Your Best Engineering Work Happens When You Look Idle

What Happened

Alex Selimov, a computational materials science researcher, published a blog post titled "[Men Who Stare at Walls](https://www.alexselimov.com/posts/men_who_stare_at_walls/)" that quickly climbed to 535 points on Hacker News — putting it in the top fraction of a percent of posts that make the front page. The title is a nod to the somewhat absurd image of a scientist or engineer sitting motionless, apparently doing nothing, while their mind is fully engaged with a problem that resists brute-force approaches.

The core argument is deceptively simple: the most valuable phase of technical work often looks like idleness. Staring at a wall, pacing, sketching on a whiteboard with no audience — these are not breaks from work, they are the work. Selimov draws from his experience in materials science, where understanding the behavior of crystal structures, grain boundaries, and atomic-scale defects requires building a mental model so complete that the right experiment or simulation becomes obvious before you ever touch a keyboard.

The post resonated because it names something most experienced engineers know intuitively but struggle to defend in standup meetings: the thinking that precedes code is more important than the code itself.

Why It Matters

Modern software engineering culture has an output visibility problem. Agile ceremonies, DORA metrics, commit frequency dashboards, PR throughput — the entire measurement apparatus of contemporary engineering organizations is calibrated to detect *activity*, not *insight*. A developer who ships 15 small PRs in a week is legible to management. A developer who spends three days thinking and then writes 200 lines that solve a problem no one else could is invisible until the PR lands — and even then, the value is attributed to the code, not the thinking that produced it.

Selimov's materials science framing adds a useful lens. In his field, you might spend weeks studying a grain boundary structure before running a single simulation. The reason is pragmatic, not romantic: compute time is expensive, and running the wrong simulation wastes weeks. So you think first. You stare at diagrams. You sketch crystallographic orientations on paper. You argue with colleagues at a whiteboard. The wall-staring isn't a personality quirk — it's resource optimization.

Software engineers face the same calculus, though it's obscured by the low marginal cost of "just trying something." Compute is cheap. Spinning up a branch is free. But the hidden cost of skipping the thinking phase is architectural debt: solutions that work but don't compose, abstractions that leak on day two, systems that can't be extended without rewriting. The wall-starer who designs the right interface saves the team six months of refactoring. The activity-maximizer who starts coding immediately ships faster this sprint and creates next quarter's crisis.

The Hacker News discussion — as these discussions tend to — split into two camps. One side shared war stories of breakthroughs that came during walks, showers, or deliberate periods of "doing nothing." The other side raised the legitimate organizational question: how do you distinguish productive contemplation from actual slacking? This is not a trivial objection. Any system that rewards visible idleness can be gamed. The answer, imperfect as it is, comes down to trust, track record, and the willingness to judge engineers by the quality of their solutions rather than the frequency of their commits.

There is also a deeper cognitive science angle here. Research on incubation effects — the phenomenon where stepping away from a problem leads to sudden insight — has been documented since at least the early 20th century. The mathematician Henri Poincaré wrote about it. So did the physicist Richard Feynman. Barbara Oakley's work on diffuse vs. focused thinking modes provides a modern neuroscience framework: the brain's default mode network, active during apparent rest, is doing associative work that the focused prefrontal cortex cannot. You are not choosing between thinking and not thinking. You are choosing between two different *modes* of thinking — and modern work environments systematically suppress the one that produces novel solutions.

What This Means for Your Stack

If you lead a team, the practical implications are uncomfortable but clear. First, audit what you actually measure. If your engineering metrics are dominated by throughput proxies — velocity, cycle time, PR count — you have built an incentive structure that penalizes deep work. Consider adding outcome-based measures: incidents prevented, architectural decisions that held up over six months, problems that stayed solved.

Second, protect unstructured time structurally, not just rhetorically. "We value deep work" means nothing if every calendar has four hours of meetings daily. Some teams have adopted "Maker's Schedules" with meeting-free blocks of 4+ hours, and the results consistently show that the first thing engineers do with that time is not code — it's think. The code comes later, and it's better.

Third, recognize that AI coding assistants make this *more* important, not less. When generating code is cheap (Copilot, Claude, Cursor), the bottleneck shifts decisively from typing to thinking. The engineer who understands the problem deeply enough to prompt correctly, to evaluate the generated code critically, and to see the architectural implications three steps ahead — that engineer is doing wall-staring work, whether or not they're literally staring at a wall. In an AI-augmented workflow, the value of contemplation goes up, not down, because the cost of acting on a bad mental model drops to near zero — making it easier than ever to build the wrong thing very quickly.

Looking Ahead

Selimov's post is part of a broader counter-current in engineering culture — a pushback against the "always be shipping" mentality that dominated the 2010s. As the industry matures, and as the tools for generating output become trivially powerful, the scarce resource is increasingly *judgment*, not *effort*. The engineers and organizations that figure out how to cultivate, protect, and reward deep thinking will outperform those still optimizing for commit frequency. The men who stare at walls aren't slacking. They're loading the gun before they fire.