Software Architect.
Yes, most companies don’t have them nor know about them. It’s a pity, but software engineering isn’t understood nor recognised by managers. Most still have the mindset that software engineers and programmers are the same thing because they sit behind a computer all day. I imagine that in their minds it’s the equivalent of dicking around all day like a gamer does. It’s ignorance.
“it can’t be that hard, just tell the computer what to do”
People who don’t understand coding think it’s a bunch of mumbo jumbo made to sound difficult. They still think in the physical realm. Multiply engineers and it goes X times more quickly! If I wanted a building finished, all I need is manpower.
Of course they also don’t value the profession. They think managing people is much more difficult than writing code. I’ve heard this over and over for years. “You don’t understand how difficult it is to manage people”. I think “You don’t understand how difficult it is to write good software”. Since they think it’s easy and in some virtual, magical realm, that one person should be able to do many things. They don’t understand the value of QA, architects, developers, devops, sysadmins, etc.
karlhungus@lemmy.ca 2 years ago
Probably my quotes implied sarcasm, what i should have said is there are so many hats that a “software developer” or “software engineer” is really really broad like by the wikipedia definition at my current company we typically call those “principal engineers”, or “principal architect”; i’ve also seen them called staff software engineers.
Likely it’s super domain dependent; the failure cost with a satellite’s or hardware cost you the business. Where with a website the MTTR can be very small. So a large oversight isn’t quite as needed, as the cost is so small.
firelizzard@programming.dev 2 years ago
I’m thinking more of design than oversight. In my experience building a large, complex system without seriously considering the system design (in the way that a systems engineer would) leads to many “oops” moments that will eat into the schedule.