<story><title>The Bulk of Software Engineering in 2018 Is Just Plumbing</title><url>https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/plumbing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>c22</author><text>So is plumbing.</text></item><item><author>RobertDeNiro</author><text>Keep in mind that it&amp;#x27;s easy to you because you&amp;#x27;re from that particular field. For a lot of people software development is still basically witchcraft.</text></item><item><author>ken</author><text>&amp;gt; I believe that many in the field are overpaid relative to the difficulty of the work they do.&lt;p&gt;I believe that &lt;i&gt;every&lt;/i&gt; programmer is overpaid relative to the difficulty of the work they do -- or, more accurately, that The Market doesn&amp;#x27;t pay based on &lt;i&gt;difficulty&lt;/i&gt; of work.  Software pays so well because the product scales so well.&lt;p&gt;Successful pop musicians don&amp;#x27;t do work that&amp;#x27;s 100 times more &amp;#x27;difficult&amp;#x27; than software engineering.  They do work that scales even better (copying digital music; playing to arenas; branding on merch).&lt;p&gt;Having worked outside the software world, I absolutely do not believe that software people are any smarter, on average, than anyone else.  Ever see a plumbing or electrical or structural system fail spectacularly?  Other types of workers absolutely need to understand interactions between multiple complex systems, deal with obsolete and incompatible systems, and deal with changing and conflicting requirements and regulations.&lt;p&gt;If software is any more complex to deal with than physical systems, it&amp;#x27;s only because the architects and implementors let it get that way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>minor3rd</author><text>I had a plumber over for some fixes about a month ago, and he saw me doing some coding on my laptop. He made a comment like &amp;quot;I have absolutely no clue how any of that works... it is wizardry to me&amp;quot;. I said &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m watching you fix plumbing issues around my house, and that is wizardry to me&amp;quot;. I think we could probably learn each others&amp;#x27; jobs if we really tried, but the point is that all things can seem like magic until you learn them.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Bulk of Software Engineering in 2018 Is Just Plumbing</title><url>https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/plumbing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>c22</author><text>So is plumbing.</text></item><item><author>RobertDeNiro</author><text>Keep in mind that it&amp;#x27;s easy to you because you&amp;#x27;re from that particular field. For a lot of people software development is still basically witchcraft.</text></item><item><author>ken</author><text>&amp;gt; I believe that many in the field are overpaid relative to the difficulty of the work they do.&lt;p&gt;I believe that &lt;i&gt;every&lt;/i&gt; programmer is overpaid relative to the difficulty of the work they do -- or, more accurately, that The Market doesn&amp;#x27;t pay based on &lt;i&gt;difficulty&lt;/i&gt; of work.  Software pays so well because the product scales so well.&lt;p&gt;Successful pop musicians don&amp;#x27;t do work that&amp;#x27;s 100 times more &amp;#x27;difficult&amp;#x27; than software engineering.  They do work that scales even better (copying digital music; playing to arenas; branding on merch).&lt;p&gt;Having worked outside the software world, I absolutely do not believe that software people are any smarter, on average, than anyone else.  Ever see a plumbing or electrical or structural system fail spectacularly?  Other types of workers absolutely need to understand interactions between multiple complex systems, deal with obsolete and incompatible systems, and deal with changing and conflicting requirements and regulations.&lt;p&gt;If software is any more complex to deal with than physical systems, it&amp;#x27;s only because the architects and implementors let it get that way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>21</author><text>A random person from the street would be able to fix a small plumbing problem. Water and pipes are well into the normal day to day experience.&lt;p&gt;A random person from the street would not be able to fix a trivial problem&amp;#x2F;bug in some software - let&amp;#x27;s say a missing runtime package on linux.</text></comment>