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I've moved around within software — from developing a commercial app in the finance industry, to developing simulations of air traffic control for the FAA, to d
by randcraw 8y ago
I've moved around within software — from developing a commercial app in the finance industry, to developing simulations of air traffic control for the FAA, to developing distributed a command and control plan view display for the Army, to building datamining a custom supercomputer-based hadoop sized VLDB for social activity for the government, to supporting HPC users in academia, to modeling disease in a pharmaceutical company, to analyzing 3D biomedical images to quantlfy drug effects, increasingly using ML and deep learning.
In all, that spans 32 years. I've found the trick to avoiding boredom is to not stand still in the same problem space for too long.
- badpun 8y agoHow's Scrum/Agile/micromanagement in the fields you've mentioned? I've heard that even some research units at universities are beginning to use Agile now...
- randcraw 8y agoWhen developing prototype apps, you tend toward agile practices naturally. Status/update meetings are regular and quick, if not daily. The chief difference may be the absence of Agile's task cards, which requires too much forward decomposition of the design into bite-sized units, IMHO. R&D projects know the starting point and the objective, but only in terms of utility, not the means to that end. You're managing your team's passage through the problem space, not the solution space. That requires a lot of interaction with the client, since you need to learn from them if what you can deliver will serve their need. Thus you need to revise the task cards a lot, to the extent they just aren't that helpful in gauging your progress. It also helps that the team size in R&D is generally tiny, like one or two.