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It's hard to design and create software for subjects you don't know much about. It's not really a surprise that people create software for their own lives. A l

It's hard to design and create software for subjects you don't know much about. It's not really a surprise that people create software for their own lives. A lot of open source is focused on programming languages, libraries and things to help you code. It's what most open source people know, and thus what they create. I wonder if it would have been better for CS to have been only offered as a minor or double-major to another field of study, at least at the Bachelor level. We would have fewer pure CS people, but a lot more people with training in another domain.

qzxt 13y ago
I second this! or something similar, at least. Having not really gone to college, myself, I was lucky enough to have had so many varied life experiences and interests before I took up tech; so when talking to my colleagues who are cs-equipped, I find their methodology is often very CS oriented, and focused more on the tech than on the problem. I think that's why "design" has become such a big fad these days - it's almost as if we just figured out that people buy products, not tech. That being said, after speaking with quite a few tech-inclined people, I feel they would be a lot more comfortable with less technically inclined subjects if they were stripped of the general cultural pretensions that they come with. There is a very strong resistance to "acculturation" among techies, as it is usually seen - rightly, for the most part - as a mechanism of enforcing a "cool kids' club", so to speak, rather than an actual venue for intellectual exploration. I think, that as techies, we are in a unique situation, as far as intellectual development is concerned. The vast majority of the population can't appreciate technical phenomena because it is culturally viewed as "too hard" or "robotic" or "blah blah, boring". We, OTOH, actively refuse to engage with humanistic pursuits, but not out of any perceived difficulty so much as discomfort with the pretensions that come with "cultured society". If effort can be made to induct some history and philosophy, and heck, maybe even theology into the the techie culture, we could have the best of both worlds and possibly even have some truly fresh ideas put out. In short, it's easier to teach a physicist to write essays than it is to teach a poet Diff Eq
- mc-lovin 13y ago
  You characterize the situation very well. It reminds me of the parody of the academic left in sci fi such as the novels of Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge. And the parodies of religion and philosophy are even worse. It certainly came as a shock to me to realize that much of academia is simultaneously incoherent and pretentious, and full of deep insights.
jiggy2011 13y ago
I don't know about "only". Sometimes it's good to have a narrow focus on CS topics if you are going to implementing difficult low level stuff that only other techies will touch directly. It's also possible to get knowledge of other fields from places outside of academia. Most UK universities do offer CS as a joint degree with other subjects, though in many cases they are limited to mainly other STEM subjects. I don't know anyone who studied joint CS/art history for example.
- ams6110 13y ago
  My university offered a undergrad CS major with a business minor that was pretty popular.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    True, in fact many universities offer a dedicated "business computing" degree which seems to be a CS degree with a lot of the theory stripped out and some business modules added. Though these courses often have a stigma amongst people who consider themselves "techies".
BrentRitterbeck 13y ago
Domain knowledge is important; however, even more important is domain experience. With domain experience, you learn where the bottlenecks and pain points are in your workflows. During my time as an interest rate risk analyst, I had the displeasure of working with a horrible piece of software. It crashed at the most inopportune times, usually near the end of a run. Considering that one run could be on the order of a few hours, you could lose a significant portion of your computing time, something in short-supply when other business processes don't get you your input until seven to ten business days within a new monthly reporting cycle. When it did finish, the probability that there was a problem with the final output was much larger than it should have been. Furthermore, the software could not even be used for actually analyzing your results. You still needed to dump out the calculations to Excel before finishing your analysis. On the surface, it would seem that the hardest part of solving this problem would be implementing the software as it's a highly specialized area of finance with lots of mathematics. When you break it down, however, what needs to be done on the software side is pretty straightforward. I had to document this stuff for regulatory purposes at my old job. To document this stuff, I had to do a lot of "reverse engineering" of this software, basically building in Excel the same calculations performed by the software. If any person or group of people near Mountain View are looking for a problem to solve, I'd gladly sit down with you one evening and answer questions about this space.
- kfk 13y ago
  That's very interesting stuff. I don't live in Mountain View, but I do work in controlling and I do deal with inefficient software on a daily basis. What this comes down to is safety/reliability vs speed and efficiency. If you can get a workable extraction, even if we are talking GB's of data (never happened to me, we are always below 1GB and we struggle with it because all has to go in Excel), you could work out a good solution. However, most companies use software that makes extracting data impossible (welcome to SAP). Partly this is due to complexity in users rights, partly is just people ignorance. This is a very complex domain problem, especially because a SaaS most of the times is not an option because we are talking about very sensible data.

qzxt 13y ago

I second this! or something similar, at least. Having not really gone to college, myself, I was lucky enough to have had so many varied life experiences and interests before I took up tech; so when talking to my colleagues who are cs-equipped, I find their methodology is often very CS oriented, and focused more on the tech than on the problem. I think that's why "design" has become such a big fad these days - it's almost as if we just figured out that people buy products, not tech. That being said, after speaking with quite a few tech-inclined people, I feel they would be a lot more comfortable with less technically inclined subjects if they were stripped of the general cultural pretensions that they come with. There is a very strong resistance to "acculturation" among techies, as it is usually seen - rightly, for the most part - as a mechanism of enforcing a "cool kids' club", so to speak, rather than an actual venue for intellectual exploration. I think, that as techies, we are in a unique situation, as far as intellectual development is concerned. The vast majority of the population can't appreciate technical phenomena because it is culturally viewed as "too hard" or "robotic" or "blah blah, boring". We, OTOH, actively refuse to engage with humanistic pursuits, but not out of any perceived difficulty so much as discomfort with the pretensions that come with "cultured society". If effort can be made to induct some history and philosophy, and heck, maybe even theology into the the techie culture, we could have the best of both worlds and possibly even have some truly fresh ideas put out. In short, it's easier to teach a physicist to write essays than it is to teach a poet Diff Eq

mc-lovin 13y ago
You characterize the situation very well. It reminds me of the parody of the academic left in sci fi such as the novels of Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge. And the parodies of religion and philosophy are even worse. It certainly came as a shock to me to realize that much of academia is simultaneously incoherent and pretentious, and full of deep insights.

jiggy2011 13y ago

I don't know about "only". Sometimes it's good to have a narrow focus on CS topics if you are going to implementing difficult low level stuff that only other techies will touch directly. It's also possible to get knowledge of other fields from places outside of academia. Most UK universities do offer CS as a joint degree with other subjects, though in many cases they are limited to mainly other STEM subjects. I don't know anyone who studied joint CS/art history for example.

ams6110 13y ago
My university offered a undergrad CS major with a business minor that was pretty popular.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  True, in fact many universities offer a dedicated "business computing" degree which seems to be a CS degree with a lot of the theory stripped out and some business modules added. Though these courses often have a stigma amongst people who consider themselves "techies".

BrentRitterbeck 13y ago

Domain knowledge is important; however, even more important is domain experience. With domain experience, you learn where the bottlenecks and pain points are in your workflows. During my time as an interest rate risk analyst, I had the displeasure of working with a horrible piece of software. It crashed at the most inopportune times, usually near the end of a run. Considering that one run could be on the order of a few hours, you could lose a significant portion of your computing time, something in short-supply when other business processes don't get you your input until seven to ten business days within a new monthly reporting cycle. When it did finish, the probability that there was a problem with the final output was much larger than it should have been. Furthermore, the software could not even be used for actually analyzing your results. You still needed to dump out the calculations to Excel before finishing your analysis. On the surface, it would seem that the hardest part of solving this problem would be implementing the software as it's a highly specialized area of finance with lots of mathematics. When you break it down, however, what needs to be done on the software side is pretty straightforward. I had to document this stuff for regulatory purposes at my old job. To document this stuff, I had to do a lot of "reverse engineering" of this software, basically building in Excel the same calculations performed by the software. If any person or group of people near Mountain View are looking for a problem to solve, I'd gladly sit down with you one evening and answer questions about this space.

kfk 13y ago
That's very interesting stuff. I don't live in Mountain View, but I do work in controlling and I do deal with inefficient software on a daily basis. What this comes down to is safety/reliability vs speed and efficiency. If you can get a workable extraction, even if we are talking GB's of data (never happened to me, we are always below 1GB and we struggle with it because all has to go in Excel), you could work out a good solution. However, most companies use software that makes extracting data impossible (welcome to SAP). Partly this is due to complexity in users rights, partly is just people ignorance. This is a very complex domain problem, especially because a SaaS most of the times is not an option because we are talking about very sensible data.