[joeman1000]

I think cross-discipline training is really under-rated and important. For instance, as a 3.5th year civil engineering student, I’ve been taught systems engineering and project management multiple times and in multiple different contexts. These are integral to ‘physical’ engineering, but seem (to me) to be missing from software engineering. I’m dabbling in programming and software eng now and I’m constantly surprised by the lack of standardisation and the sort of ‘wild west’ approach to things. This is fine for getting things done, but in terms of liability and responsibilities (like what the post talks about), it seems that many jobs are ill-defined and poorly scoped.

Overall, I think software and ‘physical’ engineers should swap experience. Physical engineering could use a tech-injection, and software could use a ‘structure’-injection.

[spyremeown]

Electronics Engineering student here. My Semiconductor Devices Professor said it best (this is paraphrashing):

"What you gotta understand is that in the beggining of Electronics, people were pretty much trying to put two materials together they thought worked and then tried modelling it. It was pretty much trial and error, experimentation..." and then he hits me with the most "holy s*" moment of my academic life: "... much like programming and software engineering is today. You write some code, run it, see if it works. Works, ok, go ahead, make sense of it, explain in the documentation, next task".

I had NEVER thought of software like this, it just hit me like an atomic bomb in the head, I felt like I understood where in the history of software engineering we are right now. Structure is coming, slowly but surely.

[joeman1000]

It’s shocking to be able to see it this way. Thank you for sharing this insight. It’s easy to see programming as something uber-sophisticated, because in most senses it is.

The reality is that we’ve been programming (we, the wider public) for a few decades of our millions of years of consciousness. Of course it doesn’t have the scientific rigour of something we’ve been doing for millennia, like construction.

With that said though, I think programming and computers in general is the closest we will ever come to ‘magic’ and wizardry. The fact that we can now effect reality with a few keystrokes is magical.