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A comment on Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007). Parent comment

Re:Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007) by blub on Sunday April 28, 2019 @02:45AM (#19769740)
Isn't this more or less what Google does with all their profitless projects? Giving senior engineers something to play with so that they don't leave for the competition or create new competition.

I guess it's nice for the devs at first, but creates a lot of waste. They're basically spamming the world with programming languages, libraries and products only to wind them down and start again.

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Re:Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007) by marmaduke on Sunday April 28, 2019 @03:10AM (#19769808)
> They're basically spamming the world with programming languages, libraries and products only to wind them down and start again

Replace libraries, languages and products with statistics, hypotheses and figures and you have described scientific research.

The point is that each iteration learns from the last, in principle, even if they aren’t backwards or forwards compatible.

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Re:Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007) by TelmoMenezes on Sunday April 28, 2019 @03:37AM (#19769881)
Replace statistics, hypotheses and figures with bread, donuts and cake and you have described a bakery. Hmmm cake... How can you not like cake?
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Re:Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007) by marmaduke on Sunday April 28, 2019 @01:19PM (#19772316)
I do like cake. But I think baked goods are somewhat solved problem.
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Re:Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007) by pjc50 on Sunday April 28, 2019 @06:36AM (#19770372)
> Replace libraries, languages and products with statistics, hypotheses and figures and you have described scientific research.

Well, yes - and the inability to build on previous research code because people don't publish it results in a colossal waste of (usually) public money. Nonreproducibility in science, and Google's abandoning of products, are phenomena that resemble one another somewhat.

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