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What Hacker News says
- One of the earlier references to the 10x that I've found is in
https://www.scribd.com/document/557220119/NNPP-Article
> Researchers have found between a low of 5 to 1 to a high of 100 to 1 ratios in programmer performance. This means that programmers at the same level, with similar backgrounds and comparable salaries, might take 1 to 100 weeks to complete the same tasks. [21, p. 8]
> The ratio of programmer performance that repeatedly appeared in the studies investigated by Bill Curtis in the July/August 1990 issue of American Programmer was 22 to 1. This was both for source lines of code produced and for debugging times - which includes both defect detection rate and defect removal efficiency. [5, pp. 4 - 6] The NNPP also produces a higher instance of defects in the work product. Figure 1 shows the consequences of the NNPPs.
The reference to 21 is Shneiderman, Ben Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1980) and 5 is Curtis, Bill, "Managing the Real Leverage in Software Productivity and Quality", American Programmer July/August 1990
https://archive.org/details/softwarepsycholo00shne/page/8/mo... - this then goes into an entire book of sources and research.
There's also mention of DeMarco and Lister in some literature... which means Peopleware.
From there:
> While this [10 to 1] productivity differential among programmers is understandable, there is also a 10 to 1 difference in productivity among software organizations.
> H. D. Mills, Software Productivity (New York: Dorset House Publishing, 1988), p. 266.
> Our study found that there were huge differences between the 92 competing organizations. Over the whole sample, the best organization (the one with the best average performance of its representatives) worked more than ten times faster than the worst organization. In addition to their speed, all competitors from the fastest organization developed code that passed the major acceptance test.
> This is more than a little unsettling. Managers for years have affected a certain fatalism about individual differences. They reasoned that the differences were innate, so you couldn’t do much about them. It’s harder to be fatalistic about the clustering effect. Some companies are doing a lot worse than others. Something about their environment and corporate culture is failing to attract and keep good people or is making it impossible for even good people to work effectively.
- Donald Norman and Ben Shneiderman are old friends and colleagues.
https://www.nngroup.com/news/item/hci-pioneers-photos/
NN/g News; HCI Pioneers Photos; Announcements; September 8, 2015
Professor Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland) is one of the founders of the discipline of human-computer interaction (HCI) and has produced breakthrough research and influential textbooks since the early 1980s. He is also an accomplished photographer from a family of world-class photographers. Dr. Shneiderman has now released a website that collects many of his photographs from the last 32 years of the field's other pioneers, including Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman. It's amazing how young they look in the early photos :-)
https://hcipioneers.wordpress.com/
Shneiderman's comment on launching this history site: "My goal is to make HCI more visible and tell our history more widely. I think HCI designs have had as much impact as Moore’s Law in bringing the web and mobile devices to the world."
Since this is a photohistory, it's much more approachable than most history sites. Well worth perusing for anybody with an interest in where we come from.
----
Ben Shneiderman coined and defined the term "Direct Manipulation":
http://www.csc.kth.se/utbildning/kth/kurser/DH3050/hcihist11...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11365359
DonHopkins on March 27, 2016 | next [–]
Wow, Ben Shneiderman looks so young in that photo. He's still hard at work making computers easier for people to use, and he just published a major update to his classic book, "Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction", which just went to the printers and will be available on April 26. [1]
I enjoyed working with him at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, and the experience deeply influenced everything I've done since.
Ben is the human who suggested the field be called "Human Computer Interaction" instead of "Computer Human Interaction", to put humans first.
He defined the term Direct Manipulation [2] as:
1) continuous representation of the objects and actions,
2) rapid, incremental, and reversible actions, and
3) physical actions and gestures to replace typed commands.
He also came up with the blue underlined hypertext link, as well as embedded graphical links [3] for the "HyperTIES" system [4].
Here's a paper I published when I was at HCIL, about a visual PostScript programming environment that featured "direct stack manipulation": "The Shape of PSIBER Space - October 1989". [5]
Ben's an avid photographer, and has published this photo history of SIGCHI conferences. [6]
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Designing-User-Interface-Human-Compute...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_manipulation_interface
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM
[4] http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/
[5] http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/97
[6] http://www.sigchi.org/photohistory/lib_viewer.jsp?lib=chi
----
Ben Shneiderman founded the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, but instead of calling it "Computer Human Interaction" like CHI, he put Humans first instead of Computers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35736775
*
4 points by DonHopkins 8 months ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
That's a point Ben Shneiderman insisted on making in 1983, when he named his "Human Computer Interaction Lab" at the University of Maryland HCIL instead of CHIL, where I worked with him from 1986-1990. Go Terps! ;)
Do you have any citations of European or other labs using that human-first convention before 1983?
University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Maryland_Human%E...
Ben Shneiderman:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shneiderman
Ben also coined the term "Direct Manipulation", and came up with the design of making links blue for the early HyperTIES hypermedia system we developed at HCIL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_manipulation_interface
Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue (blog.mozilla.org):
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29921532
>Ben Shneiderman recalled that "Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project".
Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg
30 YEARS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND’S HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION LAB (HCIL). (2013) By Ben Shneiderman, Kent Norman, Catherine Plaisant, Benjamin Bederson, Allison Druin, Jennifer Golbeck:
http://interactionsdev.acm.org/archive/view/september-octobe...
>One attraction of the University of Maryland was its strong psychology department. My computing colleagues were intrigued by my early attempts to use empirical techniques to study programmers as they wrote, modified, or debugged programs. These crossover ideas caught the attention of Azriel Rosenfeld (1931–2004), a world leader in computer vision, who was forming an interdisciplinary Center for Automation Research (CfAR). He led the Computer Vision Lab and invited me to form a Human-Computer Interaction Lab when he launched CfAR in 1983. In a campus reorganization, HCIL became a unit in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and eventually became jointly managed with the iSchool.
>Rosenfeld's invitation advanced my efforts by at least five years, giving credibility to the "marriage of computer science and psychology," which I described in my 1980 book, Software Psychology. Gaining credibility was important, as this was still a time when many computer scientists were unsure about the value of psychological studies of programmers and database systems' users, and even the growing field of interactive computer systems. The term human-computer interaction (HCI) was still novel, but I insisted on putting the human first, as opposed to the ACM's choice of computer-human interaction to make a more pronounceable name, "CHI."
Ken Perlin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Perlin
Ken Perlin's Blog:
http://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=237
>Human first (May 29th, 2008)
>I spent the day today at the annual end-of-year symposium of the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland. All three of the Lab’s successive directors – Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin – were there, and they are all good friends of mine. Ben Shneiderman founded the lab in 1983. He is one of the fathers of the field of HCI research, and is a font of wisdom on many subjects. Ben Bederson, with whom I’ve been friends since he was in grad school, took over the lab directorship in 2000. Allison, who is married to Ben Bederson, became the lab’s director in 2006. I actually know Allison the longest of the three. I have had lots of time to talk with all three of them in the last twenty four hours, which has been great fun.
>The wonderful thing about the HCIL, as Allison pointed out today, is that it puts the “human” first. Much of computer science research seems to forget that there are such things as humans. Instead it seems to be a quest for a kind of abstract algorithmic purity, as though computer science were merely a branch of mathematics. The HCIL people have been way ahead of the curve in recognizing that the real power of computers comes when we find ways to interweave that power with the complementary power of the human mind. Computation is indeed enormously powerful, but computation that augments human thought is downright transformative. And to achieve that, you’ve got to understand human thought.
>This is rather tricky for many academics, because it requires bridging the large gap in scientific subcultures between computer science on the one hand, and psychology on the other. It’s very hard to get academic recognition when any given reviewer of your manuscript is not going to understand half of what you are saying. To me the people at HCIL are visionary because they recognized, a full quarter of a century ago – long before it was fashionable – the need to reconcile these two parts of the problem.
>And they are still at it. Only now the world is starting to catch up.
>Ben Shneiderman says on June 3, 2008 at 8:12 pm:
>Thanks Ken… for your kind words and thoughtful contribution to the 25th Anniversary events…. it’s great to see that our message was heard and received in a warm human way. Sincerely… Ben Shneiderman
Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser: By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...
HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus: Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser () and Ben Shneiderman. Computer Science Department University of Maryland College Park, Maryland 20742 () Computer Science Laboratory, Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, Calif. 94303. Presented at ACM CHI’88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...
- That's a point Ben Shneiderman insisted on making in 1983, when he named his "Human Computer Interaction Lab" at the University of Maryland HCIL instead of CHIL, where I worked with him from 1986-1990. Go Terps! ;)
Do you have any citations of European or other labs using that human-first convention before 1983?
University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Maryland_Human%E...
Ben Shneiderman:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shneiderman
Ben also coined the term "Direct Manipulation", and came up with the design of making links blue for the early HyperTIES hypermedia system we developed at HCIL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_manipulation_interface
Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue (blog.mozilla.org):
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29921532
>Ben Shneiderman recalled that "Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project".
Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg
30 YEARS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND’S HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION LAB (HCIL). (2013) By Ben Shneiderman, Kent Norman, Catherine Plaisant, Benjamin Bederson, Allison Druin, Jennifer Golbeck:
http://interactionsdev.acm.org/archive/view/september-octobe...
>One attraction of the University of Maryland was its strong psychology department. My computing colleagues were intrigued by my early attempts to use empirical techniques to study programmers as they wrote, modified, or debugged programs. These crossover ideas caught the attention of Azriel Rosenfeld (1931–2004), a world leader in computer vision, who was forming an interdisciplinary Center for Automation Research (CfAR). He led the Computer Vision Lab and invited me to form a Human-Computer Interaction Lab when he launched CfAR in 1983. In a campus reorganization, HCIL became a unit in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and eventually became jointly managed with the iSchool.
>Rosenfeld's invitation advanced my efforts by at least five years, giving credibility to the "marriage of computer science and psychology," which I described in my 1980 book, Software Psychology. Gaining credibility was important, as this was still a time when many computer scientists were unsure about the value of psychological studies of programmers and database systems' users, and even the growing field of interactive computer systems. The term human-computer interaction (HCI) was still novel, but I insisted on putting the human first, as opposed to the ACM's choice of computer-human interaction to make a more pronounceable name, "CHI."
Ken Perlin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Perlin
Ken Perlin's Blog:
http://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=237
>Human first (May 29th, 2008)
>I spent the day today at the annual end-of-year symposium of the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland. All three of the Lab’s successive directors – Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin – were there, and they are all good friends of mine. Ben Shneiderman founded the lab in 1983. He is one of the fathers of the field of HCI research, and is a font of wisdom on many subjects. Ben Bederson, with whom I’ve been friends since he was in grad school, took over the lab directorship in 2000. Allison, who is married to Ben Bederson, became the lab’s director in 2006. I actually know Allison the longest of the three. I have had lots of time to talk with all three of them in the last twenty four hours, which has been great fun.
>The wonderful thing about the HCIL, as Allison pointed out today, is that it puts the “human” first. Much of computer science research seems to forget that there are such things as humans. Instead it seems to be a quest for a kind of abstract algorithmic purity, as though computer science were merely a branch of mathematics. The HCIL people have been way ahead of the curve in recognizing that the real power of computers comes when we find ways to interweave that power with the complementary power of the human mind. Computation is indeed enormously powerful, but computation that augments human thought is downright transformative. And to achieve that, you’ve got to understand human thought.
>This is rather tricky for many academics, because it requires bridging the large gap in scientific subcultures between computer science on the one hand, and psychology on the other. It’s very hard to get academic recognition when any given reviewer of your manuscript is not going to understand half of what you are saying. To me the people at HCIL are visionary because they recognized, a full quarter of a century ago – long before it was fashionable – the need to reconcile these two parts of the problem.
>And they are still at it. Only now the world is starting to catch up.
>Ben Shneiderman says on June 3, 2008 at 8:12 pm:
>Thanks Ken… for your kind words and thoughtful contribution to the 25th Anniversary events…. it’s great to see that our message was heard and received in a warm human way. Sincerely… Ben Shneiderman
Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser: By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...
HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus: Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser (*) and Ben Shneiderman. Computer Science Department University of Maryland College Park, Maryland 20742 (*) Computer Science Laboratory, Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, Calif. 94303. Presented at ACM CHI’88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...
- On the Net Negative Producing Programmer - https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer and the referenced article from there http://pyxisinc.com/NNPP_Article.pdf
That article starts out with...
> We've known since the early sixties, but have never come to grips with the implications that there are net negative producing programmers (NNPPs) on almost all projects, who insert enough spoilage to exceed the value of their production. So, it is important to make the bold statement: Taking a poor performer off the team can often be more productive than adding a good one. [6, p. 208] Although important, it is difficult to deal with the NNPP. Most development managers do not handle negative aspects of their programming staff well. This paper discusses how to recognize NNPPs, and remedial actions necessary for project success.
> Researchers have found between a low of 5 to 1 to a high of 100 to 1 ratios in programmer performance. This means that programmers at the same level, with similar backgrounds and comparable salaries, might take 1 to 100 weeks to complete the same tasks. [21, p. 8]
Source 21 is: Shneiderman, Ben Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1980)
https://www.amazon.com/Software-psychology-computer-informat...
- In Software Psychology they try to avoid using words in software that triggers others. For example abort or kill might offend someone because it could be used for ending life. Yet I am certain Cancel Culture is behind this one. Computer Science has used blacklist, master, slave, etc for a long time now and books have to be updated to the new terms.
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