alt Hacker NewsHonestly it’s hard to refute the fact that we need roads and houses more than we need cat videos.
The real differentiator though is that the engineers of tangible things can get sued and go to jail if someone dies, but it seems tech companies gets away with atrocities (profits at the expense of teen suicides) with zero repercussions.
But, what is being described is THE EFFECT OF INSTITUTIONS ON INDIVIDUALS. This happens in every industry. The larger the company, the more disconnected people become.
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> Honestly it’s hard to refute the fact that we need roads and houses more than we need cat videos.
Software does more than cat videos.
Examples that may be relevant:
- CAD and simulation tools that physical world engineers use
- telecommunications (not just programmers, but programmers are vital for the current ultra-cheap generation)
- CT and MRI data processing
- alphafold
- scheduling systems for universities and other schools (makes education more scalable)
- infrastructure/systems programming (OS, web browser, etc.)
Furthermore, no one would claim that civil engineering is useless just because a certain class of billionaires liked to hire them to design silly structures. So, the prevalence of the less useful things speaks more to priorities as a society than anything about software engineering itself
>The real differentiator though is that the engineers of tangible things can get sued and go to jail if someone dies,
That basically never happens because the license wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on if it didn't essentially protect you from your own stupidity. Any credentialed professional basically has to be farcically negligent for anything to stick and even if it does damage is usually limited by statute.
That's the whole point. The industry basically strikes a bargain with government to it's benefit. Government lets me run a supply cartel, I promise to enforce minimum standards along the way. Government gives me favorable treatment in court, I do whatever the government's rules say to the detriment of my customers. Society gets just enough scraps to provide the political will to get it done.
Hear hear
> Honestly it’s hard to refute the fact that we need roads and houses more than we need cat videos.
This is a fundamentalist perspective; it's hard to dispute that if we didn't have any roads, houses, or cat videos, we would need new roads more than we needed new cat videos.
It's much easier to dispute the idea that we currently need new roads more than we need new cat videos; we already have a lot of roads.
> Honestly it’s hard to refute the fact that we need roads and houses more than we need cat videos.
If the software made by my company ceased to exist, every government in the US, federal, state, and municipal, every construction company, plus most governments worldwide would be unable to build roads or houses until they were able to cobble together a replacement.
The entire world runs on software. Software controls our banks, flies our planes, decides what happens when you press the brake pedal in your car. The bridges you drive, walk, or ride across were modeled in software and simulated to determine whether they needed to be built stronger. The power companies use software to route power across the grid. Software drives servos which determine how much natural gas and air get pumped into our power plants. Every day, power producers and power consumers bid on how much they will pay for electricity at certain times tomorrow, and all of that is automated by software. Judges and lawyers file motions electronically, routed through software. Two weeks ago, US President Donald Trump, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed a memorandum of understanding, opening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump was in Versaille, Pezeshkian was in Tehran, Sharif was in Islamabad; the agreement was signed digitally, with software.
If every computer on earth stopped working tomorrow, we wouldn't notice the lack of cat videos, but we would notice the complete collapse of civilization.