Re: Embedded Systems Survey

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@acm.org>]

tmoran@bix.com wrote:
>   "Mail the postcard" surveys have their own problems.  Adding an
> innocuous question with answer obviously unknown to the interviewer
> is one way of increasing anonymity, even with a numbered postcard or
> a face-to-face interviewer.  I think it's clever.  Since it adds
> known noise to lessen error, I suppose it's analogous to dithering
> for improving printing.

Yeah, but the biggest problem is that of a self selected group. If
you're interested in finding a reasonably accurate answer concerning the
number of software engineers that prefer/dislike Ada, you need to define
the group by some other means. Those who would voluntarily fill out a
card in a magazing may be biased heavily by being Ada Hawks or Anti-Ada
Bigots. The magazine itself is going to have a biased population of
readers in some ways and probably is not going to reflect a reasonable
cross section of all software professionals.

People are likely to be honest about whether or not they like/dislike a
given programming language. It's not like you're asking them something
terribly personal or something sensitive which might lead them to lie
about it. The problem is identifying a good sample set to ask.

MDC
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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