You and Your Research (1986)
cs.virginia.edu
cs.virginia.edu
>I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.
As someone that got married during their PhD and is now finishing up and reflecting: it isn't worth it. Neglecting the people in your life that love you in the pursuit of "science" is no different than neglecting them because you have a drug habit or because you're an inveterate gambler or because you're chasing fame and fortune. The science will get done regardless and the only thing you accomplish is ensuring your own interests. Suffice it to say I'm taking steps make sure my next gig has more room.
I truly love working on the problem, investing time in research papers, and experimenting, but I have no desire to stay in academia. Plus, I have a well-paying full-time job (that I took during the pandemic to save my wife from having to shoulder our living expenses basically single-handedly while growing our child inside of her).
> Suffice it to say I'm taking steps make sure my next gig has more room.
I hear you. It's crazy how mentally abusive a lot of people's relationship with their PhD is. I'm convinced it's one of the reasons so many people with PhDs marry other PhDs. They're the only ones that "understand" the level of single-minded devotion you have to have to be an early career researcher.
It's not just neglect during the PhD. Even a non-neglectful academic is asking a lot of their partner. Stipends are low. Post-docs require chasing term-limited positions around the country, often with little to no savings, for up the half a decade. Building wealth is impossible, having a family is just barely possible, and the process takes you well into mid-life depriving your partner of a career and a real relationship.
I have seen more divorces during post-docs than during PhDs.
Everyone I know who made it through PhDs and post-docs without scars fell into one of two categories: unmarried or wealthy. I think academia's biggest open secret is that a HUGE number of academics -- especially in and around large metros or in nice climates -- are chasing a prestigious and comfortable job because their trust funds allow them to not care about the money and their upbringing makes it difficult for them to deal with having a manager.
This is because the career was originally set up for those who were independently wealthy, or at least rich enough to have a spouse who didn't work. All of this stuff happened within the last 150 years, and it was made worse in recent years following the massive increase of skilled people in the discipline.
A career in science also differs based on whether you're an academic or in industry. On whether you're out their seeking grants, or out making products to sell.
These are all decisions being made based on what people demonstrate that they will tolerate. No different than the Japanese Karoshi-culture. If your Ph.D. or Post-Doc supervisor won't allow you to have a life outside of science, then dump them. Leave them up the creek without a paddle. They are not your only option.
At its absolute worse, the hours involved in an academic Ph.D./Post-Doc aren't significantly worse than a chronic precariat worker. I had two jobs during a particular semester when finishing up my A.S., and averaged 3.5 hours of sleep per night (outside of the weekends). I've read about a guy who spent years walking and taking transit for 8 hours each day from his house to his 8-hour a day job. 16 hours per day just dedicated to work. Ultimately his job and/or co-workers pitched in to buy him a car.
The harsh hours in scientific academia is ultimately a choice. And the choice is not between science and a life. The choice is between science with this particular supervisor and a life.
A secondary mistake for Ph.D.s in particular is requiring an original contribution to science instead of a demonstration of appropriate levels of mastery, because this requirement really screws over students who realize that their thesis is wrong, or intractable, too late. And even worse incentivizes cheating above and beyond the already existing incentives.
> Would there be less incentive to do bullshit studies and cave to political pressures and bribes if the people doing the studies didn't need the job to survive?
People who genuinely need the job to survive, quit, and get a job that allows them to survive, sometimes alternating this with academia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Streleski ). Or like the graduate students and Post-docs at the University of California, they band together and strike.
Social pressures and sunken-cost fallacies affect enough people of all socioeconomic classes. Especially when the added grief is spun as a status symbol.
Focusing specifically on the the word "selfish"--isn't academia about dedicating yourself to scientific discovery? That dedication may require a sacrifice from your spouse, but it should benefit humanity at large.
That may or may not be a sacrifice your family is willing to make--and it's a shame that anyone is required to make it--but it's not selfish!
Regardless of personal intentions, it's also a fact that we have a massive oversupply of people trying to make it in academic science. Functionally the only way it is selfless then is if you are meaningfully better at science than replacement level (and again potential replacements run deep these days).
This makes most people either knowingly selfish (if they are sacrificing others' wellbeing for their research anyway) or very arrogant about their intelligence level. Or naive about the system, but I don't think you'll meet many postdocs that don't know these facts.
The people that stick around and grind away at research work even once any chance at a tenure track position has passed are a lot more defensible as selfless of course, but that's not really the most common situation to find in a lab. The majority are gunning for a career in academic science, even down to the poorly treated pre-PhD RA labor.
Now obviously if some rich kid or someone with no personal attachments wants to fuck around in academia they should totally go for it. I just don't think selfless is the right word for that, and it's certainly not the right word for your typical academic ladder climber.
It's okay even if different researchers are working on similar problems, because replicability is important.
A common control in sociological studies of educational systems is to compare people who are just above a particular cutoff (say a 2.00 GPA), and just below that cutoff (say a 1.99 GPA). These people are often effectively equivalent except for one good or bad day, or one harsh or forgiving instructor.
If an academic department makes 15 positions available for graduate students, it will have 15 graduate students. Regardless. Is the 16th applicant who just didn't make the cut worse than the 15th who did? Probably not. And they might have been better, or at least have been a better fit.
I'm better at science than I am at the replacement job. Ergo the maximum I can contribute to the world is through science.
Choosing to go into research means your career choice is entirely determined by what you are most interested in, what you are passionate about, what you want to spend your day thinking about. I feel like the benefit to society is often secondary in that choice. It's nice that often science benefits humanity as a whole, but often it also doesn't and is just obscure niche research.
And indeed, the relational sacrifices that come with a (high ambition) career in science are IMO not worth it. I would not recommend anymore to pursue some abstract high brow principle like "the pursuit of knowledge" over deep, loving, healthy, sustainable relationships with people to a young ambitious person. People are more real than principles.
Ideally you can combine it of course. But the academic job market is not easy and rarely allows this without significant friction.
I am 99% sure I will leave academia after my PhD. Not for the this reason per se, but it appears in the equation. The relational aspect is a big part, though.
Lack of pressure to change something is absolutely a reason in and of itself. How could the system be changed to avoid this?
Another change I'd like to see is shorter undergraduate programs. Most can stand to lose a few classes off the beginning that duplicate high school and a few off the end that duplicate grad school. That might have to be a political decision in response to the high cost of education. Shaving off a year could help you avoid the family issue entirely, especially if you worked for a year or two before returning to grad school.
Similarly, another proven model is that senior year of high school can also be used to reduce the duration of college. You can already get college credit, but it's a very fragmented and uneven system. State governments could fix that with policy, again to address the high cost of education.
That said, I don't really trust the funding agencies and department heads to do the right things that will actually improve the long-term health of the system. I think we'll end up with a shitty band-aid solution instead like giving postdocs mediocre raises. It could take a really long time for the system to truly crumble enough to force change.
We'll see though, I hope things take a turn for the better in the coming years because certainly I know many PIs that are frustrated for one reason or another. If you get enough profs on the same page it could have some actual power.
They could, but why?
However, I would venture that being successful in any career --- be it research, business, politics, arts --- requires a certain amount of focus and neglect of your family and friends.
But later, if you succeed, you can make it up to them and make it worth it for them as well.
A warning for the younger readers in our midst: this is NOT how most relationships work. You normally don't get to mismanage a relationship and then "make up for it" later. When you do, there are almost always lasting scars.
That said: this might be true for business and politics. But academics? LOL. Becoming a professor, even at a top university, is a pretty pathetic definition of "success". A professor is a mid-level manager position that pays about the same as an entry-level position at a top tech or finance firm. Most people involved in allocating budget / selecting projects understand that the work being managed is mostly not valuable; that's why they don't mind telling you that you need to pay your subordinates about what they'd make at McDonald's.
It's a first line management job where pay is not enough to "make up" for the lost years and the work almost always literally doesn't matter.
> But later, if you succeed, you can make it up to them and make it worth it for them as well.
This might be true in business and politics, and to some extent in arts, but it's not true in academia. And to the extent that it is true, it's enabled by pushing shit down the hill.
Which is why I'm a lapsed academic. I turned down my TT offers because I realized that I couldn't, in good conscience, build a career out of abusing junior labor. And universities put hard constraints on how you pay and manage PhD students, so avoiding at least financial abuse is mostly impossible.
Who cares if they make more or less than a techbro? If they're happy with their job and they earn enough to pay for things they want (house, vacations, whatever), then they should chase the rat-race of the "ladder of success" because...?
We aren't talking about nurses or school teachers. We are talking about professors at large research universities.
Your sibling comment speaks of working "nights and weekends" with frequent travel. That puts an enormous amount of work and stress on their partner, and faculty usually don't make enough money to offset those contributions.
Deciding not to optimize for wealth is perfectly fine. Doing to do so while working nights and weekends with frequent travel isn't. Optimizing for "prestige" is infinitely worse than optimizing for "wealth", because at least the latter can be shared and has utility beyond pure ego.
Deciding to sacrifice your nights, weekends, and financial life to work on science and research is okay. But it's also enormously selfish. Other people who spend time doing "what they love" -- ski bums, for example -- at least recognize their selfishness as such.
Being selfish can be okay. But it's probably not great to be selfish and try to build a life-long partnership. Especially if you don't realize you are being selfish.
I won't tell anyone not to ski bum or not to do a PhD. But I will gut check people when they get confused about the difference between selfish and selfless dedication to a craft. An academic career -- the type where you spend nights and weekends without at least contributing a modicum of financial comfort to those around you -- is selfish.
At the end of the day, most grant-funded projects are born useless. There isn't as much of a difference between ski bumming and PhDing as professors like to pretend.
If you think the majority of people in your current field are not optimizing for prestige (and you're past the mid-point of a PhD), I would love to know what field that is - seriously.
I am at now a point as a researcher where I am financially secure, work on interesting problems, and have time for my wife and children. My colleagues, junior as well as senior, seem to be in similar situations.
To be clear, in my case "focus and neglect" meant working weekends and evenings and lots of travel for some years before we had children. I see successful people in other careers doing the same.
My current situation does not involve anything remotely like "pushing shit" or "abusing junior labor". I have no "hard constraints" and I see no "financial abuse" at my university.
I couldn't accept the job and look myself in the mirror while knowing that not only do my direct reports struggle to get by and can't save tax-deferred for retirement, but that I'm one of the only employers in the country who doesn't even pay FICA taxes.
With finance or ad-tech like you are recommending the whole output of the job is often zero or negative sum. That can happen in academia as well but it seems less likely.
If you moved money from a sinkhole garbage establishment project to some other promising scientific endeavors, that would almost certainly be a net positive for the world even if the total spend is the same and you "just pushed money around". A similar principle applies when considering many industry investment decisions.
Regardless, "finance" is broad as hell and there are a huge number of potentially well-paying careers that are not finance nor ad-tech. Not to mention that a FIRE research scientist who is less beholden to the current system might very well contribute more scientific progress over their lifetime than the latest career academic.
The reward for that investment is the same as the reward for the next guy who gets it down to 22.45ms, despite the first guy saving 0.1ms on the state of the art and the second guy only saving 0.05ms. Surely 0.05ms is worth a lot less than 0.1ms to society, and it shows this whole thing is almost totally detached from any value to society.
It's just lowest number wins and the industry will consume any number of resources (running CPUs in spinlock loops instead of more efficient ones, having human labor climb microwave towers at some risk of life) up to the reward amount to claim it, regardless of any marginal value to society of the improvement.
That said, I find it hard to believe you don't have constraints on what you can pay labor? Maybe it is field dependent, but the NIH sets some real low ball salary caps on how much postdocs (and other titles) can be paid with their grant money. So if you rely on this sort of government funding it is difficult to pay postdocs a fair wage for their experience and stage of life -- forget about it if you live in a particularly high CoL area, which NIH does not adequately account for.
So yeah, postdocs are taken advantage of in a lot of fields in a way that is (to some extent) beyond the control of the advisor. In a cheaper area it's not necessarily dire straights, but it is often a huge underpayment nonetheless. And if you talk to postdocs a lot of them are doing it because they're still chasing tenure track dreams that are not super likely.
At what point is it wrong to facilitate minor league baseball? I don't think there's an objective answer here, and obviously I don't blame people for trying to do their best as a PI. But I also don't think the OC's reaction to the situation is outside the realm of reasonable for an informed person.
As an aside, you're (unsurprisingly) kinda fucked if you wanted software to be part of your NIH-funded project, because they do not acknowledge the cost of hiring anyone with a remotely valuable skill set.
Just incase anybody is unaware - this is really not how interpersonal relationships work. Especially romantic interests. You may one day find yourself with a lot of money/power but nobody who truly loves you (or enjoys your company) for who you are - or with not much to show for your years of tunnel visioned neuroticism, symptoms of complete burnout, & also nobody who loves you.
I’m not trying to say there’s something wrong with dedicating a large chunk of your life to a pursuit like they’ve mentioned - I’m just saying don’t be surprised when people you’ve neglected have moved on to greener pastures in that time.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Speaking of innovation on hn, this is definitely innovative levels of pedantry.
The answer is simple and obvious: be alone. It wont work for everyone but it works for me. Valuing your time means having to say no to intrusions and impositions.
Modern academic science is really its own special breed, and unfortunately a lot of that grinding these days goes to fighting the crazy career ladder, not so much directly to obsessive, curious science.
Hamming definitely made lots of sacrifices to become famous. Although if you noticed his achievements, they were actually all done early in his career, rather than late.
It depends; the neglect during studies is a temporary thing! All thos other things you mention are permanent things!
There's very little similarity between "temporarily neglecting family to provide better opportunities to my kids"[1] and "permanently neglecting family to get a high".
[1] Make no mistake, you can introduce your kids to better opportunities in a your social circle of Phds (or MBAs, etc) than your social circle of whoever your current colleagues are.
Let's put deep learning aside for a second. Can anyone here name a single academic in any other subfield of computer science who had a string of groundbreaking research works where every one of those works is from 1980 or after? I can't. And that's almost half a century that we're working with. Many people who defended their PhDs in the 1980s are already retired.
This applies to plenty of other fields as well. Medicine, for instance: There were surgeons in the 1960s and 1970s who have half a dozen new surgical techniques to their name. (If you want some examples, look up Michael DeBakey, Mark Coventry, and Thomas Starzl.) You will not find a single academic surgeon today who comes even close to that, and at least in my opinion it's not because modern surgeons lack drive or creativity or the ambition to tackle big problems.
Hamming is probably right that the role of luck in the sense of serendipity is overblown, but he ignores role of luck in the sense of structural factors that are out of your control. Because he and his colleagues largely operated in a context where all those structural factors were completely optimized.
If you decide to start a PhD in a field 10 years before that field is destined to hit a multi-decade rut, if your advisor fails to make tenure partway through your PhD and your lab is shut down, if you get your first academic appointment in an environment where research funding is trending down and regulatory burdens are trending up, these are all factors that are by and large out of your control that can significantly alter the trajectory of your career.
I’ve been thinking long and hard about this for years. Perhaps researchers who value freedom of inquiry and freedom from “publish-or-perish” pressures could work independently, perhaps being funded by fellowships (like the MacArthur Grant), from part-time work, or from a side business.
Although I'm not familiar with today's groundbreaking research, I think dismissing an entire branch of research simply because it goes against one's argument is a little funny. However, Hamming specifically states in his lecture that this could be applied to engineers starting companies, and there are numerous examples of founders who have started multiple successful businesses in this area.
In the lecture series, Hamming explicitly emphasizes the importance of dedicating time to predicting what the next big step in one's field would be. He dedicated half of every Friday to trying to predict the future of computer science. One of the major points he drives home is that the next breakthrough in any field will not be what he or anyone else has worked on in the past. That is why it is worth striving to work on the right things.
I don't think it goes against my argument at all. Deep learning is a place where many structural factors are currently optimized, so it has a glut of prominent researchers. The big names in deep learning like Hinton, LeCunn, Bengio took their first post PhD appointments 30 to 40 years ago. All three put out some good work between 1985 and 2010, but all three became an order of magnitude more productive after 2010. They went from being members of a mostly irrelevant and overlooked research niche (neural networks were considered a dead end in ML) to being heads of research at multi-billion dollar companies. If it is really all about the individual, why weren't they that productive from the start? What changed? Well, the number of GPU cores hit an inflection point. Technologies for GP-GPU programming like cuda reached maturity.
As I said, there is truth to what Hamming said too. The 1920s were primed for a revolution in physics, but there were thousands of physicists contemporary to Einstein, de Broglie, Heisenberg, and Bohr who didn't do anything of note. So what set the ones who won Nobel prizes apart from the rest? That's where Hamming's advice comes in.
In other words, I can be convinced that Einstein or de Broglie would have reached the tops of their fields in any time or place and in nearly any field. But you cannot convince me that they would have made the history books if they were marine biologists in the 1990s. It doesn't matter how hard you think about where the next revolution in your field will be if there is no revolution to be had.
I’m guessing most of us were obsessed with computers in our teens, and the job market just happened to align with one of our hobbies.
Kids who are fascinated with classical piano or performance art don’t stumble into lucrative careers unless they’re in the top 0.1%.
Shafi Goldwasser (Probabilistic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, etc.) got her PhD in 1984.
Leslie Lamport is just a bit before your deadline, his 'Time, Clocks' paper came out in 1978, but the bulk of his work was after 1980, including paxos.
While there's definitely some truth to your Kuhnian view of 'times of revolution' in a field, I think it's hard to apply that to recent progress because it may just be that it's not clear which research works were groundbreaking without the benefit of hindsight. To me, the revolutionary period of CS research is still ongoing.
If you look at "Computer science" as the narrowly-defined field of data structure and algorithm design in a vacuum, maybe things slowed down after 1980, but that's because problems with different constraints just became more interesting.
your chances of doing great research are slim if you're born in kenya in the 01940s, no matter how much drive and creativity you have, but that's not because 'research advances' have 'droughts', it's because you're not being allowed to do great research, even if plenty of research advances are happening out of your reach
(unless you're richard leakey)
that's what's happened to modern surgeons, nuclear engineers, aeronautical engineers, chemists, etc. the usa and eu today have mostly become the kenya of the 01940s, where only the occasional richard leakey is allowed to excel, and thus we have entered the so-called great stagnation
but restrictions are much looser in computer science than in most fields. we still have:
- oleg kiselyov (sxml, probabilistic programming, relational programming and thence the reasoned schemer, type checking as small-step abstract evaluation, tagless staged interpreters, stream processing without runtime overhead)
- dan bernstein (twisted edwards curves including curve25519, breaking aes with cache timing attacks, nacl, tweetnacl, qmail, salsa, poly1305, striking down usa export controls, organizing the pqc conferences)
- fabrice bellard (qemu, ffmpeg, tcc, lzexe, and bellard's formula, aside from nncp, which is deep learning)
- jeff dean and sanjay ghemawat (epi info, leveldb, tensorflow, bigtable, mapreduce, spanner, 'the google cluster architecture', lots of internal google stuff, and again a bunch of deep learning stuff)
- raph levien (io, advogato, the gnome canvas, libart)
- graydon hoare (monotone and thence git, rust), and
- rob pike (blit, utf-8, much of plan9, sawzall, and golang)
- wouter van oortmerssen (cube/sauerbraten, flatbuffers, amiga e, false and thus more or less the field of esolangs, lobster, bla with first-class environments, aardappel, fisheye quake)
i've left out the people i personally know well
That's because of the nature of the field. CS researchers are kind of like NPCs or bureaucrats. The technical stuff we do is not interesting to the general public, but it enables other people to do more interesting stuff.
You mention deep learning as an exception. I, as a researcher in another CS subfield, cannot name a single person who has done fundamental work in it.
The "tragedy" of CS is that it's too relevant in the short term. If someone makes a breakthrough, other people will probably commercialize it in a decade or two. Afterwards, history books won't remember the person who discovered the thing but the company that commercialized it or the product launched by the company.
People upthread said a lot of scientific research is useless, but my understanding was that the research eventually builds on top of each other in a lot of cases?
Hennessy and Patterson for their work on RISC Patterson for RAID Dean and Ghemawat for MapReduce
That's without thinking. There have been a lot of very important works since the 1980s.
Not only is this unfair to unlucky research paths, but it also breeds a social media-like positive feedback loop wherein the individual researcher feels alone in failure.
When thanks to them not publishing their failure, there will probably be a few others who fail the exact same way on the exact same research idea.
I also highly recommend reading the Stripe Press book also with the same name: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732265178
Its also a beautiful and well made book.
FWIW, I was fortunate to do a postdoc at Bell Labs in the early 90s. The established and successful researchers, mostly men, would all talk about the sacrifices their wives made so that they could focus on meeting the insanely high expectations of the place in its glory days. It was the custom back when they made their reputations. The younger permanent staff members were leery of this because social mores and the nature of the research environment were both changing. The freewheeling pre-divestiture days were gone by that time and there was a pressure to be relevant to the needs of the corporation. The management still wanted publications in prestige journals and an international reputation by 35 but couldn't say how to do all that while satisfying the relevancy mandate. The stress on the younger permanent staff was palpable but they and everybody else made life delightful for us short-term appointees - it was all the things Universities ought to be.
At the end of each Science Magazine issue is a "Working Life" feature where a (typically) young person writes about problems s/he is facing in launching a career. Work/family life balance is a consistent theme and more importantly an /expectation/ even for those on the tenure-track at high powered places. The times they have a-changed.
- Seemed that Google had that spirit at one time with its X Lab and also the Google Labs that put out fun products but all I read here and elsewhere is that is in the past
- The Janelia Research Campus may be carrying on the spirit of small, collaborative groups led by a hands-on scientist (there were no empires at Bell Labs.) Could be a very good place to be a young student that has an interest in biology, instrumentation, and/or computation. See what they expect from the lab heads here:
https://www.janelia.org/our-research/our-labs/group-leaders
/excerpt "Group Leaders have time to focus their energy and creativity on research with the freedom to pursue long-term difficult projects through collaborative, interdisciplinary work. They are not evaluated solely on conventional academic measures, such as publishing. Rather, Group Leaders will be expected to make progress in their research areas and make contributions to the work of other Janelia scientists through collaboration, constructive criticism, or mentoring." /excerpt
One of the guys I did know personally wound up at Janelia and eventually at Stockholm.
I was on the other side of the very long Murray Hill building in the physical sciences area. I went to one of Odlyzko's presentations at the Journal Club circa 1992 or 1993 - I think it was on an important new result in prime numbers/factorization/encryption. I never met him, let alone worked with him, though. I do remember one of my senior colleagues (physical scientist) wondering why any of that stuff mattered. My response was that it was probably much more important than anything he or I were doing, had done, or would ever do. I had read something in Byte or a similar popular magazine about primes and encryption it seemed like the field had serious practical implications on top of being incredibly interesting. One of the few correct predictions in my career!
Addendum: On re-reading this, I realized that I am taking a very US-centric perspective. The spirit/culture I was talking about could exist in other countries.
I like this article from Daniel Lemire which explores this further
https://lemire.me/blog/2010/03/22/so-you-know-whats-importan...
Sure you can’t accurately predict what will and won’t be important long term, but you should think your work is important. Whether you’re right or wrong time will tell.
In fact, I remember the book having a very clear assumption that you can't work on important things all the time anyway. But well, there has been some time since I've read it. But it is a very sensible and nuanced advice for highly ambitious people.
True but unfortunately this is how funding works based on what I saw during my time working at various labs.
You need to provide enough evidence that what you are after is going to "work". Most of the brand new ideas get resources by repurposing data from existing funded projects. If you don't have what you need, you finangle the funded project to produce the data the new idea needs.
I'm all for not syncing resources into crazy ideas that will never work but current state of affairs (it's getting worse) is too conservative
That, I suppose, is why the concept of 'academic fraud' doesn't appear once in the the talk, which is otherwise full of good general advice. However, fraudulent science is now a major problem in academia, and one of the worst took place some 15 years after this publication, at Bell Labs itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal
If you're working in a lab and find the PI is fabricating data on a regular basis in order to get publications into journals, or so that they can be the first to claim a patent for a particular process, well, what's to be done? Hamming's comment doesn't really work in that case:
> "Another fault is anger. Often a scientist becomes angry, and this is no way to handle things. Amusement, yes, anger, no. Anger is misdirected. You should follow and cooperate rather than struggle against the system all the time... Another thing you should look for is the positive side of things instead of the negative."
Perhaps there was a Golden Age of Science in the past, when academic fraud wasn't fairly common and scientists weren't also entrepreneurs looking to market their dubious patents to large corporations for a percentage of the profits?
> Another personality defect is ego assertion and I'll speak in this case of my own experience. I came from Los Alamos and in the early days I was using a machine in New York at 590 Madison Avenue where we merely rented time. I was still dressing in western clothes, big slash pockets, a bolo and all those things. I vaguely noticed that I was not getting as good service as other people. So I set out to measure. You came in and you waited for your turn; I felt I was not getting a fair deal. I said to myself, ``Why? No Vice President at IBM said, `Give Hamming a bad time'. It is the secretaries at the bottom who are doing this. When a slot appears, they'll rush to find someone to slip in, but they go out and find somebody else. Now, why? I haven't mistreated them.'' Answer, I wasn't dressing the way they felt somebody in that situation should. It came down to just that - I wasn't dressing properly. I had to make the decision - was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better? I decided I would make an effort to appear to conform properly. The moment I did, I got much better service. And now, as an old colorful character, I get better service than other people.
> Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree; somebody's has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to be? Be clear, when you fight the system and struggle with it, what you are doing, how far to go out of amusement, and how much to waste your effort fighting the system. My advice is to let somebody else do it and you get on with becoming a first-class scientist. Very few of you have the ability to both reform the system and become a first-class scientist.
I tried to live that way for a couple years. Frankly, I think this way of living is unnecessarily restrictive. So what if you get slightly worse service? The clothes you wear and your expressions highlight your history and your culture. By self-censoring yourself, you end up just perpetuating the censorship of other views in the workplace. This goes double for scientists, as we are rather public facing and have room for wearing nontraditional clothes within our jobs.
Should I consider what I feel excited to be important? Personally, sure, but objectively speaking the world might not think that way.
> There are three things you have to do in selling. You have to learn to write clearly and well so that people will read it, you must learn to give reasonably formal talks, and you also must learn to give informal talks. We had a lot of so-called `back room scientists.' In a conference, they would keep quiet. Three weeks later after a decision was made they filed a report saying why you should do so and so. Well, it was too late. They would not stand up right in the middle of a hot conference, in the middle of activity, and say, ``We should do this for these reasons.'' You need to master that form of communication as well as prepared speeches.
I ran across this speech about 5 years into my software development career. These two paragraphs were a MAJOR game changer. Until then I could not believe that more than a minimum of soft skills were necessary being a developer and that my code would speak for itself.
After reading Hamming's words I started putting much more effort into things like presentations and status emails. The results were not immediate and I am not exactly "next VP" but I am definitely in a stable and comfortable position in my current company.
More importantly I am not frustrated when I write some cool-new-tool and nobody takes an interest. It almost certainly means there's nothing wrong with cool-new-tool and I need to better communicate what it is and why its useful. (Related: Hammings point about working on an important problem...your cool-new-tool may not actually be solving anything important).
You and Your Research (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31796353 - June 2022 (33 comments)
You and Your Research – Richard Hamming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27451360 - June 2021 (1 comment)
You and Your Research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25242617 - Nov 2020 (1 comment)
Richard Hamming: You and Your Research (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24171820 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)
You and Your Research – A talk by Richard W. Hamming [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23558974 - June 2020 (1 comment)
You and Your Research by Richard Hamming (1995) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18505884 - Nov 2018 (10 comments)
You and Your Research (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18014209 - Sept 2018 (10 comments)
You and your research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14179317 - April 2017 (1 comment)
You and Your Research, by Richard Hamming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280198 - Sept 2015 (1 comment)
You and Your Research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9279585 - March 2015 (1 comment)
Hamming, "You and Your Research" (1995) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7683711 - May 2014 (25 comments)
Video of Hamming's "You and Your Research" (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5567448 - April 2013 (1 comment)
Richard Hamming: You and Your Research (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626349 - Oct 2012 (27 comments)
Richard Hamming: You and Your Research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3142978 - Oct 2011 (7 comments)
You and Your Research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915515 - Nov 2009 (5 comments)
Richard Hamming - You and your research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852405 - Sept 2009 (1 comment)
You and Your Research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625857 - May 2009 (13 comments)
You and Your Research (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542023 - April 2009 (4 comments)
You and Your Research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=524856 - March 2009 (1 comment)
Richard Hamming: You and Your Research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067 - June 2008 (7 comments)
Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run? - "You and Your Research" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52337 - Sept 2007 (11 comments)
You and Your (Great) Research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13218 - April 2007 (6 comments)
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Note for anyone wondering: reposts are ok after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). I'll play the "or so" card and call this one ok. In addition to it being good for curiosity to revisit perennials sometimes (just not too often), HN is also a place for junior cohorts to have the pleasure of encountering the classics for the first time—an important function of the site!
That is part of why I've made my own cleaned-up & annotated version: http://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming
Even if you decide not to use the Zettelkasten method, this book is still a great read.