this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
18 points (90.9% liked)

Experienced Devs

3961 readers
5 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
jmk1ng@programming.dev
drewsiferr@programming.dev
18
Systems engineering in the software industry (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by firelizzard@programming.dev to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev
10 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] glad_cat@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No one said it’s made up, just that we don’t know what it is because it’s a term for big (and maybe hardware-oriented) industries. Most devs will never touch this in their lives.

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, and make sure that a good path is followed by everyone.

Last but not least, this book seems interesting and gives an overview of what I said: https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Software-Architecture-Comprehensive-Characteristics/dp/1492043451