My comment tried (possibly not very clearly) to talk about the differences between the other engineerings and software. People keep thinking that programmers are like factory employees. And that's so wrong. Each engineering endeavour is different. In software, our factory workers, are the tools that do the job. What in other places is designing in software is just programming. In my view (and I'm not alone in that) people keep applying the manufacturing metaphor to software for the wrong reasons.
In construction, the distance between design and implementation is so huge, that the construction workers save or doom construction projects all the time. Spend some time in a big construction site, in their meetings and you will discover why those projects take so long to finish. Hence, they are important because what the designer design is just an specification for the project, it's a map not the territory. An ideal brick in a CAD program is not a brick. Your perfect design for the AirCon machine in that room got destroyed by an in place decision by a worker of changing the wiring in a wall, ignoring the plan. Through tremendous effort during centuries construction has accumulated more or less accurate models for bricks, but the workers do so many things that the architects doesn't know how to do that the distance persist, and my times just ignore them.
In manufacturing, you have the Ford model of car manufacturing. It has being employed in nearly every single factory in the world. Yes, the Japanese empowered their employees more than in other countries but hey, they took note and introduced some of the practices. As of today American companies are as competitive as the Japanese ones without all the mumbo jumbo and black zen magic.
My point here is that each engineering is different. Different factors forced us to discover what work for them and what doesn't. That knowledge was accumulated in the industry and depending on the engineering, the feedback loop from the industry into the University could vary a lot. In software, the distance between the two is huge, due to the lack of transparency and secretism that most software companies exhibit.
My comment tried (possibly not very clearly) to talk about the differences between the other engineerings and software. People keep thinking that programmers are like factory employees. And that's so wrong. Each engineering endeavour is different. In software, our factory workers, are the tools that do the job. What in other places is designing in software is just programming. In my view (and I'm not alone in that) people keep applying the manufacturing metaphor to software for the wrong reasons.
In construction, the distance between design and implementation is so huge, that the construction workers save or doom construction projects all the time. Spend some time in a big construction site, in their meetings and you will discover why those projects take so long to finish. Hence, they are important because what the designer design is just an specification for the project, it's a map not the territory. An ideal brick in a CAD program is not a brick. Your perfect design for the AirCon machine in that room got destroyed by an in place decision by a worker of changing the wiring in a wall, ignoring the plan. Through tremendous effort during centuries construction has accumulated more or less accurate models for bricks, but the workers do so many things that the architects doesn't know how to do that the distance persist, and my times just ignore them.
In manufacturing, you have the Ford model of car manufacturing. It has being employed in nearly every single factory in the world. Yes, the Japanese empowered their employees more than in other countries but hey, they took note and introduced some of the practices. As of today American companies are as competitive as the Japanese ones without all the mumbo jumbo and black zen magic.
My point here is that each engineering is different. Different factors forced us to discover what work for them and what doesn't. That knowledge was accumulated in the industry and depending on the engineering, the feedback loop from the industry into the University could vary a lot. In software, the distance between the two is huge, due to the lack of transparency and secretism that most software companies exhibit.