Comment by matthewdgreen
Comment by matthewdgreen 18 hours ago
This same post appears at the top of every single HN story on reproducibility. “I was a student in [totally unrelated field] and found reproducibility to be difficult. I didn’t investigate it deeply and ultimately I left the field, not because I was unsuccessful, of course, but because I understood deeply despite my own extremely limited experience in the area that all of the science was deeply flawed if not false.”
Imagine the guy who got a FAANG job and made it nine weeks in before washing out, informing you how the entire industry doesn’t know how to write code. Maybe they’re right and the industry doesn’t know how to write code! But I want to hear it from the person who actually made a career, not the intern who made it through part of a summer.
The problem is the negative feedback cycle: someone who has spent decades in academia and is highly published, almost by definition alone, has not experienced the pains of industry practitioners.
Their findings are often irrelevant to industry at best and contradictory at worst.
Of course I'm talking almost solely about SE.