[godelski]

I also find really interesting how we frequently talk about how different the two are yet also reinforce the divergence.

  What you learn in school doesn't apply to the job
    Yet we still:
      - fixate on GPA instead of having a sufficient threshold. E.g instead of considering anyone above a 3.0 we prefer a 4.0 student over a 3.8 student.
      - we prefer hiring students with prestigious pedigrees

I'm not saying what you learn in school doesn't matter (I think it does. It forms the foundation) but we often talk as if the knowledge is completely disjoint and then hire using academic pedigrees as the primary signal. I had an interview last week where a guy was saying "this is an engineering role. It's very different from academia" and then was fixated on my publication record. This seems quite common.

  We test applicants based on leetcode and academic like problems

This was clearly originally inspired by the traditional engineering interview but it's become optimized where all we do is study these problems. Instead of building more things and expanding our portfolios. Maybe we should go back to whiteboard interviews and in person. It'll put the focus back on evaluating how a candidate thinks and you can't use GPT on the whiteboard (without easily being caught)

But I think we like to say things and act a different way. Academia has lots of politics, but so does work. Navigating these is something I find challenging and exhausting.

My last job my boss told me "this isn't academia, we care if things work." I was confused, because in my academic research the primary goal was to make things work. Just at a more fundamental level. I also used that knowledge to 20x the performance of one of their systems. They left the PR on read as it wasn't as flashy as the larger more complex model that I out performed.

Honestly, I think just no one knows what they're doing and we're all trying to figure it out. But we're talking confidently about causality and then don't walk the walk. I mean the first part is fine, the world is complex, but do we need to pretend that things are so easy? Maybe if we didn't they'd actually become a bit easier. Instead of having the complexity of the world and the complexity of (business and cultural) politics and navigating all the double speak we would just have the complexity of the world. Idk, I feel like half our problems (or more) are created because we want to pretend things are easier than they are, because not knowing is scary?