6 ms·

The overwhelming majority of natural phenomena follow the normal distribution. Do you have any reason for assuming software development is somehow different?

• flyhighplato 14y ago
  Well, I don't know how you got that assertion about the normal distribution. But, one reason you could think it's not a simple normal distribution is that computer science classes often have bimodal grade distributions.
• tzs 14y ago
  Software development is not a natural phenomenon.
• mej10 14y ago
  A lot of genetic traits follow normal distribution due to the way genes are combined. It doesn't follow at all from this that human skill follows a normal distribution, especially looking at the whole population. It seems to be more like a power law distribution.
• zeroonetwothree 14y ago
  Distribution of software development skill in the entire population is probably normal. However, developers are not the entire population, they are a tiny slice of the right tail. So the distribution is more like an exponential distribution, which has the mean smaller than the median.
  • ta12121 14y ago
    The performance of doctors follows the normal distribution. I think that extrapolating to programmers is not a huge stretch. It used to be assumed that differences among hospitals or doctors in a particular specialty were generally insignificant. If you plotted a graph showing the results of all the centers treating cystic fibrosis—or any other disease, for that matter—people expected that the curve would look something like a shark fin, with most places clustered around the very best outcomes. But the evidence has begun to indicate otherwise. What you tend to find is a bell curve: a handful of team with disturbingly poor outcomes for their patients, a handful with remarkably good results, and a great undistinguished middle. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/12/06/041206fa_fact?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/12/06/041206fa_fact?cu...
    • tim_h 14y ago
      The difference between doctors and programmers is that programmers get to build/leverage tools that are abstractions of other tools, hence you can have orders-of-magnitude differences in productivity between programmers who use the best tools and those who don't. I assume that there's not that much variation between the way two different doctors carry out the same task like there is with programmers.
      • sedachv 14y ago
        Actually, doctors do have order-of-magnitude tools for improving certain metrics, such as recovery and infection rates: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...
• gyom 14y ago
  Do you have any reason to assume that programming competence is a "natural phenomenon" ? We're not talking about the statistical central limit theorem here, we're talking about people who are passionate about programming and spend years working on their craft. You can only invoke the normal distribution thing when you're talking about an outcome that is the average of many independent quantities.
  • ta12121 14y ago
    Research into the performance of medical doctors shows that their skill follows the normal distribution: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/12/06/041206fa_fact?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/12/06/041206fa_fact?cu...
• Xcelerate 14y ago
  Actually, a lot of natural phenomena does NOT follow a normal distribution. The problem is that most people assume it does anyway, and that's where a lot of errors come from. Statistics requires a lot of correct assumptions in order to be accurate; sadly, most people overlook or fail to check their assumptions.
  • estebank 14y ago
    The thing is, natural phenomena doesn't follow normal distribution, but the sum of non-normal variables, will approach a Gaussian distribution, as per the Central Limit Theorem[1][2]. The problem is people assuming a normal distribution on a single variable with unknown distribution. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem [2]: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/22387/why-it-is-often-assumed-gaussian-distribution http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/22387/why-it-is-oft...
    • Xcelerate 14y ago
      Yes, that's correct. If anyone wants to know more, an elementary statistics book will teach you all about the central limit theorem and the law of large numbers. Very useful things to know.
      • mlvljr 14y ago
        Exactly, and there're also lognormal distribution and friends, which are quite hard to distinguish from normal with limited data at hand. There's no magical "naturally" normal distribution at all. And whether smth is normal depends on how and what we measure: consider a plant's leaf, whose shape is elliptical, with axes independently normally distributed; the area is not distributed normally then. :) We had quite wonderful discussions here at Russia last winter on whether the shape of some poll graphs clearly hints there was a fraud (it does not), and it turned out many people with technical education are lacking basic mathstat knowledge (but have strong "beliefs" regarding normal distribution).
      • Xcelerate 14y ago
• Daniel_Newby 14y ago
  The phenomena are normally distributed, but there are often steep threshold effects in performance. For example, no number of teacup poodles is sufficient to win a dogsled race. Most dogs have above average completion times on the Iditarod race. Which is not to say there is no market for chasing frisbies.
• mcguire 14y ago
  Given that there are N animals of size X, how many animals are there of size X/10?
• sageikosa 14y ago
  Software development is not a D&D stat block item. No reason to believe it is even quantifiable (although I like to think some developers approach writing code the same: rolling dice). If it were quantifiable, what would be the metric?
  • deleted 14y ago
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