The Software Scientist
evanmiller.org
The Software Scientist
1–10 of 54 posts
Re: The Software Scientist
#2A fantastic article, and I hope we see more relevant research gathered under this banner. Not having a name for something can be a big problem in even knowing what's out there.
As a side-point, I am often shocked that we don't see more research into how to make software teams more productive coming out of places like Google/Facebook/Microsoft etc, given that these companies (claim to) live and die by the effectiveness of their engineering. If a large amount of their expenditure is in software, to the point they'll buy entire companies just for the engineers, why aren't they financing the large-scale experiments that will settle certain questions for good?
Re: The Software Scientist
#3I don't understand how this role doesn't fall under the scenario of: "The engineer becomes a manager"
In order to do a superlative job as a manager of a software engineering team, one has to master these same skills. Perhaps the term "Software Scientist" will help distinguish good software engineering management practices from bad ones, but I fail to see how "The Software Scientist" is not a management role.
Re: The Software Scientist
#4The first paragraph seems to imply that, to understand recursive algorithms, you need to be young. And rightly so, the software industry is not for old people. Did I get the argument right?
Re: The Software Scientist
#5The first paragraph seems to imply that, to understand recursive algorithms, you need to be young. And rightly so, the software industry is not for old people. Did I get the argument right?
I didn't get that, what does a software engineer with a basic grasp of recursion have to do with "software science"?
Re: The Software Scientist
#6I don't understand how this role doesn't fall under the scenario of: "The engineer becomes a manager" In order to do a superlative job as a manager of a software engineering team, one has to master these same skills. Perhaps the term "Software Scientist" will help distinguish good software engineering management practices from bad ones, but I fail to see how "The Software Scientist" is not a management role.
Also, most academic and research scientists manage a team of students and post-docs who do the actual lab work/analysis/writing. The article's description of a "software scientist" might be more accurately named "software research assistant".
Re: The Software Scientist
#7To summarize, the article suggests making the "software science" job title to:
* "reduce career path anxiety" * "enhance engineering organizations' self-understanding" * "advance the general understanding of the right way to develop software" * "raise awareness about the sponsoring engineering organization" * "bring out some of those 'big picture' thinkers from the woodwork"
The third point is the only one close to the traditional role of a scientist, though "general understanding" takes more than data and statistics from a single organization. Otherwise, this seems to be a pretty blatant misappropriation of the name "scientist"!
Re: The Software Scientist
#8Would such a person practice real science, or just apply the first test that cones to mind, and ignore all of the confounding factors?
Re: The Software Scientist
#9I don't understand how this role doesn't fall under the scenario of: "The engineer becomes a manager" In order to do a superlative job as a manager of a software engineering team, one has to master these same skills. Perhaps the term "Software Scientist" will help distinguish good software engineering management practices from bad ones, but I fail to see how "The Software Scientist" is not a management role.
Agreed.
The only way that the post makes sense to me is that if the organization is large enough, have a role that supports CTO / VPE's efforts and tried to do it in a more data-driven way.
So this way CTO / VPE still have those responsibilities, but have a person who is fully focused on measuring the impact of changes and getting data.
I think these would be very special roles and very few organizations, so not enough to really talk about it as an alternative to the two traditional tracks. That said, there is certainly there is value in this role.
Re: The Software Scientist
#10"By and large, programming is a young man’s game"
As a middle-aged programmer who is a much better programmer now than I was when I was young, I'd argue with the article's initial premise.