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0 pointsdrewcoo3y ago0 comments

Software is a pure ideas business.

You'd be surprised how many people have, sell, and get venture capital for ideas without a huge upfront spend attached just to try something out.

Software is the scratch tickets of "engineering."

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chrisco2553y ago

Nice, haven't seen "engineering" elitism since university. Software is the nervous system of a business. Everything from accounting, to payroll, to inventory tracking, to sales, to marketing, to communications, is achieved in today's world by interfacing with dozens if not hundreds of software programs and systems. Impossible to achieve with hardware alone obviously, you need operating systems, you need data centers, need custom dashboards and BI, you need ACH/SWIFT routing interfaces to make payments go through, you need file management, you need chat software to communicate with employees and customers, you need software nearly every step of the way. It's complex as hell. And the complexity of making all those systems work together just compounds that complexity.

seabird3y ago

As a software engineer, software "engineering" is a joke, at least in the sense we apply that term to other disciplines of engineering. It's not like all that complexity you mentioned is understood. It's worked around, and then the workaround is taken for granted and exists in perpetuity because nobody can discern why it was done in the first place. Watching a mechanical or electrical engineer be able to predict the performance of a design in a hypothetical scenario and then have that prediction largely reflect reality in later testing is pretty enlightening. These types of things generally don't happen in non-trivial software systems largely because software "engineers" don't really care. Formal methods for verifying correctness is something we've decided isn't worth it. Formally verified operating systems like seL4, and languages that lend themselves to formal verification like Ada/SPARK, are nothing more than oddities for most software engineers; the only places that bother with this are hard engineering firms that are trying to live up to do-or-die performance guarantees.

Additionally, the minimum knowledge required to be a "good" software engineer is significantly lower than the amount required to be a "good" electrical engineer. You are not pushing any limits without an expansive understanding of mathematics, multiple opportunities to work on some very expensive shit, and an employer that's actually pushing something forward. Getting a VLSI/radio electronics/DSP/etc. engineer online is a process that takes years before that engineer doesn't need constant input to keep them from shitting the bed. Unless you're so passionate about it that you can't possibly bring yourself to do anything else, you would have to be insane to go through the amount of learning required so you can pull a salary that will only slightly top an entry-level software development job.

None of this is to say that software development isn't valuable, or that the people that are doing aren't skilled, but as an industry, we don't hold ourselves to anywhere near the standard that other disciplines do, and there's not much to gain other than saving face by not admitting it.

eastbound3y ago

You comment a lot about calculating performance, but this is not engineering.

Engineering is about suiting the needs to the means. In the realm of widely-used webapps, the need is 1. speed to market, 2. features and 3. maybe stability against errors 4. if successful, scalability.

And our engineering is perfectly successful for that. We are able to output features after features, we’ve factorized the boilerplate, and we publish our apps before they’re even ready.

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ZephyrBlu3y ago

Disagree. The impression I've got when talking to friends in traditional engineering is that the scope of a software role is larger (More vertically integrated, more expectations) and we have better processes (E.g. code review, deployment pipeline, monitoring, etc).

Cannot speak for EE, but I'm friends with people who do ChemE, MechE, Civil and mechatronics.

jfim3y ago

Most of that is software glue, and not particularly challenging. It's necessary to run a modern company to have this kind of glue to connect systems together, but at the same time EE and ChemE are much more challenging.

lumost3y ago

Consider that the space shuttle was considered one of the most complex projects in history with around 1 million parts. 1 million loc projects are common, a large tech company like google likely has billions of loc.

Putting all of this together sensibly is hard.

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