Might be an unpopular take but… maybe being good at high school math tests is not really such an important gift in the real world.
Bring able to do those sorts of problems isn’t important.
Having the logic solving ability to do those sorts of problems is.
I’d say the real world doesn’t reward being actually gifted.
School rewards obedience and memorization. If you’re aggressively mediocre, but sufficiently agreeable and willing/able to memorize a bunch of bullshit, chances are, you’ll get pretty good grades. I know several people with very good grades who are simply not very intelligent.
Universities also reward memorization. If you’re good at learning facts and writing bullshit like the prof wants to read it, chances are, you’ll get good grades in at least some areas (business, psychology , medicine, and as a CS graduate, even CS to a frighteningly high degree).
If you’re gifted (like I’m actually certified to be, whatever that means), you’re often bored at school, you won’t learn because you don’t really need to, and you don’t really want to play ball with all the bullshit. You can see through it, and especially for teenagers, that’s extremely frustrating.
In the “real world” being gifted isn’t really a huge benefit either. I’m good at what I’m doing and what’s the result? I’m now de facto managing other people at doing what I’m good at. I can’t complain, cushy job, very good pay. But a literal monkey could do 70% of my tasks. I’m inside a corporate cage, that I realistically can’t escape from.
And I think that’s where many of the “gifted, but neither genius nor psychopath” people are at. Overqualified for what they’re doing, but caught in a system where they can’t really excel in the ways they could.
As someone also measured as gifted and put in gifted classes, there was an interesting discussion that I had with one of the teachers about how the views for approaching gifted education was changing.
For a lot of schools, the “gifted” students are gifts; you don’t have to spend time on their education and they may end up helping the classes they are in. So, it is ok to treat them like normal kids and they won’t become a problem.
However, studies have shown that to be really bad for the “gifted” students. You get a lot of underperforming students who don’t engage with the material as it is mentally underwhelming. Soft skills that they were supposed to learn were never developed because they never had to. You even had issues with developing social skills as the distance in standard deviations between gifted and normal children are the same as between a normal kid and a “special education” kid.
The findings were showing you had to treat the “gifted” students with the same care as those in “special education” as the common teaching techniques don’t work, issues are much more varied between children, and being able to lean on talent in some cases leads to skills not being learned because they never needed to be.
Sounds like you were kept with the normal kids.
No, I was actually in a class specifically for gifted children.
However, this was over 20 years ago and back then, this was a relatively new concept in my region. That meant the class had to be padded with “regulars” and the special treatment we got, was rather limited. Looking back, it seemed like they dropped the idea almost completely after 9th grade or so.
And even today I’m pretty sure there’s no comprehensive testing going on. So a ton of smart children get labelled as having ADHD or just as delinquents if they’re from a “bad” background.
Funny thing is, Germany actually did have a three tiered school system for decades, where after elementary the children were separated by “performance”, but since this country is laughably bad at creating equal opportunities, this de facto became a class filter. Parents are academics? Off to the Gymnasium with you! Parents are poor/migrants? Well, Hauptschule will have to do. Good luck at being underemployed for life.
Your last paragraph seems misinformed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(Germany)
State-funded schools (a big majority) are tuition-free, as foreseen by the respective laws, even often on constitutional level. Segregation of students by parent wealth or income is looked down upon, to the point of being an exception to the constitutionally guaranteed freedom to have private schools (Article 7 section 4 of the German constitution, Sondierungsverbot). Of the private gymnasia, the vast majority is run by the Catholic Church on very low tuition fees (which is more easy as by Concordat, the Church receives a high percentage of the amount of money the State need not spend for a pupil in a Church-school); fees for schools who need to earn money by teaching are higher. Schools with fees generally offer scholarships.
In 2005, the German government spent €5,400 per student for those attending public gymnasium. This is less than what was spent on a student attending Hauptschule, but more than was spent on those attending Realschule.[22] Some Hauptschule and Gesamtschule students have special needs requiring extra help, so those schools cannot operate as cost-effectively as gymnasia.
I myself went to a public Gymnasium and can still remember that among my classmates we had a wide range re “parent income and status”.
Literally from:
- ‘single parent that barely gets by’
- ‘teacher parents’
- attorneys / judges / cardiologist / engineers / etc.
- CEO parent of an international company
I literally:
- went through elementary school
- got a recommendation for going to a Gymnasium at end of 4th year based on my performance
- picked one out of the available Gymnasiums in my area (within what was doable by bus on a daily basis)
- then went there
And even if you go to “Hauptschule”, that’s not the end of education. One can still do what’s called “M-Zweig”, which gets you the equivalent degree of “Realschule”. Then one can go to “FOS”, which gets you a degree close to that of Gymnasium. It at least allows for going to a “university of applied sciences”, which is less geared towards academics and more towards industry. Still can get you your masters degree or if a doctors degree if one really wants that and partners with an “academic university” (AFAIR).
Some children simply take that other route. Still, it comes down to ability of the child. Of course, having a non-supportive environment that doesn’t believe in achild can make things harder on it. Some children might actually be motivated by “potentially escaping that”.
But to say this education system is a “class filter” is just wrong.
You seem to have a much too positive view of our system: https://www.das-parlament.de/inland/bildung/wie-gerecht-ist-das-deutsche-bildungssystem
Maybe I have bit too positive outlook on this, yeah.
But that article also emphasizes a lot (first half) that a child’s environment simply matters a lot. Esp. having parents that have higher education themselves and are there for the child to support it regarding learning outside of school can make a big difference. And this isn’t just about the first couple years before elementary school (what article says re “Wortschatz”). Esp. the ongoing school period thereafter. E.g. “Does it make a difference in a child’s household if parents can speak English when trying to learn English?” - of course it does!
The point on “Brennpunktschulen” is also very environment driven. I’m not saying that “Lehrermangel” isn’t real, or that having this system of three school paths starting from 5th grade is the best invention ever.
But one can’t put all the blame on the school system, when “what happens outside of school” has such a big impact on a child.
You can absolutely blame the schools, if so many other countries manage to do better.
You’re basically blaming the children.
Definitely feel the last part… Regular people really don’t realize the distance between them and some of us is the same as them and their dog. It’s cute when it’s a dog; it’s incredibly taxing when it’s a person.
How do you know that what you consider “literal monkey could do it” is not something many other people struggle with?
As a kid i struggled a lot understanding, why people didn’t get the math we dealt with in high school, but i lacked behind in languages, not getting that you have to study for them and can’t just “get” them like with math.
“the real world” isn’t a thing.
There’s no such monolith. Different jobs reward different gifts. The challenge is finding one for your own.
Well, thank you very much, Captain Obvious!
Are you aware that generalizations can sometimes be a proper rhetorical device or do you need your contrarianism for self validation?
I’d say the real world doesn’t reward being actually gifted.
More accurately, the real world punishes being below average at any one of like a dozen skillets. You can’t min/max your stats because being 99th percentile at something won’t make up for being 30th percentile at something else. Better to be 75th percentile at both.
The real world requires cross-disciplinary coordination, which means thriving requires both soft skills and multiple hard skills.
Where and how do they certify “gifted”?
Basically an extended IQ test, back then this was done at the local university, probably by some psychologist.
I’m not entirely sure in how far these tests have changed over time and how different they are from adult IQ tests. I definitely remember a longer interview with someone, which isn’t part of a regular test, I think.
For example, a gifted student would probably know how to use Google
The person I was replying to knows how to use Google.
They’re not the one asking easily searched questions
If we cut all the “Iam very smort”- humblebrags out, what we’re left with is kind of a shit take in my oppinion. You say you were gifted, but not gifted enough to game the system, nor smart enough to realize that in order to succeed academically, the skills you should have been honing were infact memorization and communication skills?
You kind of sound like you’ve got an inflated ego. You might think society screwed you over and now you’re a wageslave, but more than likely you landed exactly where you belong. I’ve listened to enough upper-middle-management powerlarping to know that 2/3 of cushy office job management shares your delusion.
I’m not saying that anything about the premise is wrong, I have intimate experience with the downsides of being differently-abled compared to your peers. Turned into a youth delinquent for a payday earlier than most people have their first sip of beer etc. but still got an academic education, as well as a vocation (nurse), because I realized quite soon that I just can’t take people with this kind of mindset that you clearly have, where you belittle people who have different skills and aptitudes than yourself.
I saw more than enough of the corpo mindset that come with a suite, designer briefcase and S- class Merc to know to steer fucking clear of that life.
I don’t know how it is in other countries, but Spanish high school math competitions are designed to test both logic and creativity. They’ll require you to use the material from your current year, but the way in which you have to apply that math isn’t obvious if your only competency in math is specifically passing high school tests. You don’t get a good score by being a proficient human calculator, but by applying good abstract analysis, which you should be able to apply in other areas of your life.
I wonder if Spanish people write more interesting Jira tickets.
They pronounce it “heera”
By “high school math competitions” I mean provincial or regional competitions where different schools send their best students. The average Spaniard has as much trouble in math as people from all other places, and high school math is very much the same.
I memorized all 151 pokemon before the second generation came out.
I also write Jira tickets.
It usually means that their logical thing is pretty good because discrete math is pretty much all that.
You learn a concept, then you modify it to apply to different contexts for different applications.
The math competitions is a good training for that.
Kind of off topic but some people are really bad at writing jira tickets.
“Show the user a list of projects [eof]”
Ok but like, only their projects, right? Do they need to be ordered? Searchable? Paginated? Only active ones or soft deleted ones, too? Do you just need the name or do you need metadata too?
Somehow product doesn’t love my stance of “if it’s not on the ticket or in a sop, the behavior is undefined and you get what you get” stance.
Dealing with this at the moment - in an org that’s been pretty lax at writing anything down about what and why as far as internal software goes, trying (with support from C-suite) to get people to actually write up any amount of detail in their requests is like pulling teeth.
I tend to take that position as well; if it’s not defined, I get to define it. If I ask for feedback or review and get silence, that means you approve.
The problem is that requirements refinement has been unceremoniously dumped in your lap. The failure here is organizational; maybe you have a design person involved, maybe devs are expected to do this. Either way, your job now also includes communications.
One strategy I’ve used is to draw a low-fi example of what they’re going to get - Figma is great at this these days. Then I add it to the issue and push the whole thing back for early approval in order to suss out these finer points.
Not to come off as misanthropic here, but many people are hot garbage at describing what’s in their head. Most of the time, it’s all abstract concepts up there until you start asking the real questions. They really do need a whole-ass conversation to sharpen that mental image. Or in this case, what they want that feature to look like. Incidentally, this is also the reason why therapy is a thing, and why it takes people years to make sense of themselves, and that outcome is usually far more crucial than anything we’re doing at the keyboard.
If it’s someone else’s job to design things, then that’s a pretty terrible specification. But depending on your role, it’s common enough for there to be one person who designs and builds a feature like “User projects dashboard”, and the job is to decide what’s important based on the product. Especially with smaller companies.
This is me, writing jiras for myself.
Reminds me of this gem: https://lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/
If you think it’s fine to show a list of a variable length without it being sortable, searchable, and pagineable, that’d be on you.
Being in IT communicating must be really hard.
The amount of human ingenuity that’s wasted on shit like figuring out how to make more intrusive ads, that could’ve instead been used to advance humanity is one of the biggest tragedies of capitalism.
The most creative artistic minds of today, are probably working on advertisement.
the sad reality
For a median salary of $112k/yr. Just sayin’.
Would you expect lower or higher?
Plagiarizing my autobiography, I see
That’s not true.
We use YouTrack.
It me
I was a gifted kid who realized that when I applied myself all I got was more and harder work that I also didn’t want to do. Being successful academically felt like a punishment.
So I don’t mind at all that I’m filling out Jira tickets. It’s easy work and I have other things to enjoy.
I feel personally attacked by this post!
I failed maths, but I’m great at logic, which I consider to be the more important proficiency for programming.
I think you need both. Does your logic cover complexity analysis, big O?
I did well in data structures and algorithms in uni, but I have never had those topics come up in my 4 years of being a software developer. I’m in web development, FWIW.
So you don’t really have to know that stuff, depending on what kind of software engineering that you get into.
I’ve done Telephony, Games and I’m currently working in a high performance context. 99% of the time, you don’t need to be thinking about Big O
I think part of it is going through all those sorting methods to show quick sort is the best so that a) students who run into new sorts are better equipped to determine it most likely isn’t better than quick sort and b) to show the process used to determine quick sort is better than the rest in case you have some other algorithm options you want to pick the best of.
And yeah, depending on what you do, some tasks never involve any of that, or when they do, they get offloaded onto a library or something that gives the solution to that step directly.
But, for example, if you have a collection, the question of array vs linked list vs tree is still relevant, even if you’re just choosing a provided construct that is built on top of one of those. Each has their strengths and weaknesses depending on how the data is added, removed, and accessed.
And with how slow things are these days despite how much better the hardware is, I think there’s a lot of successful software engineers and programmers who should be using that stuff from school more than they are.
There’s a lot of software engineering that doesn’t require understanding Big O
Also big O analysis IMO should just be the starting point of maximizing efficiency. Those coefficients that just get dropped can have a huge impact. For example, any algorithm written in JavaScript or visual basic will be of the same order as that same algorithm written in C/C++ or rust, but will likely perform much slower. And the exact manner of implementation could even result in the C version being slower than the VB one.
And on the other hand, I wouldn’t call a lot of big O analysis very advanced math. You might get a tighter bound with advanced math on some algorithms, but you can get a rough estimate just by multiplying and adding loops together. The harder question would be something like “does this early exit optimization result in an O(x³) algorithm becoming an O(log(x)*x²)?”
Another big thing that doesn’t get covered by big O analysis is the potential for parallelization and multi threading, because the difference created by multi threading only amounts to one of those dropped coefficients.
And yet, especially for the workloads being run on a server with 32-128 cores, being able to run algorithms in parallel will make a huge difference to performance.
I think the tldr; of what you said is that even when you have a theoretical handle on the growth function, you still need to actually benchmark anyway
I don’t get the hate for Jira
Maybe it’s badly implemented where I work, but I feel it’s clunky and messy
Categorizing stuff hard
I don’t hate jira. I just hate the managers who make me use it.
Manager lead process is often bad process, for sure
Seems like the hate I see for JIRA and Bitbucket consistently boils down to whoever implemented them being bad at their job
That’s fair, it’s very configurable so I guess you can do that badly
I feel it bloated with a lot of add ons that are not used, or not implemented.
I hate Jira because it’s slow and there’s no CLI interface
It’s slow if your server is slow but fair point about a CLI
Oh look, it’s me.
Should we make a club?
My high school never had math competitions so I’ll never know how I’d do. :(
