I worked with a number of brilliant people at Bell Labs through the 1980s/1990s. The most comfortably competent among them, the most productive among them, were also the least abrasive. They were also the most self deprecating.
Not just one or two, but the majority of them. To the point that the aggressive geniuses stood out. And I worked for/with two abrasive ones as well, so I know the difference.
The same was true for the two startups I worked at after that, and Qualcomm, and now the third startup where I work.
The really productive geniuses in each situation were easy to work with, I think largely, because of their confidence in their own grasp of the subject at hand. They had nothing to prove, they knew that, and it showed. The difficult people were never stupid, far from it, but they felt like they needed to defend everything they did, every decision they made, and that made working with them less productive.
With the gentle geniuses, if you thought you came up with something that was an improvement on what was being done, they would look at it honestly, and if it was not better, they would calmly explain why, and if it was better, they would acknowledge it right out and discuss how to merge that into the current work.
The 'less gentle' ones would take pride in pointing out the flaws in your idea if you were wrong, and if you were right, would fight you over whether it had any real value at all, then would stiff arm you as far as getting it accepted as a change.
My favourite people to work with are the gentle geniuses. I love to be wrong around them because I get to learn, and I love opportunities to present something useful I've done and know it will become a valuable contribution.
I avoid the other kind of person like a plague now. They ruin otherwise excellent teams. They might be fine to have a drink with or something, but in day to day work, they are sand paper.
Another thing I find is that the gentle variety tend to understand and appreciate realistic timelines. Highly competitive "nerds" tend to fight on timelines, or suppress others using them. Why wasn't that done sooner? Wait, all you did in 3 days was this? It's a terrible tool used to knock team mates down a peg on a routine basis.
I know, right? It is one of the greatest things in the world to be the dumbest guy in a room full of really smart, secure people. It’s like you’re getting a mini postdoc education for free, compressed into a few minutes.
I have had that same experience with many people, re criticising other people’s timelines. But I don’t think that’s the kind of “fierce nerd” Paul is talking about. I rather think he’s talking about the person who is so involved in doing their own work, that they don’t spend the time to evaluate other people’s productivity.
If I had to guess, I would guess these would often be "fierce nerds" who mellowed with age.
I think this "fierceness" is an expected sign of intellectual dominance of your peers at 15-20. At 25+, it's a sign that you've either never entered a pond with genuinely big fish, or you've never managed to recognize that big fish are swimming around you.
Of course, you could just be dominating big fish at 25+. It's logically possible. But the incident of "fierceness" is muuuuch higher than the incidence of that level of genius.
it's frustrating to me that Paul conflated fierceness with competitiveness, because I see passion & vigor & energy as very decoupled from the forces of personization & ego that this part of the thread are wrapped around, that Paul linked together.
another comment mentioned that it's a matter of tamping down the inner asshole, having self awareness. this still allows for an enormous domineering ego but supposes it can be self regulated, held back.
I feel like even that is still a radical take. fierce nerds just see opportunity in the world. they want to strike, want to seize good, promote the paths everyone else disregards as too difficult too hard top unknown, to say, let's really find out. fiercely try. try to learn if we fail & try again next time too. thw competition is not with each other, not about who; it's a competition against mediocrity & safety & fragility. a competition to collaboratively find excellence & further truths.
you should remain fierce. there are not many other real big fish on the sea. most folk have narrow windows of experience, limited views, & your nerdly bigger picture takes of the fierce are direly needed. especially when we don't attach ourselves to the try, when we are all aligned to try greatly & learn & adjust as we go, with fierceness, but without ego.
Maybe factors in someone good at something being humble about it includes:
* Confidence of not needing to prove something to themselves.
* Comfort with their situation, aka not needing to prove something to others -- for practical reasons, separate from validation of own security/insecurity. (In your Bell Labs example, having gotten into there, getting to do the kind of work they want, presumably having sufficient respect of others for a pleasant environment, not feeling like they have to fight their way to opportunity and respect.)
* Intellectual humility that comes with experience, having realized how easy and frequent it is to be mistaken.
* Maybe differences of personality wiring. (I know nothing of the psychological research, but, anecdotally, there seems to be variation among people in how problem-solving interacts with emotions, for example, and maybe how that affects their interactions in that context.)
Also, taking a step back, I don't know how good our perceptions of humility. (Of course, different people express themselves differently, which I suppose affects perceptions of those people's humility. And maybe, when we're characterizing humility of others, we're usually basing that on perceptions, rather than some more objective criteria.)
* Perhaps, humility from knowing how much you don't know. The older I get, the bigger the circle of what I don't know grows. I now know that there is no way in my lifetime I will be able to learn even a tiny percentage of all that I would like to learn. It is humbling to learn how little you really know, no matter how quickly you acquire new knowledge.
Thank you for bringing up humility. Can't believe he got through this entire post without once mentioning it. Says as much about the author as it does about the world in which fierce nerds operate.
Humility is simply not seen as a virtue in a business environment anymore.
Career coaches teach you how you can get ahead and to be confident.
But having knowledge also means you know about your limits, so your only option is to pretend to know everything.
It can be useful to convince people with low tech literacy of your solution, but I don't think confidence is a good metric. It is basically a dysfunctional form of communication.
Yeah, it's remarkable to me that this article could be written to provide advice to "fierce nerds", and not include a single sentence about not being an asshole.
I work with "fierce nerds". Some of them are self-aware, and try very very hard not to be assholes to the people around them. They do this without sacrificing their passion. And they are tolerable to work with only because they consciously push back against their inner asshole.
It takes a lot of effort in some areas to stay calm and allow the other side to play out their argument, and I recognize how critical it is in maintaining a positive attitude towards work.
I find that minimizing unnecessary conference calls was a monumental step in the right direction. When a technical conversation is serialized through a Github issue, it tends to get a lot more thought and time applied. It is also easy to walk away from a frustrating issue, go for a run, come back, and write a much more reasonable reply than you otherwise would have if compelled to do so.
Microsoft vet from 1990s-2000: same. Got to work with many of my programming heroes, and many of the same people influencing programming language design, Azure, and .NET even now. The vast majority were a pure joy to work with, just as you describe.
> The difficult people were never stupid, far from it, but they felt like they needed to defend everything they did, every decision they made, and that made working with them less productive.
I assume the implication here is that the productive folks didn't necessarily defend everything they did, and thus went with other people's solutions sometimes even when their own was better? Is that what you're trying to convey? or should I be reading it differently? Curious how their behavior contrasted in your experience.
I interpreted this differently. My takeaway was that the abrasive ones constantly defend everything they do, even when it’s not necessary, and the gentle genius doesn’t feel the need to be defensive at every step.
It doesn’t have to mean that the gentle genius never defends their viewpoints, but highlights the key differences in how these personality types operate on a day-to-day basis, and the resulting impact on the team around them.
"Fierce nerds" can be valuable. Sure. But the folks who truly stand out in my mind are a level higher. They're the ones at the top of their game, who know how to demand & command excellence, without being jerks about it.
I'm reminded of this episode of "The Chef Show" where Jon Favreau compliments Roy Choi behind his back. He tells Bill Burr that he had followed Roy around for a full day, going to all his restaurants and food trucks, and not once did Roy raise his voice to his staff. It's pretty cool to see how much admiration one artist/leader has for the other, not because of their technical skills but because they choose to be kind.
I don't think we need to settle for being "fierce nerds".
> "Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?" -Jeff Bezos
That an interesting read, thanks.
I struggle to square what Bezos is saying with what Amazon has become. He is clearly incredibly clever but appears devoid of any kindness toward his low level employees. Am I missing something?
That's the feel I get from reading Brad Stone's "Amazon Unbound" .There were multiple instances where Bezos appear devoid of kindness towards employees.
E.g
'...In 2009, Onetto’s human resources deputy, David Niekerk, wrote a paper titled “Respect for People,” and presented it at an S-team meeting. The paper drew from Toyota’s proven Lean ideology and argued for “treating people fairly,” building “mutual trust between managers and associates,” and empowering leaders to inspire employees rather than act as disciplinarians.
Bezos hated it. He not only railed against it in the meeting but called Niekerk the following morning to continue the browbeating. Amazon should never imply that it didn’t have respect for people embedded in the very fabric of how it operated, he said...'
"...Among the final straws for Onetto was a September 2011 story in the Morning Call newspaper in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The paper reported that the company’s warehouse in the Lehigh Valley had gotten so swelteringly hot that summer that workers were passing out and being transported to nearby hospitals by ambulances that Amazon had waiting outside. An ER doctor even called federal regulators to report an unsafe work environment..."
"...Before the incident, Onetto had presented a white paper to the S-team that included a few paragraphs proposing to install rooftop air-conditioning units in Amazon’s facilities. But according to Niekerk, Bezos bluntly dismissed the request, citing the cost. After the Morning Call article drew widespread condemnation, Bezos approved the $52 million expense, establishing a pattern of making changes only after he read criticism in the media. But he also criticized Onetto for not anticipating the crisis.
Fuming, Onetto prepared to remind Bezos of his original proposal. Colleagues begged him to let it go, but he couldn’t. As they anticipated, the meeting did not go well. Bezos said that as a matter of fact, he did remember the paper and that it was so poorly written and ambiguous that no one had understood what course of action Onetto was recommending. As other S-team members cringed, Bezos declared that the entire incident was evidence of what happens when Amazon puts people in top jobs who can’t articulate their ideas clearly and support them with data..."
"...Bezos didn’t want another empathetic business philosopher to replace Onetto as the head of Amazon’s operations; he sought an uncompromising operator..."
> > "Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?" -Jeff Bezos
> I struggle to square what Bezos is saying with what Amazon has become. He is clearly incredibly clever but appears devoid of any kindness toward his low level employees.
That seems perfectly consistent - he chose option A.
Are you only believing what you read in the media or do you know people that actually work at Amazon? The fact that Amazon employees in a warehouse rejected unionization speaks volumes. And I know plenty of Amazon engineers that love working there.
To put it in perspective, there may be employees that hate working at Amazon, but there are also 100,000 employees. If only 10% of the employees hated working there, that's still 10,000 employees. But a 90% satisfaction rate for any company is amazingly high.
Once you have achieved significant status and money you no longer need to be fierce since people listen anyway. But most people worth listening to doesn't have significant status and money, instead we wait until they found their own companies and become rich before we listen to them.
This may be true for you, but not for me. I listen to many people who are not well known, and who are not rich, and who arae not startup founders. For instance, none of my friends are rich startup founders, neither is my partner, nor my therapist, nor my coworkers, yet I consider all their opinions valuable (more so than the rich "fierce nerds"). Most of the podcasts I listen to are not run by the rich and powerful, either.
I find this ironic coming out of Jeff Bezos. There are plenty of examples of people that are exactly opposite of what you describe as. Steve Jobs - massive jerk, but demanded and commanded excellence. I don't personally condone this type of personalities but they exist. Linus Torvalds is another example. There is much more to it.
> He tells Bill Burr that he had followed Roy around for a full day, going to all his restaurants and food trucks, and not once did Roy raise his voice to his staff.
Sorry what are you trying to say here? It's admirable or difficult not to yell at your employees?
Since pg's essay is of a psychoanalytic nature, I'll reply in a psychoanalytic frame, for the sake of conversation, not criticism. [Protip: never psychoanalyze anyone! This likely applies even to psychoanalysts.]
During the last year or two pg has written more than a few essays and tweets which appear to be of a defensive nature. People like him contribute more than other people, it's alright to to be fierce, can't speak the "truth," etc.
Whenever there is dichotomous thinking, cognition has moved away from clarity. If it were me, I'd be asking myself, What is being defended? (This kind of question can be a multi-decade inquiry.)
Although most of us are easily baited into self-justification or self-promotion, I think going down that path it is ultimately a distraction from doing real work and knowing who you are.
PG, if you asked him, might describe himself as defending people who do real work from a larger culture that all too often prioritizes serving the status quo over accomplishing the goals that the status quo was established to accomplish. One example of that would be SpaceX doing the launch vehicle design work that the NASA/Boeing/Big Government Contractor complex was established to do. At the same time, SpaceX works its people extremely hard and is lead by a billionaire with abnormally unsophisticated PR. So there you have cultural and business forces set against a new company that has nothing going for it except the fact that it actually does stuff. Actually doing stuff is a surprisingly small advantage in a world that is interested in so many other qualities.
I would like people to stop believing that this is a real example, at least around here (I'm close to a few NASA missions). SpaceX was selected by NASA for some lunar lift services, and everyone I know is quite excited by US's expanding lift / launch capabilities. I think that I and those around me exist in these roles to serve the needs of the nation and priorities of congress and the scientific community, and will use any tools at our disposal to do so.
Other companies may fight this, sure, but stop throwing NASA (an exploration agency) in with those who would benefit from suppressing SpaceX.
Why can’t we have both? A job where we can “actually do stuff” without getting mistreated by psychotic billionaires. There’s a lack of compassion in tech.
I'm speculating, but perhaps with all the YC IPOs in the past year they are now liquid billionaires, and he is thinking it through, out loud, via essays, which is how he figured out things from Lisp to startups to investing?
> Protip: never psychoanalyze anyone! This likely applies even to psychoanalysts.
Underrated advice. Psychoanalytics helps with self reflection, not with reading minds.
I can recommend Erich Fromm "Fear of Liberty" these days, because it describes many dilemma we face today. Might be interesting if you can see some effects he describes in yourself or others.
Psychoanalysis should be eaten with a pack of salt though. I think it vastly more fitting to model behavior than what writers from the field of psychology produce these days, apart perhaps from advertisers.
This is a deep topic worthy of an essay, the kind of essay pg might write! The concise reply is, when you catch yourself in dichotomous thinking, you should assume you have misunderstood or oversimplified.
Sometimes you have to go with your misunderstanding or oversimplification to make a decision or to make progress, but keep in mind you are doing so based on beliefs which are unlikely to correspond to reality.
It's striking that so many mental health difficulties are characterized by dichotomous thinking. [1]
Rationality itself can be profitably critiqued at the meta-level.[2] So, don't be an asshole, unless you need to be. Do you see the world as consisting of assholes and non-assholes? How does that feel? What are the advantages of that view? What are the disadvantages? Is considering that question worth your time?
> Protip: never psychoanalyze anyone! This likely applies even to psychoanalysts.
Beside your point, but wondering if you could expand on this.
I have a tendency to do this, and while it's fun, I'm starting to get the sense that it's a bad habit, possibly because I sense I'm overly confident on something that might be 100% wrong and it feels... invasive?
I've asked myself the same question. While I don't go as far as "never", I do it much less than I used to.
Thinking this way can certainly lead to worthwhile and actionable insights. But I think any skilled amateur will overestimate their abilities. Therapists build their insights on top of huge amounts of biographical information that they gather in intense, concentrated sessions. Their observational skills are trained, and they use them to gather as much information from posture, tone, and expression as they do from narrative. Even if an amateur's observational skills are good, they won't have the right context (the session) to gather that kind of information. So the amateur will be lacking in both theory, and information - compared to the pros. And yet the amateur often has more confidence than the pro - leaping at the first theory that "clicks", not considering alternatives, and with an unwillingness to revise.
The next pitfall comes if/when you decide to act on your insights. And once you have those insights, it becomes tempting to act on them. Then, when you do act, you're almost by definition being manipulative. Your behavior towards the other person is no longer a straightforward reaction to what they're sending your way, but is instead following an agenda constructed to fit a diagnosis that is unknown to them. If they knew what you were up to, they would most likely object, even if your agenda was "for their own good." At best it's paternalistic. Therapists do act on their insights in opaque ways (and often screw up despite all their training) but the particulars of the patient-therapist relationship resolve the ethical violations that us civilians are likely to stumble into.
So, I would say that the tendency to psychoanalyze needs to come with heaps of humility, openness to revision, and a reluctance to act on the resulting insights in 9 out of 10 cases.
Not OP, but as someone who holds this view (who also used to engage in the practice): a lot of armchair psychoanalysis is based less on a genuine understanding of the other person's life and circumstances, and more on the assumption of what their life and circumstances must be combined with a surface-level knowledge of psychoanalytic practice.
Armchair psychoanalysis ostensibly seeks to understand the subject of analysis, but rarely makes the effort to first understand the subject on their terms or in a way where they can articulate their own experience; instead, someone usually has their presumptive conclusion about the subject in mind ("they're just doing this because they haven't gotten over being bullied as a kid" or whatever), and tries to wrangle the limited information they have about that person into their conclusion.
I think you have to detach to get value out of it -- not "what's the reason this person is like this" but "what are three different mechanisms by which a person might become like this". A bit like how a history student of a certain level isn't asked "why did WWI happen" but "contrast the materialist and post-revisionist explanations for the origins of WWI".
I see what you are saying. I mean the topics do have something of a defensive nature. Though arguably PG could just be making a valid point on topics that are contentious and widely misunderstood
I see the description he puts forward as essentially fitting contrarian types.
Speaking as a contrarian myself, I think the biggest challenge / trap is it's easy to point out things that are wrong or stupid, but tougher to do anything positive about it. I think this equates to the idea about avoiding becoming bitter.
Also, something he missed, and the curse of the contrarian, is "the market can stay irrational long enough for you to lose all your money". This happens all the time with unorthodox ideas, you can be right but if the mainstream doesn't shift in your favor before too long, you get ignored, discredited, or worse. I'd argue this is a bigger problem now, there is more polarization and a shorter feedback cycle so ideas get shot down and people fall out of favor much more quickly. Popular but wrong ideas, once they have "network effects" are much stickier than they once were. All this is tougher on the contrarian, or "fierce nerd".
The biggest problem facing contrarians is how more people are people stake out contrarian positions for the express purpose of building personal brands, despite any genuine conviction. A contrarian used to be dependably passionate. Now it's just another tool for audience building. As such, all contrarians now have an uphill battle of gaining trust because not only do you have to convince people of your views but you also have to convince them you're not just some charlatan on their latest grift.
In the tech world, it also seems to stem from insecurity (I'm sure many here have held their tongue in meetings when someone with little experience talks well above their level of competence in the subject).
I'm not convinced that it's a bigger problem now. In many ways, the ancient world was much stickier. A king could have a bad idea, and it could persist through generations before it falls to better ideas.
Are we talking about the Bronze Age, or about the early '00s?
In the '00s, before the FAANG giants had arisen, I would say things were more dynamic than they are now, and there was more room for smaller players.
If we're talking about the Bronze Age then this is a different conversation entirely. Then there was more continuity in each place with the past, but more difference between different places.
>This happens all the time with unorthodox ideas, you can be right but if the mainstream doesn't shift in your favor before too long, you get ignored, discredited, or worse. I'd argue this is a bigger problem now,
If I'm understanding you correctly, he doesn't miss this. He addresses it directly and comes to the opposite conclusion.
> The good news is that your fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems. And not just the kind of scientific and technical problems that nerds have traditionally solved. As the world progresses, the number of things you can win at by getting the right answer increases. Recently getting rich became one of them: 7 of the 8 richest people in America are now fierce nerds....In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it.
Im sure all of us see ourselves in this essay, in part because it's ego catnip. But this part resonated very strongly with me. I was in my early 20s when I realized how crucial it was for me to work somewhere where my work was measured as objectively as possible, which has finally led me to hone in on small/mid-sized co applied research[1] as the path that fits me.
It's definitely my perception that the world supports this more now than it ever used to. You can't ignore people skills entirely, but the path to success through technical work instead of management has never been better (eg the IC ladder at my co easily goes up to $1M/yr).
> Popular but wrong ideas, once they have "network effects" are much stickier than they once were. All this is tougher on the contrarian, or "fierce nerd".
I'm not convinced that this is __worse_ than it once was. There's too much heterodoxy, too much pluralism, too low barriers to entry, and too much opportunity for the quiet dissenter to build their niche and wait out the irrationality longer than they could ever have dreamed in the world of 50 or even 20 years ago.
[1] driven by well-defined problems instead of product people's beliefs about the market, or the politics and bureaucracy of academia. It's actually been very useful ground for me to practice my political skills, since the impact of rubbing people the wrong way while figuring it out is heavily mitigated by the clear and measurable impact of my work.
The first rush of comments are all negative, mostly of the ad hominem sort, accusing PG of publicly psychoanalyzing himself. And yet, I really liked the essay because it reads like a lifeline to those who doubt themselves, perhaps profoundly. To PG the same qualities that alienate a "fierce nerd" in so many contexts are precisely the same qualities that could lead to success (even dominance) in other contexts.
The useful follow on to this essay, I would think, is to give a list, as long as possible, of places where "fierce nerds" are wanted, demanded, needed - both well-known institutions and startups.
Another useful follow up would be to give better advice about achieving harmony. Everyone deserves peace; to put it another way, progress that requires a human to sacrifice love isn't worth making.
>The useful follow on to this essay, I would think, is to give a list, as long as possible, of places where "fierce nerds" are wanted, demanded, needed - both well-known institutions and startups.
This article promises "how to deal", but all it delivers is a list of difficult stereotypes, prefaced by reasons you are not allowed to disagree with the stereotypes, and never discusses how to deal with them.
> And yet, I really liked the essay because it reads like a lifeline to those who doubt themselves, perhaps profoundly
Do they? I mean one of the define characteristics is an overconfidence in themselves.
I think PG is trying to justify some kind of assholish behaviour in his past by reframing it as a virtue.
Really, I think the “fierceness” is incidental. Do immensely successful people need to be somewhat competitive? Sure. Do they have to interrupt everyone, lack social awareness, etc? Probably not.
I went to school at MIT with tons of people who had world-class intelligence, productivity and even accomplishments, but imposter syndrome was still rampant.
Even if someone happens to be exceptional at everything you choose to do and thus have confidence, they can only do so many things. And that means that for every thing they are exceptional at, there are a thousand things where they are unimaginably outclassed by others. MIT was awful for that.
For me personally, the more I learn about my areas of expertise, the more I realize how clueless I am about so many other areas. But if the knowledge of your general cluelessness makes you timid outside of your domain of expertise, it limits how much you can accomplish.
Also, I didn’t really read ‘fierceness’ to mean ‘assholeness’. I’ve been around some people who had ideas that they desperately wanted to see out into the world. They were fiercely passionate and they did have a tendency to interrupt, but they definitely weren’t assholes.
> I think PG is trying to justify some kind of assholish behaviour in his past by reframing it as a virtue.
I couldn't help but read part of it as a response to/rationalization of the recent pushback he (and other "fierce nerds") have been receiving lately...the former underdogs are now the establishment.
The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the hater, the shooter down of new ideas.
That's a pretty good description, and many of the posts here are about fierce nerds with petty issues which I think the essay is not about.
I've grown into that fierce nerd. Being in forced conscription in my 20s has made me wary of the 'wait to rush for nothing meaningful' culture. Then I joined companies and it feels like a ton of my time is wasted by processes, norms and ideologies. I did break out once to try and make a business but that hasn't worked out. So now I'm in employment just to earn/invest to have enough for a certain level of financial independence and I'm feeling that bitterness rise up again.
I'm very likely destined to burn out of industries/companies that aren't my own quickly, and this could cascade into bad looking resumes. It feels like a do or die situation sometimes.
Being an ordinary success is fine too. Been there, done that, more than once. Being fierce worked sometime and not others. Found the sweet spot in some companies, fired in others. Moderate success as a consultant (made a living for 7 years), failed at other business(lost a years salary). Learned how to write resumes out of that pastiche so I am still working on nerd stuff 3/4 time, enough to save money, leaving me time to play with other fun nerd stuff.
Heard a "rockstar" lamenting he would never win Grammy because of his niche but was not unsatisfied with the 60 year arc of his career.
Retrospectively, I see I could have been a contender several time but me then (brash) nor me now (wiser, possibly) could have been capable of elevating myself from a working nerd to a famous rich nerd.
>Then I joined companies and it feels like a ton of my time is wasted by processes, norms and ideologies.
I work in biotech and I smiled when I read this. The entirety of our business relies on people following processes, norms and ideologies. Once the "thinking" stage is done - the rules and framework are now in-place. You need to trust them and follow through to produce results for the company.
In tech so many nerds are constantly sharpening their tools or creating new ones and chasing some mythical 'perfection' that they lose sight of the results - the thing that matters the most to the company. Being entirely result oriented has changed my outlook completely, and made me a happier person. I am much more respectful towards people who produce actual results using any tools rather than judging someone who uses Java or Perl or whatever other language/tool that is not the flavor of the month. And working in biotech has made me value long term reliability over everything else. The single most thing that is important to me is that the tool be reliable and ready for me to use to produce results.
Have you done mine prodding drills over 50 square meter fields? Sure it'll fulfill some superior's KPI but it's not very useful nowadays with all that modern military equipment. A good majority of these prescribed processes, norms and ideologies just aren't useful in the individual's growth.
A ton of his time his wasted by other people trying not to waste their time. If we all just agreed to do everything his way, it would be a huge time saver... for him.
> And moreover it's clear from the story that Crick and Watson's fierce nerdiness was integral to their success.
I dare say PG's analysis of the psychology of Crick & Watson is correct, but one should not take only Watson's word for it about the source of their success. Rosalind Franklin was the first to observe the double-helix structure, a fact omitted from Watson's book.
Very much agree on not taking Watson's word for it. As for Franklin, it would be nice to think the Nobol committee would have agonised long and hard had she lived long enough to make it an issue for them (given at most 3 people can share a nobel, her early death ruled her out - a fact often ignored).
> Fierce nerds also tend to be somewhat overconfident, especially when young.
I wonder if that statement is overly specific. AFAIK, young people in general, or at least young men in general, have a reputation for being overconfident.
Maybe it's because I'm living in a latino country, but it certainly seems like men start with too much confidence since teenage years, and slowly brings it down so everyone stop calling them arrogant, then there is their appropriate level. While for females (again, at least here in this latino country) it's the opposite, they start off being super humble and careful, and while growing up gaining more and more confidence until finding the right level.
Of course, this is a broad generalization, but seems to fit where I'm living right now, but it's all anecdotal as it's based on my own perceived view of things of course.
Sounds right in line with my experiences and exposure to the "Machismo" portions of many Latino cultures. I always brought this up to my far leftist friends who tried to pretend that the cuban revolution was somehow good for the LGBT minority of Cuba. LOL you think that they abandoned machismo just because they got a hammer and sickle? They call queerness "capitalist decadence" there...
I think the "fierce need" / INTJ archetype the author is describing takes it a step above that of young men in general when it comes to overconfident / arrogance. And I agree with the author in that it's related to independent-mindedness. I can reflect on memories growing up where other young men were much more "in tune" to the group. They more intuitively understood the social cost of adopting an unpopular position. Or they just had the sensitivity to know that a position or statement wouldn't be well-received within the group. Or they just valued social harmony in general more than accurately representing what they believed to be true.
That's a bit different than when I think of young men in general being more confident than they ought to be. It has more to do with the goal: status within a group vs putting effort into finding what you believe is true and accurately representing that truth potentially at a social cost.
It's a fact that all humans are overconfident. That's why we have biases that make us confident in what we "know", and make us reject information to the contrary even if the information is factually accurate.
The overconfidence is not a trait endemic only to male "nerds".
Of course, it's still helpful to concede that humans should recognize and be aware of that weakness in themselves. Overconfidence is the reason so many spend the healthy end years of their lives so much less well off financially than they spent their healthy prime years. It behooves us all to be on guard against our overconfidence.
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Not just one or two, but the majority of them. To the point that the aggressive geniuses stood out. And I worked for/with two abrasive ones as well, so I know the difference.
The same was true for the two startups I worked at after that, and Qualcomm, and now the third startup where I work.
The really productive geniuses in each situation were easy to work with, I think largely, because of their confidence in their own grasp of the subject at hand. They had nothing to prove, they knew that, and it showed. The difficult people were never stupid, far from it, but they felt like they needed to defend everything they did, every decision they made, and that made working with them less productive.
With the gentle geniuses, if you thought you came up with something that was an improvement on what was being done, they would look at it honestly, and if it was not better, they would calmly explain why, and if it was better, they would acknowledge it right out and discuss how to merge that into the current work.
The 'less gentle' ones would take pride in pointing out the flaws in your idea if you were wrong, and if you were right, would fight you over whether it had any real value at all, then would stiff arm you as far as getting it accepted as a change.
I avoid the other kind of person like a plague now. They ruin otherwise excellent teams. They might be fine to have a drink with or something, but in day to day work, they are sand paper.
Another thing I find is that the gentle variety tend to understand and appreciate realistic timelines. Highly competitive "nerds" tend to fight on timelines, or suppress others using them. Why wasn't that done sooner? Wait, all you did in 3 days was this? It's a terrible tool used to knock team mates down a peg on a routine basis.
I think this "fierceness" is an expected sign of intellectual dominance of your peers at 15-20. At 25+, it's a sign that you've either never entered a pond with genuinely big fish, or you've never managed to recognize that big fish are swimming around you.
Of course, you could just be dominating big fish at 25+. It's logically possible. But the incident of "fierceness" is muuuuch higher than the incidence of that level of genius.
another comment mentioned that it's a matter of tamping down the inner asshole, having self awareness. this still allows for an enormous domineering ego but supposes it can be self regulated, held back.
I feel like even that is still a radical take. fierce nerds just see opportunity in the world. they want to strike, want to seize good, promote the paths everyone else disregards as too difficult too hard top unknown, to say, let's really find out. fiercely try. try to learn if we fail & try again next time too. thw competition is not with each other, not about who; it's a competition against mediocrity & safety & fragility. a competition to collaboratively find excellence & further truths.
you should remain fierce. there are not many other real big fish on the sea. most folk have narrow windows of experience, limited views, & your nerdly bigger picture takes of the fierce are direly needed. especially when we don't attach ourselves to the try, when we are all aligned to try greatly & learn & adjust as we go, with fierceness, but without ego.
* Confidence of not needing to prove something to themselves.
* Comfort with their situation, aka not needing to prove something to others -- for practical reasons, separate from validation of own security/insecurity. (In your Bell Labs example, having gotten into there, getting to do the kind of work they want, presumably having sufficient respect of others for a pleasant environment, not feeling like they have to fight their way to opportunity and respect.)
* Intellectual humility that comes with experience, having realized how easy and frequent it is to be mistaken.
* Maybe differences of personality wiring. (I know nothing of the psychological research, but, anecdotally, there seems to be variation among people in how problem-solving interacts with emotions, for example, and maybe how that affects their interactions in that context.)
Also, taking a step back, I don't know how good our perceptions of humility. (Of course, different people express themselves differently, which I suppose affects perceptions of those people's humility. And maybe, when we're characterizing humility of others, we're usually basing that on perceptions, rather than some more objective criteria.)
Career coaches teach you how you can get ahead and to be confident.
But having knowledge also means you know about your limits, so your only option is to pretend to know everything.
It can be useful to convince people with low tech literacy of your solution, but I don't think confidence is a good metric. It is basically a dysfunctional form of communication.
I work with "fierce nerds". Some of them are self-aware, and try very very hard not to be assholes to the people around them. They do this without sacrificing their passion. And they are tolerable to work with only because they consciously push back against their inner asshole.
It takes a lot of effort in some areas to stay calm and allow the other side to play out their argument, and I recognize how critical it is in maintaining a positive attitude towards work.
I find that minimizing unnecessary conference calls was a monumental step in the right direction. When a technical conversation is serialized through a Github issue, it tends to get a lot more thought and time applied. It is also easy to walk away from a frustrating issue, go for a run, come back, and write a much more reasonable reply than you otherwise would have if compelled to do so.
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Did you know any of them via mailing lists or Usenet, just face to face?
People's abrasiveness will come out in situations in which they think there won't be any repercussions.
Who is a wise man?
The one that always seeks to occupy the smallest place/room.
Nota Bene: I am not a Russian, but simply encountered this formulation several times.
* Whoever said this didn’t own a grand piano. Just saying.
I assume the implication here is that the productive folks didn't necessarily defend everything they did, and thus went with other people's solutions sometimes even when their own was better? Is that what you're trying to convey? or should I be reading it differently? Curious how their behavior contrasted in your experience.
It doesn’t have to mean that the gentle genius never defends their viewpoints, but highlights the key differences in how these personality types operate on a day-to-day basis, and the resulting impact on the team around them.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate...
"Fierce nerds" can be valuable. Sure. But the folks who truly stand out in my mind are a level higher. They're the ones at the top of their game, who know how to demand & command excellence, without being jerks about it.
I'm reminded of this episode of "The Chef Show" where Jon Favreau compliments Roy Choi behind his back. He tells Bill Burr that he had followed Roy around for a full day, going to all his restaurants and food trucks, and not once did Roy raise his voice to his staff. It's pretty cool to see how much admiration one artist/leader has for the other, not because of their technical skills but because they choose to be kind.
I don't think we need to settle for being "fierce nerds".
That an interesting read, thanks. I struggle to square what Bezos is saying with what Amazon has become. He is clearly incredibly clever but appears devoid of any kindness toward his low level employees. Am I missing something?
E.g '...In 2009, Onetto’s human resources deputy, David Niekerk, wrote a paper titled “Respect for People,” and presented it at an S-team meeting. The paper drew from Toyota’s proven Lean ideology and argued for “treating people fairly,” building “mutual trust between managers and associates,” and empowering leaders to inspire employees rather than act as disciplinarians. Bezos hated it. He not only railed against it in the meeting but called Niekerk the following morning to continue the browbeating. Amazon should never imply that it didn’t have respect for people embedded in the very fabric of how it operated, he said...'
"...Among the final straws for Onetto was a September 2011 story in the Morning Call newspaper in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The paper reported that the company’s warehouse in the Lehigh Valley had gotten so swelteringly hot that summer that workers were passing out and being transported to nearby hospitals by ambulances that Amazon had waiting outside. An ER doctor even called federal regulators to report an unsafe work environment..."
"...Before the incident, Onetto had presented a white paper to the S-team that included a few paragraphs proposing to install rooftop air-conditioning units in Amazon’s facilities. But according to Niekerk, Bezos bluntly dismissed the request, citing the cost. After the Morning Call article drew widespread condemnation, Bezos approved the $52 million expense, establishing a pattern of making changes only after he read criticism in the media. But he also criticized Onetto for not anticipating the crisis. Fuming, Onetto prepared to remind Bezos of his original proposal. Colleagues begged him to let it go, but he couldn’t. As they anticipated, the meeting did not go well. Bezos said that as a matter of fact, he did remember the paper and that it was so poorly written and ambiguous that no one had understood what course of action Onetto was recommending. As other S-team members cringed, Bezos declared that the entire incident was evidence of what happens when Amazon puts people in top jobs who can’t articulate their ideas clearly and support them with data..."
"...Bezos didn’t want another empathetic business philosopher to replace Onetto as the head of Amazon’s operations; he sought an uncompromising operator..."
> I struggle to square what Bezos is saying with what Amazon has become. He is clearly incredibly clever but appears devoid of any kindness toward his low level employees.
That seems perfectly consistent - he chose option A.
Probably how good his publicist is.
If I'm being really cynical, Jeff is suggesting these Princeton grads be kind so that he may become clever at their expense.
To put it in perspective, there may be employees that hate working at Amazon, but there are also 100,000 employees. If only 10% of the employees hated working there, that's still 10,000 employees. But a 90% satisfaction rate for any company is amazingly high.
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-- Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
Sorry what are you trying to say here? It's admirable or difficult not to yell at your employees?
During the last year or two pg has written more than a few essays and tweets which appear to be of a defensive nature. People like him contribute more than other people, it's alright to to be fierce, can't speak the "truth," etc.
Whenever there is dichotomous thinking, cognition has moved away from clarity. If it were me, I'd be asking myself, What is being defended? (This kind of question can be a multi-decade inquiry.)
Although most of us are easily baited into self-justification or self-promotion, I think going down that path it is ultimately a distraction from doing real work and knowing who you are.
Other companies may fight this, sure, but stop throwing NASA (an exploration agency) in with those who would benefit from suppressing SpaceX.
Personal opinion.
Underrated advice. Psychoanalytics helps with self reflection, not with reading minds.
I can recommend Erich Fromm "Fear of Liberty" these days, because it describes many dilemma we face today. Might be interesting if you can see some effects he describes in yourself or others.
Psychoanalysis should be eaten with a pack of salt though. I think it vastly more fitting to model behavior than what writers from the field of psychology produce these days, apart perhaps from advertisers.
Can you expand on this?
Sometimes you have to go with your misunderstanding or oversimplification to make a decision or to make progress, but keep in mind you are doing so based on beliefs which are unlikely to correspond to reality.
It's striking that so many mental health difficulties are characterized by dichotomous thinking. [1]
Rationality itself can be profitably critiqued at the meta-level.[2] So, don't be an asshole, unless you need to be. Do you see the world as consisting of assholes and non-assholes? How does that feel? What are the advantages of that view? What are the disadvantages? Is considering that question worth your time?
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/she-comes-long-way-b...
[2] https://metarationality.com/introduction
EDIT: Fixed link, spacing
(I added this as an edit to my other reply, but it seems the edit is lost.)
Beside your point, but wondering if you could expand on this. I have a tendency to do this, and while it's fun, I'm starting to get the sense that it's a bad habit, possibly because I sense I'm overly confident on something that might be 100% wrong and it feels... invasive?
Thinking this way can certainly lead to worthwhile and actionable insights. But I think any skilled amateur will overestimate their abilities. Therapists build their insights on top of huge amounts of biographical information that they gather in intense, concentrated sessions. Their observational skills are trained, and they use them to gather as much information from posture, tone, and expression as they do from narrative. Even if an amateur's observational skills are good, they won't have the right context (the session) to gather that kind of information. So the amateur will be lacking in both theory, and information - compared to the pros. And yet the amateur often has more confidence than the pro - leaping at the first theory that "clicks", not considering alternatives, and with an unwillingness to revise.
The next pitfall comes if/when you decide to act on your insights. And once you have those insights, it becomes tempting to act on them. Then, when you do act, you're almost by definition being manipulative. Your behavior towards the other person is no longer a straightforward reaction to what they're sending your way, but is instead following an agenda constructed to fit a diagnosis that is unknown to them. If they knew what you were up to, they would most likely object, even if your agenda was "for their own good." At best it's paternalistic. Therapists do act on their insights in opaque ways (and often screw up despite all their training) but the particulars of the patient-therapist relationship resolve the ethical violations that us civilians are likely to stumble into.
So, I would say that the tendency to psychoanalyze needs to come with heaps of humility, openness to revision, and a reluctance to act on the resulting insights in 9 out of 10 cases.
Armchair psychoanalysis ostensibly seeks to understand the subject of analysis, but rarely makes the effort to first understand the subject on their terms or in a way where they can articulate their own experience; instead, someone usually has their presumptive conclusion about the subject in mind ("they're just doing this because they haven't gotten over being bullied as a kid" or whatever), and tries to wrangle the limited information they have about that person into their conclusion.
Speaking as a contrarian myself, I think the biggest challenge / trap is it's easy to point out things that are wrong or stupid, but tougher to do anything positive about it. I think this equates to the idea about avoiding becoming bitter.
Also, something he missed, and the curse of the contrarian, is "the market can stay irrational long enough for you to lose all your money". This happens all the time with unorthodox ideas, you can be right but if the mainstream doesn't shift in your favor before too long, you get ignored, discredited, or worse. I'd argue this is a bigger problem now, there is more polarization and a shorter feedback cycle so ideas get shot down and people fall out of favor much more quickly. Popular but wrong ideas, once they have "network effects" are much stickier than they once were. All this is tougher on the contrarian, or "fierce nerd".
In the '00s, before the FAANG giants had arisen, I would say things were more dynamic than they are now, and there was more room for smaller players.
If we're talking about the Bronze Age then this is a different conversation entirely. Then there was more continuity in each place with the past, but more difference between different places.
If I'm understanding you correctly, he doesn't miss this. He addresses it directly and comes to the opposite conclusion.
> The good news is that your fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems. And not just the kind of scientific and technical problems that nerds have traditionally solved. As the world progresses, the number of things you can win at by getting the right answer increases. Recently getting rich became one of them: 7 of the 8 richest people in America are now fierce nerds....In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it.
Im sure all of us see ourselves in this essay, in part because it's ego catnip. But this part resonated very strongly with me. I was in my early 20s when I realized how crucial it was for me to work somewhere where my work was measured as objectively as possible, which has finally led me to hone in on small/mid-sized co applied research[1] as the path that fits me.
It's definitely my perception that the world supports this more now than it ever used to. You can't ignore people skills entirely, but the path to success through technical work instead of management has never been better (eg the IC ladder at my co easily goes up to $1M/yr).
> Popular but wrong ideas, once they have "network effects" are much stickier than they once were. All this is tougher on the contrarian, or "fierce nerd".
I'm not convinced that this is __worse_ than it once was. There's too much heterodoxy, too much pluralism, too low barriers to entry, and too much opportunity for the quiet dissenter to build their niche and wait out the irrationality longer than they could ever have dreamed in the world of 50 or even 20 years ago.
[1] driven by well-defined problems instead of product people's beliefs about the market, or the politics and bureaucracy of academia. It's actually been very useful ground for me to practice my political skills, since the impact of rubbing people the wrong way while figuring it out is heavily mitigated by the clear and measurable impact of my work.
The useful follow on to this essay, I would think, is to give a list, as long as possible, of places where "fierce nerds" are wanted, demanded, needed - both well-known institutions and startups.
Another useful follow up would be to give better advice about achieving harmony. Everyone deserves peace; to put it another way, progress that requires a human to sacrifice love isn't worth making.
"How to Deal with Difficult People on Software Projects" is a pretty good read in this vain https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-proj...
Do they? I mean one of the define characteristics is an overconfidence in themselves.
I think PG is trying to justify some kind of assholish behaviour in his past by reframing it as a virtue.
Really, I think the “fierceness” is incidental. Do immensely successful people need to be somewhat competitive? Sure. Do they have to interrupt everyone, lack social awareness, etc? Probably not.
Even if someone happens to be exceptional at everything you choose to do and thus have confidence, they can only do so many things. And that means that for every thing they are exceptional at, there are a thousand things where they are unimaginably outclassed by others. MIT was awful for that.
For me personally, the more I learn about my areas of expertise, the more I realize how clueless I am about so many other areas. But if the knowledge of your general cluelessness makes you timid outside of your domain of expertise, it limits how much you can accomplish.
Also, I didn’t really read ‘fierceness’ to mean ‘assholeness’. I’ve been around some people who had ideas that they desperately wanted to see out into the world. They were fiercely passionate and they did have a tendency to interrupt, but they definitely weren’t assholes.
I couldn't help but read part of it as a response to/rationalization of the recent pushback he (and other "fierce nerds") have been receiving lately...the former underdogs are now the establishment.
The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the hater, the shooter down of new ideas.
I wonder how much Bill Gates triggered this write up.
Happens on every PG post.
I've grown into that fierce nerd. Being in forced conscription in my 20s has made me wary of the 'wait to rush for nothing meaningful' culture. Then I joined companies and it feels like a ton of my time is wasted by processes, norms and ideologies. I did break out once to try and make a business but that hasn't worked out. So now I'm in employment just to earn/invest to have enough for a certain level of financial independence and I'm feeling that bitterness rise up again.
I'm very likely destined to burn out of industries/companies that aren't my own quickly, and this could cascade into bad looking resumes. It feels like a do or die situation sometimes.
Heard a "rockstar" lamenting he would never win Grammy because of his niche but was not unsatisfied with the 60 year arc of his career.
Retrospectively, I see I could have been a contender several time but me then (brash) nor me now (wiser, possibly) could have been capable of elevating myself from a working nerd to a famous rich nerd.
I work in biotech and I smiled when I read this. The entirety of our business relies on people following processes, norms and ideologies. Once the "thinking" stage is done - the rules and framework are now in-place. You need to trust them and follow through to produce results for the company.
In tech so many nerds are constantly sharpening their tools or creating new ones and chasing some mythical 'perfection' that they lose sight of the results - the thing that matters the most to the company. Being entirely result oriented has changed my outlook completely, and made me a happier person. I am much more respectful towards people who produce actual results using any tools rather than judging someone who uses Java or Perl or whatever other language/tool that is not the flavor of the month. And working in biotech has made me value long term reliability over everything else. The single most thing that is important to me is that the tool be reliable and ready for me to use to produce results.
So, all the stuff that helps society function?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Dead Comment
I dare say PG's analysis of the psychology of Crick & Watson is correct, but one should not take only Watson's word for it about the source of their success. Rosalind Franklin was the first to observe the double-helix structure, a fact omitted from Watson's book.
https://sites.psu.edu/magdaliapassionblog/2018/02/08/watson-...
I wonder if that statement is overly specific. AFAIK, young people in general, or at least young men in general, have a reputation for being overconfident.
Of course, this is a broad generalization, but seems to fit where I'm living right now, but it's all anecdotal as it's based on my own perceived view of things of course.
That's a bit different than when I think of young men in general being more confident than they ought to be. It has more to do with the goal: status within a group vs putting effort into finding what you believe is true and accurately representing that truth potentially at a social cost.
The overconfidence is not a trait endemic only to male "nerds".
Of course, it's still helpful to concede that humans should recognize and be aware of that weakness in themselves. Overconfidence is the reason so many spend the healthy end years of their lives so much less well off financially than they spent their healthy prime years. It behooves us all to be on guard against our overconfidence.