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Why SWEs Can't Have Nice Things | |
Not that long ago, and not that far away (from San Francisco, as it were) at a | |
software company, one of those billion-dollar concerns you've heard of, a Vice | |
President attended a dwarf-tossing-slash-coke orgy on his rival's yacht. He | |
couldn't enjoy himself, for that intrusive realization: "This guy's boat's | |
twice as big as mine! No wonder I haven't been promoted." So, when he returned | |
to work, he knew what he needed to do: "free up salary" (fire people) to justify | |
a bonus for himself. | |
He calls one of the firm's economists into his office, and describes a "special | |
project" he'd like the economist to do. It doesn't take long for the economist | |
to realize that this "project" is the replacement of his entire department, and | |
because his master's thesis was on the bargaining power of cartels, he brings | |
the other economists together and explains what the VP's trying to do. The next | |
day, they call a meeting with him and say they've formed a union. They agree to | |
do the project, but only in exchange for massive raises and a tenure system to | |
protect their jobs. | |
The VP gets furious, but he knows he's been beaten. "Fry my frenulum," he says. | |
"That didn't work." | |
Perhaps statisticians would be a better target, he decides. He calls his chief | |
data scientist into his office and describes a "special project" he'd like her | |
to complete. She realizes what he's really asking, but tentatively agrees to do | |
it. The next week, she presents the VP with a study that gave the project a 57 | |
percent chance of the project succeeding. "Well, 57 ain't bad," says the VP. | |
"Go on." She continues to explain that her 95-percent confidence interval around | |
this 57 is quite wide (17 to 97) and further admits she's only about 40% | |
confident in her model. "These things are never actually normally distributed." | |
She begins to throw words like "heteroscedastic", "posterior probability," and | |
"curse of dimensionality", and by the time she's getting into her philosophical | |
spiel about Bayesian versus frequentist approaches, the VP gives up, realizing | |
he's out of his league-- the statisticians are far too smart for him to be able | |
to evaluate their work. She keeps her job. | |
As soon as she leaves, he balls his fists. "Son of a taint!" For psychosomatic | |
reasons, he's walking funny the rest of the day. Goddammit, society owes him a | |
bigger yacht. He went to MBA school at Harvard, you prole fucks! His anger gets | |
the better of him and, in an unrelated meeting later that day, he goes off on a | |
tirade reminiscent of Bruno Ganz's performance in Downfall, and his boss sends | |
him home. | |
Twice defeated, not ready to give up, really wanting to buy himself a new yacht, | |
the VP decides to go after the software engineers. They're just glorified | |
mechanics after all, anomalously paid a middle-class salary. What do they even | |
get up to all day? He grabs a random engineer and pulls him into his office and, | |
yet again, explains the "special project" to automate and replace all of the | |
company's software engineers. | |
The engineer, like his predecessors, realizes quickly that he's being asked to | |
dig his own grave, so he goes to a whiteboard and begins making diagrams the VP | |
can't understand about the company's systems and the various programming | |
languages used to build them. The VP slumps in his seat, realizing again that | |
he's out of his depth. The programmer, at the end of the presentation, concludes | |
by saying, "Really, I should be making your salary. I'm irreplaceable, bitch." | |
The VP put his hands in his pockets and folds in on himself, giving a | |
nod of concession. The yacht of his fantasies, the yacht society owes him, | |
recedes from possibility... a tear forms in his eye. | |
"However," the engineer continues. "If your goal is to replace all the other | |
bozos on my team, this is what you need to do..." |
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Thanks to you, now whenever I watch GATTACA, whenever the readout says "INVALID", in my mind's eye it instead says "BOZO BIT SET".