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john01dav

> Honestly it’s hard to refute the fact that we need roads and houses more than we need cat videos.

Software does more than cat videos.

Examples that may be relevant:

- CAD and simulation tools that physical world engineers use

- telecommunications (not just programmers, but programmers are vital for the current ultra-cheap generation)

- CT and MRI data processing

- alphafold

- scheduling systems for universities and other schools (makes education more scalable)

- infrastructure/systems programming (OS, web browser, etc.)

Furthermore, no one would claim that civil engineering is useless just because a certain class of billionaires liked to hire them to design silly structures. So, the prevalence of the less useful things speaks more to priorities as a society than anything about software engineering itself

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Your right, as are your examples, but I want to point out an interesting thing about your examples :)

> - CT and MRI data processing

> - scheduling systems for universities and other schools (makes education more scalable)

Those two read as if they are of different urgency (#1: whoever needs it urgently is at risk of dying, schedules for "non-urgent" cases will be affected for months, turning many into urgent cases; #2: the education systems will suffer, but it only gets dire after multiple days), until you realize that #2 also applies to e.g. hospitals.

Medicine at scale is already barely scraping by as it is (see: overworked staff etc. etc.), but disrupt the internal IT working of hospitals and the indirect body count will rise fast.

Conveniently, those are the subdomains of the tech industry that require a deep understanding of CS theory (eg embedded systems) and DS&A, and yet whenever the subject of Leetcode comes up on HN, software “engineers” swoop in to argue how useless those are as a whole to 90% of the software being built in the world today…

Which, really, implies that 90% of people in this industry work in bullshit jobs that don’t require real engineering skills. You could even spout any BS about architecture in Medium.com and then asked to speak in a conference if it gets enough views.

How does embedded require deep understanding of CS? I work on embedded systems (safety critical no less) and while I can point out how they're actually distributed systems or x theorem is applicable all day, my coworkers don't actually need that info to do their jobs.

C and the various C++ subsets called "C with templates" would be much less common than they are if "deep understandings of CS and DS&A" were required in day to day work.

I do realize this and the cat video mention was really me being facetious.

And honestly software engineers don’t need roads anyway working a tough four-day work week with long commute into the basement.

Jokes aside, innovation comes at a price. Every great thing will be turned into a weapon so just wait until the alpha-fold mutants start crawling out of a nearby sewage treatment plant.

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