5 ms·

If this was the case, then why are most applications full of bugs, including those written by trillion dollar corporations? To me, coding is a lot like physical

If this was the case, then why are most applications full of bugs, including those written by trillion dollar corporations? To me, coding is a lot like physical construction - anyone who can swing a hammer can build a treehouse, but try to scale that to a skyscraper and it will go badly. At that point you need careful planning and lots of specialized knowledge to do it proper.

deltaonefour 5y ago
The things you describe, managing complexity, is hard because there's no science around it. There's no optimization method for calculating the best way to organize code. It's not even formally defined what "organization" is. As a result everyone just makes up anecdotal "patterns" without proof that those patterns satisfy any quantitative "efficiency" criteria. Again this "efficiency" criteria doesn't really exist, we have some numerical metrics for measuring certain things but we can't really say definitively which is more organized the windows code base or the linux code base. So in terms of these kinds of things. Nobody really knows who does what better. Does hiring people who can solve LC type problems result in more "organized" code? How can we know when we don't even have the word "organized" defined? The existence of this problem in CS doesn't make CS harder because everybody is basically ignoring this problem and just picking arbitrary solutions aka "patterns" to solve things. Coding is like physical construction, unbounded by the rules of physics and therefore MUCH MUCH easier then engineering a boeing 747. Try learning building a 747 from a bootcamp. You can't. Coding bootcamps exist because it's freakishly easy to learn programming while engineering a 747 is freakishly hard, hence the lack of bootcamps for building airplanes. It's like making legos to fulfill your goal. In the end the thing we build with these legos likely isn't the most theoretically efficient thing but it works and we didn't need super high intelligence to build it and we don't need someone smart either. The thing with programming is this. It makes you feel smart. The reality is, your not.
- laserlight 5y ago
  > Coding is like physical construction, unbounded by the rules of physics and therefore MUCH MUCH easier then engineering a boeing 747. No, this is exactly backwards: engineering software is much much harder than engineering a large airplane. The latter is bounded by laws of physics, which acts as a global coordinator between parts and teams. There are no global constraints in software engineering and therefore coordinating modules and teams are very difficult. We have to come up with a set of constraints to achieve these goals, but the search space for the correct constraints is almost infinite. Enforcing these constraints is another issue. > Try learning building a 747 from a bootcamp. You can't. Coding bootcamps exist because it's freakishly easy to learn programming while engineering a 747 is freakishly hard, hence the lack of bootcamps for building airplanes. This is a false equivalence. Coding bootcamps are akin to learning to assemble parts --- nothing like engineering software.
  - deltaonefour 5y ago
    >No, this is exactly backwards: engineering software is much much harder than engineering a large airplane. The latter is bounded by laws of physics, which acts as a global coordinator between parts and teams. There are no global constraints in software engineering and therefore coordinating modules and teams are very difficult. We have to come up with a set of constraints to achieve these goals, but the search space for the correct constraints is almost infinite. Enforcing these constraints is another issue. Your joking or highly highly misguided. Very few corporations have the ability to manufacture/designs planes. Tons of software engineering firms exist that hire coders out of bootcamp. Global constraints makes problems harder. Why? because these constraints are extremely hard to figure out. They can be modeled with differential equations but much of the constraints can only be determined through building an actual model and experimenting with them. >This is a false equivalence. Coding bootcamps are akin to learning to assemble parts --- nothing like engineering software. This is a true equivalence. Let me explain to you. THERE are many people who can't "engineer" software after they come out of a bootcamp. BUT there are tons of people who come out of a bootcamp and CAN engineer software. That's why people say you don't even need to go to school to learn how to program. You don't even need to go to school to learn how to "ENGINEER" it's easy. Now for engineering a plane? I can assure you. An aerospace engineer can't EVEN engineer a 747 OUT OF UNIVERSITY; it's that hard. It's also fundamentally impossible for a plane engineering bootcamp to even exist due to the sheer challenge of it. You have a misguided notion of how hard software engineering is. Software Engineering is Ironically the easiest "engineering" discipline out there yet one of the highest paid.
    - laserlight 5y ago
      > Very few corporations have the ability to manufacture/designs planes. So what? The reason could as well be market dynamics. By the same reasoning we could also argue that software engineering is the hardest, because it is the highest paid one. > You have a misguided notion of how hard software engineering is. Software engineering is not programming, just like aerospace engineering is not assembling a plane. > An aerospace engineer can't EVEN engineer a 747 OUT OF UNIVERSITY; it's that hard. Let me rewrite that: A software engineer can't even engineer a Google out of university; it's that hard. I don't think this discussion is being fruitful to me. I hear personal attacks instead of counterarguments to the ideas I presented. So, I won't be replying further.
- P_I_Staker 5y ago
  With you for the most part, but can’t get behind your analogy. > Try learning building a 747 from a bootcamp. You can't. Yeah, try doing that with an engineering degree. You can’t. Try grabbing a random Boeing engineer and get them to build a 747. They can’t. No one can. Okay, I should be more charitable. You mean can’t contribute to a portion of the 747 project? Yeah, college isn’t necessarily going to help you much either, and you might be surprised what a smart person off the street can do… there’s a really good chance your boss just has a bunch of spreadsheets for all her maths. Yeah in the grand scheme of things you’ll have to learn how to do that too, but it may not be the barrier it seems. I’m a SW Eng, but did and entry level EE gig, and basing my experience on that. College did not prepare me at all. Engineers routinely enter industry without knowing what a relay is (and we used ladder logc!). Btw, we had self taught non-college educated “engineers”… they'd usually be talented operators that knew the machine like the back of their hands. So that’s basically an ME without a degree. I did a stint on an F-16 project after switching to computer engineering, and it was the same shit. Almost everything was learned on the spot from the veterans or google for general stuff. So yes, I could have worked on F-16 off the street, as well as done EE work and it really seemed like my ME friends were grinding out the same BS. Where are all these super special engineering people you so admire? Some of them do get very specialized education, but we were talking BS Engs. P.S. I do agree about the accessibility of programming. There actually are many topics that are hard to self learn, for example comp arch would be very challenging without a good professor. There’s many others, that’s just what sticks out as “thank God I went to uni so I could learn X”
  - deltaonefour 5y ago
    > With you for the most part, but can’t get behind your analogy. I think the analogy works. No single engineer whether out of university or not can build a 747. However a single person built a search engine. Duckduckgo. The person didn't even have a degree in software engineering. He had a physics degree. I see your point. Let me put it this way. Somewhere in building the F-16 or the boeing 747 there is a form of theoretical modelling that must be done as a fundamental thing in order to build it. You need to calculate the flight dynamics and mathematically model the control system using math skills that cannot be obtained by attending a bootcamp. Most of these skills can only be obtained through several years of practice, and a bootcamp doesn't offer that. Granted there are many parts of engineering a 747 that don't need these deep design skills so you can get away with not knowing what an ODE is while being an engineer.
- JHer 5y ago
  For people interested in the comparison between “real” engineers and software engineers (as in this thread), Hillel Wayne wrote an outstanding series of blog posts summarizing a bunch of interviews he did with former “real” engineers who turned software engineers. I found it extremely interesting. https://hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/ https://hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
foxfluff 5y ago
"If this was the case, then why are most applications full of bugs, including those written by trillion dollar corporations?" No-one ever seriously asked me how to make a program bug free. They also didn't ask me to use formal methods or prove any properties of the system I'm asked to implement. Hell, I can tell that I want to spend time developing tests and they say no, nah, we don't want that. Everywhere I've been it's been more important to deliver stuff quick and cheap than it is to make it perfect. Maybe places where extreme focus on quality do exist, and you only hear about them when the extremely unlikely catastrophic failure happens. But that's not the norm. Analogies to real world rarely fit but I think most software is like most construction: houses and flats and small commercial buildings where you can and regularly do get away with shoddy stuff and blemishes. The usual thing complaints are about are schedule and budget overruns, and then when everything is done, all the faults and rushed parts they find... Guess what, they like cheap and fast in construction too. In every place I've lived, I could point out many many little snafus from walls that aren't quite straight, misdimensioned boards and panels and other things that just don't quite fit, design issues such as doors obstructing important paths or not having room to fully open, etcetra. And you get away with it because your house is not going to fall apart because of a missing nail. Likewise for most software. Just another bug? Fix it and move on. Or maybe even leave it in if it's not catastrophic and there's more important things to do. The bar for quality is generally pretty low.
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  Exactly. Try open source development on a boeing 747 or even agile style development. @svantana Would you step onto a plane that was developed this way? The bar is low as hell.
ericbarrett 5y ago
This is an especially good analogy when you look at mass home builders and buyers' frequent complaints about shoddy materials and workmanship, e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/RoundRock/comments/ae8p5c/what_is_your_experience_with_kb_homes_and_other/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RoundRock/comments/ae8p5c/what_is_y...
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  Anaolgies are deceptive. They don't prove anything but they lead you to perceive something to be more real even though no argument was made for proof. So houses are made from shoddy workmanship. Software is also made with shoddy workmanship. How does this analogy prove that software engineering is not the easiest engineering field out there? I would argue that it proves software engineering IS the easiest engineering field out there because you can get away with this shoddy workmanship. In fact the engineering process of software engineering are centered around shoddy workmanship and throwing in and developing features without any sort of plan. See agile for more info on this process.
  - ericbarrett 5y ago
    I used agile before it was cool, back when it was a website and some rebel engineers frustrated at 6-month point patch cycles. In those days everything was a skyscraper, even getting MS Word installed on your company desktop. I hate what it's become and you're preaching to the choir. But some big projects do take real engineering, and coordination, and careful weighing of options before moving forward.
    - deltaonefour 5y ago
      I've worked on these projects, they still exist but are rare. You'll find most of these projects are in high end defense or other embedded systems projects that are highly, highly connected with building hardware. Outside of this kind of stuff, software engineering is easier than most other forms of engineering due to an accepted lower bar of quality.

deltaonefour 5y ago

The things you describe, managing complexity, is hard because there's no science around it. There's no optimization method for calculating the best way to organize code. It's not even formally defined what "organization" is. As a result everyone just makes up anecdotal "patterns" without proof that those patterns satisfy any quantitative "efficiency" criteria. Again this "efficiency" criteria doesn't really exist, we have some numerical metrics for measuring certain things but we can't really say definitively which is more organized the windows code base or the linux code base. So in terms of these kinds of things. Nobody really knows who does what better. Does hiring people who can solve LC type problems result in more "organized" code? How can we know when we don't even have the word "organized" defined? The existence of this problem in CS doesn't make CS harder because everybody is basically ignoring this problem and just picking arbitrary solutions aka "patterns" to solve things. Coding is like physical construction, unbounded by the rules of physics and therefore MUCH MUCH easier then engineering a boeing 747. Try learning building a 747 from a bootcamp. You can't. Coding bootcamps exist because it's freakishly easy to learn programming while engineering a 747 is freakishly hard, hence the lack of bootcamps for building airplanes. It's like making legos to fulfill your goal. In the end the thing we build with these legos likely isn't the most theoretically efficient thing but it works and we didn't need super high intelligence to build it and we don't need someone smart either. The thing with programming is this. It makes you feel smart. The reality is, your not.

laserlight 5y ago
> Coding is like physical construction, unbounded by the rules of physics and therefore MUCH MUCH easier then engineering a boeing 747. No, this is exactly backwards: engineering software is much much harder than engineering a large airplane. The latter is bounded by laws of physics, which acts as a global coordinator between parts and teams. There are no global constraints in software engineering and therefore coordinating modules and teams are very difficult. We have to come up with a set of constraints to achieve these goals, but the search space for the correct constraints is almost infinite. Enforcing these constraints is another issue. > Try learning building a 747 from a bootcamp. You can't. Coding bootcamps exist because it's freakishly easy to learn programming while engineering a 747 is freakishly hard, hence the lack of bootcamps for building airplanes. This is a false equivalence. Coding bootcamps are akin to learning to assemble parts --- nothing like engineering software.
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  >No, this is exactly backwards: engineering software is much much harder than engineering a large airplane. The latter is bounded by laws of physics, which acts as a global coordinator between parts and teams. There are no global constraints in software engineering and therefore coordinating modules and teams are very difficult. We have to come up with a set of constraints to achieve these goals, but the search space for the correct constraints is almost infinite. Enforcing these constraints is another issue. Your joking or highly highly misguided. Very few corporations have the ability to manufacture/designs planes. Tons of software engineering firms exist that hire coders out of bootcamp. Global constraints makes problems harder. Why? because these constraints are extremely hard to figure out. They can be modeled with differential equations but much of the constraints can only be determined through building an actual model and experimenting with them. >This is a false equivalence. Coding bootcamps are akin to learning to assemble parts --- nothing like engineering software. This is a true equivalence. Let me explain to you. THERE are many people who can't "engineer" software after they come out of a bootcamp. BUT there are tons of people who come out of a bootcamp and CAN engineer software. That's why people say you don't even need to go to school to learn how to program. You don't even need to go to school to learn how to "ENGINEER" it's easy. Now for engineering a plane? I can assure you. An aerospace engineer can't EVEN engineer a 747 OUT OF UNIVERSITY; it's that hard. It's also fundamentally impossible for a plane engineering bootcamp to even exist due to the sheer challenge of it. You have a misguided notion of how hard software engineering is. Software Engineering is Ironically the easiest "engineering" discipline out there yet one of the highest paid.
  - laserlight 5y ago
    > Very few corporations have the ability to manufacture/designs planes. So what? The reason could as well be market dynamics. By the same reasoning we could also argue that software engineering is the hardest, because it is the highest paid one. > You have a misguided notion of how hard software engineering is. Software engineering is not programming, just like aerospace engineering is not assembling a plane. > An aerospace engineer can't EVEN engineer a 747 OUT OF UNIVERSITY; it's that hard. Let me rewrite that: A software engineer can't even engineer a Google out of university; it's that hard. I don't think this discussion is being fruitful to me. I hear personal attacks instead of counterarguments to the ideas I presented. So, I won't be replying further.
P_I_Staker 5y ago
With you for the most part, but can’t get behind your analogy. > Try learning building a 747 from a bootcamp. You can't. Yeah, try doing that with an engineering degree. You can’t. Try grabbing a random Boeing engineer and get them to build a 747. They can’t. No one can. Okay, I should be more charitable. You mean can’t contribute to a portion of the 747 project? Yeah, college isn’t necessarily going to help you much either, and you might be surprised what a smart person off the street can do… there’s a really good chance your boss just has a bunch of spreadsheets for all her maths. Yeah in the grand scheme of things you’ll have to learn how to do that too, but it may not be the barrier it seems. I’m a SW Eng, but did and entry level EE gig, and basing my experience on that. College did not prepare me at all. Engineers routinely enter industry without knowing what a relay is (and we used ladder logc!). Btw, we had self taught non-college educated “engineers”… they'd usually be talented operators that knew the machine like the back of their hands. So that’s basically an ME without a degree. I did a stint on an F-16 project after switching to computer engineering, and it was the same shit. Almost everything was learned on the spot from the veterans or google for general stuff. So yes, I could have worked on F-16 off the street, as well as done EE work and it really seemed like my ME friends were grinding out the same BS. Where are all these super special engineering people you so admire? Some of them do get very specialized education, but we were talking BS Engs. P.S. I do agree about the accessibility of programming. There actually are many topics that are hard to self learn, for example comp arch would be very challenging without a good professor. There’s many others, that’s just what sticks out as “thank God I went to uni so I could learn X”
- deltaonefour 5y ago
  > With you for the most part, but can’t get behind your analogy. I think the analogy works. No single engineer whether out of university or not can build a 747. However a single person built a search engine. Duckduckgo. The person didn't even have a degree in software engineering. He had a physics degree. I see your point. Let me put it this way. Somewhere in building the F-16 or the boeing 747 there is a form of theoretical modelling that must be done as a fundamental thing in order to build it. You need to calculate the flight dynamics and mathematically model the control system using math skills that cannot be obtained by attending a bootcamp. Most of these skills can only be obtained through several years of practice, and a bootcamp doesn't offer that. Granted there are many parts of engineering a 747 that don't need these deep design skills so you can get away with not knowing what an ODE is while being an engineer.
JHer 5y ago
For people interested in the comparison between “real” engineers and software engineers (as in this thread), Hillel Wayne wrote an outstanding series of blog posts summarizing a bunch of interviews he did with former “real” engineers who turned software engineers. I found it extremely interesting. https://hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/ https://hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

foxfluff 5y ago

"If this was the case, then why are most applications full of bugs, including those written by trillion dollar corporations?" No-one ever seriously asked me how to make a program bug free. They also didn't ask me to use formal methods or prove any properties of the system I'm asked to implement. Hell, I can tell that I want to spend time developing tests and they say no, nah, we don't want that. Everywhere I've been it's been more important to deliver stuff quick and cheap than it is to make it perfect. Maybe places where extreme focus on quality do exist, and you only hear about them when the extremely unlikely catastrophic failure happens. But that's not the norm. Analogies to real world rarely fit but I think most software is like most construction: houses and flats and small commercial buildings where you can and regularly do get away with shoddy stuff and blemishes. The usual thing complaints are about are schedule and budget overruns, and then when everything is done, all the faults and rushed parts they find... Guess what, they like cheap and fast in construction too. In every place I've lived, I could point out many many little snafus from walls that aren't quite straight, misdimensioned boards and panels and other things that just don't quite fit, design issues such as doors obstructing important paths or not having room to fully open, etcetra. And you get away with it because your house is not going to fall apart because of a missing nail. Likewise for most software. Just another bug? Fix it and move on. Or maybe even leave it in if it's not catastrophic and there's more important things to do. The bar for quality is generally pretty low.

deltaonefour 5y ago
Exactly. Try open source development on a boeing 747 or even agile style development. @svantana Would you step onto a plane that was developed this way? The bar is low as hell.

ericbarrett 5y ago

This is an especially good analogy when you look at mass home builders and buyers' frequent complaints about shoddy materials and workmanship, e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/RoundRock/comments/ae8p5c/what_is_your_experience_with_kb_homes_and_other/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RoundRock/comments/ae8p5c/what_is_y...

deltaonefour 5y ago
Anaolgies are deceptive. They don't prove anything but they lead you to perceive something to be more real even though no argument was made for proof. So houses are made from shoddy workmanship. Software is also made with shoddy workmanship. How does this analogy prove that software engineering is not the easiest engineering field out there? I would argue that it proves software engineering IS the easiest engineering field out there because you can get away with this shoddy workmanship. In fact the engineering process of software engineering are centered around shoddy workmanship and throwing in and developing features without any sort of plan. See agile for more info on this process.
- ericbarrett 5y ago
  I used agile before it was cool, back when it was a website and some rebel engineers frustrated at 6-month point patch cycles. In those days everything was a skyscraper, even getting MS Word installed on your company desktop. I hate what it's become and you're preaching to the choir. But some big projects do take real engineering, and coordination, and careful weighing of options before moving forward.
  - deltaonefour 5y ago
    I've worked on these projects, they still exist but are rare. You'll find most of these projects are in high end defense or other embedded systems projects that are highly, highly connected with building hardware. Outside of this kind of stuff, software engineering is easier than most other forms of engineering due to an accepted lower bar of quality.