Miklós Danka

The same article in Hungarian: http://agondolkodasorome.hu/fb/danka-miklos-egyetemvalasztas-maskent/

As always, what I describe is my mental model, and not “a universal truth”. There are implicit exceptions to everything I write. You can benefit most from it by open-mindedly considering my points and incorporating them into your mental model.

In a recent discussion with a young person who was facing a university choice I realised that our regular assessments are oriented around less important aspects.

Discussions around universities tend to be dominated by subject quality: which university is the best at teaching a given subject? For heavily knowledge-based subjects like Medicine, this might make sense. But for others - like Maths, Computer Science, Social Sciences, and so on - it does not.

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People frequently ask me what my work-life balance is like at my current company. Aside from the fact that I don’t agree with the term itself since work and life are not a trade-off (see Shyam Sankar’s take on why it’s a false dichotomy), the question normally mixes up various interpretations of the term.

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[Preference Matrix App] [Source on Github]

Take your 5 favourite meals, or the 10 people closest to you in your life. What would happen if you tried to order them in an order of preference?

Making a preference order in the usual way will likely result in an inaccurate list. It is difficult to really understand our own preferences: our brain plays tricks, we have biases we're not aware of, and we conform to societal expectations without realising.

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Best. Holiday. Ever.

Do you want to go somewhere where there is both history and culture, beautiful scenery, beaches and hot weather? Then Israel is the perfect place for you. Thousands of years of intense history are compressed in a tiny country with an outstanding mix of religion and culture.

At least half of the fun was the specific group of us travelling together. I had the amazing luck of having two Israeli friends taking me and a long-time close friend around the country, telling us stories of places with a level of historic and cultural detail that even the best guides would envy - and having incredible fun in the meantime.

But half of the fun was just pure Israel.

If you need an inspiration for what to do, here's a sample, based on our trip.

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On April 24, 2016, I did the unimaginable… I reset my Facebook account.

Since Facebook itself doesn't offer a clearing option, resetting in practice means deleting the account and creating a new one. In the world of today, where for many people 'having a Facebook account' is equivalent with 'existing', resetting the account amounts to dying - and then coming back from the dead.

The reactions were as expected:

The most frequent question was: why?

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This post is written with students of the Computer Science Tripos at the University of Cambridge as the audience, but almost all of the principles apply to other standard memorisation-based examinations as well.

Despite being an awful tool, you’ll have to deal with exams (see David MacKay’s “Everybody Should Get an A” for a better system). I don’t judge you based on how you think of exams or your performance - this is because I don’t think how you think about exams reflects values that are good or bad: there are legitimate reasons for both. But if you do care about exam performance - like I did at university - then this post is for you. I was top of the exam papers of the Computer Science Tripos at the University of Cambridge all three years not because of specific skills, but because of figuring out the right strategies.

We can’t all be top of the years, but you can significantly improve your result compared to others by leveraging the below principles. The catch? It’s difficult.

Exams are a game. Here is the winning strategy.

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The below are my interviewing principles aimed at intermediate-level people who conduct standalone job interviews.

The first interview I've ever conducted was at Palantir, 2.5 years ago (at the end of 2012). An interviewer dropped out and there were only the 15 of us in Europe at the time - so I had a whopping 10 minutes to prepare for an interview for a different role than mine. It was seemingly a disaster - the interviewee was several levels above me intellectually at the time and owned the interview. 140 interviews later, I don’t think that it was a disaster anymore (although naturally one of my weakest interviews). My goal was to find the truth about his technical abilities - and I accomplished just that. We hired him and now he’s one of the strongest execution people in the European business.

What follows is a set of interviewing principles which apply to all roles. The role-specific parts of interviewing are signal collection and the hiring decision and these are outside of the scope of this discussion.

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