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It is common for people who write UIs and APIs to call themselves software engineers, but real engineering is what AUDI and other automakers do for a living. D
by andmarios 9y ago
It is common for people who write UIs and APIs to call themselves software engineers, but real engineering is what AUDI and other automakers do for a living.
Demonstrating a “god-awful” UI as evidence that they can't do autonomous driving is silly imo. We talk about people who design cars that can safely travel at 150+ kph. The tiniest bug or design failure can kill their clients in a spectacular way. We trust these guys with our lives.
Autonomous driving isn't about the UI, it is about math, systems, modeling, safety valves, rigorous testing. This is engineering and isn't taught in CS but in ECE classes. It is easier for an engineer to learn git than for a developer to learn differential equations.
Airplanes, cars etc are controlled by microprocessors for the couple last decades. Sure, writing a polished website in angular is cool but engineers write the software that runs pacemakers. How can they not understand reliability?
- stouset 9y agoThe god-awful UI was not central to my point. Your talk about their hardware engineering chops completely ignores the very real evidence we have that their software engineering efforts are utterly horrifying. Have you seen the reports about Toyota's software development practices? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643551 By all accounts, while Toyota is a particularly bad offender, these kinds of problems are not unique to them. Software engineering is not something that historically-hardware manufacturing companies tend to have the culture to perform well.
- koffiezet 9y agoThe problem is that most hardware companies (including car makers) simply don't understand software. The other way around is also true: software companies do not understand hardware.