On being a real engineer

In his blog, my brother calls me a "genuine engineer". [Quick aside. I don't name or provide pointers to any other member of my family, and I try very hard not to provide identifying details of any other person with whom I have direct contact. Earlier this evening, for instance, I edited out a person's name from an older post when I realized I'd unintentionally included it. As a result, I won't provide a link to the posting. Sorry. It's kind of fun. I also won't provide long block quotes, since, given the block quotes, you could search for the original source, and, from that, figure out who he is.] It's a high compliment, coming from him, and I think it's how most people would see me -- but, what's odd is that it's about the last term I'd use for myself.

I'd be willing to lay claim to the term "failed scholar", "failed actor", or "failed musician", although, to be fair to myself, none of those claims is true. I wasn't a failure as a scholar, merely not a success to the standards I demanded of myself. I published a number of interesting papers, and, even now, continue to do interesting and original work, albeit far-removed from my original field. I never tried to make it professionally as an actor or a musician -- I knew that I didn't have the fire in my belly to make it on Broadway, and my voice, while exotic, is really too heavy for me to have found many roles. After all, you can only sing Sixteen Tons so many times each year, there's a limited market for interpretations of Tom Lehrer songs as German Leider, and you can't count on a dinner invitation from Don Giovanni every weekend.

If there's one role other people see me in, it's "computer programmer". It's one I'm good at, and one that I enjoy, particularly in combination with the "algorithm and architecture designer" role -- which is why people call me an engineer -- but, oddly, it's not the label I apply to myself. I'm not an engineer, you see. I'm a craftsman.

Engineers worry about things like reproducibility, cost, and process constraints. They worry about large scale production constraints. I worry about very few of those things -- software is easy to copy, and, once one takes the inevitable hardware-induced failures into account, scaling and scalability aren't really interesting or difficult problems to solve. (No, really. They just aren't. Don't let the hypemeisters tell you otherwise; if someone is telling you haw hard it is to scale something out...they're lying to you.)

Software "engineers" build one-off items, with simple tools. We smooth out rough edges, and our standards of productivity are those of a medieval guild master -- elegance, and fitness of decoration to form and function. In fact, our internal hierarchy is very similar to that of a medieval guild's, with apprentices, journeymen, and masters -- only we call them "contractors", "full-timers", and "distinguished engineers".

So, much as I am flattered by the term...I'm not an engineer. I'm a guild-member, and a journeyman, at that.