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Re:From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb by Vinnl on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @09:14AM (#30931591)
That seems consistent. If there's a 1% chance of a meaningful improvement, and 99 out of 100 changes do not meaningfully improve things, than the challenge is knowing beforehand what the most impactful engineering work is going to be.
Re:From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb by exikyut on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @10:03AM (#30932043)
Meta-question: does the cognizance, cohesion and awareness that goes into identifying that 1% emerge from the 99% quotient of inefficient aimless wandering, or somewhere else?

Meta-meta-question: assuming that it does, how does the line get described (let alone drawn) dividing "this work contributes to identifying the 1%" from "this is a waste of time"?

(Insert something about gradient descent and local vs global maximums here)

I'll call this a genuine question, I could definitely use some refinement of my own optimization of this problem space (and not wind up in micro-optimized dead ends etc).

Re:From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb by seoaeu on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @02:39PM (#30935855)
> the challenge is knowing beforehand what the most impactful engineering work is going to be

If the payoff in the 1% case is high enough, then you don't have to know beforehand! Just do all 100 changes and the one winner pays for all the rest.

Re:From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb by Vinnl on Thursday April 07, 2022 @03:58AM (#30941864)
Yeah that's what I meant: 1% of engineers might be doing the most impactful work, but all of them have a claim to potentially being that engineer.