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Re:Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effec... by ddevault on Saturday October 02, 2021 @03:11AM (#28726650)
I agree that 99% of software developers are not engineers, not because software engineering isn't engineering, but because they are not doing software engineering. You can, and should, apply the principles of engineering to your development process, but hardly anyone does. Generous planning and foresight, objective measures of performance, an intimate understanding of the system you're deploying, etc.

A software developer glues together 400 node modules they don't understand and ships to Other People's Computers, then hands them their debit card when the load goes up. A software engineer knows that every line of code is accounted for, because they've actually done the accounting, and knew the scale requirements in advance (with error bars) and provisioned the infrastructure accordingly - with a budget.

Re:Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effec... by btgeekboy on Saturday October 02, 2021 @03:29AM (#28726739)
Engineering isn’t about building the perfect widget. (Otherwise, the Juicero would have done better.) It’s about building things that meet requirements, given a set of inputs. A credit card is certainly one of those inputs, and perfectly precise scaling may not be one of those requirements.
Re:Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar over Instagram’s Effec... by ddevault on Saturday October 02, 2021 @03:46AM (#28726813)
You don't need perfect, but some actual planning and application of the scientific method is called for.