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99% of software engineering is just data plumbing and processing. It does not require big picture thinking skills beyond the immediate problem or creative prob
by dsfyu404ed 8y ago
99% 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.