What do you do?

I've been led to believe, or at least have heard that in some certain cases, people decide to have kids because they were bored. Well, that's probably a great idea because regardless of whether you were bored or not before, there's no possibility of being "bored" once you've taken that specific plunge because you essentially have no time to do anything and therefore couldn't possibly be bored any longer. Have I mentioned that here before? Probably. But anyways, while GWMD has prided itself during the previous several years (!) of publishing only a quality product with each sentence, phrase, and individual word painfully and often brutally extracted from a deep, hard-thinking, brain-storm-of-the-century-ing effort, and then agonizingly re-thought and edited, and re-written, ad nauseum, etc., we are going to have to -- at least temporarily -- pull slightly back from said policy because really there's just no time for all that. And since we don't want to close up shop altogether, I'll just quickly write a bunch of crap when I have two seconds every seven or eight weeks. Deal?

It's one of the most oft-asked questions when you meet someone new, or even when you're talking with someone you know that you haven't seen in a while and your job has changed, and even in the case where you're chatting with said individual but you had so many better things to discuss and then this finally came up because there was a major lull in a once-vibrant conversation stream, and it seems to me that it should have an easy answer for most people. The second "do" in this context (see blog post title) is referring to your job, of course. And I think for many/most professions/jobs the answer is clear and requires little explaining. "I'm a teacher" means you teach; "I'm a waiter", "I'm a lawyer", "I'm a doctor" are also all pretty straightforward. But if someone asks me what I do, it's not all that easy to give a good answer. I end up feeling pretentious or inarticulate or stupid or embarrassed or some other nasty feeling, or more often, most of those things all combined because I don't really have something so easy to say. Even if I explain the product that I work on, the actual day-to-day tasks don't make a lot of sense at least in any simply explainable manner. But what are you gonna do right?

This does lead me to get to pull some quotes from a great book that I'm reading (one page every nine or ten weeks when the opportunity presents itself). The book is Emanuel Derman's My Life as a Quant and it's just great. The sub-title of the book is "Reflections on Physics and Finance" and Emanuel talks about his life as first a physicist, going through three postdocs and then briefly as an assistant professor in Colorado, then through five years in the ex-physicist wasteland of 1970's Bell Labs, and finally on to his life as a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. Anyways, the reason I can pull this quote is because it relates to the above in the following way. And unfortunately it's related to vanity I think. If you tell someone you work in computers then they often presume that you work in "IT". Like those IT nerds that keep the computers running at your office and know how to take apart a computer and put it back together and like doing so. Eww. Others presume that you're a "programmer" or "developer" (in fact my European Blue Card says I'm an "Entwickler" which means "Developer"). For both of these my pride and vanity are upset because I didn't spend four years becoming a doctor of philosophy (seriously, look it up) to be some nerd IT dude wiring up network cables and programming user interfaces.

Truth be told, though, my job does involve a little bit of programming and I'm often for some reason a bit embarrassed, or at least hesitant, to mention that fact, and it's imperative that I include the important fact that that is only a very small part of my job. And I don't really know why I feel that way and then I got to this in Dr. Derman's book:

"By some strange unanimity of opposites, both my scientist and business-world friends were condescending about programming -- they thought it inferior to doing physics or making money."

So at least I'm not the only one! But then Manny (I don't know if he'd mind me calling him that but I'm going to go ahead and do it) talked about how programming is actually not some terrible thing worthy of condescension. He says quite eloquently (in my humble opinion -- emphasis mine):

"What are you doing when you program? You are trying to use a language to specify an imagined world and its details as accurately as possible. You are trying to create this world on a machine that can understand and execute only simple commands. You do this solely by writing precise instructions, often many hundreds of thousands of lines long. Your sequence of instructions must be executed without ambiguity, by an uncomprehending automaton, the computer, and yet, in parallel, must be read, comprehended, remembered and modified by you and other programmers. Just as poetry strives to resolve the tension between form and meaning, so programming must resolve the tension between intelligibility and concision."

Totally! The (potentially misattributed but whatever) famous computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra (allegedly) once said "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes". Great quote. I guess I'm kind of going off-topic here and just putting some random things on the page as well but I did sort of warn you about that in the opening paragraph of this particular post. But the point is that doing computer science, and even programming as Dr. Derman nicely explains in his really nice book, is something beyond, say, repairing computers. I'm sure you don't need it spelled out for you anymore than it's already been but to flog a dead horse (to make use of a crude idiom in probably the wrong context but I'm OK with it if you are), there's a difference between the telescope repairman and Carl Sagan (no offence to either one though, of course).

And so did I accomplish at explaining what I do? Of course not. And that's why it's not a great conversation topic because if I can't explain it in a thousand words or so, I'm probably not going to do a great job at it in a live conversation. But just to close things off, I also wanted to mention that being the fastest growing job in America (I probably read that somewhere), my actual title of "Data Scientist" must be a pretty rad job. But going back to that part where I said I sometimes feel a little pretentious or some variation of that feeling, saying "I'm a data scientist" I think, personally, sounds a little douchey. So what do I really do? I mostly waste my life away writing e-mails to people who don't actually read them. Ah well. At least my parents read my blog posts (for now...