But this isn’t engineering. This is the IT equivalent of building a bridge and driving successively larger trucks over it. In real engineering fields, you can do predictive analyses based on prior empiricism. There’s none of that in our fields until you’re talking about very small systems where, for example, the stack consumption can be determined in advance and the scheduler can give you guarantees about worst-case performance.

And this is to the detriment of all of us. That’s why you’ll never hear me call myself an engineer.