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> The people who create software generally refer to themselves as software engineers Engineers follow processes and measure things. If a developer is not measu

> The people who create software generally refer to themselves as software engineers Engineers follow processes and measure things. If a developer is not measuring things, most are not, then they are not engineering. If, at least, they are doing something new they are writing. Otherwise, they are typing. Software employs a lot of typists. If you want to select for excellent engineers you only need to identify two qualities: conscientiousness and persistence. Conscientiousness is awareness of the world outside yourself and is negatively correlated with intelligence. Conscientiousness is where you find disciplined industriousness. Add a little bit of intelligence and you also get people that can follow complex instructions and achieve high precision. Creativity is the child of persistence and high intelligence. Creativity is achieved by trying many variations of a process and carefully discerning quality against some audience or metric. If you hire a bunch of clowns you get a circus.

drewcoo 1y ago
> Software employs a lot of typists. We have many strong typists.
- mdaniel 1y ago
  What I want are more static typists
et1337 1y ago
I think there’s more to creativity than persistence and high intelligence. What about Docker, or Terraform? Super simple ideas that as far as I can tell, were not the result of persistence, and were not uniquely intellectually taxing to invent. I don’t think there’s a formula for creativity. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t.
strken 1y ago
This is an absolutely ridiculous take. If my more traditional engineering friend spends a day putting together plans based on existing documentation of parts, is he suddenly not doing engineering anymore? Do you expect him to run off to the supplier with a probe in hand and redo all their data sheets?
- austin-cheney 1y ago
  If your engineering friends only follow instructions and assemble things then they are not engineering. They are assembling. It takes less to follow instructions than it does to write the instructions.
  - strken 1y ago
    I'm sure the world's civil engineers will be pleased to learn that, since they already know the tensile strength of concrete and since they use surveyors to map a site, they're merely assembling bridges and freeways rather than engineering them.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      You don't need to be a civil engineer to design a single family house. The properties of the common materials like 2x4s are so well known that you need very little training to draw up a print that can be built - you look up in a chart how long a 2x12 can span and so long as you stay under that size your are okay. Now in a typical house the floor and roof use trusses that are engineered because in those areas engineering matters. Even then they are mostly taking a bunch of trusses already designed and putting their stamp on the system working. As buildings get larger/more complex though it becomes harder and harder to build the needed charts. Eventually you need a civil engineer to do a lot of calculation (with the help of a computer) because the building is different enough from anything before.

drewcoo 1y ago

> Software employs a lot of typists. We have many strong typists.

mdaniel 1y ago
What I want are more static typists

et1337 1y ago

I think there’s more to creativity than persistence and high intelligence. What about Docker, or Terraform? Super simple ideas that as far as I can tell, were not the result of persistence, and were not uniquely intellectually taxing to invent. I don’t think there’s a formula for creativity. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t.

strken 1y ago

This is an absolutely ridiculous take. If my more traditional engineering friend spends a day putting together plans based on existing documentation of parts, is he suddenly not doing engineering anymore? Do you expect him to run off to the supplier with a probe in hand and redo all their data sheets?

austin-cheney 1y ago
If your engineering friends only follow instructions and assemble things then they are not engineering. They are assembling. It takes less to follow instructions than it does to write the instructions.
- strken 1y ago
  I'm sure the world's civil engineers will be pleased to learn that, since they already know the tensile strength of concrete and since they use surveyors to map a site, they're merely assembling bridges and freeways rather than engineering them.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    You don't need to be a civil engineer to design a single family house. The properties of the common materials like 2x4s are so well known that you need very little training to draw up a print that can be built - you look up in a chart how long a 2x12 can span and so long as you stay under that size your are okay. Now in a typical house the floor and roof use trusses that are engineered because in those areas engineering matters. Even then they are mostly taking a bunch of trusses already designed and putting their stamp on the system working. As buildings get larger/more complex though it becomes harder and harder to build the needed charts. Eventually you need a civil engineer to do a lot of calculation (with the help of a computer) because the building is different enough from anything before.