My last job was at a company that designed and built satellites to order. There was a well defined process for this, and systems engineers were a big part of it. Maybe my experience there is distorting my perspective, but it seems to me that any sufficiently complex project needs to include systems engineering, even if the person doing that is not called a systems engineer. Yet as far as I can tell, it isn’t really a thing in the software industry. When I look at job postings and “about us” blog posts about how a company operates, I don’t see systems engineering mentioned. Am I just not seeing it, is it called something else, or is the majority of the industry somehow operating without it?
my guess is the software equivalent is the architect role - basically someone high level that doesn’t code much but does design the overall way that systems interact (or, to put it redundantly, designs the architecture of the full system)
however i don’t know if this term is en vogue as much anymore except for very large scale businesses (i would bet money that banks employ architects, for example)
karlhungus@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
If you described what a “systems engineer” did that’d be a big help.
firelizzard@programming.dev 1 year ago
Systems engineering is an established discipline, one you can get a degree in. It’s not just a random term I’m making up. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_engineering
glad_cat@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
No one said it’s made up, just that we don’t know what it is.
From your link, it seems that the “software architect” is the closest equivalent. He must have a broad knowledge in a bit of everything from the code to talking with clients in order to make good decisions for everyone.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 year ago
Software Architect
karlhungus@lemmy.ca 1 year 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.