My own conclusion is that system design is really a matter of technique, a way of thinking rather than a subject that can be taught in a particular course. It might be possible to build a program that teaches system design by putting students through a series of courses that hone their system design skills as they move through the subject matter of the courses. Such a series of courses would, in effect, be a formalized version of the apprenticeship that is now the way people acquire their system design technique…..
…..Even worse than not being visible to the customer, work done on designing the system is not visible to the management of the company that is developing the system. Even though managers will pay lip service to the teaching of The Mythical Man Month, there is still the worry that engineers who aren’t producing code are not doing anything useful. While there are few companies that explicitly measure productivity in lines-of-code per week, there is still pressure to produce something that can be seen. The notion that design can take weeks or months and that during that time little or no code will be written is hard to sell to managers. Harder still is selling the notion that any code that does get written will be thrown away, which often appears to be regression rather than progress.
In such an environment lip service often extends to technical strategy as well.
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