Maybe I can respond with an anecdote relayed by my wife: She was a Biology undergrad who got into food science. Her first job was for a food co-manufacturer wh

Maybe I can respond with an anecdote relayed by my wife: She was a Biology undergrad who got into food science. Her first job was for a food co-manufacturer who made many of the frozen pizzas you probably eat (but purchase under the major labels brands). She invented the formulas and ran test batches before they'd run the actual production runs in the factory. They co-manufactured a lot of food and if you've eaten any frozen pizza or cheap take-out/delivery pizza within the last 5 years you've probably eaten bread my wife "optimized" :). I just want to make sure I set this scene up before I get into the incredibly crazy part: When she first started she did two things that previously nobody else did: she wrote her formulas down as she made them so she could reproduce them later, and she applied the scientific method to her formula making. Now anybody else reading this HN comment will probably think "WTF that's very obvious". Like I said, she was the first person to do it at her gigantic company (along with her other new co-worker hired at the same time). And she was made fun of and teased! "You crazy college kids" was what she heard at first. Then after she proved that she was far and away more productive than any of her co-workers they'd scoff at her that "Pizza making is an art". Nevermind that in between those scoffs her boss said she was the most creative thinker... The old guards wouldn't even write down what ingredients or the quantity when they were making new formulations. They'd have to try to remember later what they did. And guess and checking formulas was how they'd develop new stuff that was tightly specified. Guess and checking pizza is almost always a lot slower than guess and checking the positioning of a label on a web app, so this was a very expensive process. And when you work with food at that scale it's all marketing driven: Marketing comes down with an idea that "Sodium is scary so let's develop a pizza that's really low sodium. Oh and let's see if we pitch it to blah for their kids meal". They'd specify a level of sodium that was acceptable, and then the kids meal specifications had their own acceptable levels of X, Y, and Z. So with that in mind she would work backwards, make 12 different formulations in spec at once and let the marketers try them to see which tasted best (sidenote: low-sodium pizza tastes awful. Just eat real pizza and have an extra glass of water). All of these scientific techniques were totally foreign to her co-workers and even her customers, and we're talking math and science that most learn in 4th grade. She worked for a huge successful company that's successful in spite of itself! Could you imagine the software that could have helped her do an even better job: - Software to manage the dozen or so different variations of the project she was working on - Even better, software to help her collaborate with an assistant so she could get these 12 variations in front of customers faster - Software to help her plot some sort of optimization curve to figure out the 12 different variations she should try based on the input parameters - Some sort of version control for her formulations - Automatically come up with the nutrition label before she started working on the pizza - Even more if I could remember some of our other ideas So to keep on topic: There are a lot of things, at least for baking, that were disrupted by just using 4th grade math and science. Software was the next step, and we were going to start making software (she'd be the domain expert for my coding work), but then we had twin boys so right now we're just trying to tread water. Maybe soon...