Hacker News Reader

Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

I grew up working on cars and motorcycles. The mindset is very similar. Since I work more in DevOps than as a developer, I often think of myself as a software mechanic.

Interestingly, I find the musician mindset is also very similar, particularly musicians who compose or improvise.

View on HN

Software Mechanic is a pretty good term. A lot of people out there claim to be software engineers (creatively design solutions to problems), when really they are mechanics (apply technical skill and knowledge to already solved problems). Web development is an example of a largely solved problem, the answer to every problem in webdev is to look it up in the manual (Google it). Adoption of this term would clear up a point of mass-confusion in our industry.

Exactly, my debugging is so much stronger than my architecture skills that I've been calling myself a software mechanic for a while as well!

Software Mechanic is a great brand. I'm stealing it :)

"Software Janitor" is my personal favorite. I should probably carry around a bag of pencil shavings on principle.

Yeah, I used to say CTO = main janitor of tech.

Software mechanic says: I don't mind getting my hands dirty while doing intricate work (computers, who understands 'em?). Janitorial work seems to be regarded as lowly drudge work, even though being a good caretaker/warden means preventing problems from occurring in the first place, like watering the garden and keeping leaks in check.

Everyone is trying to keep a cupboard in order somewhere :).

In my enterprise dev mgr role in maintaining a legacy codebase while introducing new features I used to talk w/ my team in terms of "software gardening".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com