I think Hillel is a pretty interesting guy. But I think that he's a bit missing the mark here. It feels like his view of engineers is that they are people who

I think Hillel is a pretty interesting guy. But I think that he's a bit missing the mark here. It feels like his view of engineers is that they are people who can put together a solution and then use a lot of fancy numbers and established facts to support their solution. In his oil drilling example.. he's not going into the same issues that we face. (Is that drilling analyze for failure worth the money in investigation, etc) With software engineering you're putting together instructions to fit within a computer's hardware capacity to solve your problem in the context that you need to operate it. There are a lot of ways about it .. however we have a lot of issues in our field surrounding the technical aspect on this: 1. Academics is dead focused on the hard part of language schemas, grammars, correctness-proofs, etc. 2. The research that we have about design patterns and their usages are nothing more than surveys and try to debunk a negative. (This goes back to the whole "academics proved unit tests don't provide value") [The results are never influential and they completely ignore the quality of the data] Additionally: I want to say that as engineers .. at companies, we're put into aggressive processes and methodologies that prevent us from operating a very high quality output. As a software engineer, you should have verification to prove your program works as intended, you should have monitoring to validate that constantly in production, you should have experience+data that supports the design decisions. There are metrics there to quantify our solutions.. but being business and shipping led.. that's forced to the wayside. --- Slight addition here: We're in a phase in the industry where experience is completely ignored and we're forgoing technical "merit"(By that I mean experience, strong practices, discipline.. not the business says I'm good) in favor of blasting people into the door. We're not getting a lot of people that are willing to learn from the methods of old and make constructive commentary, we're getting people that are not willing to be disciplined, and we're getting people who forgo good practices because "they dont' wanna". (You see this all the time with lazy arguments about people hating to do unit tests, bad tooling, etc) TL;DR to my argument, are we engineers right now.. some have the privilege to be.. but most are punished for doing so because it may annoy the PO. We totally can be engineers, no one really rewards you for this.