> Honestly it’s hard to refute the fact that we need roads and houses more than we need cat videos.

Software does more than cat videos.

Examples that may be relevant:

- CAD and simulation tools that physical world engineers use

- telecommunications (not just programmers, but programmers are vital for the current ultra-cheap generation)

- CT and MRI data processing

- alphafold

- scheduling systems for universities and other schools (makes education more scalable)

- infrastructure/systems programming (OS, web browser, etc.)

Furthermore, no one would claim that civil engineering is useless just because a certain class of billionaires liked to hire them to design silly structures. So, the prevalence of the less useful things speaks more to priorities as a society than anything about software engineering itself

I do realize this and the cat video mention was really me being facetious.

And honestly software engineers don’t need roads anyway working a tough four-day work week with long commute into the basement.

Jokes aside, innovation comes at a price. Every great thing will be turned into a weapon so just wait until the alpha-fold mutants start crawling out of a nearby sewage treatment plant.

Conveniently, those are the subdomains of the tech industry that require a deep understanding of CS theory (eg embedded systems) and DS&A, and yet whenever the subject of Leetcode comes up on HN, software “engineers” swoop in to argue how useless those are as a whole to 90% of the software being built in the world today…

Which, really, implies that 90% of people in this industry work in bullshit jobs that don’t require real engineering skills. You could even spout any BS about architecture in Medium.com and then asked to speak in a conference if it gets enough views.

How does embedded require deep understanding of CS? I work on embedded systems (safety critical no less) and while I can point out how they're actually distributed systems or x theorem is applicable all day, my coworkers don't actually need that info to do their jobs.

C and the various C++ subsets called "C with templates" would be much less common than they are if "deep understandings of CS and DS&A" were required in day to day work.

Your right, as are your examples, but I want to point out an interesting thing about your examples :)

> - CT and MRI data processing

> - scheduling systems for universities and other schools (makes education more scalable)

Those two read as if they are of different urgency (#1: whoever needs it urgently is at risk of dying, schedules for "non-urgent" cases will be affected for months, turning many into urgent cases; #2: the education systems will suffer, but it only gets dire after multiple days), until you realize that #2 also applies to e.g. hospitals.

Medicine at scale is already barely scraping by as it is (see: overworked staff etc. etc.), but disrupt the internal IT working of hospitals and the indirect body count will rise fast.

Hear hear

> Honestly it’s hard to refute the fact that we need roads and houses more than we need cat videos.

This is a fundamentalist perspective; it's hard to dispute that if we didn't have any roads, houses, or cat videos, we would need new roads more than we needed new cat videos.

It's much easier to dispute the idea that we currently need new roads more than we need new cat videos; we already have a lot of roads.

Yeah and a lot of the guys who actually do the work of building roads learn and upskill off youtube.

> Honestly it’s hard to refute the fact that we need roads and houses more than we need cat videos.

If the software made by my company ceased to exist, every government in the US, federal, state, and municipal, every construction company, plus most governments worldwide would be unable to build roads or houses until they were able to cobble together a replacement.

The entire world runs on software. Software controls our banks, flies our planes, decides what happens when you press the brake pedal in your car. The bridges you drive, walk, or ride across were modeled in software and simulated to determine whether they needed to be built stronger. The power companies use software to route power across the grid. Software drives servos which determine how much natural gas and air get pumped into our power plants. Every day, power producers and power consumers bid on how much they will pay for electricity at certain times tomorrow, and all of that is automated by software. Judges and lawyers file motions electronically, routed through software. Two weeks ago, US President Donald Trump, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed a memorandum of understanding, opening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump was in Versaille, Pezeshkian was in Tehran, Sharif was in Islamabad; the agreement was signed digitally, with software.

If every computer on earth stopped working tomorrow, we wouldn't notice the lack of cat videos, but we would notice the complete collapse of civilization.

As a 'software engineer' myself, I fully understand your position, but please qualify the statement about the software you work on. Either add 'efficiently' or 'at scale', because all that infrastructure you mentioned could definitely be built without your software. It was possible before your software and it sure would be possible without it, it just would not be as easy.

I am sure someone is going to dwell on that if not fixed.

This is silly. People survived before the Haber Bosch process but an overnight removal of it from the world would absolutely result in a catastrophic collapse.

If you want to be reductive, we’re all going to die due to entropy anyway, it will all balance out so there’s no point in doing anything at all.

Your company's software enhances the process somehow, making it easier or faster or cheaper. Your company's software did not unlock the technology of road building.

There were roads built before your company's software and I'm sure if your company disappeared that ultimately roads would get built with or without their software.

It would be interesting to look at all the technological advances of the last 60 years and break them down into categories based on what happens if they went away though (category A: the field just goes back to 1950s and we more or less get by vs Category B: society utterly collapses).

It's fun to do it forwards too (ie all recent technological advances that could be category a where society cannot live without it or category b where society is like meh or even category c where soecity utterly collapses because of it).

The internet as a whole can arguably be all three at the same time.

It's less about whether we could live without it, more about whether we could live without it now.

We objectively don't need credit cards. We could do with cash just fine. If we were told that Visa / Mastercard were shutting down in 5 years, we'd manage to muddle through. If they suddenly vanished off the face of the Earth? People would definitely die due to starvation.

If the toilets at all those firms started operating in reverse, very little would get built. The conclusion is that plumbers are extremely important, not that plumbing is de facto engineering.

Plumbers build all the pipes, but one of the aforementioned professional engineers created a drawing of where they would go and how the water and sewage would move through the building.

And crucially, independent regulatory bodies formed the building codes[0] which govern things like minimum acceptable pitch for waste lines, size and materials selection of pipes, acceptable pressures and temperatures, etc. Engineers can be held responsible for failing to design to these codes, and plumbers and other tradespersons can be held responsible for failing to build to them.

IMO what we really need in software is something like the various codes which govern fire safety, efficiency, etc of modern buildings. It exists in some safety critical domains but should be more widely applied.

The safety codes are where we accumulate the hard-won knowledge over time. Many of the rules in the codes were paid for with human lives lost.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_Council

Internet is now critical infrastructure, whether we like it or not.

We've quietly gone from it being a research project, to a cool toy, to something most people had but that definitely wasn't essential, to a world where it is just as crucial as lightning or electricity.

I bet many farming and food distribution operations just wouldn't be able to function without a connection to AWS.

>The real differentiator though is that the engineers of tangible things can get sued and go to jail if someone dies,

That basically never happens because the license wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on if it didn't essentially protect you from your own stupidity. Any credentialed professional basically has to be farcically negligent for anything to stick and even if it does damage is usually limited by statute.

That's the whole point. The industry basically strikes a bargain with government to it's benefit. Government lets me run a supply cartel, I promise to enforce minimum standards along the way. Government gives me favorable treatment in court, I do whatever the government's rules say to the detriment of my customers. Society gets just enough scraps to provide the political will to get it done.