{"id":4789,"date":"2015-09-14T03:32:56","date_gmt":"2015-09-14T08:32:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=4789"},"modified":"2015-09-14T03:35:00","modified_gmt":"2015-09-14T08:35:00","slug":"why-attending-a-software-conference-made-me-sad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/why-attending-a-software-conference-made-me-sad\/","title":{"rendered":"Why attending a software conference made me sad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I went to the Western Users of SAS Software conference last week and came home sad. It wasn&#8217;t for the reasons you&#8217;d guess.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>No one sexually harassed me (as if!).<\/li>\n<li>I did not forget how to code a confirmatory factor analysis in the middle of the pre-conference class I was teaching.<\/li>\n<li>The other statisticians didn&#8217;t make fun of me. (Not within earshot, anyway.)<\/li>\n<li>All the other SAS programmers didn&#8217;t refuse to sit and drink with me at the networking mixer.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It was actually during Maura Stokes&#8217; presentation on new developments in statistics procedures that I started to get depressed. You might wonder why discussion of adding link=alogit in PROC LOGISTIC so that the adjacent category is used as the referent would be a cause for dismay or what is disheartening about changing the default number of imputations in PROC MI to 25 from 5.<\/p>\n<p>The problem is that as I sat there I thought,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This is some interesting stuff and I probably won&#8217;t get the time to try hardly any of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Now, I do realize that not being able to play with the latest software is close to first on the list of First World Problems.<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t the first time I&#8217;ve been in this situation. When I started my career, I was a pretty good programmer. That&#8217;s what we were called back then and it didn&#8217;t bother us. Software engineer, software developer and data scientist weren&#8217;t things yet.<\/p>\n<p>After I earned my doctorate and started teaching, my husband was in an accident and I became the sole breadwinner for the family, so my consulting side gig grew and all of a sudden I had more people working for me than I could count. It was more like dozens than hundreds, but I just didn&#8217;t have any time to count them. I also didn&#8217;t have time to do nearly as much data analysis and coding as I would have liked and ended up in the unhappy situation that some of the people working for me were more up on the latest technology than I was. (<em>NOTE to young people: If your boss is not up on the newest OS, language, update etc. it maybe isn&#8217;t because he or she is unintelligent, uninterested or an old fogey but perhaps, instead, is doing the things that bring in the money to pay your salary.)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>After a while, I disentangled myself, paid the bills and remarried, not in that order, and was able to get back to doing work that really interested me. However, here I am again, spending more time building a company than building a product.<\/p>\n<p>A few weeks ago when we began our three months as part of the Boom Startup ed tech accelerator, The Invisible Developer turned to me and said,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;You know, I&#8217;ll bet there came a point when Bill Gates started to spend more time building Microsoft than building operating systems.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;d pout about spending so much time in meetings on convertible notes, discount rates and forecast returns but then I remember that:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>All companies need some adult supervision, so it may as well be me.<\/li>\n<li>The alternative to let someone else take the responsibility and make the decisions.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>&#8212;- This is my company &#8212;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.7generationgames.com\/buy\/\">7 Generation Games: Learn math and Native American history<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.7generationgames.com\/buy\/\">Get it for yourself or anyone who wants to be smarter<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.7generationgames.com\/buy\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4192\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/villageburned-300x169.png\" alt=\"burning village\" width=\"300\" height=\"169\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/villageburned-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/villageburned.png 450w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I went to the Western Users of SAS Software conference last week and came home sad. It wasn&#8217;t for the reasons you&#8217;d guess. No one sexually harassed me (as if!). I did not forget how to code a confirmatory factor analysis in the middle of the pre-conference class I was teaching. The other statisticians didn&#8217;t&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-julia-group"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4789"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4792,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4789\/revisions\/4792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}