It's cute that you think that being a sound engineer is something you can pick up in a few minutes, while it requires knowledge of acoustics, electronics, music theory and human perception.
I went into software instead, but IIRC sales and QA engineers were common jobs I heard about for people in my actual accredited (optical) engineering program. A quick search suggests it is common for sales engineers to have engineering degrees? Is this specifically about software (where "software engineers" frequently don't have engineering degrees either)?
In my (software) organisation, sales engineers were not aware of the fact that after entering a command on a linux terminal you must press enter for it to work.
They were also unaware of the fact that if you create a filename with spaces you must then escape/quote it for it to work.
They requested this important information to be included in the user manual (the users being sysadmins at very large companies).
In the places I've worked, sales engineers are similar to consultants. They work with the sales team to produce a demo for a prospective customer. They need to have development chops to do any customizations, produce realistic sample data, and need to understand the architecture of the product to make a compelling demo. They also need to have the social skills to answer technical questions on-the-fly.
Yeah where I work they have no idea about development. What they do is more like write in the chat saying stuff like "I have a 100% guaranteed sale to the biggest customer ever (which is usually bs), now implement this incredibly complicated feature within this week!"
Actually our sales INCREASED when they fired like 100 of these guys :D
I have a degree in software engineering and I'm still critical if its inclusion as an engineering discipline, just given the level of rigour that's applied to typical software development.
When it comes to "prompt engineering", the argument is even less compelling. Its like saying typing in a search query is engineering.
googling pre-LLMs was a required skill. Prompting is not just for search if you build LLM pipelines. Cost commonly can be easily optimized 2x if you know what you are doing.
something being a skill does not mean it is an engineering discipline. engineering is the application of science or math to solve problems. writing prompts doesn't fit that definition.
I think a more fundamental aspect of engineering is that it involves well-defined processes with predictable results, and prompting doesn't check either box.
For real. Editing prompts bares no resemblance to engineering at all, there is no accuracy or precision. Say you have a benchmark to test against and you're trying to make an improvement. Will your change to the prompt make the benchmark go up? Down? Why? Can you predict? No, it is not a science at all. It's just throwing shit and examples at the wall in hopes and prayers.
Me too but it's after the fact. I make a change then measure, if it doesn't I roll back. But it's as good as witch craft or alchemy. Will I get I get gold with this adjustment? Nope, still lead. Tries variation #243 next
And Tesla famously described Edison as an idiot for this very reason. Then Tesla revolutionized the way we use electricity while Edison was busy killing elephants.
Lots of things have been discovered by guess-and-check, but it's a shit method for problem solving. You wouldn't use guess-and-check unless A) you don't know enough about the problem to employ a better method or B) the problem space can be searched quickly enough that using a better method doesn't really matter.
I think that the only reason guess-and-check fails is when you don't know enough to actually check.
Maybe this is why we disagreed on a previous comment. I think guess and check is generally the best way to solve problems, so long as your checks well-designed (which to be fair, does require understanding the problem) and you incorporate the results from the check back into further guesses, and you can afford to brute force it (which is statistically the most common problems big and small I've had to solve).
In a lot of ways, there's nothing fancy about that, it's just the scientific method -- the whole point which is that you don't really need to "know" about the problem a priori to get to the truth, and that you can recompile all dependent knowledge from scratch through experimentation to get to it.
In practice it feels really expensive but it's also where the best insights come from -- experimentally re-deriving common knowledge often exposes where its fractures and exceptions are in clear enough detail to translate it into novel discovery.
Absolutely. It's not appropriate to describe developers in general either. That fight has been lost I think and that's all the more reason to push against this nonsense now.
> Calling someone a prompt engineer is like calling the guy who works at Subway an artist because his shirt says ‘Sandwich Artist.’
All jokes aside I wouldn't get to hung up on the title, the term engineer has long since been diluted to the point of meaninglessness.
https://jobs.mysubwaycareer.eu/careers/sandwich-artist.htm