Honestly, this has confused me too [0]. Replies to your comment also seem to highlight this, being overly defensive of a position rejecting academia. Don't get me wrong, it's got lots of issues (I'm quite vocal about this too, even with my name associated), but they also do a lot of good.
What's most baffling to me is the rejection of research and theory (depth in knowledge). Claiming that the work isn't impactful. But that's like saying the ground you stand on doesn't matter...
I'm absolutely astounded this is such a common opinion among programmers and CS people. We're literally building the largest companies in the world and bringing about the information revolution and AI revolution on technology that isn't even 100 years old. It's rapidly getting better because of research and we're not waiting for a hundred years of return on investment here.
It's anti-intellectualism. Often spewed by those trying to prove their own genius, demonstrating the opposite. CS of all people should be able to recognize how complex even the simplest things are. For fuck's sake, we can't even get timezones right lol. We need to balance depth, not ignore it or reject it (I don't think the author argued that btw)
It feels excessively myopic. And honestly, the major problem with academia is the same myopia!
| How do you manage genius?
You don't
- Mervin Kelly (Bell Labs)
| What I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.
- Donald Knuth
I think we have this weird image in our heads that researchers do nothing and if left to their own devices will just waste time and money. I write with my pocket computer that sends signals across the world and into space, passing through machines moving so fast their clocks disagree. Our science isn't taking centuries to benefit from. It rarely ever took decades.
Yet historically most science was done by the rich who had free time. Sure, we're moving faster now but we also have several orders of magnitude more scientists. Our continued growth doesn't mean we've become more efficient.
We seem to be really bad at attributing the causes of success. We're fixate on those at the end of a long chain of work. I mean even NVIDIA depends on TSMC, as does Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others. And TSMC is far from the root. I'm not trying to say how the economics should all fall out but its at least a helpful illustrative target to look at the biases in how we think.
> What I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want.
I had a boss who let me do this for a while. He just told me to do whatever I wanted that would help the team. He didn’t talk to me for 2 years after that. For the first few weeks I was kind of stressing to find what to do and show some results, but after that the boredom set in, and that’s one things took off. It was the most productive I’ve ever been. I was regularly working 12+ hour days, because I was enjoying what I was working on. After 2 years I had so many projects and so much stuff that they built a whole team around what I was doing to spread the load out a little. That actually helped me get bored again, so the ideas started flowing again. Those were the good ole days.
A lot of what I did started as research, then I applied what I learned. It was a nice balance to keep things interesting, rather than being in research mode or build mode all the time.
I think the result is unsurprising when you think about it for a bit. Though non-obvious at first!
Most people want to work. They think "hey, I'm here, might as well do something." When we're talking about experts in a field (academic or work), usually what interests them the most is the things that matter the most. Giving free time to "play" allows for these larger challenges to be solved. Things that you could never pitch to a manager because it's highly technical, hard to measure, and difficult to prove. But expertise tends to fill in those gaps.
Obviously you can't and shouldn't do this with everyone. Juniors shouldn't have completely free range. They need some to be able to learn this process, but need much more hand holding. But a senior? That's a position with high levels of trust. They should know the core business and you're literally hiring them to be an expert, right? And of course there are people that just want a paycheck. I think a surprising amount of them will still work regardless, but maybe not as much and as effectively. Certainly, micromanaging people will not get these people to do more work, and you risk just becoming overburdened with people in administrative positions.
Usually, you can sniff out the people that should be given more free reign. You don't have to understand the technical, you only have to detect passion. Some people will fool you, but passion is a pretty good litmus test. There's no optimal global solution here, so we have to accept some losses. Doesn't prevent us from trying to minimize that loss, but I think we get overly concerned with the losses that are easy to detect. Removing those often just results in your losses being harder to detect, not becoming non-existent. It's like the survivorship bias problem. You can't measure the hits on the planes that don't make it back. In our case, losses through employees (including managers) metric hacking. Frankly, we want our losses to be visible, because that makes them treatable.