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Deep research requires a slower pace than tech industry work

notes.andymatuschak.org · 445 words · saved by 1 readers

Anyone working in an industry for a while will become accustomed to that culture—its processes, its norms, its values, its tacit knowledge. Much of this is incredibly valuable, of course, but these ideas can also represent constraints. There are some important impedances here between tech industry culture and research culture. In particular, tech culture is calibrated to a much faster pace. This can lead to impatience or early abandonment when confronting problems which require a researcher’s pace. A “huge project” for a Silicon Valley tech person may be a year or two long; a “huge project” for a researcher may last a decade. Persistence with a difficult problem may require tens of hours for a tech person and hundreds of hours for a researcher. It’s not that the tech people are constitutionally lazy or something like that: in that industry, it’s usually a bad idea to spend many hundreds of hours thinking about a single problem. But foundational insights often do require more patient, f

Deep research requires a slower pace than tech industry work Deep research requires a slower pace than tech industry work Anyone working in an industry for a while will become accustomed to that culture—its processes, its norms, its values, its tacit knowledge. Much of this is incredibly valuable, of course, but these ideas can also represent constraints. There are some important impedances here between tech industry culture and research culture. In particular, tech culture is calibrated to a much faster pace. This can lead to impatience or early abandonment when confronting problems which req

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