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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

I love this point, and I have to go on a tangent on this:

> This is a lot like software developers and their persistence. When your production service has a mysterious error in the logs, do you shrug and say “well, probably some transient network bug, it won’t matter” or do you dig in to understand what’s going on? Both approaches are reasonable, and it takes a balance of pragmatism and curiosity to be effective.

I find that it really depends on how harried I am. Am I (or someone on my team) able to dedicate time to this issue, or do we have other higher priority concerns?

Every single time I can think of where we've had a "that's weird", it was a bug in the software. But it would take days to weeks for someone find the root cause (these were 1 in 100,000 race conditions), and we just can't afford to dedicate that amount of time to each.

So we have to pick our battles.

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When the system is the Solar System, or the human nervous system, I say society has an ROI worth multiple PhDs to invest - but for an ad service that is likely to be completely replaced in a decade - yeah it's a lower ROI

But this raises the interesting (to me) question - almost every enterprise I know operates at the "harried" level - no one is so well funded they can saunter around

But science is basically saying "we trust you to find something worthwhile. Go saunter"

Maybe it's all about trust

There's plenty of sauntering in industry. Especially enterprise. "Enterprise" is notorious for not actually getting anything done, even though many of the individuals may feel stressed most of the time.

> "Enterprise" is notorious for not actually getting anything done, even though many of the individuals may feel stressed most of the time.

Enterprise is also way more driven by personal egos and certainties about being right. I doubt too many scientists would say "I'm going to reform the department, let's throw away the last 5 years of work and start again" – but decisions like that are commonplace in enterprise software.

> But science is basically saying "we trust you to find something worthwhile. Go saunter"

Not... quite.

Typically, scientist in academia are underfunded and overloaded with teaching and management duties. The way to get round to actual research is to hire phd students / postdocs. But there is no institutional funding, so you have to write a grant proposal. Since every academic is in the same boat, project calls are swamped with proposals and can only funds 10-20%. Since you want to get funding, you create a very clear project proposal with detailed timeline of expected publications. Because funders don't award mediocrity, your proposal is ambitious in this.

Now if you get the funding, you suddenly have a significant, detailed, ambitious research obligation to fulfil for the next #PhD years. You get to do research, but there's not much leeway.

No project funding? Here are stacks of committee work and teaching load. Oh, but we do expect you to keep publishing actively. Maybe make time on the evenings and weekends for research?

All in all, not really "go saunter".

> When your production service has a mysterious error in the logs

...such as a 75 cent accounting discrepancy? ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)

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