Who do you think puts systems like a web search engine together?

It's certainly not people who are lost in details like string matching or how ACID is implemented in distributed databases.

Of course you need all these things in order for the search engine to work – but if you write them yourself, even if you think about them excessively, you will never finish.

Software engineering is knowing that you don't need to know everything, you only need to know where to find everything. "Programming" is an important part of it, but far from the only one.

> Who do you think puts systems like a web search engine together?

A really good programmer who is free from the tyranny of software “engineering”.

I believe this more and more as I go through my career. There is usually one person carrying progress hard. If you can get three or four of those people and another one to coordinate them you can do truly amazing things. Usually though you just need one unencumbered by bureaucracy.

Not sure what you guys think software engineering means, but it's definitely not the same as what I think it means.

Software engineering is whatever definition that allows me to procrastinate and sleep at night knowing I don’t need to learn more.

If you don't want to learn you chose the wrong profession.

To expand, the software industry moves fast, and you have to keep learning to stay afloat, or risk stagnating and ending your career early. look at where software was at 5 or 10 or even 20 years ago. There was no react and no rust 20 years ago, nor was there even git! Whatever you know now is going to be out of date in a matter of years. good luck getting a job if that's all you ever want to learn.

Conversely, 10 years ago we also had Grunt, Gulp, etc, which were poor implementations of build systems we had ~40 years ago.

It’s not all progress.

Stagnating yes, but not ending career early. There will be python/java/c/c++ jobs for decades just keeping the lights on for non-tech companies.

Say that to people in this thread.

I find your comment quite ironic considering the engineers that built Google search did it by developing novel software systems, to great success. The Google codebase is basically the definition of NIH syndrome.

> Who do you think puts systems like a web search engine together?

Literally by stitching together people you’ve listed here and making them work together:

> It's certainly not people who are lost in details like string matching or how ACID is implemented in distributed databases.

> Of course you need all these things in order for the search engine to work – but if you write them yourself, even if you think about them excessively, you will never finish.

Being able to write something from scratch is not the same as always writing from scratch. Let me turn this around. Who would you trust with writing search engine, a software engineer who worked on and wrote search engine from scratch or someone who only theoretically knows about it?

> Software engineering is knowing that you don't need to know everything, you only need to know where to find everything. "Programming" is an important part of it, but far from the only one.

I hear this excuse more and more when it comes to threads like this. You don’t need to defend your life position, it’s okay to not know everything.

> Who do you think puts systems like a web search engine together?

i've met a good fraction of the first 128 google employees, and this could not be farther from the truth:

> It's certainly not people who are lost in details like string matching or how ACID is implemented in distributed databases.

the people who thought those things were unimportant details were the ones who tried to compete against google and failed, like lycos, inktomi, and pets.com

like, check out the wikipedia article on udi manber, who is best known for spending 15 years 'lost' in string matching:

> In 2002, he joined Amazon.com, where he became "chief algorithms officer" and a vice president. (...) In 2004, Google promoted sponsored listings for its own recruiting whenever someone searched for his name on Google's search engine. In 2006, he was hired by Google as one of their vice presidents of engineering. (...) In October 2010, he was responsible for all the search products at Google.

the fact that in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769506 you claimed that orchestra conductors don't need to play any instrument further calls your credibility into question

BTW at Yahoo in the 2000s I learned that Manber had invented at least one new trade-secret algorithm while he was there. The one I ran across wasn't for string matching but it was a fairly basic kind of thing.

The good news is that the field of computer programming is huge - so there is room for all sorts of preferences, skills, and abilities.

And sure, use of the word "engineer" will cause angst among some - because it used to have a precise meaning which has been diluted (and in the case of software, ignored.)

Indeed the list of projects runs the gamut of where a programmer might go in life. They might do user UI, or games, or work on an OS or compiler. More likely they'll work at some random company doing databases and reports. Or they'll be Web focused doing lots of JavaScript. Or they'll be deeply involved in the field of Advertising (Advertising Engineer anyone?)

Of course wherever you end up, you can still have some fun. And if you're just starting out then it can help you understand your desires, and limitations.

So don't worry too much about the "engineer" word. It's pretty irrelevant. Even the title of the thread is "programmer" not "engineer".

Not ignored! It's precisely because software engineering discards the very parts of programming that are closest to real engineering that this term came to describe it. "Don't bother learning the fundamentals, but focus on bureaucratic ritual instead" is a message that requires excellent marketing.

Maybe the *term" "software engineer" is not an established thing.

But these points raised by GP... are basically self-evident.

> - Deciding what to write yourself and what to take from a library

> - Identifying high-quality libraries and frameworks that meet your project needs

> - Deciding where optimization is worth the effort and where it is not

> - Writing code that will still be readable to you (and others) a few years from now

> - Thinking about the project as a large-scale, complex system with software and non-software dependencies

... But since they don't have immediate effect (along the tune of "look I made this shiny thing myself in a weekend!"), it's hard to brag about it and perhaps even hard to establish causality that your skills in the areas above contributed to the software/business' success. But you can always brag about how you implemented a Fibonacci heap or something and made your heap operations 0.2ms slower.

I do that shit every day at my job. When I’m just coding for fun at home I want to implement crazy data structures, otherwise what’s the point?

I honestly don't see a difference between programmer and software engineer. The one I see a difference with is "coder"