> Many people have asked me why I care so much about this project. Why does it matter whether or not software is “really” engineering? Why can’t we just say tha

> Many people have asked me why I care so much about this project. Why does it matter whether or not software is “really” engineering? Why can’t we just say that “software is software”? It’s because of these misconceptions. People have a stereotyped notion of what engineering looks like. Because software doesn’t look like the stereotype, they assume that we are wholly unlike engineering. This helped me understand his motivation, although I like to frame the problem differently.. more like "why does software seemingly fail to learn from other disciplines, or even its own history?". IMO the answers are sort of universal - the best practitioners do know, but they either can't/won't teach due to time or legal constraints, and even if they did no one would listen. I've seen good tech-company internal wiki articles that are often much more comprehensive and well thought out than a 100 blog posts. It happens in many other fields like say quantitative trading, or law or hardware/semi manufacturing too. There is a low base level of public knowledge, say like TA or PE ratios in investing, and then real firms are decades ahead. I feel like it is the difference between a small, loosely competence based hierarchy (like a company) vs. a huge, flat network like the internet. Hierarchies are able to continuously build upon a structured body of information, even codifying knowledge that only a few people within the hierarchy understand. Flat networks don't work that way for better and for worse.