Software engineering 'ideas' regarding modeling and testing have gone way overboard.
I have a feeling that that all those who peddle fancy buzzwords such as agile and kanban are either MBA graduates with no real engineering background or failed engineers trying to reinvent their career.
I'm a preacher of Agile. I talk about it in order to get things done. Theoretical work is important, but let's face it, most customers want products, not research. Your average person declaring himself 'theoretically oriented' is no good in delivering products. He hasn't understood the bigger goal and will just waste the clients time and money training himself to write better algos. Most likely he will be rather unexperienced, and produce pale replicas of existing library algos and data structures.
In my experience the ones who know the most theory are also often the most pragmatic and professional ones. These don't boost about their technical knowledge, but they know it and know how to apply it. These will declare themselves 'problem solving'.
One that declares himself mostly theoretical most likely just hasn't gotten that far yet. Then we have real researchers, but that's another story entirely.
"I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already."
So said Alan Perlis, the first recepient of the ACM Turing award. I'll listen to Perlis all day than pay any attention to an Agile blowhard who calls himself a "thought leader" on his own biopage. customers can go fuck themselves. cs is what matters.
Well I for one want to make great products that make me feel like we surpassed ourselves and makes the customers happy. Most likely this involves technical innovation. I'm sick and tired of the ones writing "better" hash tables all day, blowing by budget and pissing everone off who actually wants to accomplish something.
Fun for me means keeping the project on track, delivering so that we get an income and can spend real money on R&D and events. I don't want to sit in a project which hasn't delivered in months, is in overtime (with all rhe stress that that means) and no working program what so ever, just a bunch of Impls, Contexts, BidiMaps and XxxUtils. That's not cs, and it sure as hl ain't fun!
Your salary from Bank of America comes from customers -- even if you're paid from investment, the investment is only there because Bank of America has customers. Your research in academia is paid for by customers of the institution, both former and present, and possibly governments (who are also interested in the product of the research). Your shortsighted world view is tragically common in those who favor academia, and without paying customers driving research into new areas, your precious academia wouldn't exist and you'd do well to understand that. Money is everything.
What the hell do you think the point of academia is? All throughout history, the sciences are almost always advanced due to a pressing need or mistake from practical execution.
> cs is what matters.
Execution is the only thing in the world that matters. You are basically admitting that you're the idea guy, searching for a "technical co-founder".
Had Mark Zuckerberg spent a lot of time worried about the runtime efficiency of parts of his code or whether there was a more efficient algorithm for sorting friends, Facebook would be nothing today. He executed and didn't give a shit, because he wasn't exercising computer science, he was exercising building a product.
Surely people went back and made things more efficient as Facebook scaled, but I've been at a rapidly-growing startup a while, and I haven't made my product more efficient through many computer science advances. Most have been using better software, better network topology, better configuration, less dumb code, and so on.
Your attitude completely misses what the article is explaining, and, frankly, your ad hominem on the guy talking about Agile is completely out of place when practically your entire LinkedIn profile is buzzwords, just your field instead of his.
(Aside: I love that HN makes it really easy to build a list of no-hires, fairly easily, just by observing how people think and communicate.)
"I haven't made my product more efficient through many computer science advances. Most have been using better software, better network topology, better configuration, less dumb code, and so on."
Please stop. You're getting irony all over my desk here.
No. I will not silence my opinion because you disagree. Although your comment is almost devoid of insight, I would infer that you're implying I'm being obtuse regarding the role of computer science in making my stuff better. Example of a performance improvement: choosing a frobnicator that uses multiple cores to frobnicate instead of a single core to frobnicate. Do I have computer science to thank for that? In a way, the same way I have medical research to thank for Advil. However, it's disingenuous to say medical research got rid of my headache. The Advil did.
Computer science has its place, but it needs to be more aware of that place. This thread is a very poignant demonstration of that.
Software engineering 'ideas' regarding modeling and testing have gone way overboard.
I have a feeling that that all those who peddle fancy buzzwords such as agile and kanban are either MBA graduates with no real engineering background or failed engineers trying to reinvent their career.