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by granshaw 969 days ago
This doesn’t sound like any university CS degree I know of, apart from maybe a single class actually called “software engineering”, which in many cases isn’t even required

And even if it was, no, engineer personalities are horrible at designing solutions that actually meet customers’ and the business’s needs

2 comments

The engineering classes I took were full of stories and problems centered around solving erroneous customer reports. A good example is the ice cream story [0], where a customer reports their car malfunctioning when they buy the wrong kind of ice cream, which was used as an introduction to root causing techniques. That specific story is apocryphal and the manufacturer varies, but there's an entire mythology of such stories being used to introduce topics / provide "realistic" problems / do design projects for students.

This sort of stuff is a not-insignificant portion of my job as well, since PMs rarely have the technical skills to know what's feasible as a solution anyway in my experience.

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/

My CS degree was full of classes where we had to deal with problems like that.