There are aspects of the scientific method in programming work, but I feel it has much more in common with engineering than science. Science uses the scientifi

There are aspects of the scientific method in programming work, but I feel it has much more in common with engineering than science. Science uses the scientific method to model the universe. The experiments serve the purpose of clarifying that model and uncovering new information. I feel programming is more like building a bridge. An engineer uses his knowledge of physics and (much more importantly) a wealth of field knowledge and best practices to design the bridge. As a programmer, I have tasks much like building bridges, only they are apps. I don't discover new algorithms through experimentation. I implement algorithms that are already well understood. If there is a problem in my code and I run performance tests, the tests do not clarify hitherto unknown phenomena regarding the nature of computers. They simply highlight human errors or bottlenecks caused by well understood characteristics of the underlying computer system. If this is considered science, then basically anything that involves trial and error, be it snowboarding or checkers, is science. Of course I admit it may depend on what you do (programming is a broad field). There are those, for example, that invent algorithms and such, though it seems to me those computer scientists are more mathematicians than scientists. The one area of my work I have felt was scientific was AB testing, which is a kind of consumer science.