Paraphrasing. Closed doors (focused work) lets you reach local minimum faster. Open doors (More connections) lets you escape local minimums.

I guess you need focused work to make progress but once in a while you need contact with others to find inspiration or new ideas.

Another one similar phrase(kinda). "If you want to go fast go alone. If want to go far go together". African proverb.

When I was piecing together how I got to be a relatively young lead developer, it came down to my open door policy. I essentially rediscovered Hamming's wisdom just by extending a policy that started with my college roommate who was struggling with our CS homework. That lead to me helping other kids in the computer lab (with C/C++ bugs, not with the algorithms), and if you have skills at <5YOE you're going to use them at work if you can, because what else can you do to not look like a newb?

But open door policy doesn't have to mean a literal open door. When I went remote I was still helping people sort out problems, and when you ask for the back story you get to find out what other teams are working on, and where 1/3 of your coworkers are all struggling with the same API. That's a lot of ammo for a Staff, Lead, or Principal-track role.

Because you understand a lot more of the project, and you already have the trust of half the org chart.

Maybe it’s more that those who work with the door open do work that is hailed as important. It might be based on the work of those that worked with the door closed, but those citations are ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Seems very simple, working more with people than with problems gets you more social capital; people gonna remember someone helping them with something relatively trivial directly more than "they saw a bunch of code commited regularly".

Probably anyone working long enough saw a case of someone being promoted over "better" technically candidates, just because he happened to be always there when important things happened.

Doors? All I’ve ever known were cubicles and open office plans. What world is this where offices have doors?

> 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.

Or you end up with the lone coder problem.

I love Richard Hamming but

> But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on

Is clearly a quote from a different era. Not only have most engineers I've known never had a tenure at a job close to 10 years, I've found the foresight/planning window of companies I've joined is shrinking each year. In the era of "AI", leadership in most companies I've been at seem to think 3 months ahead is a bit too forward looking.

Also... how many people on HN even remember having an office? I had multiple jobs early in my career where I had an actual office with a window and a door. An open door office is nothing close to the misery of sitting at a desk in an open floor plan. The fact that you could close the door means you do have the opportunity for pure focus. Even when the door was open, it was customary to knock gently on the frame after very checking if it looked like the inhabitant was focused.

Richard Hamming describes a world of research that frankly doesn't exist any more today (I know because I briefly got a taste of the old world of research 20 years ago).

> But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on

How would someone notice this? It's not like they can run multiple 10-year experiments and notice a pattern.

He delivered that speech in 1986, so this would have been based on professional experience through the 60s-70s. A time before ubiquitous electronic communications. Back then you really would have been disconnecting by keeping your office door shut and focusing on your work.

Mapping those observations to today's environment, the individual in a closed private office is more like a hermit with a mailbox but no cell/internet connection.

Research is not corporate labor. Rarely are there “good problems” to work on. I’d bet dollars to donuts 99.99999% of employed HNers could close their door at work, or work from home, rarely interact with anyone, and know exactly what needs to be worked on. It’s another CRUD app.

Conflating actual productive academic research with the mundane triviality of a day job is crazy.

You’re going to have lots of disgruntled naysayers, but this principle is 100% true.

The world is full of people who moan “why do idiots run things, get all the opportunities, make money from easy ideas.”

Meanwhile those same people fester, working away on their little corner.

This feels so pretentious. People can keep it closed or open for whatever reason they want, and it has no correlation to how they solve problems or learn.

Personally, I like it open when I'm feeling social and in a good mood, and close it when it's noisy outside and/or I need to hunker down and focus for a bit without distractions. That doesn't say anything about understanding or solving problems, other than 'sometimes people need quiet to focus' which is not a very shocking revelation.

Richard Hamming’s second most famous quote:

> I would never work in an open office big tech sweatshop, fuck that

Irony aside, this has zero relevance for your run of the mill dev. They’re not researchers working in cozy offices of 60-70s on psychics and math problems.

Also:

> 10 years

Average tenure of a tech worker is around 2-3 years, who even cares what happens in 10 years in those companies? They’re literally living quarter to quarter while VC money lasts.