I think there's more to Hamming's advice than just parroting back what the consensus is in a given field though. Hamming did something that most people just don

I think there's more to Hamming's advice than just parroting back what the consensus is in a given field though. Hamming did something that most people just don't do. He intentionally cross pollinated by having lunch with people in different academic disciplines. His harassing questions, "what's the biggest problem in your field?", and, "why aren't you working on it?", I think were first and foremost, meant to help him get a better idea of the broad strokes of the field in question (I'm sure he also got a certain amount of perverse pleasure in being a pest). But after that, if you look at how he writes about people's responses, I think he was also trying to get people to think about the big picture for themselves, and in this context, it doesn't really matter what your answer is to his questions, so long as you've given it some thought. His observation, that people who tended to give satisfactory answers later tended to have more prominent positions (I can't remember if he also said anything about the importance of their direct contributions), really just lends support to the idea that it's important to step back and keep the big picture in mind. He made similar observations when he talked about people who work with their doors open vs those who work with their doors closed. And that those who kept their doors closed tended to find themselves working their way towards irrelevance in their field, despite much greater short term productivity. Mostly I find he's got advice that seems generally useful in any career, which can be boiled down to be wary of working on something without regard to how it fits into the bigger picture.