Cliquebusting

Last evening we hosted a party at home. Like all parties we host, we used Graph Theory to plan this one. This time, however, we used graph theory in a very different way to how we normally use it – our intent was to avoid large cliques. And, looking back, I think it worked.

First, some back story. For some 3-4 months now we’ve been planning to have a party at home. There has been no real occasion accompanying it – we’ve just wanted to have a party for the heck of it, and to meet a few people.

The moment we started planning, my wife declared “you are the relatively more extrovert among the two of us, so organising this is your responsibility”. I duly put NED. She even wrote a newsletter about it.

The gamechanger was this podcast episode I listened to last month.

The episode, like a lot of podcast episodes, is related to this book that the guest has written. Something went off in my head as I listened to this episode on my way to work one day.

The biggest “bingo” moment was that this was going to be a strictly 2-hour party (well, we did 2.5 hours last night). In other words, “limited liability”!!

One of my biggest issues about having parties at my house is that sometimes guests tend to linger on, and there is no “defined end time”. For someone with limited social skills, this can be far more important than you think.

The next bingo was that this would be a “cocktail” party (meaning, no main course food). Again that massively brought down the cost of hosting – no planning menus, no messy food that would make the floor dirty, no hassles of cleaning up, and (most importantly) you could stick to your 2 / 2.5 hour limit without any “blockers”.

Listen to the whole episode. There are other tips and tricks, some of which I had internalised ahead of yesterday’s party. And then came the matter of the guest list.

I’ve always used graph theory (coincidentally my favourite subject from my undergrad) while planning parties. Typical use cases have been to ensure that the graph is connected (everyone knows at least one other person) and that there are no “cut vertices” (you don’t want the graph to get disconnected if one person doesn’t turn up).

This time we used it in another way – we wanted the graph to be connected but not too connected! The idea was that if there are small groups of guests who know each other too well, then they will spend the entirety of the party hanging out with each other, and not add value to the rest of the group.

Related to this was the fact that we had pre-decided that this party is not going to be a one-off, and we will host regularly. This made it easier to leave out people – we could always invite them the next time. Again, it is important that the party was “occasion-less” – if it is a birthday party or graduation party or wedding party or some such, people might feel offended that you left them out. Here, because we know we are going to do this regularly, we know “everyone’s number will come sometime”.

I remember the day we make the guest list. “If we invite X and Y, we cannot invite Z since she knows both X and Y too well”. “OK let’s leave out Z then”. “Take this guy’s name off the list, else there will be too many people from this hostel”. “I’ve met these two together several times, so we can call exactly one of them”. And so on.

With the benefit of hindsight, it went well. Everyone who said they will turn up turned up. There were fourteen adults (including us), which meant that there were at least three groups of conversation at any point in time – the “anti two pizza rule” I’ve written about. So a lot of people spoke to a lot of other people, and it was easy to move across groups.

I had promised to serve wine and kODbaLe, and kept it – kODbaLe is a fantastic party food in that it is large enough that you don’t eat too many in the course of an evening, and it doesn’t mess up your fingers. So no need of plates, and very little use of tissues. The wine was served in paper cups.

I wasn’t very good at keeping up timelines – maybe I drank too much wine. The party was supposed to end at 7:30, but it was 7:45 when I banged a spoon on a plate to get everyone’s attention and inform them that the party was over. In another ten minutes, everyone had left.

When Institutions Decay

A few weeks back, I’d written about “average and peak skills“. The basic idea in this blogpost is that in most jobs, the level of skills you need on most days (or the “average skill” you need) is far far inferior to the “peak skill” level required occasionally.

I didn’t think about this when I wrote that blogpost, but now I realise that a lot of institutional decay can be simply explained by ignoring this gap between average and peak skills required.

I was at my niece’s wedding this morning, and was talking to my wife about the nadaswara players (and more specifically about this tweet):

“Why do you even need a jalra”, she asked. And then I pointed out that the jalra guy had now started playing the nadaswara (volga). “Why do we need this entire band”, she went on, suggesting that we could potentially use a tape instead.

This is a classic case of peak and average skill. The average skill required by the nadaswara player (whether someone sitting there or just operating a tape) is to just play, play it well and play in sync with the dhol guy. And if you want to maximise for the sheer quality of the music played, then you might as well just buy a tape and play it at the venue.

However, the “peak skill” of the nadaswara player goes beyond that. He is supposed to function without instruction. He is supposed to keep an eye on what is happening at the wedding, have an idea of the rituals (given how much the rituals vary by community, this is nontrivial) and know what kind of music to play when (or not play at all). He is supposed to gauge the sense of the audience and adjust the sort of music he is playing accordingly.

And if you consider all these peak skills required, you realise that you need a live player rather than a tape. And you realise that you need someone who is fairly experienced since this kind of judgment is likely to come more easily to the player.

The problem with professions with big gaps between average and peak skills, and where peak skills are seldom called upon, is that penny-pinching managers can ignore the peak and just hire for average skill (I had mentioned this in my previous post on the topic as well).

In the short run, there is an advantage in that people with average skills for the job are far cheaper than those with peak skills for the job (and the former are unlikely to suffer motivational issues as well). Now, over a period of time you find that these average skilled people are able to do rather well (and are much cheaper and much lower maintenance than peak skilled people).

Soon you start questioning why you need the peak skill people after all. And start replacing them with average people. The more rare the requirement of peak skill is in the job, the longer you’ll be able to go on like this. And then one day you’ll find that the job on that day required a little more nuance and skill, and your current team is wholly incapable of handling it.

You replace your live music by tapes, and find that your music has got static and boring. You replace your bank tellers with a combination of ATMs and call centres, and find it impossible to serve that one customer with an idiosyncratic request. You replace your software engineers with people who don’t have that good an idea of algorithmic theory, and one day are saddled with inefficient code.

Ignoring peak skill required while hiring is like ignoring tail risk. Because it is so improbable, you think it’s okay to ignore it. And then when it hits you it hits you hard.

Maybe that’s why risk management is usually bundled into a finance person’s job – if the same person or department in charge of cutting costs is also responsible for managing risk, they should be able to make better tradeoffs.

Everyone can be above average

All it requires is some selection bias

There were quite a few teachers during my time at IIT Madras who were rumoured to have said the line “I want everyone in class to be above average”. Some people credit a professor of mathematics for saying this. At other times, the quote is ascribed to a lecturer of Engineering Drawing. In the last 20 years I’m sure even some statistics professors would have been credited with this line.

The absurdity in the line is clear. By definition, everyone cannot be above average. The average is a measure of central tendency. However you define it (arithmetic mean, geometric mean, harmonic mean, median, mode), the average is by definition a “central value”, meaning you will have numbers both above and below it. In the worst case (assuming you are using a mode or median for a highly skewed distribution), there will be a large number of data points EQUAL to the average. Everyone cannot be above (strictly greater than) average.

However, based on some recent incidents, I figured out a way in which everyone can actually be above average. All it takes is some kind of selection bias. Basically you need to be clever in terms of how you count – both when you calculate the average and when you define the “everyone”.

Take one example – you have an exam you need to pass to go from Grade 1 to Grade 2. Let’s say the class average (let’s use the simple mean here) is 41, and you need to have scored at least 40 to pass. Let’s also assume that nobody has scored exactly 40 or 41.

Now, if you come back next month and look at the exam scores of all the Grade 2 students, you will find that all of them would have scored strictly more than 41 – the old “average”. In other words, since the below average students are no longer part of the sample (since they have “not passed”), everyone left is above average! The below average set has simply been eliminated!

Another way is simple relative grading. Let’s say there are 3 sections in the class. Telling one section that “everyone should be above average” is fairly legit – all it says is that this particular section should outperform the others so significantly that everyone in this section will be above the average defined by all sections!

It is easier to do in code – using some statistical packages, as long as you slip in a few missing values into your dataset, you will find that the average is meaningless, and when you ask your software for how many are above average, the program defaults can mean that everyone can be classified as “above average” (even the ones with missing values).

I must have recommended this a few times already, but Darrell Huff’s 1954 book How to Lie With Statistics remains a masterpiece.

 

The kids are alright

The art we saw today didn’t have that much to write home about – well, one exhibit definitely did but that requires some pre work so will write about it in a week or so – so I’m back to writing about the children I’m travelling with.

Before we begin, though, in beryl shereshewsky style, here is the art work for today. This is a portion of a long scroll by Anju Acharya, clicked at the biennale today. This was the second most interesting piece of art i saw today.

Now back to talking about the children. Oh wait – I want to put a song first.

https://spotify.link/0pxHYIBI1xb

  • The hardest part of the first half of this trip was my daughter refusing to hang out with me, and not talking much to me. She wanted to be with her friends. That changed this morning when she snuggled up to me as we were waiting for the bus (more on that later) saying she really missed me last night since she hasn’t really spent two nights away from both me and her mother before.
  • The second hardest part of this trip has been that I’ve found it hard to not swear. I’m so used to swearing (and at home our daughter knows that there are “big people words” (like there are “big people juices” ) she can’t use even if we use them). I haven’t used the F word but liberally used damn and bloody and shit. I felt relieved this morning when I heard a kid shout “oh shit”.
  • I’m struggling to talk to kids (not my own) about words regarding bodily functions. “Wee wee” is too Brit. Piss might be impolite. Shit as well. Kakka – I largely talk to them in English.
  • The best part of the trip so far happened last night when I was sitting in my room talking to three of my daughters’ friends, about her (and she wasn’t there). It was nice hearing about her from her friends – something I’ve pretty much never done before. Got a lot of insight into what she’s like
  • This morning our bus broke down. Rather it refused to start. It took an hour for our agent to find a replacement and for that replacement to arrive (the original bus was presently repaired, and I’m sitting in it now on my way back to the hotel). I was amazed at how calm all the children were during that time. Absolutely no hint of irritation. One thing is they had one another for company. My wife (who I spoke to about this) thinks the school has something to do with this – given there are no exams and not many deadlines, children here haven’t yet learnt to be anxious, she thinks
  • I saw a mild hint of mob mentality and cascades. We had lunch in the same restaurant as yesterday. First one kid said “today I’ll have a veg lunch”. Suddenly all kids wanted a veg lunch. Then one kid said she wanted fish with it. And when the waiter came with a plate of fried fish, the decisions overturned – half the kids now wanted the fish.
  • Both yesterday and today afternoon we went to an “art room” set up as part of the biennale. Some kids had spent time yesterday making a sculpture and today they only wanted to finish that. Every time the guides tried to lead them to other activities they would say “just 10 minutes we’ll finish this and come”. They worked on this sculpture till end of day
  • Yesterday at the art room, my daughter and some of her friends started making another sculpture with dried leaves. Presently a puppy arrived and started pulling at those leaves, mildly destroying the sculpture in the process. The girls quickly abandoned the sculpture and lost proceeded to play with the puppy! It was spontaneous and nice to watch!

Ok that’s sufficient pertinent observations for today. And the bus is nearing the hotel.

More tomorrow.

Biennale!

I’m starting to write this at the beginning of today, as we go through the biennale.

We started with one place near the main venue where some volunteers has made some art. Some fairly trippy stuff, and some risqué stuff

Now on to today’s pertinent observations

  • This is only the fifth edition of the biennale
  • I quite love the artwork I’ve seen so far. And if not for the school I don’t think I would’ve seen all this art at all
  • Some of the art is “vaguely familiar”. And that intrigues me. The familiarity draws me in. The vagueness makes me want to keep seeing more of it. Sidhus quote about the bikini comes to mind
  • The biennale has this concept of “art mediators”. Effectively tour guides who explain the art and concepts around it. Our guide today was Safa. The comment I made about tour guides yesterday doesn’t apply to her. I’m enjoying her commentary.
  • Just now I heard another art mediator explain a piece of art that Safa had just explained. And the two are nearly orthogonal! I guess the thing with art is that it’s in the eyes of the beholder, or maybe the mediator
  • From the biennale venue (aspinwal house) you can see the kochi container port. To me, watching container ships getting loaded and unloaded is also art
  • Ok I finally have a hypothesis on what I consider as good art – something that compels me to keep looking at it. It could be stuff that is hard to interpret. It could be stuff with several dimensions. It could be things that tell a new story every time you look at them. That is the kind of art I like.
    • And so I like Paul Fernandes – so much going on in his art. And why I cut out a page from the times of india on Republic Day and pinned it on my wall
    • And so I like Picasso – it is so hard to interpret what he has done and there are so many dimensions I want to keep looking at it
    • If it gets too abstract though there is no “handle” to latch on to. And so it becomes hard to interpret
    • So far I haven’t been impressed by stuff with too much “messaging” – the message by definition makes it one dimensional and not something I want to keep seeing!
  • Art is fundamentally a “low precision low recall” activity. You can never see anywhere close to all the good art in the world (hence low recall)! Low precision because to find any good art you need to also go through a lot of art you can’t appreciate.

Ok now it’s afternoon and we’re at lunch. The post is long enough as it is and we’re done with the first session of the biennale. And I’m rather proud of the last two things I’ve mentioned here. So I’ll stop here.

More pertinent observations from the school trip

Ok I’m starting to write this on the first “sight seeing leg” of the school trip to kocbi. I’ll just stick to pertinent observations in a bullet format this time

  • There is this old T-shirt that went “I was born intelligent. Education ruined me”. The more I hang out with kids the more I believe this is true
  • Around 10 years back I used to give lots of lectures. A lot of them were rather painful, since there would be next to no class participation. And then I remember giving one lecture to a bunch of high school children. And the questions were exemplary. And with the kids on this tour I find that another level.
  • We were at fort Kochi. One tour guide was giving us the history of Judaism, prepping us for the synagogue visit. And he asks “kids do you know who is Abraham?” And someone says “you mean John Abraham?”
  • Over the years I’ve developed a healthy disrespect for the gyaan spouted by tour guides. And that Bayesian prior only keeps getting stronger with further evidence. I wonder if guides haven’t figured out that Wikipedia exists.
  • A mixed age group of kids in a school class means there’s more cuddling! Mostly older kids cuddling the younger ones. It’s damn cute to watch.
  • A mic was brought out on the bus. And the kids started singing, one by one. Massive diversity in the songs. From devotional songs to ???????????? ??????? to baby shark. Later in the evening, when we went to see the fishing nets, we also saw a baby shark – for sale
  • The kochi synagogue is amazing. I’d loved it in 2002. I loved it today. Small space but really really nicely done up. And really really colourful
  • But then this part of town is incredibly incredibly touristy. Lots of shops with fairly pretty (and I’m sure pretty overpriced) stuff aimed largely at foreign tourists. I’m sure 10 years back I would’ve fallen in love with it and out of love with some of my money. Of course today I’m with a school group so didn’t indulge but I don’t think I would’ve indulged anyway
  • Kids have amazing energy levels. Sometime it is difficult to keep up with them true energiser bunnies. Most of us started the day at 3 am and they were all going strong at 7pm, when I had completely given up (and started writing this)
  • At a more global level – I wonder how a historically strong trading centre like Kerala became so strongly communist.
  • Shorts are good for this kind of humid weather (though absolutely nothing compared to chennai). But downside is mosquitoes. And I haven’t packed full pants for this trip

More tomorrow, after we visit the actual biennale!

An interesting experiment

Hello from kochi.

I’ve volunteered to accompany a group of children from my daughters school on a trip to the kochi biennale. And here we are.

I sometimes like to say that my daughters school curriculum is like an office – they had invited me for a day of “observation” in January and what I saw was a lot of group work, collaboration, research, etc. I also know there is plenty of making presentations and reports. (there are no lectures)

And in an extension of “office life” they made the kids catch a 7am flight as well! Most kids woke ip ~3 to meet outside the airport at 5. While my initial reaction was “too early” the slack helped significantly in terms of taking the large group through the airport.

In any case, so far we’ve only been at the hotel and rested and had lunch, and yet to go see town (writing this in the interregnum between lunch and heading out)

Yet, quite a few pertinent observations so far

  • Kids are resourceful. One has produced a pack of cards and another has carried a whole monopoly set (neither is my daughter)
  • Kids are inventive. In the absence of playing material I’ve seen them invent a “pen cap hide and seek”. One counts while the other hides a pen cap somewhere in the room. And the counter searches. A hotel room is a small space to hide an entire person (however small) so this is a nice workaround
  • This is a harsh lesson of growing up – in the presence of their friends, your children sometimes don’t really want you. Or want to talk to you.
  • Left to themselves kids sometimes do “constructive play”. This morning one boy said to another “do you want to sketch?” And the other agreed. The first then produced a notebook and colour pencil box and the two quietly say drawing for the next half hour.
  • The noise cancelling feature of AirPods Pro rocks. And can sometimes be a lifesaver.

More later!

Hosur cuisine

Some 6-7 months back my office shifted from a relatively quiet semi-residential lane in Indiranagar to the slam-bang commercial area of Residency Road. This meant that Udupi Vaibhava, situated next to our old office and had served many of us rather well, suddenly lost a bunch of business. We, however, needed something to find something.

On the first day in the new office I visited good ol’ Konark next door for “tiffin” and coffee. Food was good but transaction cost (of sitting down and waiting) was rather high. And then people in office started raving about this “IDC Kitchen” across the road, and a week later I went there for breakfast.

I asked for idli-vaDe, and the first look of the vaDe gave me the jitters – instead of one large vaDe, there were two tiny vaDes, the sort we make at death ceremonies here in Bangalore. The idli looked dense as well. “Oh gosh, this is Tamil-style food”, I thought. And then I found that the sambar was red and sweet, of the kind you normally find in Bangalore. It was a bit of a relief.

Yet, the food was confusing. Some of it was evidently Tamil style (the “pODi iDli” and stuff), but it wasn’t quite entirely Tamil style. The dosé was thin. Chutney was neither thick nor thin. Very very very confusing.

And then a few days later a friend insisted we have breakfast at “Cafe Amudham” in Siddapura, insisting the dosé there was excellent. I didn’t want to have a dosé that day, so I asked for iDli-vaDe, and once again it was insanely dense iDlis, but normal sized vaDes. The sambar was more Bangalore style as well – again massively confusing.

Based on these two data points (and that yet-to-be-sampled data point that is Rameshwaram Cafe), I hereby declare that there exists a new cuisine that I call “Hosur cuisine”. It is basically a mix of Bangalore and classic Tamil cuisines. It is like the chromosomes of the two cuisines having undergone a random crossover (and some mutations), and so different restaurants serving this cuisine have adopted different aspects of the cuisines of the two  states – the style of sambar, density of idli, thickness of dosé, size of vaDe, number of chutneys served, etc.

And recently, having got quite bored of IDC (I’ve pretty much stopped eating there now), I tried the Virinchi Cafe next door to that. They make thick dosés but have drumstick in their otherwise red sambar. Incredibly confusing, and I can say that this is yet another “strand” of the Hosur cuisine crossover.

In any case, I’ve been brewing over this blogpost for a few days now, and then I saw Sandesh’s excellent dissection of Rameshwaram Cafe, and decided it’s time to put this down.

I’m yet to visit a Rameshwaram Cafe – the only one within my orbit is in JP Nagar 2nd phase, but it’s way too close to SN Refreshments to give it a try (and I have breakfast at SN some 2-3 times a week at least!). I suppose that is yet another random crossover of the Bangalore and Tamil food styles .

PS: This blogpost has absolutely NOTHING to do with my grandmother-in-law who is from Hosur

Reading Kannada aloud

I’ve never learnt much Kannada formally. Of course, it is the first language, and the language I’ve always spoken at home. However, I’ve not learnt it much formally. While we had it in school as a “third / fourth language”, the focus there was largely functional – that we learnt the language sufficiently to get by in South Bangalore.

The little I remember from the Kannada lessons in school is that we made fun of some words. Basically, the way they were written is very different from the way we spoke them. “adarinda” became “aaddarinda” or even “aadudarinda”. “nintOgatte” became “nintu hOgatte”. Basically, Kannada as a language in which it was written was very different from the way we spoke it.

That said, during those days (early 90s), the only newspaper we got at home was in Kannada, and I learnt to read it fairly well. I still made fun of the “aadudarindas” (and my parents agreed it was weird), but I had figured out how to parse the “written Kannada” as “normal Kannada” and got the information I needed to.

In adulthood, my Kannada reading skills have atrophied, primarily because there isn’t much need to read / write Kannada (apart from the occasional addresses or sign boards). In terms of speaking, Kannada is still my first language, but when it comes to the written text (either reading or writing), English has taken its place.

Recently, my wife has gotten our daughter a few Kannada and Hindi story books, so that she can practice reading the two languages. And last night, before she went to bed, my daughter asked me to read out one of the Kannada books to her.

What I found is that Kannada is a language that is very tough to read aloud, primarily due to the large (in my mind) differences between the way it is written and spoken. I read the sentences out alright, but struggled to make meaning out of it since the words were all formally written.

Soon I gave up and resorted to what I used to do with “Kannada Prabha” or “Vijaya Karnataka” back in the 90s – I would see the words in the formal way but call them out “informally”. So I would see “aadudarinda” in the text, and just read it as “adarinda”. I would read “hOguttade” and say “hOgatte”. Wasn’t easy business, but I managed to read out the whole story.

Nevertheless, Kannada is not a language that is easy to read aloud, because the way it’s written is so different from the way it is spoken. It almost feels like the spoken language has evolved significantly over the years, but the written language hasn’t  kept up. If you have to read silently, you can just substitute the “normal words” for the “formal words” and get on. However, reading aloud, that is not a choice.

In any case, now I’m worried that with my way of reading aloud (speak the words as I would speak them, rather than the way they are written), I’m messing with my daughter’s Kannada reading skills. And having spent two of her first three years in London, Kannada is not even her first language (she basically learnt to talk in her nursery)!

Average skill and peak skill

One way to describe how complex a job is is to measure the “average level of skill” and “peak level of skill” required to do the job. The more complex the job is, the larger this difference is. And sometimes, the frequency at which the peak level of skill is required can determine the quality of people you can expect to attract to the job.

Let us start with one extreme – the classic case of someone  turning screws in a Ford factory. The design has been done so perfectly and the assembly line so optimised that the level of skill required by this worker each day is identical. All he/she (much more likely a he) has to do is to show up at the job, stand in the assembly line, and turn the specific screw in every single car (or part thereof) that passes his way.

The delta between the complexity of the average day and the “toughest day” is likely to be very low in this kind of job, given the amount of optimisation already put in place by the engineers at the factory.

Consider a maintenance engineer (let’s say at an oil pipeline) on the other hand. On most days, the complexity required of the job is very close to zero, for there is nothing much to do. The engineer just needs to show up and potter around and make a usual round of checks and all izz well.

On a day when there is an issue however, things are completely different – the engineer now needs to identify the source of the issue, figure out how to fix it and then actually put in the fix. Each of this is an insanely complex process requiring insane skill. This maintenance engineer needs to be prepared for this kind of occasional complexity, and despite the banality of most of his days on the job, maintain the requisite skill to do the job on these peak days.

In fact, if you think of it, a lot of “knowledge” jobs, which are supposed to be quite complex, actually don’t require a very high level of skill on most days. Yet, most of these jobs tend to employ people at a far higher skill level than what is required on most days, and this is because of the level of skill required on “peak days” (however you define “peak”).

The challenge in these cases, though, is to keep these high skilled people excited and motivated enough when the job on most days requires pretty low skill. Some industries, such as oil and gas, resolve this issue by paying well and giving good “benefits” – so even an engineer who might get bored by the lack of work on most days stays on to be able to contribute in times when there is a problem.

The other way to do this is in terms of the frequency of high skill days – if you can somehow engineer your organisation such that the high skilled people have a reasonable frequency of days when high skills are required, then they might find more motivation. For example, you might create an “internal consulting” team of some kind – they are tasked with performing a high skill task across different teams in the org. Each time this particular high skill task is required, the internal consulting team is called for. This way, this team can be kept motivated and (more importantly, perhaps) other teams can be staffed at a lower average skill level (since they can get help on high peak days).

I’m reminded of my first ever real taste of professional life – an internship in an investment bank in London in 2005. That was the classic “high variance in skills” job. Having been tested on fairly extreme maths and logic before I got hired, I found that most of my days were spent just keying in numbers in to an Excel sheet to call a macro someone else had written to price swaps (interest rate derivatives).

And being fairly young and immature, I decided this job is not worth it for me, and did not take up the full time offer they made me. And off I went on a rather futile “tour” to figure out what kind of job has sufficient high skill work to keep me interested. And then left it all to start my own consultancy (where others would ONLY call me when there was work of my specialty; else I could chill).

With the benefit of hindsight (and having worked in a somewhat similar job later in life), though, I had completely missed the “skill gap” (delta between peak and average skill days) in my internship, and thus not appreciated why I had been hired for it. Also, that I spent barely two months in the internship meant I didn’t have sufficient data to know the frequency of “interesting days”.

And this is why – most of your time might be spent in writing some fairly ordinary code, but you will still be required to know how to reverse a red-black tree.

Most of your time might be spent in writing SQL queries or pulling some averages, but on the odd day you might need to know that a chi square test is the best way to test your current hypothesis.

Most of your time might be spent in managing people and making sure the metrics are alright, but on the odd day you might have to redesign the process at the facility that you are in charge of.

In most complex jobs, the average day is NOT similar to the most complex day by any means. And thus the average day is NOT representative of the job. The next time someone I’m interviewing asks me what my “average day looks like”, I’ll maybe point that person to this post!