[stuxnet79]

I love this quote too. But it had the opposite effect on me when I first heard it. More than anything it reinforced how much software engineering was a joke of a discipline.

Perhaps my views are an artifact of 2010s ZIRP era software culture. Cheap money poisoned the well and incentivized 'artisans' to build Rube Goldberg-esque towers of abstractions without a care for their cost impact or conceptual integrity.

Possibility of death as a result of negligence, CapEx and actual physics are an amazing forcing function for a group of professionals to take themselves and their work seriously.

Software engineering as a discipline will need to go through an upheaval before it can join the big boy club.

AI seems to be making the problem worse. Now just about anybody with Internet access and a credit card can use Claude to add to the pile of questionable code that runs the global economy.

[whateveracct]

if there was a market for crappy bridges that collapse, "real" engineering standards would be lower

idk maybe it's because all my software in my career has been about "real stuff" (and i write Haskell), but this "software engineering is a joke" take has been going on since before I can remember and it doesn't speak for me. Maybe I just do a good job.

Software is just fundamentally different. But one nice thing (and why I bailed on "real" engineering) is how portable the skills are. I can easily use my skills to benefit myself in so many small and big ways. I couldn't do much with, say, chemical engineering hahah.

I agree that AI is accelerating all the worst of the worst garbage practices.

[schonfinkel]

If you come from a pure FP or embedded systems background you are exposed to a much better version of "sofware engineering" than your average React dev out there. The bar created by webdev is so low it made the whole industry look like a joke.