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I had added to the title: "79% of software engineers lean D" Per your feedback I have removed this part, as more accurately this would be described as "Accordi

I had added to the title: "79% of software engineers lean D" Per your feedback I have removed this part, as more accurately this would be described as "According to FEC data, out of 100 software engineers who made political contributions, 79 were to democrats and 19 to republicans" In any case this is strong evidence software engineers lean overwhelmingly democrat rather than republican, compared to other professions. Per http://verdantlabs.com/blog/2015/06/02/politics-of-professions/ http://verdantlabs.com/blog/2015/06/02/politics-of-professio... and http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/06/03/how-democratic-or-republican-is-your-job-this-tool-tells-you/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/06/03/ho... the data source for the second chart is the same, and refers to the self-reported occupations from the 2012 and 2014 cycles.

DrScump 11y ago
Yet again, both sources exhibit the same problem. They are cooking the data. I've worked with voter data a lot over the years, both on the registration/turnout side and the contributions side. The "occupation" field is just a self-assigned 35 character text field, lacking a discrete set of predefined titles to choose from. The data referred to here represent the authors pooling a semi-random assortment of descriptions into specific buckets of their definition (for example, very few FEC entries actually say "Beer wholesaler", since people performing that role would use any of 5-10 different terms in preference, given that such wholesalers almost never limit themselves to just beer... and I doubt that a statistically significant population actually records its occupation as, literally, "cattle feeder"). Point being, trying to make general inferences from unattributed, cooked data is more parody than news. By the say, can anybody get that search box on the WP page to do anything? It does nothing for me on either IE or Chrome.

DrScump 11y ago

Yet again, both sources exhibit the same problem. They are cooking the data. I've worked with voter data a lot over the years, both on the registration/turnout side and the contributions side. The "occupation" field is just a self-assigned 35 character text field, lacking a discrete set of predefined titles to choose from. The data referred to here represent the authors pooling a semi-random assortment of descriptions into specific buckets of their definition (for example, very few FEC entries actually say "Beer wholesaler", since people performing that role would use any of 5-10 different terms in preference, given that such wholesalers almost never limit themselves to just beer... and I doubt that a statistically significant population actually records its occupation as, literally, "cattle feeder"). Point being, trying to make general inferences from unattributed, cooked data is more parody than news. By the say, can anybody get that search box on the WP page to do anything? It does nothing for me on either IE or Chrome.