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I knew exactly how she felt

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Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#281

Post by mogrim »

memset wrote: post #25

I will offer an experience which is the inverse of this! I am a male software engineer who works in fashion (and before this I worked in wine.) I knew nothing about wine when I started, and my fashion sense is prototypically, well, male-software-centric. People in the wine industry are palpably aware that people view it as "hoity-toity". Professionals I've worked with are usually very gracious in explaining what it m…

> I feel like there is a bigger lesson in this story: I've got to stop making people feel silly for not getting my Star Wars references, and they've got to understand that there's no logical reason I'd know anything about the big names in fashion

Not convinced by this: you work in the fashion industry. Sure, not knowing that in 2003 rustic/peasant chic was big (again!) would be acceptable, but not knowing the big names? Surely a certain amount of domain knowledge ought to be expected from you?

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#282

Post by mogrim »

lotharbot wrote: post #118
petercooper wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not seen Star Wars . Well, I tried to but fell asleep 10 minutes in. Oddly, I'm not feeling like an odd one out here, even so :-)

I refused to watch Star Wars as a kid, because people kept telling me that if I was a nerd I had to watch it. I considered it a protest against their definition of "nerd". I did finally watch the original trilogy after I was married. It's OK I guess...

Watching it as an adult was always going to be a recipe for failure, I think you really need to have grown up with swapping Star Wars cards, playing with the figures, etc.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#283

Post by mogrim »

ucee054 wrote: post #245
ahoyhere wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Wars is really, really stupid. Also boring. People have an obsession with it because it hit them at the age when they were too young to realize how it's about as intellectually challenging as My Little Ponies in Space. They saw LASERS! and SPACE SHIPS! and EVIL PEOPLE! as 9-year-olds and it embedded in their minds as "cooler than cool." The same way that some adults have a huge nostalgia-on for He-Man or Gem and…

Star Wars is not really, really stupid - that end of the spectrum belongs to James Bond.

James Bond films are James Bond films, as long as you accept that fact they're great. They're only stupid if you try to impose reality on them.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#284

Post by nayefc »

coldtea wrote: post #126
nayefc wrote: post #57

I wish I could understand what the relationship between Star Wars and technology/hacking/software engineering is, that everyone is talking about here. (P.S: I'm a Software Engineer but never watched Star Wars).

The relationship is that lots of people in the technology/hacking/software community like Star Wars and Star Trek and science fiction in general. To the point that you get references to said things all the time in programming circles. I'm sure you are aware of all this, but still wanted to make your point. But the fact that you have some outlier experience ("engineer who never watched Star Wars") should not come into…

> I'm sure you are aware of all this.

I'm not sure how you're sure. I haven't. I've heard Star Wars references before in general, but not particularly from the tech/software community. Your second analogy doesn't really make sense to me.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#285

Post by ahoyhere »

devcpp wrote: post #263
ahoyhere wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Wars is really, really stupid. Also boring. People have an obsession with it because it hit them at the age when they were too young to realize how it's about as intellectually challenging as My Little Ponies in Space. They saw LASERS! and SPACE SHIPS! and EVIL PEOPLE! as 9-year-olds and it embedded in their minds as "cooler than cool." The same way that some adults have a huge nostalgia-on for He-Man or Gem and…

You're absolutely right. Read this: http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1bp44q/til_ge... . Basically, Lucas did the funding on his second movie, which encouraged him to use clever marketing strategies (since the profit was all for him). So he came up with this idea of selling his boring movie to nerds (even though it's entirely unrelated) and it worked! He simply spotted an under-exploited demographic, an…

Three wordsL

L Ron Hubbard

As for Steve Jobs, people have always loved beautiful and desirable objects. As long as there have been objects to love. And designers were hipsters way before Jobs' return.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#287

Post by Gormo »

dasil003 wrote: post #86
seivan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't PM's know jack about code. The problem is the set where a PM would even be required. That means there's a structural flaw in your process. The idea of having a project manager is ridiculous. People _should_ manage themselves and take ownership of the project. Making the PM useless.

Speaking as a technical lead with a decade and a half of experience shipping web products solo and with small teams never exceeding 10 people, I can assure you that there very much is a place for a product manager in a great many products. In fact we just hired a product manager and it's a huge weight off my shoulders. Requiring all developers to be responsible for strategic thinking at all times is at odds with low-…

I believe he's referring to project managers, not product managers. The latter certainly have a crucial role in understanding how the product fits into the market, and undertaking the kind of strategic thinking you're talking about. The role of the former, however, is usually to manage work scheduling and intra-team coordination, which, the OP is arguing, is something that programmers can generally handle on their own.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#288

Post by chris_mahan »

spiffytech wrote: post #272
chris_mahan wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's laziness, and it's also lack of empathy.

It's not really either of these things. The curse of expertise in a field is you live and breathe stuff so deeply for so long that you forget what it's like to not be an expert in your field. You forget what non-experts, or bystanders, don't know, because it's hard to remember a time when you didn't know these things. Computer people are notorious for having trouble explaining technical issues to computer-illiterates…

Was it Einstein who said: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough"?

In any case, I agree that it's hard to explain computer stuff to non-computer people. That does not mean one can then be arrogant toward others.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#289

Post by Gormo »

mynewwork wrote: post #80
rdouble wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of Silicon Valley anything that has to do with a computer has always been called IT.

This is entirely wrong. I've always thought one of the peculiarities about the UK is that they refer to all things computer as "IT" while the rest of the english-speaking world differentiates. I don't work in IT and I never will, it's a different job with a different skill set. I'm not tech support, a dba, or 'the network guy'. I'm a software engineer and I work in R&D.

Well, outside "Silicon Valley" - i.e. the software industry itself - most programmers really do work in IT . The code they write is usually for use in internal operations, and not itself a product they ship to customers.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#290

Post by LekkoscPiwa »

spiffytech wrote: post #273
ams6110 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"allowing more people to refinance and purchase homes" is a big part of what got us into this mess.

That's an oversimplistic evaluation of the situation. We didn't get into the financial crisis simply because people bought homes, we got into it because banks found clever ways to issue mortgages to unqualified borrowers and pass the risk off on someone else.

They didn't find "clever ways to issue mortgages to unqualified borrowers". Simply put the US government guaranteed all the mortgages via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by law. The law passed by Congress in 1990s to increase number of homeowners among minorities was to guarantee all the bad loans by the Government. So from a banker perspective it didn't matter if a borrower will repay. Because if he doesn't than the tax payer will by the law. So, ultimately, it's government fault. And democracy fallacy that voters vote for idiotisms like this and then complain that "banks are greedy".
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