As A Computer Scientist, Are You So Good You Can't Be Ignored?

00:00:00.000 | [music]

00:00:04.720 | All right, we have a question here from Mr. Academia.

00:00:07.040 | He asks, "As a computer scientist, are you so good you can't be ignored? And if not,

00:00:14.400 | does it bother you?" Well, you know, it's a hard question. It does bother me. But it's a hard

00:00:20.560 | question, because in any field with an elite competitive structure, the question of what is

00:00:29.920 | good is a squirrely one, because there is almost always levels above whatever you grab, whatever

00:00:38.480 | you fix, as this is good. It's all super relative. It really depends who you fix to. So I don't know

00:00:44.640 | the answer to this question. It depends who you anchor to. So let me give you both arguments.

00:00:48.880 | Let me give you the argument that, "No, I'm not." The argument, "No, I'm not," is,

00:00:56.800 | well, look, you're not at a top 10 computer science department. There is no major theorem

00:01:04.560 | that has been solved that has your name on it. That's true. In recent years during the pandemic,

00:01:12.880 | your publication dried up. You wouldn't see that with a really top computer scientist. You had

00:01:18.560 | other things going on, and that kind of dried up. There are certain very competitive grants that I

00:01:24.880 | don't have. I don't have an NSF career grant. So I could make an argument pretty quickly

00:01:29.680 | that I'm a bust. Now let me go the other way. Let me go the other way.

00:01:36.240 | Look, you came out of Dartmouth sort of guns blazing, A's in everything, went to MIT,

00:01:45.200 | like the number one place in the world, breezed through your doctorate there, got A's in all of

00:01:50.320 | your classes, were publishing left and right at MIT, got a really good tenure track academic job

00:01:59.040 | at a top 25 US university in sort of exactly the narrow geographic band in which you wanted to live.

00:02:06.480 | Once at that university, you published a lot, you got tenure early, you went up for tenure

00:02:11.040 | after just four years, you were named a Provost Distinguished Associate Professor Scholar,

00:02:15.920 | you have 70 peer-reviewed papers and over 3,000 citations on those papers, an H-index of 30.

00:02:21.840 | Compared to most people who study computer science, "Oh, you're a tenured professor who

00:02:28.480 | has all these publications." Both of those things could be true. Those are both accurate assessments

00:02:33.360 | I gave. So honestly, it really depends on the day whether I feel really good or really bad.

00:02:38.880 | If I'm hanging out with some of my old MIT buds that are just killing it, I feel essentially

00:02:46.160 | like I'm a fourth grader who wandered into the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. But then other

00:02:52.640 | times I'm around my students or this or that, and I'm like, "Oh yeah, look at all these ideas I came

00:02:56.240 | up with, these theorems that I cracked, these new techniques, these NSF grants I've gotten,

00:02:59.920 | and I feel really good." So it's really hard. It's really hard in fields with elite competitive

00:03:06.400 | structures. And so it just goes back and forth. The same thing with writing. I mean, I could do

00:03:13.120 | the same thing with writing. Depends on the day. I have friends who have sold book amounts that

00:03:20.320 | boggle the mind, like more than, well, not more than, say eight figures, eight figures worth of

00:03:26.960 | books, right? Lots of books. Made a fortune. And I have friends who are award-winning,

00:03:34.240 | notable book, major awards, including at least one Pulitzer winner. So I can look there and be

00:03:41.120 | like, "What the hell am I doing as a writer? I'm nothing. I'm nobody." Or I could look the other

00:03:44.960 | way and be like, "Hey, I have seven books and write for The New Yorker and a bunch of New York

00:03:49.840 | Times bestsellers. And I make a lot of best of the year lists. Those aren't easy to make. I think

00:03:54.960 | email will be on the Times of London's best of the year list. It's on the Financial Times best

00:04:00.400 | of the year list. It's on Amazon's best of the year list. Like, hey, I'm writing books that sell

00:04:04.480 | a ton of copies, relatively speaking, and are on best of year books." Or then I look over here and

00:04:08.960 | say, "They don't have a Pulitzer and it didn't sell 10 million copies, so it's nothing." So I

00:04:12.960 | guess my point here, Mr. Academia, is that it all just depends what you're measuring against.

00:04:18.560 | So probably the right strategy is to stop trying to actually get a definitive answer and shift over,

00:04:26.640 | like I try to do on my good days, towards lifestyle-centric, value-driven career planning.

00:04:31.440 | This is what I want my life to be like. These are the things I value. I value the craft of writing.

00:04:36.720 | I value the craft of the computer science I do. Here's what I want my life to be like. And try

00:04:41.920 | to get as much satisfaction as I can out of the execution of this plan, of the realization

00:04:49.600 | of this idealized lifestyle, and try less to put myself up on a scoreboard and say,

00:04:56.800 | "I just fell from seven to nine. Now I'm upset." I don't succeed

00:05:02.000 | in that mindset shift all the time, but it's what I try to do.

As A Computer Scientist, Are You So Good You Can't Be Ignored?

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