Comment by habinero

> And so they get really thrown off when people use computers in a nondeterministic way to solve a deterministic problem

Ah, no. This is wildly off the mark, but I think a lot of people don't understand what SWEs actually do.

We don't get paid to write code. We get paid to solve problems. We're knowledge workers like lawyers or doctors or other engineers, meaning we're the ones making the judgement calls and making the technical decisions.

In my current job, I tell my boss what I'm going to be working on, not the other way around. That's not always true, but it's mostly true for most SWEs.

The flip side of that is I'm also held responsible. If I write ass code and deploy it to prod, it's my ass that's gonna get paged for it. If I take prod down and cause a major incident, the blame comes to me. It's not hard to come up with scenarios where your bad choices end up costing the company enormous sums of money. Millions of dollars for large companies. Fines.

So no, it has nothing to do with non-determinism lol. We deal with that all the time. (Machine learning is decades old, after all.)

It's evaluating things, weighing the benefits against the risks and failure modes, and making a judgement call that it's ass.