One of my first senior engineering roles was making what was at first a CRUD app to support user studies and data collection. At some point the project blew up, and requirements grew many fold in complexity. My CS background let me view the problem space from a broader perspective, and I ended up building what was essentially a spreadsheet based DSL so that user study designers could define what were, under the hood, state machines that covered pretty much any scenario they could come up with.
The workload increased by 50x, but the system I built only needed a couple engineers to maintain and add features to.
I hate to sound cocky, but I think any engineer without a formal CS background would have attempted to solve each case on an ad hoc basis, either greatly delaying the project at best, or fucking it up irremediably at worst.
I have many examples like that.
Perhaps in all of the examples you cited, you’ve inadvertently cost the company 10 times the time or the money that a more methodical engineer with a theoretical background would have. You don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s the difference between an engineer and a technician (a distinction that the US doesn’t tend to make, but some other countries do).
The workload increased by 50x, but the system I built only needed a couple engineers to maintain and add features to.
I hate to sound cocky, but I think any engineer without a formal CS background would have attempted to solve each case on an ad hoc basis, either greatly delaying the project at best, or fucking it up irremediably at worst.
I have many examples like that.
Perhaps in all of the examples you cited, you’ve inadvertently cost the company 10 times the time or the money that a more methodical engineer with a theoretical background would have. You don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s the difference between an engineer and a technician (a distinction that the US doesn’t tend to make, but some other countries do).