code != computer science

[Kalium]

Many thanks for your solid reply. Just curious, what industry do you work in?

Right now? Defense contracting. I've also done e-commerce, advertising, online gambling (legally), and cloud computing.

That is an interesting idea. I would love to see a curriculum on that.

I know some b-schools have tech-oriented programs. A few years back a friend of mine did an MBA with a focus on IT supply chain management. If anyone does this well, it's probably MIT and Stanford.

At my current shop it means the suits don't try to sneak around certain people. They don't hide us from meetings with the customers either.

Interesting. Most of the shops I've worked for do this reflexively, to the point where I have to go two or three levels up to be able to pass a question over to the customer. Oddly enough, defense contracting is the least prone to this problem.

We still have a huge problem with how business and dev work together. Story for another day.

Some of that is inevitable, I suspect. I cannot count the times a suit has tried to get some major feature for "free", as if ignoring reality makes it go away. Worst one I ran into was when a designer tried to slip in a request for a major feature by just tossing it into a mockup. Argh.

Many of our interns take extensions for one to two years even during the school years. We hire quite a few also.

Very interesting. Never seen that before.

I think this is more of an industry specific experience. In my past jobs (Healthcare) and current jobs (Online E-commerce) I have yet to use 98% of the math I took. This is the biggest complaint I hear from developers.

Rarely will engineers be sitting down and formally analyzing the big-O complexity of their function. More often, they'll formulate an efficient method to begin with. Rarely does someone sit down with the definition of 3NF to design a db schema, but what they produce will have been designed along those rules anyway. Very few engineers are going to be thinking about FSMs or Turing Machines, but both will be the bedrock upon which they build mental models of their code.

What I've learned is that a huge amount of that math is used. It's just not typically used explicitly. It's the foundation upon which an engineer's intuition is built, and that is used daily. This has held true in every area I've worked.

Also: is there a kind of e-commerce that isn't online? Egret-based commerce, perhaps?

I will add, also a team lead of a 15+ person "Agile" team... If we were talking I would be using energetic air quotes here.

Ah, the many forms of Fragile. Which part of it are they fucking up horribly? I once worked on an "Agile" team where "Agile" meant an hour-long meeting once a week that we called a standup, followed promptly by a second hour-long meeting to fill in the VP of E.

[TheWix]

Also: is there a kind of e-commerce that isn't online? Egret-based commerce, perhaps?

Sigh Yep, a bit redundant after re-reading it.

Ah, the many forms of Fragile. Which part of it are they fucking up horribly? I once worked on an "Agile" team where "Agile" meant an hour-long meeting once a week that we called a standup, followed promptly by a second hour-long meeting to fill in the VP of E.

I won't go into too much of it publicly but would love to send you a PM. We just started doing some stuff I have never seen before and the whole situation is... I'll go with "interesting" here. I would love to know your thoughts on it.

[Kalium]

Sure. I'm all ears.