<story><title>Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google</title><url>https://triplebyte.com/blog/marissa-mayer-interview</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Harj</author><text>Marissa described possibly the most thorough and analytical job search process I&amp;#x27;ve heard from anyone, when she was talking about how she joined Google. I really liked her reflection on this in hindsight on how being overly analytical is dangerous and it&amp;#x27;s something I try to remind myself of when I&amp;#x27;m in danger of overthinking a decision:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up with. They look at things as if there’s a right answer and a wrong answer when, the truth is, there’s often just good choices, and maybe a great choice in there.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lkrubner</author><text>Too much focus on utility functions, not enough focus on novelty functions, even though it&amp;#x27;s been proven that utility functions decline in usefulness as a search space expands. Given an infinite search space, a utility function can only find local optima, there is no global optima. In such situations, a novelty function that finds a path from one happy local optima to another happy local optima is a better bet than using a utility function.&lt;p&gt;The above paragraph is rational, and yet people who consider themselves hyper rational often ignore the truth of this. And the irony is that some of them do this for an emotional reason: they want the security that comes from believing that there is an absolute right answer. They are irrationally rational.</text></comment>
<story><title>Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google</title><url>https://triplebyte.com/blog/marissa-mayer-interview</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Harj</author><text>Marissa described possibly the most thorough and analytical job search process I&amp;#x27;ve heard from anyone, when she was talking about how she joined Google. I really liked her reflection on this in hindsight on how being overly analytical is dangerous and it&amp;#x27;s something I try to remind myself of when I&amp;#x27;m in danger of overthinking a decision:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up with. They look at things as if there’s a right answer and a wrong answer when, the truth is, there’s often just good choices, and maybe a great choice in there.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duxup</author><text>As someone who feels they&amp;#x27;re from the outside looking in (left college to work, still ended up in the technology but without a traditional college education) one of the most frustrating things is watch folks who I perceive as traditionally trained CS and similar folks ... is their desire to go hyper analytical ... and then REALLY commit to the result as the best choice above all others because of whatever analysis they made.&lt;p&gt;Now granted there are time to hunker down and commit but sometimes all that data doesn&amp;#x27;t really tell you anything and you&amp;#x27;re still facing an unknown no matter how much work you do, and it might be worth thinking about it after taking a few steps down that road &amp;#x2F; experience.   It&amp;#x27;s not uncommon to come across a variable(s) that plays a far stronger role than any other, only AFTER you tried doing something.&lt;p&gt;For hyper analytical folks the data on hand is the hammer for every nail it seems sometimes.</text></comment>