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What makes a good engineer also makes a good engineering organization (2024)

The people who create software generally refer to themselves as software engineers, and yet if they graduate from university, it is typically with a degree in computer science. That has always felt a little strange to me, because science and engineering are two pretty different disciplines – yet ...

I’m using color cycling as an example because it’s visual and so old as to be uncontroversial, but it’s a pattern that I’ve seen appear again and again throughout the course of my involvement with software: deep understanding of tools and technology yields a new vision, unexpected results, insight, or a solution of some kind (big or small!). To me, in complex ecosystems like computing, there just seems to be some kind of ongoing relationship between deep understanding of how the tools we use to create things function and the quality or creativity of the output we get as a result. The problem with this logic is that, right now, whether Jeff Bezos starts every day with a cold plunge at 5am or a bowl of fruit loops at 10am probably has minimal bearing on the outcome of his companies.

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