[aleph_minus_one]

> But the problem is that as an engineering discipline, software engineering is just profoundly underwhelming. There are basically no universally-respected design best practices, no governing bodies, no calculations of safety limits, no nothing.

I somewhat disagree: there exist a lot of deep questions in software engineering, and there do exist some (very, very partial) answers.

The problem rather is that most people don't want to listen to and/or do deep literature research about the few answers that we do have, but rather want to aggressively push their private political agenda about how they want software to be built. With some literature research, it is often not too hard to disprove the "foundations" on which this political agenda is built. But this does not make you admired because you showed serious knowledge about software engineering, but rather near to an outlaw.

TLDR: the problem is not software engineering, the problem is organizational politics.

[wwweston]

When you say “political“, what do you mean? It’s easy for me to relate to talk of software development aesthetics or philosophy and I’ve certainly had plenty of conversations that I think are accurately described that way. But I can’t think of software development discussions that I’d describe as political (except in the sense that politics is what happens when people disagree on anything).

[fn-mote]

Depends on your organization I suppose.

Some places you see people pushing their Shiny New Rewrite, basically as resume fodder or promo packet material.

I describe that kind of decision as political because it doesn’t seem to come with a legitimate cost-benefit analysis.

[wwweston]

That makes sense — decisions that are about personal benefits beyond technical/product choices and their merits.

[psychoslave]

Might be like, do we build more datacenters whose masters and possessors are all in the oligarch club, or do we build distributed systems that maximize flat power distribution.

[sky2224]

What questions in particular are you thinking of that's purely about the engineering and ultimately not the political agenda?

[aleph_minus_one]

- If it's about gaining a deep understanding of the topic involved for the pursuit of knowledge, it's science or engineering.

- If it's about manipulating people, it's politics.