Comment by in_cahoots
4 days ago
As an aviation fan just reading this thread is quite eye-opening in terms of how much risk tolerance the average commenter has vs what is standard in the aviation community and on aviation forums. It's almost like peeking into two different worlds. I wonder if there would be any value in teaching an "engineering when lives are on the line" or "war stories from accident investigations" classes to new engineers. I feel like there's value in appreciating just how much more work goes into building a system where people's lives are at stake.
Yeah it bothers me to no end with the "engineering"-inflation of various jobs.
Like, I'm definitively not an engineer, nor does my day job really involve engineering, yet my title contains Engineer! I'm a proud CRUD monkey and designer.
I have done engineering work previously when developing hardware, and it's really a different mindset (even in an agile & fast-moving engineering org). Safety, cost, reliability, multidisciplinary integration, etc. just don't really come up in a lot in web and app development (which is a wonderful thing, really—I love it!)
It is an endless source of frustration to see poorly engineered software solutions powering critical systems.
> I wonder if there would be any value in teaching an "engineering when lives are on the line" or "war stories from accident investigations" classes to new engineers.
There would be immense value in that. But who is going to pay for it? It's a course that will essentially cause your crew to start producing software at 1/10th the rate they would otherwise do.
The average commenter here is a software guy. I imagine for the average software guy a Master Caution would be like a minor compile-time warning, i.e. feel free to just disregard it. :)
That would be funny if it wasn't uncomfortably close to the truth.