SAT and Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers have many important applications in PL, including verification, testing, type checking and inference, and program analysis – but they are often a mysterious black box to their users, even when those users are PL researchers with lots of solver experience! This talk will be partly a tutorial introduction to the inner workings of SAT and SMT solvers, and partly an extended analogy to navigating life as a researcher: making decisions when you have only incomplete information to go on, learning from decisions that turned out to be bad, and determining when to give up and when to try again. I’ll also highlight a variety of papers in this year’s POPL program that make use of SAT and SMT solving, and discuss why I think it’s worthwhile to learn about solver internals.