
Xkcd - story of our lives - andrewbadera
http://xkcd.com/664/
======
patio11
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.

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.

(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.)

Sadly, my ability to express this comment in the form of a witty stick figure
sketch leaves much to be desired.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Yes, I was actually expecting the cartoon to go in that direction. Academia:
"You're going to be modestly famous in mathematics textbooks!" Business: "OMG
your brilliant code [1] has saved me three hours of work _per day_ and
generated an additional $1M in revenue. Here, have a raise."

But this is a cartoon specificially about deep magic: About the bittersweet
joy of discovering something great that only the well-trained can understand.
It's not about the money, and it isn't even about happiness in general: It's
about a specific _sort_ of happiness and how delimited it is.

\---

[1] i.e. "the CRUD app that you copied from the framework documentation in one
afternoon". But a well-placed simple CRUD app is a godsend. Businesspeople
don't care about methods, they only care about results, but _by god_ are they
happy with results.

------
Tichy
Are really all of us hackers superhumans? Hands up, who has created a
revolutionary new algorithm as part of his day job?

I've really started to dislike this self-congratulory style of postings
("managers are stupid, hackers should rule the world").

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.

~~~
dkersten
Guess what, rocket science isn't that hard either.

~~~
varaon
Carmack was able to grasp it with enough studying.

~~~
trafficlight
I think Carmack might be superhuman, though.

------
cperciva
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.

~~~
cubicle67
attributed to John Carmack and first observed (by non-id people) in the source
of Quake III

here's a good read <http://www.codemaestro.com/reviews/9>

[Edit: I've always thought this was Carmack's code, but it looks like I was
wrong. see email from Carmack in here
<http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/> ]

~~~
dkersten
Apparently its attributed to Greg Walsh who got the idea working on the Titan
graphics computer at Ardent Computers with Cleve Moler, the author of matlab.

<http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/15/>

------
mahmud
Alternative Business universe:

"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&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."

------
pbhjpbhj
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.

~~~
barredo
I don't think "posting all xkcd cartoons" is near happening in HN at all. This
one it's pretty close to the HN main interests (academy research and/or
entrepreneurism)

~~~
Tichy
Actually we've been through that. Not sure why it (thankfully) stopped.

~~~
jcdreads
My guess is that it stopped because there are no longer any HN readers who
both like xkcd and don't check it anyway. We reached xkcd-awareness saturation
a couple of years ago.

~~~
Kirby
I think there's a reason to post this one in particular - to set up a comments
thread on HN about it.

I kind of thought it had harsher implications for Academia - for every self-
congratulatory paper of something new, it's already been done a hundred times
in the "Real World" in an unheralded source control repository.

------
synth
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.

I've never seen code in the business world that even approached being as
horrid as the stuff I saw in academia.

------
mbrubeck
Okay, raise your hand if you actually are working on phone-to-Exchange sync
software...

 _raises hand_

~~~
ahpeeyem
I would have raised my hand 3 months ago.

I nearly quit for a dish washing job when our customer couldn't understand why
it was taking us so long (~3 weeks!) to do two-way appointment sync between
our application's booking system and Exchange. An actual quote: "but Outlook
can do it!" Attempts to explain the API learning curve and the work needed to
manage conflicts were met with blank looks.

I nearly had to get a dish washing job when they didn't pay, but that's
another story...

------
anateus
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.

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!

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.

~~~
tsally
I think you'll find that programming ability and vision go hand in hand. So
when you talk about "brilliant people ... who truly think the two outcomes on
the right are the only possibilities", by definition they are unlikely to
exist in significant numbers. Brilliant programmers don't believe that
academia and large corporations are the only two possibilities. They wouldn't
be great programmers if they couldn't see past two obvious possibilities.

~~~
anateus
Perhaps. "Large quantities" comes from generalizing my personal anecdotal
experience of people with great ability, and plenty of vision, but without
that sense of where to go with it (one could argue that this is a defect in
their vision). I wasn't comfortable enough with the generalization to go into
"most" territory :>

I think it's to a great degree a cultural thing. If you are exposed to
something repeatedly and told it is good, such as being an academic scientist,
a programmer for a company, yes, even an entrepreneur, you are more likely to
see that thing as a promising path.

Here on HN everyone is inundated with "startup this" and "startup that", so I
seem to be belaboring a point, but my personal experience has been that "out
there" entrepreneurship is not often enough seen as a viable option and that
the inclination to do it is a variable (somewhat) independent of the
brilliance of the hacker.

------
SapphireSun
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 $$$.

~~~
pwmanagerdied
Doubtful, his company probably owns the right to it since he developed it at
work.

~~~
SapphireSun
Well at least the company would use it. It wouldn't die in obscurity.

------
ajaimk
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)

~~~
cubicle67
depends on where you are. for me, it was just after lunch

~~~
ramidarigaz
Yay for Asia.

