Ask HN: Am I thick? What advice would you give me?

8 pointsby tinktankover 3 years ago

The headline is a little click-bait, humor me.I'm 39, have a PhD in CS from an older university in Cambridge, MA (not MIT). When there, I never published much, a couple of top-tier publications with collaborators and a ton of mid-tier publications.I spent 7 years as a Post Doc doing research in an area which I didn't care about and where there wasn't a lot of scope. In this time I graduated 7 students (who have gone on Facebook, Google, etc) and started two companies -- a direct one which I shut down because it was not successful and helped a friend to start his as co-owner but didn't put in any intellectual development. I did a lot of contracting and consulting work for a company my PhD external supervisor started that makes a niche MIPS CPU but doing software work at the kernel/application layer.3 years ago I joined the company full-time. I got the job because he knew me and we are friends (I am absolutely convinced I would have failed an interview). The agreement was I'd do system architecture for hardware.I was in a world I knew very little about. CPUs are complex hardware devices. While I had done Computer Architecture and am very comfortable with the hardware as seen from a software level, I started spending my time doing more hardware system architecture work.I love this field. The challenge means it's satisfying. I wish I'd done a degree in CE instead.Three years on, I'm having a hard hard time. The problems are:* I don't know enough -- every time we have a meeting or a new project comes up, it's like drinking from a firehose. PCIe, Memory technologies, the internals of ALUs, caching subsystems -- all of it is a field in and of itself. The complexity and runes and domain specific knowledge means I'm always running behind never able to quite keep up. Even where I have done things before things move fast so keeping up is hard.* I can't think fast enough -- I'm actually known as "recorder" in the organization -- I record all meetings and go back and listen to them, trying to understand, stopping, taking notes, researching so I can actually follow what's going on. This helps but is hard.* I have a different style of working -- company style is to come into a meeting and freestyle, throw up ideas, brainstorm, etc. I can't do that. I don't know enough and can't contribute because most times I only know about half of what is going on. I am able to come up with solutions and designs alone but I am slower because I alone, learn, design and get feedback afterwards.* My instincts are wrong -- My dimensioning, calculations, core design principles often overlook something or are just not right. It's to be so OBVIOUSLY wrong. At least when it's pointed out most times I see it immediately.* Don't have the detail -- Not understanding the runes or not following through on all the possible side-effects that may happen mean things can never work. I just delayed tape-out because one return value was 2b offset between busses.* Can't seem to abstract and think clearly -- I can't seem to reason about cause and effect clearly enough. In software I felt I always had a good working model in my head. Here it's just gaps.I desperately want to get good the art. I stay because it's a challenge but I feel thick. I'm wondering whether I'll actually become good enough to be comfortable and master this.A part of me wants to quit and go join the platforms division of some company or the other but I kind of feel I'm likely to see the same things in software even if I think I'm better at it. Ultimately I'm not sure if I'm just not clever enough . I just spent the holiday break reading a 1000 page architectural standard to come into the new year prepared, spent this week in a workshop where I just couldn't keep up even with the prep and am deflated and disillusioned.What advice would you give me?

9 comments

Rouninover 3 years ago

If you have a PhD in CS, your intelligence is probably above average.A former boss of mine in the software business told me that it generally takes five years to become attractive to employers. If you're three years in and struggling a bit, perhaps you just need to keep practicing and gaining experience.It may also be the case that you're more critical of your own performance than people around you. This is known to be common in software as well, and I see it even more in graphical artists – "Oh, I'm so terrible at drawing". And yet, it's somehow their full-time job.It's also possible that you'd enjoy a different specialization more than making CPUs. It could be a different kind of hardware, it could be various kinds of software, the opportunities are endless.You also seem to have an extremely detail-oriented attitude, and sometimes feel overwhelmed by the complexity and the ever-changing landscape. I wonder if that's something you might encounter in most jobs.It's very common to feel frustrated by the incomplete, contradictory, unrealistic and ever-changing specifications and priorities in a project, the constant interruptions, meetings, e-mails and "do you have a minute"s, the office politics and corporate bureaucracy, and many other things that make working very different in real life than on paper. And while there might be a few jobs out there that aren't a complete madhouse, they're probably few and far between. For what it's worth, one of my most intellectual friends is working as a land surveyor, and seems to be loving it. But who knows what would work for you?

ostenningover 3 years ago

Looking at your hn history, I would say that your technical expertise or knowledge is not the cause of your discomfort. To me, at very initial glance, it seems that perhaps there are aspects of yourself you aren't nurturing as much as you should.Do some introspection, listen to some Alan Watts or Ram Dass on YouTube and maybe stop focusing on work and your career so much.Take this advice with a grain of salt

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jimmyvalmerover 3 years ago

As an alum of the little red schoolhouse, I have to assume you were a special admit since the CS program there, while not as prestigious as MIT's, was still world-class. And even if you're inexplicably sandbagging about your raw intellect, one thing none of our brotherhood lacked was arrogance, thus casting further suspicion to your recount.If you were a special admit, then that should be obvious to your colleagues, and there's nothing you need to do specially since you've made a career of trying to meet expectations.

vanusaover 3 years ago

First, I would suggest you edit your post right now to remove any hints about the school where you did your PhD (even the geographic location). There's no reason anyone needs to know who you are, but from what you've written, it's almost a dead giveaway (to anyone who may know you -- like your coworkers for example). As to the subject of your post:No, you're not "thick", by any stretch. But it seems pretty clear you that you think ... differently from the people around you.That by itself doesn't have to be a problem. But it does seem that at some point you started to run into objective performance difficulties at your job, which were causing you to doubt yourself... which results in brain fog, causing more performance problems and self-doubt. So it's something of downward spiral.As to advice? I don't know right off -- this is a tough one.But I would suggest (1) looking into what's called "imposter syndrome", which is amazingly common in our industry and may be part of what's holding you back; and (2) and you may also look into the possibility of that, while you definitely are not stupid, you may be what's called "neuro-atypical" (or not "neurotypical"), if there is such a thing (this itself being something of a hotly debated research field).The bottom line is -- one way or another, you'll probably have to accept that (either from habit or neurological makeup) your brain seems to march to the beat of a very different drummer than from that of most people (as least those involved in CS research). Which by itself is neither good nor bad. What matters is that you find a way to play this to your advantage -- which most likely will require changing jobs, from what you've written about the profound difference in working styles compared to your teammates.And one more suggestion: apart from hypothetical differences in cognitive makeup and style -- you may want to develop more of a "take the bull by the horns" approach to life. Spending 7 years of one's life in (as you say very up front) a research area you didn't care about would be pure torture to most people I know (who go the academic route, at least).Seriously: why do that to yourself? Was it because you felt you had "no choice"? Because you didn't "deserve better"? You may want to start asking yourself what went wrong here.But also (and this is very important) without ruminating too much. What matters for you is not the past, but what you do now.

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jkaover 3 years ago

I've had some similar experiences; it's tricky to keep up with what's going on in some environments.It's easier when you and the team have regular communication and build up a shared set of interpersonal experiences and terminology over time, and have similar tolerance levels for quality and detail.Over the past few years I've had a sense that there's room for improvement regarding details, bugfixes and maintenance in software, but I think that says more about my own preferred pace and problem-solving style nowadays.If any of that resonates, I'd suggest you try out one or two puzzles from last year's Advent of Code - I enjoyed those a lot, and I think that part of the reason was that they allowed me to digest, tackle and experiment with solutions at my own preferred level, with preferred tools, and on my own timescale -- with a clear, binary "success" criteria.Software needs to lean towards FOSS and become simpler for it to be sustainable, in my personal and long-argued opinion. A nice thing about FOSS software issues is that you can solve them at your own pace, but you'd need to find an employer who is willing to invest in improving that kind of software, and would like you to work on it -- assuming that any of that even appeals to you in the first place.As with one or two other comments here, please take these thoughts with a grain of salt and take your time to figure out what works for you; I'm probably just projecting my own situation here.

goethes_kindover 3 years ago

If the job is stressing you out, why not just find something you are more comfortable working with? At the end of the day, I am sure a drop in salary won't be necessary and you do not need the stress. You are thick if you keep torturing yourself. You don't need to learn whatever the fuck they need you to do. You need to find a job you can do with more ease, while enjoying the rest of your life with less stress.

jbjbjbjbover 3 years ago

Is the “recorder” thing you do helpful? What’s the return on the time spent? Does anyone else do it? What advice would the people who are good at the job give you? What did they do to get where they are?