This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[Kagamin]

On Saturday, 1 September 2018 at 11:32:32 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> I think that his point was more that it's sometimes argued that 
> software engineering really isn't engineering in the classical 
> sense. If you're talking about someone like a civil engineer 
> for instance, the engineer applies well-known and established 
> principles to everything they do in a disciplined way.

If they are asked to do so. In an attempt to be fancy, the sewage 
system in my apartment doesn't have a hydraulic seal, but has a 
workaround: one pipe is flexible. How physical is that?

> The engineering aspects of civil engineering aren't subjective 
> at all. They're completely based in the physical sciences. 
> Software engineering on the other hand isn't based on the 
> physical sciences at all, and there really isn't general 
> agreement on what good software engineering principles are.

Like in science, ones based on previous experience.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering
> One of the core issues in software engineering is that its 
> approaches are not empirical enough because a real-world 
> validation of approaches is usually absent

That criticism isn't very informed. Also is the problem really in 
how it's called?

> Issues with management cause other problems on top of all of 
> that, but even if you have a group of software engineers doing 
> their absolute best to follow good software engineering 
> principles without any kind of management interference, what 
> they're doing is still very different from most engineering 
> disciplines

Because hardware engineers want to pass certification. Never 
heard of what they do when they are not constrained by that? And 
even then there's a lot of funny stuff that passes certification 
like that x-ray machine and Intel processors.

> and it likely wouldn't be hard for another group of competent 
> software engineers to make solid arguments about why the good 
> software engineering practices that they're following actually 
> aren't all that good.

Anything created by humans has flaws and can be criticized.