disagree, but the consequences I'm imagining are the consequences of loosing money due to not making those kinds of decisions.
the consequences for the decision makers are very different, the incentives which surround them and the consequences they'll face are not what you seem to think they are.
but I disagree that engineering is just execution. I disagree even harder that you can create something by throwing random stuff,, you may well find something cool like that but I think creation does require more of a clear intent than random throwing and finding as if by chance.
> unlike software engineers that typically have a 4 year degree, 2 year degree...
they do NOW. Back when a lot of us started getting involved with this, most 'engineers' had physics, engineering, mathematics, and other various backgrounds because software engineering degrees were too freaking new.
In the near-future (10 5? years? possibly sooner?) kids are gonna graduate with specialized PM degrees having gone to highschool thinking about being "product manager" when they grow up. When I was in highscool i wanted to be a Webmaster! now a webmaster is 15 people between desiginers, PMs, backend, frontend, QA, testers, blah blah blha
It’s a good point that things have changed a bit, but in 1993 when this article was written you couldn’t get a web job based on code camps, neither really existed. There was no role called webmaster yet. Webmaster today is a team only if you’re managing a large site, but not for small sites, and it doesn’t require many specific skills for small sites. Like you said, most engineers had degrees of some sort. For the purposes of comparing to a producer job (which has existed in film, tv, radio, and music for ~100 years) engineering has always had higher skill & technical requirements.
Back when a lot of us started getting involved with this, most 'engineers' had physics, engineering, mathematics, and other various backgrounds because software engineering degrees were too freaking new
Or in some cases, humanities backgrounds (Medieval Lit, philosophy, etc).
That’s (the music industry) is their point. They wrote this well into a prominent career working in the industry. It’s not just some navel gazing about the impact, it’s served as a reality calibration for musicians seeking something on the spectrum of sustainable career to stardom for decades. The sobering reality that “success” in music is and has been mostly a vessel to concentrate wealth and direct culture at the whims of a few powerful people is definitely not limited to music, but it’s something musicians deserve to be aware of in the particulars of how it plays out.
But those are encoded by the DNA as well. That isn't how software works (which runs on hardware that exists independently of it) I suppose you could argue that it is similar to a FPGA, where entire CPUs can be created in software, but even there there is still underlying hardware that can't be modified by software.
DNA exists physically, and the way the software "runs" is not just dependent on the abstract genetic code, but also the particular way it gets folded in 3D space. In this sense, DNA is both software and hardware. Arguably a lot of things at the cellular level defy the distinction between code, data, hardware and runtime.
disagree, but the consequences I'm imagining are the consequences of loosing money due to not making those kinds of decisions.
the consequences for the decision makers are very different, the incentives which surround them and the consequences they'll face are not what you seem to think they are.