Comment by Erikun
2 years ago
It might be from the great book The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner (p 135).
'In the midst of Shannon’s career, some lawyers in the patent department at Bell Labs decided to study whether there was an organizing principle that could explain why certain individuals at the Labs were more productive than others. They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, “he drew people out, got them thinking.” More than anything, Nyquist asked good questions.'
The most impressive thing about this story is that they figured out the answer. They did the research, and nailed down that it was Nyquist who was was the productivity booster. It’s the exact opposite of the OP’s story, where management tried to fire the Nyquist-equivalent.
They found an answer that felt right to them. The reseachers weren't blinded to the context they were working in, and their hypothesis is essentially unfalsifiable so I would take it with a grain of salt.
All they figured out was that the smart people hung out together.
IMHO this is the right answer :)
Honestly, I'm kind of skeptical of the answer. I'm not saying that talking with Nyquist wouldn't be useful, probably it was, but what's stopping a dozen other things at least that useful from being part of the answer?
> I'm not saying that talking with Nyquist wouldn't be useful
No, you probably shouldn't be saying that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Nyquist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_frequency
> but what's stopping a dozen other things at least that useful from being part of the answer?
Because someone needs to act, and that's exactly what Nyquist did, in a very unobtrusive and non-confrontational manner.
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Concretely I'd suggest that Nyquist was probably most interested in lunching with other smart people who had interesting things to talk about.
I.e. there's no check or control on their output without lunch or breakfast with him, maybe it'd have been little different.
It’s a lovely story but a prime candidate for “correlation !== causation”.
Harry Nyquist isn't exactly an unknown engineer who doesn't have his own achievements, though - not sure why people are saying he would be fired in a modern company!
He doesn’t have his own achievements?
I have heard of the Nyquist frequency, the nyquist limit, the nyquist sampling rate and the Shannon nyquist theorem.
As far as I know no other individual has had this many “things” named after him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Joh...
Note that the "Known for" section on his main page has 119 elements. But they're not all named after him.
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The GP used a double negative.
Did you skip over the word "isn't"?
In the modern company good engineers are not valued.
Engineering excellence is not a prerequisite to business success. Managers know this.
Why else many things any one of us could list from the computing business.
I agree with you 100%. Management does not have an eye for software that is easy to maintain and continue to make money on 5 or 10 years down the line. Most management is thinking short term, how do I get money in MY pocket right NOW. Who cares how the business does in the long term, they'll jump ship and move on. It is the engineering that often makes a difference for long lived companies, it's just that usually the engineers and/or management isn't around long enough to reap the rewards. I try to balance engineering with product cost (I'm lucky enough where I can see the "numbers"). I try to give more to the clients that pay more, or at least create something that I can reuse in the future, while making sure what I deliver is stable and not a big ball of spaghetti to make the next developer/engineer cry at night.
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Reminds me of the adage of “solving the problem is the hard part, the hard part is figuring out the right problem to solve”.
I always remember as “questions are harder than answers”.
Wiki says it is this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Nyquist
Woah. He has a huge list of "Known for"!
Yeah that's the one! Thanks for finding the reference.
Rumour has it Nyquist was promised to be on 18 breakfasts a day to placate investors after a slow quarter.
You also need a fertile soil. In many many places, curiosity, exploration is passively frowned upon.