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> The average developer thinks empirical software engineering is a waste of time. How can you possibly study something as complex as software engineering?! You’
by Quanttek 5y ago
> The average developer thinks empirical software engineering is a waste of time. How can you possibly study something as complex as software engineering?! You’ve got different languages and projects and teams and experience levels and problem domains and constraints and timelines and everything else. Why should they believe your giant incoherent mess of sadness over their personal experience or their favorite speaker’s logical arguments?
This argument could be used for literally any science but, for some reason, it seems to fall on attentive ears mostly in the software industry.
- hwayne 5y agoI think it's common in a lot of fields. It's def prevalent in medicine, for example: people are skeptical of any research on doctor behavior.
- twobitshifter 5y agoI think the issue is that management is not done scientifically. You can see this with something as estimating for a project. Higher ups just ask “how many hours and when can you get it done” - they don’t want you to go through past similar work review it’s timeliness and hours, divide it into smaller tasks, build a project schedule, review productivity trends and resource loadings, or any scientific way of arriving at the number. What they really want is a seat of the pants WAG, which isn’t too big to scare the client, that they can use to get going, with the understanding that shit happens along the way.