My problem is I usually don’t have a story, my career has been boring and stagnant.
I had one of these questions tossed at me in an interview last year. Something a long the lines of a “time I faced a difficult technical challenge and how I managed to solve it”, but I didn’t have any.
Well… ok not exactly true. In my professional career I’ve done more sitting around staring at the screen while bureaucrats debates than I have working on challenging technical problems. Any true difficult problems I’ve faced professionally have been predominately organizational.
However I’ve been programming in general for a lot longer, and in recent years, despite finding a continuous lack of interest in programming, I am very interested in things that end with me writing code and that’s created some of the work I’m most proud of l. Ofc the interviewer wasn’t interested in any of that, as they wanted something from a position off my resume.
> Any true difficult problems I’ve faced professionally have been predominately organizational.
If I was the interviewer I would love to hear that story.
Much like in political debates, answering the question asked is not required to persuade the voters. And in an interview, the end goal is to convince the voters.
Could you elaborate a bit more on how you do this, or point to resources on it? Do you mean putting constraints on possible parameter values, or just on the loss function values itself? Thanks.
I have never dabbled with constraining the parameter values themselves. Ive mostly put the constraints into the loss function. This works well when working with regression, a super simple constraint that adds penalty when the regression goes outside of the possible solution space has been extremely helpful in our work. Heuristically, I think it’s more useful during the first few iterations to find the correct local minima. If you were already finding the “correct” local minima this might be less important, but if you’ve ever dealt with convolutional artifacts (boxes, lines, edge effects) in your predictions, well informed constraints tend to help avoid these, as they are a symptom of being in an incorrect local minima.
Of interest, Winston Chuchill took up bricklaying while performing many other duties, became a member of his local bricklaying union, and build a bomb shelter in his back garden.
I think many experiences do compound. Most people who take the traditional path of working straight after school trade security for reference experiences which help in understanding what they want, and helping deal with challenges further down the line. For some this is fine, security is what they want and the 'what ifs' and opportunity cost on growth experiences will not bother them. For others this may cause more existential problems down the line.
As a generalising anecdote, some of the greatest people I have worked with had very non-traditional paths early on, and I find them to have a greater 'big picture' sense, more resiliency and more humour in the face of adversity. But are not as rich in their 40s as others.
I think the question of how experiences compound is totally interesting and worth asking (which is why I did :P). It's something I think is worth considering when thinking through how you prioritize your life and your goals.
Doing things that make you a happier, healthier (mentally and physically) person at age 25 my seriously pay off vs doing those things at age 45. In fact I strongly suspect they do.
I'm surpised this is getting downvoted. The OPs assertion that listening is easier than speaking makes sense in the context he describes, a closed testing environment.
In a more practical setting, as someone who is living in another country and learning the language, it is far easier for me to convey my meaning with limited vocabulary, than to listen and interpret another speaker, and especially a group conversation.
Certainly listening is easier than me speaking at the same proficiency as the other speaker, but in terms of what matters for using the language on a day to day basis, it is the other way around.
I'm a native Russian speaker but have forgotten most of it since I moved away from there. One thing that makes listening so much easier than speaking is that I can often infer context of a sentence based on just a few words, even if I don't know what the other 5 are. With speaking, I might know what I want to say but I get stuck on the one or two words that I just don't have in my vocabulary, and it crushes my ability to communicate(in Russian).
Obviously, everyone's mileage varies, this is just an anecdote :)
When we're speaking of proficiency and comparing them between reading, listening, and speaking, you look at them through a similar lens. How well can you understand or communicate ideas in the language? Can you convey complicated and nuanced thoughts in your target language? Can you understand those? How would your speaking ability compare to a well educated native speaker? How does it compare against a less educated native speaker?
You feel more fluent in speaking because you're only working within your own ability while listening you'll encounter things you don't understand or situations where it's difficult to understand things all the time. That doesn't mean you're more proficient at speaking and in most cases you aren't going to be nearly as proficient at speaking as you think.
I have some sympathy to this argument, even though I agree with you in overall that based on what we know from the millions of vaccines being administered, they appear to be very safe. But points in favor of the FDA argument, which is mostly around emergency authorization requiring a lower standard of evidence:
- The pharmaceutical industry is notorious for manipulation of trial data to make their treatments looks as beneficial as possible, as they are incentivized to do so. In the current case Pfizer and others have still not made the trial data public, and probably never will [0][1]
- The main study on the Pfizer vaccine contained safety data for an average of about two months - on this basis the vaccine was declared to be extremely safe. Obviously longer term effects cannot be captured in this timeframe [2]
- Due to the requirements to generate a clear public health message, almost anything that may suggest a risk with vaccines is downplayed. See for example how VAERS data is routinely dismissed (with some reason)[3], whereas data on COVID hospitalization and death rates is largely unquestioned, despite containing some room for interpretation [4].
Again, the the totality of evidence suggests that the vaccine are safe and effective. But it is not crazy or evil, as some would suggest here, to question some of what we are being told and how the data is being presented to us.
Does full FDA approval make a meaningful difference, though?
If anything, it seems like if someone doesn’t want to rely on the current EUA (because of limited data, incentives, etc.) then they shouldn’t suddenly be okay with the FDA’s full authorization.
Over the past couple years we’ve witnessed and discussed at length the level of regulatory capture that has affected the FAA (via Boeing).
That makes me wonder if the FDA has also succumbed to the same issues (via Pfizer).
The agencies have a similar role and similar potentiality for capture. Revolving doors, lots of $ at stake, huge multinational corporations.
I’ve brought this up before and was downvoted to hell. But I’m just putting it out there without bias. It’s based on a logical thought process. I don’t understand why we can’t even discuss if there are issues with the FDA’s process being corrupted by corporations with billions of dollars.
