You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

lfghjkl comments on What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion

28 Post author: Punoxysm 16 October 2014 05:58PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (364)

Comments (364)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: lfghjkl 18 October 2014 12:28:53AM 4 points [-]

What you're missing is the following insight:

Let's simplify for the moment and assume that all software developers in the world could be ranked in absolute order of skill, and that you had a magical screening process that found the "best" person from any field.

Now, when you get those 200 resumes, and hire the best person from the top 200, does that mean you're hiring the top 0.5%?

"Maybe."

No. You're not. Think about what happens to the other 199 that you didn't hire.

They go look for another job.

That means, in this horribly simplified universe, that the entire world could consist of 1,000,000 programmers, of whom the worst 199 keep applying for every job and never getting them, but the best 999,801 always get jobs as soon as they apply for one. So every time a job is listed the 199 losers apply, as usual, and one guy from the pool of 999,801 applies, and he gets the job, of course, because he's the best, and now, in this contrived example, every employer thinks they're getting the top 0.5% when they're actually getting the top 99.9801%.

Taken from here.

Comment author: Jiro 18 October 2014 12:51:27AM *  2 points [-]

Taking a quote from somewhere else as a reply always risks the possibility that it doesn't quite fit what it is being used as a reply to.

I was pointing out that the described competence level implies that a competent programmer must be in the top 0.5% of the candidates for the job, not the top 0.5% of all programmers in the world. Of course your quote is in reference to the latter, not the former, and is therefore off point. In fact, your quote says that the former is indeed true, but the latter should not be confused with it.

(Furthermore, the original FizzBuzz reference claims that only 1 out of 200 people can solve FizzBuzz as an interview question, not as something required with each resume. Only hiring 1 out of 200 candidates who submit resumes is a heck of a lot more plausible than only hiring 1 out of 200 candidates who get to the interview stage.)

Comment author: lfghjkl 18 October 2014 01:39:57AM 3 points [-]

Taking a quote from somewhere else as a reply always risks the possibility that it doesn't quite fit what it is being used as a reply to.

The quote might not fit perfectly, but the insight does.

I was pointing out that the described competence level implies that a competent programmer must be in the top 0.5% of the candidates for the job, not the top 0.5% of all programmers in the world.

And the point of the quote is that this really doesn't say as much as you think. Hence why "99.5% of candidates fail the FizzBuzz test" isn't as implausible as on first glance.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit