Athletes/musicians pursue fundamentals more rigorously than knowledge workers

The force of competition at work. There are vanishingly few desirable opportunities in music and sport, and many potential contenders who will be selected on their individual skills and performance vying for those spots. Often to put in the hours needed to be competitive you have to also love the game; in all fields including knowledge work I’d speculate the top performers are more likely to enjoy the activity for its own sake than the median performer.

Knowledge work like programming is just much less competitive. In a graduating class of 5000 computer science majors at a good university, I’d be surprised if the majority fail to “make it” to a 100k job and be able to support themselves. Once you secure a spot in the workforce it’s pretty easy to hang onto it as an average contributor without much objective measure or comparison against your peers.

Compare to sport, at the same university maybe there are 50 spots on a sports team, and 10 good teams at the school. What percent of kids who start out playing a sport at 10 years old get to have one of those spots, and what percent of those who make the college team go on to make 100k, support their family etc playing the sport?

That competition forces rigor - if I had to compete like that to get a software job, maybe I’d be “practicing scales” on the weekend too, not just when gearing up for interviews.

If you want to look at something specific like software engineering, it is not even a little bit similar to being an athlete or musician.

Athletes and musicians are performers. They are repeating a set sequence of movements over and over. They are reacting to the same situation with minor variations over and over.

If your knowledge work is in any way similar to that, then it should have already been automated. Probably by you, if not someone else before.

And there is no live requirement for doing programming while someone watches in a particular time frame. In fact, it's better to take your time. That will allow you to solve more difficult problems more robustly.

I would almost say that programming is just about the opposite of something performative like a sport or playing music.

You can get better at reading and solving problems by practicing that. But I don't see how toy exercises are usually important at all for professional programmers. Much less something like reading for the sake of practice.

This is something I am currently thinking about. I am a software engineer who also happens to be a amateur musician. I used to do at least 2h of exercise on my instrument for a year, and then not less than that for many years after that. Lots of time I did allocate to fundamentals and standard songs I did not want to lose - and even today, more than a decade after my peak and active time, I have a feeling of where I am skillwise when I comes to those things I practised.

But for software engineering? This seems a lot harder to me. What seems to make most sense to me currently is really high-level stuff like "build up a local dev environment from scratch", "implement a minimal change than is visible in the frontend, but results in a change to the data storage in backend" and "write an integration test". Those seem to touch on many areas of skill and should be "trainable" in some sense, making them a good target of deliberate practice.

Thoughts or experiences anyone? :)

Slightly off topic.

But I feel for a lot of "knowledge work" what is proclaimed to be the fundamentals and what the actually fundamentals are diverge quite a bit.

E.g. if automata theory a fundamental of (generic) software development. IMHO it's not. Sure it's a fundamental of many things you use for software development (e.g. programming languages, compilers, various "foundation libraries" like regex etc.). It's also a neat tool to have from time to time. But definitely not a fundamental for most software development jobs.

Through it's also a bit a question about what you define as "fundamentals". E.g. there are "fundamentals somewhat needed to understand at least somewhat to _effectively_ improve yourself" at least if you want to improve above a certain (often medium skill level) point. E.g. how colors work (physically and mentally) for painting and/or graphics design. And "fundamentals the science is technically based on but it kinda doesn't matter much for using it". E.g. a lot of things related to Chomsky-Hierarchie and grammars is for most software developers most times irrelevant. Not always, sure. But most times you end up needing this stuff at work you should pause and wonder "is that a good idea?". Because lets be honest while it's often fun, most times you are reinventing a wheel or making things more complicated then it should be or less maintainable etc. Sometimes in a subtle way. (E.g. custom config file format instead of leveraging existing formats like json, toml, etc.).

Athletes and musicians pursue fundamentals because they have time; their “work” occurs in intense but short bursts of performances, leaving them the rest of their days to practice. Knowledge workers don’t “practice” because their job (long-term research or whatever) demands much more time and commitment.

Many top-tier knowledge workers are also teachers, who review their fundamentals every time they teach them, and whose ideas are regulary vetted students in class discussions.

This doesn't seem to take into account that professional athletes and musicians work very few hours in a year. Imagine if programmers were like NFL players, working for four 15-minute sessions, seventeen times a year.

The article starts with a legitimate problem but meanders to false or suboptimal solutions. It is true that, for example, when I read a text, I can usually only (consciously) remember a few high-level points. But the solution is not note-taking, spaced repetition, or "Inbox Zero". This might be anecdotal, but I have tried all these and failed to discern any noticeable improvements. One technique the article mentions that might work is Ben Franklin's practice of rewriting a previously read text in one's own words.

I'm probably missing the forest for the trees but elite player and world class musician are the p99 in their fields. I'm pretty sure some top notch at FAANG, medical research etc do at very least teaching/mentoring other people, which makes them go through "the basics" often enough.

Also, muscle coordination is something completely different from "knowledge work", unless the knowledge worker needs to learn by heart the Hamlet.

The piece compares exceptional athletes with average knowledge workers.

It’s not interesting to compare an extraordinary athlete - fill in your favorite professional hall-of-famer or multiple Olympic gold medalist here - to your average knowledge worker. Of course the extraordinary person does things differently.

More interesting to compare an extraordinary knowledge worker instead: top-tier CEO, famed author, Noam Chomsky, Einstein, whatever.

Speaking from personal experience: tt depends on what level of a musician you aim to become. If you intend to be one of the top classical solo musicians (violin, cello, piano, flue etc.) you will have to practice 8h a day - every day - for years. Even if you "only" aim for a top position on a major orchestra.

I have been suffering of this lately, ironically because I'm venturing into business.

I find huge gaps in my ability to rigorously read (and push through) boring (but important) paperwork. Take notes and do the required work afterwards (or take an important decision because of what I have read).

I find it very difficult to organize myself (and others) to do chores especially ones that are very disruptive and not technical.

I'm starting to see the value of project managers and other non-technical or semi-technical people in the companies. Their work now seems much more difficult than I imagined previously. Their skills are much less "interesting" and maybe "easier" in isolation, but in the same time they need to perform at high levels constantly.

This is simply a case of "How good do you need/want to be?"

This is everywhere. Humans can get remarkably competent at lots of things with a small investment of time (100 hours or so) and some intermittent practice.

The problem is that reaching the next layer almost always takes a big jump in time commitment. Want to be better at that foreign language? Yeah, 1000+ hours of practice and memorization incoming. Want to play something on guitar other than Wonderwall? Yeah, 1000+ hours of scales and metronome work. Want to win more at Chess. Yep, 1000+ hours of tactics along with some basic opening memorization.

I agree that practice can be tremendously valuable in knowledge work, but at some point in the skill curve, once you have built up a the ability to accurately self-evaluate the value of practice goes down because the work itself is the practice.

Benjamin Franklin was referenced in the article, and there are far more examples in his life than just the writing exercises where he employed deliberate practice to improve his ability in an area. But he didn't continue these once we was rocking these skills at a world class skill level - instead he switched to practicing new skills he wanted to add.

But if you haven't tried doing so deliberate practice - I'd highly recommend it.

For athletes, everything is less subjective. Diet, gear, tactics, strategies either produces results or they don't.

It varies. If doing quantitative or research work, there is a better pursuit of fundamentals, but even so, it's no more than is necessary. Yet, it is fundamentals that push boundaries, as for example with innovative neural network architectures.

+1 for hard columns. I can't stand fluid web interfaces, it makes it really hard for mind my to remember the placement/visualize the words I've previously read. I did not have this problem with text books.

As a knowledge worker who went from math academia to software engineering to management, it turns out the fundamentals of each job haven’t actually mattered that much for the next job.

this fits... i'm constantly amazed by how bad most programmers are at maths and problem solving, and how few of them do anything in their own time to improve their skills.

Comparing top tier anything to normal people is apples to oranges.

I am a knowledge worker, but I don't often take notes in meetings, because the purpose of meetings to to get agreement, not to forge new knowledge. Sure there are minutes and actions. But a meeting notes is not a "kata" that I practice to be better at my job.

I work in a research org at a FAANG, which supposedly puts me in the "top tier". I do not have a doctorate, or a masters. The thing that makes me "good" is that I am able to communicate how to do x with y, and direct people to use z with building blocks omega and theta. the thing I practice every day is working out how to translate an infrastructure problem to a researcher who couldn't give a shit and just wants put what they have running locally on the GPU farm, but faster.

That is my kata, that is what I strive to be better at.

I write to explain, not remember. that's just a nice side effect. Is that writing perfect prose? fuck no, but its a fucksite better than most of my peers. It has to be because I'm a shit engineer otherwise.

> People seem to forget most of what they read

Yes, and musicians forget music. Sure they have a repertoire of core pieces that they can pull out, but they are often learning one off pieces, or semi-sight reading stuff (session musicians are fucking ace by the way. Some are able to read music like a news reader does an autocue.) That core repertoire is kept alive because they need to play it often. For me, my professional repertoire is threading, message passing, and large scale dataflow. But my sight reading is computer vision shit.

In the same way a phd student will master and expand a tiny part of human knowledge, a musician will tend to specialise in a few composers, styles or periods.

> confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable understanding

Again, thats not what a knowledge worker does. Learning for fun is not the same as core knowledge/skill required for someone to perform a job. Thats someone pissing about and learning new things for enjoyment, and they should fucking do it regardless of the snobbery from people who want "completeness"

One of the amusing things about this whole argument is that the writer must have been able to write, spell and read well from a young age. The ancient greeks would have been very suspicious of that kind of working, because they thought that writing was the death of memory, deliberation and debate. Socrates would have particularly pissed off with the assertions on memory.

I couldn't write meaningfully until I learnt to touch type. So for me, everything was memory. I work differently to most people, so I'm not arrogant enough to produce sources and say that I have the best way to be a knowledge worker. I don't but it works for me. The author would do well to remember that untested assertions are not science. (yes, even if you cite papers.)

I'm curious....

How many of you use ZettelKasten note taking?

What is the underlying technology for notes.andymatuschak.org? Seems like a nice note-taking application.

Comparing top-tier athletes and top-tier musicians against average knowledge workers will lead to this sort of result.

I suspect that top-tier athletes at least are not spending 40 hours a week on training and performing. Writers, too. Musicians I am not sure about.

The saying goes "smooth and slow to go fast". It applies to all sorts of physical abilities: playing an instrument, driving, motorcycle riding, shooting, and athletics.

There's a lot of neural and muscle learning and tuning involved to specialize in those skills. But in order to start, you need to learn and tune the right things. As they also say, it very hard to unlearn things.

It what amazes men when I watch baseball (I'm a nut for baseball). We watch these guys perform "routine" stuff on the field every day, but we also watch them bumble, slip, drop things, miss the balls, etc. And these are the REALLY GOOD players. There's 10,000 other players in the minor leagues. They try to make it look easy, but demonstrably, it's not.

But if you watch how they train, it's all about fundamentals. Arm angle, foot placement, where to look, when to look, and that's even before you talk about "baseball" knowledge -- knowledge of the game itself, field awareness, etc. This is just getting the ball in the mitt or the bat on the ball.

In our field?

Not so much. It's far less important.

My favorite anecdote was when a junior programmer at work came to me and we were talking about his project, a little GUI front end to a SQL database. He was done with the project, and I asked him how it went. He said it went fine, but he was confused about something. He wasn't sure what the difference was between RAM and disk.

So, here was a fellow, who accomplished something, using then modern tools while essentially ignorant of how a computer even works. This is a testament to the tools and platforms of the day. How with just some syntax knowledge, and a bit of a logical head on his shoulders, he can accomplish productive work.

For many, computer work is borderline blue collar work. It's assembly line stuff, know what to do, not necessarily how or why it's done. Drag and drop, cut and paste, commit it and ship it. And now, of course, we have the AIs to help.

This is not a bad thing.

I've managed to get through my entire career without a deep understanding of networking, firewalls, BGP, routing, all of that stuff. Can I configure a DNS server? Nope. Despite the Petabytes of information I've shipped hither and yon across such things, when it comes down to the core level? The lower layers of the stack? "Contact your Network Administrator" because that's not me.

I am ignorant of cache lines and such like that. I know they exist, I certainly understand what they do, but I've never given them any consideration in my work. None of that has ever been necessary.

It's certainly valuable to get exposure to all of the parts of puzzle, even if you don't have a full understanding of them. I know I resort to core fundamentals about how things work to understand problems all the time. But the truth is, for a lot of the work available, and that needs to be done, that level of detail is unnecessary.

I've worked with folks who are fascinated with the craft and field, always learning and growing. And I've worked with the 9-5 folks, who learn precisely what they need to accomplish the job, and just...stop. Do the work, but just the work. They have other interests elsewhere.

Doesn't mean they can't do the job though. These are not bad people.