[HN Gopher] Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish a...
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Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
Author : ent101
Score : 337 points
Date : 2024-01-11 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.asc.ohio-state.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.asc.ohio-state.edu)
| MPSimmons wrote:
| The entire 'Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman' book is just an
| incredible read.
| b8 wrote:
| Yep, I recommend that and his other book.
| jwilk wrote:
| What's the other book?
| donkeyballs wrote:
| "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"
| btilly wrote:
| The other book is, "What Do You Care What Other People
| Think?"
|
| https://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-
| Think/dp/03933...
|
| I particularly liked it for the in depth discussion of how
| Appendix F came to be written.
|
| https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
| srean wrote:
| Yeah, the Feynman in this book is more human, more
| vulnerable.
| srean wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Do_You_Care_What_Other_P
| e...
| dartos wrote:
| What an inspiring passage.
|
| I've been feeling the exact same way about software lately.
|
| It's just no fun anymore. I should do something pointless like
| making a wayland compositor for myself or something.
| JohnFen wrote:
| When I struggled hard with burnout, I found that hobbies were
| an important part of fixing that -- but it was important that
| the hobbies had little-to-nothing to do with computers (I had
| computer-related hobbies too, of course, but they didn't seem
| particularly effective in terms of mitigating burnout).
| brokencode wrote:
| Personally, I've found that if I get super interested in a
| programming project at home that I'll get too distracted and
| unfocused at work, which feels pretty miserable. For that
| reason, I've mostly given up on programming at home in favor
| of reading and other hobbies.
|
| I do think this is a good approach at work though. There's
| always something I can investigate that I'm interested in at
| work that I can find enjoyment from. Even if it isn't exactly
| what I'm ideally supposed to be working on, I'm able to help
| people and provide valuable insights that are beneficial for
| my team and company.
|
| This is a much more satisfying situation than either spinning
| my wheels because I'm not interested in what I'm working on
| am too distracted by projects at home.
| makapuf wrote:
| A good thing is to remind that you have not to finish hobby
| projets. Dont feel any shame about putting it aside and start
| something more interesting, do it : it's not work and you do
| it to let off steam. You may even come back to it later
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes!
|
| I think that the real difference between an activity being
| a hobby and it being a job is that a hobby activity is
| always optional. If I don't feel like working on a hobby
| project today (or ever again), I don't have to. On the job,
| I don't have that option. That makes a world of difference.
| nosequel wrote:
| My same thought. The software I'm required to write isn't
| necessarily fun anymore. I find more fun writing tools when I
| need them. I'll find myself needing a helper tool, I start
| writing, I enjoy writing it, then I realize I went off the deep
| end and made a really cool thing and completely lost track of
| time.
| rand1239 wrote:
| Go and meditate. You will never find truth in
| thoughts/words/code/beliefs. It can be in trillions of possible
| combinations. You can keep churning it out for infinity and not
| reach anywhere.
| csours wrote:
| I think this is an indication of the difference between the start
| of project and maintenance of a product.
|
| At the start, you can imagine all the cool things it does, once
| it's working you have to keep it working in the real world.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| Spot on. Everything is fun when the scale is small and the
| consequences don't matter, and everything is serious when the
| scale is large and the consequences matter.
| david422 wrote:
| Or the start of the project and completing the project. All
| those fun projects people start and never finish. All the fun
| stuff is done, it's the boilerplate that needs to be done to
| actually complete the project that is the "hard" part.
| mikrl wrote:
| I've had an 'instrumental' mindset for as long as I can remember.
| Almost my entire life after being a kid.
|
| >I need to do this because I need to know that to pass my exams,
| get a good job to... etc
|
| I feel for a lot of 30 and under people today it's the same. I
| managed to capture the 'playing around' feeling very fleetingly
| earlier in my 20s but it doesn't last long before some little
| productivity demon starts gnawing at you.
|
| Even resting has its purpose: mentally recharge to work more, let
| muscles repair themselves to lift more.
| amiga386 wrote:
| I can just imagine this in his voice (e.g.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc)
|
| Feynman is my favourite physicist. Of course you could pick
| someone else, you could argue about the relative importance of
| each person's contribution to scientific knowledge, but it was
| his aimiability, playfulness and curiousity, combined with the
| fact that he _did_ break new frontiers in quantum physics that
| make him so inspiring for me. His famed series of lectures at
| Caltech were a great introduction to physics.
|
| I was hoping to see more of his time at Los Alamos in the
| _Oppenheimer_ biopic, but he doesn 't even seem to be in it.
| There's supposedly someone playing him, but I don't see it; I
| assume the two-second silent shot of someone from behind playing
| the bongos was meant to be him.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Yeah uh I was forever hoping for Feynmann to appear. Suddenly,
| a man playing bongos! Finally, here he comes, I thought... but
| no. No Feynmann. What a disappointment.
| kitchi wrote:
| There was the person who viewed the blast from behind glass
| with no protection, which I'm pretty sure is a reference to his
| story about the exact same thing.
| privacyisntdead wrote:
| A favorite of mine as well. I too was hoping for more of an
| appearance. I wondered if Feynman's moment was during the first
| test scene where there is a spectator/scientist sitting in a
| car with Teller sitting in a lawn chair in the foreground.
| Feynman says in one of his books he noticed the car windows
| should block the UV radiation.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Ah, yes, that is it. So he gets a few more seconds in the
| movie than I thought :)
|
| [An army man is handing out welders glass to the observers.
| Feynman is in a car, Teller is next to him in a deckchair
| rubbing sun cream into his skin]
|
| TELLER [to the army man while rubbing his hands]: On the leg,
| please
|
| ARMY MAN: Feynman
|
| FEYNMAN: No. The glass [knocks on car windshield] stops the
| UV
|
| TELLER: And what stops the glass?
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| He's one of the scientists being recruited from a university
| (they address him by name).
|
| He also says something about building a cyclotron when they are
| constructing Los Alamos.
|
| And he sits behind a window of a car or truck during the atomic
| test blast.
|
| That's all I spotted
| vasco wrote:
| I'm not a mental health connoisseur or anything, but removing
| your own pressure to perform seems like good advice regardless of
| your circumstances. If you're tired or stressed or whatever,
| labeling yourself as "a burned out person" seems to me like the
| only good thing it does is add more pressure. Because how can you
| do well if you're "damaged" in some way?
|
| It's important to not just do old style sweep it under the rug
| when it's serious, but I do think the current zeitgeist over
| indexes on being a good person equating to being hyper aware of
| all your struggles and anxieties and so on, and I don't see how
| all that extra pressure will help, specially for young people.
| Most times "it's not that big of a deal" is really the best thing
| I can tell myself. That being said, asking for help from someone
| that knows what they are talking about also seems like a good
| idea, if you can't overcome it on your own. The universe doesn't
| give you any extra points for doing it alone.
| dexwiz wrote:
| I view burnout as a psychic wound. You should be aware of it to
| treat and not let it fester. At the same time, if you are
| always messing with it then it won't heal.
|
| I agree there is probably a balance, and we are currently
| focusing too hard on it. I've had the same thought about the
| obsession about childhood trauma from people with average
| upbringings.
|
| But both parents and work have heavy influences on how we live
| our lives, so who else are you going to blame? Yourself? Don't
| be silly.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Makes sense, we are taught that being "mindful" of our mental
| state is key to mental health, but it also means everyone walks
| around with a handful of self diagnosed mental deficits.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Being mindful of what you are doing, what you are thinking,
| how you are feeling, and how you are reacting to things is
| not diagnosing. You should probably leave the diagnosing part
| to a professional if you feel that you really need help with
| your mental health.
| tnecniv wrote:
| As a researcher, I've felt largely the same way lately. It's been
| hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when
| I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged.
| Unfortunately, I don't have a cozy tenure position at a major
| research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel
| inspired again. I'm just a lowly postdoc.
|
| I've thought about leaving the research life for a regular job,
| but it's not obvious to me that would help. First, there's not
| really other jobs I'd rather do. Second, the burnout has
| penetrated so many facets of my life (various hobbies, etc.) I'm
| not sure if it even is burnout or a deeper issue.
|
| Therapy and medication has only been marginally helpful. I'm
| really not sure what to do at this point.
| fnord77 wrote:
| burnout = depression
| tnecniv wrote:
| You are right, but the hard part for me is determining the
| causality here. Am I depressed because I'm burnt out, or am I
| feeling burnt out because I'm depressed?
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I suspect treatment will be much the same in either case.
| bhaney wrote:
| I usually try to avoid engaging in armchair psychology, but
| "the burnout has penetrated so many facets of my life
| (various hobbies, etc.)" makes me think it's depression
| causing the burnout rather than the other way around.
| kbf wrote:
| I thought I was burnt out and just recently found out I had
| an undiagnosed chronic illness, so that's a possibility
| too...
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Not sure it would help, but it may: adopt a rescue animal, if
| you're a pet oriented person, and don't already have one, and
| it may jar your perspectives in multiple dimensions as to what
| is fun, what is entertaining, what is meaningful.
|
| That worked for me when i felt like you describe.
| tnecniv wrote:
| I do love animals, but I've always been intimidated about the
| responsibility of being the person solely in charge of that
| animal's life. I've always struggled with routines and such
| (I found out in adulthood I have ADHD).
|
| I have thought about it lately, though. Maybe having that
| responsibility will cause other things to click into place?
| However, I'm worried about it not working and impacting a
| life beyond my own.
| janussunaj wrote:
| Your concern is more of a sign that you'd be a responsible
| pet parent. I don't have experience with dogs (rescue or
| not), but caring for a cat is relatively straightforward
| and can bring lots of joy. Writing this with a cat sleeping
| on my lap, who showed up in my backyard a few years ago.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Caring for two cats is even easier because if their human
| is boring because of concentration, they can entertain
| each other. Works here, and with rescue dog in the mix
| too.
|
| Also, if the dog is fond of walks and hikes etc, that's
| possibly super healthy for a break from sitting and
| working. As the joke goes, "Ask me how I know." :)
| earthling8118 wrote:
| Only do this if you're serious. Depending on the animal you
| could very well just add another negative thing to your life.
| There are upsides, sure, but there's nothing that feels great
| about walking into your bedroom and getting a nasty look from
| an animal you put hours upon hours of work in per week for
| because they don't like humans.
| scrapcode wrote:
| Man, I feel you. I'm not an academic, but I'm just feeling out
| of breath and defeated lately. I grew up loving to build
| software. Reading programming books, keeping up with tech. It's
| the closest thing to work + passion that I think I've ever
| felt. Joined the military to get out of my hometown. Worked in
| whatever field I could remotely relate to while I finished my
| BS:CS. Moved from non-IT fields into whatever IT-related field
| I could hoping it'd get my resume closer to what I wanted to
| do.
|
| Now I'm just pigeon-holed into some boring bureaucratic IT
| admin gig with just enough perks to keep me around, and big
| enough dollar signs to prevent me from starting over in a
| junior capacity. Then I see all of the discussions from people
| that don't enjoy development after just a short time, get laid
| off, etc - and it makes the reality that I'm just destined to
| rot bored to death for 40hrs a week for the next 25+ years all
| the more real.
|
| I also realize I am extremely fortunate compared to plenty of
| others, but that "tug" telling me I was destined for much more
| gets stronger the older I get.
| mikub wrote:
| I think that one of the problems of us humans is that we want
| to accomplish something, we tell our self storys about our
| self how we should have become that or done that. But in the
| end it really doesn't matter, even if you were Albert
| Einstein, Richard Feynman or Marie Curie, in a few billion
| years none of all the work any human ever did, everything
| accomplished, won't matter, no one will be here to remember
| anymore. I think the best one can do is to look at this world
| with some sort of an observer mindset and be curious about
| the things happening in this world, try not to judge the
| things happening, just think "Oh, that's interesting, I
| wonder why it is like that.". And of course, always try to be
| friendly to other living beings, even if there might be no
| afterlife after the end of the universe and you can't trade
| in your browniepoints anymore, ther is no excuse for making
| other peoples life worse than it already is. ;)
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| That's the alarm system telling you to wake up and start
| looking around for a change. For whatever reason, we seem to
| have a meta-cognitive system that watches for stagnation and
| creates unease when it is detected. Am convinced that you
| can't disable it entirely, but you can self-mediate or ignore
| it. Either route is not great, as you're aware on some level
| that you're refusing your destiny (of sorts).
|
| I think about this quote a lot:
|
| "i keep re-encountering with a shock the way that most people
| do not know, at all, that the problem the entire universe is
| devoted to, that it crashes us into walls, throws us off
| cliffs, tortures and murders us to try to solve, is that of
| escaping local maxima"
|
| - https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1248861223501942784?r
| e...
|
| Thus, I'd implore you to stick with the feeling and use it as
| impetus to change for something new.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Incredibly relatable
| nsagent wrote:
| I'm in a similar boat. Not a postdoc yet, but will be starting
| a postdoc in July (assuming I graduate in May, which I'm on
| track for).
|
| I've always been interested in the intersection of AI and
| interactive storytelling. Worked in the game industry for a
| while, then came back for a PhD when ML really started taking
| off.
|
| With the current frenzied climate in NLP research, I just feel
| demotivated. Mainly because I think my research outlook is very
| different from the mainstream, so I feel my work gets
| undervalued or ignored entirely.
|
| I spent over a year and a half on my last published research
| project [1], and it's been largely ignored. Despite having
| strong reviews after rebuttal, the paper was relegated to the
| Findings of EMNLP, likely because my research was video game
| related.
|
| I'm usually the kind of person that focuses on things because I
| care about them, rather than because others do, but the reality
| is that hiring decisions in academia (or even industry) require
| that others value your work. If I truly thought I could do
| research I cared about and get paid a living, without having to
| worry about whether others accepted it, I think I'd be much
| more motivated.
|
| [1]: https://pl.aiwright.dev
|
| My site is a static site hosted on sourcehut, which is having
| an outage. If it's still down, try
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240110040908/https://pl.aiwrig...
| tnecniv wrote:
| I started my postdoc in August, but the burnout started
| earlier, a few months before writing my dissertation.
| Congrats on finishing your degree (almost)!
|
| I also have kind of esoteric interests in my field but it
| mostly hasn't bothered me. It certainly doesn't help with
| matters though when sometimes I'm trying to motivate myself
| and go "what's the point?"
|
| I will say that one thing I've learned as a researcher is
| that it's hard to know what people will and will not like.
| I've received compliments on some of my least favorite papers
| I've written. My advisor always told this story about how, as
| a student, he won a best paper award for a paper that almost
| decided not to publish because they thought the results
| weren't strong enough.
| godelski wrote:
| > Mainly because I think my research outlook is very
| different from the mainstream, so I feel my work gets
| undervalued or ignored entirely.
|
| You're not alone.
|
| One of my first papers was in normalizing flows and I focused
| on a niche area in there (if I said, I'd dox myself. Even
| this limits the search a lot). Reviewers came back and asked
| why my images weren't as good as SOTA GANs and just rejected.
| Half my experiments were on density estimation... The other
| reviews said I should be applying my methods to GANs instead,
| but that wasn't even possible because I was explicitly
| exploiting the distributional properties at each flow step.
|
| My most cited paper is unpublished and the reviews I got back
| were about why someone would want to train from scratch
| instead of tuning a large model. Why we cared about such
| things as small number of parameters or how to quickly train
| models without overfitting because "bigger models generalize
| better."
|
| Fwiw, I'd have no issue accepting your work. It looks useful,
| it advances domain knowledge, and is clearly written. I think
| a lot of people lose sight that experiments are proxies and
| that the tools we are working with are more general than the
| specific applications we demonstrate.
| flatline wrote:
| Academia is a recipe for burnout. It's like pro sports, unless
| you are the top 1% of the top 1% you may be able to keep eeking
| by but will never be in a comfortable position. There is always
| more to do and you do not get paid well for your time. You are
| surrounded by people who pour their lives into their work and
| it will be expected of you. The culture is extremely toxic and
| dysfunctional.
|
| Your lack of imagination as to another job is part of the trap.
| Work can be enjoyable, pay well, and you can still have a
| personal life, but academia sells itself as the only possible
| trajectory for a certain type of person. _Most_ people leave
| academia and many of them find meaningful work outside of that.
| nextos wrote:
| The problem in Academia is that its too crowded. With
| crowding, in many fields, the _de facto_ way to progress has
| become to play corridor and department politics. I know
| completely clueless and incompetent researchers that made an
| effortless transition to faculty positions at top 10
| universities, whereas some great postdocs were stuck forever,
| burnt out, and left. Ironically, some of said postdocs did
| the work the others took credit for in order to be promoted.
|
| Some fields are more prone to this kind of behavior and power
| structures than others. Plus, in the past, it was much easier
| for recent PhD graduates to progress to tenure-track
| positions, without needing to do a postdoc (or many!) in
| between.
|
| Actually, some countries have established regulations to try
| to prevent postdoc abuse, as faculty is typically interested
| in getting them to do all work, giving them little credit,
| etc. Some of my postdoc friends were supervising students,
| designing studies, and writing grants but their names were
| never officially on paper! Their PI used this as a way to
| getting them trapped. Without e.g. supervision experience,
| they would not be able to move to tenure-track positions,
| thereby getting stuck with him (as cheap labor) forever.
| godelski wrote:
| > I know completely clueless and incompetent researchers
| that made an effortless transition to faculty positions at
| top 10 universities, whereas some great postdocs were stuck
| forever, burnt out, and left. Ironically, some of said
| postdocs did the work the others took credit for in order
| to be promoted.
|
| I've seen this, and it's happened to me. I'm at a much
| lower ranking uni and we partner with higher ranking unis
| and I can tell you that I know quite a number of people at
| top 5 universities that do not know what an expectation
| value, probability density, or covariance is. They get
| attached to my papers but I do not get attached to their
| papers, even if I put in more work than the reverse
| situation (I can't tell you what some of my coauthors did).
| I wrote an entire NSF grant, that we won, and my advisor
| told me I only played a small role. Even if true, that
| should be a red flag that the system is broken. Why is this
| so much about politics?
|
| What we're seeing is the meritocracy-metric paradox. Where
| metrics are literally the biggest killers of any
| meritocracies. Every metric can be hacked and the more
| reliance you place upon them, the more they will be. The
| problem is people think metrics perfectly align with
| objectives and that this alignment is static throughout
| time. Neither of those is true and it is baffling to me
| that people either aren't willing to admit it or are
| willing to and then just continue as if it didn't. The
| world is fuzzy and metrics are just guides. I thought the
| difference between humans and machines was that we could
| generalize instructions to the intent and not the letter.
| gen220 wrote:
| In bureaucracies like this, the fish inenvitably rots
| from the head. The people who offer the faculty positions
| are incompetent or indifferent. And the people who hired
| _those_ people are incompetent or indifferent.
|
| As such, it's a mess that literally can't be solved from
| within, it needs to be solved by the administration, and
| the boards who appoint them. The tenure system means
| it'll take generations to resolve.
|
| Academia in the U.S. has seen systemic issues like this
| in the past (see: eugenics). Unfortunately the
| implication is that it'll continue to get worse until
| it's mostly made better by people retiring.
| htss2013 wrote:
| What do you mean by eugenics? That academics studied
| eugenics? Or that eugenics was widely popular among
| academics?
|
| I guess the pendulum always swings to the extreme other
| direction. Today, the more disadvantaged your
| intersectional identity, the better your prospects in
| academia.
| godelski wrote:
| I agree, and I think that is the essence of the
| meritocracy-metric paradox. Those that hacked the metric
| become those in charge. I think that only reinforces the
| idea of metric hacking. I really think this concept is
| playing out at large and not just academia.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think this is something... I dunno, it ought to be obvious,
| but maybe we miss it in the general public? The tenure system
| is partially there because it is actually good to give smart
| people the latitude to screw around and play with problems.
|
| And good ideas have the element of play. If academics have to
| retreat to complexity, nobody will be able to follow...
| godelski wrote:
| > The tenure system is partially there because it is actually
| good to give smart people the latitude to screw around and
| play with problems.
|
| The tenure system doesn't work like most people think it
| does. It is not "I made it, now I can just do whatever I want
| without getting fired." You still have publication quotas and
| you end up having more bureaucratic work. Even with all the
| admins that schools have hired, there is just more work for
| professors.
|
| > If academics have to retreat to complexity, nobody will be
| able to follow...
|
| And? The world in complex. Simplicity is the goal, but it is
| the simplest description that also adequately explains the
| thing. That's not going to end up being very simple and
| there's a reason you see physicists learning very complex
| mathematics. It should absolutely make sense that complexity
| takes over as we advance our knowledge as a species because
| the simple things are easier to understand and are understood
| first. If things are not getting more complex over time,
| that's a sign that we are either really fucking dumb (having
| missed many simple things) or that we simply understand
| things with higher resolution. Simplicity is for the Luddites
| (this is literally a key part of that history).
| godelski wrote:
| I'm in a similar position. At the end of my PhD I feel like I
| want to drop out. I do ML research and I just lost faith in the
| academic system.
|
| Research is my absolute favorite thing to do but everything
| else surrounding it I just absolutely hate and it feels
| draining and worthless. Ideas get dismissed without
| explanations (even after asking), publication process is
| incredibly noisy and when you get a nonsensical review (I can
| share) people just say "shit happens" or "weird" and then it
| happens again and again, and advisors and managers want weekly
| updates but visible progress in a project goes through wild
| cycles of lots of work with little to nothing to show vs low
| work where it looks like lots of progress is made (e.g. tuning
| models). It just feels like hell. I'm always thinking about my
| projects because they sincerely interest and captivate me but I
| feel like the systems we have built around what is entirely a
| creative process is structured for routine work. I'm being
| asked to do things that have never been done before -- and I
| love this, it is the ultimate puzzle -- but how the fuck do you
| expect me to give accurate ETAs and to do this 3-5 times a year
| and launch ground breaking work with some 2080Ti nodes and
| maybe one A100 node? How ground breaking of work can it be if
| it is done in a few months? I am supposed to do this by myself
| and compete against a team of Google engineers? This publish or
| perish paradigm is absolute bullshit and we're at a point where
| fucking Nvidia asked for a new PhD to have 8 top conference 1st
| author publications.
|
| Therapy and medication definitely help, and I were I not to
| start them I, without a doubt, would have dropped out. But I
| think we need to have a very serious discussion about the
| systems that we have in place and how we're continually
| shooting ourselves in the foot with this fucking rat race.
| Maybe I'm just a bad researcher, because it does seem that
| there are a lot of highly successful people. But if I'm being
| honest, when I talk to those people I can't see anything that
| they are doing different other than opportunities/resources and
| possibly better mentoring. There are of course people that
| stand out and I can definitely see their genius when talking to
| them, but for the vast majority of researchers I really can't
| tell what makes the difference between making it and breaking
| it. I can't tell what makes a paper work and not work.
|
| I really just want to spend my days reading math books, hacking
| away at ML systems, and trying to understand what this whole
| thing around consciousness, intelligence, and sentience is. But
| I don't know how to make this life. It isn't academia and it
| isn't industry. So how do I be born rich? Can we get to post
| scarcity yet?
| nsagent wrote:
| Sounds like we are in a similar boat :-/
| godelski wrote:
| I'm really sorry to hear that. It's fucking rough. But I'd
| encourage you to speak up if you do agree about the
| systematic issues. I think the existing momentum is strong
| and because there is enough success most people do not feel
| the need to improve the system and failures (like me) blame
| it on themselves (like me). But I think I can be a failure
| AND the system can be bad too.
| thefaux wrote:
| Before I left academia, I felt that I would be a terrible
| failure. The people I was surrounded by looked at leaving the
| academy as a sad admission of defeat. In retrospect, I think
| this was largely a reflection of their own insecurity and lack
| of perspective because most had never been outside of the
| academic bubble.
|
| Life on the outside is different. Having been gone over a
| decade, there are some things I miss and that are definitely
| hard to find in other environments. On the other hand, I feel
| immeasurably better about myself not having to beg to toil away
| on projects of questionable significance that happen to have
| funding and be stuck in the precarity of borderline poverty in
| the service of supposedly higher ideals.
| max_ wrote:
| What things do you miss in academia that you didn't find in
| industry?
| academic_tmp22 wrote:
| As academic with the tenure job, I don't think it gets easier
| with the tenure -- you'll have to do more non-research stuff,
| admin, teaching, supervisions, grading, grant writing etc.
| (some people like it, but I just prefer research)
|
| I do have burn-out certainly that appeared after I had a
| faculty job for a few years. That mostly has affected my
| overtime research work, which previously would take most of my
| free-time, but now I try to spend more of my free time on
| hobbies.
|
| My advice is that unless you can overcome burnout somehow, not
| to try tenure positions in the states, because there you'll
| have to work really hard to get to tenure. I think positions in
| Europe tend to be often tenured from the beginning (i.e. UK) so
| it may be easier.
|
| (throwaway account)
| tnecniv wrote:
| Yeah I'm not sure I'd go the tenure route anyway. I'd rather
| do research than manage people doing research on my half-
| baked ideas. Fortunately, in my field, there's options to
| publish as an industry research. Unfortunately, those jobs
| dried up last year along with all the other tech jobs when I
| was searching.
|
| I guess the tricky thing (maybe it suggests it's not burnout
| but some other source of depression) is that I haven't been
| motivated by my hobbies either. It's been hard to find much
| joy in anything as of late.
| borroka wrote:
| > First, there's not really other jobs I'd rather do.
|
| I suspect there are many jobs you would do, but you have to
| allow yourself to let go of the dreams, the ambitions, the
| identity you have built in academia.
|
| A few years ago, almost seven, I decided to leave academia,
| after a PhD and many years as a post doc, more than 50 journal
| papers published, awards and recognition in my field. I loved
| doing research, writing papers and thinking about the new
| advances I would make.
|
| Why the change of mind and career? First, it seemed that my
| time as a researcher had passed, and that I was becoming an old
| postdoc with little appeal to universities and research
| institutions. Second, I was growing tired of earning little
| money. Third, it was beginning to look like I was doing similar
| research to what I was doing 5 years earlier, and I had a
| feeling that it would be the same research I would be doing 5
| years down the road.
|
| I started interviewing for positions in (tech) industry, got a
| monetary offer 5 times what I was making as a senior postdoc,
| started a new career, and never looked back. The last part is
| not entirely true. At times, I look back and regret the last 5
| years I spent in academia. I could have had a faster career in
| tech, earned much more money, and would have met bright and
| motivated people sooner. The world is full of interesting
| technical problems that need to be solved.
| etrautmann wrote:
| This is true for a surprisingly large number of people. It's
| very easy to lose time in a post doc that's not either fun
| science or advancing your career in a high ROI way. Many post
| docs don't have the experience and diversity of perspective
| required to recognize this trap, and nobody around them is
| incentivized to help. This is true whether you're planning to
| stay in academia or not.
| borroka wrote:
| This is one of the reasons I stopped informally mentoring
| postdocs. It was an exercise in frustration. It was like
| telling someone who had only had one
| husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend in their life (and now
| has left or is leaving) that there were many other people
| in the world with whom they could have been as happy as
| they were with their ex (willy-nilly), and even much
| happier, if only they had allowed themselves to experience
| their new world.
|
| "They (the research/partner) are all I have loved in my
| life," "I can't imagine myself with anyone else/with any
| other job." The arguments were remarkably similar and
| equally frustrating to deal with.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| There is only so much one can do for people in that
| situation. They need to close the chapter themselves.
| Their Stockholm Syndrome [1] is a mix of helplessness and
| _Sunken Cost_ fallacy [2].
|
| People invest heavily, are _encouraged_ to believe by the
| power structure, and suffer as they slowly begin to see
| that they have been beguiled (scammed).
|
| [1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
|
| [2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
| tnecniv wrote:
| Well I should clarify. There are jobs that I can do
| certainly, but very few that I've thought would given me the
| internal satisfaction of what academia used to give me (and I
| think could give me again). Before I was hired as a postdoc I
| applied for various research scientist positions at places
| that would still let me publish, but then all the hiring
| freezes happened. Whether that counts as academia is in the
| eye of the beholder but at least they pay better.
|
| The only other gig I can think of that would excite me is
| being a statistical analyst for a baseball team. I know more
| than one person who made that transition after getting their
| PhD. Something else is probably out there, too, but I haven't
| discovered it for myself yet.
| borroka wrote:
| > There are jobs that I can do certainly, but very few that
| I've thought would given me the internal satisfaction of
| what academia used to give me (and I think could give me
| again).
|
| My comment is not meant to be advice-column material, but I
| get the impression that as long as you think that "[there
| are] very few [jobs] that I've thought would give me the
| internal satisfaction of what academia used to give me,"
| you are unlikely to resolve or leave behind your current
| frustration. This is not an invitation to try all the jobs
| for which you might be qualified, but until you have tried
| some of them, you cannot know.
|
| Before I left academia, although I was a fairly well-
| rounded person in general, looking back at what I thought
| at the time, I didn't have a clue about the tech industry,
| the private sector, the tools used, the money I could make,
| the weekends spent doing things that weren't trying again
| to run a simulation model that no one was interested in
| anyway.
|
| But, as I said in another comment, it's like listening to
| someone say "I'll never find a man like him again" while
| you think that that man, who you know, is for you in the
| bottom 15% of men with IQ>70. You are incredulous, you
| can't understand how someone could say that, but here we
| are. She has to broaden her perspective to understand what
| you now know, and all the words said in the meantime will
| be forgotten, like wind in the pines.
| godelski wrote:
| This sounds like you're describing a system that is a failure
| but that the solution is not to fix the system but to give up
| and do something else. Can we not fix academia? Is the signal
| of so many people, especially in CS, abandoning academia for
| industry not as clear of a sign as you can get? I feel crazy
| because it feels like everyone either does not want to admit
| the system is broken or will admit it but not want to do
| anything about it (which maybe is simply fatigue).
| borroka wrote:
| First, a postdoc on the way out of academia is not going to
| fix academia.
|
| Second, how is the system broken? There are mismanaged
| resources, some nepotism (in the U.S., a lot of nepotism if
| we look at countries other than the U.S. or the like), some
| research questions that are (wrongly) favored, but it
| doesn't change the fact that many more PhDs with academic
| career ambitions are being produced than there are (and
| will be) positions available. And this is not just an
| academia problem: the same mismatch between supply and
| demand is found in many other creative and aspirational
| careers, think actors, singers, sports. Only a small
| percentage of those who want that life can get it, and
| those who are left out are often frustrated by the
| perceived unfairness of life. But that does not change the
| fact that many aspiring creatives, because of that massive
| mismatch between supply and demand, will not be able to
| pursue those careers.
|
| Sure, more permanent research positions could be thought of
| instead of forcing careers through the very narrow
| bottleneck of tenure track positions, but the vast majority
| of PhDs with academic ambitions (at least 8 out 10) will
| not have the opportunity to make that career, and they are
| (or are themselves) being bread-crumbed for years and years
| hoping that their dreams will, one day, come true. But they
| won't come true. And, as soon as they find another
| fulfilling occupation, they will find out it was not a real
| dream anyway, just a dream they thought they had.
| godelski wrote:
| > Second, how is the system broken?
|
| I want to d my best to respond, but can you help me
| determine my audience? That way I can be clear? Are you
| coming from inside or outside academia? If inside, what
| field? If outside, have you gone through a graduate
| program? Which decade? No need to give highly specific
| answers, I'm just trying to get some additional context
| to best respond. There are problems more visible to those
| inside and often nuanced and problems that are invisible
| to outside.
| tnecniv wrote:
| When I was still a PhD student, my advisor lamented that he
| couldn't find postdocs to hire because big tech was paying
| them more for the same role with minimal constraints. If
| that kept going for a while, I imagine it'd put pressure on
| at least some parts of academia (CS and engineering don't
| expect you to do a series of postdocs like biology does,
| and pure math has their own system of seniority I only know
| a little about). The money dried up though.
| borroka wrote:
| I think having trouble finding a postdoc is a good
| outcome of the process, the incentives in this case are
| working properly. Postdoc positions were designed as a
| short bridge between a PhD and a tenure-track position,
| not as a long-term crutch for people who are not ready to
| leave academic research.
| godelski wrote:
| I literally went through this recently with someone in my
| department. They wanted to know what professors did
| similar research to me at R1 universities of comparable
| rank. I told them no one and they didn't believe me. I
| sent them an annotated version of a bibliography to a
| survey paper I had recently written, writing down where
| each person worked. I just don't think they understand
| that right now, as an intern for a big tech company I am
| making more money than some of our junior professors.
| When I can get a full time position my cash in hand
| compensation goes up, plus equity and more benefits (like
| 401k). Who the hell would go into academia? You have
| lower pay, fewer resources, and more bureaucratic BS.
| There's lots of bureaucracy in industry too, don't get me
| wrong, but it's easier to deal with when you're getting
| paid more.
|
| A post doc position wants me to move across the country,
| into a major city, and pay me $50k/yr for a position with
| low growth opportunities and where I will have to move
| again in another few years? No thanks.
| glitchc wrote:
| In the academic system, positions are globally accessible
| and therefore hyper-competitive. Moreover, headcount grows
| slowly as it depends on funding and attrition through
| retirement/death. As such, demand outstrips supply. Strip
| everything extraneous away and that's the heart of it.
|
| If enough post-docs leave, it will reduce the demand for
| tenure-track positions. Eventually fewer PhDs will become
| post-docs, further decreasing demand.
| gwd wrote:
| > This sounds like you're describing a system that is a
| failure but that the solution is not to fix the system but
| to give up and do something else. Can we not fix academia?
|
| The problem with academia is basic mathematics. In a system
| where there are a fixed number of tenured professorships,
| where each tenured professor has the job for life, each
| professor should produce only a single tenure-track PhD
| student _in their entire career_.
|
| OK, so to deal with attrition and other unforeseen
| circumstances, perhaps 10 tenured professors should produce
| 11 tenure-track PhD students. But definitely not the
| situation we have now, where each professor produces dozens
| of PhD students in the course of their career who go on to
| attempt to get tenure.
|
| The people trying to get tenure don't want to admit the
| system is broken, because that would be to admit they _just
| weren 't good enough_ to get tenure.
|
| The people who _have_ tenure have every incentive to keep
| it going, because it means they have an army of highly-
| skilled and highly-motivated postdocs willing to work long
| hours for peanuts for a decade or two.
| godelski wrote:
| It's a bit worse than that. Prestige matters a lot too.
| General rule of thumb is that you can only apply to a
| position at a university of equal or lesser ranking than
| the one you were previously at. (obviously can still
| climb the ladder, in many ways, but this is a strong
| pattern all throughout the process from High School to
| Tenure) You're exactly right about the number of
| positions problem too. Because clearly the result of this
| is that the quality and methods from higher ranking
| institutions diffuse into lower ranking ones. Hell, when
| I was at a community college I had a professor from
| Harvard and several from Berkeley. Prestigue doesn't make
| sense in a system like that because you can't maintain an
| edge when you are literally telling the people you
| trained to go work somewhere else.
|
| I think you're exactly right about the reasons people
| keep quiet. But this is not helpful to anyone, especially
| the universities. They are certainly losing a lot of
| money and even prestige from all of this. You don't make
| Nobel laureates with publish or perish. But no one wants
| to shake things up, which is weird because academia is
| __explicitly__ supposed to be the place where you can
| focus on things that aren't profit driven. Or at least
| short ROI. It is a loss for the country too, as it means
| a lot of academics move away from low risky TRL research
| and follow a model much closer to industry research
| (which is profit driven) Historically industry has
| (generally) relied on academic research doing low TRL and
| then they bring it to mid and high TRL.
|
| We've lost sight of what we're trying to accomplish.
| dexwiz wrote:
| I think there is a kind of grief associated with growing up
| that people don't talk about. When you are young and inspired
| it seems like life is long and you can do anything, branching
| paths with unlimited doors. Once you're an adult, your past
| choices narrow down your future paths, and your sense of age
| starts to set in. In some way you mourn the paths not taken.
| This is called mortality, and can be a nasty combo with other
| depressive factors.
|
| As you get older, you realize some doors not yet stepped
| through are now closed, and less doors are opened by others for
| you. Life can start to feel like a hallway with the investable
| at the end. While less doors are open now, life is still very
| free. You may now be able to see decades into your past, but
| you still cannot see into your future. There are many open
| doors still hidden, they just take a bit more searching. Good
| news, you are an adult with years of life experience, you can
| go find them.
| tnecniv wrote:
| Coincidentally, I was rewatching the first season of True
| Detective last night and they were talking about this in the
| show. I almost turned it off because it was too real for me
| at the moment.
| weakfish wrote:
| I just wanted to say thank you for this comment, it helped a
| lot of with some general anxieties plaguing me lately.
| wnolens wrote:
| I need a support group for this idea. Can't seem to accept it
| and walk through some doors, abandoning the other paths. It's
| sparked a major depression in me.
| bdowling wrote:
| You could try going on an adventure, ideally a real one that is
| a little bit dangerous.
| tnecniv wrote:
| That does always seem to work in the movies
| TimPC wrote:
| As someone who initially started my career in academia I've
| been much happier since leaving. There are opportunities across
| industrial R&D that are far saner in terms of compensation and
| while they are slightly more restrictive in terms of what you
| work on there are still chances to do interesting research.
| godelski wrote:
| There definitely are, but to be honest, my passion is
| research at low TRL. Industry is saner, but they necessarily
| work at a higher TRL because they are not just profit
| motivated, but need to make profits from your research in 6
| months to 3 years.
| skadamat wrote:
| Jonathan Blow has a great talk on long projects (The Witness was
| like 8 years in development?) here which I watch once in a while:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0m0jIzJfiQ
|
| Some highlights:
|
| - He takes a week long vacation every now and then to hack on a
| completely different game idea for fun, with the focus on it
| being short and fun
|
| - Time for relaxation and unstructured thinking
|
| - Walks / showers can produce amazing ideas
| hathawsh wrote:
| While this passage is inspiring, it boils down to:
| 1. Get good at something 2. Get paid for doing it 3.
| Get burned out by doing it 4. Return to the fun way of
| doing it 5. ??? 6. Win a Nobel prize or similar
|
| How repeatable is that pattern? Is that one of the patterns we
| want to teach the next generation? Serious question. I don't know
| the answer. Feynman is obviously rather exceptional. Should we
| encourage people to follow a path like his?
| metalrain wrote:
| Pattern like that isn't repeatable, but idea of letting go of
| expectations to recover the joy of doing whatever you are doing
| is.
| b8 wrote:
| I heavily agree. I got in to security and programming by
| doing fund video game hacking stuff. Then I got paid to do
| it, lost the joy and got fired, then started to do it
| recreationally again and the dopamine rush/addiction is back.
| MissingAFew wrote:
| I think the takeaway from the anecdote is that you should have
| fun with the simple things if you have "writers block" or are
| tired. Try to get a new perspective on something.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| Not sure how Nobel prize got on your list.
|
| I read it that way:
|
| - Things become taxing when they stop being fun
|
| - Doing fun things and playing around whatever interests you is
| the way to make things less taxing
|
| - _Sometimes_ things you play with are also useful to others
|
| Although I am not sure if it is always possible to match what
| you are getting paid for to what you consider being fun.
| Feynman gives no answer for this.
| hathawsh wrote:
| To clarify, the Nobel prize comment is a reference to the
| last sentence of the passage: "The diagrams and the whole
| business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that
| piddling around with the wobbling plate."
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| I understand. I just wanted to point out that pattern does
| not seem to have Nobel/etc reward built into it, neither it
| is a strategy to achieve something other than having fun
| and discovering random things that interest you. Everything
| else is coincidental.
|
| You might easily end up living on the street by applying
| that strategy.
|
| On the other hand, some of the best results I ever got
| professionally were coming from that exact state of play
| that Feynman describes.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Most people aren't Feynman and won't get a Nobel prize whatever
| strategy they follow.
|
| Finding a fun way to do things does seem like it produces
| better solutions, though. I mean, if you dread reading about
| your solution, what do you expect from people who don't even
| want to devote their life to it?
| divyaranjan1905 wrote:
| Or, act as if you're excited about it, how visionary you are.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess it depends on the audience you are looking for. If
| you want to specifically target the gullible or you are
| really good at lying, this might be a great strategy.
| fatherzine wrote:
| on 4, the fun way of doing it is teaching / helping others
| doing it. coincidentally, that's the most common path to escape
| the toxic loop.
| kevinsync wrote:
| When I read the OP link, #4 is both the eureka moment of your
| list AND the last item on the list.
|
| There is no #5 and #6. You can't predict what happens next.
|
| The lesson is to let go of your ego and self-imposed,
| prescriptive ideas of 'importance' and realize that while
| important things do matter, they also simultaneously often
| don't matter at all (in the grand scheme of things)
|
| This is a function of time; in the moment, stuff that feels
| intractable and overwhelming often can be seen in hindsight
| with enough clarity to realize that what you were feeling at
| the time and what was objective reality were two completely
| different things.
|
| Anyways, not trying to get all "The Dude" about it, but in my
| experience, as long as you continue to show up, and be patient,
| present and available for opportunities, things you weren't
| even looking for have a way of finding you and lead to stuff
| that you could never have forced into existence through sheer
| willpower alone. If you can find a way to let all the baggage
| go and reboot to a place of genuine curiosity, you might be
| surprised where you eventually find yourself.
|
| YMMV of course.
|
| (and no, I'm not preaching "manifestation" / "law of
| attraction" bullshit -- just advocating for people who hit a
| wall creatively to consider stepping off the treadmill,
| releasing the pressure valve, and seeing where they end up)
| godelski wrote:
| My takeaway is a bit different. My takeaway is that the system
| has been killing researchers' passion for research for decades
| (I think it's only gotten worse) and turns them into less
| effective researchers. That the solution here is to make a
| system that encourages the things that got people so passionate
| in their field in the first place. At some point, nearly
| everyone that does a PhD is doing it out of passion (I say
| nearly because money, jobs, and immigration are certainly other
| important influences). Those big advancements often come out of
| that love and play. Which should make sense that when you're
| trying to create or discover something that no one else has
| ever done before that you have to... explore. You have to play,
| you have to question, you have to push the bounds and reject
| established beliefs and do things that might not even make
| sense. Because if you did do the status quo, then we'd have
| figured out those things previously. Clearly to advance we have
| to do something different. But I think very few people want to
| be open about the absurdity of the system that we have. I think
| part of this is due to the fact that it is easier to place
| blame for lack of success on yourself when you see others
| succeeding around you (I certainly know I do. I just don't
| think that I'm the only thing that is a failure).
|
| My literal solution is to just say fuck it to the
| journal/publishing system and to the publish or perish
| paradigm. Papers are simply a means to communicate to other
| researchers, and we already know how to find one another on
| arxiv, semantic/google scholar, and so many other platforms.
| Research is ambiguous and you never know where leaps and bounds
| are going to come out of, even if you know the general
| direction. The devil is in the details because nuance is the
| essence of what makes things work, especially as we've
| advanced. We have all these admins at universities, why are
| they not doing all the bureaucratic bullshit that is draining
| to researchers and let the researchers focus on what they love
| and do best?
|
| What Feynman is saying is that researchers are the other side
| of "fuck around and find out." So you want effective
| researchers? Let them fuck around and they will find things
| out.
| fritzo wrote:
| Seems similar to Feynman's classic problem solving technique:
| 1. Write down the problem 2. Think very hard 3.
| Write down the solution
|
| https://wiki.c2.com/?FeynmanAlgorithm
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I we replace the Nobel prize part with some sort of
| accomplishment, this is largely the pattern that lead up to my
| own building an internet search engine.
|
| Though I think it's pretty dodgy career advice. Existential
| crises are harrowing. It's a dark pit you fumble through for
| years. 1/5 stars on trip advisor.
| BubbleRings wrote:
| For a really cool video from the International Space Station
| about a phenomenon related to the spinning plate stuff, see here:
|
| Dancing T-handle in zero-g, HD
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n-HMSCDYtM
| phkahler wrote:
| That is really interesting. I know it's not correct to simulate
| rigid body dynamics as constant unless an outside force is
| applied, but what to do differently is not obvious to me. That
| looks like the object changes orientation while it's world-
| coordinates momentum vector remains unchanged. Got any
| references for why that happens?
|
| I mean orientation changes regarding the flip, not the obvious
| spinning motion.
| BubbleRings wrote:
| Not me. I only understand half your post, to tell you the
| truth.
|
| But Derek Muller on the youtube channel Veritasium has a good
| video on this, where he mentions how, when asked one time,
| Feynman couldn't think of a simple way to describe how it
| works, and then Muller goes on to explain it in a way that I
| could see. Great stuff:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU
| primitivesuave wrote:
| I was severely burned out two years ago after I left the last
| startup I cofounded. I had a good bit of cash saved up, so I
| traveled around the world to get better at rock climbing. I could
| barely write more than a few lines of code before closing my
| laptop. I would rather sit on the beach and stare at the waves
| than do anything productive back then.
|
| When I got home from my trip around the world, I struggled to
| build anything meaningful - I'd get intensely bored after
| starting a new project, and move on to something else. The first
| project that I took to completion was reprogramming my Lifx smart
| bulbs. There was a noticeable delay between turning a light
| on/off in the iOS app, and the light actually changing its state.
| Sometimes the app and lightbulb would get their states out of
| sync, and I didn't like the idea of some light bulb company
| knowing my schedule. Even for first-world problems though, it was
| hardly worth solving.
|
| I discovered there is a binary protocol to control the lights
| directly over the local network, so I developed an extensive
| TypeScript library to control the lights and build custom web
| interfaces to serve as light switches. I found a guy on the Lifx
| forums who built his own crude solution with Python scripts, and
| he became my first consulting client. That client's referral led
| me to a variety of interesting work opportunities over the past
| year. Noticing similarities across a variety of these projects
| led me to start a new company a few months ago to build a product
| to address them.
|
| My point being, sometimes you just have to sit down and play.
| edu_do_cerrado wrote:
| Very inspiring passage. I had this feeling of playing around with
| stuff (Programming in my case) in the beginning of my studies,
| but it faded away over time because of work. Even though I work
| in a wonderful project, I feel burned out a lot nowadays. Might
| lookout for that initial feeling again now, I probably won't
| achieve as much as Feynman, but I hope that removing the pressure
| and enjoying what I'm doing might be good for mental health
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| There is a highly relevant and resent research on the state of
| play, nicely summarised on Huberman Lab Podcast:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwyZIWeBpRw
| cs702 wrote:
| A classic. Any and all administrators tasked with evaluating
| research-funding proposals should be _required to read this short
| passage_ before making any funding decisions, so they can be
| reminded that groundbreaking research is driven mainly by
| _intellectual curiosity_ , not by metrics that seek to quantify
| "relevance" or "importance."
| ryandv wrote:
| The pandemic burned me out pretty hard after a lifelong obsession
| with computers, tinkering around with technology back when it was
| more of a hobby than a commercial pursuit. It was nice to be able
| to parley my passion into a career, but contact with the world of
| business tends to corrupt what I always viewed as a form of play
| and artistic expression.
|
| I like simple technologies like IRC. You don't need K8s clusters
| or deployment pipelines. String together everything with a
| smattering of bash because nothing is really at stake. It's easy
| to get started since the tech is as simple as it gets, and
| there's nothing actually on the line. You can practice using
| obscure languages never seen in industry. Do things because they
| make you laugh, not to build a portfolio or a product. At the
| least, I can still crank out a modest amount of code and actually
| enjoy the process, without tearing my hair out over whatever
| asinine enterprise-scale clusterfuck needs to be untangled now.
|
| Still waiting for whatever is next.
| oldandboring wrote:
| This is the closest comment I could find to how I experience my
| burnout. Nothing makes me more anxious than realizing that I
| fall further behind every day I'm not spending (unbillable)
| time becoming an expert in all the dev/ops tooling that somehow
| became indispensable the past 5-10 years. It's funny because I
| used to LOVE computers as a teenager because I loved setting up
| and configuring Unix systems. Now, as a developer, the idea of
| writing configurations instead of code just makes my hair stand
| on end.
| mbm wrote:
| The complexity has increased exponentially, but the user
| experience has not.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| If anything, it's regressed.
|
| All of this complex tooling gives devops the ability to say
| "sorry, no capacity, see you in two quarters".
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| Just some random thoughts, but I've started during the era of
| J2EE monoliths still being on the rise, when Web 1.0 -> 2.0 was
| only starting its transition, Python still being niche etc.
| Amount of _insanely boring and inefficient stuff_ like digging
| through all the XML APIs and CORBA was self-evident.
|
| It was fun to build totally new (and much simpler) tools,
| shortcutting quite literal man-years of work with each
| solution. Like rewriting half of some insanely expensive and
| over bloated million-dollar Oracle enterprise product into web
| app that we crunched out in a weekend over pizzas, and then
| demoed and validated with our clients before next week ended.
|
| Over the years all this exciting new way of doing things has
| somehow evolved into what feels very much like the older dig-
| through-XML-schemas-for-hours world.
|
| What I miss the most is the shared mindset of focusing on the
| problem, using simple tools that were build for purpose. That
| mindset was commonplace back then, at least in my circle. Maybe
| that's just a phase (cycle?) the industry goes through.
| mbm wrote:
| This.
| juris wrote:
| The other day I had remarked to an old gal (the proprietor) of a
| local strip mall toy store that I walked into on a whim that
| "really this is where it all started". Round hole, square block
| diagonally (almost anyway); oh that can's label so perfectly
| lines up with the tiling of this table when it's rolled across
| it; oh that soap dispenser pump has the -same threading- as this
| vodka bottle and screws on just easy...and so on. It would turn
| out that that old gal wrote a bunch of code for some local
| military contractors waaay back when and had quite the reputation
| for connecting the unlikeliest of systems together. The corporate
| types would naysay whether a thing could be done, and she'd have
| it back on their desk within 3 hours. And now she runs a toy
| store, and loves it!!! Feeling burned out myself, I took from
| that conversation some modicum of hope that looking at problems
| as //play// is what I need personally-- and prospects look better
| for it! Happy to hear that Feynman would agree.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Greatest book I've ever read
| danjc wrote:
| I see a parallel to short vs long term thinking here that applies
| to R&D.
|
| When quarterly results are the priority, innovation is stifled
| but what's insidious is that this only becomes evident over a
| long time span.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Feynman 's Nobel Ambition_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31236758 - May 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Feynman: I am burned out and I 'll never accomplish anything
| (1985)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931359 - April
| 2021 (276 comments)
|
| _Feynman: I am burned out and I 'll never accomplish anything_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10585890 - Nov 2015 (22
| comments)
|
| _Feynman: I am burned out and I 'll never accomplish anything_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874875 - April 2012 (66
| comments)
| systems_glitch wrote:
| I feel like Bell Labs was the biggest loss of "play at it, see if
| something important comes out" possible. Never worked there, but
| a lot of friends did, from the 50s thru the Lucent transition
| right up to the end.
| RationalDino wrote:
| Based on his biographies, I think that Feynman had ADHD. He never
| demonstrated an ability to do things because he thought he should
| do them. And, as this story shows, trying just resulted in a
| demotivated and unproductive Feynman. On the other hand he
| accomplished great results when pulled by desire. Especially in
| the form of play.
|
| _Surely You Must Be Joking_ does a great job of showing how he
| kept coming back to play throughout his life. Everything from
| lock picking at Los Alamos, to playing the bongo drums.
|
| _What Do You Care What Other People Think_ has an extended
| description of the creation of Appendix F about the shuttle
| disaster. See https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm for
| that. As someone who has been in the state, it is clear that he
| was in a state of hyperfocus. I've never matched what Feynman
| could do, but it comes as no surprise to me that he'd realize
| that he could get away with learning about a topic others didn't
| want him to learn, because he could do so quickly enough that
| they wouldn't believe that he'd possibly have learned it.
|
| I highly recommend both books, Appendix F, and of course,
| https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm. (If
| psychologists had followed up what he said 50 years ago, the
| Replication Crisis would have been discovered 40 years earlier
| than it was. Oh well, missed opportunities.)
| asadalt wrote:
| I have a similar approach to side projects. I have a day job
| (that is fun btw) and then I spend nights and weekends "playing"
| with code with no expectations. This has worked well for me and I
| LOVE this setup!
|
| The alternative would be to raise VC and work full-time on a
| half-baked idea. :cringe:
| buescher wrote:
| Incidentally, the faucet problem is neat! You can solve it with
| high-school level physics and analytical geometry ("pre-
| calculus").
| goethes_kind wrote:
| Interesting anecdote. But I don't envy Fenyman. I would rather be
| like the guys I know you can just sit down and get to work
| conscientiously without any such intrusive thoughts whatsoever.
| Those guys have a superpower they don't appreciate.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Macro-scale example of magnetic locking by a spinning magnet
| analogous to bound states in subatomic particles:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5FyFvgxUhE
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bound_state
|
| It reminds me of Feynman's wobble in the article. Which may
| relate to spin 1/2 particles and/or radioactive decay.
|
| The strong force is empirically measured and I have yet to find a
| satisfactory explanation of its fundamental mechanism. But
| nucleons moving near the speed of light are held inside the
| nucleus by a force of several pounds! So the nuclear force acts
| like a gravity well but comes from electroweak effects somehow.
| Loosely that means that there's a centripetal force so strong
| that if we measure it over years, the odds of seeing a stable
| nucleus often approach or meet 100%.
|
| I only bring this up because currently there's no way to modulate
| decay, electron capture, fission or fusion via simple means like
| temperature or charge. Ideally we should be able to add/remove
| electromagnetic energy and transmute elements by generating
| electron/positron pairs from photons (for example). Until we
| really understand how the strong force works, all the cool sci fi
| and Iron Man stuff will be confined to research labs.
|
| I've spent my whole life working to make rent instead of working
| on important problems. What a waste for society to invest
| education dollars in me so I could subsist on what is largely
| custodial work. So I think the most important thing we can
| manifest is getting more leisure time, money and resources into
| the hands of dreamers.
|
| The second most important thing we can do is pay our success
| forward. So I don't want to hear about any more billionaires and
| their pet projects. I want to see visionary goals, labor-saving
| devices to reduce suffering, automation, UBI, and most
| importantly people paying it forward by paying their fair share
| of taxes into democratic societies and having enough faith in the
| higher power of love to give the people the dignity and means to
| solve their problems and self-actualize. I mean, that's what the
| USA used to be until I watched it all fall apart after 9/11 to
| leave us with whatever all this is.
| max_ wrote:
| There is a Richard Feynman documentary I saw where he talked
| about his darkest episode of depression (another depression
| episode).
|
| It was after them testing one of the Atomic bombs when it had
| been developed.
|
| He described it as follows, he would for example watch see
| someone building a bridge or doing maintainance, and he would
| think to himself, "Why is he doing this? Doesn't he know that he
| is wasting his time, that all this work he is doing is useless?"
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| If you haven't read "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman" yet you
| should.
|
| Both hilarious and fascinating.
|
| https://search.brave.com/search?q=%22Surely+you%27re+joking%...
| xdavidliu wrote:
| "1985" in the title is misleading. The sentence is an excerpt
| from a biography published in 1985, describing Feynman's
| experience as a young Assistant Prof at Cornell shortly after
| WWII.
| juancn wrote:
| It's the quintessential hard problem solving strategy.
|
| It works on many hard disciplines, and it boils down to two
| steps:
|
| 1- Obsess
|
| 2- Let Go
|
| Step two is the hardest one, but it's the most fruitful one and
| you really have to let go, no cheating.
|
| Once you do, for some reason your mind will use everything from
| step one in the background to find the solution, in a weird
| moment, in an effortless manner.
|
| But if you don't let go, it will never happen.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'd probably get fired for playing around at work. Burnout is
| just the standard state for most workers in today's world. We
| just have to live with it.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| It's aggravating as there is a lot of value I could provide to my
| organization if they set me loose and gave me full autonomy. I'd
| also be a lot happier. But that is pretty hard to come by.
| vehementi wrote:
| Kind of a miss on the title. The quote is: "Now that I _am_
| burned out and I 'll never accomplish anything, I've got this
| nice position...". The title is slightly taking the quote out of
| context and isn't the title of the article
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Much of the work I'm truly proud of, I did when I was playing.
| It's an absolute mystery why I can't intentionally put myself
| into that mindset no matter how hard I try.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| This is me with writing code. I do it professionally and have for
| almost 15 years. I'm so burnt out on the day to day, forced work.
| But show me something interesting or hackable, a game I like that
| I can mod, a cool script, a cool concept that might make a neat
| image or sound. Whatever it might be, suddenly I'm playing again
| and having fun, burnout or not.
|
| Just wish I could find a way to make that my paycheck...
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