Re:Too Many Managers: The Strategic Use of Titles to Avoid O...
by dgb23 on Friday February 03, 2023 @06:37PM
(#34649424)
Thank you for sharing this. I’m still reading, but the section about math resonated so much with me.
Just today we looked at a performance problem. CPU/memory usage, DB queries, indexes and joins, size of data, frequency of requests, redundant work, caching, different parts slowing down others...
These things are so ingrained that I don’t think of then as applying math. In my inner eye I see pictures moving around. It’s all familiar and obvious. But thinking about it, there’s always math behind it all in some way. We don’t express it as such but it’s still there.
He actually interviewed a number of people who transitioned from a licensed engineering discipline to software, and asked them how they felt about software as an engineering discipline. His insights are a lot more useful than the arguments between only-ever-software people on HN who have inflated perceptions of what "real" engineers do.
The whole series is worth a read, but here's the short version:
> Instead of asking how they felt about certain engineering topics, I just asked them point blank. “Do you consider software engineering actually engineering?”
> Of the 17 crossovers I talked to, 15 said yes.
> That’s not the answer I expected going in. I assumed we weren’t engineers, that we’re actually very far from being engineers. But then again, I was never a “real” engineer. I don’t know what it’s like to be a “real” engineer, and so can’t compare software engineering to other forms. I don’t have the experience. These people did, and they considered software engineering real engineering.
[0] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/