Real Software Engineers

• Real software engineers don’t need safety nets. Instead, they are ready to face all dangers and risks without any fear. For this reason, they dislike (unit) testing, because (unit) testing is for pussies (i.e., those who do not trust their own code.) Since real software engineers never make mistakes, testing would be a mere waste of time.
• Real software engineers won’t document their design, because these designs contain an incredible amount of design pearls other mortals would not be able to comprehend, anyway.
• Nor do real software engineers read other design documents nor manuals, either because their fellow engineers did not provide documentation or because they do not trust these documents.
• Instead, their main guidelines are:
• All you need is code
• Bubbles don’t crash
• Real software engineers do not check or prioritize requirements. Instead, they got intuition for customers’ needs which drives all their activities.
• Real Software Engineers do not communicate (much) with other stakeholders, because other stakeholders are just obstacles on the way to project completion. That’s also the reason why real software engineers hate meetings.
• Real software engineers do rarely speak English, German, …. They rather express themselves using C#, Java, C++, …
• Real Software Engineers feel more comfortable in the solution domain. Their goal is to provide solutions instead of getting lost in problem domains. This is why they prefer playing around with solution technologies.
• Real software engineers can turn any problem into a nail for which they can use their favourite hammer.
• Real software engineers do not need software architecture because a predefined architecture would just limit their creativity. A good architecture is always created ad-hoc for solving real problems in a pragmatic way.
• Real software engineers do not foster re-use. First of all, re-use has never worked in practice. And secondly, re-using design or code typically requires more resources than reinventing the wheel. This is often due to the fact that re-usable artifacte were created by other real software engineers who failed to document their work.
• Real software engineers won’t read this blog because in the time needed for reading, they could add another feature to their software.