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Magic of software; what makes a good engineer also makes a good engineering org

Published on: 2025-06-28 10:26:32

The people who create software generally refer to themselves as software engineers, and yet if they graduate from university, it is typically with a degree in computer science. That has always felt a little strange to me, because science and engineering are two pretty different disciplines – yet we for the most part seem to take such an obvious contradiction for granted. However, I think there is something uniquely magical about software, and part of that magic might stem from this tension in how we define it. At first glance, software seems like a straightforward engineering practice. After all, it exists within a fully known universe – the computer – of our own making. This is in stark contrast to disciplines that are more obviously science, like biology or physics, which exist within domains that we did not create and do not fully understand. Unlike computers, which are fully understood, those disciplines are in large part about the search for understanding. Science, in other words ... Read full article.