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Comment by chrneu | Hacker News Reader

everyone is guessing

some are just a bit better at guessing

I am not sure which profession they are in (software development?), but no. Not everybody is guessing. If they were you would have half of the buildings and bridges collapsing and the other half on fire by bad electrical wiring.

You can legitly learn how to do things properly and people who learnt to do that do the polar opposite of guessing. It is just that the world of software development has yet to be made liable for their results in the same way as civil or electrical engineers. So in software development many are just guessing because guessing wrong won't ruin their life.

Software "engineering" also differs in the way from more formal engineering in that there are very rarely absolutes, there's often many different correct ways to solve a problem, each possessing their own pros and cons. So, it could feel like "guessing" choosing a certain approach over another, but more senior people usually have an intuition brought from experience which one will work better and be more informed of the tradeoffs, so it looks a lot less like guessing.

Yet when we talk about controlling trains, airplanes, freight ships, medical devices, nuclear power plants and space stuff we suddenly know how to do it?

There is software engineering and it is known how to do things that absolutely must not fail. It is just thst these standard are not commonly deployed if nobody forces you to deploy them. And why would you? Costs money and a software error is widely treated like divine intervention.

There is a big difference between knowing something must not fail, and how to make it so it will not fail. The latter is where opinions and approaches often differ, in ways that more formal engineering does not.

I'm very wary of anyone in tech/software eng that says "this is the only right way to do this." I'm aware those attitudes exist everywhere.

I once found a very interesting definition of engineering. It is about making something that just barely does the job. Doing it better costs more usually and doing it worse costs lives.

Not much different in software. There is always many ways of solving problems and that is typical of any engineering. Contrary to sciences.

I mean that is the case as well for other engineering principles. There is not just one way to design a working and steady bridge.

They are guessing much more than computer scientists would think, typically . A structural engineer does not know: the peak wind force, what the ground under the bridge is really made of, what the actual tensile strength at the weakest piece of material is, what the exact force on the screws were at time of fastening (and after), etc... Heck, they don't even know if euler bernoulli beam theory is actually right about the existence of a neutral axis..They just take their best guesses, add generous safety factors and have the bridge inspected regularly ..

You have abstractions and models for those things. I was formally trained as an EE, so I'm just guessing at how structural engineers do it.

I would expect someone building a bridge to keep the average/peak winds into consideration - and then feed it to CAD or whatever modeling software they use to design the structure. They don't need to know the exact force a screw was tightened with - they do need to give the specs of what range they should be tightened to. Again - considered in CAD. They don't need to know that theory is right - they just need to know it's not wrong to an unacceptable degree.

I'm sure there's some guessing, but a lot of these things are actually factored in.

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