Failing better in Stata

The Stata idiom capture quietly makes it so that any output from the subsequent command is suppressed, and that even critical failures are happily ignored. Your script soldiers on, and you are none the wiser. I always thought that this is a wonderful metaphor for organisational behaviour.

In unrelated news, every other summer, Statacorp comes up with a new version of its product. Every other summer, I succumb to some Pavlovian reflex and decide to spend some institutional money on upgrading my unit’s licences for some interesting but usually quite marginal benefits.

It is the same story in other units and departments, and by coordinating and pooling our orders, we can get substantial discounts. And so, come autumn, the university’s IT centre is collating expressions of interest and communicating tentative prices, going back and forth until some equilibrium is reached. From then on, it can still take months until the new licences arrive, in spite of shipments being just codes and downloads now. Yesterday, I realised that Stata 17 came out in April, i.e. nine months ago, and so decided to find out what had happened to our order. As it turned out, the IT centre required our charge codes to proceed, but had never bothered to ask for them.

17 thoughts on “Failing better in Stata”

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