
When You’re Hot, You’re Hot: Career Successes Come in Clusters - barry-cotter
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/career-hot-streaks
======
elgenie
I'm a bit skeptical.

They looked at scientists (citations), artists (painting prices), and film
directors (imdb ratings). The question is whether the works that they're
looking at are actually independent.

For scientists, it's rather unlikely that, having discovered a rich vein of
research, a scientist would put out a single perfect paper and then never
revisit the topic. Instead, I'd expect several papers exploring aspects of the
research, which would get cited where those aspects are applicable; that
pattern would produce several highly cited papers which look like a 'hot
streak' but are actually just one piece of work.

For film directors, the Peter Jackson example the article gives is similar:
the three Lord of the Rings movies are a 'hot streak' consisting of the
director repeatedly putting together the same actors playing the same
characters in the same story.

For artists, they're using the art market, in which prices are determined by
the opinions of critics, gallerists, and other experts herding towards a
consensus about importance and quality, as a proxy for quality. A conclusion
that "the stuff artist X was doing during this period was important" would
naturally produce a cluster of works escalating in price.

My expectation would be that after such effects are accounted for Einstein's
_anno mirablis_ that produced four transformative and unrelated papers would
once again appear to be extremely atypical.

~~~
mkagenius
Whatever may be the contribution of actors in addition doesn't invalidate the
results though. Whatever environment forms around the scientist may lead to a
streak of great works. The streak remains.

~~~
GavinMcG
But if we're looking at things like a trilogy, or a series of papers in the
same small area, it only appears to be a streak due to a (somewhat artificial)
decision about divvying up the results. These sorts of "streaks" could be
interpreted instead as single events, and the whole premise of the article
goes out the window.

------
georgeburdell
I wanted to dismiss this finding as some kind of reputation adder, whereby
after a hit a professional's work would receive extra positive attention that
might not have been warranted. However, but the authors appear to extend their
result to artists such as Van Gogh, who was not, to my understanding, famous
during his lifetime. According to the authors, he managed to produce his best
works in a clustered manner while the feedback from these works presumably
remained about constant.

~~~
elgenie
The research is using prices to determine the "best" paintings for an artist,
but that means that their data for art is basically determined by the not-
exactly-quality-based forces involved in pricing art. "Van Gogh painted this
one at the same time as X that sold for $$$$Y" is an effective selling point
to certain segments of that market.

------
itronitron
In general I think the clustering of success comes from recognition of
successful bits during/after repeated practice or iterative production. Once
you recognize that you are onto something you can pursue that until you either
become bored with it or the market does.

I have had two successes that kicked off hot-streaks and they each came after
several years of thrashing around, learning the space and material with which
to work. I am in the middle (hopefully) of a new thrashing phase, lots of core
competency being built up, (waxonwaxoff) some minor successes, and a whole lot
of dissatisfaction.

~~~
nur0n
I have noticed this as well. Insights don't come out of nowhere (although they
often appear to). In my experience, they are the result of focus and effort
over a period of time.

------
kamaal
This is a very under-appreciated article.

The more I look around the more I feel every one has at least the following
phases in their career- Fall, Struggle, Rise, Plateau. The thing is the order
is not guaranteed. But the phases come in parcels of decades.

The best is the order I mentioned. Sometimes the order is brutal. You go like
Rise, Plateau, Struggle, Fall. The best years happen in early life- Like 20's.
You go through it assuming this is how its going to be all life, don't invest
or save up. And then reach 40's and realize you have another 40 to go and
regardless of how hard you work, You have to suffer through the remainder.

In some people's case the big success comes in the last decade of their
working career.

Either way the most important to note is, that luck goes around. No one
remains lucky forever. One must be worried if start tossing a coin, and head
comes up straight 100 times.

~~~
scarface74
_The more I look around the more I feel every one has at least the following
phases in their career- Fall, Struggle, Rise, Plateau. The thing is the order
is not guaranteed. But the phases come in parcels of decades._

That describes my career perfectly.

(this started in the mid 90s)

Fail - first pass of my first major development project out of college. I was
the only developer at my company. I knew how to program - I done complicated
side projects in assembly and C for years before and during college.

Rise - Asked a former professor for help, came out with version 2.0 of the
project. Between two raises, a basically guaranteed 20^ bonus, and changing
jobs, I was making $40K more in 4 years.

Plateau - next 8 years, took my eye off the ball, stayed at the one job too
long and between bonuses being cut, and 3% raises, only made $7K more in year
9 than I made in year 2.

Plateau #2 - I changed jobs, learned a lot and muddled my way through the
recession for 3 years.

Rise - over the next 5 years, changed jobs 4 times and made $55K more at the
end.

For context, because of the mistake made by staying at a job too long up until
2008 and focuses on always getting jobs where I’m barely qualified to learn
and build my resume, I’ve been under the median salary for my market for my
years of experience since then. So I’m definitely not trying to brag. I’m also
not in Silicon Valley. I am in a major metropolitan city.

------
k__
Can confirm.

Got 4000 stars on GitHub and suddendly a publisher offered me a book deal.

Had some interviews and people told me, they already knew me from the news,
where I got to via the 4k GitHub stars.

~~~
52-6F-62
Please do elaborate if you can.

~~~
k__
I wrote a React tutorial in 2015.

A React core dev starred it on GitHub.

I got about 4k stars for this and some news coverage (front-end/JS/React news)

Some publisher asked me if I want to turn it into a book, so he can sell it
for/with me.

Later I had a few interviews where I was asked to show my GitHub account. When
the interviewers saw the 4k repo they told me they read about it a few days
ago in the news and now they were impressed because they talking to the
creator of it in person.

------
caseysoftware
I wonder how much of it is having one breakout hit drives more attention
towards their later ones and helps them have better resources (budget, staff,
equipment, etc).

Works that might have ignored or simply missed earlier now get more attention.

And works that might have failed due to lack of resources now have a better
shot.

------
shoyer
i don’t think it’s so much that people become “hot” as people tend to work on
the same thing for a while. So of course your biggest hits will be in close
proximity to your next biggest hits — they are variations on the same theme!
Hot topics, not hot people.

I would be quite surprised if patterns like Einstein’s annus mirabelus are
actually the norm, with four largely unrelated breakthroughs in the same year.

------
Xcelerate
It would be interesting to know how these "hot streaks" coincide with personal
events occurring in people's lives.

------
gargarplex
[http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~mozer/Teaching/syllabi/7782/read...](http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~mozer/Teaching/syllabi/7782/readings/gilovich%20vallone%20tversky.pdf)

~~~
elgenie
… is the first paper cited in the abstract of the paper in the article:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0315-8](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0315-8)

------
sarosh
Link to the actual paper
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01804](https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01804)

------
sinatra
Exciting research for someone who did their best work recently. But maybe
scary for someone who think their best work happened few years back.

------
vowelless
What about Jeff Dean?

~~~
nostrademons
Between 2000-2004: GFS, GroupVarInts, Snappy, Protocol Buffers, Google's
cluster-management system, MapReduce, AdSense, BigTable, & a critical part of
the Search serving stack that doesn't appear to be public.

Between 2011-2015: LevelDB, Google Brain, another important internal project
that I don't think is public, and TensorFlow.

Between 2004-2011: Spanner, some work on Google Translate, and consultation
for the replacements for GFS, Proto1, and MapReduce.

Certainly seems like clusters to me.

~~~
stygiansonic
Isn’t that just one big cluster from 2000-2015? Or, was that your point?

~~~
nostrademons
It's two clusters, one centered around big data from 2000-2004, and another on
large-scale machine-learning from 2011-2015. The middle period from 2004-2011
mostly just featured Spanner and helping other people pick up the torch for
his accomplishments of 2000-2004. While Spanner is great and last I heard had
one big client inside Google, it's hardly as impactful as GFS, Protobufs,
MapReduce, Google's serving system, and BigTable were, nor as Brain,
TensorFlow, and that other internal project are now.

------
lettergram
I think it may have to do more with one idea triggering another. For instance,
Einsteins papers were all pretty much the "logical" conclusion of a single
idea - mearly separated by publication date.

In my own life, I can witness similar events in collegues and myself. It may
also be that others take a "hot streak" train of thought, style, premise, and
once it becomes common place, that hot streak or cluster ceases to be
relevant.

~~~
SatvikBeri
Einstein's annus mirabilis ("miracle year") in 1905 involved publishing 4
excellent papers, covering some very different ideas: the photoelectric
effect, brownian motion, mass-energy equivalence, and special relativity. It's
true that he later focused on relativity, but the photoelectric effect and
brownian motion are still quite different.

~~~
ISL
Agreed. The photoelectric effect paper revolutionized quantum physics, the
brownian-motion paper revolutionized statistical mechanics, and relativity
changed everything.

They are _really_ different papers, each of which most physicists would be
extremely blessed to have just one in their lifetimes.

------
flashgordon
Damn. Could it mean if you can reflect and pinpoint your glory years being a
while in the past then you are screwed?

~~~
withdavidli
I mean, is your career finished? Reading this, I wondered if there were any
other clusters that would have been the glory years, but later on the person’s
accomplishments were so much better it completely eclipses their past glory.

It seems the researchers concentrated on creative careers. Wonder if it is
applicable to more corporate standardized careers and how would they would
measure it. The title implies careers in general, but I don’t find what the
article says to support the careers in general.

Would also warn against using this as self fulling prophecy.

~~~
MoBattah
If you were to study this for corporate standardized careers, how would you go
about getting data?

I can't think of a reliable, detailed, readily available source of info like
that. Maybe LinkedIn for profiles that explicitly state education years (HS
and B.S. to estimate age) and then somehow filter through and classify job
titles?

Several issues not including users who state themselves "Founder", "CEO", for
MLM schemes. Maybe you could cut the population down to users who have had
software titles.

~~~
ghaff
I expect it would be effectively impossible. The meaning of titles vary
markedly between companies, a lot of companies don't even have well-
standardized titles, and people often don't list a succession of titles within
a given company. And I'm not sure how any of that maps to success anyway. Even
if you had salary info, which you don't, that's only one metric and, for many,
not even the most relevant one.

~~~
MoBattah
Perhaps data from large HR departments would be useful. Although that would
limit it to people who stay at the same company.

Brings another question, is it possible to find out which two companies in the
world have the most overlap between employees? To clarify, two companies which
a majority of knowledge workers jump between.

------
nsxwolf
Can’t wait for my first cluster!

