05.12.06
Nerd Bravado, redux.
I was reading Kristin Abkemeier’s post on what it feels like to be a “geek girl”, and she linked to Matt McIrvin’s post about Nerd Bravado, which is the claim (originally made by an anonymous poster on yet a third blog post that I haven’t read) that in order to have any cred as an engineer, one has to at least once solve a problem in the manner of sitting down and working on it for 20 or 30 hours of continuous independent work, because there are some problems that can’t be solved any other way. (To be clear, that’s a claim that Matt was describing in order to disagree with it.)
I’m going to claim some authority in talking about this, because I’ve done that — and it wasn’t just 20 or 30 hours, either. A year ago, I thought that there was some chance that I could finish my dissertation by the end of the academic year if I got a certain set of simulations done, which required taking a computer program that was currently held together by Duck-brand Fortran Tape, and turning the structurally unsound mass of the core algorithms into a well-oiled robust, solid, machine that would do what I told it. I had two weeks in which to either accomplish it or give up.
So, I sat down on Monday to start working on it, and for all practical purposes, I worked on it straight through until Wednesday of the following week.
This is the first flaw of the Nerd Bravado claim. Hyperfocus doesn’t care if you sleep and eat and take a shower. You can think while you’re eating. Your brain keeps working on things when you sleep, and if you think about a problem when you go to bed and when you get up in the morning, you’ll often find that some tricky bit of it has become a lot clearer in the interim. You don’t have to sit for 25 hours straight to get the benefits.
That’s where the benefit of this style of working is, insofar as there is one: Hyperfocus. After a dozen or so hours into this project, I was so focused on it that I couldn’t really think about anything else — even if I tried, the problems in the code would keep distracting me back to the task. And, because I’d pretty much emptied everything else from short-term memory, quite a lot of stuff about the code could fit in there — enough to contain all the complicated interweavings of how the code all fit together. I could look at the results and see where the problems were coming from and what bits of subroutines wove together to create the particular effect that was happening, and I knew, without having to look, where to prod the program to change it, and when I prodded it, it changed. It’s a heady feeling.
I think that’s what the appeal of Nerd Bravado is, really. It’s like spice, from Dune. Get a bit of it into your system, and the universe opens up before you and whirls at your beck and call, and you have tremendous power at your fingertips to poke exactly the right thing in exactly the right place. But it’s also got downsides; do it a few too many times, and your eyeballs turn funny colors and it completely eats your life.
Now, I said I had two weeks to fix this program, and I stopped a week and a half in. Do you think that means I finished early? Hardly. A week in, and I’d gotten all the easy bugs fixed and most of the complicated ones, and I’d started tangling with the algorithms at the core of it. And they had a problem: The math that I was working with involved solving an equation where significant parts of both sides are multiplied by a factor that goes to zero. Divide that out to solve it, and very small errors in one term become very big errors in the solution, and it stops being well-behaved. There are ways around this, but they have to be designed into the algorithm from the start, not bolted on later. And by about Wednesday, it became quite clear that I was dealing with something that needed to be fixed from the ground up, and there was no way I could come close to that in the three days I had left.
This is the second flaw of the Nerd Bravado claim. It doesn’t actually solve the real big problems. Hyperfocus is a state of working on instincts, of having enough information actively in your brain that you don’t have to work through logic and deductive reasoning to know what the Right Thing To Do Now is. And that’s great, if what you need to accomplish is something that’s a chain of consecutive steps, like debugging a convoluted program or working through a complicated mathematical derivation or even writing a new program that fits a general specification that you’ve already determined.
Real big problems aren’t like that. Flash-of-insight problems aren’t like that — Einstein didn’t have his flash of insight about time dilation on the trolley because he’d been hyperfocusing on the problem for the past few days; he had it because he’d been rolling the problem around in his head for months. (Or years; I don’t actually know that bit of his biography well enough to say for sure.) And hard-work problems aren’t like that, either — writing a fixed version of my program isn’t going to work like that either, because it needs to be designed right from the ground up, and designing something right is a process that requires awareness of the outside world, and of a lot more than what fits in the hyperfocus. Yes, there are the legends of the great designers who sit down and in one day lay out the basic lines of an airplane or a car engine that are more right than their less-great colleagues create with a committee and a month, and that comes from having tremendous amounts of knowledge in their heads, but that’s the sort of knowledge that gets there over years, not hours.
This brings me to the third flaw of the Nerd Bravado claim: It’s not, overall, worth doing. When I’d finished my week-and-a-half of debugging, I was mentally exhausted. I was a week behind on all of the minutiae of daily life, I was emotionally starved for interpersonal interactions, I’d barely talked to my wife about anything that mattered to her, and my brain felt thoroughly fried. (My wife’s ironic laugh when I asked her if she remembered when I did this probably tells you all you need to know about what it was like from the outside.) It took somewhere around a month before my work productivity was anywhere near normal again. All totaled, I’d probably have accomplished as much if I’d simply worked at a reasonable pace for the month and two weeks, and I’m pretty sure the resulting solution would have been worth a bit more, as I’d have had the time to actually work out at least a first cut at a ground-up solution.
And, finally, the fourth flaw of the Nerd Bravado claim: the claim that “you must do it at least once to be a successful engineer … and to gain the respect of your peers” simply doesn’t hold true. The result of this particular experience, for me, was that I had a nicely debugged program that solved the equations the wrong way and didn’t produce useful answers. And all I learned from it was this: That style of working isn’t sustainable, and doesn’t lead to an enjoyable life, and I don’t want to do it again except in very small doses. As for the respect of my peers — well, does this cause any of you to respect me any more? No? I didn’t think so.