Turing Award Winner David Patterson: 16 Lessons on Living Well
October 12, 2025
Jeff Dean recently posted a photo of David Patterson’s handwritten essay: sixteen short lines that sum up half a century in computing. Patterson earned his Turing Award by building fast chips, but the notes he kept were about living well. They read like a lab notebook from someone who wants the next generation to skip the mistakes he made.
Benchmarks Shape The Field
One line jumps out: “For better or for worse, benchmarks shape a field.” Patterson first said it while tuning processors. Choose the wrong benchmark and you spend years polishing the wrong transistor. The graphs look great. The users feel nothing.
Benchmarks are the rulers we hold up to our own work. Academia shouts about paper counts. Startups worship revenue charts and user curves. They are loud because they are easy to graph, not because they reflect the dent you hoped to make.
Measure Impact, Not Vanity
When Patterson arrived at Berkeley he asked the senior faculty what the school prized. The answer was plain: “Work that pushes the world forward.” Not citation counts. Not press clippings. If a project quietly improved people’s lives, it counted. That standard killed the urge to publish filler. It pushed him to pick problems that mattered even if they took longer.
I think about that when we run ExplainThis. It is simple to chase vanity metrics such as page views, likes, and followers. They spike fast, and they whisper that you are doing great. Yet the moments that prove value are quieter: a reader finally lands interviews after reworking a résumé; a tech lead shares that a meeting ran smoother because of a checklist we published. Those notes are the right benchmark.
Pick Your Own Scoreboard
Patterson’s broader lesson is agency. Humans can pick their own benchmarks. If you do not choose, your manager, your feed, or the latest productivity guru will choose for you. So keep a running log of real wins: the bugs you fixed, the teammates you coached, the readers who wrote back. That journal keeps you honest when the empty numbers glow brighter.
These sixteen lessons are scattered across the slide Jeff Dean shared, but the full story lives in Patterson’s essay, Life Lessons from the First Half-Century of My Career. It is worth printing and folding into your notebook. Read it when you need help reminding yourself what game you are really playing.
Original essay can be seen at https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/life-lessons-from-the-first-half-century-of-my-career