Ask HN: Question of the day – Software Developer vs. Engineer – thoughts? - spiderjako22
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airbreather
Engineering is applied science. As an Electrical Engineer who is also a
Functional Safety engineer that is expected to define and produce software to
a level of detail and rigour that often corresponds to less than a line of
code per day across multi year projects, it is hard to see the "move fast and
break things" crowd as Engineers.

Not to say that they have not achieved some amazing and useful things, but I
remember one of my lecturers at Uni saying, "At many times during your career
you may well encounter unqualified and/or inexperienced people who can
seemingly deliver comparable results by taking extreme or unwarranted gambles,
but it is the engineer who should be able to be relied upon to do these things
for the benefit of society consistently and safely, to a known budget and
schedule".

Now many people would (maybe rightly) think that is fantasy land, but there is
an art to navigating the conflicting requirements and expectations within a
defined budget up front when you are creating things with a very real
potential to directly kill people if they go wrong. But this also brings a
certain amount of conservatism that seems limiting at times of extremely rapid
progress within a field of endeavour, such as we have seen in SV for the last
few decades.

