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The World is Full of Real People

jumpstartlab.com

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Re: The World is Full of Real People

#41

Post by j_baker »

I'm always skeptical of this attitude. It reminds me of politicians who go to the Midwest looking to campaign to "real" Americans, and end up campaigning to no one. The thing is: I know what I want. I have absolutely no clue what anyone else wants. And at the end of the day, I don't buy that I'm that much of a freak. At the end of the day, I want the same thing as anyone else: software that works and is easy to use.

Meanwhile, your new testing framework didn’t make any jobs.

What's your point? Neither did your blogpost.

But if you could say that you really changed ten, what would that feel like?

Ok, now I'm calling shenanigans. You really don't believe my (hypothetical) testing framework can't make 10 peoples' lives better?

Re: The World is Full of Real People

#44

Post by jiggy2011 »

nickpinkston wrote: post #36
apsec112 wrote: post #28

This is kafkatrapping ( http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122 ): "The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator’s personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the k…

Great link - I think that this can be used as a mild form of coercion. However, in this case I have to object more to the target than the method. Developer tools, as mentioned above, can certainly be used to improve the world by making it easier to develop - sure. My main gripe is with startups that make something that is a net-negative to society - which I'd argue Zynga, et al. are actually doing - just sucking mone…

By that token you could say that any passive form of entertainment is bad , from movies to sports.

There's value in helping people to relax I guess.

Re: The World is Full of Real People

#45

Post by robosox »

AznHisoka wrote: post #12

I think most people just aren't exposed to big problems, and that's why we build software for other techies. We also tend to solve our own problems, which are mostly "trivial" compared to the bigger problems outside of our lives. One way to solve this is to encourage multi-disciplines in school. CS students should interact and do more projects with Pre-med students, psych majors, etc.

Agreed. It's also an argument for just being a well-rounded person even after entering adulthood. Staying on top of non-technology news & issues, taking time to travel, spending time with (and learning from) friends outside of the tech industry...all of it exposes you to problems outside of your normal circle of awareness.

Re: The World is Full of Real People

#46

Post by jiggy2011 »

j_baker wrote: post #41

I'm always skeptical of this attitude. It reminds me of politicians who go to the Midwest looking to campaign to "real" Americans, and end up campaigning to no one. The thing is: I know what I want. I have absolutely no clue what anyone else wants. And at the end of the day, I don't buy that I'm that much of a freak. At the end of the day, I want the same thing as anyone else: software that works and is easy to use.…

Allot of software that is good and useful to people might actually destroy jobs.

If you create a testing framework that is more robust and simpler than a previous one then it makes testers more efficient so a company needs less of them.

If it can be picked up easily and intuitively then it destroys the jobs of people who sell training on testing frameworks.

Your best hope is that your testing framework makes someone else more efficient at doing something innovative which does create jobs.

Re: The World is Full of Real People

#47

Post by yummyfajitas »

dxbydt wrote: post #38
mikeash wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is then figuring out what's valuable. But being told that building an entire class of extremely useful tools is not valuable just gets it completely wrong. To take your analogy, it's like seeing some people jumping out of windows with wings and telling them, hey, stop trying to invent stuff. No, the correct message is, do your research. Developer tools can be extremely useful, you just have to make sure t…

> "This is completely different from saying that all developer tools are useless, which is what was said in the post." That isn't what was said nor what was implied. Someday we will stop pretending that what we do is "extremely useful". A developer tool is nice. It is neat. It is cool. It is a bulletpoint on your resume. It is a repo in the github. It buils your brand. It scratches your itch. It generates revenue. It…

...we need to compute the value at risk so we know how much capital to set aside in case of defaults. Why in the world would I need that ? Well since....I can go on and on...

And if you went one step further, you'd have realized: "to reduce the risk of a bank failure and potentially saving thousands of jobs."

But to pretend that what I'm doing is on the same plane of someone say vaccinating a kid with malaria in the tropics...

Lets think about the guy vaccinating a kid to prevent malaria.

But lets think a few steps back. Rather than thinking about the guy with the needle, think about the guy in the lab coat. He's currently sitting in a lab somewhere, fucking around with gene assays in order to create antibodies. Why does he do this? Because some other guy might use the antibodies to stimulate an immune response to malaria parasites in rats. And the other guy might find out the first guy was wasting his time.

The vast majority of people who are trying to do exactly what you ask (creating a malaria vaccine) are "building things 'we don't need', throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something will stick."

And if you back up a couple steps more, you realize all this was only possible because someone built biologist tools (e.g. gene sequencing machines, bioinformatics software) which are neat and cool and bullet points on a CV and also completely useless to "real people".

Re: The World is Full of Real People

#48

Post by mikeash »

dxbydt wrote: post #38
mikeash wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is then figuring out what's valuable. But being told that building an entire class of extremely useful tools is not valuable just gets it completely wrong. To take your analogy, it's like seeing some people jumping out of windows with wings and telling them, hey, stop trying to invent stuff. No, the correct message is, do your research. Developer tools can be extremely useful, you just have to make sure t…

> "This is completely different from saying that all developer tools are useless, which is what was said in the post." That isn't what was said nor what was implied. Someday we will stop pretending that what we do is "extremely useful". A developer tool is nice. It is neat. It is cool. It is a bulletpoint on your resume. It is a repo in the github. It buils your brand. It scratches your itch. It generates revenue. It…

Yes, some tools are toys without much use. I don't dispute that.

But to make a blanket claim that no tool is useful, "not in a million years", is completely wrong. The real world full of real people has benefitted tremendously from certain software projects. Those projects have in turn benefitted from others, which benefitted from others, etc. Not all software is involved in the chain, but a lot is.

Software does things like predict weather (saving thousands, perhaps millions, of lives and vastly improving other lives), help design buildings and machines, allow people to communicate over extremely long distances at very little cost, etc. etc.

All of that software was enabled by various developer tools that have been built over the years. Tools like FORTRAN compilers, UNIX systems, make, gcc, VMS, etc. etc. All of those have been extremely useful. Indirectly, they have been extremely useful to real people in the real world. So why do you say that "not in a million years" would anything we build be useful. Maybe what we build isn't, but it certainly can be, and a lot of it is.

Is what I'm doing extremely useful? Probably not. But if I wanted it to be, the answer isn't to stop programming and go vaccinate kids. The answer is to apply my software skills to areas which are useful in general. The results don't have to be directly useful to "real people" to be indirectly useful to them.

Building some Facebook clone is probably not all that useful. But to come along and act like all software is simply an act of privilege and is never useful to "real people" is just plain wrong.

Re: The World is Full of Real People

#49

Post by angersock »

akavi wrote: post #22
tomjen3 wrote: post #13

Bullshit. The reason we don't have to worry about getting a job is because a computer programmer provide value and because we are good at it. So no we don't live a life of privilege. We worked for, and earned, our position.

I don't know the circumstances of your life, so maybe what you say is true, but at least in my case, I had huge advantages in reaching the point where I could provide said value: 1) I was born in a wealthy, stable country 2) to, even for said country, well-off parents 3) with a natural inclination to mathematics/logic 4) and access to computers/internet resources from a young age All of these seem like privilege to m…

...and were you to switch places with one of the great unwashed masses, and they were to piss all that opportunity away, they'd be fools still.

We all play the hands we're dealt in life, using whatever calculations make sense to us. We are "graded" by the effectiveness of these calculations. The fact that somebody else given the same inputs could still screw everything up or make the same decisions implies, to me anyways, that we shouldn't worry about or have guilt for our initial conditions.

You could have thrown all that wealth and opportunity away (as many do), but you didn't. Don't undervalue your own efficacy.

Re: The World is Full of Real People

#50

Post by zmj »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #46
j_baker wrote: post #41

I'm always skeptical of this attitude. It reminds me of politicians who go to the Midwest looking to campaign to "real" Americans, and end up campaigning to no one. The thing is: I know what I want. I have absolutely no clue what anyone else wants. And at the end of the day, I don't buy that I'm that much of a freak. At the end of the day, I want the same thing as anyone else: software that works and is easy to use.…

Allot of software that is good and useful to people might actually destroy jobs. If you create a testing framework that is more robust and simpler than a previous one then it makes testers more efficient so a company needs less of them. If it can be picked up easily and intuitively then it destroys the jobs of people who sell training on testing frameworks. Your best hope is that your testing framework makes someone…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite_fallacy
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