I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it

Re:I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and mad... by __s on Thursday April 09, 2020 @10:26AM (#22822819)

> I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked, so there's some anecdotal personal truth.

I've experienced this too, & entered the profession in 2011 without completing post secondary

Essentially I believe it comes down to the fact that if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year. When you're just trying to scrape by you won't make take those odds. But if you're passionate you're not thinking about those odds, they're a byproduct of your passion

Prefer opportunism to goal setting

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Re:I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and mad... by dmd on Thursday April 09, 2020 @10:40AM (#22822958)

> if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year.

"actualllyyy" you've got a 2 in 3 chance of landing it each year.

1-((1-(0.3/100))^365) = 0.66

EDIT: stop upvoting me, he's right. The question isn't "what is the probability of at least one success in a year", but rather "how many trials, on average, does it take to get one success" - and the answer to THAT is in fact 333, from the geometric distribution.

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Re:I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and mad... by socketnaut on Thursday April 09, 2020 @11:06AM (#22823235)

“actualllllyyyyy” he’s saying something different. If you take a 0.3% chance for N days where N is large, you’ll land it 0.003N times, or once every ~333 days.

The chance of landing it within any particular window of K days is a different concept (which you showed how to reason about).

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Re:I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and mad... by dmd on Thursday April 09, 2020 @11:46AM (#22823650)

You're right! Edited my comment.

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Re:I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and mad... by lalaithion on Thursday April 09, 2020 @11:46AM (#22823649)

But you've also got a 20% chance of landing it twice and a 7% chance of landing it three times and a 2% chance of landing it four times and so, on average, you'll land it every 333 days.

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Re:I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and mad... by electricstate on Thursday April 09, 2020 @11:10AM (#22823277)

> Essentially I believe it comes down to the fact that if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year.

This is very true. Life is like poker, not chess. On that front everyone should read Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke.

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