Three career paths diverge: craftsman (mastery), problem-solver (research/entrepreneurship), and principle-fighter

Victor identifies three distinct orientations a technical career can take. The craftsman path pursues mastery of a specific skill or practice — valuable but contained. The problem-solver path (entrepreneurship/academia) identifies problems within existing fields and solves them one by one. The principle-fighter path is rarer: a person identifies a wrong that others don’t recognize as wrong, forms a specific guiding principle, and dedicates their career to fighting for it — inventing whatever is necessary to realize a vision. Victor argues that Tesler, Engelbart, Kay, and Stallman are examples of the third path, not the first two. This framing is relevant for anyone considering long-term creative practice: the principle-fighter path requires self-knowledge (finding what you believe in) more than domain expertise alone.

Examples

Tesler didn’t contribute to ‘user experience design’ — there was no such field. He invented it as a means to fight his principle. Kay didn’t solve open problems in computer science; he pursued a vision of children as computational thinkers.

Assessment

Choose one of the three paths Victor describes and argue why it best describes your own current orientation. Then identify one assumption or constraint of that path and explain how the principle-fighter path would handle it differently.