[Avicebron]

God I feel old.

Engineering is about the weight of responsibility you have from the thing that you build. Being knowledgeable and accomplished is a way to reduce that weight because you are confident that you did the correct thing.

[Veserv]

To add on, engineering is about objective guarantees to meet objective responsibility.

This bridge is rated for 10 tons. This chemical process produces 1 mg 99% purity crystals. This biological process produces 90% pure insulin. This circuit handles 1 kA.

Engineering is not about better or worse it is about acceptable or unacceptable.

This naturally results in a desire for requirements so you can meet your guarantees. Specifications so you know what guarantees you need or what you are provided and how those map back to the real responsibility. Standards so you can consistently solve common problems.

[rowanG077]

Engineering is most certainly about being better or worse. A key aspect of being an engineer is that you can make conscious trade offs that include time, cost and feasability among others. It's not always a good choice the make the minimal thing that ticks of all the must requirements. In all cases there are unstated requirements that any engineer worth their salty will think and ask about. If you dont the that's how you get angry customers. That's how you get shitty quality bridges and buildings or cost blowouts. That's how you get bug ridden software. That's how you get the windows start menu.

[Veserv]

Writers make conscious trade offs between time, cost, feasibility. Are writers language engineers? Literally everybody makes trade offs, that is not a distinguishing aspect.

I am confused how you got to “make the minimal thing that ticks of [sic] all of the must requirements”. I said engineering was about objective guarantees. Requirements are a derivative and means of that.

Making things better, more efficient, cheaper, etc. is not at odds with that. If you guarantee that level of performance and achieve it, then you have produced a acceptable instance meeting your guarantees. If you fail to meet your guarantees, then you have something unacceptable.

Despite the tolerances of a rocket-quality screw being far better than a car-quality screw being far better than a toy-quality screw, a car-quality screw does not get a pass in rockets because it is “better” than a toy-quality screw. It needs to meet the guarantees.

When you would rather have nothing over something that pretends to meet its guarantees, then you are probably in the vicinity of engineering.

[malux85]

After getting a tiny amount of traffic from HN, its now crashed. Beautifully poetic.

I think theres still a lot of room for traditional engineering - methods that have been robust enough to stand the test of time are enduring because they work! Hype will always hype, but when its delivery time and the system is stress tested, we will see what happens...

[chilipepperhott]

Should be good to go. Got a huge spike of traffic from China (according to Cloudflare) when this hit the front page. Odd…

[mannanj]

I think you are mixing "engineering" with responsibility. You could literally take away "engineering" and put in any other word and it wouldn't mean much at all except just saying 'be responsible'.

Yes having more knowledge and accomplishment (experience) in anything in life lets you develop more confidence.

Ethicality is different from responsibility though, I think you conflated the two.

[Stefan-H]

In some traditions, engineering is intertwined with responsibility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calling_of_an_Engineer

[mannanj]

Okay well which ones do you subscribe to? And I wonder what definition of engineer do you and OP subscribe to, because this conversation probably goes nowhere when everyone sees it as meaning separate things.

Here's one simple one we can probably agree on:

> An engineer is a professional who applies scientific and mathematical principles to design, build, and maintain machines, structures, systems, and software.

As a professional applying these principles to design, build and maintain systems, morals and ethics are not involved in the definition of a professional who does these things. If you want to involve that, use your adjectives and communication and writing skills to add the word ethical or responsible in front of the word engineer wherever you use it. Instead of making up new definitions to fit your egoic desires: i.e. say "Responsible engineers xysz" instead of "engineers xysz" and then trying to project onto everyone that they are wrong or don't understand what an engineer is if they don't automatically assume and engineer must be responsible to be called an engineer. (which imo is deceptive and self-serving in use of language)

[Stefan-H]

In many engineering professions licenses and certifications require adherence to an ethical code, for instance the ISC2 certifications like the CISSP. So for one to be a professional in these fields one must actually act ethically.