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Comment by hbrn | Hacker News Reader

While what you're saying is generally true, one should also keep in mind that people (especially engineers) are extremely biased and tend to drastically overestimate the cost of mistakes.

Github Actions went down yesterday, disrupting the service for thousands of companies. They also went down today.

And yet, if they didn't have the "move fast" mindset, they probably wouldn't have Actions as a product in the first place.

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> one should also keep in mind that people (especially engineers) are extremely biased and tend to drastically overestimate the cost of mistakes.

Perhaps that's true of software engineers but I don't think it's true for Professional Engineers. That's one of the reasons I wouldn't consider most people who call themselves software engineers to be an engineer at all.

'developer' and 'programmer' really are more apt terms - 'engineer' sounds more impressive though

So does vice president instead of manager or executive assistant instead of secretary.

Wait until you meet sales engineers

> ...That's one of the reasons I wouldn't consider most people who call themselves software engineers to be an engineer at all.

Few people who call themselves (non-software) engineers today are running locomotives. Words can evolve over time.

What does operating locomotives have to do with making sure the thing you're building follows all the rules and has appropriate safety factors and such?

Operating trains is literally the origin of "engineer". It was a job that required significant application of accepted rules and methods to calculate acceptable speeds for cornering, hill climbing, and hill descent, especially when they were all combined. Getting outside the acceptable speed ranges could be catastrophic in every single one of those cases, and acceptable speeds could vary significantly depending on weather, train length, and train weight. The job was all about understanding how to correctly apply all the rules and control the vehicle to stay within safety factors.

>Operating trains is literally the origin of "engineer"

That sounds pretty dubious to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeatonian_Society_of_Civil_En...

There were probably earlier usages of the term too. As the article says the Civil bit came about to distinguish themselves from the older profession of Military Engineers.

What "engine" do you think "engineer" is referring to?

A war machine. Engineer is an old name that existed long before trains.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engin#Old_French

Edit: Might have heard of the term "Siege engine" as well?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_engine

Words do evolve. That’s why I said Profession Engineer rather than just engineer. It's a relatively new title (from early 1900's) and in lots of jurisdictions it implies the person is licensed and if something they stamp fails, they can be sued for malpractice and even lose their license to practice.

> one should also keep in mind that people (especially engineers) are extremely biased and tend to drastically overestimate the cost of mistakes

I've found the opposite to be true, especially with engineers moving from pure software to founding companies in regulated industries such as aerospace or medical devices.

Good point, though I'd say the major factor is dealing with hardware, not necessarily being regulated. You can't just push a hotfix to a million of on-premise devices with one click.

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