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Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

tnecniv
80 replies
23h30m

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.

borroka
30 replies
23h0m

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.

godelski
23 replies
22h10m

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
7 replies
21h53m

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
2 replies
20h5m

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.

borroka
1 replies
18h31m

I was referring to "system broken" with respect to many PhDs with ambitions of an academic career having to leave academia because there are not enough tenure-track positions available. With respect to that problem, it would be equivalent to say that "Hollywood is broken" because many talented aspiring actors cannot find stable work in films and tv shows. It is a supply and demand mismatch problem.

I was not referring to the paper review and publication process, funding, grants, teaching etc.

Your audience is someone with a PhD in the biological sciences, with more than 10 years of postdoc experience (before leaving for greener pastures a few years ago, after having realized that I was not interested in tenure-track positions anymore and in any case no position had been offered to me) in Europe and in the US, who won grants, awards, competitive scholarships, and have dozens of first-author papers published in some of the most prestigious disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals.

godelski
0 replies
17h53m

I was referring to ... many PhDs with ambitions of an academic career having to leave academia...

I see. I don't think this makes the system broken and I don't think a large portion of people going into industry is a bad thing. At the end of the day, schooling, even at the PhD level, is training. I am not concerned that we do not have a high retention rate, though I am concerned that the retention is not targeting the best of the best (but that's a different conversation). I do not think this is what most academics are referring to when they mention a broken system.

My complaint about the system being broken is more about the incentive structures and metrics that are used within the academic setting. This is the more frequent usage of this phrasing that I see, so I was quite surprised at the mention of your background. The problem I am more concerned about is the entire existential question of academia. It is being treated like a business but academia is explicitly about not being subject to such things like a short term return on investment. I think an important aspect of academia is being able to do risky and low level research where the returns are going to be years or decades. So I think we have a broken system when we are trying to perform high pace output with high impact. I simply do not think you can be fast and revolutionary at the same time (at least consistently). It seems that h-index is of greater concern and this is a compounding metric that does not requisite the highest quality work but rather is more dependent upon frequency and highly influenced by publicity.

In my mind, the system is broken when the it is not encouraging academics to be the best scientists they can be. When the system encourages bad science and when a noisy process is held up as if it is the arbiter of truth (journals and conferences are even given the misnomer of "peer review" when this, as you know, takes place before and after venue publication and peers still review "preprint" works that never end up getting "published." The whole language is misleading when you break it down). I'm sure a lot of my feelings come from working in ML where the signal to noise ratio of venue publications is exceptionally low (nearly all CS domains target conferences rather than journals and so there is little to no rebuttal period. The number of submissions in each conference is well over 10k now and you cannot assume a reviewer has domain knowledge in your subfield), but I do believe that it still parallels other domains and that the problem is growing not shrinking. I think the system is broken when we discourage foundational research and the pursuit of knowledge for scientific value. Certainly something is broken when we hire a ton of administrative staff and the administrative tasks given to researchers only increases.

aleph_minus_one
2 replies
15h54m

First, a postdoc on the way out of academia is not going to fix academia.

I disagree: just found an edtech startup for tertiary education or (post-)graduate level research.

godelski
1 replies
11h28m

Honestly if I knew how to do this I would do it. How do I convince a bunch of billionaires to hand me money to do very fundamental research? Dream would be to have it be very open too and hire people from multiple domains but keep a high focus on being nuance and detail oriented. Honestly, I don't think companies like OpenAI are going to end up being the first to AGI because they get caught in the profit stages and so just pivot to say that more data and more compute is all you need. Maybe it is true, but I doubt it. And most certainly there are other ways considering a 3 pound piece of meat does it using less than a kW per day.

aleph_minus_one
0 replies
4h9m

Honestly if I knew how to do this I would do it.

Do an MVP in your spare time.

I guess if you have a normal programming job in most countries (even in countries where programmers are not paid that well), you will likely be able to pay the bills for, say, server renting, domains, ...

For things that you will do likely badly by yourself like design drafts (if you are bad at visual design), ask some friends whether they would be willing to do it for you in exchange for something that you could do for them (so that you don't have to spend money).

Start with kinds of research that can be done with little money, but have a possible insanely high impact.

Iterate until your platform cannot be ignored anymore.

jebarker
0 replies
2h41m

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

I don't often hear people complaining that sports, music, theatre are broken because of this supply/demand mismatch. (People certainly complain about other problems, e.g. streaming music royalties). It's generally accepted that it's a rare and special thing to make a good living in those industries. Why do we view academia differently? Is it because it seems more like "work"?

tnecniv
6 replies
21h51m

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.

godelski
2 replies
19h58m

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.

aleph_minus_one
1 replies
4h1m

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?

If it is work that some industry is highly interested in, and this industry has deep pockets, it is very hard to compete with it in academia. Look for more fundamental questions to research (there exist insanely many, just don't follow the hype) that can be investigated with a lot less ressources.

godelski
0 replies
23m

Fwiw, this is the route most academics take, but it is still not easy to publish in this domain. I've seen workshop papers get rejected from very clearly academic work because they don't use real world or large datasets. I've seen theory papers get rejected because they don't have experiments. Yes, read that last one again. And mind you, these big companies also do a lot of theory and foundational work too. The process is just noisy.

borroka
1 replies
21h25m

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.

tnecniv
0 replies
16h2m

When postdoc positions first were created, they were illusive and of high prestige. Then the idea got abused to add labor for professors to varying degrees depending on the field.

theGnuMe
0 replies
15h38m

We are in the big science phase of biology using AI. Individual labs and researchers will be hard pressed to compete but the worse part is the lack of original thinking.

gwd
4 replies
20h52m

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
2 replies
20h12m

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.

tnecniv
1 replies
16h45m

I just wanted to comment regarding the rule you mentioned and wanted to say that I was always told that, unofficially, you can always move up but only a tier at a time and you don’t want to move down if you can avoid it because then you likely have to move back up. The calculus does get harder though the longer you’re in the game — you might elect to move down because you’re significant other gets a promotion or you don’t want to uproot your family, etc.

godelski
0 replies
16h30m

For sure, they aren't hard rules. There is also the aspect that locations matter to some people. It's worth noting though that universities have a unique negotiating token, in that you can also negotiate for a job for your partner as well. I think universities are often forced into this because of the natural location constraints.

chaxor
0 replies
17h9m

I think they may have been commenting a bit more about the incentive structure and that any "prestigious researcher" or institution typically got there via questionable ethics, etc.

lmm
1 replies
19h16m

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?

Not enough people have left yet. Until enough people leave that academia has a hard time finding talent that it needs, as far as they're concerned there's no problem.

godelski
0 replies
18h51m

Until enough people leave that academia has a hard time finding talent

That's going to be a long time. If by talent you mean people who can do the job. But that doesn't fit the story that universities sell, which is about learning from the cream of the crop.

glitchc
0 replies
20h53m

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.

etrautmann
2 replies
22h50m

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
1 replies
22h30m

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
0 replies
22h9m

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
1 replies
22h41m

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
0 replies
22h2m

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.

mtekman
0 replies
5h9m

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.

Hello, I'm in a similar sort of transition position. May I ask where you applied (US/UK/EU-based?) and what your main experience was in adapting your academic CV to industry?

(Feel free to reach me by email or matrix too)

flatline
6 replies
23h11m

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
5 replies
23h3m

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
4 replies
22h22m

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
3 replies
21h7m

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
1 replies
19h54m

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.

gen220
0 replies
2h46m

That eugenics was widely popular among academics, especially in certain disciplines like Psychology (the founding members of the APA were all eugenicists).

As an example I'm familiar with, the first generations of academics at Stanford University were socially-active eugenicists (see the founding President, David Starr Jordan, who hired people like Ellwood Cubberley and Lewis Terman).

Many buildings, awards, dorms, department chairs are still named after these people.

godelski
0 replies
19h53m

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.

dexwiz
5 replies
22h56m

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.

wnolens
0 replies
19h36m

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.

weakfish
0 replies
21h34m

I just wanted to say thank you for this comment, it helped a lot of with some general anxieties plaguing me lately.

tnecniv
0 replies
22h36m

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.

sirpilade
0 replies
4h51m

I totally agree with your comment. I should add that, as the Romans used to say quite some time ago, 'Audentes fortuna juvat' (fortune favors the bold). With this I mean to say that some more optimistic and unmindful attitude usually helps in finding those doors, or at least in forgetting the ones that did not eventually open.

marssaxman
0 replies
19h21m

As I have grown older I have come to see a similar effect not just in my own life but in the shape of the world around us; humanity has closed the doors to certain kinds of futures I once hoped and worked for, and "mourning" is a good term for those feelings. There are many open doors remaining in humanity's future, to be sure, but the scope of change seems narrower than it once did, since the bright new possibilities of the future always seem to get swallowed up by the ugly messes left over from the past.

thefaux
4 replies
23h2m

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.

Aeolun
2 replies
18h38m

It’s quite telling that you never see people in industry long for their time in academia.

tnecniv
0 replies
15h45m

Eh I think there’s a good chance they’re less vocal about it. My father is a lawyer and he chose between going into a legal career and doing a PhD in philosophy. If you asked him, he’d tell you he wished he didn’t latter now that he’s nearing the end of his legal career. I think that 1) there’s a smaller percentage of people that made the choice between academics and industry and chose industry 2) they’re not vocal about it for one reason or the other. Most of the people I went to undergrad with whom I thought could succeed in academia had zero interest in doing research at any level.

Academia is definitely not for everyone, but when I weighed my options I am happy I did my PhD regardless of how I feel at the moment. It’s a peculiar thing for peculiar people and the attraction does not correlate with intelligence.

kelipso
0 replies
4h50m

I certainly do. Plenty of people do.

max_
0 replies
22h24m

What things do you miss in academia that you didn't find in industry?

jjtheblunt
4 replies
23h19m

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
2 replies
23h11m

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
1 replies
21h24m

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
0 replies
21h5m

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
0 replies
23h7m

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.

fnord77
4 replies
23h30m

burnout = depression

tnecniv
2 replies
23h15m

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
0 replies
23h9m

I suspect treatment will be much the same in either case.

bhaney
0 replies
23h5m

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
0 replies
23h8m

I thought I was burnt out and just recently found out I had an undiagnosed chronic illness, so that’s a possibility too…

scrapcode
3 replies
23h16m

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.

spencerflem
0 replies
21h28m

Incredibly relatable

mikub
0 replies
23h0m

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
0 replies
21h33m

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?re...

Thus, I'd implore you to stick with the feeling and use it as impetus to change for something new.

nsagent
2 replies
23h13m

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
0 replies
23h0m

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
0 replies
22h54m

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.

godelski
2 replies
23h8m

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
1 replies
23h3m

Sounds like we are in a similar boat :-/

godelski
0 replies
22h51m

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.

bee_rider
1 replies
23h10m

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
0 replies
22h14m

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).

bdowling
1 replies
22h49m

You could try going on an adventure, ideally a real one that is a little bit dangerous.

tnecniv
0 replies
22h33m

That does always seem to work in the movies

academic_tmp22
1 replies
23h0m

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
0 replies
22h52m

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.

TimPC
1 replies
22h23m

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
0 replies
22h20m

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.

naveen99
0 replies
2h37m

There are a couple of approaches to life I have used at various times:

1. Have fun. Limit productive activities to 2 hrs a day.

2. Go all out on a new idea. Succeed or fail.

If there is no risk of failure, you are really in mode 1. 2 is only possibly for short bursts, upto 1-2 weeks. if you feel burnt out, it’s time for zone 1 for sure.

galdosdi
0 replies
18h7m

I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, but it’s not obvious to me that would help.

It might help a lot by giving you a break from thinking about the kinds of things you currently think about a lot. Seriously consider it. You don't know what you don't know. Perspective helps.

First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do.

Not relevant -- you can come back to research later, and when you're burn out or depressed you inherently have a hard time imagining how new things could be fun

I’m not sure if it even is burnout or a deeper issue.

Well, as a researcher you can appreciate that there is one way to find out -- experiment. But if it started with work and later spread, work probably had a lot to do with it. Besides, burnout is really common in academia.

0x3444ac53
0 replies
19h18m

Personally, I never made it very far in academia. Never even finished out undergrad. That said, I'm now at a point in my life where I'm mostly surrounded by Businesses Majors and I do truly miss my time as a philosophy student, despite being very burnt out when I left.

Academia is a weird field, that, in my experience, is wonderful to have connections to, but for the most part is exhausting. Frankly I think things can be more exhausting when you love them enough to be consumed by them.

Even now, I have projects that I work on in my free time that I'm so engaged and miss sleep for, and while I'm proud of whatever is produced, it does often lead me feeling frustrated and burnt out. It helped me quite a bit to start setting boundaries for myself, as in: I'm going to work on this project until this time, and then I'm taking time to disconnect from it. Even though it can be frustrating to interrupt a flow state, it's still important to take care of ones own needs.

hathawsh
18 replies
23h24m

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?

smugglerFlynn
3 replies
23h14m

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
2 replies
23h11m

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
1 replies
23h0m

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.

blep_
0 replies
18h57m

That would seem to be why they asked how repeatable the pattern was, in a tone heavily implying the answer was "not very".

bee_rider
3 replies
23h6m

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
1 replies
21h56m

Or, act as if you're excited about it, how visionary you are.

bee_rider
0 replies
21h2m

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.

godelski
0 replies
17h44m

I often tell people that science is the rigurous version of "fuck around and find out." (Similar to Adam Savage's quote about science)

The point is to understand things, but it is easy to get trapped in needing to prove the value of that understanding. Sometimes this takes decades! I am not aware of how having a deeper understanding of any system has not been a net gain for humans in the long run. So many things overlap (I mean all physics uses the same laws) that it probably shouldn't be surprising that there ends up being a relationship to how plates spin and electrons orbit. But finding that connection is far easier said than done and far more obvious post hoc than a priori.

So why not encourage these people to play? Because it's clear that "fuck around and find out" is a very successful model. It's hard to measure and noisy, but I'm not convinced it's more noisy than the current system we use.

metalrain
1 replies
23h21m

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
0 replies
23h20m

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.

marginalia_nu
1 replies
22h30m

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.

Warwolt
0 replies
8h31m

Marginalia is great! Super cool tool

kevinsync
0 replies
22h45m

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
0 replies
22h33m

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
0 replies
22h32m

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

fatherzine
0 replies
22h56m

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.

Warwolt
0 replies
8h32m

I don't think that's the point of the text.

You can just as easily read it as stating that you should allow yourself to be led by what inspires you or interests you in your field of work, and not to try to produce notable results directly, but rather allow notable results follow from just passionately exploring.

MissingAFew
0 replies
23h17m

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.

dartos
6 replies
23h39m

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
3 replies
23h37m

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).

makapuf
1 replies
22h54m

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
0 replies
20h52m

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.

brokencode
0 replies
23h19m

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.

rand1239
0 replies
23h32m

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.

nosequel
0 replies
23h33m

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.

MPSimmons
6 replies
23h42m

The entire 'Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman' book is just an incredible read.

b8
5 replies
23h21m

Yep, I recommend that and his other book.

jwilk
4 replies
23h16m

What's the other book?

btilly
1 replies
23h0m

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
0 replies
22h50m

Yeah, the Feynman in this book is more human, more vulnerable.

srean
0 replies
22h52m
donkeyballs
0 replies
23h1m

"What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

ryandv
5 replies
23h8m

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
2 replies
22h46m

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
1 replies
22h26m

The complexity has increased exponentially, but the user experience has not.

phone8675309
0 replies
20h10m

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
1 replies
22h39m

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
0 replies
22h26m

This.

amiga386
5 replies
23h32m

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.

privacyisntdead
1 replies
23h16m

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
0 replies
22h53m

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
0 replies
22h50m

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

kitchi
0 replies
23h17m

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.

isoprophlex
0 replies
23h23m

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.

vasco
3 replies
23h32m

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.

ericmcer
1 replies
23h0m

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
0 replies
19h51m

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.

dexwiz
0 replies
23h7m

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.

csours
2 replies
23h36m

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.

david422
0 replies
23h22m

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.

alexpetralia
0 replies
23h30m

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.

BubbleRings
2 replies
23h22m

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
1 replies
23h5m

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
0 replies
22h6m

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

juancn
1 replies
21h39m

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.

rochak
0 replies
4h2m

Happened to me today. Always works but can never be controlled :)

zubairq
0 replies
11h32m

Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman was such an influential book for me! It was so readable and I believe it helped alot of people become interested in science, which was usually portrayed as a very boring topic

zackmorris
0 replies
22h13m

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.

xdavidliu
0 replies
21h39m

"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.

vehementi
0 replies
20h32m

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

systems_glitch
0 replies
22h53m

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.

smugglerFlynn
0 replies
23h12m

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

skadamat
0 replies
23h25m

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

sirsinsalot
0 replies
19h17m

I'm so burned out that the idea of even sitting at a desk with a screen in front of it, never mind coding or thinking or doing anything worthwhile, makes me feel sick to the stomach.

I'll always love coding. Stress can kill anything.

primitivesuave
0 replies
23h21m

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.

mikrl
0 replies
23h32m

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.

max_
0 replies
22h10m

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?"

kromem
0 replies
12h7m

I used to include a bit about it into most of my presentations, and I recommend everyone read up on the over-justification effect.

One of the least widely known psychological effects relative to its impact on people's lives.

A nefarious little bugger that's hard to evade too.

juris
0 replies
23h5m

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.

goethes_kind
0 replies
22h45m

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.

giantg2
0 replies
21h37m

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.

edu_do_cerrado
0 replies
23h19m

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

dshpala
0 replies
19h12m

I remember I used to kick-start myself into flow by doing "useless" things like rearranging code around, doing small renames for consistency, etc.

I need to return that that practice, as I find it harder and harder to interest myself in what I'm doing...

danjc
0 replies
23h3m

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.

danielvaughn
0 replies
20h31m

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.

dang
0 replies
22h56m

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)

cs702
0 replies
23h11m

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."

chankstein38
0 replies
19h52m

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...

buescher
0 replies
22h46m

Incidentally, the faucet problem is neat! You can solve it with high-school level physics and analytical geometry ("pre-calculus").

asadalt
0 replies
22h48m

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:

arisAlexis
0 replies
23h3m

Greatest book I've ever read

Vicinity9635
0 replies
21h53m

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%...

RationalDino
0 replies
22h49m

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.)

7thaccount
0 replies
21h32m

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.