Comment by healsjnr1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by healsjnr1 | Hacker News Reader

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In a way I understand these comments, but I think they are drawing a very black white line in a grey area.

I trained as an electrical engineer (but I'm now %100 software), yes there was a lot about responsibility, safety etc, but to me the core of engineering and in being an engineer is to be able to apply theoretical math and physics concepts to real world problems.

That is why I did what I did, I didn't want to be an engineer to be an on time, on budget, project manager. I did it to combine design, maths and physics to build real world solutions to problems.

And this is why I would 100% consider myself a software engineer.

The accreditation and certification is missing (so far) because we are still figuring out the best ways to apply engineering to building abstractions (which is what I believe our field is). To me this doesn't make us any less engineers.

It does exist, but sadly not widespread enough for those that care about quality.

Quality isn't the end-all be-all. Engineering is about understanding tradeoffs so that you can actually have a profitable business. It has always been tightly coupled with business. You can't build a bridge if no one wants the expense. Government is OK to regulate outcomes (like bridge can't fall down) but it's not OK for it to start mandating that every bridge must be a suspended bridge.

This is the first misunderstanding of people not involved with QA in any way. (IS9000 series).

In this sense, quality doesn't mean "goodness", rather it implies predictability and repeatability. eg Are you doing what you said you would do to make something of "goodness" you defined?

Under the ISO standards it is entirely suitable to have a quality assurance system in your company that says, "we will make minimum effort to make to minimum quality, to the measurable metric of x failures per y products and intended product life span of z days".

The colloquial use and technical use of the word quality are quite different.

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