Have you ever handled a surgical scalpel? It’s an incredible tool - small, light and sharper than anything of its size and purpose. It takes thousands of hours of practice before someone is authorized to use it on human skin, and mastering it takes a lifetime. You don’t want to give this tool to the wrong person. No matter how motivated, open to learning, well-meaning and hard-working they are, they will mess things up. They might be a chef, a hairdresser or any other professional handler of a cutting tool. Despite their adjacent experience, they will mess up. Handling a scalpel for the purpose of surgery is a difficult job with high responsibility.

Most of the people mentioned above held more senior positions than me at the time I worked with them, and all of them considered a formal education and computer science and skills in algorithmic problem-solving to not be important for a successful career. That mindset was either condoned or celebrated at many places I worked in. The people I wrote above weren’t considered bad performers.

If I had to categorize the “no need for education, no need for algorithms” crowd of our field, they’d fall into three categories: They either focus on the wrong things when developing software, they have a very shallow knowledge and lack of regard of how difficult good engineering is, or they’re utterly clueless and rely on good soft skills and politics.

Perhaps I’ve grown too resentful of dealing with people who take shortcuts where shortcuts are not supposed to be taken.

  • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    I liked the take take, though it is put in perspective by the fact that he bought the “AI will revolutionize SW Engineering” story.

    AI has enabled me to be more daring in my work and offered more difficult problems to tackle. It’s intoxicating, but also tiring. The productivity gains are real, but I wouldn’t put a multiplier on them. It all averages out around 20-25% individual productivity increase.

    (from the first post on his blog)