If a lot of the knowledge is specialized in one area, the "trivia" (I feel this is such a negative connotation lol) has come in handy. YMMV.
- To your point, Jeremy Howard has never saved my production server (yet), but knowing how to scp, grep, cat around a list of files out has though :)
- Looking at my deck, most of the one-off questions have long half-lives. Most of these are answered as easy and are about 3-5 years before it's asked again ... personally, that's a fair tradeoff.
- Knowing certain "trivia" facts have been a hack to demonstrate expertise. It can also be used to relate to someone's experience. I interviewed a candidate once who had worked at DuckDuckGo. Having a conversation with him about experiences with "Gabe" (Who is the CEO of DuckDuckGo?) and some of his Mental Model essays immediately cut the tension.
- The opposite has also happened. Knowing about a very specific term in Django got me an offer. This has actually happened twice.
- EDIT (next this + next two points): I was thinking about this and realized I had other times when knowing trivia is a lazy heuristic for expertise. (I'm not saying this is right, just saying it happens). Knowing the hourly cost of AutoML immediately convinced someone that our team had the expertise and tentatively agreed to a MM deal. I had never used AutoML.
- Rattling off an answer to an esoteric question in due diligence changed the tone from us convincing we were technical to the person convincing him he was technical enough to do due diligence on us.
- Simpsons Paradox: Whenever I'm answering these trivia questions, I'm saying it quite confidently, which conflates the results.
- The knowledge stacks up in really interesting ways. I think of more things similar to connected graph trees.
If most of my decks were about random Jeopardy facts, then I'd certainly agree that it's not the best use of my time though ...
If a lot of the knowledge is specialized in one area, the "trivia" (I feel this is such a negative connotation lol) has come in handy. YMMV.
- To your point, Jeremy Howard has never saved my production server (yet), but knowing how to scp, grep, cat around a list of files out has though :)
- Looking at my deck, most of the one-off questions have long half-lives. Most of these are answered as easy and are about 3-5 years before it's asked again ... personally, that's a fair tradeoff.
- Knowing certain "trivia" facts have been a hack to demonstrate expertise. It can also be used to relate to someone's experience. I interviewed a candidate once who had worked at DuckDuckGo. Having a conversation with him about experiences with "Gabe" (Who is the CEO of DuckDuckGo?) and some of his Mental Model essays immediately cut the tension.
- The opposite has also happened. Knowing about a very specific term in Django got me an offer. This has actually happened twice.
- EDIT (next this + next two points): I was thinking about this and realized I had other times when knowing trivia is a lazy heuristic for expertise. (I'm not saying this is right, just saying it happens). Knowing the hourly cost of AutoML immediately convinced someone that our team had the expertise and tentatively agreed to a MM deal. I had never used AutoML.
- Rattling off an answer to an esoteric question in due diligence changed the tone from us convincing we were technical to the person convincing him he was technical enough to do due diligence on us.
- Simpsons Paradox: Whenever I'm answering these trivia questions, I'm saying it quite confidently, which conflates the results.
- The knowledge stacks up in really interesting ways. I think of more things similar to connected graph trees.
If most of my decks were about random Jeopardy facts, then I'd certainly agree that it's not the best use of my time though ...