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“engineers stick to doing things that are well understood and predictable” I’m calling BS on this. If this were true, we’d still be a ground species. Engineeri
by reactordev 3y ago
“engineers stick to doing things that are well understood and predictable”
I’m calling BS on this. If this were true, we’d still be a ground species. Engineering has been and will always be about creating something electrical, mechanical, computerized, or all, that solves a problem. Understood or not. Engineers are not oracles. They can not predict whether a tower built in Italy will eventually begin to lean due to erosion. They can not predict that a steel beam rated for 300T of force would break at 180T. They can not predict a rogue developer removing a package from underneath their dependency tree.
You can give estimates all you want but you are still guessing.
If engineers were as you say they are, we would never have delays, we would never have traffic jams, we would never have crap software, we would never have flight.
- practicemaths 3y ago“Engineering is the art of modelling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyse so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance.” - Dr. AR Dykes
- reactordev 3y agoAh the eloquence of Dr. AR Dykes, perfectly said. Thank you.
- noboostforyou 3y agoI am partial to the following one about computers: "A cpu is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking."
- cduzz 3y agoEngineers manage risk and cost. They certainly make mistakes, like those couple buildings that are famously leaning over in SF and NYC, or the citycorp center where they got the wind sheer loads wrong and had to hot patch the building. But looking at the malarkey that goes on in "software engineering" or whatever -- clearly not engineering, at least not where I've seen it. Engineering: a process of repeatably solving an understood problem predictably. Craft: a process of solving an understood problem. Science: a process of solving a problem without an exactly understood outcome. Art: a process of working. These are all made-up definitions. I'd expect a software engineer to give me a system that locally caches and verifies distribution artifacts and validates changes -- a craftsperson who gives me a tool chain that yeets goo from the internet and builds on that without validation is not, in fact, an engineer. They could be quite practiced at the art of building working systems, but they're not managing risk....
- dehrmann 3y agoWhat makes software engineering special is the systems are more complex and are cheaper to test and break. You get a completely different engineering culture when you can roll back a bad change after seeing it fail during the canary push. That, and what's usually on the line is money, not life. I'd feel a lot better making a $1M mistake than making a mistake that killed someone.
- ExoticPearTree 3y ago> Engineering: a process of repeatably solving an understood problem predictably. We call it help desk, not engineering.
- gottorf 3y ago> Engineers manage risk and cost. "Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."