Changes for Better (and Worse?): Part I

Everything we get seems to do more for us. Yet, as it all becomes more complicated, the effort we used to spend on some tasks is transferred to others. Where we once had limited choices, we now have many and they can be overwhelming and confusing. Going back twenty years to look back to my first jobs out of college from my undergraduate degree, there are some examples that sound incredible to me, now. Today, I’ll talk about how much some tools have changed. Later this week, I will discuss other aspects of these changes.

Better and More Tools
My first job consisted of writing custom programs for scientific applications within a research facility that had teams of scientists that needed all types of analysis on a routine basis. Research scientists would come to me with some basic requirements and often a bunch of equations (sometimes, I had to go find some equations to use, depending on the situation). It was my job to figure out what to do with it all and write a computer program to give them a program they could plug their data into and to give them appropriate options for analyzing that data. When creating one of these programs, I would write a report that included an overview, a list of the functionality provided, and a section with all the details of how the program worked that included all the subroutines, flowcharts, equations, and other such details.

In order to write one of these reports, I had only a text editor to work with. I did not have a way to create or print symbols. So, I would create my report with many blank areas and would carefully hand-write every equation into it. Cross-outs were not allowed nor was it allowed to continue elsewhere if I miscalculated the space needed for an equation. If I was not careful and made a mistake, I was required to reprint the report and start over hand-writing all the equations. Being a junior person, this was just part of my job, but senior people did have others to take on this type of work for them. In those days, programs that did this type of thing were considered expensive. Junior people such as myself weren’t given a license to them, even where they did exist.

Today, of course, our word-processing programs include special symbols and our printers will print these symbols. In fact, even without buying a sophisticated system, there are now many share-ware and free-ware programs available for many of these activities, now giving us almost no excuse not to be able to do them. However, where we once had people to type our reports for us, we are now all required to know these word-processing programs and to know them fairly well. Where we once might have been able to pass reports onto a secretary or typist to format our reports for us (unless we were quite junior, that is), many of us now spend part of our time on formatting reports for others. Think of this: how many times has your boss or a customer looked at a report and asked you to reformat it and you’ve spent almost more time formatting a report than it took to create it? So, our time is now spent on different things. Whether it’s better or not is probably a matter of opinion depending on each person’s situation.

Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/