2023-03-16 14:14:01
Trying despite disbeliefI am very good at finding reasons why something will NOT work out, and pessimistically hyper-focusing on them. In my past they were enough to immediately give up on an idea. One thing that my wife taught me is what I call
trying despite disbelief.
I think the first time it happened was ~9y ago. The company I worked for made me a H1B work visa and offered $56k/year salary. I took the deal without negotiations and moved to the US. When my wife, girlfriend at the time, heard that my salary is just $56k, she was like "WTF, they low-balled you, go and ask for 20% more". I laughed because nobody gets 20% raises, but she convinced me to TRY. I went to my boss and asked for 20% raise with
zero belief that I will get it. The funny thing is, when I try I appear like I know what I am doing, smiling and such, and what do you know, to my surprise I got ~15% increase.
Another time I left my backpack with a laptop in a coffee shop. I called them up and they said they don't see one. Past me would give up, because I got a pretty strong signal that
it isn't there. By that time I already had a few experiences where trying helped, so I simply drove there and there it was, on the floor. I don't know how they couldn't notice it.
There were many other examples. Some still required encouragements by my wife and others, like trying for L7, and asking for more money. Another example is me accepting the L7 high-risk high-reward offer -- I'll do my best and hopefully survive. Even publishing this post is an example -- the reason not to post it is that this is possibly bullshit.
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I am not saying that it will help everyone, but it might certainly help those competent but not confident. Quoting Wikipedia "The
Dunning–Kruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability, and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability" (I encourage to read the rest of article). If you believe you belong to the second group, or sometimes you find yourself thinking "if even he/she did it, then I should be able too!", then it might help. Or if you are a woman, because the ever-present patriarchy makes you feel small.
A part of this is accepting a possibility of failure. In fact, I usually go with low expectations and just do my best. If you fail, that's OK. It isn't the end of the world.
Another thing is, you might luck out. An interviewer might not ask you topics that you are weak at (I am weak at parsers). In my Google interview I wasn't prepared for system design. I failed one; the other was quite algorithmic (=easier) and the interviewer was from Android (not working distributed systems themselves), so I got lucky. You cannot get lucky if don't even try .
Like I said, I tend to hyper-focus on reasons why something will NOT work out, in a pessimistic way. While it is discouraging, it also guides me to work on the weakest parts. If you think about chances of success as a confidence interval, then working on the weakest parts maximizes the lower bound. You can see an example of this in my obsessive preparation for the behavioral interview which I never did before and which isn't very technical. This attitude also poses the question "What am I missing?" and you can see an example of this in researching my Microsoft interviewers and discovering new topics to learn. Thinking how a system might fail (failure modes, unhappy cases) is one difference between L4 and L5.
Overall I can say that this simple technique made a big difference in my life. The first step is the hardest.
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