As someone that does what you consider "engineering", my current project is containerized because I've lost too much of my life to debugging broken dev environments. The person who ships safety critical releases at most companies isn't a developer that's deeply familiar with the code, it's usually a distracted test engineer with other things to do that may not be very tech-saavy. Anything I can do to help them get a reproducible environment is great.

I remember back around 2009, our org had this horrible open source program, which shall not be named, foisted upon us by an excitable bloke who had heard wondrous things from the university where it had been developed. Well, we had a bitch of a time getting it running. Instructions and build scripts were minimal. We thrashed around.

I noted to someone that this felt less like a product and more like a website and set of scripts ripped from a working system. A few of us were shipped up to the originating university for a week to hob-knob with the people in charge of it. Toward the end, during the ritual inebriation phase, I managed to find out that they had never actually attempted to install it on a clean system. This had truly been ripped from a working system. And I thought to myself, "How horrible."

Now, I am admittedly pants at Linux. No good at all. But there is something about Docker and similar technologies that says, "Yes, we threw our hands in the air and stopped trying to make a decent installation system."

> "Yes, we threw our hands in the air and stopped trying to make a decent installation system."

I mean what do you expect, it goes along so nicely with "Yes, we threw our hands in the air and stopped trying to architect coherent software systems."

I doubt the real™ engineers at NASA and SpaceX know everything their proprietary closed-source Matlab-to-FPGA tooling is actually doing under the hood.

can't say for spaceX, but most NASA glue is built in house. close to zero proprietary ones.

maybe the vlsi is closed. but that is "industry standard" i guess. rest is a bunch of mathy-language du jour held together with python or something.

...opaque docker containers going to prod doesn't have a excuse other than inefficient orgs fulled by VC or Ad money. Or maybe they do, but you won't excuse them using NASA as an example :)

Developer/Programmer/Engineer titles are mostly meaningless because they mean different things at different companies. You can go wayback and call yourself a coder.

what's old is new again. the teenagers nowadays call themselves "coders" because "programmer" is for old people.