Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by antod 3018 days ago
Would it be too presumptuous to assume you have less structural engineering experience than you do with software?

You seem to be forgetting that vast majority of software development is churning out the same old buggy barely maintainable CRUD apps in dull enterprise environments or for tight fisted agency clients.

1 comments

Precisely. I would have been less charitable in my response. Most software development is plumbing. To say we're solving new problems all the time and then to set that in some unclear opposition to what structural engineers do... I mean, just like software, each SE's project is different and yet similar across cases. That's uninformative, to say that least. So if you want to contrast them, it's best to actually know what you're talking. Also, I always hated occupational narcissism. It's a sign of narrow-mindedness.

(Besides, the question about whether software development is engineering or craft is very much real. John Allen, John McCarthy, Bertrand Meyer and Peter Denning have all written interesting things about this subject.)