This is utter rubbish; I really wish people would keep quiet about things they know nothing about. I suggest that you have never actually discussed a domain with a data scientist if you think it's "basic statistics".

In our dev. shop, we have a lot of great programmers, but none of them can touch our data scientist when it comes to working out what our tens of millions of users are actually doing and what their salient attributes are.

As for the data scientist needing to 'implement their theories', that's what the developers are for. The data scientist does the analysis, then works with the developers to implement systems that incorporate the results. Neither group is capable of the other's work.

Utter rubbish, perhaps. But since I've actually done the job, I do happen to know something about the subject. It's a marketing term, not a term of art.

The vast majority of "data science" performed at web companies boils down to knowledge of summary statistics and probability theory, a smattering of basic statistical models, and (most importantly) the ability to write code. There's not much that would challenge an advanced undergraduate, let alone a doctoral-level statistician.

The interesting question is 'why do foolish managers continue to treat their employers in poor ways that are known to decrease productivity?' In terms of productivity, it's a total lose-lose situation.

I'm 37, and I'm pretty sure that I have worked out the answer. Most corporations are run by people (the managerial class) who are more interested in power than results. They hire sycophants who kiss upwards and amplify pressure downwards. Competence is irrelevant; after all, any competent manager would resist managing their employees in ways that management science have proven to be unproductive.

I have been in a couple of these companies, and they absolutely rot from the head down.

At least in tech. we have the option of getting out, because such companies are generally not entrenched and are on track to fail. Unfortunately, in other parts of the economy, such companies are unassailably entrenched, so their workers have no choice but to work for stupid, evil, toxic organisations, or to change career.

The result of these organisations is that much of the US now has a toxic culture of 'if you're not stressed, you're not working'.

A friend also suggested to me that it's possible for groups of people to become 'addicted' to stress; it would be interesting to see more on this.

This made me a lot angrier before I realized that this is just the primate dominance dynamic expressed in business organizational structure. It's the default human response to the circumstance, just like street gangs are the default response to different circumstances.

That has changed my attitude to "I hope these assholes get hit by a truck" to one of compassion to people whose wiring has gotten them trapped in a local maximum. There are no villains, only people who the system has trained to serve the system.

If there actually were an objetive way, then it would be a different story. But in the absence of it, a team has to "look" productive at least, and that means people in the office looking like they're working. Even if it means less real work getting done (because again, how do you measure that objetively? can't be done).

One of the big reasons programmer productivity is so difficult to measure, is that you need to also see future productivity of everyone else who works on the code. If a programmer takes an extra week to build something more maintainable and that improved design saves months of future work, it's likely a productive use of time, but that's not always obvious until those months are saved (or not saved). That's not easily measured until the full lifecycle of the software is complete.

The tech world has some problems, but compared to the work environments that the rest of the country is experiencing, it's Shangri-La.

I wish that all of the country (world, really) would be able to exercise control over their destinies as easily as we can. The mindset and the skills together are a great gift. Never cease to be grateful.

This NY Times article was posted here a few months back and touches on the same idea: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-tra...

Publicly traded corporations are all the same; they're all equally obnoxious, a-moral, and hostile to customers when it suits their perceived interests. Oracle's Java adware is just a tiny little symptom of this; the actual problem is systemic to public corporations.

This kind of obnoxious user-hostility is what made me abandon closed source software for personal use. Additionally, my company (a private company) doesn't use any closed-source software in our systems, and never will. For us, open source software is better, more flexible, more supportable, and the nail in the coffin is that there simply aren't any vendors that can be trusted by a small organisation such as us.

Oracle don't care about little people signing a petition anyway. If one of their large corporate customers told them directly that this was unacceptable, they would stop it in a minute.

<sarc>This is why free-market, no-social-services USA has such a low public debt/GDP ratio, whereas quasi-socialist (public health: boo!) Australia has high debt/GDP, and socialist hell-holes like Denmark have off-the-scale debt/GDP ratios.</sarc>

Just look at the numbers in my (highly debatable and somewhat cherry picked) loosely ranked list of least to most socialist countries.

Debt to GDP ratios (2010) USA: 73% UK: 86.8% Australia: 30% Canada: 83% Germany: 82% Japan: 208% Finland: 49% Sweden: 38% Denmark: 46% Norway: 49% Singapore: 118.2% France: 86%

DERP. Oh dear, the numbers appear to have little correlation with with how socialist the country is, but may be more related to how 'innovative' a country's banking sector is, how many 'state owned enterprises' there are, national demographics, corporate political capture, and how distorting the tax system is.

Even the neo-liberals at the Economist are starting to understand that government provided social services, transport, health, and education aren't the primary factor that sends countries broke. Perhaps one day they'll notice the elephant in the room: the banking sector.

I believe The Economist paid lip service to the role of the financial sector in the collapse; but that's mostly my opinion; as you say, they definitely covered it to some degree. At least they're apparently starting to realise that chanting "cut public services" over and over isn't the answer.

One problem with the USA left-right false dichotomy is that when you pick a middle point between the Republicans and the Democrats, you end up with something that resembles no political party anywhere else (including in the USA's history); everyone else's right wing parties (and the Republicans in the past) resemble the Democrats or are even further 'left'.

As far as I can tell, there's almost no difference between Obama and (for example) Reagan based on the left/right scale; yet US conservatives generally idolise Reagan and demonise Obama. It's bizarre.

My comment wasn't especially well-worded or clear, but loaded with a fair amount of sarcasm which some people have trouble with, so let me try again.

The Economist is a Neo-Liberal rag. 6 years ago, they would NEVER have published an article like this. Now they're starting to consider actual evidence and are seeing that government social services don't necessarily send countries broke.

However, they still have a long way to go before their analysis actually mean anything. Because they're still strongly attached to their broken neo-liberal world-view.

If you had been straight-forward up front, that would have been much more interesting. Your initial comment was a mess. Not because I "have trouble with sarcasm", but because it had little direction and (to phrase it in terms you should understand) was so drenched in sarcasm as to have practically washed away the original message.

Here's a fun experiment. Go to the article, and search for the terms 'bank' and 'monetary'. 'bank' appears once within 'bankrupt', and 'monetary' doesn't exist at all.

Any article on this subject is meaningless without including those. The Economist is like an alcoholic who has recently started to admit that their behaviour is sometimes harmful, but hasn't yet come out and said "I'm an alcoholic".

Eh, it's fine in my book. Banks may be the biggest issue, but so long as we're getting somewhere I'm happy with The Economist focusing on different aspects. Getting tunnel vision and saying "we must focus only on banks!" would ultimately be a loss, IMO.

The high chance that more catastrophic rails exploits will be found in the next month (if all of the paths to YAML.load have been found, I'll eat my hat) will increase the number of people making or agreeing with statements like static_typed's. After an exploit or two have been found in February or March, people will be pointing at Rails and saying 'I told you so'.