> 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.