's own Y-intercept and guess the slope. The hard part is assessing someone's slope when all you have is it's Y-intercept ( freshly out of school ).

Concerning asking tricky question, you can do it the Google way ( How many frogs does it take to build a space elevator ) but even they decided to stop these kind of questions or take a lot of time and find something your candidate can work on, even if the technology is known to him, seeing how fast he can appropriate himself the codebase is really a good way to judge your future new recruit potential

SilasX3• 12 years ago

If it were trivial to get people to take the time to test your slope, then yes, doing projects would indeed be a waste of time.

Fishkins• 12 years ago

When hiring, I agree that aptitude is probably a better signal than experience. However, I also think aptitude is much harder to assess during an interview. It's pretty easy to look at someone's work history, github, and ask them a few questions about what they currently know. I'm not sure if I know a truly effective way to figure out their aptitude in a short amount of time.

Swizec• 12 years ago

Teach them something.

There was an article about it making the rounds a few days/weeks ago. A guy basically takes on a class of 30+ people for two days when hiring, teaches them something, then hires the one who did best. The rest are still happy to have learned something.

Another good approach might be flat out asking "Tell me about the last time you learned something new"

df07• 12 years ago

I used to think this was right (trained in the school of Joel), but now I'm not so sure. I look at it this way: the best predictor of future success is past success. School is pretty non-predictive of your success in industry. General "intelligence" is as well. The best thing I can look at is: do you have a track record of tackling problems and delivering solutions? If you do, you'll probably keep doing that. If not, you're at best a gamble.

beachstartup• 12 years ago

during the first 3 years we were basically forced to hire from two pools of candidates:

1. people we have worked with before who are known quantities i.e. smart AND good

2. people with minimal experience who we deemed to be smart after talking to them for a few hours

it's worked out well. to be deadly honest nobody else wanted to work for us.

thrownaway24242• 12 years ago

But what if you just need the job done? Sometimes you're hiring for a position you expect to make a deep impact on the success of your startup, sometimes you just need the project written. In the latter case Ms. Intercept might get the job done in a week while Mr. Slope will take six months in some cases. All the aptitude in the world won't compensate for experience when time is a factor. Experience knows how to do the job on day zero, even if they aren't any better at it after they're done. The time you save from hiring Ms. Intercept as your first programmer might even buy you some extra time to find exactly the right person to be your superstar hire.

vanderZwan• 12 years ago

Oosterhout had that covered:

And if the Y-axis is something good, depending on your definition of something good, then I think most people would pick the red trajectory over the blue trajectory (..unless you think you're going to die before you get to the crossing point).

vinceguidry• 12 years ago

These days, you'd be best off contracting it out.

sillysaurus32• 12 years ago

Why do Quora articles continue to make the front page when we can't read them? I'm greeted with http://i.imgur.com/WTeSt8s.png No, I won't sign in with Google, nor Facebook.

How do the people upvoting this read the article? Do they sign in? What possible benefit is there to signing in? They're basically holding content hostage.

When I defended Scribd, people came out in droves to point out how wrong it was to hold unique content hostage. I'll admit, it made me rethink my position. But it's strange to see that Quora doesn't get the same stick.

EDIT: If the HN homepage had a popup saying "Login with Google or Facebook to read all of HN," would you tolerate it?

arjie3• 12 years ago

I believe it's because everyone knows you can add ?share=1 at the end and have it work.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-profound-life-lesson...

Still, I'm not a fan of this either.

JoshTriplett2• 12 years ago

Perhaps HN could either do this automatically for Quora links, or simply prohibit Quora links that don't already have this added?

yathern• 12 years ago

There's a button right there that says 'close'. I assume you just didn't see it. Granted, I'm not a fan of this either - but it's hardly holding the content hostage.

teraflop• 12 years ago

Clicking "close" doesn't make the blurred-out content visible.

nhebb• 12 years ago

I never noticed the Close button before, so I tried it w/o the ?share=1 in another browser. I get "Close & Read First Answer". All the answers after the first were blurred. I think this is the first time I've seen a site A/B test how best to annoy people.

isaacdl• 12 years ago

I just clicked on the whitespace away from/off of the login popup - it disappeared and I could read all the text.

arasmussen• 12 years ago

Why do Quora articles continue to make the front page when we can't read them?

We can read them, by signing in.

How do the people upvoting this read the article? Do they sign in?

Yes

What possible benefit is there to signing in?

We get to read the article.

If the HN homepage had a popup saying "Login with Google or Facebook to read all of HN," would you tolerate it?

Yes

Btw, dude, there's a close button.

grkvlt2• 12 years ago

Exactly. I really don't understand what's wrong with signing in to access content, it shows the site owner I'm actually interested in engaging. Facebook isn't going steal my soul when I send them my credentials, you know.

mindcrime• 12 years ago

Speaking only for myself, I visit Quora so frequently that I pretty much always have a login cookie stored, so I never see the login page.

That said, given my very public and vocal arguments against "walled gardens" in the past, why do I tolerate Quora? For the same reasons I tolerate G+, Facebook, etc. I annoys me and tickles a sore spot regarding the way I want things to be, but the value of the content is sufficient for me to "grin and bear it". But if there were a really good Quora alternative that was more open, I'd work to promote and support it. I don't know of one offhand though, especially considering network effects (that is, the value of Quora isn't the Quora software, it's the people posting and answering).

sillysaurus32• 12 years ago

Thank you for providing a counterargument.

jlees2• 12 years ago

I have a similar position. If the content is valuable enough then it's tolerable to have a gate. Quibb is another similar platform, but I don't know of anything with the quality of Quora answers - Stack Overflow is the closest, but it's very specific and Quora covers a lot of content the various Stack sites don't.

mscarborough• 12 years ago

Worse than being simply annoying and deceptive (since there are plenty of ways to get around it if you care), it's also literally useless.

For example, I just went into Incognito on another machine out of curiosity. I unclicked 'I am 13 or older' and then clicked on random grayed-out whitespace, and it showed the full article. Unless they kept my home IP from previous requests, but at that point, why bother with the age gate? Lawyers?

Not sure how anyone can defend this deceptive UX bullshit.

grkvlt2• 12 years ago

No, I won't sign in with Google, nor Facebook.

That's probably your problem. I signed up for Quora and can read the posts fine. Also, there's a 'close' link under that dialog, which you could have clicked without logging in.

If the HN homepage had a popup saying "Login with Google or Facebook to read all of HN," would you tolerate it?

Yes. Why not? It seems childish to rail against this. If a site is useful, I create an account. I did that for HN, and it doesn't matter if the sign-in mechanism is proprietary, Google based, Facebook or OAuth. In fact, I trust sites that use external, federalised SSO more because I know they didn't roll their own authentication with associated failures.

te• 12 years ago

http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php

tempestn• 12 years ago

Good points. I would add to his last point though that hiring at least one person with a high y-intercept can increase the slope of your other hires significantly. (It's a lot easier to learn something quickly if you have someone around who already knows a lot about it.) And people who both know a lot and learn quickly are expensive and rare, so I expect the optimal hiring process would look for a large percentage of relatively inexperienced fast learners, along with a small (but non-zero) percentage of more experienced people, even if they aren't likely to develop as quickly. (Perhaps consultants would fit well in that role too.)

hyperliner• 12 years ago

Actually, if you are going in the opposite direction, a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of negative Y-intercept.

oaktowner• 12 years ago

Ah, Ousterhout. Guess he's at Stanford now; he was a prof at Berkeley when I was there. He had an amazing knack for presenting CS in an entertaining (and, at times, hilarious) manner.

Best professor I ever had.

calcsam• 12 years ago

One hopes that the graph of life is linear and not a differential equation path-dependent on initial conditions...

crasshopper3• 12 years ago

Let's race 10 miles. I run each mile in 5:59 and you run each mile in 6:00. You get a mile head start.

Whoops—this fable is only true "eventually", if the slopes remain the same as t→∞.

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

I'm curious, do you think Ousterhout or the people quoting him are confused about this?

crasshopper3• 12 years ago

Probably everyone knows the math; I just think they're exaggerating the relevance of this model to real life.

I'm with the commenter (here) who said that real life is more likely to be an initial-value-dependent or path-dependent PDE. Someone else said having a high-IV person on your team will raise the slopes of everyone else which seems also right: the issues are multidimensional, not affine 1-D.

Ousterhout is taking sides (smarter > more experienced) which is fine; he can make that argument. But using y=mx+b as x→∞ doesn't count as an argument; it's rhetorical flair, not rhetorical substance. The substance of his reasoning seems to be "That's my opinion based on my experience in my past jobs".

cpwright• 12 years ago

If you read the full answer, you'll realize that he points out you'll pick the better slope, unless you think you'll be dead before the two lines intersect; so he clearly understands it.

If you're going to pick apart the math, we might as well pick apart that not everything can be modeled well as a linear function.

tfigueroa• 12 years ago

It's a bit of a false dilemma to choose between experience or aptitude.

In the start-up period, though, aptitude is a better strategic choice in that you need people who can grow as quickly as the venture.

Later, you need the people with experience, even if they're a bit slow. They're the ones that have been bitten by the edge cases, the deadlocks, the XSS openings - and know to avoid them.

thrownaway24242• 12 years ago

Really? I'd rather have the experienced but dull people to put together the minimal product first. Having them onboard gives me more time to find and hire the right aptitude people, and having them there _first_ keeps the inexperienced people from sticking in all the deadlocks and security holes in the first place.

Do people really want their minimally-viable product to be full of deadlocks? I personally do not. And I don't want to hire promising but new-to-the-industry people who have to check stackoverflow to remember the difference between a pointer and a reference, or who spend hours trying to debug why something in their python program is iterating over a string.

Bottom line, I guess I don't see how anyone can want to bring in aptitude in the absence of experience. People with both would be fine, or a combination of both types of people would be fine. Aptitude without experience is not going to work.

orasis• 12 years ago

Said another way: You are perfect exactly as you are, because in this moment, there is no other way you can possibly be.

However, in this moment, perfect as you are, you can still resolve to practice.

- Paraphrased from "The Practicing Mind"

EGreg• 12 years ago

I happen to disagree regarding the hiring. I prefer to put more emphasis on the system itself, and not the developers, who should be replaceable. (I say this as a developer myself, who prefers to be replaceable.)

When a developer forgets to test their code before pushing it to production, we often blame the developer. But the real problem is lack of automated testing, lack of processes, and too much responsibility for the developer.

With a good system in place, you hire people who have all the prerequisite knowledge (the languages, patterns, experience with similar solutions to the ones they'll do, and preferably good team spirit that matches your culture). The rest can be learned on the job. But once again, focus on your onboarding materials!

In short -- you should always look to be optimizing the system. THAT is your "slope" if you will. Except it's not a slope, it's an exponent! Because it builds on itself week after week. And you don't risk that one developer somewhere messing up your code.

We say: people live lives, companies create products.

“A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

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