Comment by simonw
1 day ago
I've seen some good arguments recently that software engineering is weird in that computers ARE completely predictable - which isn't the case for other engineering fields, where there are far more unpredictable forces at play and the goal is to engineer in tolerances to account for that.
So maybe "prompt engineering" is closer to real engineering than "software engineering" is!
With distributed systems I'd say network unreliability introduces a good amount of unpredictability. Whether that's comparable to what traditional engineering disciplines see, I couldn't say. Some types of embedded programming, especially those deployed out in the field, might also need to account for non-favorable conditions. But the predictability argument is interesting nonetheless.
The computer may be reliable but the data passing through it isn’t.