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Perhaps I phrased this badly. My point wasn’t a clear boundary between professions, because you are right, that is difficult to impossible to draw. However, the
by 9dev 3y ago
Perhaps I phrased this badly. My point wasn’t a clear boundary between professions, because you are right, that is difficult to impossible to draw. However, there’s a clear boundary between the goals of the code written by scientists vs. software engineers. Where a scientist aims to prove something, a software engineer builds code to produce business value. Both are trained very differently towards these goals.
- LeonardoTolstoy 3y agoThis probably highlights why so many software engineers in scientific R&D are "bad" in the strictest sense: they often don't understand that business value doesn't come from production-perfect solutions, but instead 100% of the business value comes from doing stuff fast, good enough, and understandable (so that researchers, not software engineers, can read it in a paper and iterate off of it).
- mihaaly 3y agoI still disagree a bit. Their goals are the same: producing a product that fulfills the intended purpose and brings on value (financial or else or mixed). They may bring in their specialty learned beforehand (or even during) but this distribution of labour is not a goal but tool in reaching the common goal. Also no such as a software engineer is trained to seeks business value while a scientist seeks proof with clear cut separation, not at all.