Something I didn't bring up in the engineering crossovers talk, but I was reminded of in a conversation:

One engineer I talked to said that we focus too much on comparing software to engineering, when there's another field we really should researching MUCH more:

Event Planning.

AWS re:Invent 2019 lasted five days and had 60,000 attendees. There's no way for the planners to do a dry run in advance, no clear specification on what to do, and things are going wrong all the time even if the conference is successful overall.

And AWS isn't even that biggest conference! Something like CES had almost 200,000 attendees. I'd love to know how they pull off something like that! And I'm sure there are a LOT of lessons we can import into software engineering.

"Man plans, God laughs." What happens if the wifi fails? Or the coffee is taken away too early? Or a keynote speaker drops out? Or there's a car accident that blocks inbound traffic? Or a million more subtle issues I, as someone who never planned events, cannot begin to imagine

That's the drum I keep banging: we can learn so much from other fields. I focused on trad engineering because that's what we most often compare ourselves too, but that's not the only thing we can study. We should be studying everything!

I bet we could learn a FUCKTON about security, privacy, and threat modelling from hybrid software engineers / sex workers