My grad school advice must have picked up some serious Googlejuice lately, because I am getting a ton of email about it.
Much—all right, all—of this email asks my advice.
Er, this is, to put it mildly, slightly strange. Guys? Gals? I’m the one who crapped out, remember? Failed? Crawled out on belly?
Generally one asks advice of people who succeed at something.
I spend a fair bit of time reading about the war. You wouldn’t know it from CavLec, because reading about the war is a far cry from having anything useful or coherent to say about it. More than enough useless incoherence around, no?
Mostly my reading is centered around a question that Burningbird asked a little bit ago: What do I do? What do I do now? And what do I do later so that this does not happen again?
A lot of what I see reads very much like Jonathon:
To put it bluntly, we?re fucked.
Unless the anti-war/peace movement can come up with something more sophisticated and useful than red-daubed faces, drumming, banal chants, puerile street theater, trite placards, histrionics, self-indulgent moralizing, and wishful thinking.
Ah. Well, that pretty much leaves me out, ignorant and impotent fool that I am. And since Jonathon presents no useful alternatives, I—do what? Despair, I guess. If someone were to make a case for a given action as being more useful than what I’ve done, I’d do it. I’ve read cases for public demonstration, and I’ve demonstrated publicly. I’ve read cases for contacting elected officials, and I’ve done that.
So. Despair. I can do that, sure. I’ve been very close to it for some time now.
Was that the intent, Jonathon?
Sometimes you just gotta love the ’net.
David was due to land in Madison fifteen minutes ago, but air travel being what it is, I didn’t care to assume. So I hopped onto the airline’s website, and in ten seconds, bada-bing bada-boom, I knew both his flights had arrived on time.
Assuming he made his first one—David being David, an assumption that may not be entirely wise—he should be home in ten or twenty minutes.
The porch light is on. I think Didi has been missing him.
You know what? I’m wrong a lot. Big surprise, I know. But, dang it, this time I am not wrong.
I am a software company, ’k? And you are a Captain of Industry. I come to you with two proposals. The first runs thus:
“I want to send an anthropologist/ethnologist/usability expert/tester/developer to your company for a week. This person needs to have full access to your most productive employees—which means watching them like a hawk, distracting them, hauling them out of production to run them through rat-mazes, and training them on software that may never hit the market. And, um, we’re going to compensate you for their lost productivity with, um, maybe better software down the road?”
The second runs thus:
“This is our employee, John. We want you to use his services for six months as an assistant or apprentice. You need pay John nothing—we pay him—and naturally he will sign appropriate NDAs so that your trade secrets remain intact. We just want him to learn the ropes here, so we can use what he learns to make better software for companies like yours.”
If I were a Captain of Industry, I bloody well know which offer I’d take. And as I’ve already said, I’d put my money on that approach ending up with better software. As far as I know, though, nobody is making that kind of offer.
Burningbird’s point about her own background is well taken, but I note she isn’t making, say, point-of-sale software for restaurants. I think she should be; the POS systems I’ve seen are pretty regularly awful.
It’s a question of studying from outside versus learning from inside. Maybe I’m just too hands-on for my own good, but I bet on the latter over the former every time. Don’t just “talk to” the users. Be one.
(Intentionally provocative title, okay? Let’s take the denial-of-service attacks elsewhere.)
Alex Halavais recounts an instance of my favorite thing about kinda-sorta knowing how to program: the “Good $DEITY, you’re doing that by hand?” moment.
I had a good solid moment like that two jobs ago. One of the Quark people came to me asking for help getting OCLC to accept her SGML journal headers. I took a look, fixed problem (missing angle bracket), she was happy. Until the next header fried. At the time—I dearly hope they’ve fixed this!—OCLC’s SGML-accepting gizmo parsed the file and sent back errors. One. At. A. Time. So if you initially created a file with three errors, you would end up submitting the file four separate times.
When she came back for more help, I asked her how she was generating the SGML. Turned out to be cutting-and-pasting from her Quark files into an SGML template somebody had done up for her (with no docco and no explanation—don’t know who it was, but would still like to wring his neck).
Gah! I expostulated, and promptly automated the process via my old pal RoustaboutXT and some Python.
Why do I never, ever see this process at work in software development? At least in the fields I’m familiar with? I am still utterly wog-boggled to have worked with ebook-gadget designers who had never so much as read a print design spec, never mind actually talking to a typesetter or anybody like that. (Other than me, I mean. Most of the time I was ebooking I wasn’t a typesetter anyway.)
What we seem to see instead is developers beating their breasts about what “users” (er, which users? doing what tasks? why? hoping for what result?) do and don’t do. No developers actually sit down with a secretary, or a typesetter, or an editor, or an accountant, to find out what they do, much less learn to do it.
(Not to mention that the Cult of the Programmer mandates that Real Programmers be computer hobbyists from youth. Real Programmers are never ex-accountants or ex-typesetters. Heaven forfend they should be ex-secretaries! Like, er, me. Yes, I know the Cult of the Programmer is not exactly representative of the entire field, but it does wield significant and in my opinion excessive influence on commercial-programming and open-source practices.)
In short, software developers miss out completely on all the “$DEITY, you do that by hand?” moments.
Even the Alan Cooper brigade doesn’t seem to favor (or even talk of) direct experience feeding into software design. Instead, developers sit around and imagine what real people in real jobs do. That such imaginings all by themselves are a vast improvement over what has gone before is a pretty strong indictment of software development, to my way of thinking.
(Adherents to the Cult of the Programmer too often display a lamentable contempt for the implicit knowledge in other professions, incidentally, while vociferously insisting that no one else in the world is capable of absorbing theirs. Definitely this is part of the problem.)
This is my answer to one of Liz’s commenters, who asked just what there was for software people to do these days.
Learn what other people do. Not what you think they do, not what they think they do—what they actually do do. Then make it easier for them to do it. Then profit. Hugely. Isn’t that basically what programmers have done for themselves with open-source compilers and libraries and IDEs and APIs?
I mean, imagine a commercial software company targeting a particular industry that sent its people on six-month internships to companies actually in the industry. I grant you most jobs you don’t learn in six months, but you surely do learn enough to come back with lots of $DEITY moments and bright software design ideas.
The next Microsoft. I’m telling you. Huge.
I’d take a job as one of their intern-type people, too. I like to learn how things get done.
Okay, guys, I’m here to do you a virtual financial favor.
Sell me short. I mean it. We are talking dot-bomb-level overvaluation here.
(If I just lost you—short-selling is having somebody loan you a bunch of shares in a company whose stock price is due for a dive. When the dive happens, you buy the stock at the lower price, pay your loan back, and pocket the difference between the prices. Minus fees, of course.)
The nice people at Kurtti-Pellerin arranged to fly David out to California this weekend, to talk to him for a few hours tomorrow. (Who they, and what they want with David? Google ’em and guess.)
So he packed himself up (mostly; I had to remind him about such valuable items as ties and toiletries) and set his alarm for what Li calls “oh-dark-early” this morning.
I got my lazy butt out of bed fifteen minutes or so before the cab was supposed to arrive. “Um, I can’t find my driver’s license,” he said. “Any idea where it might be? I’ve got an expired one…”
I have never so wanted to shake him. Honestly.
Needless to say we did not find it in the ten minutes before he left. I sat on the couch and fumed for some time, before recalling that there wasn’t a thing I could do.
If they hadn’t let him on the plane, he’d be home by now, so he must have managed somehow. I guess he doesn’t fit The Profile (whatever The Profile actually is) as well as I do.
Occurs to me, though, that it isn’t David I ought to be angry at—it’s police-state-style security measures that don’t even have effectiveness as an argument in their favor.
Update: He found his license, he emails me. In his wallet the whole time. He is a caution and no mistake. Well, saves rooting through the entire house looking for it—not to mention worrying that they’ll detain him indefinitely for not having it.
The machine that Yarinareth is hosted on was seriously borked until just a few seconds ago. I don’t think I lost mail, but I might have. If it was important, please resend.
Sorry for the outage…
An email I got today asked innocently “if I was still in academia.” Referring to my current job, mind you, not my grad-school stint.
*choke*
Just for the record, in case offhanded comments haven’t been enough—I am only “in academia” insofar as my lackluster programming skills and wizard typing speed are furthering an academic project. The principal investigators, all of them of the Professorial Class (a term I am coining because I haven’t a better one), look at me and my three coworkers (not my boss, but they know my boss personally) like—hm, well of metaphor running dry. Suffice to say that they give us the look that people give other people whom they consider inferior.
(I’m not dissing them, believe it or not. I used to use that look myself. I’m thoroughly ashamed of that, and I have banished that look from my repertoire of expressions.)
My status will, as most readers know, change this fall, when I start in on a library-science degree. Should I be successful in attaining that degree, chances are probably roughly even that I will end up as “academic staff” or whatever the term is for non-Professorial-Class university employees where you are.
It’s kind of a weird thing, how the gigantic structure that is a university has a public face composed entirely of the Professorial Class. I mean, my correspondent knows perfectly well I am not Professorial Class (at least, I think he knows it! not something I exactly keep secret!), but his email implied that I was engaged in some kind of thrilling research-think-tank type thingie with a thrilling title and thrilling work, when all I am is ten busy fingers and occasional code generator. Chief cook and bottle washer, that’s me.
Maybe part of what’s going on in the academia fracas (which itself is still going on, at Naomi’s and Li’s), and if I’m right about this I’m as guilty as anyone, is myopia. Grad students aren’t all there is to a university. Nor are professors. Nor is a university a law unto itself. I don’t know if anyone can compass the whole picture—I certainly can’t—but it’d be interesting to try.
I am dancing on needles at the moment, with more to say but knowing I really ought to shut up. Well, duty calls, so up I shut—with apologies to Joseph Duemer, whom I unaccountably left out of my earlier list. He’s such a gentleman I honestly didn’t realize how badly I’d hit him until I took another look at the comments to Naomi’s first response to me today. I am sorry, Joseph.
I’m too lazy to do anything like it—XHTML is just fine for my modest purposes on this blog—but I gotta say, I bow down before the ’leet markup skillz Chris Thompson is using on his Movable Type blog. Wicked.
I will watch his continued progress with interest.