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> Medical and legal are not having hype cycles that need to be kept up with in this way. Medical and legal professions both have strong centralized authority.
by speedplane 7y ago
> Medical and legal are not having hype cycles that need to be kept up with in this way.
Medical and legal professions both have strong centralized authority. In the medical field, it's the professional organizations, in legal it's the judges, for architects there are safety and standards organizations. Software development doesn't have any such central authority, and the entire profession is also heavily influenced by biased business interests. So there's definitely a lot more BS and hype that floats around in software development.
That said, just because it's harder to keep up and filter the real from the BS in software development, doesn't give you a pass to ignore it.
- oh_sigh 7y agoSure it does. Anyone can write a blog post about why you should do X, and then they write another blog post 5 years later about "Boy was I an idiot for suggesting X, do Y instead!"
- speedplane 7y ago> Anyone can write a blog post about why you should do X, and then they write another blog post 5 years later about "Boy was I an idiot for suggesting X, do Y instead!" Scientific literature does this all the time: they put forth a theory and evidence for it, and 5 years later write why they were wrong. But if the lesson is to not spend too much time on unreputable blog posts, I agree.
- yabadabadoes 7y agoWe have plenty of central authorities for the technical fields, for example IETF, IEEE, W3C all have systems for creating filtered papers and standards.. There is plenty to keep up with in applied CS that is the same as in medical and legal. There is just a tendency to tell us we need to find the diamonds in the BS in topics that an average doctor or lawyer would ignore until an institutional change occurs after a consensus.