
Critical thinking and why you shouldn’t listen to Martin Fowler - dudeinahat
https://medium.com/@jamesflight/critical-thinking-in-software-development-the-word-should-and-why-you-shouldn-t-listen-to-563090144331
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ravitation
Articles like these often make me ponder the state of software engineering and
especially the state of its leadership... I never have conversations that even
remotely resemble (even a slightly less exaggerated version of) the opening
example... Yet the author claims to have had them often enough to have noticed
a pattern...

One thing that I have seen enough of to notice a pattern is articles like
this... As someone who would self identify as an engineer, I find this to be a
deeply troubling pattern in an _engineering_ discipline. And merely extolling
the virtues of critical thinking (to, humorously, _engineers_ ) is probably
not a solution.

Potential areas to address this are probably education and hiring...

~~~
jryan49
I have these conversations all the time. Lately mostly about microservices.

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zaptheimpaler
Yet another person rediscovering cargo-culting.. the problem with software
engineering is that everyone (me included) thinks they discovered something
new and writes yet another blog post, but in fact they only rediscovered
something that was discovered, written about, and promptly forgotten 20 years
ago. Because we are all _so_ smart, and tech changes _so_ fast of course.

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rhapsodic
Early in my career as a developer, I worked, at two different companies, on
two major large-scale, high-stakes projects, both of which failed
spectacularly.

That was without a doubt some of my most valuable experience as a developer. I
learned that a lot of what is passed off as conventional wisdom is pure
bullshit. I learned that a lot of people focus too much on the latest and
greatest tools, technologies, methodologies, etc., and too little on creating
and shipping robust, well-crafted software.

For the latter half of my career, I've been calling the shots, and I've
shipped a lot of code, and made a lot of money for myself and my employer, by
staying focused on results and not getting distracted by the never-ending
stream of bullshit that plagues my profession.

