Admittedly, I only skimmed this. But within the space of video games, I’m not sure Overwatch is a stunning example since it’s generally a casual game.
I’ve been playing various iterations of Counter-Strike and StarCraft for decades. Sometimes with deliberate practice, including reading strategies, playing custom maps to practice certain skills, and watching series aimed at improving level of play. And despite the hundreds of hours invested I don’t believe I’ve ever cracked the top 50% in any leaderboard rankings.
Anyone in the top 5% is definitely that good, executing complex strategies with extreme precision.
There are lots of areas in life that are highly competitive — where being the best takes raw talent, a huge time investment, and a bit of luck. I wouldn’t try to diminish that.
In every competitive game I've ever played (Overwatch, CSGO, LoL, TFT, Rocket League), the top 5% definitely wasn't "that good".
In my mind, the top 20% are people who actually play. If you are stuck anywhere below that, you aren't even trying to improve. If a leaderboard says you haven't even cracked top 50%, then that leaderboard is definitely cutting players that don't play much from the bottom of that list. In most competitive games, the bottom 80% is just casuals who play a few times and stop, or people who only play the game while high.
Then the top 5% is when you start understanding the game at a competitive level. The very start.
Then the top 1% is where you can consider yourself good at the game, but, still, there are a ton of fairly bad players that play enough to get here but don't understand what they're doing. It's a combination of grinders and skilled players.
Then the 0.1% is where you have good players. Not pros, but definitely, unarguably, good.
>Then the top 5% is when you start understanding the game at a competitive level. The very start.
On the other hand, your handle is "xbox, no life".
The whole OP premise is:
"Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things. Note that when I say 95%-ile, I mean 95%-ile among people who participate, not all people (for many activities, just doing it at all makes you 99%-ile or above across all people). I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate."
It might not be impressive if you have a monomania on the specific subject, but it is very impressive when you also have a life, and this is just one thing you do...
Even more so if you're 95% on more than one things (imaging meeting someone that's 95% programmer, conversationalist, cook, guitar player, marathon runner, business owner, ... He would automatically be hella more impressive than the huge majority of people you meet)...
Congrats on the ad hominem I guess? My name is a joke.
> Even more so if you're 95% on more than one things (imaging meeting someone that's 95% programmer, conversationalist, cook, guitar player, marathon runner, business owner, ... He would automatically be hella more impressive than the huge majority of people you meet)...
Being in the top 5% for more than 1 thing is trivially easy. Top 5% is just 1 in 20 people who have attempted. Most people have tried cooking at least once. Most people have ran at least once in their life (Hell, just completing a marathon would put you in the top 5% of of people who run). The pool of people who have attempted programming by now is pretty massive (and it's a pretty big conversation about how many do not succeed).
Being in the top 5% of just these is really not difficult. It only seems difficult if you only compare people trying to be in the top percentile and not every person who has ever participated.
SC2 is by far the hardest (in terms of time investment & deliberate practice) to achieve. The amount of practice required to not get demolished by 16-19 year olds in a PC cafe in Seoul was ...yikes.
Games like CSGO/OW, where teamwork above speeds viable for human to human communication is required, can often topple "individual rockstars" with superior team coordination (each member of a team reacts to an event within 150-350ms knowing exactly how their teammates will react, and this is executed in tandem). The biggest difference between Top .1% and professionals is very similar to the difference between good and excellent engineers in terms of organizational efficacy: while their individual raw skill levels may be quite similar, the ability to communicate / coordinate makes a world of difference. A well-oiled team, in gaming and in software, will almost always run circles around a disjoined one comprised of people who have an otherwise higher skill level individually.
Source: Been to a few world finals and top 0.01% in CSGO/OW/SC2/SCBW/others.
Top 5% rating cutoff for lichess blitz chess is currently 2200. That corresponds to the bottom levels of master/pro players in classic odb chess tournaments. A lot of pros play online, so benchmarking is decently reliable.
"Not that good" is subjective... but to me, this is serious levels of chess play.
But you're looking at "chess players with a lichess rating", not all chess players. Chess in particular has a ton of people who only play very occasionally, can barely remember the rules, and move the pieces semi-randomly rather than develop any sort of tactics or strategy.
Have you played an RTS game? Look at Age of Empires 2 or 4. The ELO system has a nice normal distribution. My brother, myself, and a few friends have been playing for 20 years. I'm top 30%. My brother's top 60%.
Everyone watches streamers, micros, max-performs their civs, uses strong unit comps, does all the economic tricks like luring boars, knows the counters etc.
Starcraft 2 was similar, although ELO was tougher to determine since it was grouped in leagues.
I've found that if you consistently make vills & army you can compete pretty easily at this level. For the most part I play random civ, don't use hotkeys, and don't use build orders and it hasn't been too rough.
Lately I've been playing more teamgames and spending more time watching streamers play (shout out to survivalist!).
Nice! It really is amazing watching the community over time. Techniques like house walling, archer kiting, scout rushes, hit+run vil attacks with starting scout, boar luring, deer pushing etc went from being rare/high-level play, to something everyone (above 800 ELO at least) does!
This is exactly in line with my experience as well. There is also an idea that all skilled players are grinders, which in my experience is definitely not true; having more games played than a professional usually signals to me that they're addicted to the game but don't care much about actually improving.
I remember back in the days I had dial-up and installed a Tetrinet server. I could beat anyone, except this one girl who was competitive with me. People came and went. I could slack a bit, get on their level, yet still win. Then I got DSL and my ping improved, making the game easier. OTOH, some people (mostly, good ones) sticked around, and ultimately improved. I had to play better. Until, at some point, we had multiple competitive players. Competition makes people (play) better, its one of the thriving forces behind capitalism (which, arguably, also has its flaws). Did we all play Tetrinet a lot? Oh yes.
My experience with gaming is that at a certain percentile, there's no-lifers, some of whom are pros. I don't want to look up at no-lifers, so I care about the amount of effort put in to reach the goal. Without knowing the amount of effort, I don't care about the result. Its meaningless to me. Whereas in a sports competition with sponsors and everything you can assume they give it their everything (their life's work), we don't know how it is with non-professional gaming. Ergo: meaningless.
Except that's not what I argue, at all. I have seen people in gaming who put in a lot less effort than I did, yet are far better. I've seen people adapt to new mechanics quickly. That's productive, in a way. I've also seen the opposite of that.
I never said that my own gameplay is the way to go though. Just that I observed people who put in less effort being better, and people put in more effort being worse. Its why I went with a more casual approach, which meant half of what was the standard as structured group play... except for one thing: they added M+ dungeons in that expansion, and that forced players to play more structured group play than raiding.
Also, there's this thing where you give up. There's no shame in such, either. Its just that you decide to not spend time trying. As the saying goes: Quitters never win. Winners never quit. But those who never quit, and never win, are losers.
Skimmed too fast indeed you missed this: “ …I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. …” I think anyone in the leaderboard rankings is consciously learning like you. He means 95th-ile among everyone who plays casually.
I played StarCraft 2 (SC2). I reached Master 3, and my MMR at the time was top 3% globally.
I wouldn't say I was that good. My foundational skills were decent, but not amazing and I did poorly against cheese or in extreme late-game situations. My micro in large scale battles also sucked.
A lot of people in the community would say that Master is where the game starts, and in some ways that's very true.
This:
> Anyone in the top 5% is definitely that good, executing complex strategies with extreme precision
Is more like GM in SC2. In Master players can usually execute 90-95% perfectly if left alone, but that quickly falls apart if you have to multitask. Probably closer to 70-80% at best in real games, if that.
Also, almost everyone is copying strategies not doing anything particularly complicated. It's hard enough to just play the damn game with a simple strategy, no point in making it harder.
I think this is basically true when looking at most skillsets. 95%ile is a grind, but it's mostly one of error reduction and vocabulary building. Most people can build vocabulary just fine given time and attention, but observing and correcting errors is much harder.
When a game is just outright complex like SC2 in its decision making(hundreds of units and structures that could be individually commanded), all the skills needed to reach 95%ile boil down to rote technique: "good builds", "meta strats", etc. This is where most video games sit, since this kind of overt complexity is something you can learn in little nibbles: A is more powerful than B in situation X.
In comparison, games like pinball have relatively little going on in their vocabulary: there are plenty of techniques and rulesets, but much of the good strategy boils down to "hit accurately" and "recover successfully", and those are entirely sources of error, reduced only through many hours of play to find methods of hitting and recovering with good expected value and low risk - sweet spots on a playfield and a deep understanding of the physics to enable combo setups. If you have accuracy, you need only have a small layer of rules and shots knowledge to smoke tournaments. With little to consciously memorize to overcome the skill gap, casual players conclude that pinball is "just random".
1. Overwatch, the competitive ladder, is not a casual game. Everything you mentioned for CS, happens in Overwatch too; it's a esport that had millions invested.
2. The top 5% of CSGO ranked is Legendary Eagle. There is a world of difference between Legendary Eagle and Global Elite (top .75%). And even between those 2 ranks, there are two other ranks. The top 5% isn't that good; and Global Elite itself is still a step below actual pros.
I don't think it's a matter of not being good, just that others are that much better. It might sound similar, but it's not. You're still better than hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people.
It's like being a tech worker who earns $400k a year and saying "I don't earn that much, there's people who do what I do clearing seven figures a year, and others who were able to retire in their early 30s and don't even have to work anymore because they became so wealthy from work." Sure, it's not a lot of money compared to those people, but it is when compared to the vast majority of wage earners in any region in the world.
Actually, global elite is a few steps below actual pros - above global theres faceit level 10, then open ladders/leagues, then invite only leagues which are at semi-pro level and lastly the pro leagues
EDIT: AFAIK Global Elite starts at about 1600-1700 elo, theres a lot of room above that
Cool. As a Legendary Eagle Master I didn't even know this. I assume that is like the top 2.5% or something? I would agree with the initial statement of the article, though: Watching "real" competitive players just seems like magic and I feel like average at best, albeit apparently (as I just learned) being in the top 5% or better. Same goes for basically anything else I am "good" at, even with work. There's just always so many people being so much better ...
At least a few years ago when I was still following the CS:GO scene a lot of pros weren't Global Elite. It takes a different skillset to be able to dominate pubs and to be able to work well in a professional CS team.
A lot of pros aren’t global elite simply because they don’t play matchmaking seriously at all. Absolutely every professional csgo player in a top-20/30/100 team would easily attain that rank if they wanted it.
I mean that's a pretty empty statement then. I might as well say "Anyone can easily attain Global Elite if they wanted it.". Most people aren't taking matchmaking serious at all. It's just a pub game. I don't see a reason to hold pros to a lower standard here.
Counter-strike and StarCraft have existed for way longer than Overwatch and it was even truer in 2020. 95-percentile of a playerbase full of casuals is easier than 95-percentile of a playerbase of hardcore fans that have all been doing it for decades.
In fact that may be a lesson to take away. If you want to be 95 percentile easily, pick a new field. Since you don't have catching up to do, 95-perentile effort will get you there quickly.
Top 0.05 is really not good. You're talking diamond league. There's a huge amount of mistakes and errors that a serious observer can spot.
But not everyone can reach 0.05, that's where he's mistaken. He thinks that because he is highly intelligent and getting to 0.05 is a breeze for such people. But most people aren't.
TFA: The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate
An important point is that you're now better than 95% of starcraft players if you reach middling competitiveness against those who compete regularly. At 50th pctile in competitions youre absolutely better than the vast majority of starcraft players.
It's not clear what being 99% among people who play very casually actually gives you. In many cases it's not a lot.
Take chess, for example. By practicing regularly on Lichess, you can achieve a skill level that will beat 99% of casual chess players. However, you'll almost never play against this people. You'll play against other folks on Lichess, who all play regularly, and a top 1% of all chess players can easily be in the bottom 50% of the people you'll play on Lichess. It's not clear what you gain from being better than 99% of people who don't play on Lichess with any regularity, and you'll therefore never encounter.
I think the point of the article is more in line of: "If there's something useful you want to be excellent at, rest assured it'll take much less effort than you think".
> Take chess, for example. By practicing regularly on Lichess, you can achieve a skill level that will beat 99% of casual chess players.
> However, you'll almost never play against this people. You'll play against other folks on Lichess, who all play regularly, and a top 1% of all chess players can easily be in the bottom 50% of the people you'll play on Lichess.
Yes, that's in line with TFA and my comment (being middling against top 10% makes you excellent against 90% of people).
> It's not clear what you gain from being better than 99% of people who don't play on Lichess with any regularity, and you'll therefore never encounter.
You gain the ability to say "I'm probably in 95%-le of people who play chess". and "Oh you play chess? We should play!" and you will soundly defeat them. If you don't soundly defeat them, you can rest assured they have studied and practiced and regularly compete, since you do those things. Maybe you can organize chess clubs. Maybe there are in-person tournaments you'd like to compete in. Maybe it'll make you friends or a spouse or open up job opportunities or be a decent interview discussion to show "extra curricular activities". Who knows.
It's not as clear an advantage in every-day situations as, say, practicing a martial art or car maintenance or long-distance running or cooking, where the 10%/95%-ile tradeoff becomes painfully obvious. The problem is that chess isn't very useful. So, being 95%-ile at chess just doesn't get you much.
I bet %95 of the people who do Ski jumping are THAT GOOD because they are already an elite subset of the population. That is probably true for all the professional athletes.
As a result, athletes mostly compete on the higher end where everyone is very good and all the hard work they put in barely moves the needle due to the law of diminishing returns.
My point is, the percentile is likely to be defined around how hard or easy it is to reach the point where putting in effort starts yielding less and less of returns.
The skill floor of really old games gets skewed dramatically. If you don’t have a ton of people flooding into 0MMR, and people start to filter out of the game, the bare minimum required to make it at the very bottom of the competitive game modes climbs steadily over time.
I left CS:GO as a Master Guardian Elite. I stopped enjoying FPS games. When I reranked a year later, I was low Nova. When I reranked 6 months later, I was high Silver.
Saw something similar in DOTA 2, which I picked up last year. At the lowest MMR, games are filled with people with hundreds or thousands of games.
I’m order to climb off the very bottom of the games, you need to heat people with an intense amount of game knowledge, but below average understanding of winning in the game.
> Sometimes with deliberate practice, including reading strategies, playing custom maps to practice certain skills, and watching series aimed at improving level of play.
The article argues that you need more than "sometimes deliberate practice".
You forgot the most important part which is looking at your own replays, and having someone better than you look at your replays.
Leaderboard may be the wrong term. In StarCraft 2 for instance, there are Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Masters, and Grandmasters leagues. Diamond 1 to GM might include around 5% of the ranked players.
In SC2, unranked and ranked players are actually mixed in matchmaking. So if you are playing unranked you still have an MMR, just not one you can see. As an unranked player, you can tell what division you are in based on the portrait frame of your (ranked) opponents.
> Anyone in the top 5% is definitely that good, executing complex strategies with extreme precision.
Indeed.
> Personally, in every activity I've participated in where it's possible to get a rough percentile ranking, people who are 95%-ile constantly make mistakes that seem like they should be easy to observe and correct. "Real world" activities typically can't be reduced to a percentile rating, but achieving what appears to be a similar level of proficiency seems similarly easy.
Its not that they play flawless. They make mistakes because the skill cap is high that mistakes get you at 95 percentile. Ie. the competition is still (much) worse. Its the same in any competition.
Effort + skill = win.
You might be able to learn skill, by so much (there's some traits you have which are static, e.g. someone with short legs is less likely going to be a good marathon runner or basketball player), but it would require [some] effort. For some, it would cost more effort than others. The outcome (win) does not reflect how much effort you put in. Its a skewed way of displaying your skill.
In WoW, there are people who play the game countless of hours a week. I am talking about 12 hours a week raiding, and then a lot of hours solo and 5-man dungeons (M+). Then they reach a certain M+ rating and a certain amount of mythic raid bosses dead, but such result doesn't mention the amount of hours put into it. For this reason, I joined a 6 hours a week raiding guild (2 days 3 hours) which was considered minimal (most semi hardcore would raid at least 12 hours a week), but Blizzard introduced M+. And no guild would advertise if and how much they played M+, but if you did not you'd get (eventually) removed from the raid team.
> And for games like Overwatch, I don't think improving is a moral imperative; there's nothing wrong with having fun at 50%-ile or 10%-ile or any rank. But in every game I've played with a rating and/or league/tournament system, a lot of people get really upset and unhappy when they lose even when they haven't put much effort into improving. If that's the case, why not put a little bit of effort into improving and spend a little bit less time being upset?
You're missing out, 50% is average. For every person who wins, one must lose, to reach above 50% percentile. Then there's leagues where people of different skill caps get put together. If you ignore effort (money spend on hardware, time spend on playing and improving the game, etc etc), then anything above 50% is objectively better than average.
PS: This article reminds me of Greedy Goblin's rants about M&S (Morons & Slackers).
I’ve made it to the top 5% in a few competitive games, top 1% or 0.1% even. Once you get there, it’s surreal because of how sloppy you know you are: everything you do is still so clumsy and you still have so much uncertainty. It’s just that most other players are even more clumsy and even more confused (often more confident however).
A video game and public speaking seem like really weird/unusual examples.
A ton of people play video games, very few people do it professionally. A ton of people give talks, but it’s usually a small part of their jobs. Being even 50%-ile among professionals for either would certainly be extremely impressive.
When I think about normal jobs, which are less competitive fields than professional gaming or speaking, being 95%-ile is very good (although 50%-ile is not great). Certainly, the top 5% of people at my company (200 people in my office, so 10 people I work with) are on the “top of their game”, so to speak - they always drive towards the most important objectives, rarely make errors, come up with incredible ideas, etc.
> Being even 50%-ile among professionals for either would certainly be extremely impressive.
I think you'd be surprised at how low the bar is. And how people either 1) don't care about actively improving or 2) don't effectively learn from their mistakes. For a lot of people their career is just a way to get paid. As long as they don't get fired that's enough for them. And for other people they never developed a growth mindset and a habit of introspection, or they treat mistakes/failure as a painful memory to be avoided rather than something to be learned from.
> For a lot of people their career is just a way to get paid. As long as they don't get fired that's enough for them.
This was one of my hardest earned lessons when I became a manager. Previously I had worked my way into high-performing teams where everybody really cared about doing a good job. I was so surrounded by people with that mindset that I assumed that’s just how everybody in tech operated.
Only later did I realize that I was surrounded by those people because my managers actively selected for those hires and carefully weeded out the people who weren’t interested in anything other than doing the bare minimum to collect a paycheck.
As a hiring manager, the opposite selection bias occurs: The candidate pool is heavily biased toward people who have lost their jobs or are being pushed out as part of a PiP. You end up interviewing a lot of people who really just want to collect a paycheck and be bothered as little as possible with actual work.
Poke around Reddit or even HN and this work minimization mindset is even celebrated by a lot of people. If you’ve been surrounded by high achievers and motivated people who would have chosen programming jobs because that’s what they like to do every day, it can be a shock to work with people who really just hate doing anything that resembles work. Yet they’re out there, in surprisingly large numbers.
> If you’ve been surrounded by high achievers and motivated people who would have chosen programming jobs because that’s what they like to do every day, it can be a shock to work with people who really just hate doing anything that resembles work.
That's a false dichotomy[1]
[1] If I am reading you correctly, you're saying that there's two extremes
1. Programmers who enjoy it.
2. Programmers who hate doing anything that resembles work.
But, honestly, those two classes can't be the extreme ends of the spectrum. "People who enjoy programming" overlap significantly with "people who hate doing the work assigned to them".
You make it sound like people who hate doing the work you assigned to them must be people who hate programming.
IME, it's almost the opposite - people who love programming aren't going to be the least bit excited about mindless CRUD duties on an over-engineered stack that has 27 levels of indirection before it even hits the database record.
> Yet they’re out there, in surprisingly large numbers.
It appears that way to you because you are drawing wrong conclusions from your observations. You're looking at devs who hate working on your stack, for your team and extrapolating that to "These devs hate working as a programmer".
IOW, your observations that people hate working is accurate, your conclusion that it must be because they hate programming is not.
>aren't going to be the least bit excited about mindless CRUD duties on an over-engineered stack that has 27 levels of indirection before it even hits the database record.
Yes, this is really the issue isn't it? Most problems have been solved and made into a library. The public internet is coming on its 30th year. Mobile apps are coming to their 15th year. Nothing really on the horizon. Most of what's left is the same drudge work over and over again. Drudge work is fun the first time you do it, but gets boring fast. It's like any artist forced to paint walls for a living. You'll have to excuse them if they aren't overly excited about their 30th year of wall painting.
So, how do you improve?
1. Try to make your wall painting more interesting. Carve out interesting stuff from time to time, even if it's a POC that will probably never get released. This is where you have to be creative/good as a manager and not just a whip cracker. What are different people interested in? Some like automation engines, some like ML, some like experimenting with new frameworks and languages. Experimentation like this used to be pretty common.
2. Give people some real vacation. Developers tend to be on call 24/7. Take it easy with the whip every once in a while. A good month would really relieve the burnout, but to most US companies/managers, this is akin to poison.
Both of us know this probably isn't going to happen, so be comfortable in the bed we've made for ourselves.
> Poke around Reddit or even HN and this work minimization mindset is even celebrated by a lot of people. If you’ve been surrounded by high achievers and motivated people who would have chosen programming jobs because that’s what they like to do every day, it can be a shock to work with people who really just hate doing anything that resembles work. Yet they’re out there, in surprisingly large numbers.
You say this like its a bad thing?
Even still, wanting to work less but taking pride in your work aren't mutually exclusive ideas. Id prefer to work as little as possible, I always do the best I can though and take care to be thoughtful and do things right. Im just not going to bend over backwards for a corporation.
I got piped out of Microsoft and Amazon, both cases after years of excellence on my part because my VP lost a fight with another VP.
In my case, I knew that I was a five star engineer in a 3 star company and landed on my feet easily both times. The experience was awful, though, and anyone with an ounce of humility or respect for authority could have been crushed by it easily. Yet here you come, just assuming everyone you come across is a sad loser.
IMO, you and every salaried engineer are someone who's willing to settle for donating 90% of the profits from their labor to shareholders in exchange for a little bit of comfort and an illusion of safety.
You should re-read the comment you replied to carefully. PragmaticPulp doesn't imply that everyone on a PiP is bad a person and should feel bad.
For PragmaticPulp's argument it is more than enough that people on the job market skew towards being worse employees. Similarly, people on a PiP skew towards being lower achievers.
> IMO, you and every salaried engineer are someone who's willing to settle for donating 90% of the profits from their labor to shareholders in exchange for a little bit of comfort and an illusion of safety.
Where do you get the 90% figure from?
In general, it's really, really easy to start a company that makes use of programmer labour. Barriers to entry in the buy-side of the market for programmers are low. Especially with the more globalised labour market we got out of the pandemic.
So colour me suspicious of the notion that it's trivial to 'exploit' programmers and steal their lunch like you suggest.
Keep in mind that that most software projects in most companies are delayed or fail outright.
Haha, yeah, I got kinda bitter after learning the hard way that Dilbert wasn't a parody
You make good points, about that 90% figure and that I shouldn't imply salaried life as exploitation. There's a reasonably healthy free market and the means of production (a laptop) can be fished out of a trash can
I came at 90% since Google had 135k employees in 2020, and $209B in revenue. That's $1.5M per person, and then my mental math went off the rails.. obviously revenue isn't profit, and who knows if $150k/year/employee on average would be enough to provide the same benefits/take home pay on average. There are economies of scale at work too
PragmaticPulp has a fundamental belief deep in his soul that some people are good engineers, and others are "people who really just hate doing anything that resembles work". That, in my opinion, is wrong and leads to bad things*. I believe that anyone can succeed in the right environment.
* like Amazon/Microsoft giving hundreds of good employees the "unregretted attrition" axe because it's easier for upper management to do it that way
Yes, I would advise against taking Google as an explanation. As far as I can tell, Google does have some 'secret sauce' that takes in good people and turns that into revenue. And in some sense, the market pays for that secret sauce in the sense that (going by your numbers) they only need to pay out 10% of their revenue as salary. (Though part of that is also just that they have other costs, like actually running data centres.)
I suspect the average employee at Google would find it quite a lot more uncomfortable to get the same total compensation from a company they just founded.
I've worked at Google before, and I've also been on a PIP before.
That's not true. If you are at a big tech company, working on a small feature, at least you'll know a lot of people will be affected or use what you do.
If you are at a startup, you are doing a lot, but there's a big chance no one will ever see it.
Bigger risk, bigger reward. Most people are driven by what makes them feel good, not just money.
Curious what steps you took to get the most out of your team when some teammates aren't intrinsically motivated? Did you build a sort of incentive structure?
Hate to sound trite, but it often is the culture. If people feel siloed it's really easy to fall into not caring very much if you're not intrinsically motivated to succeed. However, on a closely knit team, where you put in the effort to get them included and owning things and be supported by the rest of the team in it, many start performing better (even if that starts by just asking for help earlier) simply because they don't want to let the team down. Not always, perhaps, but I'm not convinced that "poor employees" are innately reflective of the individual, so much as the individual + environment. Certainly, I personally have been in environments where I was a rockstar...and environments where I mentally checked very quickly (and sought to leave as such). And the former were the higher output environments, I might add; it wasn't just me being "out of my depth" in terms of skills or similar, but rather me not doing well when I was set up without any real empowerment or support structure and still expected to at least put on a show of trying.
It's not trite and I wish people didn't need to feel like apologizing for it.
This has been central to my life the last several years, this culture and person-fit issue. I've seen it play out with friends and family and it's surprising to me it isn't recognized as such. A close friend went from almost literally rockstar status at one place, and moved for reasons that had nothing to do with him or where he was at. He completely fell apart performance-wise at the new place because he didn't fit in to the same extent, went back, and now is doing great again. I don't think the new place was bad, or him, it was just this poor person-culture fit issue.
My spouse was somewhere she was treated like dirt, never quite welcomed into the team (she wasn't the only one, but it was the case nevertheless), and then treated her like a failing employee when she wasn't acting the way they wanted her to (however that was). She left, and now is bringing in more money for the new company than any other employee, in large part in my opinion just because they actually let her be part of the team (this second place is actually a much larger company).
The experience of being siloed is awful, and even if you are intrinsically motivated, can be completely demotivating, because if it's bad enough, it leads to this feeling of complete loss of control where you're at. There's also all these little things that even if you're super competent, you might need help with, just as a function of being a human being as part of a larger organization.
I could go on with stories like this, but suffice to say I think in a lot of places management often doesn't look inward enough. I think the churn continues because for whatever reason the culture change is more painful for them to contemplate and implement than whatever losses are incurred by high turnover in a given position. The last place I was at had entire key units just resign completely together en masse, and the response after they left was "well I guess we're not good at [key function] so we'll just go on without that." In an important sense they had to narrow the scope of what they offer because of culture problems.
And yet we end up having these discussions of displaced employees not being "intrinsically motivated" enough, as if that happens in a vacuum.
I agree about culture being a big part. Though no clue how you can improve that in your team as a manager?
I worked for a company where my team was fine, and individual people from other teams seemed perfectly smart and capable when talking to them, but looking at their team's output, they might as well have been idiots. I image for many of them, if they had worked at a more functional organization like Google, they would have done good work. (Even if not to the standards that Google has. But certainly better than at their then current employer.)
As a manager, the big ones are making sure that everyone understands what is going on, and feels responsible for it. So if you see a silo developing, you intentionally break it, and explain to the team why you're asking someone who knows nothing about a particular domain to own the task (and also call on the silo to make themselves available to help teach the domain and answer questions and such). It means that task will take longer, but the long term health and effectiveness of the team will be increased.
That also includes manager context; ideally, even things that a manager usually does, the team starts stepping up to do. So working with product to define requirements? Manager should include the team with that and look to have them start taking ownership of it over time. Prioritization? Team sport, until it becomes as natural as breathing, and people are better able to prioritize their own time as emergents come in. Etc. This not only helps avoid the -manager- becoming a bottleneck that slows everyone down, but it helps individuals to grow really quickly and feel more empowered.
>Only later did I realize that I was surrounded by those people because my managers actively selected for those hires and carefully weeded out the people who weren’t interested in anything other than doing the bare minimum to collect a paycheck.
I'm going to counter it, I did always my best. But I got shot. But.......... I'm again back with more power as a front-ens developer. (Not searching for work at the moment.)
If someone is primarily earning their living from speaking, they're probably pretty good (or have a particularly compelling story to tell)--or they wouldn't be earning their living from speaking. As the parent suggests, most people in, say, the tech industry give talks at conferences etc. now and then as a sideline. Some more than others, some better than others. But mostly, they're not having coaching, watching video, rehearsing extensively etc.--i.e. the things a professional athlete does all the time. They're just going out and doing it at least well enough that they get invited back.
> For a lot of people their career is just a way to get paid. As long as they don't get fired that's enough for them.
When that’s the target for hiring and the majority of people in professional practice any attempts to aggressively improve are frequently met with friction and do more to put your job at risk than just coasting. That’s why so many developers have side projects where they can be as ambitious as they wish completely disconnected from the boring professional work designed for 25%-ile.
> A video game and public speaking seem like really weird/unusual examples.
I thought they were great examples because most people are familiar with both. Dan's not wrong: most people don't improve because they don't invest in getting better, and often getting better is easy to do. Incidentally, I watched one of my kids do this with Overwatch. She started watching the replays and seeing what she did wrong, and then that turned into what is that player doing right. Two weeks later top 50%.
I agree. That probably do require spending a fair bit of time to build confidence and skills. But they also benefit from some deliberate practice/skills building as opposed to just repeating some of the same mistakes over and over again.
I'm not convinced anyone can just work at it and get to top 95%, or even top 75%, or even top 50% at any activity. There is a ton of selecting going on that keeps people who do not have some amount of talent from even attempting to get close. I've played a decent amount of first person shooters and RTS games and I am decent but I have friends who play less and are more talented than me. Given similar practice regimens and training/feedback, I'm pretty sure they would always get higher than me in the rankings. All that to say, I don't think that simply anyone who works at it can get to the top 95% in any random activity.
> Given similar practice regimens and training/feedback,
But that's the point, I think.
Sure, "natural talent" might lead to a reduction in necessary practice time, but what if you spent 1.5x or 2x or 3x the time, or used a different practice method that was more suited to your needs?
I believe I am one of those people who just needed more time, and I've seen success. It was definitely demotivating watching others improve faster or seemingly not need improvement at all, it just came to them naturally. But I have an obsession, which led to me being very methodical about practice, time, etc. And it worked out.
Not just anyone, only those with already existing natural talent.
If something comes very easy to you then you may believe that it's that easy for everyone. It's not. This is the fallacy of the author - he should try to get to 95th percentile doing something brand new that they don't have a natural talent for to understand how very wrong they are.
I found learning to programming extremely easy but my best friend just couldn't grasp it even though she tried much harder than I did and we were in exactly the same class. OTOH she bought a guitar and taught herself to play it without even trying whereas I couldn't play more than a couple notes even with years of music lessons.
He's basically right. Here's another example, math contests.
When I was in high school I was really into math. I was way ahead of my year group and I figured it was more interesting to do special problems of the "what is the last digit of 2^2022" variety, the kind of thing that didn't turn up on normal homework, but also not terribly complicated, the kind of thing you can figure out with a short burst of concentration.
So I went to math contests around Europe with other schools. The thing was that most kids I met there were totally ordinary at maths. Sure, some were really quite good, but most of the bottom 75% were indistinguishable from your normal kid who doesn't know at 15 what an integral is. The friends on my team weren't even in the top set math class at my little school, but my observation was that most kids from the other schools weren't either. Most were along for the ride, much like myself at school sports events where you also got a trip across Europe for participating.
I did okay at it, and in my final year we had a couple of really good kids on the team and won the contest. I thought that was pretty cool, but I also knew I wasn't close to the pinnacle of math contestery. Fact was I was like that kid who just had some natural ability but I didn't really practice a huge amount and nobody suggested there was a way to get much better. If you added up all the extra practice compared to just sitting in math class, maybe it was a couple of extra lessons a week, with more interesting homework. My math teacher was a great motivator whom I still keep in touch with, but we only had him and his experience.
Fast forward to now and I recently discovered a friend of mine got a top 10 at the IMO. Basically top 10 among all high school kids on the planet. I can ask him the occasional interesting question that I see on FB, and he'll know how to do it. He did proper years of training in math, had a very famous coach among others, and went through the eye of the needle several times. There's a world of difference between that and your casual have-a-go person.
One way that I've always found ways to skew this is to not restrict yourself strictly to 'programming' however you define it. Always treat the problem as a one-off where everything is 'in bounds' for the solution space. This approach lets me solve problems where the top 5% have not found a solution because they were looking at certain pure problems and not the practical ones at hand.
Two other superpowers: (1) don't try to impress yourself or anyone else with the sophistication of your solutions, in fact do the opposite finding simple mechanisms that fit the problem. When you do this well, the solution looks simple, and makes the original problem seem much less hard. People don't do this because there's little credit to be had in a simple solution to a non-hard problem. Just keep in your own mind that it was a hard problem and finding that simple solution wasn't easy. With repeated practice, this means you can solve more difficult problems than others because you operate at a lower ratio of solution-complexity:problem-complexity. This is how you deal with intrinsic complexity rather than incidental. (2) Do not think procedurally (like a machine) in time steps. Think in invariants, decompose into independent logical partitions, ensure that logic is composable. When we say make code easy to 'reason about' we want to be able to, at each level, understand only what the subparts are doing, not how, and that those parts do not interfere with each other. If you repeat this at every level, you need to keep far less in your 'working memory' compared to problems that have deep implementations to keep in mind to understand and use properly. Related to this, relate the implementation structure to a conceptual model, and don't be compelled to make the conceptual model into concrete form, that tends to only add incidental complexity. People tend to do this because the conceptual model is cool and beautiful and would like to be able to show it, see it. Whenever you see a deep implementation stack that seems excessive and unnecessary there was probably a simpler implementation where each concept didn't have to be an explicit piece of architecture. Again this is very much less code, and less impressive to the unenlightened, but don't concern yourself with that, lose the ego (or rather feed it yourself instead of externally), only focus on solving hard problems with simple, underappreciated solutions.
I would counter with the idea that seniority and programming ability are inversely proportional via The Gervais Principal (mentioned on hn again just recently)
Doing that at a startup would be easy, since you control the whole stack and can tune it to the use case, and almost certainly don't have problems of scale. It's 90% getting the technical stuff in place, assuming you have the budget.
Doing it at a place like Google is a different matter. The job isn't tuning a stack. It's coordinating multiple teams that own different services, and trying to make general-purpose services and frameworks work especially well for a specific case, even in the face of competing demands and standardization forces. It would be 90% political, and the task-specific differentiation required may simply be insurmountable - the extra wrinkles for your use case might cost more in complexity and reliability than it's worth.
What makes you think a Principal engineer is tasked with that? Principal engineers do mostly stuff like create new infrastructure technology like spanner, or machine learning frameworks, or similar stuff. Google doesn't have that many principal engineers, they correspond to director on the manager ladder, but there are way fewer principal engineers than directors as it is much harder to climb the contributor ladder than the manager ladder. Most Google products doesn't have a single principal engineer on the team.
Drive almost certainly has an L8 on the team somewhere. It is a big product. And it could be the case that "find a completely new indexing structure that makes drive search and folder navigation 10x faster" is a L8 task. Drive is indeed a lot slower than I'd personally like and a lot of that comes down to the way that indexing works when you cannot group users together, which is at the very core of the product.
In the terms of that article, Principal Engineers would perhaps be classified as 'losers'.
> The Gervais principle differs from the Peter Principle, which it superficially resembles. The Peter Principle states that all people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. It is based on the assumption that future promotions are based on past performance. The Peter Principle is wrong for the simple reason that executives aren’t that stupid, and because there isn’t that much room in an upward-narrowing pyramid. They know what it takes for a promotion candidate to perform at the to level. So if they are promoting people beyond their competence anyway, under conditions of opportunity scarcity, there must be a good reason.
> Scott Adams, seeing a different flaw in the Peter Principle, proposed the Dilbert Principle: that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to middle management to limit the damage they can do. This again is untrue. The Gervais principle predicts the exact opposite: that the most competent ones will be promoted to middle management. Michael Scott was a star salesman before he become a Clueless middle manager. The least competent employees (but not all of them — only certain enlightened incompetents) will be promoted not to middle management, but fast-tracked through to senior management. To the Sociopath level.
To be clear: I mean to imply no opinion on whether 'The Gervais Principle' is true nor applicable. I'm just saying that 'The Gervais Principle' is perfectly compatible with Principal Engineers at Google knowing their stuff.
More interesting is that reaching the 99.99th percentile is very difficult, and yet completely unremarkable. I love David Foster Wallace’s essay on this subject: “ Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness.” He follows a top 200 and is impressed by how absolutely amazing he is at tennis, but ultimately knows the player will know neither fame nor fortune.
And if you’re in the top, say 1/3, of engineers you’ll make a good living. If you’re in the top 1% of say, chess players, you probably won’t even get tournament invites.
Tournament jobs is even a term. Look for any field that has unpaid or very lowly paid internships (or would-be actors waiting tables) because so many people will work for nothing to get a foot in the door hoping for a big break.
Compared to the best in the world, they were all still not very good. But on the metric of being able to make it to the Olympics, they were all geniuses.
Pool sizes and opportunity vary. Once you are part of a bobsledder team you are in a limited group where bobsled track time is available. You could already be in the top 200. To be in a top 200 lawyer you would need to beat out a huge pool.
>Being in the top 200 lawyers is probably pretty awesome.
And assuming that money is the relevant metric (which it may or may not be), working at a big city law firm. You can be a top 200 lawyer (whatever that means exactly) but if you're practicing family law in a small town, you're probably not making a lot.
The caveat is that in any activity you’re disproportionately likely to encounter those who practice that activity the most. Therefore, you could be in the 90th percentile of participants, but below average against those you encounter.
On lichess, the 95th percentile rating of active participants is 2125. I wonder if this author would agree such a rating "isn't that good"? I think it's pretty darn good.
So someone who only knows how to play chess would be considered a participant? Maybe this is what the author intended, I don't know. However, I find this definition of "participant" strange, because it allows us to truthfully say that someone is a participant, even though they don't play chess (they know the rules, but don't play).
I've played chess plenty of times. Against my parents growing up, against friends, computers, etc. Probably played 50 games of chess in my life. Compared to none at all, that's a lot. But I've never actually studied the game. I don't know any theory, haven't memorized any openings, etc. I have no idea what my rating would be, but I'm sure it'd be low. I expect there are plenty of similar people out there, who "play" chess, meaning they have done so on occasion, but are not in any way students of the game.
Yep, I'm forever 'amazed' (read: not surprised) that this type of content continually makes it to the top of the front page of this website.
With the way the author described Overwatch, it sounds like the equivalent to 95th percentile for chess would be more 50th percentile for chess, because in order to reach around that level, one would have to put in that type of work as described to purportedly reach the 95th percentile in Overwatch.
Based on my understanding with the Lichess's blitz rating system (which of course can't be directly mapped to any other rating system), I expect that players rated 2175 Glicko in Lichess blitz could roughly be getting close to 1800-2000 Elo with FIDE if they played FIDE classical tournaments and were rated accordingly.
For comparison, FIDE's rating floor is 1000, but newbie players would likely remain "unrated" because they "aren't (yet) good enough" to be 1000 after 5 rated games. Meanwhile, GM Magnus Carlsen currently has a "live" FIDE rating of 2863.9 Elo (live, as opposed to published monthly rating).
As a further comparison, popular Twitch chess streamers WFM Alexandra Botez and WFM Anna Cramling have FIDE ratings of 2020 and 2057 Elo respectively, and Chesscom blitz ratings of 2195 and 2084 glicko respectively. I think they would simply wipe the floor at most (but not all) chess clubs that exist in the world.
There really aren't a lot of players who go through my chess club who are at or near this level. It really takes a lot of work to get anywhere close to that standard. The amount of work it takes for most to get that good would require chess to be their main hobby, if not something more. That, or they have to start it from a young age and also be quite obsessive about it.
Exact numbers aside, this level strength in chess isn't to be sneezed at, and requires significant investments of time - often over a "lifetime" (where lifetime = 10 or more years of a high level of dedication, focus, and good guidance), which for many young players, it is most of their lifetime. Most chess players will never reach this standard of chess, despite following all the basic advice as per the post. So I just find top 5% / 95th percentile being bandied about to be applicable for any field as somewhat laughable or fabricated. Maybe the figure is real for Overwatch, but for things like chess, speedcubing, and instrumental/vocal music, it just doesn't quite work that way as much as many would wish it did. Yes, the overall message of practising and learning is good, but when extraordinary claims such as "95%-ile isn't that good" get thrown about with Overwatch being used as primary evidence, the substance isn't much more convincing than typical clickbait. Survivorship bias?
>But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.
I think this point of view is not only blatantly false but also much more dangerous than most people realize. It sets an unrealistic standard across all disciplines, with a wide range of detrimental effects:
1. People entering majors that they are not qualified for, taking on more debt and failing later than than they otherwise would
2. Incentives for schools and colleges to inflate grades, since people are less likely to question unrealistically high graduation rates
3. 1 and 2 combining in the worst case to uncrease the number of incompetent workers across technical industries
We've had decades of this sort "you can do anything if you work hard" propaganda in the west now and I fear that in addition to reducing competence across the board, it reduces the average person's ability to recognize competence, since the default assumption is that we are all endowed with the same potential, something fundamentally incompatible with human nature.
Your observation is perfectly compatible with the notion you quoted from the article.
It's just that the 95%-ile photography major or art major etc is not gonna make money from photography or art. Nobody buys the records of a 95%-ile musician either. (Though you can probably teach music at that skill level and earn a living.)
In comparison, a 95%-ile engineer can expect to make a decent living from engineering.
> I think this point of view is not only blatantly false but also much more dangerous than most people realize.
I partially agree about the notion being dangerous, despite probably being true.
The thing is that most people never put in the conscious effort required to get to 95%-ile proficiency. Despite any exhortations to the contrary.
the 95%-ile is irrelevant - it's more the sector that matters. a 5%-ile doctor is still going to be able to do the work of a doctor.
The reason photography or art/music require a 99%-ile is because these sectors require popularity, and the quality is subjective. Only the most popular pieces make any money - the rest are passion projects by its creators.
Engineering sectors don't need it - there's an objective standard to which your work can be graded, and as long as you pass that grade, your work is valuable to someone (who's gonna be paying you for it).
I'm not sure the two are in opposition although I do think the MD example in the article in questionable. (I get the point he's making but, while you're either an MD or not an MD to a significant degree--it's a rather different situation from pro football player vs. not pro football player.) Tournament jobs is another term I've seen used which are characterized by an excess of supply at the entry level.
The article was mostly about things like table tennis and card games, not really careers (since I would consider getting an education "practicing regularly" which the article said it wasn't referring to). Most people who practice can become relatively good at table tennis, drawing, juggling, etc.
A not quite obvious side effect of this - you should be aware of the vast majority of things you do that you are not in the top 5% - and don’t sweat it. Most things in life just need to be done, not done exceptionally well, so spend your effort on the things that matter.
For example, I shop pretty badly at the store, no list, no plan - not worth it to me to develop those, I can spend time elsewhere on the things I can be good at.
Time is rarely the limiting factor in achieving goals. The vast majority of us kill time with time sinks like playing on our phone or watching TV series - none of which are likely to be life goals.
Instead optimizing for putting productive energy towards real goals and avoiding menial tasks that at best save some time seems like a more optimal strategy.
> The vast majority of us kill time with time sinks like playing on our phone or watching TV series - none of which are likely to be life goals.
People state a goal, but that's not a goal - that's an aspiration. The person doing the above "time wasting" is just setting the actual goal of "relax" and "hedonism", which tbh, is completely fine. What they say their goals are is irrelevant.
Not very many people actually work towards the goal they say they want to achieve. Those who do are quite likely to achieve it.
I find I do groceries at similar speeds with or without a list (if anything, I can often be faster if I just get what seems to make sense rather than hunting out something specific from a list). Where it makes the bigger difference is in reduced food waste (probably the biggest difference) and less money spent.
Part of it is also “do I get basically the same stuff each time” or in my case the grocery store is a block away so it’s “what five items am I grabbing now”.
And even if I did have a list I’d still be bottom 50% I’m sure.
I'll see your bikeshed and raise you a yak shave. Sometimes I just need to be "good enough" at something because it's not my ultimate goal (aka the thing I want to accomplish or be good at).
I'll use a shopping list on the rare occasion where I really need to buy something, and very much am in tune with how to use both digital and paper lists / notes, but with the vast majority of the time, I know what I want to buy or what I want to browse, and that most of the time, having a list makes very little difference to my day to day life.
Sometimes I feel that people try to over-optimise grocery shopping. Basically, my process is simple and works: 1. realise I need more food, 2. grab keys, phone (and maybe wallet) and reusable bags, 3. go to the supermarket, 4. browse the usual stuff I'm interested in and look for what's on sale, 5. grab it off the shelf if I want it.
It's really not that complicated, nor at all stressful to shop without a list. Not everything in life needs a list.
Wow, a lot of these comments seem to misunderstand that this is 95th percentile amongst people who participate, not people who practice actively. The article is mostly correct.
Redefining percentile or who is considered an active participant as the author did is the greater self-serving misunderstanding. Following from my earlier comment here, this weekly graph already shows active players - those who aren't active aren't factored in: https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/blitz
To be active on Lichess requires on to actually be active and have a Rating Deviation below a certain value.
It's all easy to "reaching the top 1% is easy" if you're already at the top. I commented earlier explaining the difference between Overwatch and chess, pointing out how the author's description of what it took to get "good" at Overwatch simply doesn't work for chess. Without trying to slight Overwatch, chess is simply a very very tough game/sport to get very good at.
As Grandmaster Ben Finegold would say, "I'm the best player in this chair!" Yep, so that also makes me in the 100th percentile when in my own chair, just with fancier words.
I think this only applies to some things, not others. If you're in the 95th percentile of high-school students, then you're probably getting into a good university. For university, the 95th percentile is enough to get into medicine, law, or a good business school. The 95th percentile for overall intelligence is 125. The 95th percentile for household income is $250 000.
For things like video games, which have a broad net of casual players and a few who are very competitive, it isn't that good. All you need to do to get in the 95th percentile is to be competitive; but for applications where everyone is acting somewhat competitively, or for non-zero sum competitions like school or income, the 95th percentile can be very good.
> But what if he tried to pick up playing the flute? How about drawing comics? Competitive swimming? Investing?
Having seen exactly 2 of your examples in real life, particularly people who had no experience and no interest in painting or playing an instrument until their 40s, a few years of persistence and targeted practice made them better than me after a lifetime of “casual play”.
I might have to put in less time to “get better than them” if I really sat down and tried for a year, but I’m not sure that matters in the way you’re thinking
In machine learning 95% accuracy is not very useful. It means the algorithm will be wrong 1 out of 20 times. So every 20th word in speech recognition will be incorrect, your medical diagnosis will be wrong for every 20th person, your face will not unlock your phone every 20th time, every 20th person will not be allowed to log into a web site. There are some machine learning applications where 95% is good enough or even great such as web search engines, but for many important applications it is nowhere near good enough and you need something more like 99.9% or better to be actually useful. Think about how often the algorithm can be allowed to make a mistake. If it's never, then don't use machine learning. If it's 1 in a million you need 99.9999% accuracy.
95% looks good in machine learning papers in computer science, but in the real world 95% often means dismal failure. Think of an autonomous killer robot, is mistakenly killing 1 out of 20 people ok? For a self driving car is harming the driver or car (or pedestrian/dog/child/other car) mistakenly even 1 out of 1000 (99.9%) times ok? I think not.
One measure of what accuracy you need is how well people do the same task. If you can do better than people most of the time, maybe the algorithm is useful, though you also have to compare exactly how the algorithm fails to the way people fail. If people fail by choosing a fender bender and the algorithm fails by killing someone, the algorithm has to work better than people do.
95% accuracy has nothing to do with being in the 95pctile of active participants other than using the number 95.
To achieve a 95th pctile ranking among the relevant machine learning frameworks means being more accurate than 95 % of other approaches, and that's probably quite good and useful.
Golf is a real-world activity that can be used for comparison here. It's a good candidate because there is a standard handicap rating system issued by a central governing body, and there are a large number of amateur players who play regularly, compared to other sports.
- Roughly 10% of golfers in the US maintain a handicap rating.
- "Today, the 2,417,905 who have a handicap included 2,051,675 “active posters,” meaning they posted at least one score in 2020. However, the average number of posted scores was 38, almost double the average number of rounds played by golfers overall last year—so it’s pretty clear that those who get a handicap are among the game’s most engaged participants." [0]
- "it has been found that on a given day the average golfer would be expected to post a score of approximately 100 strokes when following all the rules of golf" [1] which is 28 strokes over par. A 28 handicap is around the 5%-ile of golfers with a handicap [2]
- As such, those 10% of golfers with a handicap should overlap pretty heavily with the top 10-20% of all golfers. The 50%-ile of golfers with a handicap is 13 [2], so by extrapolation that should be 90-95%-ile of all golfers.
- 13 is still a solid handicap. That's someone who is breaking 90 (better than bogey golf) pretty much every round and likely has years of practice. Saying it "isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do" would be an incorrect statement in my opinion.
- (as a sanity check, the 90%-ile of golfers with a handicap is a handicap of 5. Most D1 golfers will have a handicap right around 0, and D3 will be maybe 2. Given the number of casual golfers, it seems likely that only about 1 or 2 out of 100 are nearing that level.)
It also shows that the population you're comparing yourself to, i.e. the denominator, matters a lot. If you're comparing yourself mostly to people who do some activity pretty regularly, top 5-10% means you're pretty good compared to the average person on the street who may never have touched a golf club. But if you draw your population from anyone who has ever taken a swing at a golf ball, 5-10% is a lot less impressive.
After reaching that percentile the grind begins. And that's when learning begins. And that's when you develop character. The dopamine doesn't flow as freely any more as obstacles to improvement become the rule rather than the exception. Braggadocious anecdote: on December 25th, 2021, I started solving Kattis problems. I set myself a goal to reach a top 1000 rank in 2022. This took me two weeks instead of an entire year. I adjusted the goal to top 100. This is significantly harder, and after two more weeks I was tempted to dismiss the goal through excuses like: "these are just puzzles with limited real-world application". This is obvious bullshit, and I just wanted to avoid doing the work. I caught myself in the act and doubled down on the goal. I bought some books and learned a lot. Currently sitting on #229, and I _will_ reach top 100 this year.
This article belies a key assumption that is also the biggest challenge when making such a statement.
Distributional assumption - The assumption is that the mean and std dev of the participating class is in line with the general population.
Overwatch and public speaking sneakily satisfy this assumption. Everyone is forced to speak in public at some point, and overwatch is the archetypal 'normie' game of the of the past few years.
Dan then moves from these 2 scenarios to programming, where this assumption doesn't work. There are many formal and informal filters involved in making it an employable programmer. (Say complete a BSCS or equivalent experience). There are also supply-demand factors, where the top %ilers are presorting themselves into CS like no other time in history.
Landing a FANGesque job straight out of college is already putting you in the 95th percentile, because of sheer number of filters that one person passes through. Other situations with strong filtering include inaccessible games like Dota2 or high barrier of entry sports like climbing.
Now, I agree with Dan's title and the contents, but for a different reason. There is perpetual headroom in the pyramid of excellence. Eventually, those better than you at a particular thing go from being a number to a tangible list of names. But, whether that should mean anything is a purely personal decision. The argument that anyone can go beyond x-percetile through deliberate practice is always true until it isn't. That's because we tend to take our personal IQ, resilience, discipline and acumen for granted.
So, I would rephrase that as:
'When the distributional assumption holds, 95th percentile would not be considered noteworthy by any institutions or people that the average FANG/HN reader would find worthy of respect.'
Doesn't sound as useful with the qualifications.
P.S: something something nuance for large scale communication is impossible. Criticizing danluu for one post lends credence to another post of his. Such is life.
The biggest takeaway I got from this was that recording yourself doing something, then observing yourself completing it as an outsider can dramatically increase your performance. Relevant content:
After watching a recording of myself writing code, I realized I was spending about a quarter of the total time implementing the feature tracking down which functions the bugs were in! This was completely non-obvious to me and I wouldn’t have found it out without recording myself
Now that I’m aware that I spent so much time isolating which function a bugs are in, I now test each function as I write it to make sure they work
This allows me to write code a lot faster as it dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes to debug my code
"95 percentile" vs "1 in 20" is a good example of how confusing statistics are. First sounds excellent, second sounds like anyone could (try to) do it.
20 people is about a school class. Being the best at something everyone does in a class is rather hard.
If you suck at skipping rope (I did) you could probably climb the implicit rank quite easily by practice, till you were up against the sporty girls with aptitude.
Yes. Though I think the more interesting part of the article are when the author goes into the detailed mechanics of how that effort looks like for two examples.
> Most people probably don't have the talent to play in a professional league regardless of their practice regimen, but when you can get to 95%-ile by fixing mistakes like "not realizing that you should stand on the objective", you don't really need a lot of talent to get to 95%-ile.
In the only 2 competitive games I played enough to talk about this - sc2 and dota2 - the mistakes people make at my level (which at my peak was ~2000 mmr in dota and low plat in starcraft - probably top 60-40% of the active players in both) - were nothing like "not understanding game objectives".
In starcraft it's easy to say what went wrong because there's much less variables. Usually it's going for a wrong build order blindly, not reacting to enemy unit composition in time, or just being too slow mechanically (usually in the economy part of the game, fights you can just attack-move into the enemy army, but you have to build buildings and units FAST or you don't have enough units to fight). I've been watching sc2 games on top level, I've even played vs people in top 90% in 8v8 free for all games, and there's just no way for me to win against them.
I've played one 8v8 game where I was the only one in plat and the rest was in master/grand master. They left me alone for 20 minutes and fought it between themselves. I've build maxed 3/3/3 skytoss fleet with mothership and carriers, full wall of photon cannons and a lot of gates for instant remax. 20 minutes of reasonably fast base-building. After I started to fight I lost in like 5 minutes vs mass marines + medivacs :/ Guy just harassed me to death from 10 different angles while escaping my deathball of carriers. I had 10 times his resources but not the skill to defend from so many points at once. And he wasn't even grand master. Sc2 will show you exactly how much you suck.
In dota there's much more chaos, sometimes it's lost in the picking phase, other times someone just feeds for 10 minutes, sometimes people don't understand who is more late-game and farm for 40 minutes vs later-game carry or constantly fight vs earlier-game lineup instead of farming. Other than these I usually don't know why we lose. It's never "I don't understand the game objective".
I could probably get much higher if I wasn't spamming winter wyvern as pos4/5 every game. But it's the only hero I enjoy, so whatever.
article definitely made me think about what else I could be 95th percentile in. I agree that dedicated practice is very important compared with people that just play casually
okay yeah but context matters here. Who cares about being in the 95th percentile of overwatch compared to say being in the 95th percentile of income earned?
> Despite all of the caveats above, my belief is that it's easier to become relatively good at real life activities relative to games or sports because there's so little delibrate practice put into most real life activities.
> You're probably 99%-ile, but someone with no talent who's put in the time to practice the basics is going to have a serve that you can't return
I have a soft spot for this kind of insight because it is supposed to be inspiring and I know I should take it in that spirit, but one thing that's always bothered me is the contradictory assertions that on the one hand, almost no one deliberately practices, but on the other hand, this makes it "easier". How can both assertions be true? Any sensible definition of difficulty has to consider how many people succeed at it. If very few people succeed at a task in practice, it is a difficult task no matter how "easy" it looks in theory.
I've come to see passion & motivation as indistinguishable from "talent". Having the passion & motivation to put in the effort is part of one's "talent" and realistically is not that easy to change. Everyone knows that to write well, you need to practice writing a lot. Scott Alexander notes in his Parable of the Talents [1] that he never needed to really muster up the energy to practice writing a lot:
> I know people who want to get good at writing, and make a mighty resolution to write two hundred words a day every day, and then after the first week they find it’s too annoying and give up. These people think I’m amazing, and why shouldn’t they? I’ve written a few hundred to a few thousand words pretty much every day for the past ten years. But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower.
I've found this to be true in a lot of walks in life. While there are certainly people with genius intellect/ability, most of the "talented" people I meet aren't of that kind, they are just effortlessly more motivated or passionate about something than I am. For example, they often started programming when they were 10 or something and spent most of their childhood choosing to do little side projects instead of the normal variety of childhood time wasters.
I think this essay's (95%-ile is not that good) thesis is roughly this: to be good at something, you just need to care a little, because most people don't care at all. Just need to care a little, that doesn't sound so hard, right? All I want to say is yes, in my experience caring even a little is so, so hard. There's a reason why most people don't care at all and that reason is probably not "you're better and more special than most people as a reader of this essay".
I’ve been playing various iterations of Counter-Strike and StarCraft for decades. Sometimes with deliberate practice, including reading strategies, playing custom maps to practice certain skills, and watching series aimed at improving level of play. And despite the hundreds of hours invested I don’t believe I’ve ever cracked the top 50% in any leaderboard rankings.
Anyone in the top 5% is definitely that good, executing complex strategies with extreme precision.
There are lots of areas in life that are highly competitive — where being the best takes raw talent, a huge time investment, and a bit of luck. I wouldn’t try to diminish that.