Three professional deformation IT specialists

Being engaged in affairs outside the IT industry, I suddenly found out that I was doing everything in an IT way and inefficiently. A little later, I talked with a friend who is in charge of IT specialists, and from a position of wisdom I should have made better decisions, but, despite the experience more than mine, he offered to do the same thing on the threshold, and, being a leader, only actively advocated 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 not engaged in IT can organize this work much better.

tl; dr: we all work in IT, even when it is not necessary. We also badly estimate forces - both in our work and in “analog”.

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Counting pedestrians in an IT way

I will give in the order of receipt of the options that we came up with:

1. Put a video camera and shoot, then find software for pattern recognition. Or write the most such program. (The last is my idea. Yes, I am ashamed.)
2. Park the car on the sidewalk, take off on the DVR.
3. Put the big board and screw the sensors. By arduino count pedestrians. (It needs to close an area of ​​5 * 2 m.)
4. All together they were trying to figure out what can be done to remove the whole day. Or a working day, replacing each other. It turned out, when calculating manually, you would need 2 people to 1 point.

All of these options are overwhelmingly complex and expensive. How people come up with this - it seems to me, from bad habits common in IT. These habits also harm us in the work itself, and if it is necessary to do something complex and non-IT, they are even harder.

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

№1. IT specialists absolutely do not measure strength and threaten the largest

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

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

While such bloated projects are in good health, their leaders are speaking at conferences as the “hayload guru”. Overseas and some of our guests wonder why in Russia they are so obsessed with the “high road”. It's just that we successfully combine super-engineering and easy money, which the customer pays for his dreams, that his child will suddenly become popular.

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

In IT, the knowledge of excesses just wanders in the form of popular 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, minimum viable product), do not engage in manilovism.

№2. All tasks turn into IT

When I tell IT people about the project, they say: you have to set the camera and look for the program, count it automatically. I explain that commercial solutions are wildly expensive, very capricious, and there is no free software yet. Then they offer me to just take a picture on the camera and read it manually. Allegedly, it will save time. I tried it right away, it turned out that it works twice as long as manually. My friends are not appealing and offer to use application counters on the iPhone.


Any work turns into this.

We counted everything manually, and it turned out to be faster and easier. It took 20 minutes to drive the results from the notebooks into the computer. Then we analyzed the numbers and wrote a report. Now about us have already written in the press. Experiments with video would turn into endless work for months, not giving any return.

The second example. One of the questions we wanted to answer is: is the street used for walking, that is, not just for going to the building. Since people walk more often together, we decided to count the number and size of groups. I would not know what it would have given myself, but it would be possible to play with numbers and graphs until it was blue.

Moral: often ask yourself what you want to do.

Number 3. ITishnik believes he is always right

How IT friends strongly advise you to read from a video camera shows that we consider ourselves experts in all digital technologies. Without participating in the business and completely without experience, we boldly advise the first thing that came to mind. "It should be like this." Non-IT people do not. The humanist, and especially the worker, knows that he does not understand technical issues.

From university, you get used to solving sterile ready-made problems, you believe in mathematical truth, and out of habit, you turn any task into a mathematical or programmer task. In addition, most often we deal with (implementation) of IT versus manual work, when IT is always better and more efficient. And most of those around are incompetent in IT. How can one not believe in one’s own divinity?

Programmers are constantly reinventing the wheel: their new managerial accounting, models of evolution, and even game theory, without finding anything ready, while closing their eyes to significant problems and errors. For example, working with the 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 errors not to commit - “and you be responsible!” - and considers itself 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 our own work, and it would be useful for any IT specialist to look more often at other professions and better understand how to manage final resources and do irrevocable actions.

How pedestrians actually think

Briefly tell you how we measured foot traffic.

We thought up to do this calculation on the forum. Several people who wanted to do something, gathered. We didn’t invite anyone to stop those who want to scratch their tongues, but gathered themselves, then found volunteers to help and counted pedestrian and car traffic on Lenin Street in Novosibirsk.

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

There are more advanced research options - counting where people stand, along which trajectories they move. This is done with a tablet and several forms, 1 form for every 10 minutes. But in our case, this was not enough people.


My friend stands on the street with mechanical meters in his hand.

Of course, you can automate all this. Calculated per unit of information such automation will be better. It is especially advantageous to automate large calculations, to dozens of control points. It is difficult to find at the same time so many people 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" considered everything manually.

Information technologies have their price and sometimes high, so you need to evaluate it well, so as not to repeat the saying “a programmer is someone who doesn’t do it for 3 hours, and he writes a program all day long that counts everything in a minute.”

results

We could do video recognition and even turn it into a startup. Only it is not known, we would have had the strength, but the results and feedback, as well as the demand, would have to wait a year or two. Now the job is done as it was intended, that is, pedestrian flows 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 came to life in the city, and the mayor was once again stuck on 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 those depicted in the illustrations. If someone wants to see the data of calculations, here is the location of points , and a table with measurements , divided by minutes and interpolated, as well as the source data and script for interpolation . (so far dropbox has blocked public links)