We Are Not Special

Summary

This is part two of the crossover project. Part one is here and part three is here. A conference talk based on this work is now available here. No one thinks about moving the starting or ending point of the bridge midway through construction. -Justin Cave I had to move a bridge. -Anonymous Carl worked as a mechanical verification engineer: he tested oil rigs to see how much they vibrated. Humans work and live on oil rigs for long stretches of time, and if they vibrate too much it can be impossible to sleep. While rigs are designed to stay below the threshold, the design and the final version often diverge. Currently, he was explaining how they find oil. After drilling a hole, he said, “you might also want to add other additives, like acid or hazelnut shells, but also-” I stopped him. “Hazelnut shells?” He smiled. “Your oil reservoir is not like a balloon full of oil. It’s more like a porous structure in the rock.” When drilling in, you might hit a sudden loss of pressure in the pipe. This is extremely dangerous as you don’t know if you’ve broken into the open ocean or have just hit a local void. In the latter case, digging further and suddenly hitting a high pressure area could destroy the pipe. By pumping in hazelnut shells they can gradually fill in small voids and test if they are still in the structure, gradually equalizing the pressure if they are. According to Carl, oil companies are the biggest purchasers of hazelnut shells in Norway. Debates about traditional versus software engineering revolve around what makes us different. The clichés here come from a different camp than the “what makes an engineer” clichés. The ways people try to define “engineering” often work to marginalize software. Differences like “we don’t have licenses” or “we’re not rigorous” are ways of saying that software is less prestigious, less “good” than traditional engineering. As we saw in the last essay, most of these don’t hold up, and the crossover engineers think the two jobs are mu...