Comment by ldp01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ldp01 | Hacker News Reader

Most of these skills seem pretty vague. How would you quantify "Judgment and Decision Making" in a generic sense? Seems a bit too context dependant to make that generalisation.

Reaching a basic level of success in employment is way more holistic than these bar charts would indicate.

Statements like this are just silly:

> "A skill like “judgement” could make you highly employable, but be hard to improve, and so offer poor returns per hour spent learning."

How about this for a pretty generic plan:

- Know your trade: Understand whatever system you are using in depth.

- Understand how you create value within the specific business you are in.

- Have an O.K understanding of how your work interacts with others, and be O.K at explaining your understanding to others.

- Try to consistently interact with others in good faith and try to score runs for your project/business/whatever. Subjugate your own ego as much as possible and remain friendly when things get hectic.

>Most of these skills seem pretty vague. How would you quantify "Judgment and Decision Making" in a generic sense? Seems a bit too context dependant to make that generalisation.

You don't need to "quantify" it. You just need to be able to exercise it. It's one of the things that people you know when you see it (especially in hindsight) whatever the domain (so the fact that it's context dependent doesn't matter either).

I'll buy that. I am expecting a lot from a random/free study on the Internet!

But I think part of my gripe stands: the study is treating all these skills as independent when they actually seem pretty interrelated. There are also important confounding factors like industry which aren't given a mention.

For example 'judgement and decision making' in any professional field has to be built on a foundation of technical knowledge. And that judgement and decision making is probably not really transferable to other professional fields.

>For example 'judgement and decision making' in any professional field has to be built on a foundation of technical knowledge. And that judgement and decision making is probably not really transferable to other professional fields.

Is it though? Because we have the case of CEOs and upper management doing fine in widely differing companies and industries.

It's more about knowing who to trust and what the signs tell you, than about having any low- or even mid-level technical knowledge.

Taleb has this story: "“In one of the rare non charlatanic books in finance, descriptively called What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars, the protagonist makes a big discovery. He remarks that a fellow called Joe Siegel, the most active trader in a commodity called “green lumber” actually thought that it was lumber painted green (rather than freshly cut lumber, called green because it had not been dried). And he made a living, even a fortune trading the stuff! Meanwhile the narrator was into theories of what caused the price of commodities to move and went bust. The fact is that predicting the order flow in lumber and the price dynamics narrative had little to do with these details — not the same thing. Floor traders are selected in the most non-narrative manner, just by evolution in the sense that nice arguments don’t make much difference.”

> How would you quantify "Judgment and Decision Making" in a generic sense?

You don't. You listen to someone trustworthy vouching for the person having good judgement.

Which is very likely affected by how much you like/trust the person, as such not an objective way to measure ?

So then the employability might just read "how much people like you".

I may severely dislike certain people but acknowledge their undeniable good judgment. Being reasonably honest, I'll tell as much if asked for a reference.

Anything that involves a word like "good" instead of something numeric is hard to objectively measure. But if your aim is not science but hiring, you learn to trust your gut and other unscientific instruments. (Human vision is very much flawed as a scientific instrument, but it helps do complex things nonetheless. Same with human judgment.)

> How would you quantify "Judgment and Decision Making" in a generic sense?

The fact that you raised this issue demonstrates good judgement. You pass.

Does it count as decision making if I decide to use a Switch statement instead of an IF statement?

Unfortunately not, that would fall under coding- which is a useless skill.[0]

[0] https://80000hours.org/articles/skills-most-employable/

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