On the nature of our hard problems …

In my post about why you should work at NetApp, I described the four fundamental reasons as

  1. Work on something important
  2. Work on hard problems
  3. Work with intelligent people
  4. Have your contribution matter

I explained in an earlier post why what I do is important to our customers.

So now let me tackle the question of hard problems. In this post, I’ll limit myself to defining the general nature of what a hard problem for a company like NetApp is. In later posts, I’ll get into more specifics about the kinds of hard problems we work on.
The first thing to is define a hard problem. A traditional definition of a hard problem is:

A problem is fundamentally hard if no solution at any cost is known to exist, and previous attempts at solving the problem resulted in failure. A problem may be impossible if no solution exists but we will assume that for the purpose of this post, a problem is hard if and only if a solution exists. This class of problems is typically the area of basic research.

At a company like Network Appliance, we do not typically explore problems in this space although we have in specific areas over the past 15 years. Basic Research is just not our focus. If you are interested in working on these kinds of problems, my recommendation is get a Ph.D. in Computer Science and then find an academic or research lab position.

The nature of hard problems that NetApp engineering works on fit into the following bucket:

There exists some basic technology that offers some compelling features to a user but does not completely satisfy the requirements of the user. The user is willing to pay for the basic technology. The user is willing to trade-off some features for other features.

To understand how this applies to NetApp I need to explain a whole bunch of things. The first is the nature of the basic technologies that we rely on and how they influence us. The second is why the user wants to use that technology. The third is to explain how the basic technology can not meet the requirements of the user. The fourth that there is an opportunity to build interesting products that can satisfy the requirements of the consumer.

Once I’ve explained those four things, I can explain in more detail where are our hard problems lie.

But I’ll leave that for another post….

Updated with some cleaned up grammar.

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