Software engineering is about working with different layers of abstraction
3 by itsmefaz | 1 comments on Hacker News.
One of the things that my mentors or industry veterans have failed to teach us is the importance of abstraction. I've been in this industry for few years and being self-taught one of the questions that still disturbs me is what the goal of software engineering was about? My mentors (typically principal or staff engineers) would answer it along the lines of the business use case. And For some reason, I'm not satisfied with the answers or maybe I'm just too arrogant to accept that the business matters more than its engineering discipline. It just occurred to me today that the most difficult part of software engineering was building better abstractions. And the issue I had comprehending was not the business aspect of it but the actual definition of software engineers (and software engineering). I guess the better definition would be 'system designers' or even 'abstraction designers' because that is what we always do build complex systems for simple components. Maybe I'm just naive in my thinking?