Xkcd - story of our lives

My experience with working in academia was that I created some software with big ideas, almost laughably poor quality of implementation, and which (mostly) ended up filed away with a grant application which has been forgotten by probably eight of the ten people who know it exists.<p>My experience with creating software in the Real World has been that I do mostly boring things with periodic flashes of insight, that in a period of five years I went from being useless grunt labor to actually making meaningful decisions (almost enough time to be allowed to tie your own shoes in academia without a PhD supervising you, as long as you give all the credit for the shoe-tying to the PhD who isn't supervising you), and I can point to actual people whose lives are measurably better for me having done the work.<p>(Among them myself, since I no longer make $12 an hour. Not that us Japanese salarymen are rolling in it, but it is a pleasant change to not worry about how I am getting home for Christmas.)<p>Sadly, my ability to express this comment in the form of a witty stick figure sketch leaves much to be desired.

Are really all of us hackers superhumans? Hands up, who has created a revolutionary new algorithm as part of his day job?<p>I've really started to dislike this self-congratulory style of postings ("managers are stupid, hackers should rule the world").<p>So we can understand computers. Guess what, it isn't rocket science. OK, maybe it is kind of rocket science - but the reason other people don't understand it is simply because they are not interested, not because they are somehow inferior.

In case anyone doesn't recognize it, the hexadecimal value in the title text is the "magic" number used in the famous approximate inverse square root routine.

Alternative Business universe:<p>"My god .. this will mean a new feature in our next version, an email blast to every industry paper, blog and publication, a massive user-drive, and after we juice it, we can let our R&#38;D spinoff company license the tech to other companies, but if we keep it, this will be an strategic asset and a big bargaining chip in any acquisition talks .. really, this puts us in the same market as the big co that has been looking for an acquisition."

We're slipping into Digg territory here - we're not going to go down the "posting all xkcd cartoons" route are we? I love xkcd incidentally.

I don't know where the idea comes from that academics value elegance in programming type problems more than businesspeople anyway. In my experience, academics are the ones who only care that it works. It might be an abstract thing that works rather than a practical thing, but it has to work and no further. In business (businesses I've worked with), you have a motivation to make something that is GOOD, and "it works" is never good enough, and only making things that work is a good way to get managed out or fired.<p>I've never seen code in the business world that even approached being as horrid as the stuff I saw in academia.

In my opinion, both outcomes are sad and unfortunate. Who has benefited from the engineer's genius? Well, a bunch of journal articles got written and perhaps someone wrote a dissertation or five, alternatively a few thousands of dollars got written off the bottom line of some mega-corp.<p>That's when the entrepreneur steps in. Either the dinky program fix, or the obscure (or not so much) journal article can be turned into something that is brought out to people, for the entrepreneur's profit, which is wholly contingent on convincing people that they have benefited!<p>It's sad to me that there really are large quantities of brilliant people who could be the guy in the first two panels who truly think the two outcomes on the right are the only possibilities.

Okay, raise your hand if you actually are working on phone-to-Exchange sync software...<p><i>raises hand</i>

Heh, only if the buisness guy is dumb. If he solved a problem that really was of that magnitude, he could probably license the technology for $$$.

Story of my life indeed. The funny part is the fact that we are all reading this and voting on it (it was posted after midnight)