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Etsy CTO: We Need Software Engineers, Not Developers

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Re: Etsy CTO: We Need Software Engineers, Not Developers

#31

Post by tvon »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #28

High-assurance software and security field have been doing real engineering for decades. Here's a nice presentation with a tie-in to another high-assurance discipline: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~hook/cs491sp08/AssuranceSp08.ppt Here's an old method, Cleanroom, that was cost-effective for business with low, defect rate even on first use: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=E10... . Altran[-Praxis] i…

The 2nd and 3rd links are truncated and do not seem to go where they are supposed to go.

Re: Etsy CTO: We Need Software Engineers, Not Developers

#34

Post by agarden »

His distinction between 'engineer' and 'developer' is artificial and easily criticized. That isn't what is interesting in this article. There are a lot of things that are.

Their method for avoiding the proliferation of different tools is interesting.

His discussion of the kind of people they want, once you ignore the semantics, is interesting. They want people who take responsibility and are always pushing the boundary of their knowledge into new fields. That's interesting.

My favorite part of the article was right at the end: "instead of asking questions about “why did something fail,” we want to ask why something succeeded, which is really easy to skip over."

Re: Etsy CTO: We Need Software Engineers, Not Developers

#35

Post by _pmf_ »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #19

I am sympathetic to the distinction. I had a bunch of applicants for a position claiming to be "Distributed Systems Engineers" mostly because they'd stood-up, maintained, and or used a Hadoop or Spark cluster in their current or prior job. But to me that was more of an advanced (one hopes) end-user. Someone who could take a bunch of large, mostly-complete logical components that somebody else engineered and then use…

> I was looking for someone who could build something as good or better than HDFS from nothing if they had to.

Well, for 90 percent of job offers, what a company claims to need is not what it actually needs (i.e. the typical "10 years experience with 5 year old technology" bullshit). If your company is not a very unique snowflake or in an academic setting, believing that it makes zero economic sense to completely reinvent the wheel from first principles is a valid assumption for applicants to make.

Re: Etsy CTO: We Need Software Engineers, Not Developers

#36

Post by andersonmvd »

I agree that there is a distinction.

At least for me, developer is solely focused on shipping code, although it's unavoidable to meet problems that require engineering. When facing such problem, the developer will focus on 'making it work', instead of focusing on answering 'how should I proper architecture it?'.

The curiosity of answering the later question comes from an engineer that also wants to know about networking, architecture and better ways to develop systems.

In simple terms this distinction answers if the professional is curious about development only (developer) or curious about the whole stack plus development (software engineer).

Re: Etsy CTO: We Need Software Engineers, Not Developers

#37

Post by aylons »

mattlutze wrote: post #25

I don't understand why he's drawing this line in the sand. Engineering is applying scientific principles to solve a problem. Development is the process of improving something. I don't see why they should be at odds; the concepts seem orthogonal. Instead of insulting rigorous, creative professionals who prefer the name "developer" over "engineer", maybe he could have said that he wants to hire people that won't go CYA…

> Engineering is applying scientific principles to solve a problem

This is too broad a definition to be useful. Any respected professional will - or at leas try - to do this - be it a medical problem, a law problem, a social problem.

What defines the engineer apart is that we try to solve the problems by designing and creating stuff.

Re: Etsy CTO: We Need Software Engineers, Not Developers

#38

Post by akavi »

chrisbennet wrote: post #5
daok wrote: post #3

More I see cross-engineer that do backend to fronend and more I see problem. There is no way a database guru can create a super nice UI with CSS and JavaScript. Same thing for an expert in JavaScript and web cannot be also an expert in AI, database and xyz stuff. I am all about having people touching a little bit of everything, but at the end, everyone has an expertise and they should do 80% of their time there. Mult…

"Specialization is for insects." -Robert A. Heinlein

Just because a famous author said it doesn't make it true.

Specialization is for people living in societies. Modern civilization would never have come into existence and cannot continue to exist without specialization.

Re: Etsy CTO: We Need Software Engineers, Not Developers

#39

Post by Joeri »

iamleppert wrote: post #16

Very odd to see this kind of attitude coming from someone who works on a community that supports makers. Not every problem needs to be engineered. Sometimes you just need a good enough solution developed, and an engineered one would be overkill.

Sometimes an engineered solution is indeed overkill, but on anything that will be in use for a few years or built by a few developers, it is not. My own experiences of herding a bunch of developers to build a product has taught me that shortcuts and worry-about-it-later decisions almost always blow up in your face eventually. An engineered solution can still be lightweight and simple, it's just that care has been taken to make sure it can grow to meet its future needs. My current philosophy to approach the start of a really big system is to map out the bits that aren't there yet but will be. I don't see this as violating YAGNI because only those parts needed today are being built and nothing more, but they're built to slot into the rest of the system if and when it is developed.

Re: Etsy CTO: We Need Software Engineers, Not Developers

#40

Post by sk5t »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #19

I am sympathetic to the distinction. I had a bunch of applicants for a position claiming to be "Distributed Systems Engineers" mostly because they'd stood-up, maintained, and or used a Hadoop or Spark cluster in their current or prior job. But to me that was more of an advanced (one hopes) end-user. Someone who could take a bunch of large, mostly-complete logical components that somebody else engineered and then use…

> take a bunch of large, mostly-complete logical components that somebody else engineered and then use them to stitch together a solution by integrating these existing frameworks that already provide the first 80+% of the technical solution to carry the last ~20% toward a domain-specific use-case

This seems like a strange objection, considering that a) getting technology to fit the use case is all virtually everybody wants, and b) having to do 20% of the solution from scratch--rather than, say, the last 0.10%--would be an _enormous_ undertaking. Or don't you consider the silicon, microcode, network, servers, physical protocol, wire protocol, operating system, standards, tools, language, and compiler in that equation? If not then where do you draw the line?

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