[SIGCIS-Members] My CACM column on "The Tears of Donald Knuth"

[Janet Abbate]

I have a grad student, Stephanie Mawler, working on that very topic (cultures and communities of software engineering, using discussion groups as a main source of data). But she has a day job as a software engineer, perhaps confirming Bjorn's point.

On Jan 15, 2015, at 11:19 43AM, Bjorn Westergard wrote:
> I write software for a living, and sometimes imagine how a social scientist would write about my peer group. If you were to read our emails/chat logs with no background in software engineering, or listen to recordings of our conversations, you might be lead to believe that a disagreement about, e.g., which library to use for time conversion is a matter of weighing fairly objective technical criteria in particular circumstances with imperfect knowledge.
> 
> But if you were familiar with the technical domain, I think you'd realize that that argument in particular, and many others besides, are in fact "about" petty personal conflicts, defending the importance of one's particular competences over the claims to superiority of others (FOSS v. Microsoft), job security through obfuscation, etc. It would be hard to see the "social" if you're not immersed in the "technical".
> 



Dr. Janet Abbate
Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society
Co-director, National Capital Region STS program
Virginia Tech
www.sts.vt.edu/ncr
www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055
www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS