I think the whole “I would stand up and walk out of that interview” trope is a little overused but … I would stand up and walk out of that interview. Was that a real situation?
If I like them (and the process was bearable), I would ask nothing. If I’m mildly annoyed, something “simple” yet patronizing like fizbuzz. If I’m REALLY annoyed then something wildly specific and pedantic.
Interviewer: “do you have any questions for me?”
Why yes, a chicken, fox and sack of flour need to cross a doubly linked list, how would you flip the list inside out from the middle while counting the number of pingpongballs that can fit into 747 VW Beatles.
When it comes to hiring decisions if there are tied candidates but only one position it can often come down to candidates A was quiet and didn't ask any questions and seems disinterested, but candidate B had loads of questions to ask at the end and seemed really interested and keen and wanted to know x, y, and z.
Who do you think gets hired in those scenarios.
But yeah it is sometimes tempting to turn the tables :). So far no one has done it to me, but not sure what my response would be. "Haha nice joke! Ok we're outta time thanks for coming!" I guess!
It demonstrates a LOT about how well you will work out at the company, how interested you are in it, how much of a self-starter you are.
It should be rephrased as “the jeopardy round” since it’s still about the candidate, but phrased backwards. And it’s not a time for REAL questions, it’s a time to show you’re smart and attentive but not TOO smart, you want the interviewer to feel good about themselves so they can feel good about you.
> what my response would be
I don’t ask candidates to do anything I wouldn’t put up with. It would be unusual but I would be game (if they were serious). Fundamentally that’s what my fantasy is about: a world where interviewer and interviewee have mutual respect for each other.
In the recent past I’ve asked candidates to walk me through code they’ve written. I’m super happy to reciprocate for 15 min and I think the candidate (if they’re working with me directly) would get a lot out of it.
I think it’s 100% okay to ask about pay in an interview but not okay if it’s the only thing you ask about.
For me: I care about the day-to-day of who I’m working with and what that dynamic is like (in addition to money and benefits).
Judging by this person's bio, I am sure he is not actually slow, at least not as defined by IQ. You don't land those jobs and credentials by being slow. Getting a quant job for example requires being able to think fast on one's feet to answer interview questions.
I think it's more like his working memory speed is not up to his satisfaction or subjectively he feels slow, but relative to everyone else or general population, he is not actually slow, much in the same way a runway model may feel fat due to body dysmorphia, but is not actually fat.
My first real struggle with slow processing time was when I started to play competitive volleyball in high school.
the vast majority of people who try a sport will suck at it, and many are still bad even with practice, hence why so few become pro. it has nothing to do with mental slowness.
It's like when Einstein felt he was bad at physics or math. No, he was brilliant at it, but he thought he was not good enough to solve the problem he wanted to solve, which had also vexed everyone else too.
I read the book and many ideas felt like "yes, that sounds reasonable and feels good" but that is a danger of the book. The very seductions it describes applies also to its readers.
Dunning Kruger effect - debunked. Etc.
Are you familiar with System 1 and System 2?
https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system...
I eventually got diagnosed as an adult with ADHD, and got treatment. Stimulants help me be significantly more “quick-witted” to use your terms. I would rather describe “being slow” as being in a constant state of distraction, which prevents me from being efficient with the task at hand. Stimulants fix this.
However having grown up scatterbrained, some aspects of it are now architectural in my brain and aren’t changed by slightly modifying the brain chemistry. I now see that as a superpower through, as it gives me a different perspective for seeing problems, and is great for strategic thinking. Stimulants just give me focused control over it and the ability to turn it off and on as the need arises.
The comment you are responding to is just trying to explain their own situation and say the person who wrote the article might want to investigate a similar experience compared to their own. I read the article as one where someone is exploring and ADHD is would be exploration. I would specify that ADHD inattentive type is the one that it reads most like to me.
I don't see why you'd want to knock someone's choice of treatment for a particular condition. You might not see a need for a particular treatment option, but many folks get relief from anxiety or other things such as RSD while being medicated for ADHD. They can make their own decisions.
I don't think it's so much about that... it's more that having a label for a common set of behaviors/symptoms can be a shorthand to explain things more succinctly.
Btw, would you say the same thing about clinical depression? Why/why not?
> Why drug your way to a different thinking style?
Because ADHD (and other things) can be crippling when it comes to actually getting IRL shit that needs doing... done. "We live in a society" is a meme, but there's actually a lot of stuff that can present non-trivial hurdles for neuro-divergent people IRL ... like filing taxes, going to an unemployment office, etc. etc.
(Also, that's not quite what the drugs do if you have ADHD, but I digress)
But the OP's points have more complexity than they think (in my main comment[0] I mention depth being missing). Let's take the quick math one for example. They made the assumption that a calculation was being made. This seems reasonable, but if you're doing a lot of those calculations you'll memorize them. I interestingly have experimental data on this. After my undergrad I had to get an EKG done and the tech asked me to do some basic math questions to get some readings. Problem is, I could answer her questions but she got almost no signal. They were just too easy for me because I was so familiar with them. You don't need to calculate what's in the cache. So we moved to 2 digit multiplications and signal was mixed. Good correlation with being able to leverage previous calculations. So then I had her and my dad pick 3 random numbers and I would multiply those in my head. That did the trick and she said it light up like a Christmas tree (I do this visually, so it really was using more parts of the brain than she was likely used to seeing).
My point is, there's more nuance to this. Your brain isn't just a computation unit, it has various levels of storage with different speeds and capacities, it has different accelerators and processing units that can be leveraged if programmed in the right way. The problem with the OP's assessment is they've measured output speed and assumed this is enough information to calculate FLOPS, but a slower processor can win that race if it just is pulling from cache. A slower processor can win in aggregate if it has more parallelism. The problem is that they're measuring something different than what they think they're measuring, even if it is right up to a first order approximation.
As to the rest of your comment, not to diminish your experience, it’s really difficult to tell what you’re trying to say, and how that has to do with any of the very specific symptoms and experiences mentioned.
Other, "quicker" people are satisfied with superficial ideas and sometimes don't even care about factual correctness. But when I finally form my opinion, it is always very considered. When quick people are questioned it's often evident that depth is lacking.
So I am slow only because I do alot more processing, simply put.
I also have ADHD and a lot of this matches Dr Russell A Barkley's description of ADHD, particularly when he describes it as a performance and executive function disorder - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzBixSjmbc8eFl6UX5_wW.... ADHD includes much more but this "slow thinking" seems to be a prominent feature.
Does not list those other qualities.
Reality is that some people are better and some are worse. No need to make half assed excuses about that.
There's another dimension that often is not acknowledged: depth. People have different thresholds at where they're comfortable talking about a topic or saying they "understand". I also don't think there's a strong correlation with the person's intelligence, if anything, a slight bias towards "slower" people being smarter.
- Dumb people might have low thresholds as they are unaware of depth.
- Smart people will have low thresholds because they do better thinking out loud or are just saying they think they have enough to launch off of.
- Dumb people might be slow because they haven't thought about the thing very much.
- Smart people might be slow because they are considering different depths.
We all think fast and slow at times (intended), and we're all 4 people in the above list on different topics. I think we should just make sure we're judging people at the right race. The trouble is despite standing in front of you, talking face to face, you don't know if in that time they've run a few meters or a few kilometers. I think we'd all do better if we worried a little less about speed. If your destination is nowhere, you get there in the same time regardless of your speed.
This is so true sadly, group conversations are very exhausting to me. It is a constant back-and-forth and if you want to say something you need to do it "quick" or the topic shifts.
>Also, my ‘processing time’ in conversation is slow. So I’ve realised that I’m better off focusing on writing as a way to communicate. Writing to me feels more suited towards slow, patient thinkers.
I feel the same way, I try to avoid arguments (like something political with friends (harmless, don't worry)) because it takes me too long to say what I want to say, and my sentences jump around awkwardly trying to express the point I want to make. I was also made fun of in school due to that... Also I tend to mispronounce some words then which makes it even more awkward. People often think that if you don't respond to an argument in two seconds you "lose"...
This also got waaay worse when I first drifted into burnout two years ago (still have, not recovered).
However, I have consistently noticed that the quickness comes at the price of a shallow understanding, and the delivery is also often lacking in those who move fast.
For me, I have to really grok the thing I'm focussing on. I have to internalise it somehow and build a mental model. Once I've done that I am actually faster and more productive than the ones who leap on things quicker.
Fortunately I've had a few good managers and business partners in my career that recognize the value, but it's far from universal and I sometimes have a hard time communicating it myself in the face of the common move fast agile culture that is so prevalent in most of tech.
The "fast thinkers" aren't thinking. They're just doing. Everyone is not only capable of this, but probably behave this way several times a day on certain tasks without realizing it or how it seems to others.
This is beyond mere practice towards a narrow goal. Certain topics just click better due to seemingly unrelated, yet deeply integrated life experiences.
It's not something to worry about since, as the article states, it doesn't affect outcomes much. If anything, "fast thinking" creates blind spots.
I have always felt that my verbal recall skills and the size of my lexicon do not correspond strongly to the quality of my ideas.
Which is unfortunate because I believe most people over-index on these attributes. folks with extremely high wit and low/average critical thinking, I.e Russel Brand types are extremely persuasive due to their ability to be so _accurate_. But accuracy doesn't matter if you're not shooting at the right target. We confuse accuracy with truthfulness. It is some sort of cognitive fallacy our brains short circuit to.
The best folks in our position can do is find work that allows our results to speak for us. And yes, write. Find the time to write. Strategically position yourself such that the battleground is async written text.
But social interactions are awkward. I can't really come up with things to say easily and lots of times I can't respond in ways to keep the conversation going. Only after the fact I get lots of ideas of what I could have said. I'm truly impressed about others who can just come up with interesting or funny things to say on the spot.
I'm a tad older, so I stopped caring about it and just accepted my slow thinking. But I'm sure that I also missed out on a lot of opportunities regarding friendships or work. I still think, that others perceive me as awkward or just not fun and it's hard to just ignore that.
Funnily my wife is completely opposite to me and we have the greatest time.
By nature I’m a slow thinker but I can mode switch if I need to but it’s exhausting after a while in a weird way I put it down to working in the trades before switching to programming full time, some of the fastest funniest people you’ll ever meet are tradesmen on job sites (introversion doesn’t mean poor social skills after all though they get conflated).
If you are generally happy as you are don’t sweat it, be a boring world if we where all the same.
answering a question in 30 seconds vs. 5 minutes of thought is a very salient distinction in school and in some job interviews. it can impress people. so it feels painful to be slow.
all else equal you’d rather be quick. but it’s only a very small advantage for doing most real work.
I doubt it's about thinking speed. At times I've thought I was fundamentally deficient in some way, only to realize later that I was catastrophising about a poor performance in something and generalizing that across my entire life.
There is also a lot of variation in our abilities, mostly due to practice. When I've holed myself up in my room working for weeks I lose the ability to socialize in general, let alone make witty comebacks. But once I'm in a social environment for a while I can banter with anybody.
rawgabbit•2h ago
gooodvibes•1h ago
rawgabbit•58m ago
The book discusses this. Albeit for most people the problem is the reverse. They are applying type 1 thinking to situations that require type 2.
leoc•50m ago