I think having a stats background helps a lot in the design of systems, but to be perfectly honest you don’t need much to be effective as an average software en

I think having a stats background helps a lot in the design of systems, but to be perfectly honest you don’t need much to be effective as an average software engineer. The place I seem to use it the most is arguing against premature optimization or let’s-just-hack-it-together mentalities. Two examples: 1. We had a new hire want to go through all of our database queries and optimize them. The only problem? The database in question was only a handful of megabytes large and saw very little usage. Even planning for inordinate success this fact would not have changed. 2. We had an upload feature that we were going to enable for our customers that people just want to quick and dirty hack together. The only problem is that it was going to be handling very large files right away. Even with “low” customer utilization it would be handling gigabytes per day. As you can see these examples are more about statistical common sense than applying really rigorous statistical modeling to a situation. If you’re really interested in applying math to your programming, I would recommend looking into getting into finance or science based programming fields.