blog: Overlooked Essentials for Optimizing Code (Software Engineering degrees)

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 01/11/2010 22:58, Diego Cano Lagneaux wrote:
>>> In most Europe, Engineering is always a 5 years (masters) degree,
>>> oriented to big project developers who'll (supposedly) lead teams. I've
>>> heard it's different in the Anglosaxon systems.
>>
>> Whoa! :o
>> Shit, I'm going to go on a big tangent here, but I'm very surprised to
>> again hear that notion that the 5 year CS/Engineering degrees in
>> Europe are for "big project developers who'll (supposedly) lead teams.".
>> In my university (which, btw, is widely regarded as the best
>> technical/engineering school in Portugal), that idea was often
>> mentioned by some of the "senior" students in my degree. The details
>> of their opinions varied, but generally some of them seemed to think
>> that our graduates would soon become project managers and/or software
>> architects in the workforce, whereas most of the programming and grunt
>> work would be left to the "trolhas": the lowly developers who took the
>> subprime 3 year "practical" courses in other
>> universities/polytechnics. ("Trolha" is Portuguese slang for a
>> bricklayer, or also any guy who does construction work... see the
>> metaphor here?)
>>
>> Obviously I found this whole idea to be complete nonsense. Not that I
>> didn't agree that the CS/E graduates from our degree were much better
>> (on average) than the graduates from those 3 or 4 year CS/E courses,
>> but rather the stupid notion that it would be perfectly fine (and
>> ideal) for a software team to have one or two good software engineers
>> as project leaders/managers/architects, and the rest to be "code
>> monkeys"... These seniors students were completely blind to the
>> importance of having the majority of your developers be good, smart
>> developers (even if junior ones).
>> One or two of such seniors even went so far as to comment that
>> programming itself was a lowly task, for "trolhas" only... we the
>> Engineers might program in the first 2-3 years after entering the
>> workplace, but we would gradually move to a architure/design role in
>> enterprise and soon would not need program anymore... [end of quote,
>> and you could feel in these comments how much this guy really disliked
>> programming... ]
>> Man, my eyes went cartoonishly wide open when I read this. How
>> incredibly deluded this guy was... :S
>>
>> But the whole surprising thing is, I wasn't expecting this kind of
>> attitude in other countries, I thought this was somewhat isolated in
>> Portugal... a mix of personal delusion (derived from the fact that
>> actually these guys sucked at programming, or anything else useful),
>> combined with a still lingering non-meritocratic class arrogance in
>> Portuguese society. Nobility may be long gone, but there are a lot of
>> people in Portugal who like to put themselves about other people, and
>> having a degree (especially with title-conferring degrees, which
>> engineering degrees are btw) is a very common excuse for people trying
>> to make themselves look superior, (even if their degree was crappy, or
>> they sucked at it).
>>
>>
>
> Well, I am not sure you got what I meant. What I said is not that
> engineers will never code or won't have to after a couple years. The
> idea is more that engineers will be able to have people with different
> skills to manage, or to work closely with, so they'll have to know many
> fields to understand the whole thing. And I was not talking specifically
> about computers, but about all kinds of engineering. Engineering is
> about understanding and developping projects as a whole, which doesn't
> exclude working also on the details.
> Of course, many engineers may end doing different things, which is
> another advantage of the generalist approach. I'm actually doing
> websites now!

Yeah, I wasn't accusing you of sharing that viewpoint, at least not in 
the same way that those students I mentioned in my post.

But you do agree that in the case of Software Engineers at least, you 
will lead a big project only after you have several years of experience 
(more or less depending on how big the project is), and even so, only if 
you are skilled enough? But more importantly, you don't need to lead 
over anyone to be a Software Engineer, even a good one.
In other words, it's not very analogous to say, civil engineering.


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer