"These days mathematicians are divided into little cliques of perhaps a dozen people who work on the same stuff. All of the papers you write get peer reviewed b

"These days mathematicians are divided into little cliques of perhaps a dozen people who work on the same stuff. All of the papers you write get peer reviewed by your clique. You then make a point of reading what your clique produces and writing papers that cite theirs. Nobody outside the clique is likely to pay much attention to, or be able to easily understand, work done within the clique. Over time people do move between cliques, but this social structure is ubiquitous. Anyone who can't accept it doesn't remain in mathematics." I think this is an exaggeration. Sure, much of mathematics and maybe most of mathematics today works like this, but it's the exceptions, in accordance with Sturgeon's Law, that are most interesting. The really good specialists tend to transcend little cliques, and sometimes entire fields. There are plenty of people who are respected outside the circle of their immediate coauthors, everybody (for some definition of "everybody" that is anyhow wider than a little clique) wants to read their papers, etc. You could say that these are rare exceptions and >90% of working mathematicians are producing highly specialized papers that are interesting to maybe a dozen other people, that don't know much outside their narrow focus and don't really care, and so on. And you'd be right. But in programming, isn't it the case that >90% of programmers are chugging along in their Java or C# shops, writing some enterprisey horror or an internal corporate monstrosity, never caring enough to read Joel, nevermind Hacker News, or to improve their knowledge of the language they're using everyday, nevermind learn Haskell. The talented hackers are rare outliers. So what's different? I do agree with some other thoughts in the article. Someone who wants to dabble in many things has their work cut out in the academic math culture. I left grad school because I couldn't hack a bloody-minded focus on working on my thesis and doing nothing else. I had other reasons to suspect I won't be staying around in academia. For one thing, I despise internal politics and petty squabbling, and what I saw when I looked at the power structure and battles more closely, being a graduate student, shocked and disgusted me. Even more importantly, I had grave doubts about ever being able to do really meaningful work rather than end up writing up small results in a little clique. I doubted I had it in me to become an exception I talked about above. I still regret not testing this more thoroughly by mustering the will-power to shut down everything else, finish the damn thesis and get the damn degree, even if I probably wouldn't end up in academia anyway.