The Top 10 Things Only a Software Engineer Knows

In which I expose the dark secrets of the profession...

1.?????An interface, in programming terminology, has nothing at all to do with the visual “interface” of buttons, menus, forms, and windows that the users interact with.

2.?????The programming languages Java and JavaScript are not related to each other in any way - even though their names are similar, their syntax is almost identical, and they are both used for Web development.

3.?????A graph, in computer science, has nothing at all to do with the cartesian coordinate plots that you learned about in high school algebra – nor is it related to the pie chart “graphs” that you see on reports.

4.?????“Linear programming” is not at all related to programming (as in writing code).?It has its roots in mathematical optimization long before computers were invented.?But it’s a skill that computer programmers should possess, nonetheless.

5.?????The Hollywood "hacker" caricature is a myth. (But you probably already knew that.)

6.?????You would be horrified to find out how insecure and vulnerable to hackers a lot of big-name commercial software products are.

7.?????Software engineering is a completely different thing from general I.T. and computer support work.?Software engineers aren’t necessarily any better than anyone else at fixing broken laptops, repairing cracked smartphone screens, or troubleshooting Internet routers.

8.?????Programming or “coding” isn’t the same thing as software engineering.?Engineers and scientists in other fields use computer programming every day to solve problems within their domain.?And writing code is just one of many, many aspects of a software engineer’s responsibilities, which include things such as research, system design, architecture, requirements gathering, conducting peer reviews, unit and integration testing, and deploying the final product to production.

9.?????HTML is not a programming language.?It is a “markup” language, which is a different thing entirely.

10.??“Just build a wildly popular phone app and wait for Google or Microsoft to buy it” is not a sustainable business plan for the average software engineer.?One arguably has a better chance at winning the lottery.