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0 pointsjandrewrogers9mo ago0 comments

Chemical engineers are so good at distributed systems that it is almost a trope at this point. It is their specialty. Their entire discipline is optimizing aggregate throughput in decentralized systems with minimal coordination.

It maps 1:1 with the computer science but chemical engineering as a discipline has more robust design heuristics that don’t really have common equivalents in software even though they are equally applicable. Chemical engineering is extremely allergic to any brittleness in architecture, that’s a massive liability, whereas software tends to just accept it because “what’s the worst that could happen”.

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throwaway20379mo ago

From the tone of your post, I assume that you are a ChemE who works with CompSci folks. If what you say is true, why haven't ChemEs moved into the space and taken over? Software dev pays much better than ChemE.

jandrewrogersOP9mo ago

Almost all of the chemical engineers I know do work in software, mostly for the money. The skillset translates to computer science relatively seamlessly. Chemical engineering is essentially computer science where you swapped atoms for bits, but far more difficult because there are only distributed systems and the background error rate is always noticeably non-zero.

I studied chemical engineering after I was already working in software, so I did it backward.

infinite8s9mo ago

Did you study chemical engineering knowing it's applicability to software engineering?

Your observation is interesting because early ideas in object oriented design were likewise inspired by biological robustness in the face of a non-zero background error rate (see any of Alan Kay's early writings, and his Turing lecture). I wonder if half of a CS degree shouldn't also involve basic chemeng and bioeng.

whatever19mo ago

Because if you need a systems designer / architect you will look for traditional credentials in the field. It’s the same reason that computer scientists cannot break into pharma despite the fact that they would really fit with the data infrastructure & processing challenges they face.

Ultimately it is all about how strict the hiring pipeline is to the credentials vs potential.

insane_dreamer9mo ago

My D got her degree in ChemE from a top eng school was hired out of college by a big sw firm and is full time swe 5 years in (by choice).

aragilar9mo ago

Because they want to do ChemE rather than CompSci more than they care about their pay?

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