[bumby]

I agree, but think that statement does a disservice to programming by treating it as a monolithic domain. It’s telling a mechanical engineer “mechanical things will never deprecate”. That’s true, but doesn’t help the ME whose career may have been built in, say, a fossil fuel power plant.

[agumonkey]

I have a feeling that anybody in physically based engineering will never lose use of his knowledge. You don't spend time using trendy inventions at the pace of computing. Many programmers fiddle with plumbing onto <framework-of-the-day> until they get a new position. Not a lot to remember beside social reflexes and 'best practices'.

[bumby]

The pace is certainly different but I’ve found most engineers lose those skills that aren’t directly relevant to their job at hand. Ask that power plant engineer to do fluid dynamics and they’d likely be lost. The physical engineering disciplines are often hyper-specialized as well

[agumonkey]

Sure you forget but if you come into a fluid dynamic problem, you know that the universe didn't move to a new paradigm, I assume it's a different feeling to know that you can revisit the knowledge instead of navigating a totally new structure.

[bumby]

Do you feel the fundamental precepts of programming don’t generally hold true regardless of the application of the technology?

[agumonkey]

if you spend your days design algorithms yeah but if you assemble vue or angular components I think it's much different.

[bumby]

I’ve found Engineering to be similar. A relatively small percentage of engineers are actually crunching numbers in the academic sense. Most of the work is around learning a limited number of tools that may not translate effectively into another position