You don’t need to work on hard problems
A lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life—probably because that’s the only thing they’ve ever been rewarded for so far.
College, 2012 -Internship recruiting season. "What are you looking for in your internship?" the recruiter asks. "I'd like to solve hard technical problems," I reply. I end up at Jane Street writing software to calculate numeric integrals of a function that is costly to evaluate. (They don't tell me what the function is-it's too secret for interns.) After two weeks, I come up with some of my own tweaks that make the algorithm work a bit better. I happily add "built a state-of-the-art library for numerical integration, with novel improvements on the best techniques in the academic literature" to
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