I was told they do have some slower paced roles (versus most of the "tip of the spear" work they do) during my last interview cycle, but it has been some time since that has occurred. Appreciate the recent ground truth. Does 18F still have a remote contingent of support/ancillary roles? It's always helpful to know who I can send where for those looking for work vs those needing work done.
Edit: Many thanks for taking the time to reply in depth.
If people are looking for hard (the hard mostly comes from the ambiguity of problem space and autonomous nature of our teams) impactful work, send em our way (USDS).
If they’re looking for impactful work, but not necessarily some of the things that make USDS “hard,” our partners are also great places to land.
There’s plenty of work for those that can do it though
Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad. A lot of anecdotes about “important” historical figures or institutions that use copy by hand as a method for learning.
I would have preferred citing actual research, not an appeal to historical methods.
Given that some of the conclusions that word for word copy may be less efficient than summarized copy[1], it may be a less efficient and less effective way of learning than going through a reading and summarizing every paragraph.
In my personal anecdata, writing a thing down is an important mechanism to note and recall facts I’ll find important later. I nearly never consult my notes. I’m even a terrible note taker, and always have been. I write things down in random places which normally I discard as they become clutter, just because the act of writing them is an additional point of recall when I might fail to recall otherwise. It doesn’t always serve me well, but it always serves me better than not making the note somewhere.
> I would have preferred citing actual research, not an appeal to historical methods. Given that some of the conclusions that word for word copy may be less efficient than summarized copy.
I can at least provide some links. [1] is my own research on giving students optional typing practice in a CS2 course. [2] is Mickie Chi's overview of the ICAP framework which categorizes learning activities based on their level of engagement (Interactive, Constructive, Active, Passive). Chi's work notes that higher modes of engagement provide more learning gains, or I > C > A > P.
Copying would be considered an Active exercise and theoretically would not give as much learning gains as a Self-Explanation exercise ("summarized copy", Constructive). However, much of the research into self-explanation shows that lower-performing students do not provide good summarizations/self-explanations. Thus, in my [1] work, I make the argument that for these students, completing a lower ICAP mode (typing practice) is a better use of their time. While it does not provide as much learning gain as a Constructive activity, it can still give students some gains that could potentially elevate them to a mental model that can successfully complete Self-Explanations.
> In your research area, is there a significant textbook or summary paper you would recommend that summarises current findings well?
It depends on what you're referring to by "research area". My focus is specific to novel CS exercises like typing exercises, Parsons Problems, coding problems, etc. In that regard I really like Teaching Tech Together [1] as a broad, here's a blanket review of CS education and its exercises. If you mean more generally to just CS Education, then Teaching Tech is still starting point I think, as it provides a nice literature review of the domain as well.
> What would you recommend to a complete amateur orienting themselves?
It'll depend (again) on what you mean here. If you mean learning about CS Education research, then the link above will be great. Then its about going down rabbit holes from the citations to read in more detail about those findings.
If you mean simply learning CS, the biggest recommendation I can make is carve out 1-4 hours a week (depending on your schedule) and commit to learning to code via MOOCs, tutorials, videos etc. Find a CS1 syllabus from a university that has a schedule on it and follow that. A lot of learning can be traced back to "time on task". Ignoring the recent HN post about how years of experience doesn't equal most skilled coders, that article is looking at what research calls "experts" vs. "novices" (beginners). We know spaced repetition works, we know cramming (trying to learn it all immediately) doesn't. Following the syllabus' schedule will space out your learning, force you to recall the information, and produce better learning in the long run.
The idea is to make it a part of your weekly "routine" to the point where if you DON'T do it, you feel weird. For example, I've trained martial arts for 15+ years. Somewhere in that time, I'm so used to going to train that when I take nights off, its weird because I'm just USED to training. Even my body wakes up cause its used to needing adrenaline. That needs to be a part of any learning process.
Oh I've definitely figured out the trick to learning CS, tékhnē.
No worries there.
I'm simply curious about the state of the art of the pedagogy.
CS education is a fascinating situation. You have an interaction of strong mathematical, socioeconomic, and generally academic backgrounds, and often the complete opposite studying it. Plus very little institutional knowledge around pedagogy or anything else relative to almost all other fields of academia. And yet, there are all sorts of interesting factoids around the place, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-wCHDJYmo.
I don't pretend get how it all fits together.
Thank you very much, Teach Together looks like the perfect starting point, and I can follow the citation breadcrumgbs from there.
"Way of learning" is a very broad term, and the two ways may be good for different aspects of it.
Verbatim copying is good for bringing your attention to the material, it helps you notice more, and doesn't let you mind wander. While summarizing is good for cementing what you've noticed and learned.
For example, if I try to copy part of text I see the writing techniques used there a lot better. I don't see how summarizing can give me the same effect.
I'm almost ready to try both techniques simultaneously, although it seems like an overkill, so much writing.
At the beginning of diving into a topic area or when I want to go very deep on a subject.
Books tend to have good comprehensive overviews of an area/technology, whereas most online tutorials are very shallow, even if more current.
On the flip side, when I need /deep/ understanding it’s almost always a combination of a book on the topic to fill in holes I missed, the docs, and live repos if available.
If it’s just for day to day use, or a technology I’m only using in passing - no.
I do vet the authors though. A lot of trash is published.
I think things like this are not “everyone must use this new better way of typing,” but more “hey there may be a better way of doing this task.”
I am always surprised, though at this point I shouldn’t be, that there is always pushback against any attempts at improving the status quo when it comes to typing speeds on HN - as though the creator is attacking all of us with lower typing speeds personally…
From another perspective: sure you might speed up only 0.5% of your workday - but how is that a bad thing?
Repetitive stress injuries aside, even if you only spend an hour a week typing (I suspect it’s honestly more) then if you end up increasing your typing speed by double you’re still saving yourself 25 hours a year. Assuming my a career of 35 years that’s 875 hours and you increase your time fighting imposter syndrome by 0.25%.
Scale up as appropriate for how much time you actually spend typing.
The pushback is not against the improvements themselves, but rather at the claims of what the improvements solve, and the criticisms of people who fall below some threshold at some specific task, with dubious claims about the effect on their overall performance (without actually measuring the overall performance).
It seems to be a common theme among tech people to unfairly extrapolate small, vaguely related things to judge big things, even to the point of rejecting job candidates or firing employees over one of them and then crowing about it on social media (for example the "don't hire losers" post a few days ago).
If someone doesn't like how I work, then don't watch me work. I get paid for the fruits of my work, not how I get there.
> …the criticisms of people who fall below some threshold at some specific task, with dubious claims about the effect on their overall performance
It’s unclear to me where this criticism is coming from.
> If someone doesn't like how I work, then don't watch me work. I get paid for the fruits of my work, not how I get there.
Similarly it’s unclear to me where there is anything about anyone measuring how you get your work done. That seems unrelated to the article at hand that only passingly mentions any work context (only of a co-worker making a claim about their own effectiveness) while spending most of the article on games and typing competitions.
> I am always surprised, though at this point I shouldn’t be, that there is always pushback against any attempts at improving the status quo when it comes to typing speeds on HN - as though the creator is attacking all of us with lower typing speeds personally…
I don't think it's a general attack because people are personally offended; most of the criticism right now seems to be that the headline claim is materially untrue. Rejecting snake oil is healthy and reasonable even if there's value to be found.
Edit: Perhaps more succinctly, people aren't pushing back against improvements, they're pushing back on deceptive claims.
Ah yeah, that's fair. I could defend that as cost/benefit analysis, but I'm with you - let's push the limits and worry about utility evaluation later! (I literally have a chording keyboard on my desk right now, so I'm quite serious when I say I want to push the limits:])
What hardware/software are you using? I’ve looked into it a few times, but the cost benefit hasn’t been there for me for doing the research without knowing anything about it yet.
Do you code with it as well, or is it primarily chat/browsing/etc?
I own a https://www.gboards.ca/product/ginni , largely because it was the smallest/cheapest option to dip my toes in:) I don't do much of anything in it right now, because I'm still learning to use it (currently at the "I have to think about each letter" stage), so unfortunately I can't say yet. I expect to end up coding with it, likely with a custom dictionary, but we'll see how it develops.
I might have read too much into your use of the term “safe” as being indicative that there was some danger or concern.
I agree with this sentiment:
> I said I spend not a lot of time typing. Therefore, a device that is aimed at improving typing speed, has a low impact on my productivity.
Though, setting aside that efficiency =/= effectiveness/productivity, I think the spirit of the article is that if a coworker is typing a lot, that may claim that their efficiency has increased greatly, not that every single person will see equal improvements.
FWIW: this is being typed with two thumbs on an iPhone because that’s as efficient as _I_ need to be right now ;)
Medical transcriptionists once used a specialized keyboard to quickly describe spoken terminology. "Shorthand" has existed for a while and I imagine is a dying art at this point [1].
I think most cases where you needed actual really fast typing were covered long ago and the number of careers or situations where a person needed it have been declining for a long time.
My point is more of it being not a bad thing to improve on.
Most of the cases where you needed actual really fast travel have been covered for a long time and the number of careers or situations where a person need to travel fast have been declining for a long time, but I think we can all agree faster travel times are better.
Side note: stenography and chorded words with something like Plover (similar to the above) is where really fast typing usually comes into play for. I have not looked into any of the above because the pain of changing my habits hasn’t been worth the benefits to me yet.
I’ve considered it when I had to do interview transcripts, but ultimately I didn’t want to make the investment. I hope future generations are able to learn on something more designed for contemporary use than QWERTY and classic keyboards - I know my wrists have thanked me for moving to a split keyboard for the ergonomics alone.
Agreed. On my journey to some sort of personal meaning I ended up going through psychology, physical sciences, philosophy & meditation - roughly in that order with poetry and literature interspersed…
But understanding life has, in my experience, been similar to the hermeneutic circle: to understand a part, you must understand the whole, and to understand the whole, you must understand the parts…
That is: the entry point is here - learn about the world and about how humans think about and perceive it. Start anywhere, but start.
*edit: I forgot to add also history. It also helps to shed light on the different meanings people have discovered over time.
