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The other side of "We need software engineers in research" is surely the botched covid model from Imperial College way back at the beginning of the pandemic. Th
by Nursie 4y ago
The other side of "We need software engineers in research" is surely the botched covid model from Imperial College way back at the beginning of the pandemic. The group that produced it had the audacity to complain that the software industry didn't make C++ foolproof enough, and it was our fault that the modelling was wrong.
This shows the attitude that some folks in these places have - what you do is easy, and rather than your industry being exceptional as a profession that makes its tools open and shares knowledge openly, you are at fault for releasing things which I can get wrong.
"Scientists" in this view are smart people, and anything you lesser mortals do should be obvious to them immediately, or it must be your fault. Training and experience be damned.
I'd hate to work anywhere where that attitude was prevalent, or even really existed at all. And yes I realise that non-software folks often hate to work with us because of the exact same thing!
- andi999 4y agoAny reference for that incident, i havent heard of it and am curious.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoGood post on the subject. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30146245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30146245
- Nursie 4y agoHere's the open letter criticising our entire profession for producing something as terrible as C++ and allowing scientists to get into trouble with it - http://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2020/05/18/an-open-letter-to-software-engineers-criticizing-neil-ferguson-s-epidemics-simulation-code/ http://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2020/05/18/an-open-letter-to-s... There are links back to other parts of the story in the text there. Effectively, they built a model that predicted some real worst-case stuff, and used that as the basis for advice they sent out to try and affect government policy in a bunch of places. When the code was finally released and examined, it was in a bad state - 15k lines in one source file, race conditions, single name globals reused all over the place. The results were trash. Then the blame started to fly.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anonymousDan 4y agoHaving worked in both, software is much easier than producing quality scientific discoveries.
- Nursie 4y agoOK great, but being good at one doesn’t mean you’re automatically good at the other, or that it’s some ‘lesser’ field’s fault when you screw it up. In this case, due apparently to arrogance, neither was produced.
- haihaibye 4y agoI skimmed that code at the start of the pandemic and it was pretty tragic, eg how accurate could deaths be when there were no nursing homes in their models?