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> Anything else is a waste of time and money unless management dictates otherwise. Management won't say otherwise because management relies on what software en

> Anything else is a waste of time and money unless management dictates otherwise. Management won't say otherwise because management relies on what software engineers tell them, as it's the job of the engineer to consider quality, reliability and operational efficiency, and advise management on the tradeoffs involved. An engineer can choose to not pick the cheapest possible option. Your "rational software engineer" instead sounds more like someone that's happy to go with substandard solution that's bad for the user and bad for the entire field of software engineering (the more it's used, the more it's normalized), and then hide behind greedy management and penny-pinching beancounters. People sometimes wonder if software wouldn't get better (boy technologically and socially) if software engineering was a licensed profession. Well, we don't deserve to be licensed professionals, because we've abandoned respect and loyalty to our field, and became just "professionals" in the cultural sense of doing cheapest stuff the fastest and dumping all externalities on customers (on third parties).

sigseg1v 2y ago
> People sometimes wonder if software wouldn't get better (boy technologically and socially) if software engineering was a licensed profession. In some countries such as Canada, it is a licensed profession and if you refer yourself as an engineer without holding a PEng you can have legal action taken against you. However, all this has done is make it such that nobody actually holds a software PEng. The only software PEng I know works at the university nearby and I've never met a colleague with designation. Everyone gets a SEng degree but knows no PEng to do a mentorship under so never gets designated. Lack of participation is likely a contributor to being an underdeveloped field. General public confusion from positions in the USA that wildly throw around the title "software engineer" for non-PEng doesn't help.
nobankai 2y ago
Conflating fewer native interfaces with the loss of respect software engineers have is like saying plumbers all went soft at the invention of the plunger. Native apps are a waste of time if you want to sell a successful product. It really just is that simple, I'm sorry all the success stories like Slack don't use the native interface on your OS but that doesn't justify attacking the field as a whole. It's true; this is and will be an OEM issue until the end of software engineering itself. Manufacturers will either align their incentives or get thrown to the wayside by everyone that makes money today.
bitwize 2y ago
> Your "rational software engineer" instead sounds more like someone that's happy to go with substandard solution A grizzled software engineer was telling me about how we were just moments away from AI that would pretty much do almost all the coding for us, leaving software engineers to make only the highest level decisions. My response touched on the low quality of such software and of the tendency of engineers who use AI assistance to develop "skill issues" to the point that they cannot function without the AI tool. "Yes," he told me, "but what I care about is my PAYCHECK. And AI helps me ship much faster." A rational software engineer cares about their paycheck. A rational software company cares about revenues vs. expenses. If you can get a lot of revenue out of very little effort investment by using solution X, you use solution X. Period. End of statement.

sigseg1v 2y ago

> People sometimes wonder if software wouldn't get better (boy technologically and socially) if software engineering was a licensed profession. In some countries such as Canada, it is a licensed profession and if you refer yourself as an engineer without holding a PEng you can have legal action taken against you. However, all this has done is make it such that nobody actually holds a software PEng. The only software PEng I know works at the university nearby and I've never met a colleague with designation. Everyone gets a SEng degree but knows no PEng to do a mentorship under so never gets designated. Lack of participation is likely a contributor to being an underdeveloped field. General public confusion from positions in the USA that wildly throw around the title "software engineer" for non-PEng doesn't help.

nobankai 2y ago

Conflating fewer native interfaces with the loss of respect software engineers have is like saying plumbers all went soft at the invention of the plunger. Native apps are a waste of time if you want to sell a successful product. It really just is that simple, I'm sorry all the success stories like Slack don't use the native interface on your OS but that doesn't justify attacking the field as a whole. It's true; this is and will be an OEM issue until the end of software engineering itself. Manufacturers will either align their incentives or get thrown to the wayside by everyone that makes money today.

bitwize 2y ago

> Your "rational software engineer" instead sounds more like someone that's happy to go with substandard solution A grizzled software engineer was telling me about how we were just moments away from AI that would pretty much do almost all the coding for us, leaving software engineers to make only the highest level decisions. My response touched on the low quality of such software and of the tendency of engineers who use AI assistance to develop "skill issues" to the point that they cannot function without the AI tool. "Yes," he told me, "but what I care about is my PAYCHECK. And AI helps me ship much faster." A rational software engineer cares about their paycheck. A rational software company cares about revenues vs. expenses. If you can get a lot of revenue out of very little effort investment by using solution X, you use solution X. Period. End of statement.