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Facebook Exec Explains Why Technical Skills Aren't Enough To Be a Great Engineer (geekwire.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook's Regina Wallace-Jones, who is in charge of protecting 1.6 billion people on the social network, says math and science skills aren't enough to tackle challenges at a firm. "Don't let anyone tell you that engineering is only about math and science or that engineering expertise is all you have to offer the world. Your experiences and your perspectives can help inspire a company to find a different approach to a problem or encourage someone else to speak up," she said. "The impact of engineers goes well beyond the mobile apps, the gadgets, and the security systems that we build. The quest to engineer meaningful solutions... is not just about math and science, it's about making amazing solutions for real people in the real world. It's about pushing mankind to its outer limits by inspiring the world to imagine bigger solutions than our hands can hold."
> ... would Facebook know about "real solutions for real people"?
In fact, more than virtually any other company in the world, excepting perhaps Microsoft.
> What exactly do they produce? What particular problems do they address? How is mankind's lot significantly improved by the presence of Facebook?
They produce a social network. There are many problems that these address. Sure, from your point of view, people post cat baby photos. Around the world Facebook is virtually the Internet, because it provides the means to connect with a social graph of people in similar circumstances. The breadth of communities, NGOs and government agencies worldwide that use Facebook groups to communicate with small communities, where there exists no infrastructure to build and publicise traditional web sites, is beyond large. Today I fly out to the rural mountains of Taiwan where I will be working with the Taiwanese indiginous people to document their own language. They face a great many difficulties but the various tribes have been able to pull together to share information, organise events, publicise their political struggles, all via Facebook and mobile networks (another great engineering achievement, which presumably you actually rate?)
Signed,
Also an engineer (one who develops solutions for people outside of the rich white-anglosphere).
Nothing is ever enough for these corporations while there are still dollars in circulation that don't belong to them. Facebook is about making amazing solutions to fill Mark Zuckerberg's pocket, nothing more, nothing less. "Real people in the real world" my bollox
And yet... how many of us have actually made a product 1+ billion "real people in the real world" use and how many are just being Internet warriors in the comments field? I've seen a lot of engineers get lost in technical or academic challenges, philosophical issues or just perceived wants and needs the customers/users would have that they really don't. Cue the infamous "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." when Apple released the iPod. Or why "assume a spherical cow" has become a running joke of theoretical models.
There is a lot of hubris that it's what the STEM people do that's important and everything else is fluff. If nobody else will stick their neck out, I will: I don't really understand people, like what the mainstream wants or why. And that's okay, because the people who do generally haven't don't know much about actually building it. And sometimes the economists will tell you that yes, people want it and yes, we could build it but you'd be spending $100 for a solution to a $10 problem. And sometimes you build it and it's the best solution nobody's heard about.
real world <-- investigate, analyze --> problems
problems <-- design, build, test --> solutions
solutions <-- communicate, distribute --> real world
I've written a lot of good code that went to naught not because there was anything wrong with it, but because it wasn't actually solving real world problems. And you can of course blame the spec or that the user is holding it wrong, but at the end of the day it just isn't providing value. So I try to go beyond what they teach in STEM classes and work on what's the user really trying to achieve and can I deliver on that. Or maybe it's just in-house what the business analyst wants or the way the architect or development team wants to build things but there's hardly any position where you don't need those skills.
I have this person at work in mind, no doubt he's very bright but he's also quite terrible at talking to people in a way they can understand. Even for an IT person it becomes an incoherent rant of technical details, niche concepts and proscribing solutions instead of explaining them. Meanwhile I pushed through a good technical change recently asking "What if the person changes his mind?" because the proposed solution failed to take that into account. That I pointed out how we'd already solved this other places helped, of course. But if nobody pays attention, we're going to reinvent the wheel and poorly, over and over again.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Let's see what I've accomplished on Facebook today...
All that - and it's only quarter to four in the afternoon on a slow Sunday.
You may not find communicating with your fellows useful, but I certainly do. Contrary to the ignorant and idiotic position often seen here on /. (and one continues to be held in defiance of repeated corrections on the matter), there's a lot more to Facebook than playing Farmville and posting inane photographs.
Engineers focus on the details of how. This requires a certain outlook that eschews emotional appeal.
No, it really is the exact opposite. To be a successful engineer you need to know not only the technical stuff, but to understand how people will use and even feel about your products. It's always been that way, it's not really new. Engine designers have been considering the tone of the exhaust system since at least the 50s, probably before.
Often it's the engineers job to understand not only when a requested feature is technically impossible, but when users will react badly to it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC