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From Richard Hamming’s famous speech _You and Your Research_: > Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who wor

From Richard Hamming’s famous speech _You and Your Research_: > Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. > Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing—not much, but enough that they miss fame.

bluedino 11mo ago
> I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. Or you end up with the lone coder problem.
- ambicapter 11mo ago
  You're basically restating exactly what he's saying.
- riskable 11mo ago
  According to most big companies these days, "lone coder" is the peak of business efficiency!
  - PunchyHamster 11mo ago
    It is. If you have defined end goal. But to define that end goal to align with business needs you need some more people involved. day in week in office works well for us because of that. Enough to talk about what's going on and what needs to be done, and plenty of time for mostly uninterrupted work
Aeolun 11mo ago
Maybe it’s more that those who work with the door open do work that is hailed as important. It might be based on the work of those that worked with the door closed, but those citations are ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
- angiolillo 11mo ago
  > but those citations are ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things It depends on your goal. Is it enough to know that your work is excellent, or do you also want it to be used by others? I've worked with researchers who had brilliant ideas that never caught on in their field, at least partly because they neglected to develop relationships with colleagues. (I've similarly worked on products that failed in the market, partly because the teams believed that a focus on technical superiority was sufficient.)
stuffn 11mo ago
Research is not corporate labor. Rarely are there “good problems” to work on. I’d bet dollars to donuts 99.99999% of employed HNers could close their door at work, or work from home, rarely interact with anyone, and know exactly what needs to be worked on. It’s another CRUD app. Conflating actual productive academic research with the mundane triviality of a day job is crazy.
- hosh 11mo ago
  I prefer heads down time. At my remote workplace, I found several channels where people ask for help. Combined with office hours, it is the main way I keep in touch with what is going on. We also write up a weekly priorities (by team), and all the leadership put it together into emails. It is a great way for me to read what is going on. I shift between deep work and collaborative problem solving. It is not as if you can’t try structure things to have both.
- Cerium 11mo ago
  Keep your eyes open for a better job? The work you do should have impact of some kind. In the corporate world there is business impact (increase revenue, decrease direct costs or improve system efficiency), social impact (make a product that directly helps people in some way), or personal impact (work on something that you find intrinsically interesting or helps you grow your skills or understanding). I don't see any reason to permanently stay in a role filled with mundane triviality .
  - wiseowise 11mo ago
    > Keep your eyes open for a better job? This is literally opposite of “keep doors open”, if you find a better job you need to grind leetcode to get there.
  - stuffn 11mo ago
    > I don't see any reason to permanently stay in a role filled with mundane triviality Well for starters with over a decade of experience I still need to halt my entire life to grind leetcode for months. What does a top leetcode score give you? The opportunity to build CRUD apps for FAANG. No thanks. What if I go towards working at a university as “retirement”? Well, now I’m just building apps to test hypotheses developed by someone else. Grass still ain’t greener and I still don’t need to be “collaborative”. I think the modern developer views themselves wrongly as a world changing force. When in reality the majority of software engineering is getting paid a metric shitload of money to glue premade widgets together on a digital assembly line. The good “deep” jobs are excruciatingly rare, typically vary wildly in pay, and highly competitive. It’s not like the early 80s and 90s when you could get in on some crazy cool world changing stuff like OS dev, networks, and things like it. Most of the highly available “cool” jobs are solved problems.
lucianbr 11mo ago
> But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on How would someone notice this? It's not like they can run multiple 10-year experiments and notice a pattern.
- wongarsu 11mo ago
  By observing multiple people who have done either thing for 10+ years. Sure, there might be lots of confounding factors, and it might not be causation at all. That's why the quote is from a speech, not a paper
  - lucianbr 11mo ago
    Here's another quote, I don't know if it's from a speech or anything: > What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
    - ajkjk 11mo ago
      or you can thoughtfully consider it and maybe learn something quotes like this are only used to dismiss observations you don't like
      - kaffekaka 11mo ago
        The quote makes a statement, we don't know if it is true. What can you learn from that? It might spark some thoughts, maybe.
        ajkjk 11mo ago
        exactly. maybe you think of it as a smidge more credible because someone else thinks it, even. Especially if they're a generally intelligent person whose other thoughts you like.
      - wiseowise 11mo ago
        Bro, you literally provided zero evidence, learn what?
pengaru 11mo ago
He delivered that speech in 1986, so this would have been based on professional experience through the 60s-70s. A time before ubiquitous electronic communications. Back then you really would have been disconnecting by keeping your office door shut and focusing on your work. Mapping those observations to today's environment, the individual in a closed private office is more like a hermit with a mailbox but no cell/internet connection.
- thfuran 11mo ago
  I think that hermit now would be significantly more isolated than the closed door person, since no one else now is using physical mail for professional communication.
  - pengaru 11mo ago
    True, but it doesn't change the fact that in 2025 an engineer with a closed door but ethernet and cell connectivity is still likely to be inundated with a continuous stream of notifications and other forms of electronic correspondence with his peers.
    - red-iron-pine 10mo ago
      put another way, I'm getting exposed to hundreds of ideas and people -- and probably 40% bots -- just being on HN a researcher in 1971 could maybe get yesterday's news via newspaper, or maybe radio -- but if they're closed door they're focusing, so they hear nothing else.
paulddraper 11mo ago
You’re going to have lots of disgruntled naysayers, but this principle is 100% true. The world is full of people who moan “why do idiots run things, get all the opportunities, make money from easy ideas.” Meanwhile those same people fester, working away on their little corner.
- michaelmrose 11mo ago
  Idiots run things for a lot of reasons. Managing people, social networking and self aggrandizement, and doing INSERT THING, are all different skills and people who only know how to do C, A and B, or even just B are well positioned to end up in charge and suck at it. Worse at the highest levels B is so important to actual success not least of which because of the virtue of getting money from those whose only virtue is having it that it may well actually make sense to hire idiots only good at B so long as they don't hire too many like self and rot the entire org. This may happen but even as the corpse rots it may have acquired enough inertia, money, market that they are without life or virtue but still successful for a long time in spite of their stupidity. Looking at a whole perverse assortment of cretins is likely to give one the wrong impression about what actually succeeds and if you constitute a new enterprise around lessons learned you may be surprised when it implodes.
- wiseowise 11mo ago
  > Meanwhile those same people fester, working away on their little corner. Maybe because idiots usurp all power and ostracize those loners? Ever tried to really go against the grain in a relatively big corp? And I’m not talking about writing a couple angry emails/slack messages.
- roadside_picnic 11mo ago
  The principle applies to a world where people work in offices doing serious long term R&D work. The quote is entirely irrelevant to people in working open offices for projects that change direction quarterly building features designed to make PMs look busy.
  - paulddraper 11mo ago
reactordev 11mo ago
Doors? All I’ve ever known were cubicles and open office plans. What world is this where offices have doors?
- wiseowise 11mo ago
  Post WW2 times. The dude was born in 1915, this quote is just a copium for romantics.
- roadside_picnic 11mo ago
  I had an office with a door multiple times in my (early) career. An open office door is a universe away from sitting in an open office. Even when everyone has their doors open, a true office setup allows for plenty of focus. On top of that "closed"/"open" is a false dichotomy, since you can trivially change the state of your office. Have a hard problem that needs to be solved by the end of the day? You can close your door and have absolute focus. After that task is solved, you can just open that office again. Real offices also entirely change the tradeoffs for remote/in office. A true office feels like your room. It's considered a private space. I knew people that would bring in their own lamps (and keep the florescent lights off), bring in rugs, hang art from the walls, have tea setups, a bookshelf filled with reference material etc.
  - reactordev 11mo ago
    I was being facetious while pointing out that Office Plans only have doors to the floors and conference rooms. Even the bathrooms lack doors now where they have designed it so you can't see inside from the hallway. Early in my career, we had offices, with doors, that you could close. Earlier in my career we still were writing Flash ActionScript. I wasn't asking about what it was like back in the old days where offices had doors. I was being cheeky about the fact that someone decided they weren't effective at bringing the "pod" together like it's some sort of nursery for software or day care for adults. It's been a strange ride.
- red-iron-pine 10mo ago
  doors are for closers
wiseowise 11mo ago
Richard Hamming’s second most famous quote: > I would never work in an open office big tech sweatshop, fuck that Irony aside, this has zero relevance for your run of the mill dev. They’re not researchers working in cozy offices of 60-70s on psychics and math problems. Also: > 10 years Average tenure of a tech worker is around 2-3 years, who even cares what happens in 10 years in those companies? They’re literally living quarter to quarter while VC money lasts.
- aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
  > They’re not researchers working in cozy offices of 60-70s on psychics and math problems. "psychics": pun intended? ;-)
roadside_picnic 11mo ago
I love Richard Hamming but > But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on Is clearly a quote from a different era. Not only have most engineers I've known never had a tenure at a job close to 10 years, I've found the foresight/planning window of companies I've joined is shrinking each year. In the era of "AI", leadership in most companies I've been at seem to think 3 months ahead is a bit too forward looking. Also... how many people on HN even remember having an office? I had multiple jobs early in my career where I had an actual office with a window and a door. An open door office is nothing close to the misery of sitting at a desk in an open floor plan. The fact that you could close the door means you do have the opportunity for pure focus. Even when the door was open, it was customary to knock gently on the frame after very checking if it looked like the inhabitant was focused. Richard Hamming describes a world of research that frankly doesn't exist any more today (I know because I briefly got a taste of the old world of research 20 years ago).
Night_Thastus 11mo ago
This feels so pretentious. People can keep it closed or open for whatever reason they want, and it has no correlation to how they solve problems or learn. Personally, I like it open when I'm feeling social and in a good mood, and close it when it's noisy outside and/or I need to hunker down and focus for a bit without distractions. That doesn't say anything about understanding or solving problems, other than 'sometimes people need quiet to focus' which is not a very shocking revelation.
huherto 11mo ago
Paraphrasing. Closed doors (focused work) lets you reach local minimum faster. Open doors (More connections) lets you escape local minimums. I guess you need focused work to make progress but once in a while you need contact with others to find inspiration or new ideas. Another one similar phrase(kinda). "If you want to go fast go alone. If want to go far go together". African proverb.
- AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
  This is exactly the right framing and that was going to be the same quote I chose (go far together…)
PunchyHamster 11mo ago
Seems very simple, working more with people than with problems gets you more social capital; people gonna remember someone helping them with something relatively trivial directly more than "they saw a bunch of code commited regularly". Probably anyone working long enough saw a case of someone being promoted over "better" technically candidates, just because he happened to be always there when important things happened.
- hinkley 11mo ago
  Devs listen to who they trust. And how can you trust that worker you never work with?
hinkley 11mo ago
When I was piecing together how I got to be a relatively young lead developer, it came down to my open door policy. I essentially rediscovered Hamming's wisdom just by extending a policy that started with my college roommate who was struggling with our CS homework. That lead to me helping other kids in the computer lab (with C/C++ bugs, not with the algorithms), and if you have skills at <5YOE you're going to use them at work if you can, because what else can you do to not look like a newb? But open door policy doesn't have to mean a literal open door. When I went remote I was still helping people sort out problems, and when you ask for the back story you get to find out what other teams are working on, and where 1/3 of your coworkers are all struggling with the same API. That's a lot of ammo for a Staff, Lead, or Principal-track role. Because you understand a lot more of the project, and you already have the trust of half the org chart.
- euroderf 11mo ago
  > But open door policy doesn't have to mean a literal open door. This makes me think of people hanging out on Slack. But then the interruptions are constant if you keep an eye on it.
  - hinkley 11mo ago
    You don’t have to reply instantaneously. Just soon. And if you want to e a lead or principal, better learn to organize your work into little atoms that you can checkpoint because you’re gonna a get interrupted. A lot.

bluedino 11mo ago

> I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. Or you end up with the lone coder problem.

ambicapter 11mo ago
You're basically restating exactly what he's saying.
riskable 11mo ago
According to most big companies these days, "lone coder" is the peak of business efficiency!
- PunchyHamster 11mo ago
  It is. If you have defined end goal. But to define that end goal to align with business needs you need some more people involved. day in week in office works well for us because of that. Enough to talk about what's going on and what needs to be done, and plenty of time for mostly uninterrupted work

Aeolun 11mo ago

Maybe it’s more that those who work with the door open do work that is hailed as important. It might be based on the work of those that worked with the door closed, but those citations are ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

angiolillo 11mo ago
> but those citations are ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things It depends on your goal. Is it enough to know that your work is excellent, or do you also want it to be used by others? I've worked with researchers who had brilliant ideas that never caught on in their field, at least partly because they neglected to develop relationships with colleagues. (I've similarly worked on products that failed in the market, partly because the teams believed that a focus on technical superiority was sufficient.)

stuffn 11mo ago

Research is not corporate labor. Rarely are there “good problems” to work on. I’d bet dollars to donuts 99.99999% of employed HNers could close their door at work, or work from home, rarely interact with anyone, and know exactly what needs to be worked on. It’s another CRUD app. Conflating actual productive academic research with the mundane triviality of a day job is crazy.

hosh 11mo ago
I prefer heads down time. At my remote workplace, I found several channels where people ask for help. Combined with office hours, it is the main way I keep in touch with what is going on. We also write up a weekly priorities (by team), and all the leadership put it together into emails. It is a great way for me to read what is going on. I shift between deep work and collaborative problem solving. It is not as if you can’t try structure things to have both.
Cerium 11mo ago
Keep your eyes open for a better job? The work you do should have impact of some kind. In the corporate world there is business impact (increase revenue, decrease direct costs or improve system efficiency), social impact (make a product that directly helps people in some way), or personal impact (work on something that you find intrinsically interesting or helps you grow your skills or understanding). I don't see any reason to permanently stay in a role filled with mundane triviality .
- wiseowise 11mo ago
  > Keep your eyes open for a better job? This is literally opposite of “keep doors open”, if you find a better job you need to grind leetcode to get there.
- stuffn 11mo ago
  > I don't see any reason to permanently stay in a role filled with mundane triviality Well for starters with over a decade of experience I still need to halt my entire life to grind leetcode for months. What does a top leetcode score give you? The opportunity to build CRUD apps for FAANG. No thanks. What if I go towards working at a university as “retirement”? Well, now I’m just building apps to test hypotheses developed by someone else. Grass still ain’t greener and I still don’t need to be “collaborative”. I think the modern developer views themselves wrongly as a world changing force. When in reality the majority of software engineering is getting paid a metric shitload of money to glue premade widgets together on a digital assembly line. The good “deep” jobs are excruciatingly rare, typically vary wildly in pay, and highly competitive. It’s not like the early 80s and 90s when you could get in on some crazy cool world changing stuff like OS dev, networks, and things like it. Most of the highly available “cool” jobs are solved problems.

lucianbr 11mo ago

> But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on How would someone notice this? It's not like they can run multiple 10-year experiments and notice a pattern.

wongarsu 11mo ago
By observing multiple people who have done either thing for 10+ years. Sure, there might be lots of confounding factors, and it might not be causation at all. That's why the quote is from a speech, not a paper
- lucianbr 11mo ago
  Here's another quote, I don't know if it's from a speech or anything: > What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
  - ajkjk 11mo ago
    or you can thoughtfully consider it and maybe learn something quotes like this are only used to dismiss observations you don't like
    - kaffekaka 11mo ago
      The quote makes a statement, we don't know if it is true. What can you learn from that? It might spark some thoughts, maybe.
      - ajkjk 11mo ago
        exactly. maybe you think of it as a smidge more credible because someone else thinks it, even. Especially if they're a generally intelligent person whose other thoughts you like.
    - wiseowise 11mo ago
      Bro, you literally provided zero evidence, learn what?

pengaru 11mo ago

He delivered that speech in 1986, so this would have been based on professional experience through the 60s-70s. A time before ubiquitous electronic communications. Back then you really would have been disconnecting by keeping your office door shut and focusing on your work. Mapping those observations to today's environment, the individual in a closed private office is more like a hermit with a mailbox but no cell/internet connection.

thfuran 11mo ago
I think that hermit now would be significantly more isolated than the closed door person, since no one else now is using physical mail for professional communication.
- pengaru 11mo ago
  True, but it doesn't change the fact that in 2025 an engineer with a closed door but ethernet and cell connectivity is still likely to be inundated with a continuous stream of notifications and other forms of electronic correspondence with his peers.
  - red-iron-pine 10mo ago
    put another way, I'm getting exposed to hundreds of ideas and people -- and probably 40% bots -- just being on HN a researcher in 1971 could maybe get yesterday's news via newspaper, or maybe radio -- but if they're closed door they're focusing, so they hear nothing else.

paulddraper 11mo ago

You’re going to have lots of disgruntled naysayers, but this principle is 100% true. The world is full of people who moan “why do idiots run things, get all the opportunities, make money from easy ideas.” Meanwhile those same people fester, working away on their little corner.

michaelmrose 11mo ago
Idiots run things for a lot of reasons. Managing people, social networking and self aggrandizement, and doing INSERT THING, are all different skills and people who only know how to do C, A and B, or even just B are well positioned to end up in charge and suck at it. Worse at the highest levels B is so important to actual success not least of which because of the virtue of getting money from those whose only virtue is having it that it may well actually make sense to hire idiots only good at B so long as they don't hire too many like self and rot the entire org. This may happen but even as the corpse rots it may have acquired enough inertia, money, market that they are without life or virtue but still successful for a long time in spite of their stupidity. Looking at a whole perverse assortment of cretins is likely to give one the wrong impression about what actually succeeds and if you constitute a new enterprise around lessons learned you may be surprised when it implodes.
wiseowise 11mo ago
> Meanwhile those same people fester, working away on their little corner. Maybe because idiots usurp all power and ostracize those loners? Ever tried to really go against the grain in a relatively big corp? And I’m not talking about writing a couple angry emails/slack messages.
roadside_picnic 11mo ago
The principle applies to a world where people work in offices doing serious long term R&D work. The quote is entirely irrelevant to people in working open offices for projects that change direction quarterly building features designed to make PMs look busy.
- paulddraper 11mo ago

reactordev 11mo ago

Doors? All I’ve ever known were cubicles and open office plans. What world is this where offices have doors?

wiseowise 11mo ago
Post WW2 times. The dude was born in 1915, this quote is just a copium for romantics.
roadside_picnic 11mo ago
I had an office with a door multiple times in my (early) career. An open office door is a universe away from sitting in an open office. Even when everyone has their doors open, a true office setup allows for plenty of focus. On top of that "closed"/"open" is a false dichotomy, since you can trivially change the state of your office. Have a hard problem that needs to be solved by the end of the day? You can close your door and have absolute focus. After that task is solved, you can just open that office again. Real offices also entirely change the tradeoffs for remote/in office. A true office feels like your room. It's considered a private space. I knew people that would bring in their own lamps (and keep the florescent lights off), bring in rugs, hang art from the walls, have tea setups, a bookshelf filled with reference material etc.
- reactordev 11mo ago
  I was being facetious while pointing out that Office Plans only have doors to the floors and conference rooms. Even the bathrooms lack doors now where they have designed it so you can't see inside from the hallway. Early in my career, we had offices, with doors, that you could close. Earlier in my career we still were writing Flash ActionScript. I wasn't asking about what it was like back in the old days where offices had doors. I was being cheeky about the fact that someone decided they weren't effective at bringing the "pod" together like it's some sort of nursery for software or day care for adults. It's been a strange ride.
red-iron-pine 10mo ago
doors are for closers

wiseowise 11mo ago

Richard Hamming’s second most famous quote: > I would never work in an open office big tech sweatshop, fuck that Irony aside, this has zero relevance for your run of the mill dev. They’re not researchers working in cozy offices of 60-70s on psychics and math problems. Also: > 10 years Average tenure of a tech worker is around 2-3 years, who even cares what happens in 10 years in those companies? They’re literally living quarter to quarter while VC money lasts.

aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
> They’re not researchers working in cozy offices of 60-70s on psychics and math problems. "psychics": pun intended? ;-)

roadside_picnic 11mo ago

I love Richard Hamming but > But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on Is clearly a quote from a different era. Not only have most engineers I've known never had a tenure at a job close to 10 years, I've found the foresight/planning window of companies I've joined is shrinking each year. In the era of "AI", leadership in most companies I've been at seem to think 3 months ahead is a bit too forward looking. Also... how many people on HN even remember having an office? I had multiple jobs early in my career where I had an actual office with a window and a door. An open door office is nothing close to the misery of sitting at a desk in an open floor plan. The fact that you could close the door means you do have the opportunity for pure focus. Even when the door was open, it was customary to knock gently on the frame after very checking if it looked like the inhabitant was focused. Richard Hamming describes a world of research that frankly doesn't exist any more today (I know because I briefly got a taste of the old world of research 20 years ago).

Night_Thastus 11mo ago

This feels so pretentious. People can keep it closed or open for whatever reason they want, and it has no correlation to how they solve problems or learn. Personally, I like it open when I'm feeling social and in a good mood, and close it when it's noisy outside and/or I need to hunker down and focus for a bit without distractions. That doesn't say anything about understanding or solving problems, other than 'sometimes people need quiet to focus' which is not a very shocking revelation.

huherto 11mo ago

Paraphrasing. Closed doors (focused work) lets you reach local minimum faster. Open doors (More connections) lets you escape local minimums. I guess you need focused work to make progress but once in a while you need contact with others to find inspiration or new ideas. Another one similar phrase(kinda). "If you want to go fast go alone. If want to go far go together". African proverb.

AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
This is exactly the right framing and that was going to be the same quote I chose (go far together…)

PunchyHamster 11mo ago

Seems very simple, working more with people than with problems gets you more social capital; people gonna remember someone helping them with something relatively trivial directly more than "they saw a bunch of code commited regularly". Probably anyone working long enough saw a case of someone being promoted over "better" technically candidates, just because he happened to be always there when important things happened.

hinkley 11mo ago
Devs listen to who they trust. And how can you trust that worker you never work with?

hinkley 11mo ago

When I was piecing together how I got to be a relatively young lead developer, it came down to my open door policy. I essentially rediscovered Hamming's wisdom just by extending a policy that started with my college roommate who was struggling with our CS homework. That lead to me helping other kids in the computer lab (with C/C++ bugs, not with the algorithms), and if you have skills at <5YOE you're going to use them at work if you can, because what else can you do to not look like a newb? But open door policy doesn't have to mean a literal open door. When I went remote I was still helping people sort out problems, and when you ask for the back story you get to find out what other teams are working on, and where 1/3 of your coworkers are all struggling with the same API. That's a lot of ammo for a Staff, Lead, or Principal-track role. Because you understand a lot more of the project, and you already have the trust of half the org chart.

euroderf 11mo ago
> But open door policy doesn't have to mean a literal open door. This makes me think of people hanging out on Slack. But then the interruptions are constant if you keep an eye on it.
- hinkley 11mo ago
  You don’t have to reply instantaneously. Just soon. And if you want to e a lead or principal, better learn to organize your work into little atoms that you can checkpoint because you’re gonna a get interrupted. A lot.