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syllogism comments on Efficient Open Source - Less Wrong
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I don't think the Hamming advice is so great. It's akin to asking, "What are the highest salary professions? Why aren't you entering them?".
Academia is a market-place. Everyone wants high research impact, for a given expenditure of time. Some opportunities are higher-value than others, but as those opportunities appear, other researchers are going to identify them too.
So in academia, as in the economy, it's better to identify your comparative advantage --- both short-term, and long-term. You usually need to publish something quickly, so you need to know what you can do right away. But you also want to plan for the medium and long-term, too. It's a difficult trade-off.
It is worth noting that advice is given to particular people, and Hamming was asking this at Bell Labs.
I totally agree. But in the job market, I have search tools to find the best job close to where I live, within my skills, and in my salary range to maximize my comparative advantage. And don't even get me started on all the tools and advice you can get for the stock market. But there is currently no tool for maximizing the comparative advantage of volunteer work. The good news for me is that there are a lot of similar tools to what I want to do, so I don't have to be terribly creative.
You did give me an idea. Let me edit my post.