111–120 of 124 posts
> You can make lots of money by making something appear novel and undiscovered, and consequently make yourself sound smart and cutting edge. This is pretty much the crux of it. It's very similar to the strategy of undercutting a market with VC subsidies until it dies and can be replaced.
As an MCP engineer, how dare you
LOL gotta put that on my resume
Earlier quoted context omitted.
food engineers are considered real engineers. There is no way food engineering is more engineering than software engineering.
The majority of modern software engineering doesn't have human illness and or death as a consequence of failure. That's front and centre as a concern in Food, Chemical, Civil, Electrical, Mechanical etc. engineering disciplines.
You go to a 4 year Engineering school, get an actual Engineering degree. Then you apprentice with an Engineering company, and study for the state's license examination, one of the hardest tests you'll ever take. If you pass, then and only then are you an Engineer.
Real engineering is nothing like the slop portrayed in this article.
Engineering schools showcase failures of the past as a teaching tool. I still remember learning about the bridge that shook itself apart during my freshman year. Engineers value safety margins and failure analysis.
Engineers DO learn from history.
The central point, that working with agents is some tried and true variation of existing processes, is incorrect. Managing agents has some similarities with EM and program management but a whole lot of other dimensions like token use, avoiding drift, successful concurrency at scale, variations in prompting, testing, evaluation, etc., not to mention that the agents are hyperintelligent coders with zero common sense an…
Ultra-verbosity, okay you got me, humans don’t do that. They do over complexity though, when it makes them feel smart.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> obvious to anyone who hasn't swallowed orthodoxy Agile development completely whole. What? One of the first principles in doing Lean and Agile correctly is limiting Work in Progress and avoiding context switching whenever possible.
Most organizations are not doing Agile correctly. Everywhere I've worked claims to be doing Agile, but none of them have ever done anything to avoid context switching or limiting work in progress
Also what I learned back then was that accounting was invented for the same purpose the blockchain: to make fraud in the workplace very hard.
I remember engineers reinvent geospatial technologies, avoiding such thing as map projections, and in the end still came to them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All while creating new ones. :)
Nobody's perfect ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> You speak to me of perfection, but is there really any such thing? Or is it a siren, leading us astray. I happily predict that neither of us will ever summit that elusive peak, but I care little, as long as we walk together. Art gives us the perception of control. For a moment, as I paint, I find order among the chaos. That is, for me, a moment of pure contentment. And that is truly better than perfection.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a strawman argument, because most engineers aren't engineers. The vast majority of engineers have no consequences for their shite. Neither is certification a panacea against bad engineers. Watch mechanical engineers design plastic rubbish. Watch some electronic engineers design circuits that don't work. Watch some geotech engineers make up overspecified bullshit: because they're paid per hour and their work is…
The Christchurch CTV building was supposedly built to the code standard of the early 1980s, it was a non-ductile reinforced concrete structure. Supposedly is heavily stressed, the Royal Commission investigating found a lack of communication between the official structural design engineers (Alan Reay Consultants), the actual engineer employed for the design (David Harding) and somewhat more critically the "engineer" o…
Exactly: certifications were irrelevant and toothless. Unfortunately so were the laws.
Similarly in the UK no individuals or engineers have been formally charged or convicted for any offenses relating to the Grenfell Tower fire. The causes were distributed more widely in that situation.
We need heavy criminal penalties for managers and other responsible people that are irresponsible.
And the corporations should not be able to hide behind limited liability. Additionally I suspect NZ lacks a good legal framework for chasing civil liabilities.
The bigger pattern is that organisations have systemic safety flaws, so instead they want to blame their frontline staff: pilots, teachers, engineers. Every time.
If the strongest incentives result in unsafe decisions, then the incentive to not sign-off will fail (because it won't trump the other incentives).
And professional indemnity insurance undermines some negative incentives.
Certificates are for the patsies. And certifications don't work across borders.
The consequences of criminal decisions are not nearly as bad as they should be.
Basically, within NZ certifications just don't seem to have the effects we imagine they should. Unfortunately the fix should be criminal negligence laws, but they seem to fail for other less obvious reasons some of which you mention (my further guess is that negligence would tar too many people involved including politicians, so every incidental person is keen to avoid doing the right thing).
Idealists believe in civil certifications. Realists believe in a criminal code.
Criminal negligence laws should also be able to deal with deadly software (although perhaps Facebook is too nebulous).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Christchurch CTV building was supposedly built to the code standard of the early 1980s, it was a non-ductile reinforced concrete structure. Supposedly is heavily stressed, the Royal Commission investigating found a lack of communication between the official structural design engineers (Alan Reay Consultants), the actual engineer employed for the design (David Harding) and somewhat more critically the "engineer" o…
> wanted to charge Harding and Reay with manslaughter Exactly: certifications were irrelevant and toothless. Unfortunately so were the laws. Similarly in the UK no individuals or engineers have been formally charged or convicted for any offenses relating to the Grenfell Tower fire. The causes were distributed more widely in that situation. We need heavy criminal penalties for managers and other responsible people tha…
.. but the legal system felt it would be impossible to prove that the building was not built to the code that it should have been - a code that was likely insufficient in the face of the forces of the earthquake of 2011.
Seems like this could be categorized as yet another reason why software developers are not engineers.
I never understood why actual engineers(eg. Civil) have not complained more that programmers/coders stole that title.
So I think it sounds more than actual people who would be happy to be called software developers.