Tales from the jar side: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; on average it was okay
Many random thoughts this week, ranging from marketing to means and medians to memes.
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of November 29 - December 6, 2020. This week I taught a Kotlin Fundamentals class and a Getting Started with Spring and Spring Boot course, both on the O’Reilly Learning Platform, and a Deep Dive Into Spring Virtual Workshop for the No Fluff Just Stuff series. I also did a webinar on Friday on Java Testing with JUnit 5 and Mockito 3, again for NFJS.
Marketing 101
Recently I had a very pleasant conversation with a woman in marketing at O’Reilly, and if you know me, you know how unusual that is. I’ve been prodding them for years to do more in the way of marketing, and it was great to see they have a good dedicated person (if the off chance she’s reading this, Hi Suzanne!) now available to help.
The first significant result for me is this page, which lists my upcoming training courses, my books, and a brief bio. I asked them to update it to (1) show the training events in chronological order, and (2) add some of my videos / “learning paths” on the platform. Both are coming soon.
More about that as the site develops. I’m just glad to see it exists at all. :)
Means and Medians
Says it all, doesn’t it? I think about this quote frequently. It comes up all the time in sports, especially when you root for an average team, as I do. After today’s dominating 45 - 0 win over the LA (?) Chargers, my New England Patriots are at exactly .500 for the season.
Average teams will drive you crazy, because their record represents a mean without telling you the standard deviation, and variance matters. In (American) football, with its extremely short season, an average team can beat anybody and lose to anybody on any given week. It’s easy to get fooled. When your team is playing well, they look like world-beaters. When they’re playing badly, they look completely incompetent. What’s worse, both happen multiple times in the same game.
(Incidentally, I’ve had a great, nearly twenty-year (!) run with the Patriots, and my Red Sox won four World Series when I was convinced they’d never win one at all. So don’t worry about me. I’m good.)
In the US this year, we’re experiencing similar issues with massive variations. Through herculean efforts on the forefront of science and technology, multiple vaccines will shortly be available for COVID-19, developed in record time. Science, baby!
Yet, somehow a large percentage of the population dismisses all the people who have died from COVID-19 complications so far, refuses to wear masks to protect either themselves or others, and does not intend to get the vaccines when they are available.
What can you say to that? “On average it was ok,” I guess.
Speaking of COVID, they say there’s an XKCD cartoon for everything. Here are a couple recent good ones:
If you’re having trouble turning down risky activities, there’s always this one:
It’s not XKCD, but on that last point, I saw this on Twitter:
For the record, it’s been 10 days since Thanksgiving, so if you aren’t showing any symptoms yet, you’re probably in the clear.
There’s also the difference between mean and median to consider. For example, if Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos walks into any room, the average income of everyone present jumps into the millions. Literally. The median, however, stays pretty much where it was.
Sometimes the differences are geographical. In my home state of Connecticut, the median per capita income level has always been one of the highest in the country. But that status is highly dependent on a particular region bordering New York, known as the Gold Coast. If you subtract out the Gold Coast, we drop to around 35th.
On average it was ok.
(For the record, I don’t live anywhere near the Gold Coast in CT. We’re doing fine, thank you very much, but not fine like they are. Whoa.)
I don’t really have a point to make here, other than if you focus on either extreme, you’ll drive yourself crazy. The topic came up this week on twitter in connection to a study that claimed that eighty-some percent of all software developers were under the age of 40.
I usually roll my eyes at that, because it feels like they don’t know the people I do. Maybe it’s because I’m not totally focused on Silicon Valley, which tends to hire very young, pay a lot, and then grind people into the ground through massive overwork. The latest actual statistics I could find were from this year’s Stack Overflow survey:
Hey, I finally made the 1%! Or 1.4%, to be precise.
Yeah, those numbers skew on the low side. It looks like 95% of developers in the survey are below age 50 and 84.4% are under 40, so that’s consistent with the statistic quoted above.
Mostly the way this affects me is that I have to keep updating any popular culture references I use during class. Back when I started teaching, I could comfortably assume every developer in class knew all the Star Trek original series episodes pretty much by heart. Now, some of them have never even seen The Trouble With Tribbles. Shocking, I know. Then I had to switch to Next Generation. Now I can use an occasional Kirk, Picard, or Sisko reference or stick to Star Trek Discovery or Lower Decks, but in the end I’m better off with Baby Yoda.
Speaking of whom, the video in this tweet shows every episode of the Mandalorian (except maybe for the last couple, but still):
(Note the green puppy in the first image. Awesome.)
As pop culture references go, I still insist that if you haven’t seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you’re not really a developer.
Frequent readers of this newsletter know I tend to rely on Twitter for my humor. Like the chart in this tweet, unrelated to anything but a great conversation starter:
I don’t have much else to say this week. Like so many people, I’m preparing for the home stretch, consisting of classes and talks that are scheduled between now and the end of the year, while trying hard not to agree to any new commitments.
With that in mind, let me conclude with this tweet, from one of the astronauts I follow on Twitter:
Maybe I’ll see some of you (virtually, of course) on Monday:
Last week:
Kotlin Fundamentals on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Spring and Spring Boot, ditto
Deep Dive Into Spring, NFJS Virtual Workshop
Java Testing with JUnit 5 and Mockito 3, an NFJS webinar
This week:
Conference In The Cloud, Monday afternoon EST
Functional Java, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform, Monday/Tuesday
Managing Your Manager, ditto, Thursday
Reactive Spring, private class, Friday/Saturday