I love this quote too. But it had the opposite effect on me when I first heard it. More than anything it reinforced how much software engineering was a joke of a discipline.

Perhaps my views are an artifact of 2010s ZIRP era software culture. Cheap money poisoned the well and incentivized 'artisans' to build Rube Goldberg-esque towers of abstractions without a care for their cost impact or conceptual integrity.

Possibility of death as a result of negligence, CapEx and actual physics are an amazing forcing function for a group of professionals to take themselves and their work seriously.

Software engineering as a discipline will need to go through an upheaval before it can join the big boy club.

AI seems to be making the problem worse. Now just about anybody with Internet access and a credit card can use Claude to add to the pile of questionable code that runs the global economy.