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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • I appreciate your opinion. I know that the qualification I made is a controversial one as everyone wants to be an ‘engineer’, but I’m still confident it holds. Applying physics is not purely at the atomic level. In web development, one of the physical challenges can be bandwidth, however, while most people claim to concerned about bandwidth, in reality they don’t do anything about it. Minifying code is cool, but that’s not doing any engineering by itself. Calculating the throughput your datacenter can dish out for your 1million users as you write a function that optimizes load vs lag of streaming video, that’s engineering.

    Thinking about user interaction and experience is more psychological than it is physical in most cases. Designing the user experience of a medical device or cockpit switch are both not automatically qualified for engineering: unless, you are designing the medical interface to overcome spasms that someone with Parkinson’s has, or, the cockpit switch is designed with a plastic mix to survive the temperature, vibration or weight requirement, it’s going to be more of an art-than-science. I’m not saying one is worse, but we need to make the distinction between designers, developers, scientists and engineers.

    I understand that everyone wants to be an engineer, whether for pride or just to feel more important (hell I want the engineer title too). Unfortunately, the tech industry (with arguably one of the most conflated egos) liberally tossed around software engineering to every role to attract talent and I don’t see that changing. It’s a profession, so whatever you are being paid to do will determine if you are engineering


  • I typically tell people that engineering is applying physics. If you aren’t directly interacting with the physical world, you are most likely a developer.

    Working on an app, no matter how complex (or unessarily convoluted) generally makes you a developer. If you aren’t thinking about impact of clock cycles, actuation/hardware interfaces or sensing, there is a high chance that the work you do has little to no risk or a chance of failure that is governed by the physical world. As said in other comments, engineers design and sign off on things. There is an implication that there is an unknown constraint, unlike a fully observable software environment.




  • Retroactively charging developers, that’s stupid.

    However, I’m not knowledgeable on any Game Industry economics, but isn’t $0.20 on a $20-$60 game negligible? I understand some people will have multiple devices so the developer could be out $1. On a $20 game that someone sells 1000 copies, that’s only $200 of $20,000 sales (maybe $800 in fees at the high end). I’ve used Unity before and it’s still a pretty solid game engine with easy to use tooling; using it would definitely save you time to build your game (time=money). Additionally, if I were to be building a game studio, everyone knows unity, so it would be easy to hire or find contractors who can help with pieces of the game. It makes sense from a business standpoint for me unless I’m missing something.

    Is there a max fee? On the opposite side of the spectrum I could see DDOS-like attacks on game developers where an attacker can spin up a bunch of virtual machines and then keep installing the game to charge the developer $1mil dollars.