[splintercell]

The turn off for me was when the article starts talking about what engineering is (Yonatan Zunger's article does the same thing, "Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers.").

I don't believe empathy, cooperation, collaboration or managing team is engineering. Engineering is human mind dealing with systems and things. Engineering is as much about empathy and collaboration, as much as HR is about being able to use payroll software. You need the latter to be able to do the job, but it isn't "all about" that.

Yes, if you want to go up, then after a certain point you need to get into management, (like the article says "Senior engineers must manage teams", but must manage teams does not mean engineering somehow is about managing teams), but writing documentation, sitting in meetings, being on calls and reviewing other people's code is not engineering. It's not what excited me as a kid, and it's not the reason why in my free time from job I tinker stuff and write code (and nearly every Sr engineer in my team whom I respect does that). I have seen people quit of being a great tech lead to join a startup as a developer, mostly because they felt that something within them was dying.

[dekhn]

Any sufficiently complex engineering job involves a social component unless you can somehow isolate yourself from the rest of the world.

I had many engineering jobs when I was a junior programmer where there was a well defined interface, a well defined job for me to do, and I did it alone and submitted the code without review and it worked.

But, when I started working on teams and on more ambitious projects (some of my own invention), everything changed. Suddenly, I realized that I could achieve more by engineering people through writing design docs, code review, and cat-herding.

Yeha, it's less fun to program humans, but you can get more done.

[splintercell]

You're missing my point. I KNOW how bigger projects are done. My argument is something like this:

Imagine if people kept on saying "Engineering isn't just about building things, it's about design and aesthetics, it's important to know the elements of typography. It's all about that. As a Jr developer you can get away by not caring about design and beauty, but as you go up, it won't fly", then this would annoy most of us because even if it was an absolute requirement to know theory of types and aesthetics in order to do a work as an engineer in a bigger company, that ISN'T fundamentally engineering.

Engineering at its core is about building things, and on it's shoulders other elements (like design, users, engineering management etc) stands. Just like if you are an educator, at it's core, it's about teaching.

> Suddenly, I realized that I could achieve more by engineering people through writing design docs, code review, and cat-herding.

And you'd discover that by learning psychology, you are achieving even more. The problem is, in that case Psychology to HR is the same as Legal to HR, it's expansion of domain.

[neo4sure]

Well said.