March 02, 2026
Dijkstra's advice to a young scientist
Anyone remotely associated with Comptuer Science should know about Dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra. Here I reproduce his famous “advice to a young scientist”. (The original PDF is available here.)
- Raise your standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.
- We all like our work to be socially relevant and scientifically sound. If we can find a topic satisfying both desires, we are lucky; if the two targets are in conflict with each other, let the requirement of scientific soundness prevail.
- Never tackle a problem of which you can be pretty sure that (now or in the near future) it will be tackled by others who are, in relation to that problem, at least as competent and well-equipped as you are.
- Write as if your work is going to be studied by a thousand people.
- Don’t get enamoured with the complexities you have learned to live with (be they of your own making or imported). The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world’s richest source of rewarding challenges.
- Before embarking on an ambitious project, try to kill it.
- Remember that research with a big R is rarely mission-oriented and plan in terms of decades, not years. Resist all pressure - be it financial or cultural - to do work that is of ephemeral significance at best.
- Don’t strive for recognition (in whatever form): recognition should not be your goal, but a symptom that your work has been worthwhile.
- Avoid involvement in projects so vague that their failure could remain invisible: such involvement tends to corrupt one’s scientific integrity.
- Striving for perfection is ultimately the only justification for the academic enterprise: if you don’t feel comfortable with this goal - e.g. because you think is too presumptuous - stay out!
Posted by ankit at March 2, 2026 12:02 PM
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How very right and appropriate - and so simply put!
* Before embarking on an ambitious project, try to kill it.
- By far the best advice given. The last project I started out, had a major mid-life crisis and only after putting a lot of energy / thought was I able to save it. Might've saved me a lot of trouble if I had thought it through *before* I started off ...
My boss is very fond of killing projects.
I used to wonder why :)
Well I guess this advice is relevant for everyone related to research.. not just computer science..
Liked and agreed to most of what was said..except maybe
Never tackle a problem of which you can be pretty sure that (now or in the near future) it will be tackled by others who are, in relation to that problem, at least as competent and well-equipped as you are.
Seems to me as though there maybe a lot of assumptions going into that one.