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'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'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't unpredictable. Nearly nothing is unpredictable. The process of figuring out which bits are predictable isn'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.