The Human Factor in Software Engineering

I am currently implementing some key learnings from my own gender studies performed 2013. For instance, in gender studies it is found that women in informatics work on "soft topics" preferably. This might sound nice, because women have a natural gift for soft topics. But this is nonsense. I am more talented for hard facts, statistics, numbers, formulas. The soft topics are fascinating me because they are even more complex than mechnical research questions because soft skills and emotions are more difficult to measure and enhance the complexity of statistical treatment.

The harm that is done by women moving to soft topics is in that these topics have a low prestige. Producing code is valued most in informatics. This means that people who do this have a higher prestige, this work is better paid and it is easier to get funding for such work as a freelancer or as a scientist.

I wondered why this could happen that during my 20 years of work life I drifted from hard topics like programming, simulations and numerical calculations to requirements engineering. Was it a completely free choice? No. I remember jobs where suddently I was told to keep my hands from the code, in order not to damage anything. When I asked to get programming tasks, I was told this was not possible because I had never written any code before and it is too difficult for me to learn. This was not true, but prejudice beats facts. When the boss says programming is too difficult for me, I must not touch the code.

Why I write this is the following: I kept my eyes open. The world is full of opportunities and we can choose. Currently, I am preparing for a programming course, a course about IT security and for a Matlab Simulink course. Welcome back, my good old friends! Differential equations, vehicle models, graphics, DOS attacks! I am feeling like in the good old times of my studies when colourful formulas were telling me their secrets and I calculated air planes in the flight or cold metal falling into warm liquids. I am on my way back to hard topics...

Privacy captcha is an image that can hide your data when you transfer it on an open channel. "To hide" means that it can not be read automatically (e.g. by hackers or other listeners), but only by humans. It might be a photo of your dear cat or your banc account number. Listeners will not know.
You can produce your own captcha online at https://privacy-captcha.com and then download your own captcha (by rightclicking on the image) or by downloading the software to your computer.
This service is a gift by the well-known German club digitalcourage and by The Digital Native (don't ask me who they are!).
Enclosed, you see an example:

No, I did not leave Internet. I just was busy with the lecture start. Right now, I was verifying whether I really defined an unsolvable task when I asked a student to prepare a presentation about JAutoDoc. He said that he found nothing about it. It was not a YouTube. Ehm? In fact, there is ONE YouTube video about JAutoDoc. And finally, there are even more possibilities to do online research about JAutoDoc than YouTube. YouTube is neither a search machine nor a university library. Not all the world's knowledge is documented at YouTube, you know?
He said that if I find more than he did, then I am quite good at research. Oh yes, I am quite good at this! *grin*

This is cool: The last message from someone who left the internet long ago. I wonder whether he came back...

Here you find a website with studies and surveys about the perception and usage of new technologies.

"Don't study, teach yourself." This is the message of the edupunks movement. And my heart sais "yes" and "no" to this.

No: Before you start doing something new and creative, you should learn about what there is already. Problems, solutions, problems of the solutions, rules, alternative methods and tools. And only after you know this all, you can start developing your own solutions.

Learning the old stuff is more efficient when you trust an expert to summarize it for you and give you an overview about it. This is what your studies are for.

Yes: Of course, you are always responsible for yourself. The university can only deliver you part of the knowledge you will need for the rest of your life. This can not be otherwise because universities can only deliver basic knowledge which they believe will be useful for most of the students. When you were a professor, you would know what a small fraction of this expert`s knowledge fits into one lecture. It is frustrating for the professor, but he must make an educated choice. Especially, practical trainings and exercises take so much time. You can present UML in one hour, but really teaching it until everyone is a UML master would take several weeks of full-time teaching. And will all of them need it in this detail later-on?
So, the better you already know what job you want to do afterwards, the better you can teach yourself additionally what you will need and can focus during your studies on these topics, for instance by choosing the right lectures, seminars and internships.

I think that studies are a good basis for everything. You gather basic knowledge and learn working and learning strategies. And you get professional feedback about your performance, weaknesses and strengths. The professor has seen hundreds or thousands of students, he can compare.
But you will never stop learning anyway!

I understand that the demanding young generation who expects perfection from others, is not satisfied with their professors. I hope they will get more modest when they start working and see that they are not perfect neither and overestimated their knowledge and performance. When they start to see how much work it is to prepare a really good presentation and to give objective and competent feedback to 40 students.

My advice is: Go and trust the good old education system, but do not lay all responsibility on your professors. You are the one who knows where you want to go and what you want to learn. Set your own focus and teach yourself, too. And do not expect the professor to be responsible for your future. He has so many students!
And, by the way, it is the same for professionals: The boss and the company, they do not feel responsible for your learning and your future, neither. They are responsible for profit. So, they use you for producing profit. That`s it. Take the responsibility for your learning and future in your hands, too! This is the reason why I am able to earn my living now. While I was employed, I invested a lot of spare time and private money on learning. And now it is mainly these extra job activities that earn my bread and butter. Because in a company, you often learn to use very specific technologies not relevant elsewhere and follow company-specific work processes. Each company is a little universum on its own and knowledge from one universum might not be useful in the rest of the world. So, never stop learning!

Here two links:
http://www.edupunksguide.org/
And Ben, an active German blogger about anti-uni learning:
http://anti-uni.com/

And, of course, there are all these online course portals:
https://www.udemy.com
http://mooc.org/
https://www.coursepath.com/
http://www.akademie.de
http://www.lecturio.de/
http://www.edudip.com
http://www.diplomero.com
http://www.codecademy.com/
https://iversity.org/
http://www.udacity.com
http://www.coursera.org
http://www.ocwconsortium.org
http://www.codecademy.com
https://www.edx.org/
https://openhpi.de/
http://www.tele-task.de
https://www.open-c3s.de/
http://academy-cube.eu/
http://futurelearn.com
https://grockit.com/

Dear all, here you can find a test of virus scanners. They are all good, but not equally good. And some are more appropriate for some countries and some for others, as the risk profile (i.e. virus distribution) is not the same in all countries.

Oh, I like this article about the British intelligence agency who sais that they can manipulate online polls and automatically create postings in social networks. This explains how some online discussions develop! So, only trust in your own online lies!