🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BzLzI3.3J6@newcastle.ac.uk> J.W.Harley@newcastle.ac.uk (Jon Harley) writes:
>
> >Building research systems, whether you make a genine contribution to
> >the field or not, is frequently (though not always) significantly
> >different to building industrial strength systems, and should be.
>
> That's certainly true. For one thing research is creative, and seems to
> be much harder work (PhDs take long hours, and you have much more
> responsibility and less help available than a junior programmer does).

Though PhD students often work inefficiently either because they just
work that way, or lack the level of support that a junior engineer
would hope to have in industry.  I think the big distinction is not in
creativity (there's lots of creativity in industry), nor in how hard
people have to work (there seems to be a wide variation) but in the
degree of collaboration with other people and the way in which various
constraints have to be met.

> If the BCS is just going to be for engineers, it should rename itself the
> Institute of Information Systems Engineers or something and make it explicit.
> If it's going to be for everyone in computing, as the current name implies,
> it should value us all equally.

On almost every bit of paperwork I receive from the BCS, there is a
subtitle which reads "The Society of Information Systems Engineering"
(note: not "Information Engineering" as Lindsay Marshall seems to have
been saying) so I suppose they have come close to making it explicit.

--
Andrew Ormsby	 AI & Robotics Research Group, Department of Computer Science,
aro@aber.ac.uk   University of Wales, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DB, UK.