I’ve never really thought of my procrastination as coming from perfectionism as applied to the work I’m producing, but on reflection, I realized it often comes from self-disappointment (which is perhaps a form of perfectionism). Eg, I procrastinated on writing my research papers in grad school, but it was because I was disappointed in my ideas (or lack thereof), not because I feared not being able to make the current work sufficiently perfect.
Shortly after joining the PyTorch compiler team, I was part of a team that decided that we should build our own tensor-expression compiler for PyTorch (called NNC, although it wasn’t well-publicized) instead of using an existing one like Halide or TVM.
We ended up sinking two years into it, and never ended up with a particularly good compiler (although we did absolutely crush a couple toy benchmarks).
Arguably both sides of that tradeoff were wrong, though, as the eventually successful PyTorch 2.0 compiler (TorchInductor) was based on Triton (plus some custom higher-level scheduling logic).
Convolutions are fused into convolutions, elementwise operations are fused into convolutions, everything is inlined except where function calls are needed for pthread work units (and those work units are all custom/arbitrary).
Are you me? This is precisely what my life feels like. Honestly, one kid was actually manageable; two sort of hit the breaking point (it didn’t help that my work went to hell at the same time), but then we had twins and life now feels basically untenable with both of us working.
I love my kids profoundly, and I think in the long run I will be happier than if I’d not had them and focused on work instead (work tends not to care about you after you leave. Maybe if you’re Steve Jobs or something). But in the moment, life is pretty stressful.
> Honestly, one kid was actually manageable; two sort of hit the breaking point (it didn’t help that my work went to hell at the same time), but then we had twins and life now feels basically untenable with both of us working.
We have 3 kids, 3 years and under. Our twins are 3 and we have a 1 year old. I'm a Staff Software Engineer and my wife is a Senior Software Engineer II.
I feel like I'm perpetually treading water. There is a tug of war happening between my personal life and my professional life and it's frankly obscene. The professional life will lose if push comes to shove, and that will actively damage my employer, but my management team doesn't seem to give a shit.
I've become very Peter from Office Space about it all: I just don't care. When I feel my work-anxiety levels rising, I let it all out with a heavy sigh and stop caring. Work is work. I get my work done, but I prioritize higher quality and bug-free as much as possible. If work doesn't like this (and they don't, they really just want me to blast through my tasks -- despite the fact that some of them are extremely ambiguous at my level, things like digging through code no one has touched in 8 years to sort out performance problems; "So, you'll have that done by Thursday, right?") then that's their problem to deal with.
Honestly I’ve been longing for a linear workday. Before kids, and before the pandemic, I used to work 9-6 and I had the most fantastic work life balance. Distance running, rock climbing, etc.
Now I have “flexible” work hours, and it’s all cramming in whatever I can late at night so that I can accommodate the schedule of kids’ daycare. If we didn’t have flex hours, one of my wife or I would have no choice but to quit to manage the kids, and we’d have less income but probably be happier. But since we have the choice it’s all too tempting to keep burning the candle at both ends and the middle.
So I’m one of those people who doesn’t know how to fix anything; I wish I did! I’ll tell you what holds me back: I didn’t grow up around anyone particularly handy, so I don’t know what I don’t know.
Simple example: I was trying to hang some shades in my kid’s room. First set went in fine, second set, my drill hit something too hard for it (brick? Metal?). At this point I’m kind of stuck. I can search Google for this scenario but it’s hard to know conclusively which situation I’m in, and I don’t know how dangerous or destructive what I’m doing could be.
This is probably laughable to lots of you who know, intuitively from experience, what’s happening and what to do, but for someone who had no idea like me, it’s pretty intimidating.
(Coda: we bought stick-on shades and they were trivially easy to install and worked great)
I understand the predicament where you have a project that needs to be completed but you don't have the background skills to understand how to do it efficiently or at all.
I would like to point you to a subreddit [0] where you can get answers to questions like the one you described. There are lots of people like myself who hang out looking for inexperienced people who just need guidance since they already have the motivation.
People post everything from complex projects that took them multiple months to complete to ordinary maintenance tasks like replacing light fixtures or door knobs.
I hang out there a lot. I'm a guy who grew up fixing things and just never stopped even when I had the money to pay someone else. I (we) don't mind passing on useful skills to inexperienced people. It's very satisfying to know that someone tackled a problem that they thought was difficult and solved it using something you recommended.
You probably hit a "nail plate" or just happened to hit a drywall screw directly.
It can be really hard to start off without someone to at least bounce ideas off of over a beer; one of the nice things about knowing handy people, for sure.
>I didn’t grow up around anyone particularly handy
I grew up in a similar household. Fortunately I was the handyman for my family. I never had tools but I used to improvise. I also used to fix some of my hot wheel toy cars and I longed for a soldering iron and pliers.
Now I really wished I could learn in a more formal way on how to repair and maintain things. I have severe anxiety dealing with people and the attitude and workmanship of some of the repairmen makes my anxiety worse.
Kudos for you on starting a new life long addicting hobby. One of the things in repairs is that sometime you encounter problems that force you to learn new things. Why is there a metal or brick in your wall? What can you do next time to know if a particular wall has a metal or brick? Learning how to solve these kind of problems is what makes them so fun. I've ruined countless things over the years but managed to fixed much much more.
I was struck by this bit in the passage about hubris: “The STEM student is taught that hubris is a useful vocational skill.” I recently asked a successful senior engineer how he was able to start an influential project, and the answer came down to a combination of hubris (he had to have confidence that his solution, starting from scratch against a well-funded team, would win out) and appetite for risk.
I think he is wrong: STEM (especially programming) is excellent at proving the person to have failed.
You cannot create software without experience failure a hundred times a day.
Compare this to humanities like literature: how many times a day is a literature teacher proven to have made a mistake? How much real experience does this person have with failure? How many times have your literature teacher admitted "I made a mistake"?
So the STEM person is likely to be confident because s/he has a lot of experience with failure and know how to handle them, and how much they can delay progress.
>I think he is wrong: STEM (especially programming) is excellent at proving the person to have failed.
Yeah, i think the author has mixed STEM as a field with tech-startups business side where hustling attitude is advised and often necessary to be honest.
For what it’s worth, I’m not saying that confidence (even hubris!) is bad! Without his confidence, said senior engineer probably wouldn’t have built his successful project.
If I had any literary skill, I’d write a tragedy in which the hero’s flaw is his lack of hubris. (Perhaps it would be autobiographical - my grad school advisor said my weakness is that I’m not arrogant enough.)
This is literally true in terms of Larry Wall's comment about the three virtues of a great programmer. (Arguably he doesn't really mean it in the classical sense, but he does use the word.)
Qualities which are endearing in individuals or small teams pursuing open source projects are a lot less charming in corporations controlling aspects of one's daily lives. Larry Wall was never a corporate tycoon, nor did he (to my knowledge) aspire to be one. But even back in the day I found the hubris of e.g. Tim O'Reilly far less charming, even though it was hardly on a scale to threaten society.
Don't think this attitude is just limited to STEM though as Gioia implies. Humanities majors have plenty of hubris themselves, though it may have a different moral flavor than in the sciences. Similar career incentives though for sure.
The lack of self-awareness of the author is rather amusing. He seems to be striving to be a poster boy for the willful ignorance C.P. Snow bemoaned in The Two Cultures.
Re: maps. Eh. Some people tend to romanticize the pre-GPS era with stories of serendipitous adventures, but that doesn’t match my experience at all. My recollection is that wandering around lost was time-wasting, frustrating, and sometimes downright scary. I’m not sure I can recall a single positive unexpected experience that resulted. I don’t miss it one bit. If the price is that I sometimes ask for directions to a place I’ve been before, I’ll take the trade.
I used to do a lot of solo hiking / scrambling in the (PNW) Cascades. I rarely looked at maps when actually hiking, except to identify some landmark in the distance. I spent time (hours) casually perusing an open topo map laying somewhere at home; sometimes I'd discover that overflight photos were available at one of the libraries. =)
When in the field I rarely looked at a map to see where I was going. I never carried a compass.
Today I can get satellite photos on the internet, (quality? meh. some of the overflight photos were stereo. I suppose I could pay) but "up and down are forever".
> I assert most people will enjoy a baked potato ... about as much as garlic bread
See I'd assert the opposite, or at least the following more nuanced version, for myself:
If I make a baked potato, I'll eat it and be quite happy -- even delighted! -- with it. But! If I have to choose between a baked potato or garlic bread (say, on a restaurant menu) I'd choose the garlic bread virtually every time, unless I'm exerting Herculean levels of willpower to choose healthier options. And if I'm served a baked potato and garlic bread, I'd probably eat the potato, and then somehow find room to eat the garlic bread anyways.
I don't disagree that healthy food can be very tasty, but I mitigate my own struggles with healthy eating by "merely" never keeping unhealthy options around, so I can focus more on the joy of the healthy food, and not have to constantly choose to avoid the high-calorie treats.
Totally hear you. We just added kids 3 & 4 in the fall (twins! Yay!) and so far I’m on paternity leave and just managing a bit of a workout (push-ups, squats, etc) but I have this feeling it’s going to be really hard to balance almost anything against full time employment. I may just end up taking a 30 minute bite out of my work day and seeing how my performance reviews fair.
