Desire Problems , Not Prestige.
Desire Problems , Not Prestige.
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Many people define themselves by their job titles. “I am a software engineer. I am a founder. I am a venture capitalist.” They spend most of waking hours focused on this job, raising an interesting question: What is a job, really?
A job is a role that solve a specific problem; a software engineer is someone who works on problems that require software skills to solve.1 Uber wants to figure out the best way to re-route their cars, Doordash wants to add a add-ons menu when users checkout and UCSF hosptial needs to ensure its appointments run on time. 2
Without the problem, no job.
But software problems are merely one part of the problem spectrum. Being a software engineer is a useful skillset for software problems but no one has all the skills to solve every problem to the degree they want.3
Enter specialization of labor. By having individuals focus on narrow areas of expertise, I can get my vegan-reserve-kimchi, you can get your Huel and the Safeway grocer can offer paper-or-plastic-? to every customer without any of us being the wiser. However, this degree of specialization poses a risk of disconnection from the bigger picture, a level of disconnection that’s already occurring.
If you’re a Google backend engineer, can you explain how your work impacts the company's revenue and quality of user experience? In a company of 100,000+ people and tens of billions in revenue, probably not. Work becomes abstract, detached from tangible outcomes.4
This detachment is fueled in part by our schooling. We're taught solutions before problems. We learn calculus without understanding that its capacity to optimize buisness production and profit. We write essays on our “thinking” in English class yet haven’t read War and Peace and chewed it enough to have an initial position. We memorize redox equations in Chemistry to regurgitate on exams and yet drive over highway overpasses with little comprehension for rust prevention.
By presenting solutions as starting points, we’re given the impression that problems are secondary. But when we lose sight of the problem we’re trying to solve, our work becomes untethered and measureless.5 Buisness and innovation represent the precise opposite of this.
The Problem-Minded Approach
Entrepreneurial thinking is valuable precisely because it’s grounded in feedback; entrepreneurs get strong signal on whether their beliefs hold true.6 If a company gets too focused on their offerings and loses sight of evolving customer needs, they risk becoming irrelevant.7 The most successful buisness are those that remain connected to the people they serve.
You know where else this holds true?
Innovation.8
The laws of physics do not give a shit what you believe.
In my previous job working on high power, wireless power transmitters, we were pushing the boundaries of radio frequency technology.
According to textbooks, to do innovation properly, you first identify a problem you want to solve. Then you create a question, research it, create a hypothesis, conduct an experiment, collect data and draw a conclusion. That’s the scientific method.
In reality, it’s far messier. You get a group of very smart people into a room. Some of them are experts right up to edge of what's known, some are greenhorns, with most being in-between. You come up with a few design choices (I think it should look like this based on X as a engineer draws on a whiteboard while others nod on or ask questions). People finally agree on a approach, assign a few roles and engineers then jury-rig things together (that wire should hold, this setup looks right). Experiments are conducted and a few captured metrics are used to form the next hypothesis (based on X,Y,Z metrics, we should create design B). Rinse and repeat.
It requires teamwork, failure and iteration; there is no Tony Stark lab, no eureka moment. It’s ugly and most attempts fail, but each failure teaches you something.
Meaningful work and real progress are birthed from repeated failures with sparse wins, not applying pre-packaged solutions.
While job titles, specialization, and solutions are useful, they are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Rigid thinking, dogma and narrow-mindedness remain great dangers and being grounded in what you’re trying to solve is highly underrated. As major changes are underway in the world, those who keep their ear to ground and seek problems will win.
- Kiran
Thanks to Claude and ChatGPT for editing.
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Kiran’s Gems 💎
“You can see the future first in San Francisco. ... Behind the scenes, there's a fierce scramble to secure every power contract still available for the rest of the decade, every voltage transformer that can possibly be procured. ... The AGI race has begun. ... Before long, the world will wake up. ... Let me tell you what we see.”
’s Situational Awareness essay is a great read for anyone interested in understanding where and how AI will affect the future & what we should do about it.“[a] cheems mindset is automatically dismissing an idea on the basis that it cannot be done, or would be hard to do- it would be cheems mindset to oppose introducing rent control legislation because you were worried about staffing levels in MCHLG, for example.”
’s Cheems Mindset is a good explanation for why we struggle to get things done.“Remember the maternal mortality crisis? In 2022 and 2023, a lot of people were wringing their hands about how American mothers were dying at skyrocketing rates…There’s just one problem: The U.S. maternal mortality increase was fake. It was a thing that never happened.”
’s How many of our "facts" about society, health, and the economy are fake? points to why diversity of ideas and criticism are a healthy component of a functioning society.
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Questions: How many software engineers would there be if software was not intellectually challenging and pays six figures? Therefore a better self-descriptor may be “I work on software problems that are intellectually stimulating and compensate well.”And this is not taking into account that a person’s interest may not be software related at all. For some, it may be “I work on ANY problem that is intellectually stimulating and compensates well.” and for others, it may be mission driven (“I work on any problem that lessens world hunger.”),etc.
The idea of wanting a job is therefore rather confusing as it’s placing the cart ahead of the horse. Saying you want a particular job without understanding what specific problem it addresses is like hiring a plumber when you have no stuck pipes. Or buying dog food for a dog that doesn’t exist. Buying milk if you’re lactose intolerance. Okay, you might do the last one for taste but I digress.
Alternatively, doing the opposite (making the work tie directly to the larger mission) can be incredibly motivating. Elon Musk understands this. “Coming at the same issue from the bottom-up direction, technical ICs often don't have the context of the full strategic vision, and non-technical leaders often struggle to communicate it downwards in ways that are meaningful to the technical implementors. This is another thing Musk is better than almost anyone at; taking a lofty objective and chaining it down to an individual's role. I heard a SpaceX employee giving an answer in an interview like "Our mission is to become an inter-planetary species. To do that we must first colonize Mars. To do that we need to build a heavy lift rocket (Starship). To do that we need to build a more powerful engine. To build our new engine we need this valve assembly to work; my mission is to optimize this valve to X performance requirement".” Book Review: Elon Musk - by Scott Alexander (astralcodexten.com)
Beliefs can also be considered to be a type of solution. And with some beliefs, it can be challenging to determine its validity because it is rarely questioned. For example, I believed goldfish had a 3 second memory span. Turns out they can remember things for several months and can distinguish between shapes, colors & sounds. But who would go around questioning people on that? There must be quite a few tramautized goldfish in many a dentists’ offices.
With AI, we'll see that businesses that remain problem-orientated rather than solution-orientated will be more likely to thrive. Adapt or die.
This is to say, at least in economic terms.
What exactly is innovation? In- meaning into, -nov meaning new, -ation meaning a process. A process that brings the new into existence.