Keeping our door open
Richard Hamming, a legendary computer scientist made the following observation1:
I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
I think the same goes for companies which keep their doors open and which don’t. I have seen companies who keep their “door closed”. They are in stealth mode or are very secretive about their work. They don’t talk about how they did something, why they did it and what lessons they learned. In the short term they are more efficient, they save time from the communication overhead, but I believe they lose out in the long term because they lose touch with reality and what’s important.
At Neera, we like to keep our doors open. I believe you have to be open to opportunities, open to learnings, open to be judged, open to change and only then you can be open to awesomeness.
That’s why I am blogging regularly about Neera. That’s why we are not in stealth mode, and that’s why I encourage our interns Raghav and Sahil to regularly share their work, and regularly seek outside help. I’ll be honest, putting yourself out there is scary at times, and it has its risks, but I believe it's worth it.
This is one my favourite talks, 45 minutes well spent 😄
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html (Transcript if you prefer reading over listening)