Three professional deformations of IT specialists

    Khabrovchanin at work in the Technopark of the Novosibirsk Academgorodok.  Photo by Daria Shamovskaya.Having started doing business outside the IT industry, I suddenly discovered that I was doing everything in a quiet and inefficient way. A little later, I talked with a friend who leads IT people, and from the position of wisdom I should make better decisions, but despite the experience greater than mine, he suggested from the threshold to do the same, and as a leader, he only more actively defended these ideas .

    What did we do? We conceived, like the Moscow City Projects, to count the pedestrian traffic on Lenin Street in Novosibirsk. It turned out that people who are not involved in IT can organize this work much better.

    tl; dr: with us all the work turns into IT, even when it’s not necessary. We also poorly assess strength - both in our work and in the “analogue” one.


    Pedestrian Counting


    I will cite in the order of receipt the options that occurred to us:

    1. Put the camcorder and shoot, then find the software for pattern recognition. Or write such a program yourself. (The latter is my idea. Yes, I am ashamed.)
    2. Park the car on the sidewalk, shoot on the DVR.
    3. Place a large board and screw on the sensors. According to arduino count pedestrians. (It is necessary to close the area of ​​5 * 2 m with it.)
    4. Together, they wondered what could be done to remove the whole day. Or a working day, replacing each other. It turned out that when counting manually, you would need 2 people per 1 point.

    All of these options are overwhelmingly complex and expensive. How people come up with this, it seems to me, comes from bad habits that are common in IT. These habits harm us in the work itself, and if you need to do something complicated and not complicated, they are even harder.

    Just yesterday, before the publication, I met a friend of the IT specialist, whom I had not seen for many years, told what we were doing, and he immediately said that filming with a video camera was the best.

    No. 1. IT people do not measure their strength at all and aim at the largest


    This is the worst habit I know. And I also have it: I myself also thought at first that pedestrians should be counted for a whole day, every single one. But geologists do not dig the entire field for testing! The sample may be inaccurate. And even more so, if every day there is a different number of people, that is, one day, even absolutely accurately measured, is not an indicator at all.

    And in our work, we do the same: we do everything with a huge margin and expensive, even if it is not known whether it is necessary. If the class is necessarily abstract, to expand with drivers. If the site - then immediately highload.

    While such bloated projects live, their leaders speak at conferences as the “guru of haiload”. Overseas and some of our guests are surprised why in Russia the "highload" is so crazy. It’s just that we are successfully combining over-engineering and easy money, which the customer pays for his dreams, that his brainchild will suddenly become popular.

    In this sense, IT is not even a technological industry, but advertising or art, where the customer also pays for his vanity. In the technological sectors, everything is measured and counted. Airlines will not make a new flight daily and with large aircraft under high load. With a probability of 99%, putting the money down the drain, the airline does not “catch a highload”, but “beautifully dully”. In fact, they arrive at times cheaper and more careful: a small plane, a flight once or twice a week, and if passenger traffic does not appear, the flight will be curtailed, if it is, they will gradually expand.

    In IT, knowledge of excesses just wander in the form of folk wisdom, for example, YAGNI (you ain't gonna need it).

    There is a way out in the IT industry itself - do MVP (Minimum viable product), do not engage in manila.

    №2. Все задачи превращаются в айтишные


    When I tell IT people about the project, they say: you need to put the camera and look for the program, count automatically. I explain that commercial solutions are extremely expensive, very moody, and there is no free software yet. Then they offer me just to shoot on camera and count manually. Allegedly this will save time. I tried it right away, it turned out that it happens twice as long as manually. My acquaintances do not relent and suggest using counter applications on an iPhone.

    Hackday in the technopark of the Novosibirsk Academgorodok.  Photo by Daria Shamovskaya
    Any work turns into this.

    We calculated everything manually, and it turned out faster and easier. It took 20 minutes to drive the results from notebooks into the computer. Further, we already analyzed the figures and wrote a report. Now they have already written about us in the press. Video experiments would turn into endless work for months without any return.

    Second example. One of the questions that we wanted to answer is: is the street used for walking, that is, not just for passage to the building. Since people often walk together, we decided to calculate the number and size of groups. What this would give, I myself do not know, but it would be possible to play with numbers and graphs until turning blue.

    Moral: Ask yourself more often what you want to do.

    Number 3. IT specialist believes that he is always right


    The way IT friends strongly advise counting from a video camera shows that we consider ourselves experts in all digital technologies. Without participating in the business and with absolutely no experience, we boldly advise the first thing that came to mind. “You have to.” Non-IT people don't do that. The humanist, and even more so the worker, knows that he does not understand technical matters.

    Having become accustomed to solving sterile ready-made problems from the university, you believe in mathematical truth, and out of habit you turn any problem into a mathematical or programmatic problem. In addition, most often we are dealing with (implementing) IT against manual work, when IT is always better and more efficient. And most of those around are incompetent in IT. How not to believe in your own divinity from this?

    Programmers are constantly reinventing the wheel: their new management accounting, evolution models, and even game theory, without looking for anything ready, while turning a blind eye to significant problems and errors. For example, working with a version control system from the command line is fraught with errors, instead of working on the cause of the problem, the IT management regularly orders you not to make mistakes - “and you be more responsible!” - and considers himself right by definition.

    It must be remembered that you are not the navel of the earth, and the world does not follow your commands, even logically correct.

    Summary


    These professional habits, or deformations, harm us in their own work, and it would be useful for any IT specialist to look at other professions more often and better understand how to manage final resources and do irrevocable actions.

    How pedestrians are actually considered


    I’ll briefly tell you how we measured foot traffic.

    We decided to do this calculation on the forum. Several people who wanted to do something gathered. We did not call anyone, so that those who did not want to scratch their tongues would come, but assemble themselves, then find volunteers to help and count the pedestrian and car traffic on Lenin Street in Novosibirsk.

    We identified 9 points in bottlenecks (which cannot be avoided) and in each of them an hour later a man appeared with two mechanical counters and for 15 minutes counted the flow in one direction and in the other. One person stood for 15 minutes at one point, then switched to another, and for an hour measured 3 points at once. After 3 hours, it was changed by another, then vice versa. Thus, 2 people, replacing each other, measured movement at three points at once in a day. All this lasted from 8 to 22 hours.

    There are more advanced research options - calculating where people stand, along which trajectories they move. This is done using a tablet and several forms, 1 form for every 10 minutes. But in our case, there weren’t enough people to do this.

    My friend with the counters.  Lenin Street, Novosibirsk.  Photo by Dmitry Krechetov
    My friend is standing on the street with mechanical meters in his hand.

    Of course, you can automate all this. Per unit of information, such automation will be better. It is especially advantageous to automate large calculations at dozens of control points. It is difficult to find so many people at the same time and not to confuse everything along the way. But all this is for teams with big money and big sponsors. So far, even the Moscow City Projects have considered everything manually.

    Information technology has a price and is sometimes high, so you need to evaluate it well so as not to repeat the saying "a programmer is someone who doesn’t do three hours with his hands, and writes a program all day that will count everything in a minute."

    results


    We could do video recognition and even turn it into a startup. It is only unknown whether we would have had the strength, and the results and reviews, as well as the demand, would have had to wait a year or two. Now the matter is done as it was planned, that is, the flows of pedestrians are counted. And we have publications in the most popular media of the city. The whole team is happy, and there are offers of help. If it goes, you can take up the video.

    Meanwhile, discussions about the pedestrian zone were revived in the city, and the mayor again got stuck with this issue - exactly what we wanted to achieve at this stage. Our poster, published in the media Taking this opportunity, I send rays of good to all who are depicted in the illustrations. If someone wants to see the calculation data, here is the layout of the points , and

    image


    table with measurements broken down by minutes and interpolated, as well as source data and a script for interpolation . (so far, dropbox has blocked public links)

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