In a March 7 post on his blog, Oracle ACE Director Sten Vesterli raises issues worth discussing:
You do not see civil engineers starting blog wars with posts like “Concrete is Dead. Stop Using it”, and advocating carbon fibre for all construction. The reason is that civil engineers are engineers. They have a body of knowledge, accepted standards, examinations and accreditations, and they slowly accumulate knowledge and advance their profession.
In IT, we have been talking about software engineering for the 30 years I’ve been in the business. But we are even further from being an engineer's profession than we were 30 years ago. For mysterious reasons, we regularly throw away the knowledge our users and customers have paid dearly for us to accumulate, and start all over.
Do Sten's comments resonate with you? Is his civil engineers vs. software engineers comparison fair? Does software engineering lack the discipline and standards of civil engineering? Does that level of discipline and standards have a place in IT, where continuous innovation is the rule?
Please share your thoughts! Your comments will provide invaluable background for an upcoming Oracle Magazine article. Selected comments will be quoted in the article, with full attribution, of course.
Also, if you are interested in participating in a podcast on this topic, please contact me: bob.rhubart@oracle.com