These kind of studies are dubious. The PhD report could have been generated by an LLM in about a day, and no one would know any better.
It works like this:
Take any hypothesis. And have a lot of verbiage around it with dubious experiments to "statistically" validate it. and write a giant report which would eventually turn into a book.
Steve Pinker and his likes excel in this kind of stuff. Psychology/Sociology and sometimes economics are filled with these sorts of studies.
It is more persuation than science.
And one could could argue that science itself is a certain kind of persuation.
Your comment adds nothing to the discussion, reveals your prejudice against social science, and could be copied and pasted anytime a non-rigorous subject comes up. I'm actually interested in criticisms of this work, but your comment doesn't even rise to that level.
But Bohm's "On Creativity", to me presents a much deeper "philosophical" take on a) what is creativity and b) how to foster it. And I dont see it referenced in this text at all.
Again, since this is about persuation, it is what the reader wants to believe.
There are (probably) several billion works on creativity. Just reading and listing your own sources of inspiration on creativity is quite the endheavor. And that is not going to be exhaustive even in a PhD thesis. I'll give leaway there - on the contrary, mine THEIR list for stuff I missed.
fair take, but my view these days is the following.
there is way too much information-garbage floating around.
hence I try to stick to time-tested classics particularly when it comes to certain topics. now, your time-tested classic may be different from mine and certainly, i want to see if there are things I missed, and hence I mentioned Bohm's work, as something the author of this PhD missed.
End of the day, there are many belief systems that we human hold onto, but we need a method to settle opinion.
And science happens to be a certain kind of a method for settling opinion.
CS Peirce wrote about it so beautifully in his 1877 essay: "On the fixation of belief". go read it. here is a link saving you a google search. https://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html
Basically, management rot sets in with MBAs in charge who have no clue how software products get built. They see coders as overhead. Big Mistake. Short-term, it leads to some improved profits. Long term, it leads to cultural rot.
and the org is doomed.
Happening to amazon and aws as we speak.
very nice app. just the front-end browser component alone is super-slick.
but expecting users to bring their data to your platform is a barrier to adoption.
the author likens your first type to building "mental" roads, which form new pathways of cognition, and takes time, and has emotional resistance, and requires conscious effort and practice to carve out. also to relate the roads to other roads correctly, so the mental map of roads is consistent, and can be traversed.
the problem is that most students do not grasp ideas fully and develop facility with it. when this happens, the foundations are shaky, and facility is lost. then, they label themselves as incapable which leads to a vicious cycle where, the belief of being stupid leads to more stupidity.
the second type is where the roads (ideas) are there, but a route from source to destination is not clear, and the aha moment is when you see the full path in the mental eye.
Basically, the management class despises SDE worker class, and thinks of them as overhead. Recent statements by the aws head about chatGPT replacing SDEs is along the same lines.
SDEs are tools that just do what mgmt tells them. mgmt holds the decision-making and all the cards.
periodically there is a whipping (pipping) in the form of a layoff to keep the troops in fear.
I’m curious: what, in your experience, was the root cause of this contempt? Other skilled professions can make decent money as SDEs do. Is it a love/hate thing? Feeling like the tools could easily not need them if they had sufficient gumption and will?
you touch on a raw nerve that could be the subject of a long post.
in summary, the attitude of management in many large companies is that code is just work that needs to get done, and any engineer who can type on a keyboard can do it equally well (cue in ai-coder). so, the smarts is embedded in defining requirements and managing execution of said-code which resides in management.
The problem with this is many-fold.
1) it encourages a culture of top-down decision making including technical decisions and the person making designs is not the one doing the work
2) as tech evolves, the org is unable to catch up since the decision makers are the elite few.
in short, a manufacturing line mentality where the supervisor holds the cards and workers are tools.
It becomes apparent as you move higher up the IC ladder that technical work becomes slightly taboo. And it is precisely because of the attitude that the actual work is something for line employees, not them. This belief is passed down not overtly, but through gentle nudges: "you could fix that in 15 minutes, but is that really maximizing your impact?" Or the ever-present, "but how does this improve your promo packet?"
It all feels like a giant psyop on staff engs to constantly gaslight themselves into immolating themselves to the god of Impact. Little wonder they exhibit much higher rates of burnout: they're told to be responsible for things without the full range of authority.
I was $TOO_OLD when I learned that most of the actual coding on Google's systems was done by L4/L5's.
Agreed. It’s classism institutionalized in MBAs. The managerial class despises low level execution and instead considers strategy to be the most important thing. And they consider workers as replaceable pawns and not partners.
It works like this:
Take any hypothesis. And have a lot of verbiage around it with dubious experiments to "statistically" validate it. and write a giant report which would eventually turn into a book.
Steve Pinker and his likes excel in this kind of stuff. Psychology/Sociology and sometimes economics are filled with these sorts of studies.
It is more persuation than science.
And one could could argue that science itself is a certain kind of persuation.