finalarbiter

Cars have gotta be the worst possible place to put ads. Distracted driving is already a problem, this is just going to make it worse

Lmao how's that boot taste?

Wage theft is consistently the single largest form of theft in the US, coming in at around $50 BILLION every year

I'm a liar for using basic English grammar rules like em dash and oxford comma? Lol, tell on yourself harder

Lol even more at your edit. I'm as anti-LLM and generative AI as they come, are you just proud of your ignorance when it comes to grammar or something?

I'd love a pair without cameras that have a HUD, though. Being able to pull up weather, camera, directions, etc. right in my field of view without looking away from what I'm working on would be cool af.

Don't dismiss this as another nostalgic rant from a gearhead refusing to embrace the 'future'. It’s just physics.

Too bad that's exactly what this article is, with garbage takes and poor justification under a thin veil of 'science' that they don't actually understand.

No shit internal combustion engines are more 'advanced', we've been working on improving ICE for over a century. In contrast, EV powertrains are a nascent technology (ignoring the very early electric vehicles we saw in the beginning days of automobiles which are not really comparable to modern EV tech) that have already improved rapidly over the last decade.

They're also correct that gasoline is more energy dense than current battery technology, but this again discounts that the field is rapidly expanding the energy density, storage efficiency, and charging speed of batteries, as well as the fact that the relatively unoptimised EV powertrains are already significantly more efficient.

The author also confuses complexity as a justification for retaining ICE. The relative simplicity of EV powertrains is a good thing, it doesn't need to operate under the intense mechanical and thermal conditions of a combustion engine. I really don't understand how the author can look at the insane complexity of ICE technology and see that as a win. The simplicity of EVs also means that the maintenance burden is significantly lower on consumers, the supply chain for production and operation is shorter and more resilient, and in terms of carbon emissions, we get a one-time fee during production (that are largely recyclable too) instead of ongoing emissions over the course of each vehicle's lifetime.

What a bunch of copium.

Huh, TIL. thanks!

I wasn't intentionally trying to be rude, it genuinely took me aback. I'm sorry to have come across that way.

From my perspective, tt felt like you hadn't actually read my argument and were responding in bad faith, since this comparison is the sort of thing that people say to dismiss software engineering as a sort of thought-terminating cliche.

What? That's a very different situation than what I was talking about with software development. I thought I pretty clearly outlined the core of what it means to be an engineer- Custodians aren't doing engineering work. As you said, that doesn't make the role less important or less deserving of dignity.

Just calling someone an engineer because it sounds better is silly and demeans both the actual role and the work that engineers do.

Yeah I absolutely love my P2, but they sold terribly in the US. Compared to a Tesla model 3 (which are unfortunately still super popular despite Musk), it was nicer but with les range and around twice the stocker price. Polestar struggled to really position themselves here successfully, imo, but they aren't a particularly high volume brand in other places either.

You clearly have a lot more experience than me- I'm fairly fresh out the gate. Like you, though, I work in a field where licensure isn't super relevant (manufacturing).

It was drilled into my head in school and by my dad (cheme but does civil work and is on the committee that writes the cheme PE) that that for some domains, like civil and chem, it's nigh impossible to find work without a PE (even entry level often requires at least the EIT accreditation).

Our system is, frankly, still very wild-west in terms of accountability for engineers in emerging fields.

It's deeply unfortunate that your experience with the accountability side of things went the way it did. That's another thing that they drilled into my head at school- if you sign a drawing and that part killed or hurt someone, the victims could call on you in a court of law to explain or even include you as a defendant in the suit. Does that always happen? Obviously not, but at least the possibly is there I guess.

Agreed, but software has already had life-safety-critical and massively financially impactful roles in society for 50+ years now, and I see precious little progress toward formal accountability.

Fully agreed here, I was just struggling to think of older life-critical examples after travelling for 22 hours lol (long day yesterday).

I didn't know NCEES even entertained doing a software engineering license, interesting. When was that?

Engineer is a whole other thing from the steam age, my BSc was in Math, worked fine to get me in.

As a mechanical engineer, I would beg to differ. When you strip away all the fancy math, engineering is ultimately about critical thought and solving problems/achieving functionality with limited resources. As one of my professors liked to say, "Anyone can build a bridge to support a load, but only an engineer can design a bridge that just barely holds that load."

Engineering is an ancient domain that goes back to the very beginnings of civilization and continues to grow with our needs as we progress. Where once it was just mechanical, we now have domains like electrical, materials, and biomedical engineering. If we've hit a point where we need engineers who specialize in software, why shouldn't we welcome in a new domain?

While it does feel weird calling software developers 'engineers', that is arguably what they do. It's no less reductionist to suggest they are just programmers than it is to suggest that mechanical engineers are simply CAD and Excel jockeys. There's a layer of comprehension about the systems in play and how they can be manipulated that gets lost in the reduction.

My only real sticking point about software engineers where I tend to push back is that Professional Engineer is a legally protected title and indicates licensure, at least in the US. It requires the right degree(s) and several years of work supervised by a PE to qualify for that licensure. The importance of the PE license is that you are recognized as an authority in your field- for good or ill. You can make big decisions, but you will also be held accountable if something goes wrong.

In my experience, many software engineers brush aside the importance of those types of qualifications because their field wasn't quite as rigorous to enter. As we continue to develop a society where software mistakes can absolutely kill people (e.g. self-driving vehicles, robots, automated decision tools in medicine and insurance, etc) or cause massive economic damage, it's critical that we decide how software engineers play a role in preventing those things and how we hold them accountable when they don't.