5 ms·

There seems to have been an influx of these sort of posts on HN recently. To be honest, engineers are just people. A wide sample of folks from different backgr

There seems to have been an influx of these sort of posts on HN recently. To be honest, engineers are just people. A wide sample of folks from different backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities, educational-backgrounds, etc etc. This wildcard lumping of people into various categories has got to stop. It's ridiculous to say the least, and really does the profession harm when you separate the engineer from the individual in question. People are different.

001sky 14y ago
Posted on June 19th, <2007> in Management, Software/Web development -- Whats was old, is now again New
- marblar 14y ago
  That's probably worth emphasizing more: this post is pretty old.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    And that it is still relevant suggests some truisms lay within it.
xd 14y ago
I find it interesting that; "He worked at Microsoft from 1994 to 2003, mostly on Internet Explorer 1.0 to 5.0 (not 6)" ...
- rachelbythebay 14y ago
  That sure makes it sound like IE6 was a pariah project. It's the sort of thing that makes people go out of their way to say "I had no part in the making of that monster". Hmm. More Bozo Loop material.
  - jackfoxy 14y ago
    Pariah project? People forget IE6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IE6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IE6 was released in 2000 freaking one, for Christ's sake. It was state of the art for years. Sure it started becoming a pain in the ass to developers years later, but it's only a pariah project with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and years of continued engineering development.
    - whatusername 14y ago
      Maybe Opera could have been considered state of the art - but I agree. IE6 was a great browser. It was the delay for IE7 that was the problem.
    - brazzy 14y ago
      Yeah, but it became SUCH a pain in the ass later on that it's entirely understandable that people would later on not want to be associated with it.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- ChristianMarks 14y ago
  Alan Kay has been giving talks on this for some time. He says there is no equivalent of the arch of civil engineering in software development, which is at the architectural equivalent of the pyramids. Analogies like this are difficult to sustain, but one might argue that civil engineering has a head start over software engineering by a couple thousand years. Others might protest that macros and algorithms have been around at least as long. I think this misses Alan Kay's point that the Empire State Building took 3000 workers 500 or so days to build, and those kinds of coordinated efforts are unheard of in single software engineering projects. One could counter that many large programming incorporate the work of thousands of others in the form of algorithms, techniques and standards, but civil engineering is no different with respect to accumulated wisdom--over a somewhat longer period. Civil engineering does provide for coordinated efforts among thousands of construction workers on a single project.
  - KaeseEs 14y ago
    Here's where the analogy falls apart - civil engineering does not provide for coordinated efforts among thousands of construction workers. Construction management does. Any large building project will involve a civil or structural engineering firm, which designs the building or structure, and a construction firm, which builds it. The construction firm is your compiler toolchain. The benchmark to meet is how long it took to design the Empire State Building, not how long it took to put it together.
    - ChristianMarks 14y ago
      Where would construction management be without civil engineering? The analogy between construction firms and compiler toolchains is either laughable or serious publishable research--I've never seen it mentioned once in the civil engineering literature.
      - 14y ago

001sky 14y ago

Posted on June 19th, <2007> in Management, Software/Web development -- Whats was old, is now again New

marblar 14y ago
That's probably worth emphasizing more: this post is pretty old.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  And that it is still relevant suggests some truisms lay within it.

xd 14y ago

I find it interesting that; "He worked at Microsoft from 1994 to 2003, mostly on Internet Explorer 1.0 to 5.0 (not 6)" ...

rachelbythebay 14y ago
That sure makes it sound like IE6 was a pariah project. It's the sort of thing that makes people go out of their way to say "I had no part in the making of that monster". Hmm. More Bozo Loop material.
- jackfoxy 14y ago
  Pariah project? People forget IE6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IE6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IE6 was released in 2000 freaking one, for Christ's sake. It was state of the art for years. Sure it started becoming a pain in the ass to developers years later, but it's only a pariah project with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and years of continued engineering development.
  - whatusername 14y ago
    Maybe Opera could have been considered state of the art - but I agree. IE6 was a great browser. It was the delay for IE7 that was the problem.
  - brazzy 14y ago
    Yeah, but it became SUCH a pain in the ass later on that it's entirely understandable that people would later on not want to be associated with it.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ChristianMarks 14y ago
Alan Kay has been giving talks on this for some time. He says there is no equivalent of the arch of civil engineering in software development, which is at the architectural equivalent of the pyramids. Analogies like this are difficult to sustain, but one might argue that civil engineering has a head start over software engineering by a couple thousand years. Others might protest that macros and algorithms have been around at least as long. I think this misses Alan Kay's point that the Empire State Building took 3000 workers 500 or so days to build, and those kinds of coordinated efforts are unheard of in single software engineering projects. One could counter that many large programming incorporate the work of thousands of others in the form of algorithms, techniques and standards, but civil engineering is no different with respect to accumulated wisdom--over a somewhat longer period. Civil engineering does provide for coordinated efforts among thousands of construction workers on a single project.
- KaeseEs 14y ago
  Here's where the analogy falls apart - civil engineering does not provide for coordinated efforts among thousands of construction workers. Construction management does. Any large building project will involve a civil or structural engineering firm, which designs the building or structure, and a construction firm, which builds it. The construction firm is your compiler toolchain. The benchmark to meet is how long it took to design the Empire State Building, not how long it took to put it together.
  - ChristianMarks 14y ago
    Where would construction management be without civil engineering? The analogy between construction firms and compiler toolchains is either laughable or serious publishable research--I've never seen it mentioned once in the civil engineering literature.
    - 14y ago