Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The ability to read a product catalog does not make a person an engineer or an architect or someone who can think and reason.

I have encountered this for 30 years. It is as if someone had a cue card in their hand. They spew product names. Things like:

• Kafka
• HDFS
• TensorFlow
• Notebook
• Azure
• AWS
• Databricks
• Snowflake
• Kubernetes

The list can go on and on. These are all fine products with excellent places to use them to solve problems.

These, however, are implementation details. They are not designs. They are not architecture. Reading lists like this does not show the ability to think and reason. Those things (thinking, reasoning) are necessary for being an engineer or an architect or someone with something beyond the ability to read a product catalog.