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Notes -
I took the theory-and-math-heavy track at school because I figured it would be interesting. It's true that I learned more during an internship than in any of those courses. In programming in particular, degrees definitely are signaling and gatekeeping.
Still, I think programming is in its infancy. Whenever discussions about "is it really engineering or not" come up and the inevitable comparison to bridges and EE happens, people point out that software is bad and buggy, and lots of people don't follow "best practices."
It could be that in a hundred years or so, they will look back and laugh at how primitive we were. Maybe training catches up and programmers become everydaymen like plumbers instead of passionate autists.
I've had that conversation and I'm not sure we'll ever be able to get to that level of "best practices" because the need for software so heavily outstrips the supply. If we needed 100 bridges tomorrow or the world was going to end I'd assume there'd be some that aren't able to handle heavy trucks. See chinese physical engineering corner cutting.
Plus, getting a great gay sex app together is less important than a bridge. Software isn't as consistently life-critical as designing roads is (and when it is, the standards are really high).
Finally, there's the fact that we're dealing with building things that at some level don't have simple and constant physical constraints to box us into "standards". Nobody can build a bridge that corkscrews up to the moon on their own, but you can do things with software you can't do with any other type of engineering.
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