[bigtunacan]

Not op, but I'm clearly reading their message differently than you.

Any type of physical engineering is based on hard facts, data, and well established historical research, mathematics, and more.

I've seen many an electrical engineer say, "fuck it, this is too hard and pays too little" and so they pivoted into software engineering quite easily.

On the other hand I've never seen the opposite. Real engineering is hard because you actually have to get shit perfect. The wrong o rings and real people die.

There are a few real software engineering shops and real software engineers, but 90% are just slinging shit together for a bunch of enterprise CRUD and they are all just one bad deploy away from disaster.

[callc]

How are you reading noosphr’s comments?

I read it as: “software is special because its design space is high dimensional, compared to all other engineering disciplines which are limited to 3 spatial dimensions. Large design space leads to ability to mess things up.”

I wholeheartedly agree with you: “real” engineering (where lives are on the line) is hard. Most software that is made is not to control pace makers, air plane autopilot, space shuttles, etc. When we do need to program in these life and death situations, we should look carefully at the real engineers that do this all the time (looking at you self-driving car software).

[whstl]

I graduated in Electrical Engineering but have worked as a Software Engineer for the last 20 years.

I totally agree with their post and get what they're saying.

Within circuits (big or small) it is possible to do some crazy stupid shit, but reality kicks in much sooner. Either because of physics or price.

Analog circuits (my specialty) are a perfect example of this. Sure I can try to cut corners and interconnect two distant parts of the circuit together in weird ways ("tight coupling" in software), but the options I will reach for are limited, and "nature" forces me to "decouple" them. With software I can just set a distant variable...

I have a Building Engineer on my team, who also moved to Software Engineering. I can ask for examples in his field too.

[bigtunacan]

Software "design space is high dimensional" is true in that storage, latencies, processors, memory we just keep growing and growing. Given that, software should be faster and better than ever because the dimension where software lives has gotten exponentially larger and more performant. Rather than use that like responsible engineers we all started writing bloatware because it was easy and we could get away with it.

Engineering with constraints builds discipline. Maybe we are lacking as engineers in software because the constraint bar just continues to raise.

[datadrivenangel]

There's software engineering work and then there's programming.

90% of programming is enterprise CRUD, and the bar is low. Likewise, 90% of electrical work is basic circuitry with off the shelf parts: does it work and not catch fire. There are electrical engineers doing Real :TM: Engineering, but 90% or more of the work is electrician work.