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Well put. I think building software systems can be done with proper engineering techniques. But more often, many businesses don't want that! I've seen some go o

Well put. I think building software systems can be done with proper engineering techniques. But more often, many businesses don't want that! I've seen some go out of their way to chose technology and processes that eliminate any need for making engineering decisions. The goal is often to "standardize" and explicitly eliminate all novelty. And then they wonder why innovation is stalled. It's way easier to tell your developers to sprint every two weeks in some random direction, because at least then the business has control. If they were to use the scientific method, the direction would be chosen based on experiments and empirical data that they don't understand or control. Can't have that.

rockemsockem 2y ago
Which proper engineering techniques are those? In general I agree with you, but the devil is in the details and a licensure body is surely the wrong way to do this.
- perrygeo 2y ago
  Engineering (IMO) has nothing to do with licensing, and everything with how you approach the problem - Do you use gut feeling to make decisions, or do you follow the scientific method? In most so called "engineering" orgs, the scientific method is explicitly banned - decisions are made by weird scrum rituals and fabricated storypoint metrics.
  - rockemsockem 2y ago
    Agreed. I think it just comes down to most people being very bad at making decisions and doing stuff. Which, somehow, continues to amaze me given how much humanity has accomplished.
glitchc 2y ago
> Well put. I think building software systems can be done with proper engineering techniques. But more often, many businesses don't want that! I've seen some go out of their way to chose technology and processes that eliminate any need for making engineering decisions. The goal is often to "standardize" and explicitly eliminate all novelty. And then they wonder why innovation is stalled. That's not necessarily bad. The company is derisking by relying on building blocks developed by established companies with deep talent. The vast majority of projects where local developers wrote everything from scratch are nightmarish to maintain, secure and upgrade.
- perrygeo 2y ago
  It's not a bad thing if you're doing pure applied technology (IT) work. That should be standardized, there's really no innovation to be had, just optimization. It's when you develop novel products that innovation is required and where rigid standardization becomes a constraint.

rockemsockem 2y ago

Which proper engineering techniques are those? In general I agree with you, but the devil is in the details and a licensure body is surely the wrong way to do this.

perrygeo 2y ago
Engineering (IMO) has nothing to do with licensing, and everything with how you approach the problem - Do you use gut feeling to make decisions, or do you follow the scientific method? In most so called "engineering" orgs, the scientific method is explicitly banned - decisions are made by weird scrum rituals and fabricated storypoint metrics.
- rockemsockem 2y ago
  Agreed. I think it just comes down to most people being very bad at making decisions and doing stuff. Which, somehow, continues to amaze me given how much humanity has accomplished.

glitchc 2y ago

> Well put. I think building software systems can be done with proper engineering techniques. But more often, many businesses don't want that! I've seen some go out of their way to chose technology and processes that eliminate any need for making engineering decisions. The goal is often to "standardize" and explicitly eliminate all novelty. And then they wonder why innovation is stalled. That's not necessarily bad. The company is derisking by relying on building blocks developed by established companies with deep talent. The vast majority of projects where local developers wrote everything from scratch are nightmarish to maintain, secure and upgrade.

perrygeo 2y ago
It's not a bad thing if you're doing pure applied technology (IT) work. That should be standardized, there's really no innovation to be had, just optimization. It's when you develop novel products that innovation is required and where rigid standardization becomes a constraint.