> Many other fields require the same mental capacities we employ: from doctors to school teachers all the way to even accountants. They are literally doing the same stuff we are doing: grabbing stuff that was already built by others, thinking about it, discussing it, having meetings, etc.
Here I disagree. Doctors? It seems true.. But school teachers and accountants? Nope..
I don't really think these fields compare, unless your 'software' is limited to doing some outsourced CRUD work..
However much people tout against it, I believe software engineering is closer to any other engineering (say Mechanical) than it is to other fields. Our task is solving problems in efficient ways, and optimizing things for one thing or another. Except these days unfortunately the bar seems very low..
> Our task is solving problems in efficient ways, and optimizing things for one thing or another
Sounds literally like every other white collar job, or in fact ideally any job ever. I agree with OP, we devs are sometimes a bit too full of ourselves, when in fact mostly we have simply just another engineering work. I used to think that way too when I was young, naive and inexperienced.
My wife is a doctor, and when I compare, we have it too easy considering our compensation. When was the last time your bug killed a human being / destroyed their health for good? When was the last time when you got dragged into court for a bug you submitted 3 years ago and jail with permanent loss of license was a real option? Getting 25$ for 12-hour weekend nightshift?
Instead we have remote work, digital nomads and people humble-bragging about 400k FAANG compensations being at the low end and barely livable.
* By some accounts Toyota's electronic throttle control system (ETCS) had bugs that could cause sudden unintended acceleration
* The Boeing 787 Dreamliner experienced an integer overflow bug which could shut down all electrical generators if the aircraft was on for more than 248 days
* In early 2019, the transportation-rental firm Lime discovered a firmware bug with its electric scooters that can cause them to brake unexpectedly very hard, which may hurl and injure riders.[6
* A bug in the code controlling the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine was directly responsible for at least five patient deaths in the 1980s when it administered excessive quantities of beta radiation
Yeah and that's what, 0.1% of all software devs globally that can potentially do physical harm? Most of us just hurl data between places and worst damage is financial. You can't even compare the scales.
If you're a construction engineer, any serious flaw in any building you design can kill, sometimes hundreds.
How many engineers of those few cases you mention went into jail and were forbidden to work in software industry forever?
Not at all. Having jumped from the medical field to software, I can tell you that medicine is its own uniquely hellish world full of nasty tensions nobody talks about in honest terms and wicked problems that don't really have solutions...
But I do think that in a way the problems of the two industries can be similar: they both fail miserably at properly separating the work and responsibilities into different professions that make sense. Like, in medicine, taking MDs alone, you should have at least these separate professions inside each speciality:
- Patient Relations people - from PatR-agent to PatR-manager
- Diagnosticians - *partially* replaceable by AI in the future
- Patient Treatment Managers
- Patient Team Manager
- Clinical Research Project Operator
- Clinical Research Project Manager
- Clinical Research Project Architect
- ...
You should have different schools/universities/majors preparing different kinds of people for these separate kinds of jobs!!! And after this, actual partition into medical specialties might actually be more flexible, some MDs actually have multiple specialties and that can work, but cumulating all the functions above into what one person leads to extreme overload, it's like the software equivalent of having a full-stack-web-plus-security-plus-embeded-software-engineer that also has to take on project manager responsibilities! Overload + partitioning across the wrong dimension ("organ-system-based"-specialities that makes no sense in modern medicine since we know all diseases manifest across all body systems) + the separate socio-economical hellscape.
Software industry has the excuse of being really really young, medicine on the other hand had decades (or centuries...) to figure things out, but it got it all wrong because optimizing for profit and personal-ego-development trumped everything...
Anyway, you're not right, you're more than right :) Things are so good in software that we forget how totally f'ed up the rest of the world is...
Teachers absolutely do take pre-existing knowledge of pedagogy, apply it, discuss it, modify it. There's tonnes of publications on the topic; groups form to reflect and promote ideas at every level from the single school to government.
Here I disagree. Doctors? It seems true.. But school teachers and accountants? Nope..
I don't really think these fields compare, unless your 'software' is limited to doing some outsourced CRUD work..
However much people tout against it, I believe software engineering is closer to any other engineering (say Mechanical) than it is to other fields. Our task is solving problems in efficient ways, and optimizing things for one thing or another. Except these days unfortunately the bar seems very low..