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Interesting article, but it goes against my belief that software engineers should be fungible, while subject matter experts are not easily fungible.
by mark_l_watson 5y ago
Interesting article, but it goes against my belief that software engineers should be fungible, while subject matter experts are not easily fungible.
- overgard 5y agoAs a software engineer, I think this belief is incredibly naive. This is like saying "surgeons should be fungible. They all have a grasp of anatomy and are good with scalpels". As a patient, do you really want a knee specialist doing neurosurgery? As a customer, do you want a frontend web developer writing code for 8bit microcontrollers? They both write code into a text editor, what's the difference? I've worked at companies that (implicitly) held your belief and the turnover was always incredibly high because nobody sane wanted to work in a place that treated them like a cog.
- username90 5y agoFungible software engineers is good for management, it isn't good for the project or the engineers.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> it goes against my belief that software engineers should be fungible, while subject matter experts are not easily fungible. This implies that software engineers either aren’t SMEs, or that they are exclusively so in an undifferentiated way in the domain of “software engineering”. IME, that’s doubly untrue: software engineering is a broad domain, and software engineers do not have interchangeable competence in that domain, but also software engineers tend to become SMEs in the application domain(s) in which they work, and this is important to their value as software engineers in those domains.