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Please let’s not reinvent concepts or words. We are not the chosen ones nor do we live in a field that is different from any other. Many other fields require t

Please let’s not reinvent concepts or words. We are not the chosen ones nor do we live in a field that is different from any other. Many other fields require the same mental capacities we employ: from doctors to school teachers all the way to even accountants. They are literally doing the same stuff we are doing: grabbing stuff that was already built by others, thinking about it, discussing it, having meetings, etc. I hate it when a community becomes so biased towards their own field in a way that creates a bubble and interferes with actual innovation. This has sadly been the case for the software industry.

terminaljunkid 7y ago
> Many other fields require the same mental capacities we employ: from doctors to school teachers all the way to even accountants. They are literally doing the same stuff we are doing: grabbing stuff that was already built by others, thinking about it, discussing it, having meetings, etc. Here I disagree. Doctors? It seems true.. But school teachers and accountants? Nope.. I don't really think these fields compare, unless your 'software' is limited to doing some outsourced CRUD work.. However much people tout against it, I believe software engineering is closer to any other engineering (say Mechanical) than it is to other fields. Our task is solving problems in efficient ways, and optimizing things for one thing or another. Except these days unfortunately the bar seems very low..
- the_other 7y ago
  Teachers absolutely do take pre-existing knowledge of pedagogy, apply it, discuss it, modify it. There's tonnes of publications on the topic; groups form to reflect and promote ideas at every level from the single school to government.
  - sethammons 7y ago
    Having been a teacher (and designed a course with a group of other teachers) and now being a software developer, I find the similarities superficial.
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  > Our task is solving problems in efficient ways, and optimizing things for one thing or another Sounds literally like every other white collar job, or in fact ideally any job ever. I agree with OP, we devs are sometimes a bit too full of ourselves, when in fact mostly we have simply just another engineering work. I used to think that way too when I was young, naive and inexperienced. My wife is a doctor, and when I compare, we have it too easy considering our compensation. When was the last time your bug killed a human being / destroyed their health for good? When was the last time when you got dragged into court for a bug you submitted 3 years ago and jail with permanent loss of license was a real option? Getting 25$ for 12-hour weekend nightshift? Instead we have remote work, digital nomads and people humble-bragging about 400k FAANG compensations being at the low end and barely livable.
  - rodrigo975 7y ago
    Just a short list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs * By some accounts Toyota's electronic throttle control system (ETCS) had bugs that could cause sudden unintended acceleration * The Boeing 787 Dreamliner experienced an integer overflow bug which could shut down all electrical generators if the aircraft was on for more than 248 days * In early 2019, the transportation-rental firm Lime discovered a firmware bug with its electric scooters that can cause them to brake unexpectedly very hard, which may hurl and injure riders.[6 * A bug in the code controlling the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine was directly responsible for at least five patient deaths in the 1980s when it administered excessive quantities of beta radiation Now we have to sit and wait for the autonomous vehicles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-driving_car_fatalities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-driving_car_fatal...
    - saiya-jin 7y ago
      Yeah and that's what, 0.1% of all software devs globally that can potentially do physical harm? Most of us just hurl data between places and worst damage is financial. You can't even compare the scales. If you're a construction engineer, any serious flaw in any building you design can kill, sometimes hundreds. How many engineers of those few cases you mention went into jail and were forbidden to work in software industry forever?
- nnq 7y ago
  > Doctors? It seems true... Not at all. Having jumped from the medical field to software, I can tell you that medicine is its own uniquely hellish world full of nasty tensions nobody talks about in honest terms and wicked problems that don't really have solutions... But I do think that in a way the problems of the two industries can be similar: they both fail miserably at properly separating the work and responsibilities into different professions that make sense. Like, in medicine, taking MDs alone, you should have at least these separate professions inside each speciality: - Patient Relations people - from PatR-agent to PatR-manager - Diagnosticians - *partially* replaceable by AI in the future - Patient Treatment Managers - Patient Team Manager - Clinical Research Project Operator - Clinical Research Project Manager - Clinical Research Project Architect - ... You should have different schools/universities/majors preparing different kinds of people for these separate kinds of jobs!!! And after this, actual partition into medical specialties might actually be more flexible, some MDs actually have multiple specialties and that can work, but cumulating all the functions above into what one person leads to extreme overload, it's like the software equivalent of having a full-stack-web-plus-security-plus-embeded-software-engineer that also has to take on project manager responsibilities! Overload + partitioning across the wrong dimension ("organ-system-based"-specialities that makes no sense in modern medicine since we know all diseases manifest across all body systems) + the separate socio-economical hellscape. Software industry has the excuse of being really really young, medicine on the other hand had decades (or centuries...) to figure things out, but it got it all wrong because optimizing for profit and personal-ego-development trumped everything... Anyway, you're not right, you're more than right :) Things are so good in software that we forget how totally f'ed up the rest of the world is...
pjc50 7y ago
In some sense all white collar jobs are sitting at a keyboard typing, but I think we can usefully go a bit beyond that and look at the interiority of the people performing the labour - and also the management and economic structures surrounding it. Programming is really unusual in that it doesn't have the "profession" structure of doctors, lawyers etc - nor does it have the classic Taylorist assembly line. What does characterise it is traditional companies trying to structure it that way and being absolutely obliterated in the market by "outsider" companies doing things with smaller, less hierarchical teams. At one edge it resembles (and competes for hiring with) the "quant" side of financial trading. Also a focus-heavy industry.
naasking 7y ago
> Many other fields require the same mental capacities we employ: from doctors to school teachers all the way to even accountants. They are literally doing the same stuff we are doing: grabbing stuff that was already built by others, thinking about it, discussing it, having meetings, etc. They are doing some of the same things, not all of the same things. The ways they are different is obviously important. Software development requires a level of precision found only in other engineering disciplines, because computers are pedantic and unforgiving. Biological systems, like those dealt with by doctors and teachers, are forgiving and robust. For instance, most medical interventions at the family doctor level are actually unnecessary [1]. That said, software development is far from the hardest field. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medical-procedures-prove-unnecessary/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medical-procedure...
rodrigo975 7y ago
I don't agree on your examples : - teachers : if you have let's say 30 students, you need one teacher, in you have 300 you probably need 10 teachers. I don't know how can you one person deal with 300 students giving them the required attention. Since you have the school program you can start paralyzing the tasks. - doctors : If you have 10 sick peoples... 1 doctor, with 100 you probably need 10 doctors. A doctor need time with a single patient to study the case. There is probably plenty of good examples, but not that ones. About building softwares, even if you pick the right guys and split the task properly (which requires peoples, time and a high level of understanding) and let peoples work on their own, you lead to inconsistency. Splitting an existing task to add new developers and save time requires redesign and headaches to avoid incompatibilities, probably breaking new things or requiring some rework in the work done by the others.

terminaljunkid 7y ago

> Many other fields require the same mental capacities we employ: from doctors to school teachers all the way to even accountants. They are literally doing the same stuff we are doing: grabbing stuff that was already built by others, thinking about it, discussing it, having meetings, etc. Here I disagree. Doctors? It seems true.. But school teachers and accountants? Nope.. I don't really think these fields compare, unless your 'software' is limited to doing some outsourced CRUD work.. However much people tout against it, I believe software engineering is closer to any other engineering (say Mechanical) than it is to other fields. Our task is solving problems in efficient ways, and optimizing things for one thing or another. Except these days unfortunately the bar seems very low..

the_other 7y ago
Teachers absolutely do take pre-existing knowledge of pedagogy, apply it, discuss it, modify it. There's tonnes of publications on the topic; groups form to reflect and promote ideas at every level from the single school to government.
- sethammons 7y ago
  Having been a teacher (and designed a course with a group of other teachers) and now being a software developer, I find the similarities superficial.
saiya-jin 7y ago
> Our task is solving problems in efficient ways, and optimizing things for one thing or another Sounds literally like every other white collar job, or in fact ideally any job ever. I agree with OP, we devs are sometimes a bit too full of ourselves, when in fact mostly we have simply just another engineering work. I used to think that way too when I was young, naive and inexperienced. My wife is a doctor, and when I compare, we have it too easy considering our compensation. When was the last time your bug killed a human being / destroyed their health for good? When was the last time when you got dragged into court for a bug you submitted 3 years ago and jail with permanent loss of license was a real option? Getting 25$ for 12-hour weekend nightshift? Instead we have remote work, digital nomads and people humble-bragging about 400k FAANG compensations being at the low end and barely livable.
- rodrigo975 7y ago
  Just a short list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs * By some accounts Toyota's electronic throttle control system (ETCS) had bugs that could cause sudden unintended acceleration * The Boeing 787 Dreamliner experienced an integer overflow bug which could shut down all electrical generators if the aircraft was on for more than 248 days * In early 2019, the transportation-rental firm Lime discovered a firmware bug with its electric scooters that can cause them to brake unexpectedly very hard, which may hurl and injure riders.[6 * A bug in the code controlling the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine was directly responsible for at least five patient deaths in the 1980s when it administered excessive quantities of beta radiation Now we have to sit and wait for the autonomous vehicles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-driving_car_fatalities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-driving_car_fatal...
  - saiya-jin 7y ago
    Yeah and that's what, 0.1% of all software devs globally that can potentially do physical harm? Most of us just hurl data between places and worst damage is financial. You can't even compare the scales. If you're a construction engineer, any serious flaw in any building you design can kill, sometimes hundreds. How many engineers of those few cases you mention went into jail and were forbidden to work in software industry forever?
nnq 7y ago
> Doctors? It seems true... Not at all. Having jumped from the medical field to software, I can tell you that medicine is its own uniquely hellish world full of nasty tensions nobody talks about in honest terms and wicked problems that don't really have solutions... But I do think that in a way the problems of the two industries can be similar: they both fail miserably at properly separating the work and responsibilities into different professions that make sense. Like, in medicine, taking MDs alone, you should have at least these separate professions inside each speciality: - Patient Relations people - from PatR-agent to PatR-manager - Diagnosticians - *partially* replaceable by AI in the future - Patient Treatment Managers - Patient Team Manager - Clinical Research Project Operator - Clinical Research Project Manager - Clinical Research Project Architect - ... You should have different schools/universities/majors preparing different kinds of people for these separate kinds of jobs!!! And after this, actual partition into medical specialties might actually be more flexible, some MDs actually have multiple specialties and that can work, but cumulating all the functions above into what one person leads to extreme overload, it's like the software equivalent of having a full-stack-web-plus-security-plus-embeded-software-engineer that also has to take on project manager responsibilities! Overload + partitioning across the wrong dimension ("organ-system-based"-specialities that makes no sense in modern medicine since we know all diseases manifest across all body systems) + the separate socio-economical hellscape. Software industry has the excuse of being really really young, medicine on the other hand had decades (or centuries...) to figure things out, but it got it all wrong because optimizing for profit and personal-ego-development trumped everything... Anyway, you're not right, you're more than right :) Things are so good in software that we forget how totally f'ed up the rest of the world is...

pjc50 7y ago

In some sense all white collar jobs are sitting at a keyboard typing, but I think we can usefully go a bit beyond that and look at the interiority of the people performing the labour - and also the management and economic structures surrounding it. Programming is really unusual in that it doesn't have the "profession" structure of doctors, lawyers etc - nor does it have the classic Taylorist assembly line. What does characterise it is traditional companies trying to structure it that way and being absolutely obliterated in the market by "outsider" companies doing things with smaller, less hierarchical teams. At one edge it resembles (and competes for hiring with) the "quant" side of financial trading. Also a focus-heavy industry.

naasking 7y ago

> Many other fields require the same mental capacities we employ: from doctors to school teachers all the way to even accountants. They are literally doing the same stuff we are doing: grabbing stuff that was already built by others, thinking about it, discussing it, having meetings, etc. They are doing some of the same things, not all of the same things. The ways they are different is obviously important. Software development requires a level of precision found only in other engineering disciplines, because computers are pedantic and unforgiving. Biological systems, like those dealt with by doctors and teachers, are forgiving and robust. For instance, most medical interventions at the family doctor level are actually unnecessary [1]. That said, software development is far from the hardest field. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medical-procedures-prove-unnecessary/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medical-procedure...

rodrigo975 7y ago

I don't agree on your examples : - teachers : if you have let's say 30 students, you need one teacher, in you have 300 you probably need 10 teachers. I don't know how can you one person deal with 300 students giving them the required attention. Since you have the school program you can start paralyzing the tasks. - doctors : If you have 10 sick peoples... 1 doctor, with 100 you probably need 10 doctors. A doctor need time with a single patient to study the case. There is probably plenty of good examples, but not that ones. About building softwares, even if you pick the right guys and split the task properly (which requires peoples, time and a high level of understanding) and let peoples work on their own, you lead to inconsistency. Splitting an existing task to add new developers and save time requires redesign and headaches to avoid incompatibilities, probably breaking new things or requiring some rework in the work done by the others.