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What do you mean by software engineering is a trade skill?
by Denzel 7y ago
What do you mean by software engineering is a trade skill?
- pjc50 7y agoIt's not something with a formal professional exam board that you have to pass, like law, medicine, chartered accountancy, or regular engineering. Nor is it a pure academic discipline. It's a commercial skill: a trade.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago...and I really wish we had a strict professional exam to use the term "engineer".
- pjc50 7y agoTo use the term, or to make software? The latter would basically be the end of startups and agility.
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoTo sign mission-critical and potentially life-critical software and provide better safety guarantees. And have a professional body to protect employees from pressure to lower quality. Just like aeronautical and construction engineering, surgery, dentistry...
- throwaway55554 7y agoMy degree is a BsCpE. Should I be allowed to call myself an engineer?
- potta_coffee 7y agoResults are what matters. Titles are meaningless.
- throwaway55554 7y agoI don't disagree with that. I was trying to make a point. I usually tell people "I program computers" when they ask what I do. I used to say "I do computers" but people are more used to computers and software now so fewer people ask, "so, you do computers?" so I had to change it up a bit.
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoThe downvotes are telling.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago99% of software engineering is just data plumbing and processing. It does not require big picture thinking skills beyond the immediate problem or creative problem solving ability. Sure those skills help sometimes but the return diminishes rapidly and you could get by without them pretty much all the time. It's really not any harder than normal plumbing. The medium we work in and the tools and methods we use are different but that's mostly it.
- dub 7y agoI think this is less true than most people believe. A well-intentioned intern can make a programming decision in an afternoon that might take a team of senior SWEs months or more to clean up later once the code or data is being used for something important. We brush the bad engineering decisions under the rug by calling them "tech debt", but the truth is that if we invested more up front in hiring people with big picture skills and experience we'd probably save significantly more money in the long run, despite their higher salaries.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago>A well-intentioned intern can make a programming decision in an afternoon that might take a team of senior SWEs months or more to clean up later once the code or data is being used for something important. And a new maintenance tech with the wrong grease gun can cause millions of dollars of downtime. This kind of risk exists in all industries.
- slothario 7y agoThat's not a good analogy. The problem isn't an intern writing a line of code that takes out the database (although that does sometimes happen). The problem is a failure to understand a complex software system and creating years of technical debt.
- NikolaeVarius 7y ago90% of modern software is plumbing with computers. Skilled work, but doesn't require degrees because we're not really doing anything all that interesting. You don't need a degree for plumbing. It comes in damn handy when you're doing things like flow dynamics or combustion simulations
- sremani 7y agoThe other 90% is plumbing with people, users, managers and testers.
- twodave 7y agoMaybe I misused the term. I meant it more as a way to describe how learning software engineering is just as much about modeling sound principles and learning by example as it is learning theory and terminology. You don’t need a 4 year degree in order to do that, not because it isn’t a highly skilled occupation but because, on the contrary, it is highly specialized.