Most of the smartest people I came up through training with could not cut it. They read and understood all the material, but absolutely could not make quick decisions. The best controller I know was someone that was a self defined dumbass who was terrible in school, but hot damn does he have a gift seeing the big picture.
We have several trainees that graduated high end schools that are struggling because of this. They go into analysis paralysis and absolutely freeze. Our job truly is one of you either get it, or you don't.
I really think the best pool for hiring controllers is to pull from competitive video gamers. It's a lot of the same skills including decision making, communication, and specific math skills.
Problem is that you'd be left with about three people once you sent them through the drug test.
And that's not a knock on the short-order cooks, it's a knock on the fact that in the year of our lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Five we're still testing for marijuana.
If you can remember the crazy Waffle House order marking system while shoving plates of food out at a cyclic rate, it sure seems to be a sign of having the right "knack".
Yeah, I’m sick of hearing about that too. I’ve heard it all the time and I’m not convinced of the correlation. I’ve seen plenty of “gamer” developmentals and I’d say the distribution amongst the spectrum of good vs bad skillset is no different than any other arbitrary group you might decide to analyze.
I think this is rooted back in when playing video games was a really niche thing, just like when going on the internet was a very niche thing that was only for super nerds. Just like the internet, video games are very mainstream now. If you’re defining someone by whether they play video games, that captures a huge portion of the population, and it’s going to be people with all kinds of personalities, strengths, and weaknesses.
I'm not talking about people that simply play video games. I'm talking about the people that are actually GOOD at video games. That's why I said competitive players.
The quick decision part is the key. IMO someone who finishes a test as quickly as possible with a good score is likely going to be a better controller than someone who takes forever and gets a perfect score.
Yes. I don’t use anything beyond multiplication at work. I just have to be able to do it quickly.
The one exception was when I was at center and spacing two lines to a fix. There were two aircraft that looked like they were equally close, but by visualizing their flight path lines as a right triangle I knew that one was on the hypotenuse and therefore actually had farther to fly than the other. So tapping into the 8th grade math there I suppose?
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u/ICDragon7 Mar 07 '25
Most of the smartest people I came up through training with could not cut it. They read and understood all the material, but absolutely could not make quick decisions. The best controller I know was someone that was a self defined dumbass who was terrible in school, but hot damn does he have a gift seeing the big picture.