Are We Really Engineers?
There is something special about software engineering that deserves a bit of thought - the discipline is all of 70-80* years old. There are people on HN who are older than software engineering.<p>Engineering is very much about the accumulation of experience - the reason all the planning is up front isn&#x27;t because the Secret Society of Engineers said so, but because they are practicing something that has between hundreds (electrical, maybe ~200 years) and thousands (mining, dates back to the stone age) of years experience.<p>In 100 years, software engineers will have an enormous advantage over almost all non-engineers at designing and running software projects. There&#x27;ll be a few amateur prodigies that nobody trusts, and putting an engineer in charge of software projects will mysteriously trigger a lack of things going wrong.<p>Software isn&#x27;t unpredictable. Nearly nothing is unpredictable. The process of figuring out which bits are predictable isn&#x27;t finished because the hardware keeps changing and forcing the tech stack to change. When the S-curve of hardware progress flattens, software engineering will gain in importance.<p>* Changed from 20-30 because that was wrong. Changes none of the arguments.