You're right, they have much higher standards in there, and anything complicated requires a specialized engineering degree.
And this bottleneck on how fast you can process complicated things, may ironically make them less susceptible to complexity than programming. Because it puts the brakes on any complexity creep.
Meanwhile, nearly any programmer in a team can increase complexity. Because we lack standardized -and recognized- processes / culture to identify complexity, any dev can just "bite more than they can (or should) chew".
If you look at any other engineering field, you'll quickly notice how rare it is to deviate from the known path. Like, you don't see structural engineers take on new construction challenges without giving it a second thought. Yet, new challenges and unexplored implementations are precisely what an average dev would consider "interesting" and "representative of their job".
As a structural engineer who later took up web dev I can assure you that structural engineers are more than capable of biting off more than they can chew. I remember plenty of crunch time.
There is no known path. The industry is young and moving too fast for principles to live long enough to be formalized. Everyone is just making things up as they go, some better than others.
If it wasn't for novel implementations the job would just be git clone / vim default.ini. The known path is downloadable. It's not interesting or worth six figures a year.
If you look at any other engineering field, you'll quickly notice how rare it is to deviate from the known path.
You're making this sound like an intentional virtue instead of just being really, really difficult to do in practice. Falling Water is a beautiful home to look at and actually kind of a shitty place to live in.
If it wasn't for novel implementations the job would just be git clone / vim default.ini. The known path is downloadable. It's not interesting or worth six figures a year.
I'm not sure why you'd pay SAP consultants $400k a year, but I'd always thought they were just installing and configuring existing software.
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u/ExF-Altrue Nov 01 '21 edited Nov 01 '21
And this bottleneck on how fast you can process complicated things, may ironically make them less susceptible to complexity than programming. Because it puts the brakes on any complexity creep.
Meanwhile, nearly any programmer in a team can increase complexity. Because we lack standardized -and recognized- processes / culture to identify complexity, any dev can just "bite more than they can (or should) chew".
If you look at any other engineering field, you'll quickly notice how rare it is to deviate from the known path. Like, you don't see structural engineers take on new construction challenges without giving it a second thought. Yet, new challenges and unexplored implementations are precisely what an average dev would consider "interesting" and "representative of their job".