"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."
Now imagine they're judging you for something you can't change, instead of for your clothing.
With remote work being so common, I regularly think about this section:
Another trait, it took me a while to notice.
I noticed the following facts about people
who work with the door open or the door closed.
I notice that if you have the door to your
office closed, you get more work done today
and tomorrow, and you are more productive than
most. But 10 years later somehow you don't
know quite know what problems are worth working
on; all the hard work you do is sort of
tangential in importance. He who works with
the door open gets all kinds of interruptions,
but he also occasionally gets clues as to what
the world is and what might be important. Now
I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence
because you might say, ``The closed door is
symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But
I can say there is a pretty good correlation
between those who work with the doors open and
those who ultimately do important things,
although people who work with doors closed
often work harder. Somehow they seem to work
on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but
enough that they miss fame.
Possibly the best essay in the Stripe book of Richard Hamming's essays/articles.
Maybe it was a different time and/or environment, but that couldn't be furthered from the truth according to my experience — even if I read that as a metaphorical door.
Many of the people I have worked for/with who are amazing in objectively measurable ways, including fame, appear to balance their open- and closed- door times well.
If you're just chasing after fame and want to work on what "everyone" thinks is important, then I don't disagree that keeping your door opened and getting "all kinds of interruptions" is likely the way to go.
Also anecdotally, the "forever-open-door" people I have worked with who are always talking about "important problems" to solve; have huge networks; and are hopping from collaboration to collaboration working on a completely different domain of expertise every other year: they seem important to the community but, often on closer inspection, they don't actually produce much that is of substance.
A wise professor I knew always scheduled a one-on-one research meeting directly at the end of office hours.
If office hours was an hour long, students come and go for an hour with questions plus some overtime duration of extra clarifications. If office hours was four hours long, students come and go for four hours plus the same bit of overtime. With no bookend between office hours and everything else, students would beg for one more question and push the boundaries of the open-door policy.
In their eyes, the instructor who slams the door in the student's face because, "It's two o'clock, I need to work," is impolite and insensitive.
Putting an unavoidable, important meeting at the end of office hours suddenly put the burden of being impolite on the students. Suddenly, office hours became more efficient and students, more punctual. The professor was no longer so unbelievable cruel for ending the open-door session (gasp) on time. And, most importantly, research could get done at a normal hour.
It's probably a matter of moderation. Having the door closed all the time has a set of potential problems but so has having the open all the time as we have found working in open offices. I like interacting with people but I also need to be able to have peace from time to time. A door allows me to choose when I want to interact and when I need peace.
Headphones don't work for me. First, I don't like having them on for a long time and, second, I find people constantly moving in my peripheral vision very distracting and stressful. I can't focus in such an environment.
This makes sense when there was no internet. We are in the age of sensory overload. Back then you had to network to get the juice. Now the juice finds you
You'd be surprised how little of the important research information makes it onto the internet in an easily digestible format. I work with battery researchers and there's a huge amount of collective knowledge about what papers are fake, which researchers are frauds, or can generally be trusted etc. that is not documented anywhere online but easily available through in-person conferences and coffee chats.
The fact that the internet makes information widely available to everyone is exactly why this kind of critical information about who should and shouldn't be trusted never gets shared, it'd lead to immediate heated conflict that would consume the participants' lives. So (generally) no one shares these things.
But without that knowledge you're wading through a sea of plausible looking garbage.
I wonder why this is downvoted. They mostly cover the same thing iirc. I think he mentioned he has been giving the same lecture multiple times at different venues.
I have all of my students read this and we have had many spirited discussions on the contents. A great motivator for someone at the beginning, middle and end of their careers! Here's my take: https://shrirang.karandikar.org/2019/10/27/you-and-your-rese...
Not at Bell Labs but I was already making progress individually using the approach he is talking about. As much as I could come up with on my own, I didn't know who Hamming was either.
But every single word of it rings true when you look at it.
This kind of thing is from a lost culture but regardless it can be found broadly useful in the 21st century.
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)
An open-ended question for you @dang — why don't you think You and Your Research gets more attention from the HN community? It's a good talk by a highly reputable source, about having an impact with the work you do. I personally hold the talk in high regard, and I'd expect it to do well on HN, but it seems like that isn't the case.
> There are very famous quotes from Richard Hamming (see "You and Your Research") and Richard Feynman (see "Surely You're Joking!") about the importance of working on problems that seem trivial at first. Not only do they help you enjoy problem-solving for its own sake, but if you work on enough silly problems, then eventually the odds are good that you'll stumble upon something that other people will later think is really important.
seems to use it as advice not to work on the important problems in your field, but to go down rabbit holes doing frivolous research..
Oh I think it's well known and has gotten a lot of attention. In fact HN probably did a lot to expand awareness that it existed, since a lot of people here originally found out about it from PG's site. It's a bit of a puzzle why there weren't more comments on those old threads, but that's a different question.
You've got to be a good reader to begin with plus have an interest in research which there is plenty of interest.
Maybe once you get through the whole thing you have to be able to pick your jaw up off the keyboard to make a comment or there is no record of it happening?
"And I can cite another person in the same way. I trust he isn't in the audience, i.e. a fellow named Clogston. I met him when I was working on a problem with John Pierce's group and I didn't think he had much. I asked my friends who had been with him at school, ``Was he like that in graduate school?'' ``Yes,'' they replied. Well I would have fired the fellow..."
but then makes the sudden shift to conclude that
"One success brought him confidence and courage... One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage."
So on the one hand, he says he would have fired the fellow, but then also says that the fellow's success is due to him having courage. You could just as easily conclude his success was due to Hamming not being in charge. There are many environments where Hammings are put in charge.
Very few things in life are pure luck or pure personal characteristics; they're a complex, chaotic mix of things in different proportions for different people and circumstances. We as a society need to get past this, and to recognize our own hypocrisies in how we approach others.
You really sliced up that quote to make Hamming look like a hypocrite. The missing middle:
"Well I would have fired the fellow, but J. R. Pierce was smart and kept him on. Clogston finally did the Clogston cable. After that there was a steady stream of good ideas. One success brought him confidence and courage."
Emphasis mine.
I think this is self criticism on Hamming's part, not a dig at Clogston.
My point is there's many situations where JR Pierce wouldn't have been in charge, and Hamming would have. Phrase it as you will -- that Hamming wasn't in charge, or JR Pierce was, but the point is the same.
I agree Hamming was being self-deprecating but it seems strange to jump from the observation that he would have fired the guy, but that somehow it's Glogston's attributes that saved him?
To me it seems hypocritical and not at all twisting what he said.
It wasn't Clogston's attributes that saved him from getting fired. Hamming squarely credits that to Pierce being smart and not firing him.
The overall context of this paragraph is the importance of courage. Taking your quoted paragraph as 0 here are the leading sentences of paragraph -2 and +1.
> One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them.
> One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage.
Paragraph -1 is about a person that wasn't obviously impressive.
> ... It was pretty clear to me that this man didn't know much mathematics and he wasn't really articulate.
But he persisted anyway
> He went ahead, with negligible recognition from his own department..
Leading to success
> ..but ultimately he has collected all the prizes in the field.
And outward changes
> Once he got well started, his shyness, his awkwardness, his inarticulateness, fell away and he became much more productive in many other ways.
Then we get to paragraph 0, a similar story
> And I can cite another person in the same way.
Hamming doubted him
> I didn't think he had much...Well I would have fired the fellow
He had one success
> Clogston finally did the Clogston cable.
Leading to more success
> After that there was a steady stream of good ideas.
Because of an increase in his courage and outward changes
> One success brought him confidence and courage.
I'm not saying this is an airtight argument. I just think you've mischaracterized it. Hamming is saying that he doubted these people who went on to be successful. It's implied and sometimes explicitly stated that others doubted them, too. But, they had the courage to continue and this is an important attribute for scientists.
It's not a systemic way of looking at things. This advice is for people who want to work within a system, not change it. I mean, from somewhere else in the page:
> I decided I would make an effort to appear to conform properly.
You might not like what he has said, but it seems pretty consistent.
I have no idea what motivation it takes to take someone's words, twist them to make the person look as bad as possible, and then try to unfairly smear them.
He says that one success brought that guy courage.
However, in the same "point", he says that it is courage which brings success. Applied to that case, it means that the guy already had courage that Hamming couldn't see but Pierce could see. Well, then it is not a success that brought him courage.
Now imagine they're judging you for something you can't change, instead of for your clothing.