The author is describing a practice that is already well known: Systems engineering. Applied well, systems engineering helps prevent many of these issues from happening in the first place. Unfortunately, outside of heavily regulated industries or critical systems (like aerospace, as mentioned), systems engineering practices are rarely applied with the proper level of discipline.
raphtheb•4h ago
You are correct: the formal discipline of Systems Engineering, done with appropriate levels of rigor, fits this.
That said, in most software orgs, "systems engineer" doesn't mean that discipline anymore. When the title's actually used in job postings, it's almost universally infrastructure/ops, servers, reliability. The name got co-opted by a different, unrelated role in most software companies (At least the subset i have visibility into!). A hiring manager looking to hire a "systems engineer" for interface discipline would likely get a stack of infrastructure resumes instead.
That's part of why the gap persists. It's not that the discipline doesn't exist, it's that even its name doesn't point at it anymore for large swathes of the industry.
evan_a_a•9h ago
raphtheb•4h ago
That said, in most software orgs, "systems engineer" doesn't mean that discipline anymore. When the title's actually used in job postings, it's almost universally infrastructure/ops, servers, reliability. The name got co-opted by a different, unrelated role in most software companies (At least the subset i have visibility into!). A hiring manager looking to hire a "systems engineer" for interface discipline would likely get a stack of infrastructure resumes instead.
That's part of why the gap persists. It's not that the discipline doesn't exist, it's that even its name doesn't point at it anymore for large swathes of the industry.