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Software Engineering must be the only engineering discipline where mastery of tools and barrier to entry in terms of skills are in many ways inversely correlate

Software Engineering must be the only engineering discipline where mastery of tools and barrier to entry in terms of skills are in many ways inversely correlated with market demands. Every clown can write software these days and in fact a lot of clowns get paid six figure salaries to do so. When the domain is largely composed of clowns, standards become extinct and one finds oneself calibrating for a circus. If / when software liabilities become real, this fiesta of the clueless will come to a rapid stop. Let us hope that the damage done by that point will not be too great.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I actually find comments like this to be some mix of funny & infuriating because it is so dramatically false. There are all these myths about “one bad hire” or how a bad engineer can ruin a team, but they are mostly overblown bravado by coder cowboys who think they know how to do everything right and should just be left to code in a vacuum, and that anyone who dares challenge them or demand compromise with real world limitations, deadlines, customer demands, must be a “clown” (as you put it). It’s a sad state of arrogance and I think it leads directly to the joke we have today for software interviews, code tests, TripleByte / CoderPad garbage using language esoterica and whiteboard trivia to haze out anyone with common sense about business software. Most code that creates value to people is messy, written in a hurry with vague specifications & unclear understanding of what the end user wants or would pay for, and it gets iterated by disjoint teams of people with competing timelines, politics, credit mongering and resource constraints, and most of it is for reporting something to someone. If you don’t step back and realize that bare metal performance and esoteric data structures and algorithms generally don’t matter and can be picked up quickly by just about any engineer, and that real value comes from putting careful scaffolding and comments around hacked up business logic that needs to be future proofed against highly volatile business circumstances, you’re just going to be miserable and probably should quit and try to find a financially viable open source job on a compiler team or something where the exceedingly rare assumption you want to enforce (that most people reading your code are above average at the idioms of the language or tool you’re using) has some prayer of being relevant or applicable.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > ...Most code that creates value to people is messy, written in a hurry with vague specifications & unclear understanding of what the end user wants or would pay for, and it gets iterated by disjoint teams of people with competing timelines, politics, credit mongering and resource constraints, and most of it is for reporting something to someone. ... Let's not conflate the essential complexity of a problem domain with what's purely a result of grossly sub-standard development practices. And let's not pretend that the clowns are any better at coping with "real world limitations, deadlines, customer demands" - they're not.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    Nobody’s conflating anything.. these are just the ubiquitous standards imbued by Mother Nature onto the human sociological phenomenon known as “software engineering.” To call it “substandard development practices” is like saying that wealthy people shirking their civic taxation responsibilities through offshore accounts is “substandard economic practices.” It just is.
pjmlp 8y ago
It also helps that many countries allow those people to call themselves Software Engineers without having put a foot in an actual Engineering degree.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

I actually find comments like this to be some mix of funny & infuriating because it is so dramatically false. There are all these myths about “one bad hire” or how a bad engineer can ruin a team, but they are mostly overblown bravado by coder cowboys who think they know how to do everything right and should just be left to code in a vacuum, and that anyone who dares challenge them or demand compromise with real world limitations, deadlines, customer demands, must be a “clown” (as you put it). It’s a sad state of arrogance and I think it leads directly to the joke we have today for software interviews, code tests, TripleByte / CoderPad garbage using language esoterica and whiteboard trivia to haze out anyone with common sense about business software. Most code that creates value to people is messy, written in a hurry with vague specifications & unclear understanding of what the end user wants or would pay for, and it gets iterated by disjoint teams of people with competing timelines, politics, credit mongering and resource constraints, and most of it is for reporting something to someone. If you don’t step back and realize that bare metal performance and esoteric data structures and algorithms generally don’t matter and can be picked up quickly by just about any engineer, and that real value comes from putting careful scaffolding and comments around hacked up business logic that needs to be future proofed against highly volatile business circumstances, you’re just going to be miserable and probably should quit and try to find a financially viable open source job on a compiler team or something where the exceedingly rare assumption you want to enforce (that most people reading your code are above average at the idioms of the language or tool you’re using) has some prayer of being relevant or applicable.

zozbot123 8y ago
> ...Most code that creates value to people is messy, written in a hurry with vague specifications & unclear understanding of what the end user wants or would pay for, and it gets iterated by disjoint teams of people with competing timelines, politics, credit mongering and resource constraints, and most of it is for reporting something to someone. ... Let's not conflate the essential complexity of a problem domain with what's purely a result of grossly sub-standard development practices. And let's not pretend that the clowns are any better at coping with "real world limitations, deadlines, customer demands" - they're not.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Nobody’s conflating anything.. these are just the ubiquitous standards imbued by Mother Nature onto the human sociological phenomenon known as “software engineering.” To call it “substandard development practices” is like saying that wealthy people shirking their civic taxation responsibilities through offshore accounts is “substandard economic practices.” It just is.

pjmlp 8y ago

It also helps that many countries allow those people to call themselves Software Engineers without having put a foot in an actual Engineering degree.