This week’s “Ask a ScienceBlogger” is an interesting one, but *very* tricky to answer.
\nThe question was proposed by fellow SBer [Dave Munger:][munger] **”What’s a time in your
\ncareer when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or
\nset your career back?”**
\n[munger]: http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/cognitivedaily\/
\nI have to tread carefully while answering this one. It’s a good question, but it involves people who *could* be reading the blog.
\nOverall, I’ve been remarkably lucky in my career. For the most part, I’ve had excellent
\nmentors who’ve been kind and helpful, and I’ve done my best to listen to them, and not
\nscrew things up badly enough for them to really tear into me. But no one in a research career can escape complete unscathed. So I’ve got my own war stories of the ways that I’ve been shredded. And the effect\/outcome has varied enormously.<\/p>\n
\n### Grad School: Finding the Right Research Community
\nThe obvious place to start is grad school. Back then, I was doing work in parallel computing.
\nThe particular area that I was focused on was what’s now a very hot topic called [“grid
\ncomputing”][grid]. At the time, thought, it was very much *not* an area of interest. Back
\nthen, the big interest was in massively parallel supercomputers, and how to compile
\nnumerically intensive array-based code so that it could take advantage of the superfast
\nhardware. But I didn’t care. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. And the result was that
\nit was almost impossible for me to publish my work.
\nI got some positively *brutal* reviews. What was depressing about that wasn’t just the negativity of the reviews, but the sheer *pointlessness* of them. They weren’t really criticizing the quality of the work – they were judging it as something that it wasn’t: everything parallel was viewed through the lens of array-based supercomputing, and my work
\nwas not intended as that, and it was terrible for it. It got to the point where the last
\npaper I submitted in grad school repeated the phrase “While this does not perform well on
\nnumerical array based code, that is not it’s intended problem domain” in no less than **six** different places in a ten-page paper. And still came back with a rejection where the reviews basically said “Yeah, but it doesn’t work on numerical array based code”.
\nWhat did I learn from that? As a researcher, you’re a member of a community. You need to
\nconsider the community when you’re doing the work. That doesn’t mean doing things that you
\nthink are irrelevant, but it does mean that *framing* your work so that it fits in with some
\ncommunity is an absolutely essential step. I could have done nearly the same work, but
\npresented it in terms of distributed computing rather than parallel computing, and fit nicely
\ninto the distributed programming community. It would have amounted to taking the research
\nagenda I was interested in, and reordering it a little, but that wouldn’t have been a big
\ndeal. But because I believed in it as parallel computing, I insisted on publishing it in the
\nparallel programming community, and got burned as a result. I don’t mean to say that the
\nright way to be a researcher is to pile on to whatever is hot and trendy today; but rather that you need to understand research communities, and learn how to frame your work so that it will be seen by the people who will appreciate it. When I was in grad school, the kind of work
\nI was doing simply *was not* of any interest to the parallel programming community; trying to
\nforce them to look at it was a waste of my time. But there were communities that would
\nhave been very interested in it, had I taken the time to learn about them and present it to
\nthem in the correct way.
\n### Work: Standing Up for Myself
\nI’ve got two other stories about being harshly criticized that I think are interesting; both led to the same conclusion, but in very different ways.
\nAt one point not too long after grad school, I worked for a manager who was very manipulative.
\nHe constantly tore me down, criticized everything I did, shredded every idea I proposed, and
\ngenerally tried to make me believe I was an idiot, so that I would quietly and meekly do
\nwhatever he wanted me to do. It was a horrible experience; I already had a tendency to be
\ninsecure, and being told day in and day out that *every* idea I had was ridiculous, every line
\nof code I wrote was terrible, every word that came out of my mouth was stupid just reinforced
\nthat.
\nI eventually got out of that situation through nothing more than pure luck, and under the
\ntutelage of my new manager, learned that I wasn’t an idiot, that I could have good ideas
\nsometimes, and that I had to be able to stand up for myself. What I learned from the new
\nmanager was that there is no excuse for that kind of abuse – not for the manager dishing it
\nout, and not for the managee taking it. There will always be asshole managers – but an abusive
\nmanager\/employee relationship like that can only exist because *both people* allow it to.
\nIn my case, even if I truly *were* as stupid and awful as that manager kept telling me I was,
\nthat’s no way to treat an employee. A *good* manager with a poorly performing employee should
\neither work with them to improve their work, or fire them. And a good employee should know
\nthat as well, so that if their manager is treating them as a poorly performing employee, but
\nnot doing anything to help them improve, they need to stand up to the criticism, and do what’s
\nnecessary to fix things *for themselves* – either by confronting the manager, by taking the
\nmatter to an higher level manager or ombudsman, or by quitting and finding a different job.
\nThe last little story of criticism is the happiest one. It involves the same good manager who
\nI worked for in the second half of the previous story. After I’d worked for him for several
\nyears, and my third project for him was finishing up, I wanted to get into something called
\nsoftware configuration management. He was absolutely opposed to my doing that; he said that
\nthere was simply *no way* that I should waste my time running down that rat-hole. And that
\nmade me reconsider. But I’d learned from my earlier experiences. I spent some time looking at
\nthe problem, looking at research communities, and looking at communities inside of the
\ncompany, and I was *still* convinced that getting into SCM was the right thing to do. So I
\nput together all of the information I’d gather into a research plan, and convinced him to let me spend at least *some* of my time working on it. He ended up getting
\npromoted to another job, and transferred me to yet another manager, who ended up being the
\nbest manager I ever heard; the work that he’d initially discouraged, but grudgingly let me try
\nturned into the best work I’ve ever done, and 10 years later, I’m still working in SCM, and loving it.
\nBut as happy as I am with where I wound up, I’m very grateful for that criticism that he
\ngave me. He was right that getting into that area was *not* going to be an easy task.
\nHis criticism made me take the time to really methodically think it through: to think about the communities that I needed to work with, to think about the best way to frame the work, and to carefully plan out the right way to approach and prioritize the work. There’s no way that
\nI would have been as successful in my new area if he *hadn’t* forced me to do that.
\nI’ll be starting on a new project towards the middle of next year (but still in SCM), and
\nI’m going to attack my ideas and plans in exactly the way that I had to do to convince
\nthat manager to let me work on that old project. It was the right way to approach
\na new piece of work. I didn’t know that before, but his *constructive* criticism,
\nwhile harsh, was absolutely appropriate, and taught me something that I really needed to know.
\n[grid]: http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Grid_computing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week’s “Ask a ScienceBlogger” is an interesting one, but *very* tricky to answer. The question was proposed by fellow SBer [Dave Munger:][munger] **”What’s a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back?”** [munger]: http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/cognitivedaily\/ I have to tread carefully […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chatter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-40","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}