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Engineering feels more like being Tony Stark while Programming seems more like Dr Strange (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Am a civil engineer working in tech now. I never felt like engineering was magical, we studied materials and stresses and tested stuff and built things.

While I know software engineers basically do the same things in a digital concept (hardware included) they are basically speaking arcane words that make the machine do things like conjure up images, transport information across the world at the speed of light.

Maybe fantasy writers should write more infrastructure into their stories for their wizards, like undersea cables or satellites built by the generations before

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I know that software developers want to be called engineers. But honestly it is a horrible analogue

Software is honestly almost more of a scientific discipline. Sure it’s applied (things are built to a specific function), but the actual work proceeds much more like a rolling series of compounding experiments.

Computer scientist is a great piece of language that I think software developers should wear with pride.

Also, without a PE role who has legal responsibility for the design, you just can’t call it engineering in my mind. I make my living validating software that other people make. It’s gotten better but 20yrs ago we were expected to release test drugs on instruments running toy grade software. If an engineer designed a bridge with flaws equivalent to lab software that can’t do a linear regression properly they would end up in jail.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

The guys that kinda started the field in the 60s and 70s preferred the term Wizard

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Computer science is a branch of math. And while it has applications in software, most developers do not interact with it, only using existing implementations of CS results.