software engineering and factorio are cybernetics and systems theory. That's the overlap - dealing with causal loops, buffers, queue theory, feedback, all that.

software engineering and factorio are cybernetics and systems theory. That's the overlap - dealing with causal loops, buffers, queue theory, feedback, all that. It really pisses me off that we as an industry don't broadly know our roots and the actual theory that we are putting into practice when we work. The "coding is engineering or art" debate? Easy; it's systems engineering. The closest we get as an industry to teaching what's under the hood is to deal with computer science, which is great, but data structures and complexity heuristics are only a small piece of the puzzle. It's no great surprise that there's such a big problem with cargo culting when most of us don't explicitly know what it is that we're doing.