[FRIAM] career choices as combinatoric search

[Prof David West]

I have been trying to tell my students for decades that multi-disciplinary teams are essential and that the lack of them is what significantly harms software development. Multi-specialization teams, e.g. analysts, programmers, testers, etc. are not multi-disciplinary. 

In the world of software, you can find this notion in the writings of Constantine and Lockwood, 70s and 80s, Naur, 80s, Kay 90s, Beck 2000, and more.

Moreover, to be an effective part of such teams each individual on the team needs to be a "polymath." The business press and the design community have been writing about this for decades. The design community actually does it, but business is more lip service than actuality.

Buzzwords used: "T-shaped" individuals (breadth and depth), followed by "pi-shaped" (two depth, one breadth), followed by "broken comb" (multiple depths to various degrees with thick integrated breadth), followed by "modern polymath." The whole "learning organization" fad of the 1990s is also grounded in similar ideas.

Acquiring this breadth and depth of knowledge via the current educational system - semesters/quarters, N-credit courses, etc. is effectively impossible. Not to mention the disdain that every discipline has for every other discipline, such that if you really do get a degree that is inter- or multi-disciplinary, you are pretty much guaranteed you will never get a professor's job in any of the component disciplines, despite most universities erecting a liberal arts facade.

davew


On Sat, Jan 18, 2020, at 5:52 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> So, as if it weren't already hard enough to figure out what to learn to do, where to do the learning, and where to go to practice it, here comes the need to maximize your value according to the abilities of your potential co-workers.
> 
> https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/12/eaax3370
> 
> via hackernews
> 
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