The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
By Richard Hamming
Overview
Richard Hamming’s final course at the Naval Postgraduate School, distilled into a book about how to think about problems, innovation, and building a successful technical career. Written by a Bell Labs pioneer who worked alongside Claude Shannon and John Tukey, this book focuses on meta-skills for engineers and scientists.
Key Ideas
On Innovation and Creativity
- “The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers” - Focus on understanding problems deeply rather than just solving them mechanically
- Great innovations often come from asking “Why do we do it this way?” about accepted practices
- Tolerate ambiguity and work on important problems, not just urgent ones
The Hamming Questions
- “What are the important problems in your field?”
- “Why aren’t you working on them?”
- “What would you do differently if you had to start over?”
- These questions force prioritization and strategic thinking about technical careers
Learning to Learn
- Adapt to change by building learning systems, not just accumulating knowledge
- Study the fundamentals deeply - they change slower than specifics
- “What you learn from others you can use to follow; what you learn yourself enables you to lead”
Technical Leadership Principles
- Plant acorns, not oaks - Create conditions for growth rather than imposing complete solutions
- Build credibility through small wins before attempting large changes
- “Better to solve the right problem approximately than the wrong problem exactly”
On Systems Thinking
- Simple systems work, complex systems fail - resist the urge to over-engineer
- Design systems that are easy to change rather than trying to predict all future requirements
- Error correction is more valuable than error prevention in complex systems
Career Strategy
- Visibility multiplier - Great work that’s invisible is worthless for career growth
- Sell your ideas through storytelling, not just technical correctness
- Work on problems that matter to the organization, not just problems you find interesting
- “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest” - small daily improvements compound dramatically
Decision-Making in Uncertainty
- “It’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong”
- Back-of-envelope calculations beat detailed analysis for early-stage decisions
- Test assumptions early and cheaply before committing to large implementations
Practical Takeaways
For Staff Engineers:
- Ask Hamming questions monthly to ensure you’re working on high-leverage problems
- Build systems for learning new technologies rather than trying to learn everything
- Focus 20% of time on learning fundamentals that will matter in 10+ years
For Technical Leadership:
- Plant seeds of ideas and let others develop them (increases buy-in)
- Make your work visible through talks, writing, and demos
- Choose problems at the intersection of important, tractable, and interesting
For Innovation Work:
- Study the history of your field to understand why current practices exist
- Question assumptions systematically, especially those everyone agrees on
- Prototype fast, fail fast, learn fast
Why It Matters
Written by someone who witnessed the birth of information theory, coding theory, and modern computing, Hamming offers timeless principles for technical excellence. Unlike tactical programming books, this focuses on the meta-skills that separate senior ICs who execute from those who shape the future direction of technology.
The book’s emphasis on “learning to learn” is particularly relevant in 2025’s rapidly evolving AI and distributed systems landscape, where specific knowledge becomes obsolete quickly but learning systems remain valuable.
Quick Facts
- Based on Hamming’s final course taught in 1995-1996
- Author won the Turing Award in 1968
- Influenced generations of Bell Labs engineers and researchers
- Focuses on wisdom over knowledge, strategy over tactics
- Particularly relevant for engineers transitioning from senior to staff/principal levels