Good god, please stop this misguided snarkiness. Comparing software engineering (or 99.99% of EE, ME, CE, etc) to the web telescope, then haughtily using that comparison as a way to dismiss the entire industry as not really being engineering at all is just ridiculous. I have spent almost 10 years as an EE and another 12 as software engineer and the idea that the level of rigor in EE or ME is any higher than high caliber software teams is just laughable. CI? Detailed process and best practices for review, readability, reusability, testability, security... I won't even go on, most EE teams I've encountered are laughable on all those fronts, all practices that are very common in software engineering. If you think otherwise I highly doubt you have real-world exposure to the processes generally followed by those other disciplines. I do, FYI they are just regular jackasses like all of us :)

Also, guess what? The web telescope has a ton of software on it. I suppose that is just "software engineering"? (in quotes, har har)

Look, there are terrible teams doing terrible or very simplistic software work. The same is true in all engineering disciplines and it is of course true that in all engineering disciplines (including software) there are also teams operating with a high degree of passion and rigor in creating very complex things. So yeah, please stop with these silly and really pretty insulting comments.

Also, consider that a half-way complex piece of software (from our outside POV) is enormously more complex than your average IC, vehicle (if you exclude the mountain of software controlling it), or general "engineering" project in other disciplines. Obviously that isn't always true (CPUs, James Web telescope, for example are also enormously complex) but most seemingly simple things you use every day (random example: Grubhub) are massively complicated to build, evolve, and keep running each day. Dismissing them as not real engineering is really ignorant and rude.

The ME and EE associated with creating new product like the Nest Thermostat (for example) are, by comparison with something like Grubhub, of trivial engineering complexity (although still very respectable engineering efforts)

I’ve been writing software professionally since the 90s. Tons of software is pointless crap to make jobs.

I’m gonna go with Carmack on this one; you think you have a better understanding of it than him? It’s just ifs and for loops.

Sure some contexts require real nuance. But just because Grubhub IS massive doesn’t mean it needs to be engineered that way, that’s a byproduct of socio-political forces (money).

There’s nothing in any science or engineering book I’ve read that says “all software must be engineered as a large distributed application”. Again, a byproduct of contemporary business goals.

My generative art object app is not sending people to the moon and merely relied on me wrapping some well understood math in machine language syntax; it’s librarian work.

Your preference for adverbs and emphasis where you see fit to place it does not move me.

Accomplish something net new for humans, cause I’ve been sending data grams over the internet since the 80s. Grubhub isn’t all that interesting

What percentage of software projects are complete disasters? In spite of being staffed almost entirely by people with CS degrees? 50%? 60%? I guess that is because it is so easy? Whether from a societal POV they need to be that complicated, the answer is of course "no", it is all about business goals and is mostly crap we don't need. But what has that got to do with the price of tea in China? The discussion is about whether software is "real" engineering, not if engineers are engaged in meaningful work.

On that front, the idea that software systems with 100s of features, millions of daily users, extreme uptime requirements, hackers all over the world trying to break in daily , and billions of $$ on the line is "ifs and for loops" or "librarian work" is... oh come on. Never mind, this conversation is silly.

You say you are an experienced developer, but honestly it sounds like you've never built anything except generative art object apps.

> seemingly simple things you use every day (random example: Grubhub) are massively complicated to build, evolve, and keep running each day

What exactly is massively complicated about a predatory aggregator site compared to a vehicle?

What does their predatory nature have to do with complexity?

Remove predatory, keep the question.

Look past trees, see forest. Let go of your desire to shit on developers and the cheap satisfaction you get from doing so.

> Look past trees, see forest.

I have.

> Let go of your desire to shit on developers

So you're a psychic now, and you read into people's desires by looking at HN posts?

The question remains. But it's clear you can't answer it without ad hominem.

You are asking a silly question. Jeeze, maybe it isn't the best comparison, maybe I should have been more specific. The point you are asking about in no way affects my larger point so who cares. You harping on it is just weird.

> You are asking a silly question.

It's a perfectly valid question: what makes an aggregator site like GrubHub a more complex engineering problem than a vehicle?

> maybe it isn't the best comparison, maybe I should have been more specific.

May be it is, may be you should have been, but you weren't

> The point you are asking about in no way affects my larger point so who cares

What is your larger point exactly? That "having a CI" somehow make you an engineer because your software is somehow "more complex than a vehicle"?

> You harping on it is just weird.

The fact that you answered literally nothing, and keep sticking to ad hominem attacks show that you have no substance to what you're saying.

Likewise... I was pretty impressed with myself in the 90s as a young guy passing the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer exam.

"According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the first recorded 'engineer' was Imhotep. He happened to be the builder of the Step Pyramid at Ṣaqqārah, Egypt." [link]

I look forward to drinking ale with Imhotep (and NASA JW Space Telescope engineers) in the great heavenly hall of engineers.

https://interestingengineering.com/the-origin-of-the-word-en...

One of the best talks I've heard recently was by an early-20s engineer talking about safety-critical software for trains.

Yes, it's very different from most software engineering. No need to snicker, just do the appropriate thing for your situation.

Can you link the talk or post its title?

May this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hB_ghSWMoQ

Sorry, it was at an off-the-record conference. As a result it was a very candid talk!

Fair point, but the software that eventually ends up in flying space hardware has usually been put to a similar test.

This is how you are supposed to build software too.

Who supposed that?

Broken software can be fixed cheaply after the fact. Yeah, it’s cheaper if you find the bugs earlier but it shouldn’t come as any surprise that pre-validation is more extensive in systems that are expensive to change.

There are lots of different types of software.

There are phone note apps and control systems for jets and artificial hearts

All that falls within the same paradigm, it's just now that now your user requirements have a little flexibility around fault tolerance.

You still have SLAs to manage and meet.

Whether you are “supposed” to do that or not really depends on what kind of software you are building.

Precisely. Besides aerospace there aren't many industries that know how to do software well.

I see it as an Agile vs Waterfall thing.

Waterfall works great, if and ONLY if, you know 100% for sure exactly what you're requirements are at the beginning of the project and they never change significantly. This seems to be mostly true-ish for aerospace. Nobody's going to pivot the Falcon 9 into being a washing machine next week.

It seems to me that the point of Agile is that Waterfall fails hard if you have no idea what you want your business software to actually do. Agile is an attempt to build a reasonable software development process around that reality.

So when you get down to it, the lack of rigor isn't so much in software itself as in business. If you don't have any idea what your business is going to actually do, no software or engineering process can fix that.

> Nobody's going to pivot the Falcon 9 into being a washing machine next week.

I may have to borrow that.

An alternative explanation: we're so in a hurry that we don't want to take time out to decide what it is that we are going to build, and so we embrace the fact that we don't know what we are doing and put a sexy label on it, because hey, who doesn't want to be Agile? It sounds so much better than 'clueless'.

Most of the time, we don't care that much about what we're going to build. The actual goal is "build whatever makes money". In FOSS circles without money it's often "whatever gets users" instead.

If I'm doing a custom project that does some sort of warehouse management for a client, I'm not really deeply invested in my particular vision about how a warehouse should be managed. I'm deeply invested in making my client happy.

In terms of software development and testing practices, what the military/aerospace/medical industries do would never scale to any other industry. If the law were to mandate those practices across the board, that might sound great, but it won't matter because you won't be able to afford the resulting products.

It would scale just fine. Software would cost a bit more, profits would go down a bit, quality would shoot up and support costs would drop. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a net positive in the longer term.

But in a world dominated by quarterly earnings this won't fly.

Not necessarily advocating for it, but if that would mean less bloatware, de-facto spy-ware and lousy, pointless apps, or god forbid even les social media apps, I would call that a net positive.

It would catapult the industry back to the 1990s, at best.

How "at best" is interpreted is obviously up to the individual, of course.

Given Boeing’s recent history, I’m not sure aerospace knows how to do software well either.

That's a regulatory problem, not a software development problem. Simply put: that plane should have never been certified under that type.

True. I would even argue that the software and hardware Boeing developed did exactly what it was supposed to do.

You can probably snicker at most engineering in "X engineering".