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From what I hear in other engineering industries (software engineering is engineering) it is more like people just stick with what they know because it can take
by DanielHB 2y ago
From what I hear in other engineering industries (software engineering is engineering) it is more like people just stick with what they know because it can take 5-50 years for a new technique/tool that is significantly better to show up.
You can literally just specialize in something and just do that for the rest of your career. In fact they have the opposite problem, sticking with very old "proven" techniques despite innovation happening.
- Enginerrrd 2y agoYeah. Structural engineering is probably a good example of this. For any one component (a beam, an anchor, etc.) There might be a dozen or more solutions that would work. The engineer of record (the one in responsible charge) absolutely SHOULD pick the one they are most familiar with. (Different options may have totally different analysis methods) This reduces the cognitive overhead allowing them to focus on other aspects of the design, and reduces the likelihood of making analysis errors. The incentives are not to grab the latest thing because it's 5% "better" or to pick the shiny new thing because its more interesting. Instead, the engineer of record thinks to themself: "gosh if this fails on a snowy day and kills an assembly of school children, I'm personally liable for it. I've got a lot of experience in the design, construction and verification of this technology, that's the one I'm going to choose." Only when a new technology comes along that is MUCH better will they consider using it. Some may call this an excessively conservative approach, but failures in this regard are very rare as a result.