What do we have here? Software Engineers or Software Plumbers?

I always like to use metaphors so here we go!

The construction Industry, is very similar to software industry.

We have

• Builders

Builders seize the opportunities of building an apartment building, and work through the determination of price point, profitability, legal aspects of land acquisition, financing etc. They eventually decide that they should have, say, 10 condos of say 150 sq. meters, and 10 condos of 120 sq. meters; a total of 2700 sq. met. of sellable area.

• Architects & Engineers:

Architects/Engineers create the building plans in accordance with the builders’ aspirations and requirements. They study the utilitarian and aesthetic aspects and come up with building plans and get them approved by the interested parties. They decide on the technical aspects of the actual construction work, like size of beams and columns, steel required to withstand the load, which brands of building materials to use, electrical loads and requirements etc. so that the building is looks as close as possible to the approved plan.

• Construction Crew:

Excavators, Plumbers, Masons, Electricians, Painters etc. Construction crews follow the orders of the Architects & Structural Engineers and do the actual construction.

Plumbers get the orders to install a shower stall, a sink and a WC in apartments at the specified locations. They are told the brand of shower head, the brand and color of washbasin and WC to use and so on. They assemble the parts together put appropriate pipes in the appropriate places and complete the work.

Masons lay the bricks and build walls with the thickness and height etc. following the specifications given by the Engineers and Architects.

Electricians do the wiring and install appliances and points as per specifications given by Engineers and Architects.

…

Plumbers do not have competence to decide where to put the shower stall, or the diameter / slope of the sewage pipe required for the effluent of the building. Masons do not know how thick the wall should be and where to build it, and, electricians do not know the gauge of wire required to carry the necessary current.

On the other hand, the Architects & Engineers know where to build a wall (and maybe even theoretically know how to lay the bricks), but a skilled mason can do a much better job of actually building the wall. Architects & Engineers know what the slope and diameter of a sewage pipe should be and how it should be laid, but a specialist plumber has the expertise to do install it well, and ditto for electricians.

If I translate this to software building parlance, we have the Business Owners, Software Architects/Engineers and Software Plumbers

Business Owners:

The business owners envision the software with target market in mind, procure the finance, do the competitive analyses, legal analyses etc. and engage Software Architects/Engineers to design the product for them.

Software Architects/Engineers do deep analyses and decide what existing software can be reused and repurposed, or what needs to be created from scratch.

If something needs to be created from scratch, they either prototype it themselves and hire/engage other software engineers create it under their supervision. These software engineers work together, innovating and challenging the established practices. They might write some new code or sometimes take a partially usable piece from some other software, understand it and repurpose it to suit the needs.

And then we have the software plumbers, they put together the pieces already made available to them by the Software Architects/Engineers, and complete the product.

Last few years, I have interviewed hundreds of candidates for Software Engineering jobs, and most of them are software plumbers, and too mediocre software plumbers.

Python is the latest hot hero/heroin of the industry (Ruby used to be it in 2012-13). Python *Programmers* just know how to call NUMPY and SCI-KIT etc. People get offended when I call them Python Plumbers.

Maybe, it is so that most of the good things have been already invented/innovated, we do not care about resource contention anymore; because processors, RAM and disk space are cheaper and faster. Most of the newer graduates from colleges have never heard of page faults and clustered indexes….

I wonder if the world just needs software plumbers in future. What is in a name, let us call them Software Engineers.