[crasshopper]

Probably everyone knows the math; I just think they're exaggerating the relevance of this model to real life.

I'm with the commenter (here) who said that real life is more likely to be an initial-value-dependent or path-dependent PDE. Someone else said having a high-IV person on your team will raise the slopes of everyone else which seems also right: the issues are multidimensional, not affine 1-D.

Ousterhout is taking sides (smarter > more experienced) which is fine; he can make that argument. But using y=mx+b as x→∞ doesn't count as an argument; it's rhetorical flair, not rhetorical substance. The substance of his reasoning seems to be "That's my opinion based on my experience in my past jobs".

[maxerickson]

I read it more as an illustrative example to open up the following discussion than a terribly serious model of real life.

He does riff back on it, but it's five minutes of perspective tossed at teenagers, not anything formal.

[crasshopper]

It seems like a way to lend scientificity to his opinion. There are other ways of saying smarts>experience. Invoking y=mx+b here seems deceptive.

[bduerst]

Analogies are inexact by definition, which doesn't mean that the speaker is being intentionally deceptive by using one.

I don't think anyone took this beyond the anecdotal evidence provided. We can argue motive and hypotheticals all day but the fact remains that this is just a blurb thrown at fresh undergraduates.

It's a motivational speech (delivered via heresay on Quora) not a thesis.