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The handyman spends 20min thinking about how to solve the problem. The civil engineer spends 20min thinking about how to solve the problem and 20-days making s

The handyman spends 20min thinking about how to solve the problem. The civil engineer spends 20min thinking about how to solve the problem and 20-days making sure there's no way whoever signs his paycheck is going to be told by a court to pay out a bunch of money if something goes sideways. An professional engineer is basically just a lawyer for the laws of physics. You're not paying for his ability to come up with a solution. Anyone can read the books and do that. You're paying for the fact that other people take that solution seriously.

hinkley 8y ago
There was some CivE professor that people liked to quote who talked about how he had no qualms flunking people from his classes because a degree in Civil Engineering was a license to kill. If you let dumbasses through the system, they will build a pedestrian bridge in a hotel lobby that fails and kills a hundred people at a party.
- vincnetas 8y ago
  For those who didn't catch the reference : Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnvGwFegbC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnvGwFegbC8
kjs3 8y ago
You can not 'read a book' and assess the structural strength of a skyscraper, or a dam across more than a creek, or any number of other things we only trust PE qualified CEs. I hear people claim otherwise, almost exclusively from more or less generally unqualified people who want to diminish the accomplishments of others and claim qualifications don't matter.
gmueckl 8y ago
A lot of the most serious software engineering work that I have done had much the same ratio: coding the a solution that mostly works was easy. Making sure that it is robust against all kinds of failures (CPU, RAM, bus/external device failure, random bit flips etc.[0]) and does the right thing was a lot of work. [0] The system I worked on was hardened against all of that and some more failure modes.

hinkley 8y ago

There was some CivE professor that people liked to quote who talked about how he had no qualms flunking people from his classes because a degree in Civil Engineering was a license to kill. If you let dumbasses through the system, they will build a pedestrian bridge in a hotel lobby that fails and kills a hundred people at a party.

vincnetas 8y ago
For those who didn't catch the reference : Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnvGwFegbC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnvGwFegbC8

kjs3 8y ago

You can not 'read a book' and assess the structural strength of a skyscraper, or a dam across more than a creek, or any number of other things we only trust PE qualified CEs. I hear people claim otherwise, almost exclusively from more or less generally unqualified people who want to diminish the accomplishments of others and claim qualifications don't matter.

gmueckl 8y ago

A lot of the most serious software engineering work that I have done had much the same ratio: coding the a solution that mostly works was easy. Making sure that it is robust against all kinds of failures (CPU, RAM, bus/external device failure, random bit flips etc.[0]) and does the right thing was a lot of work. [0] The system I worked on was hardened against all of that and some more failure modes.