alt Hacker NewsI mean.. if you can finish a task for a client in a day, and someone else needs two days, isn't that a huge difference? Or to turn it around, if someone does 10%, 20%, 50% more in the same time period, isn't that significant?
I mean.. we are comparing students abilities here, and doing stuff fast is one of those abilities. Even potato peelers in a restaurant are valued more if they're faster, why not programmers too? Or DMV workers?
Replies
bawolff • yesterday at 11:37 PM
I don't think test speed is correlated with that.
Like anything i had to do in a test when i was taking my CS degree is maybe 5% if not less of the portion of my real job tasks. Even if i was triple as fast at taking those tests, i think that would be a neglibile increase in on the job speed.
"I mean.. if you can finish a task for a client in a day, and someone else needs two days, isn't that a huge difference?"
I've never seen that come down to processing speed. Even as a programmer -- I can program probably 10x faster than most of my peers in straight programming contest style programs. But in terms of actual real work -- I'm probably slightly faster. But my value is really I spend a lot of time really understanding the ask and impact of the work I'm doing -- asking good questions, articulating what I'm delivering, etc...
That is, my faster processing speed results in very little added benefit. That is, time to deliver results can matter. Processing speed typically is a very small percentage of that time. And for these tests processing speed is often the main distinction. It's not like they're distinguishing one kid who can't solve this equation and another kid who can. It's generally more likely one kid can finish all 25 questions in 32 minutes and the other would take 38 minutes so they only finish 23 of them in the allotted 32. I don't think that ends up mattering in any real way.