11 ms·

You are not a software engineer (2011)

122 points by llambda 13y ago

jaegerpicker 13y ago
Bleh... Can we just stop with the metaphors already? Maybe I'm not an engineer or a gardner or a scientist but maybe I am. I can be all of those things or none of them. I know how to make software of varying types and that's enough, how I apply those skills is a completely different thing. Maybe I'm a biologist using python to help see the migration patterns of fish better. Maybe I'm a web developer building highly scalable web systems in java. Maybe I'm writing drivers at a kernel level. It doesn't matter, programming is a skill set not a job definition. Engineers aren't just Engineers. They are Mechanical Engineers, Electrical Engineers, etc.. Scientists are just Scientists, they are Biologists, Chemists, and Computer Scientists. When we want programming/software development to have that same level of social standing we will use programming as a skill set not a job title.
adamnemecek 13y ago
So what exactly is the take-away of this piece?
- sz4kerto 13y ago
  That you should not believe that classic engineering techniques work in software. Also, do not believe that you, as a software developer, know how engineering works in real world. You don't.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    1. We don't need to know how engineering works in real world. You need to be in a domain and work in that domain to acquire that knowledge. Knowing how to calculate stress in civil/structural engineering doesn't mean you are an engineer. You need a job. You need an internship if you were a student. 2. It is quite dumb to assume we build software in the same way that bridge is built. That's essentially what Water Fall method would do. You build the blueprint precisely, build a prototype and then build the actual bridge. I don't see why the author would assume we think we were classical engineer. I never assumed we would be using the same technique all the time.
    - sz4kerto 13y ago
      1. Well, you don't need to, but it's certainly interesting. 2. People assume all the time that software development is engineering. That's what leads to clashes between management and developers; clients not understanding why you can't estimate precisely; neverending projects; etc. It's a very important thing to understand and explain that software development is _not_ an engineering discipline -- at least not yet. We strive to make it another branch of engineering, that's why we have design patters, methodologies, etc. Engineering is usually boring, but predictable, and that's a very important property software lacks at the moment.
  - seivan 13y ago
    That pretty much sums it up and is in fact quite accurate. Well put!
  - tjpick 13y ago
    Well, the classical engineering domains are all pretty different anyway (electrical, structural, civil, etc). I remember my grandfather saying he thought it was ludicrous that they were all covered by a single qualification. Building software with an engineering approach is a real thing. Not everyone subscribes to it, but doesn't mean it isn't a real thing. For the record, I do a lot of gardening too, and building software has fuck all to do with that. I also don't get how everyone who argues against software-as-engineering talk like buildings and bridges never fall over. They do.
- cmaitchison 13y ago
  Prefer Agile software development methodologies over Waterfall.
Avalaxy 13y ago
I just checked my diploma, it says my title is 'Engineer' (studied computer science).
- SethMurphy 13y ago
  I have to agree strongly with this. It's like a professional trainer calling themselves a professor just because they teach. You are an engineer if your diploma says so. It is an earned title, not a job description. I say this as a CS dropout that never calls myself an engineer.
  - USNetizen 13y ago
    Engineering is about process, not about degrees. My CS degree did not at ALL prepare me to be a software engineer. It taught be to be a programmer. Engineering is more about the process than the technology. CS teaches theory and technology.
    - SethMurphy 13y ago
      100% agrees, I didn't say I didn't do engineering, I just don't call myself an engineer. Ironically, I do call myself a programmer though, and I don't need a degree to do that. The state of CS degrees is a whole other topic, which from the sound of it we agree upon so far. Maybe I just can't call myself a scientist ;)
- polemic 13y ago
  This doesn't contribute anything. You're missing the important question "what is engineering?". Saying it's just "whatever engineers do" is meaningless.
  - Avalaxy 13y ago
    Wikipedia: "Engineering is the application of scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge in order to design, build, and maintain structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes. It may encompass using insights to conceive, model and scale an appropriate solution to a problem or objective. The discipline of engineering is extremely broad, and encompasses a range of more specialized fields of engineering, each with a more specific emphasis on particular areas of technology and types of application." Application of scientific/practical knowledge: check. Design, build and maintain systems/processes, check. Using insights to conceive, model and scale a solution to a problem, check. Sorry, but this is just a nonsense discussion imho. Stop devaluating your own grade.
goldvine 13y ago
I enjoyed the fresh perspective :-) Thanks for sharing
- cmaitchison 13y ago
  You're welcome. Thanks!
  - j1z0 13y ago
    I for one really like the article. Yes it's true engineering projects aren't anywhere near as perfect or on-time as people often given them credit for, but that's exactly the point. People often expect engineering project to fit a agh exile exactly. The article is about changing that perception and dealing with the reality that as an industry we don't estimate very well at all. So we need to change the metaphors to get people to understand more clearly what is I we are doing. And the Gardner metaphors is apt. Great Article!
polemic 13y ago
It's a slightly flowery (haha) way of putting it, but I agree whole-heartedly. I recently held a talk at a Python conference and I asked the question: degrees and job titles aside, are we scientists, engineers, artists or a combination of all of these. The overwhelming response was "all of the above". My preferred term is "artisan". A software developer is applying techniques acquired primarily through experience, supplemented by training and outside knowledge. The artisan has a clear vision of the end result in high-level strokes, but the actual process and implementation is strongly dictated by experience and intuition. Obviously there are different branches of software developer that have more characteristics of engineering, others of science, but I would hazard to guess that 80% of software development is essentially a guided artistic process.
- sz4kerto 13y ago
  You should have said to them: 'you're only f* programmers'. Just as a joke. As a software engineer (?), I am quite fed up with people in their early 20s calling themselves 'architects', 'artist', etc. You're not a scientist, and not an artist. Being a scientist and a programmer is extremely different because of a simple, seemingly minor thing: the lenght of the feedback loop. As a programmer, your feedback loop is sometimes an hour, sometimes a few minutes, sometimes a second (IntelliSense/other IDE help), sometimes weeks. But for scientist, it's sometimes forever. So it's for very different personalities.
  - polemic 13y ago
    Heh, well I actually say "developer", because "artisan" sounds douchey, "engineer" is (imo) incorrect and "programmer" tends to be a very narrowly defined role. Design and operational sides of a "developer" are not really adequately covered by "programmer". But that's semantics really. We're talking about what sort of techniques do you employ. It doesn't really help to say that programmers use "programming" techniques because it says nothing about the common attributes with other industries / professions. Which is where "artisan" comes in. A good developer is, IMO, more like an great chef - excellent technique, a wealth of experience across many disciplines and the best tools are the (ahem) recipe for success, not "good process".
benched 13y ago
I think this [silly] argument is nothing more than a special case of the argument over whether words have inherent meaning, or derive meaning from usage. I don't think 'software engineer' was ever meant to denote a new subtype of engineer. I think 'software engineer' is a compound word that means whatever it is we do. At work, whenever someone says 'get an engineer to look at that', absolutely nobody thinks that means to call one of the 'real' kinds of engineers on the phone. They know it means to get a software developer/programmer/code monkey/dev or whatever you want to call people who make software out of computer code.
- USNetizen 13y ago
  It is far more than semantics, the term engineering denotes a rigid adherence to processes and protocols, whereas 90% of people that call themselves "software engineers" are just developers at best - they write code to do what they are told it should do with very little concern for the overall processes involved in an engineering discipline.
  - benched 13y ago
    This misses my point completely. My point is that the term 'software engineering' is not meant to denote a type of engineering. It may include engineering as a loose metaphor, but the term 'software engineering' stands alone as a word in itself, with its own meaning, and that meaning is obvious to anyone who is or works with software engineers. More analogies: Should we not have software architecture, because it isn't real architecture? Should we not refer to systems programming, unless the practitioner has studied systems theory? Should we not have windowing systems, because no real windows are involved? Almost everything in computing is termed by metaphor with 'real' things.
  - Brakenshire 13y ago
    It's closer to the British use of the word engineer, which can mean anything from the civil engineer who designed the Channel Tunnel, to the mechanic who repairs the trains. I think I prefer the prescriptive definition, though, it's useful to have a word for someone expected to work with that level of planning and rigour.
PaulHoule 13y ago
Ugh. I wish we took the engineering metaphor more seriously. In particular, I'd like to see some real consequences for malpractice on the part of practitioners -- this would help us in our struggles with management to get projects done successfully. I've seen so many cases, for instance, where people screw up simple things, such as generating primary keys, and keep making the same mistakes over and over again. This has got to stop.
- martininmelb 13y ago
  > In particular, I'd like to see some real consequences for malpractice on the part of practitioners I agree as long as we also see some of the benefits - required registration with a professional body - along with a requirement that certain projects cannot use uncertified practitioners (in other words, better pay for Software Engineers).
  - yetanotherphd 13y ago
    And worse pay for people who can't get certified for some reason.
trimbo 13y ago
> If you were building a bridge or a skyscraper and you told me, before you began, that you knew exactly how it would look when it was finished – I would believe you. If you told me that you knew to some insane degree of accuracy how long it would take to get to ‘finished’ – I would believe you again. That’s how Engineers roll Oh neat, maybe he can explain why the new Bay Bridge was practically a decade over schedule and billions over budget. Or the Burj Khalifa was about 2 years overdue? Or the California High Speed rail is projected to be twice the budget they thought, and they've barely broken ground on it? So the idea that "Real Engineers" building bridges and railroads and skyscrapers get it right in plans and schedule is total bullshit. We've seen larger software projects, with more people working on them than these examples, hit their deadlines (Windows comes to mind -- except Vista). And by the way, those "Engineering" disciplines have only been around for, what, hundreds, if not thousands of years. What they do for a living is mostly explored territory. Software, at least at a scale to be considered engineering at all, has been around for about 3-4 decades... maybe. And we're still hitting up against major unknowns all the time at every level of the practice, big and small. edit: grammar
- maxmcd 13y ago
  If large scale civil engineering projects were not muddled by politics, contracts, and bidding wars, I imagine that wouldn't be the case. So in an abstract since, and in a world where engineers are the only ones involved in construction, I understand his point.
  - jeltz 13y ago
    > If large scale civil engineering projects were not muddled by politics, contracts, and bidding wars, I imagine that wouldn't be the case. And software development is never involved in any of that? While I suspect software is more often plagued by problems I do not see that it is another kind of problems than other forms of engineering.
  - hackula1 13y ago
    Waterfall software design would also probably work if it was not for changing requirements, limited budgets, optimistic estimate push, etc.
antonio0 13y ago
Software Engineering is an oxymoron.
mrottenkolber 13y ago
I disagree. When I code for my own amusement I might see myself as an artist but when I do professional work I definitely want to see myself as an engineer as well as a craftsman. To me it feels as if we are just at a very early stage. It takes huge amounts of time to learn software engineering, putting aside mastering it and humans haven't been practicing for very long. So I'd guess that we're just clueless enough to not be able to feel like engineers yet. We learn most of our practical abilities from experience so thats an argument for craft, but once we get a better understanding of what we are actually doing, and formalize it, our job will probably be very engineery. There is just millions of problem domains and no formal education on the domain of writing software yet (no a CS degree is not it). And I think there is a class of applications that are already so well understood that they do get developed in an engineering fashion already.
btilly 13y ago
I was hoping that a more substantial point was going to be made than this piece of fluff. Here is the substantial point. If you're building a skyscraper or a bridge, an engineer has to sign off on the design. If the design subsequently proves to be defective, said engineer is personally liable. In many places, calling yourself an engineer when you are not licensed to sign off on designs and be liable in this way is against the law. We can debate whether or not extending this principle to software development is a good idea. What we can't debate is that software development does not currently work this way. You, the software developer, are not an engineer. If you think a design is bad, you do not have both the legal authority and responsibility to stand up, declare it so, and force the design to be changed to something saner. But saying you're not an engineer because software projects don't succeed like projects done by real engineers - that's both silly and wrong.
- rhizome 13y ago
  There have been rumblings over the past decade or two about quantifying a practice and study aimed towards turning software engineering into a capital-e Engineering discipline, but evidently they never really go anywhere. That's what makes it a stupid point: it depends on a specific definition of engineer that is not used (and is not possible to use) with software engineering, and that definition is oriented around chartering/certification of the professional themselves. That he buttons the essay up in such a self-serving way is just icing: taking "engineering" too literally for the context, then calling himself a gardener.
- lttlrck 13y ago
  It has already been extended into software development. Plenty of software projects have to be signed off in aerospace, automotive, telecoms, energy and defense. In fact I'd be amazed if it did not extend into consumer electronics in large companies, e.g. Apple et al cannot risk bricking millions of phones with a bad update. The point might be that there are thousands of badly run projects, just as there are in construction.
throwaway0094 13y ago
Dismissing all other organizations as worse at "gardening" than Google was a bit offensive. And the lowest bidder for contracted work often sucks, or finds ways to bill more than the original bid. :)
- cmaitchison 13y ago
  I said they didn't have the same soil. That would include the multitude of internal tools they use to facilitate their software development, most of which are not publicly available, their culture, and the aptitude of their people.
deleted 13y ago
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jarrett 13y ago
I disagree for two reasons: First, software engineers exist in a broader culture. The connotations of the various words in our respective languages are not in our control. "Engineer" and "gardener" have very different connotations. In a profession that sometimes struggles to gain respect, it would not behoove us to use a term that (wrongly in my opinion) is associated with lower social and professional status. If we could rewrite the English language and define "gardener" as a person with rare, hard-to-learn, and highly valuable skills, then perhaps we would do well to embrace the term "software gardener." But we can't.[1] Second, software is engineering. This article seems to define engineering as Big Design Up Front. While that may describe part of what engineering can entail, it's not a complete or general description. If I had to describe engineering generally, I'd say it has to do with understanding and manipulating complex systems, analyzing and fulfilling requirements, distilling vague notions to concrete implementations, and building things that work. Software fits all of that. [1] As I hinted above, I don't think it's fair, right, or accurate to denigrate actual gardeners as compared to software engineers. I'm stating the way most people perceive social status, not the way I'd like them to.
brudgers 13y ago
In August 1991 during the S&L recession and fresh out of Vocational School, I landed my first CAD jockey job drawing fabrication plans for a precast prestressed concrete manufacturer. The first task, after running Diazos and learning that neckties would become caught in the feed and where the reverse button was by feel as my face was pressed to the top of the machine and my air supply was rapidly constricting was drawing plans for a series of double tee members [TT]. It took a couple of weeks to generate the 100 odd variations and get them through the QA process, but then I moved on to other things. But come October, they started to roll off the line...20+ kips of concrete a pop and then stacked three high. To this day, the sensation is fresh; "So that's what the fuck it really looks like." The reason it's fresh is because it returns every time I am in the presence of some lines I put on paper manifested. The picture of the bridge is not the bridge. The engineer, like the hacker, has better intuitions regarding the way in which the picture will correspond to its instantiation - but it is still no more than a [hopefully] informed intuition.[1] [1] The idea that there is an Engineer rather than a thousand authors of a successful bridge tends to be a bit absurd in modern construction practice. Such heroics are still far more likely in software development.
dogweather 13y ago
This is why I became an attorney.
matthewmacleod 13y ago
The fact that the feedback loop of a software engineering process is much tighter and cheaper than that of civil engineering does not mean that it is not engineering - that's a fallacy. Perhaps it's less applicable to civil engineers, because of the scale and safety requirements of their profession, but let's look at electrical engineering. An electrical engineer will build prototypes; they will build models; they will use computer simulations to predict how systems will behave; they will build testing and QA infrastructure. It's definitely harder to iterate—once you've built a million widgets, shifting circuits around is going to be expensive—but it's not qualitatively different to developing a software product. As in any engineering discipline, software engineers must optimise for a system's required qualities. In some cases, reliability might not be that high up the list. In others—let's say medical systems, or those used in space travel—software engineers have rigorous systems in place to ensure quality, and in many cases substantial up-front planning and certification will be involved. Ultimately this seems to say that software engineering is different from (specifically) civil engineering. I think that's broadly rather true – the nature of civil is such that generally there are stringent safety requirements, and indeed massive costs involved in making subsequent changes. The majority of software does not have the same requirements, and so it's no surprise that the process is somewhat different. And I agree that not all development is engineering, of course, but to dismiss the entire field is a bit of a shallow argument.
lettergram 13y ago
I personally prefer the term programmer. What I do is program machines to do as I wish. Gardener fits, but we design the plants in essence.... To me Programmer, developer, even software architect seems closer than gardener.
joseph_cooney 13y ago
My take on this. Not to say some people don't 'do' software engineering....but it is still nascent. http://jcooney.net/post/2012/02/27/What-Other-Engineering-Disciplines-can-Learn-from-Software-Development.aspx http://jcooney.net/post/2012/02/27/What-Other-Engineering-Di...
yetanotherphd 13y ago
I admit that I like the cachet that goes with the title "Engineer". I have no interest in worshiping the "real" engineers with their protocols and whatever. An engineer is qualified to build a bridge because they know how to build a bridge. Their professional ethics and protocols are secondary. And we certainly have ethics of our own, even if it isn't codified and we don't wear special rings.
clienthunter 13y ago
Changing requirements and development landscape do not an analogy to a gardener make. I do not 'grow' nor 'tend' code, trusting some unknown universal force to keep me on the right path. I engineer buildings, bridges, roads, tunnels - all sorts. Sometimes they're very small and sometimes they're very large but they're all subject to the forces pushing and pulling on them - my job is to build them and keep them upright as well as I can subject to the laws and constraints of the environment. I am not a gardener. I am an engineer building, modifying, and destroying complex structures daily in a controlled dance so as to keep their superstructure useful and safe. Only to the naive eye could such complexity be reduced to such apparent simplicity.
andmarios 13y ago
I would like to see him “growing” a database or a compiler, perhaps a firmware for a car or the CAD software used by the architect to design a skyscraper.
- deleted 13y ago
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Systemic33 13y ago
To me, engineering is about solving problems, it's about taking systematic analytical approach to whatever problem arise. It is a state of mind, and that is why engineering now covers everything from software to biochemistry.
virtuz 13y ago
I've also read the pragmatic programmer. They had the right idea, eh?
justin_oaks 13y ago
I grow tired of the endless comparisons of software development with some other practice, profession, or physical process. All analogies eventually break down if you take them too far. (If they didn't then you wouldn't be comparing something to something else; you'd be comparing something with itself.) But software development is so different from so many other practices and processes that most comparisons to gardening, building, finances, etc. don't provide much real value. Its especially tiresome when it's claimed that "sofware isn't like that, it's like THIS". In the article, I find that neither gardening nor engineering is an especially enlightning analogy to software development.
thenerdfiles 13y ago
I'm a software hacker that gets paid an engineer's salary. I use old tools (vim, terminals), like engineers use old tools (protractor, pencil), to make comparatively much larger artifacts (search products, management tools), like engineers (buildings, bridges). You're not judiciously applying the metaphor. You've only rephrased what it means to be "self-taught"; it goes without saying that we don't allow unlicensed people to engineer things. It also goes without saying that no one lives or dies by a faulty HTTP request header.
coldcode 13y ago
A friend's mother once gave him a handwoven little sign that said "Engineer: faultless, accurate". As programmers we thought it was funny.
nilkn 13y ago
As someone who lives in the mecca of the oil and gas industry and is thus around a lot of engineers--chemical engineers, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and more--I can tell you that trying to argue too passionately about what constitutes an "engineer" is futile at this point. Engineers do everything from physically working on an oil rig to somewhat abstract economic analysis at a desk all day. The only legitimate argument I can find regarding the use of the word "engineer" is that there are actual engineering licenses that can be obtained. But if we said that you had to have such a license to be called an engineer, that would screw up the naming conventions in a ton of industries.
wfraser 13y ago
The part of this metaphor that I really like is how a garden is always changing. Unlike a bridge or a building, software doesn't stand in isolation; it's always relying on other software for something. These other pieces of the system are in constant churn, and your software must change with it. This is even disregarding other factors like changing customer demands. You have to continuously prune and maintain your garden, or the weeds (continuously changing software/hardware/services/etc. environments) will choke out your plants. Software is never "done".
firegrind 13y ago
Quite a few people really are software engineers, by qualification and by profession. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineer That said, Chris has a good point that calling what you do engineering doesn't make you an engineer.
fleitz 13y ago
"Real" projects also know what they want in a year and don't expect the engineer to double the lanes on the bridge because the bridge went viral on social media and now needs to handle twice the traffic. I'm not going to get into a who has bigger stones pissing contest, but lets just say the expectations and requirements for skyscapers are different than software. You'd do just as well to call engineers "traffic gardners" who don't know how to make a bridge scale.
- desas 13y ago
  Software is more malleable than concrete though.
jwilliams 13y ago
Engineering is a philosophy. First principles applied to real-world problems. I'm not a Civil Engineer. So what? What does a Civil Engineer have in common with an Electrical Engineer or a Chemical Engineer? Very little day-to-day. Or an Engineer on an oil rig? They'd laugh that Engineering means getting it right every time. I can also tell you a Civil Engineer has very different problems if you're building a skyscraper in Asia, somewhere waterlogged, as opposed to somewhere geotechnically active. If you picked up your average skyscraper and dropped it in New Zealand, you'll have problems. Saying the techniques are the same is a gross generalisation.
stephen_g 13y ago
I think the largest error in this analogy is that coding is closer to what the engineer does when designing something - not when building something. I guess construction in software is more like compilation. Can a civil engineer say exactly how long it will take to design a bridge? No. Might putting more engineers on that project speed it up? Perhaps! Coding is not so much constructing a program, but more creating detailed descriptions of every aspect of the system's operation for someone else (an interpreter, compiler etc.) to follow, and that is very similar to engineering design.
zb 13y ago
This is basically wrong, because it compares designing software with constructing skyscrapers. But engineers don't construct skyscrapers, they design them. And designing software shares many, many similarities with designing skyscrapers. I agree with the author though, that part of the problem is using engineering as a metaphor (at least, I agree up to the point where he just replaces it with his own, equally bad, metaphor). Software development is not like engineering, it is engineering, and the actual practice of it is as different from civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering or any other branch of engineering as those fields are from each other. None of those, by the way, bear even a passing resemblance to the description of 'engineering' contained in the post. So yes, let's quit with the metaphors. Instead, let's talk about what engineers actually do, which is design: http://www.zerobanana.com/essays/reclaiming-software-engineering/ http://www.zerobanana.com/essays/reclaiming-software-enginee...
- kabouseng 13y ago
  That is actually also wrong. Its rather a case of each engineering profession is a regulated industry with an accreditation body, that certifies you as an engineer. Mechanical, electrical, electronic, chemical, industrial, civil, all have standards organisations, usually different ones in each country. See IEEE for instance... Also the engineer term is a protected designation in many countries, just as doctor and laywer is... So no. engineers aren't guys that design stuff, and until the software industry is as regulated as the rest of the engineering industries are, software engineer is the wrong term. The only people who can call themselves software engineers perhaps is working in the medical device, avionics software etc. industries.
  - TheCoelacanth 13y ago
    At least in the US (which has the largest software industry of anywhere in the world), the title of engineer is not regulated. Only the title "Professional Engineer" is regulated. Accreditation for engineers only applies to areas that have an impact on public safety. This means that civil engineers usually are accredited, but mechanical and electrical engineers usually aren't. So for people located in the US, it is perfectly appropriate to refer to someone as a software engineer.
wilsonfiifi 13y ago
Engineering is about following best practices based on empirical data/knowledge as much as possible and "winging it" when faced with the unforeseen. Although "winging it" is a bit of a loose statement because generally unforeseen challenges are usually solved based on past experience and quite a bit of lateral thinking. Therefor in my opinion software development "done properly" has more in common with engineering than gardening. :-)
tildeslashblog 13y ago
Op clearly doesn't understand software engineering and automation. Op may be a "software gardener" but some of us build proverbial skyscrapers.

122 points by llambda 13y ago

Bleh... Can we just stop with the metaphors already? Maybe I'm not an engineer or a gardner or a scientist but maybe I am. I can be all of those things or none of them. I know how to make software of varying types and that's enough, how I apply those skills is a completely different thing. Maybe I'm a biologist using python to help see the migration patterns of fish better. Maybe I'm a web developer building highly scalable web systems in java. Maybe I'm writing drivers at a kernel level. It doesn't matter, programming is a skill set not a job definition. Engineers aren't just Engineers. They are Mechanical Engineers, Electrical Engineers, etc.. Scientists are just Scientists, they are Biologists, Chemists, and Computer Scientists. When we want programming/software development to have that same level of social standing we will use programming as a skill set not a job title.

adamnemecek 13y ago

So what exactly is the take-away of this piece?

sz4kerto 13y ago
That you should not believe that classic engineering techniques work in software. Also, do not believe that you, as a software developer, know how engineering works in real world. You don't.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  1. We don't need to know how engineering works in real world. You need to be in a domain and work in that domain to acquire that knowledge. Knowing how to calculate stress in civil/structural engineering doesn't mean you are an engineer. You need a job. You need an internship if you were a student. 2. It is quite dumb to assume we build software in the same way that bridge is built. That's essentially what Water Fall method would do. You build the blueprint precisely, build a prototype and then build the actual bridge. I don't see why the author would assume we think we were classical engineer. I never assumed we would be using the same technique all the time.
  - sz4kerto 13y ago
    1. Well, you don't need to, but it's certainly interesting. 2. People assume all the time that software development is engineering. That's what leads to clashes between management and developers; clients not understanding why you can't estimate precisely; neverending projects; etc. It's a very important thing to understand and explain that software development is _not_ an engineering discipline -- at least not yet. We strive to make it another branch of engineering, that's why we have design patters, methodologies, etc. Engineering is usually boring, but predictable, and that's a very important property software lacks at the moment.
- seivan 13y ago
  That pretty much sums it up and is in fact quite accurate. Well put!
- tjpick 13y ago
  Well, the classical engineering domains are all pretty different anyway (electrical, structural, civil, etc). I remember my grandfather saying he thought it was ludicrous that they were all covered by a single qualification. Building software with an engineering approach is a real thing. Not everyone subscribes to it, but doesn't mean it isn't a real thing. For the record, I do a lot of gardening too, and building software has fuck all to do with that. I also don't get how everyone who argues against software-as-engineering talk like buildings and bridges never fall over. They do.
cmaitchison 13y ago
Prefer Agile software development methodologies over Waterfall.

Avalaxy 13y ago

I just checked my diploma, it says my title is 'Engineer' (studied computer science).

SethMurphy 13y ago
I have to agree strongly with this. It's like a professional trainer calling themselves a professor just because they teach. You are an engineer if your diploma says so. It is an earned title, not a job description. I say this as a CS dropout that never calls myself an engineer.
- USNetizen 13y ago
  Engineering is about process, not about degrees. My CS degree did not at ALL prepare me to be a software engineer. It taught be to be a programmer. Engineering is more about the process than the technology. CS teaches theory and technology.
  - SethMurphy 13y ago
    100% agrees, I didn't say I didn't do engineering, I just don't call myself an engineer. Ironically, I do call myself a programmer though, and I don't need a degree to do that. The state of CS degrees is a whole other topic, which from the sound of it we agree upon so far. Maybe I just can't call myself a scientist ;)
polemic 13y ago
This doesn't contribute anything. You're missing the important question "what is engineering?". Saying it's just "whatever engineers do" is meaningless.
- Avalaxy 13y ago
  Wikipedia: "Engineering is the application of scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge in order to design, build, and maintain structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes. It may encompass using insights to conceive, model and scale an appropriate solution to a problem or objective. The discipline of engineering is extremely broad, and encompasses a range of more specialized fields of engineering, each with a more specific emphasis on particular areas of technology and types of application." Application of scientific/practical knowledge: check. Design, build and maintain systems/processes, check. Using insights to conceive, model and scale a solution to a problem, check. Sorry, but this is just a nonsense discussion imho. Stop devaluating your own grade.

goldvine 13y ago

I enjoyed the fresh perspective :-) Thanks for sharing

cmaitchison 13y ago
You're welcome. Thanks!
- j1z0 13y ago
  I for one really like the article. Yes it's true engineering projects aren't anywhere near as perfect or on-time as people often given them credit for, but that's exactly the point. People often expect engineering project to fit a agh exile exactly. The article is about changing that perception and dealing with the reality that as an industry we don't estimate very well at all. So we need to change the metaphors to get people to understand more clearly what is I we are doing. And the Gardner metaphors is apt. Great Article!

polemic 13y ago

It's a slightly flowery (haha) way of putting it, but I agree whole-heartedly. I recently held a talk at a Python conference and I asked the question: degrees and job titles aside, are we scientists, engineers, artists or a combination of all of these. The overwhelming response was "all of the above". My preferred term is "artisan". A software developer is applying techniques acquired primarily through experience, supplemented by training and outside knowledge. The artisan has a clear vision of the end result in high-level strokes, but the actual process and implementation is strongly dictated by experience and intuition. Obviously there are different branches of software developer that have more characteristics of engineering, others of science, but I would hazard to guess that 80% of software development is essentially a guided artistic process.

sz4kerto 13y ago
You should have said to them: 'you're only f* programmers'. Just as a joke. As a software engineer (?), I am quite fed up with people in their early 20s calling themselves 'architects', 'artist', etc. You're not a scientist, and not an artist. Being a scientist and a programmer is extremely different because of a simple, seemingly minor thing: the lenght of the feedback loop. As a programmer, your feedback loop is sometimes an hour, sometimes a few minutes, sometimes a second (IntelliSense/other IDE help), sometimes weeks. But for scientist, it's sometimes forever. So it's for very different personalities.
- polemic 13y ago
  Heh, well I actually say "developer", because "artisan" sounds douchey, "engineer" is (imo) incorrect and "programmer" tends to be a very narrowly defined role. Design and operational sides of a "developer" are not really adequately covered by "programmer". But that's semantics really. We're talking about what sort of techniques do you employ. It doesn't really help to say that programmers use "programming" techniques because it says nothing about the common attributes with other industries / professions. Which is where "artisan" comes in. A good developer is, IMO, more like an great chef - excellent technique, a wealth of experience across many disciplines and the best tools are the (ahem) recipe for success, not "good process".

benched 13y ago

I think this [silly] argument is nothing more than a special case of the argument over whether words have inherent meaning, or derive meaning from usage. I don't think 'software engineer' was ever meant to denote a new subtype of engineer. I think 'software engineer' is a compound word that means whatever it is we do. At work, whenever someone says 'get an engineer to look at that', absolutely nobody thinks that means to call one of the 'real' kinds of engineers on the phone. They know it means to get a software developer/programmer/code monkey/dev or whatever you want to call people who make software out of computer code.

USNetizen 13y ago
It is far more than semantics, the term engineering denotes a rigid adherence to processes and protocols, whereas 90% of people that call themselves "software engineers" are just developers at best - they write code to do what they are told it should do with very little concern for the overall processes involved in an engineering discipline.
- benched 13y ago
  This misses my point completely. My point is that the term 'software engineering' is not meant to denote a type of engineering. It may include engineering as a loose metaphor, but the term 'software engineering' stands alone as a word in itself, with its own meaning, and that meaning is obvious to anyone who is or works with software engineers. More analogies: Should we not have software architecture, because it isn't real architecture? Should we not refer to systems programming, unless the practitioner has studied systems theory? Should we not have windowing systems, because no real windows are involved? Almost everything in computing is termed by metaphor with 'real' things.
- Brakenshire 13y ago
  It's closer to the British use of the word engineer, which can mean anything from the civil engineer who designed the Channel Tunnel, to the mechanic who repairs the trains. I think I prefer the prescriptive definition, though, it's useful to have a word for someone expected to work with that level of planning and rigour.

PaulHoule 13y ago

Ugh. I wish we took the engineering metaphor more seriously. In particular, I'd like to see some real consequences for malpractice on the part of practitioners -- this would help us in our struggles with management to get projects done successfully. I've seen so many cases, for instance, where people screw up simple things, such as generating primary keys, and keep making the same mistakes over and over again. This has got to stop.

martininmelb 13y ago
> In particular, I'd like to see some real consequences for malpractice on the part of practitioners I agree as long as we also see some of the benefits - required registration with a professional body - along with a requirement that certain projects cannot use uncertified practitioners (in other words, better pay for Software Engineers).
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  And worse pay for people who can't get certified for some reason.

trimbo 13y ago

> If you were building a bridge or a skyscraper and you told me, before you began, that you knew exactly how it would look when it was finished – I would believe you. If you told me that you knew to some insane degree of accuracy how long it would take to get to ‘finished’ – I would believe you again. That’s how Engineers roll Oh neat, maybe he can explain why the new Bay Bridge was practically a decade over schedule and billions over budget. Or the Burj Khalifa was about 2 years overdue? Or the California High Speed rail is projected to be twice the budget they thought, and they've barely broken ground on it? So the idea that "Real Engineers" building bridges and railroads and skyscrapers get it right in plans and schedule is total bullshit. We've seen larger software projects, with more people working on them than these examples, hit their deadlines (Windows comes to mind -- except Vista). And by the way, those "Engineering" disciplines have only been around for, what, hundreds, if not thousands of years. What they do for a living is mostly explored territory. Software, at least at a scale to be considered engineering at all, has been around for about 3-4 decades... maybe. And we're still hitting up against major unknowns all the time at every level of the practice, big and small. edit: grammar

maxmcd 13y ago
If large scale civil engineering projects were not muddled by politics, contracts, and bidding wars, I imagine that wouldn't be the case. So in an abstract since, and in a world where engineers are the only ones involved in construction, I understand his point.
- jeltz 13y ago
  > If large scale civil engineering projects were not muddled by politics, contracts, and bidding wars, I imagine that wouldn't be the case. And software development is never involved in any of that? While I suspect software is more often plagued by problems I do not see that it is another kind of problems than other forms of engineering.
- hackula1 13y ago
  Waterfall software design would also probably work if it was not for changing requirements, limited budgets, optimistic estimate push, etc.

antonio0 13y ago

Software Engineering is an oxymoron.

mrottenkolber 13y ago

I disagree. When I code for my own amusement I might see myself as an artist but when I do professional work I definitely want to see myself as an engineer as well as a craftsman. To me it feels as if we are just at a very early stage. It takes huge amounts of time to learn software engineering, putting aside mastering it and humans haven't been practicing for very long. So I'd guess that we're just clueless enough to not be able to feel like engineers yet. We learn most of our practical abilities from experience so thats an argument for craft, but once we get a better understanding of what we are actually doing, and formalize it, our job will probably be very engineery. There is just millions of problem domains and no formal education on the domain of writing software yet (no a CS degree is not it). And I think there is a class of applications that are already so well understood that they do get developed in an engineering fashion already.

btilly 13y ago

I was hoping that a more substantial point was going to be made than this piece of fluff. Here is the substantial point. If you're building a skyscraper or a bridge, an engineer has to sign off on the design. If the design subsequently proves to be defective, said engineer is personally liable. In many places, calling yourself an engineer when you are not licensed to sign off on designs and be liable in this way is against the law. We can debate whether or not extending this principle to software development is a good idea. What we can't debate is that software development does not currently work this way. You, the software developer, are not an engineer. If you think a design is bad, you do not have both the legal authority and responsibility to stand up, declare it so, and force the design to be changed to something saner. But saying you're not an engineer because software projects don't succeed like projects done by real engineers - that's both silly and wrong.

rhizome 13y ago
There have been rumblings over the past decade or two about quantifying a practice and study aimed towards turning software engineering into a capital-e Engineering discipline, but evidently they never really go anywhere. That's what makes it a stupid point: it depends on a specific definition of engineer that is not used (and is not possible to use) with software engineering, and that definition is oriented around chartering/certification of the professional themselves. That he buttons the essay up in such a self-serving way is just icing: taking "engineering" too literally for the context, then calling himself a gardener.
lttlrck 13y ago
It has already been extended into software development. Plenty of software projects have to be signed off in aerospace, automotive, telecoms, energy and defense. In fact I'd be amazed if it did not extend into consumer electronics in large companies, e.g. Apple et al cannot risk bricking millions of phones with a bad update. The point might be that there are thousands of badly run projects, just as there are in construction.

throwaway0094 13y ago

Dismissing all other organizations as worse at "gardening" than Google was a bit offensive. And the lowest bidder for contracted work often sucks, or finds ways to bill more than the original bid. :)

cmaitchison 13y ago
I said they didn't have the same soil. That would include the multitude of internal tools they use to facilitate their software development, most of which are not publicly available, their culture, and the aptitude of their people.

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jarrett 13y ago

I disagree for two reasons: First, software engineers exist in a broader culture. The connotations of the various words in our respective languages are not in our control. "Engineer" and "gardener" have very different connotations. In a profession that sometimes struggles to gain respect, it would not behoove us to use a term that (wrongly in my opinion) is associated with lower social and professional status. If we could rewrite the English language and define "gardener" as a person with rare, hard-to-learn, and highly valuable skills, then perhaps we would do well to embrace the term "software gardener." But we can't.[1] Second, software is engineering. This article seems to define engineering as Big Design Up Front. While that may describe part of what engineering can entail, it's not a complete or general description. If I had to describe engineering generally, I'd say it has to do with understanding and manipulating complex systems, analyzing and fulfilling requirements, distilling vague notions to concrete implementations, and building things that work. Software fits all of that. [1] As I hinted above, I don't think it's fair, right, or accurate to denigrate actual gardeners as compared to software engineers. I'm stating the way most people perceive social status, not the way I'd like them to.

brudgers 13y ago

In August 1991 during the S&L recession and fresh out of Vocational School, I landed my first CAD jockey job drawing fabrication plans for a precast prestressed concrete manufacturer. The first task, after running Diazos and learning that neckties would become caught in the feed and where the reverse button was by feel as my face was pressed to the top of the machine and my air supply was rapidly constricting was drawing plans for a series of double tee members [TT]. It took a couple of weeks to generate the 100 odd variations and get them through the QA process, but then I moved on to other things. But come October, they started to roll off the line...20+ kips of concrete a pop and then stacked three high. To this day, the sensation is fresh; "So that's what the fuck it really looks like." The reason it's fresh is because it returns every time I am in the presence of some lines I put on paper manifested. The picture of the bridge is not the bridge. The engineer, like the hacker, has better intuitions regarding the way in which the picture will correspond to its instantiation - but it is still no more than a [hopefully] informed intuition.[1] [1] The idea that there is an Engineer rather than a thousand authors of a successful bridge tends to be a bit absurd in modern construction practice. Such heroics are still far more likely in software development.

dogweather 13y ago

This is why I became an attorney.

matthewmacleod 13y ago

The fact that the feedback loop of a software engineering process is much tighter and cheaper than that of civil engineering does not mean that it is not engineering - that's a fallacy. Perhaps it's less applicable to civil engineers, because of the scale and safety requirements of their profession, but let's look at electrical engineering. An electrical engineer will build prototypes; they will build models; they will use computer simulations to predict how systems will behave; they will build testing and QA infrastructure. It's definitely harder to iterate—once you've built a million widgets, shifting circuits around is going to be expensive—but it's not qualitatively different to developing a software product. As in any engineering discipline, software engineers must optimise for a system's required qualities. In some cases, reliability might not be that high up the list. In others—let's say medical systems, or those used in space travel—software engineers have rigorous systems in place to ensure quality, and in many cases substantial up-front planning and certification will be involved. Ultimately this seems to say that software engineering is different from (specifically) civil engineering. I think that's broadly rather true – the nature of civil is such that generally there are stringent safety requirements, and indeed massive costs involved in making subsequent changes. The majority of software does not have the same requirements, and so it's no surprise that the process is somewhat different. And I agree that not all development is engineering, of course, but to dismiss the entire field is a bit of a shallow argument.

lettergram 13y ago

I personally prefer the term programmer. What I do is program machines to do as I wish. Gardener fits, but we design the plants in essence.... To me Programmer, developer, even software architect seems closer than gardener.

joseph_cooney 13y ago

My take on this. Not to say some people don't 'do' software engineering....but it is still nascent. http://jcooney.net/post/2012/02/27/What-Other-Engineering-Disciplines-can-Learn-from-Software-Development.aspx http://jcooney.net/post/2012/02/27/What-Other-Engineering-Di...

yetanotherphd 13y ago

I admit that I like the cachet that goes with the title "Engineer". I have no interest in worshiping the "real" engineers with their protocols and whatever. An engineer is qualified to build a bridge because they know how to build a bridge. Their professional ethics and protocols are secondary. And we certainly have ethics of our own, even if it isn't codified and we don't wear special rings.

clienthunter 13y ago

Changing requirements and development landscape do not an analogy to a gardener make. I do not 'grow' nor 'tend' code, trusting some unknown universal force to keep me on the right path. I engineer buildings, bridges, roads, tunnels - all sorts. Sometimes they're very small and sometimes they're very large but they're all subject to the forces pushing and pulling on them - my job is to build them and keep them upright as well as I can subject to the laws and constraints of the environment. I am not a gardener. I am an engineer building, modifying, and destroying complex structures daily in a controlled dance so as to keep their superstructure useful and safe. Only to the naive eye could such complexity be reduced to such apparent simplicity.

andmarios 13y ago

I would like to see him “growing” a database or a compiler, perhaps a firmware for a car or the CAD software used by the architect to design a skyscraper.

deleted 13y ago
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Systemic33 13y ago

To me, engineering is about solving problems, it's about taking systematic analytical approach to whatever problem arise. It is a state of mind, and that is why engineering now covers everything from software to biochemistry.

virtuz 13y ago

I've also read the pragmatic programmer. They had the right idea, eh?

justin_oaks 13y ago

I grow tired of the endless comparisons of software development with some other practice, profession, or physical process. All analogies eventually break down if you take them too far. (If they didn't then you wouldn't be comparing something to something else; you'd be comparing something with itself.) But software development is so different from so many other practices and processes that most comparisons to gardening, building, finances, etc. don't provide much real value. Its especially tiresome when it's claimed that "sofware isn't like that, it's like THIS". In the article, I find that neither gardening nor engineering is an especially enlightning analogy to software development.

thenerdfiles 13y ago

I'm a software hacker that gets paid an engineer's salary. I use old tools (vim, terminals), like engineers use old tools (protractor, pencil), to make comparatively much larger artifacts (search products, management tools), like engineers (buildings, bridges). You're not judiciously applying the metaphor. You've only rephrased what it means to be "self-taught"; it goes without saying that we don't allow unlicensed people to engineer things. It also goes without saying that no one lives or dies by a faulty HTTP request header.

coldcode 13y ago

A friend's mother once gave him a handwoven little sign that said "Engineer: faultless, accurate". As programmers we thought it was funny.

nilkn 13y ago

As someone who lives in the mecca of the oil and gas industry and is thus around a lot of engineers--chemical engineers, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and more--I can tell you that trying to argue too passionately about what constitutes an "engineer" is futile at this point. Engineers do everything from physically working on an oil rig to somewhat abstract economic analysis at a desk all day. The only legitimate argument I can find regarding the use of the word "engineer" is that there are actual engineering licenses that can be obtained. But if we said that you had to have such a license to be called an engineer, that would screw up the naming conventions in a ton of industries.

wfraser 13y ago

The part of this metaphor that I really like is how a garden is always changing. Unlike a bridge or a building, software doesn't stand in isolation; it's always relying on other software for something. These other pieces of the system are in constant churn, and your software must change with it. This is even disregarding other factors like changing customer demands. You have to continuously prune and maintain your garden, or the weeds (continuously changing software/hardware/services/etc. environments) will choke out your plants. Software is never "done".

firegrind 13y ago

Quite a few people really are software engineers, by qualification and by profession. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineer That said, Chris has a good point that calling what you do engineering doesn't make you an engineer.

fleitz 13y ago

"Real" projects also know what they want in a year and don't expect the engineer to double the lanes on the bridge because the bridge went viral on social media and now needs to handle twice the traffic. I'm not going to get into a who has bigger stones pissing contest, but lets just say the expectations and requirements for skyscapers are different than software. You'd do just as well to call engineers "traffic gardners" who don't know how to make a bridge scale.

desas 13y ago
Software is more malleable than concrete though.

jwilliams 13y ago

Engineering is a philosophy. First principles applied to real-world problems. I'm not a Civil Engineer. So what? What does a Civil Engineer have in common with an Electrical Engineer or a Chemical Engineer? Very little day-to-day. Or an Engineer on an oil rig? They'd laugh that Engineering means getting it right every time. I can also tell you a Civil Engineer has very different problems if you're building a skyscraper in Asia, somewhere waterlogged, as opposed to somewhere geotechnically active. If you picked up your average skyscraper and dropped it in New Zealand, you'll have problems. Saying the techniques are the same is a gross generalisation.

stephen_g 13y ago

I think the largest error in this analogy is that coding is closer to what the engineer does when designing something - not when building something. I guess construction in software is more like compilation. Can a civil engineer say exactly how long it will take to design a bridge? No. Might putting more engineers on that project speed it up? Perhaps! Coding is not so much constructing a program, but more creating detailed descriptions of every aspect of the system's operation for someone else (an interpreter, compiler etc.) to follow, and that is very similar to engineering design.

zb 13y ago

This is basically wrong, because it compares designing software with constructing skyscrapers. But engineers don't construct skyscrapers, they design them. And designing software shares many, many similarities with designing skyscrapers. I agree with the author though, that part of the problem is using engineering as a metaphor (at least, I agree up to the point where he just replaces it with his own, equally bad, metaphor). Software development is not like engineering, it is engineering, and the actual practice of it is as different from civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering or any other branch of engineering as those fields are from each other. None of those, by the way, bear even a passing resemblance to the description of 'engineering' contained in the post. So yes, let's quit with the metaphors. Instead, let's talk about what engineers actually do, which is design: http://www.zerobanana.com/essays/reclaiming-software-engineering/ http://www.zerobanana.com/essays/reclaiming-software-enginee...

kabouseng 13y ago
That is actually also wrong. Its rather a case of each engineering profession is a regulated industry with an accreditation body, that certifies you as an engineer. Mechanical, electrical, electronic, chemical, industrial, civil, all have standards organisations, usually different ones in each country. See IEEE for instance... Also the engineer term is a protected designation in many countries, just as doctor and laywer is... So no. engineers aren't guys that design stuff, and until the software industry is as regulated as the rest of the engineering industries are, software engineer is the wrong term. The only people who can call themselves software engineers perhaps is working in the medical device, avionics software etc. industries.
- TheCoelacanth 13y ago
  At least in the US (which has the largest software industry of anywhere in the world), the title of engineer is not regulated. Only the title "Professional Engineer" is regulated. Accreditation for engineers only applies to areas that have an impact on public safety. This means that civil engineers usually are accredited, but mechanical and electrical engineers usually aren't. So for people located in the US, it is perfectly appropriate to refer to someone as a software engineer.

wilsonfiifi 13y ago

Engineering is about following best practices based on empirical data/knowledge as much as possible and "winging it" when faced with the unforeseen. Although "winging it" is a bit of a loose statement because generally unforeseen challenges are usually solved based on past experience and quite a bit of lateral thinking. Therefor in my opinion software development "done properly" has more in common with engineering than gardening. :-)

tildeslashblog 13y ago

Op clearly doesn't understand software engineering and automation. Op may be a "software gardener" but some of us build proverbial skyscrapers.