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I like that quote. For me, engineering is applied science for money. That's the main thing. Someone is paying for everything you do. We get into it because we
by juancn 2y ago
I like that quote.
For me, engineering is applied science for money. That's the main thing.
Someone is paying for everything you do.
We get into it because we care about the how more than the why, but we end up having to deal with the who is paying for this.
The boundary is fuzzy, engineering is heavily influenced by finance, otherwise it's just a hobby.
Formal methods are great or an awful decision depending on wether or not they make economic sense for your product or service at your organization's current stage.
Amazon EC2? A large, mature org, with products with extremely high fubar potential? Go wild.
Your startup where market-fit is not proven? WTF? Are you high? use that money on something else.
It's like unit testing, it in general makes great sense if the cost of maintaining the tests is lower than the opportunity cost of slowing down. If you're prototyping something that you'll likely throw away, it may be a bad idea. Once it proves value, you better build a decent test harness.
Startups take technical debt because it's cheap when the market fit is not demonstrated (you pay it back later once you have succeeded somewhat).
It's a rational decision.
You don't need perfection if you're building the wrong thing, first you figure out if what you're building makes sense, then you decide in what to invest.
On the other hand, if you're building a deep space probe, a large scale distributed system for hire, or any other thing were a failure is BAD (with capital letters), the extra cost of ensuring correctness is well worth it.
- hnthrowaway0328 2y ago> The boundary is fuzzy, engineering is heavily influenced by finance, otherwise it's just a hobby. This rings true for me. I'm interested in learning things, e.g. how processes work in Windows NT kernel, or how to write a custom memory allocator, instead of creating a product. I do have some passion for a certain product but it is highly personal and won't be shared. Quoting David Cutler, "What I really wanted to do was work on computers, not apply them to problems". I wish I knew this when I was younger.
- drewcoo 2y ago> engineering is applied science for money I thought that was science, not engineering! Money determines the subjects researched, how they're researched, and the results, right?
- juancn 2y agoIn science the money is not tied to the utility of the research (or at least no directly tied in most cases). It's possible to get funding to research something completely bonkers, in engineering it's less likely.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI feel like money is too narrow here, but there does need to be some kind of budget involved. For instance, getting the energy output of a nuclear fusion reactor to exceed the energy input is an engineering problem. An energy budget, in that case.