In order to get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do first-class work.'' Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that's a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn't you set out to do something significant. You don't have to tell other people, but shouldn't you say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do something significant.''

But I'm forty-two going on forty-three...

Richard Hamming on solving important problems This, in my experience, is the whole story. Everything else falls out of this personal commitment. It's a commitment to try. To strive. To sweat. To make the effort. To care.Without this commitment, you have made a de facto decision to be on the receiving end of life. To float down the river like a leaf, now hither, now thither, carried by currents and wind.Drop the modesty. There's nothing wrong with wanting to do something great, even insanely great.

Age is another factor which the physicists particularly worry about. They always are saying that you have got to do it when you are young or you will never do it. Einstein did things very early, and all the quantum mechanic fellows were disgustingly young when they did their best work. Most mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and astrophysicists do what we consider their best work when they are young. It is not that they don't do good work in their old age but what we value most is often what they did early. On the other hand, in music, politics and literature, often what we consider their best work was done late. I don't know how whatever field you are in fits this scale, but age has some effect. But let me say why age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work... When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.



Todd Proebsting

Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, ``Do you mind if I join you?'' They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, `` What are the important problems of your field? '' And after a week or so, `` What important problems are you working on? '' And after some more time I came in one day and said, `` If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it? '' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring.

What is the most important problem in your area of interest?

What are you working on?

Why aren't they the same?



In my own experience, having some modest success early opens doors. But do they lead in the right direction? Sometimes not. I am constantly getting offers to manage teams of programmers working on uninteresting applications. I have taken such jobs, and I can say with certainty that while I have been successful most of the time and unsuccessful some of the time, uninteresting projects have never magically transformed themselves into important work.It's hard to plant acorns when you've grown an oak. But it's necessary, very necessary. You can't get buried in management meetings and UML diagrams and presentations to resellers (you especially can't even get buried in writing about software development).A few years ago I went to a conference at MIT called " Lightweight Languages 2 ." All sorts of very bright people were there. Joe Armstrong gave a talk on Erlang. Matz gave a talk on Ruby. And a charismatic speaker from Microsoft named Todd Proebsting gave a talk about Disruptive Language Technologies.In his talk, he gave a story about Richard Hamming. And here's the same story, in Richard's own words:So...

Labels: jobs, passion