[FRIAM] career choices as combinatoric search

Mon Jan 20 14:34:44 EST 2020

Think about that number and the conceptual problem being addressed.  Does it really make sense to you?

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Date: Monday, January 20, 2020 at 11:28 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] career choices as combinatoric search

When I worked on No 5 ESS at Bell Labs in 1979 we often asked haven't the division directors read "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks.  It was often said that if you got the right 20 people together you could finish the project sooner than by hiring hundreds of new people.  It's not clear that was true.  As I've said before the system deployed in 1983(?) contained 200 million lines of C code.

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

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Phone (505) 670-9918

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 11:18 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com<mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
Nick writes:

"I wonder if the same kind of argument could be made for a very special sort of computer science program."

Understanding large human-engineered codes is becoming intractable.  As codes gets larger over time, and staff come and go, they suffer more competing, often overlapping, design ideas.   Without a experienced hands-on experts that have global and deep hands-on knowledge, managers of these codes can become unaware as entropy grows, and in some situations they may not even care.    It can also happen that the managers and the individuals with global and deep hands-on knowledge are different people.    This is rationalized on the basis of the certain managers being favored by other senior managers and/or because they have "soft skills" that are deemed superior.

I find the "soft skills" argument dubious.  It seems to be built on the premise that teams need to grow.   What if the whole problem is that they favor growth over the selection of the right people?   Why have 20 people if you can have 2 and do a better job?   I think the reason is that the small team philosophy is not economically appealing to most:   How do you become a manager and increase your salary if you have no one to manage?   A manager needs to have a certain degree of incompetence amongst her managed staff in order to justify her supervisory role.   A student has believe that they can be trained in short amount of time and be ready to work and get paid, in order to justify the cost of their training.   The teacher has to have someone to teach in order to justify their role.   In a world full of humble polymaths, none of this overhead has to exist.

I think the future of software development will become more like the natural sciences.   Machine learning systems will discover algorithms, and it will be the job of humans to rationalize how it works and why.   We already have human engineered systems that need this kind of treatment (e.g. massive refactoring), so assuming that artifacts have no unifying design is not that big of a change as a practical matter.   Of course there will need to be more tools to reconcile form and function.   I see it roughly analogous to understanding biological systems.

Marcus
________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> on behalf of thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>>
Sent: Monday, January 20, 2020 10:21 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] career choices as combinatoric search

Hi, Dave,

AT LAST!  SOMETHING WE AGREE ABOUT!

I think you will read with pleasure the attached Letter to the American Psychologist written in 1969 but not published until a few years later.  The back story was that the temporary job I had at Swarthmore had run out, and the job market had tightened and I was in danger of being SOOL, with a wife and two young kids.  So I wrote a letter describing my proposed teaching program and sent it to 52 colleges and universities around the country.  I got two nibbles and one bite.  Whew.  After I got the job at Clark, I sent the proposal to the AP as a “letter to the editor”.

I think it also explains why we both believe so fervently in FRIAM.  I wonder if the same kind of argument could be made for a very special sort of computer science program.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Monday, January 20, 2020 3:00 AM
To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] career choices as combinatoric search

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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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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