God I feel old.<p>Engineering is about the weight of responsibility you have from the thing that you build. Being knowledgeable and accomplished is a way to reduce that weight because you are confident that you did the correct thing.
To add on, engineering is about <i>objective guarantees</i> to meet objective responsibility.<p>This bridge is rated for 10 tons. This chemical process produces 1 mg 99% purity crystals. This biological process produces 90% pure insulin. This circuit handles 1 kA.<p>Engineering is not about <i>better or worse</i> it is about <i>acceptable or unacceptable</i>.<p>This naturally results in a desire for <i>requirements</i> so you can meet your guarantees. Specifications so you know what guarantees you need or what you are provided and how those map back to the real responsibility. Standards so you can consistently solve common problems.
After getting a tiny amount of traffic from HN, its now crashed. Beautifully poetic.<p>I think theres still a lot of room for traditional engineering - methods that have been robust enough to stand the test of time are enduring because they work! Hype will always hype, but when its delivery time and the system is stress tested, we will see what happens...
I think you are mixing "engineering" with responsibility. You could literally take away "engineering" and put in any other word and it wouldn't mean much at all except just saying 'be responsible'.<p>Yes having more knowledge and accomplishment (experience) in anything in life lets you develop more confidence.<p>Ethicality is different from responsibility though, I think you conflated the two.