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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

Every engineer? Electrical engineers? Kernel developers? Defense workers?

I hesitate to write this (because I don't want to be negative) but I get a sense that most software "engineers" have a very narrow view of the industry at large. Or this forum leans a particular way.

I haven't A/B tested in my last three roles. Two of them were defense jobs, my current job deals with the Linux kernel.

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> Two of them were defense jobs, my current job deals with the Linux kernel.

I don't work on the kernel, but one of the most professionally useful talks about the Linux kernel was an engineer talking about how to use statistical tests on perf related changes with small effects[1]. It's not an _online_ A/B technique but sometimes you pay attention to how other fields approach things in order to learn how to improve your own field.

[1]: https://lca2021.linux.org.au/schedule/presentation/31/

I used to get knots in my hair about these distinctions, but in retrospect, I was just being pedantic. It's a headline— not a synopsis or formal tagging system. Context makes it perfectly clear to most in a web-focused software industry crowd which "engineers" might be doing a/b testing. Also, my last three jobs haven't included a lot of stuff I read about here; why should that affect the headline?

Was going to say the same thing. Lots of articles have clickbait titles, but this one is especially bad. Even among software engineers, only a small percentage will ever do any A/B testing, not to mention that often "scientists" or other roles are in charge of designing, running and analyzing A/B test experiments.

A very large percentage of product engineers at some of the biggest tech companies, eg Meta, regularly run their own experiments.

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