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Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers

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Re: Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers

#71

Post by auxym »

syntaxing wrote: post #30

Mech E here. The reality we’re paid less is because it’s harder to make a profit (but to be fair, MechE in tech get paid well still). Making good margins is really hard. You have one shot to do anything. Worse of all, anyone can take apart your design, reverse engineer and sell your product by 20% less because they don’t have to worry about recovering R&D. Most Americans won’t even bat an eye, they’ll just buy whatev…

Correct.

Software companies have very little cost other than engineering.

For hardware, once your engineers have created a design, you still have to operate a factory, pay for expensive manufacturing equipment and expensive labor required to actually build the design.

Thus, you get much less "margin per engineer" and the available portion of gross margin that can be paid to engineering is much smaller.

Still, thank you OP. It's nice to get some recognition sometimes :)

Re: Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers

#73

Post by zeroonetwothree »

dougSF70 wrote: post #10

Yes, but. Most real world engineers could also be software engineers too. I studied Mechanical Engineering and had to learn Fortran and Pascal as part of my undergrad. What I find strange is that some of the best software engineers are not as strong at Math as you would expect. Of course there are exceptions (and no doubt they are all here on HN!). So while real world engineers can cross the divide to become software…

I think it’s hard to switch jobs in all cases and I doubt any universal rule applies. Software engineering is more than writing Pascal. It’s like saying you can be a mechanical engineer because you learned physics in college.

Re: Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers

#74

Post by pvg »

MilStdJunkie wrote: post #47

If you've seen Margin Call , you know the scene I'm thinking of right now. The "I Built a Bridge" scene. Beginning in the mid-70s something went horribly, horribly wrong with the way capital handles risk management, resulting in "real stuff" being undervalued by orders of magnitude, since it was by nature riskier. Hence that aforementuioned scene. Russian-style command economies failed in some part because they lacke…

They were Soviet rather than 'Russian-style' and they very much had ways to 'borrow from the future' - externally they were connected to the global economy and there was an internal system of industrial credit and settlement strictly separated from the cash economy individuals used.

Re: Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers

#75

Post by auxym »

spicybright wrote: post #54

Over the past few years, I've been taking driving very seriously in terms of skill development and practice. One ritual I've started doing is thanking my car after every drive. For the privilege I'm afforded by being able to drive freely unlike most of the world. For the car itself for holding up so reliably. And for the hundred+ years of engineering man hours and passion given to get where we are today. In any popul…

I am mechanical engineer, though I never worked in engineering.

The low cost and amazing reliability, all things considered, of modern cars, absolutely amazes me.

Re: Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers

#76

Post by CSMastermind »

nielsole wrote: post #63
disqard wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh, your comment looks like it was authored by an LLM -- what is a "telluric state"?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellurocracy I fail to grasp the sentence though. What's a thalassocracy supposed to be in today's world?

The United States, with its blue-water navy, is commonly viewed as a Thalassocracy by a certain segment of the historian community. You can really go down the rabbithole but basically some people view the US as, at least in part, having the culture of an island scaled up to the size of a continent.

There's a similar train of thought that sea-based empires defeat land-based empires when the two do battle and some people view the conflict between the USSR and the United States during the cold war through that lense.

Re: Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers

#77

Post by Jensson »

rjbwork wrote: post #68
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software also requires far more maintenance and modification. Whereas building a bridge takes more work than maintaining it software is often the opposite

While true, nobody asks you to turn a bridge into a tunnel the day after the first cars drive across it either.

Genius Manager: Let users choose whether they want a tunnel or a bridge, and you move the road to fit their needs!

Genius Engineer: Easy, the new intel bridge builder runs a million times faster than they used to, done!

And then each car has to wait for the bridge to be rebuilt, and people wonder why driving isn't any faster than it used to even though everything is a million times faster.

Re: Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers

#78

Post by GypsyKing716 »

MilStdJunkie wrote: post #47

If you've seen Margin Call , you know the scene I'm thinking of right now. The "I Built a Bridge" scene. Beginning in the mid-70s something went horribly, horribly wrong with the way capital handles risk management, resulting in "real stuff" being undervalued by orders of magnitude, since it was by nature riskier. Hence that aforementuioned scene. Russian-style command economies failed in some part because they lacke…

I hate to say this from an engineering stand-point, but that's because the nature of programable circuits and the systems that are derived from them. Thinking in terms of the plight of Bell Labs and how the demise that made them filthy rich, but also started the end of their company. I think you're wrong on a few levels, but mostly undervaluing the nature of how software on embedded systems are infinitely changeable. It's where hardware like SDR USB devices have yet to really be realized, but they almost future proof your hardware. Why innovate in hardware? You don't have to anymore for decades and still find useful ways to flash remote systems and exponentially make them useful. I have a 1st generation Amazon Echo - the thing is so over-engineered it'll last another decade and services will still work on it.

I value hardware, but I value versatility more.

Re: Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers

#79

Post by mmcgaha »

eikenberry wrote: post #34

Why compare those of us who write software with engineers? It makes more sense to compare us to say.. composers, poets or something. Writing software is an art form and has nothing in common with engineering other than some uncreative types trying to come up with a more official sounding name.

I am not sure why you are being downvoted. There is plenty of artistic expression in programming. Maybe we need to make more distinctions in the types of work that we do because I would love to see programming become a true engineering profession but we still need the artists and tinkerers in the world pushing the boundaries that we don't even know exist yet. We should not push out DaVinci or the Wright brothers but we should make sure critical systems are safe.

Re: Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers

#80

Post by zeroonetwothree »

Existenceblinks wrote: post #36

Yeah, most of them have, in my country, called Licensed for Professional Practice while software engineers don't. If developers were to stay comply with standard quality, we would get license cancelled very fast. For example, look at how frontends don't like to talk about engineering metrics like memory / size / perf etc, it's as if this is literally a fashion industry.

Don’t mistake gatekeeping with desirable outcomes.
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