Art vs. Engineering

When working with strong engineers who are relatively early in their career, I notice many of them succumb to magical engineering thinking. This shows up as a belief that we are one perfect abstraction or one novel insight away from collapsing all complexity and solving the full problem, whatever it may be.

This often leads to disappointment. When confronted with the hard and tedious work in front of us (migrations, complex production roll-outs), a feeling of self-doubt creeps in. Is this real engineering? We are tempted to go back and refine our abstractions when we have yet to finish the stroke on our first iteration, deliver value, and collect feedback. It sometimes feels like this refinement of idealized abstractions is what real engineering should feel like, and having to slog through painful implementation steps is a symptom of failure or mediocrity.

The reality, which becomes clear with experience, is that although abstractions and insights matter, they are not a substitute for the hard work and discipline required to fully solve a technical problem.

Articulated more succintly:

• Perfection in pursuit of an internally defined ideal is art.
• Compounding solutions in pursuit of externally defined problems is engineering.

embrace the grind explores a similar idea:

Sometimes, programming feels like magic: you chant some arcane incantation and a fleet of robots do your bidding. But sometimes, magic is mundane. If you’re willing to embrace the grind, you can pull off the impossible.