Software Engineering is not Engineering
After I discovered for myself hackaday.com I realized that our faculty does not educate engineers. We are producing middle-ware "specialists" between the framework developers and the end users, that are able to compose high-level scripts that can pop-up forms and query databases. We are so got used to all possible abstraction layers that we don't see further than one layer below. Is it really engineering? Most of these "engineers" don't know how their fridge is working, not really their computers. Where is a creative thought? Where is deus ex machina?
Labels: academics, computers, observations
# posted by romka,
Thursday, February 04, 2010
09:17
This comment has been removed by the author.
As always, my comment will be some kind of criticism, just by innertia:
1. You should talk for yourself, each developer is different.
2. PHD is not supposed to produce engineers and you haven't taken the master or bachelor. I can bet those students may know more about engineering.
3. Software engineering group in our faculty by all means is the weakest group (except a couple of people who understand what is research in SE), not only in reasearch, but unfortunatelly in teaching too. Clean that group, and you might get other results.
4. A good architect is not thinking about door handles when he is designing the walls. His experience must ensure the walls and door handles will be compatible in any case. You need to look down to his layer only if it appears the layers are not compatible anymore. Again, this is not supposed to happen.
5. The creative thought - from my practice, if in a normal work you face a problem where you need to be really creative (and I believe most people have this ability) it could mean, that you are doing something wrong. Statistically most solutions have allready been found, while the fact you do not know about them could mean you are inexperienced.
Please disagree with me.
I am very happy to receive your critics, because it gives me a chance to express myself in more detail :)
Yes, I should speak about myself. I've got both bachelor and master degree at the university of Latvia which were more engineering than research oriented. I took many applied subjects, so I have some picture how computers are working. I believe my program was not that perfect and I suppose that some universities do a better job in it.
Yes, many problems were already solved before by someone else. Many, but not all. I believe that a university graduate should be able to produce creative technical solutions. I am not speaking about innovations. I am speaking about applying a combinatorial knowledge in cases when none of the previous problems match exactly.
I don't know much about architecture, but I think your comparison is not very fair. An architect is always a top-level profession. The same applies to mechanical engineers who construct locks, etc. In my post I am trying to point to the devaluation of software engineering education.