Thread:BunsenH/@comment-39080707-20190420060748/@comment-24577221-20190420184740

My Ph.D. was/is in chemistry. I've found it very frustrating that I haven't been able to use that chemistry knowledge very much -- I spent years studying it because I really like the subject! But there aren't a lot of jobs in the areas of chemistry that I know best, so I've ended up doing software stuff.

But some of the fundamental skills get used all of the time. There's the teaching-and-explaining stuff, of course. And, more importantly, there's the stuff about problem solving, and analyzing a situation. What do you really know? How sure are you? What are your observations, and what are you just guessing or assuming? To take an example of the kind of thing I see at work, I might see that a light on the control panel is off when it should be on. Has the system been given bad information about the thing that the light is supposed to show? Has there been some kind of calculation error in between that and the stuff that turns the light on or off? -- there may be a number of calculation steps, and I have to check each one of them. Or is the problem simply that the light is burned out? What I observe is only that the light is off, but in order to find the problem, I have to not make assumptions.

In the case of the current vandalism, what I observe is a lot of damage, stuff being deleted, other stuff being added, which refers back to the problems of a couple of months ago. But I have very limited information about the source(s). It might all be caused by just one very-busy person. Or each of the bits of vandalism might be caused by different people in a very large group. I think the real situation is somewhere in between. If I had access to information such as IP addresses and device info, I could make better guesses, but only Wikia/Fandom staff can see that stuff. What they need to do is to stop the vandalism without blocking innocent people. And that isn't a simple thing.