> If you need to add hardware to solve a software optimization problem such as this, you've failed your job as a software engineer That's an interestingly narr

> If you need to add hardware to solve a software optimization problem such as this, you've failed your job as a software engineer That's an interestingly narrow viewpoint with which I, narrowly, agree. I suspect that the narrow viewpoint is just a form of the aphorism "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." > if you should even be called an engineer (if you should even be called an engineer, neigh, a developer) However, in the broader context of engineering as problem solving (or developing a product), I disagree. Not all (computer) problems are best solved with software. As a sysadmin (who can code but doesn't love to), I routinely struggle with managers who don't have an intuitive sense of even a first approximation of what modern hardware is capable of, because their entire background is programming. The fact that (latency) "numbers every programmer should know" exists (and has for quite some time) is fairly telling. What's more telling is that there are no dollar values attached to any of them.