[Ezku]

This book is probably about a very different kind of ”engineering” than what you had in mind, but it’s been highly influential to my thinking:

“The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.” Berger & Luckmann 1966.

Perhaps the core insight to me is that not only does every practice of engineering exist as embedded in the context of a socially constructed reality, but the practice of engineering itself also fundamentally involves the continual construction of such realities. In other words, for a software engineer to be able to do their job, they must among other things be a kind of applied social epistemologist.

I expect this framing doesn’t make much sense to many readers — I’m hoping the following articles might serve to illustrate:

“Programming as Theory Building.” Peter Naur, Microprocessing and Microprogramming 1985 (https://doi.org/10.1016/0165-6074(85)90032-8)

> … suggests that programming properly should be regarded as an activity by which the programmers form or achieve a certain kind of insight, a theory, of the matters at hand. This suggestion is in contrast to what appears to be a more common notion, that programming should be regarded as a production of a program and certain other texts.

“Interpretation, Interaction and Reality Construction in Software Engineering: An Explanatory Model.” Kari Rönkkö, Information and Software Technology 2007 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2007.02.014)

> Floyd’s paper Outline of a Paradigm Change in Software Engineering requested that we move from a product oriented paradigm to a process oriented paradigm.

> Naur’s paper Programming as Theory Building made it painfully clear to us that exemplary resources in the form of material and available support are not enough when modifying others’ programs. In fact, if Floyd’s claims had been taken seriously by the software developers in Naur’s study, and if the same developers had access to an explanatory model … their difficulties could have been both anticipated and prevented.

> This article … explains from a natural language point of view, how interpretation takes place, and discusses the consequences of this in relation to interaction and reality construction in software engineering practice.