aggle-rithm
Ardent Formulist
I was reading an article the other day about Bill Gates nostalgia in the face of his impending retirement. One of the things it touched on was part of his deposition to the prosecuting attorney in the antitrust case against Microsoft. This testimony infuriated the prosecutor and had the judge laughing and shaking his head in court because of the perceived extreme evasiveness of Gates.
Part of his testimony:
Reading this, I couldn't help feeling a little sympathy for Bill. Since I've gotten into the technology business, I find myself becoming increasingly irritated by the inability of most people to be precise in their words, either spoken or written. No doubt, this is due to my constant envelopment in software code, which requires a level of precision that most people don't have to deal with. If, for instance, you want to excise a certain set of characters of arbitrary length from an arbitrary position in a larger set of characters, also of arbitrary length, you must tell the computer EXACTLY what you want, including each individual rule it must follow to perform the task (start with the first space in the string, find the next space after that, see if there are any dashes or apostrophes, etc., etc) from beginning to end. A human can do this same task with minimal effort, without really thinking about it, by recognizing the patterns. Except for AI, most software programs can't.
The point is, being immersed in this kind of thinking can begin to change the way you perceive verbal exchanges in the real world.
Take the divisive word "concerned". The attorney was clearly annoyed that Gates wanted clarification on this word. However, think about the fact that Gates is both a manager and a software architect. In management, a "concern" is something that is broken and needs to be fixed; in software architecture, it is a set of related tasks that must be completed.
Perhaps he should have been able to derive the exact meaning from the context of the sentence. However, it is difficult for non-technical people to understand the mental fog you can get into by thinking about software all day. It's tough to shift gears and start thinking about the real world.
In the boardroom, Gates no doubt has people trained to communicate with him in a certain way that emphasizes precision of thought. Being grilled by an unfamiliar person in an unfamiliar setting may have put him at a severe disadvantage.
Can any of you technical people out there relate to what I'm saying? Does the abstract world of software semantics begin to spill into your "normal" life, or is it just me?
Does Bill Gates deserve the benefit of the doubt here?
Part of his testimony:
Reading this, I couldn't help feeling a little sympathy for Bill. Since I've gotten into the technology business, I find myself becoming increasingly irritated by the inability of most people to be precise in their words, either spoken or written. No doubt, this is due to my constant envelopment in software code, which requires a level of precision that most people don't have to deal with. If, for instance, you want to excise a certain set of characters of arbitrary length from an arbitrary position in a larger set of characters, also of arbitrary length, you must tell the computer EXACTLY what you want, including each individual rule it must follow to perform the task (start with the first space in the string, find the next space after that, see if there are any dashes or apostrophes, etc., etc) from beginning to end. A human can do this same task with minimal effort, without really thinking about it, by recognizing the patterns. Except for AI, most software programs can't.
The point is, being immersed in this kind of thinking can begin to change the way you perceive verbal exchanges in the real world.
Take the divisive word "concerned". The attorney was clearly annoyed that Gates wanted clarification on this word. However, think about the fact that Gates is both a manager and a software architect. In management, a "concern" is something that is broken and needs to be fixed; in software architecture, it is a set of related tasks that must be completed.
Perhaps he should have been able to derive the exact meaning from the context of the sentence. However, it is difficult for non-technical people to understand the mental fog you can get into by thinking about software all day. It's tough to shift gears and start thinking about the real world.
In the boardroom, Gates no doubt has people trained to communicate with him in a certain way that emphasizes precision of thought. Being grilled by an unfamiliar person in an unfamiliar setting may have put him at a severe disadvantage.
Can any of you technical people out there relate to what I'm saying? Does the abstract world of software semantics begin to spill into your "normal" life, or is it just me?
Does Bill Gates deserve the benefit of the doubt here?
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