[constantcrying]

This is about software and management for software. But software developers have no engineering culture, they have a craftsmanship culture, favoring things like individualism and "taste". The article pretty clearly demonstrates this, as this is not how any actual engineering organization or any actual engineer thinks about management.

Software has something, which no engineering discipline has. Encapsulation. If you are building a car, a plane or a train everything affects everything. Management exists, for the sole reason of creating anything in such a world. What the corporation wants from an engineering manager, is someone who solves that communication problem, what the engineer wants from his manager is someone who figures out what is happening in the rest of the organization.

[sfink]

> Software has something, which no engineering discipline has. Encapsulation. If you are building a car, a plane or a train everything affects everything.

In other engineering disciplines, a lot of work goes into preventing everything from affecting everything. You overbuild a bridge so that you don't have to consider oscillation magnitudes (other than to conservatively figure out the maximum you need to support, and that maximum will be a worst case specifically so you don't need to consider the interaction of everything else.) Any time you're adding a safety margin, you're removing from consideration all of the things that could go wrong but not wrong enough to exceed the margin.