Project 02

Growing up my favorite toys were Legos, Pokémon/Yu-gi-oh cards and Nintendo 64. Playing with Legos was one of my favorite activities. I would build small towns, or robots and interact with them through Legos. This is very similar to the idea behind our DecoBlocks.  As I played with and used Legos, building villages and fantasy worlds or forming patterns, I learned to perceive and understand space while developing creativity. For the card games they helped me develop my basic arithmetic and for each game you would have to mentally keep track of how much life your cards had and had to quickly add and subtract in my head. Also, the cards had secondary market value so I would trade and sell them. Looking back on it now in a way this was kind of like trading stock and creating arbitrage in markets where people did not have full information. Sometimes I would be able to trade for a rare card because one of the other kids did not realize its value. So I guess in a way that’s what started my interest in business and the stock markets. In a way everything I played with growing up was definitely reinforcing gender roles and advertised towards boys while I was growing up. However, I feel Legos have recently tried to reach both genders.

As I stated early the DecoBlocks are very similar to Legos. In my mind they are a blend between Legos and Lincoln Logs. I personally do not feel that toys and stories or movies need to explicitly try and market for both genders. To me if a child is interested in a toy they wouldn’t really care or understand fundamentally that a toy is “meant for” boys or girls. So long as the toys don’t say “this toy is meant only for boys” I do not think advertising needs to overly try and gender blend advertisements. However, I do feel children should be exposed to STEM and positive gender roles and expectations early in order to promote diversity and equality. If children are raised showing that both genders are equal and that all fields are interesting I feel the world will develop faster and everyone will be more accepting in the future.

Reading 05

The Therac-25 accidents were a horrible tragedy that brought to light issues within engineering and programming culture. The Therac-25 machine was a medical device that was used to help combat cancer. It would blast the patients with radiation beams that were safely reflected off of mirrors and other safety mechanisms. According to the article, “it was determined that the root cause of the problem was twofold. Firstly, the software controlling the machine contained bugs which proved to be fatal. Secondly, the design of the machine relied on the controlling computer alone for safety. There were no hardware interlocks or supervisory circuits to ensure that software bugs couldn’t result in catastrophic failures.” Essentially, safety mechanisms within the hardware were overwritten when the code was updated to be more software based. If the user selected X-ray mode, the machine would begin setting up the machine for high-powered X-rays. This process took about 8 seconds. If the user switched to Electron mode within those 8 seconds, the turntable would not switch over to the correct position, leaving the turntable in an unknown state. Overall, the entire system design was the problem. Safety-critical loads were placed upon a computer system that was not designed to control them. Timing analysis wasn’t performed. Unit testing never happened. Fault trees for both hardware and software were not created.

I think the challenges for software developers are mainly they have to try and think of every possible way for their code to go wrong and put safety measures in place. In my mind I think there should be overall fail safes and such that are normally in place and if there are unforeseen catastrophic failures that would not seem “normal” that the developers cannot be held liable. In my mind there is no perfect machine that will run in every possible way it could be used and it’s not fair to blame the engineers. For example, in the Therac-25 case the basics of the software and hardware should have been able to prevent these issues but by quickly switching between modes it caused an error that would not have been foreseeable. Granted, I do not have any real developer experience and do not understand the inner workings of a software development firm I do not see how it could be possible to write code that would prevent every error possible.

Overall, I think safety critical systems should be overly redundant to prevent issues and have multiple safe guards but it is also reasonable to understand that people will not always use software and hardware in its intended way and we therefore can’t hold the developers responsible.

Reading 04

Diversity is an issue within the tech industry. Currently, there is an extreme bias towards white males being hired in the Silicon Valley area. However, I do not feel this lack of diversity is as big of an issue as the public and media believes it to be. I agree with the Martin Fowler article that diversity is needed and should be fostered, “Lack of diversity is itself a problem. Different people think differently, and consequently come up with different ways to solve problems. If you have a bunch of people with the same background, they miss lots of ideas – leading to inefficiencies and lack of innovation.” I truly believe that diversity should be fostered and developed in order to increase innovation and create new and unique ideas. But it should not be a forced event where minorities and women are hired purely for getting the diversity numbers but based on their merit.

The idea that there is discrimination within the industry doesn’t seem to ring true to me especially in the world we live in where there is so much political correctness and activism. The PBS article about Google’s diversity, in the non-tech positions there was about a 50-50 split between men and women. I think a root of the issue is not discrimination within companies but more that there are not lots of female, Hispanic and Black engineers and CS students. The main issue is that there simply isn’t a large enough pool of minority candidates for companies to adequately fill their diversity needs without hurting the quality of their employees. This relates back to the hiring process where companies clearly stated they are very risk adverse in hiring candidates.

One way these issues can be slightly solved are by companies investing in programs that help get more minorities and women into the tech majors in colleges. This is exemplified by Apple fostering improvement by donating to organizations that work to develop and inspire women and minorities to become tech skilled and major in the field through scholarships. The best way to remove the barriers and stigmatization of nerdy programmers is to just advertise to the minorities and women as much as possible.

Another barrier I believe is the “boys culture” within companies. These cultures have been fostered for years of not really having many women around in the workplace. While I feel like it will be an initial barrier, once more and more women enter the workforce I feel this issue might naturally fix itself, but maybe I’m a naïve optimist.

Reading 03

I feel like joining startups is all the rage now because of the expected high payoff. A start up is like a lottery ticket, there is a small chance you can make it big and everyone wants to take that risk. In my Finance studies I took a behavioral finance course that analyzed peoples’ behaviors when looking at payoffs and their probabilities. The idea known as Prospect Theory proves that people weight and more often choose bets that have low probabilities and high payoffs and in a way this rationalizes the startup craze.

Obviously, the benefits of joining a startup are that it will become huge and your stock option equity in the company will allow you to support your family for the next hundred years. However, there are also extreme risks. The way startups are designed are to ensure the investors and executives get their payouts first as seen in the New York Times article, “investors and executives generally get protections in a start-up that employees do not. Many investors have preferred stock, a class of shares that can come with a guaranteed payout. Executives frequently get special bonuses so they will not leave during deal talks.” If a private company that plans to go public gets bought by another firm or a by private equity often the employees do not get to exercise the true value of their stock options and lose out on a lot of money. In startups there is also a high risk of failure and end up with no money at all. My summer after freshman year I worked at a small tech start up in Bellevue, Washington that had some really unique ideas that I was glad to be a part of on the marketing side. Seeing the stressful culture and day to day chaos of the company really turned me away from that lifestyle.

In finance, the tried and true advice I have heard from all of my mentors is to always try and go to a big company first like Morgan Stanley or Goldman Saches. They ingrained in me that those large companies have the resources in place to train and develop your skills to make you a person in the finance industry (competence-wise not necessarily better people). After spending time getting training and using the large company’s extensive resources move down to startup scale or private equity careers. This general career plan is effective because the PE firms and startups require more specialized individuals that are developed at large companies.

Joining a startup or small finance firm was definitely a part of my career decision. I knew if I wanted to become the best and most productive individual I could be in the finance industry I would need the resources of a big company. While I am not a CS major I feel the same ideology should hold true for them. By working at big company you develop programming skills and gain credibility for when you eventually go to your startup you will have experience to back up your pitch to investors.