4 ms·
Ask HN: Am I thick? What advice would you give me?
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?
- yuppie_scum 5y agoJust say Harvard
- vanusa 5y agoFirst, 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.