All (most?) invention is engineering, but a lot of engineering is not invention.
Boeing employs many airplane engineers, but they don’t really invent new planes. Facebook employs many software engineers but isn’t inventing much in software. Both are doing product development engineering—which is fine and something the world certainly needs a lot of, but it’s not the same thing.
I think anyone who wanted to be an inventor would train as an engineer. So the education/training part of the inventor career path is there. But it falls apart after university.
Facebook employs many software engineers but isn’t inventing much in software
React, Jest, and GraphQL (among many other projects that I’m less familiar with) were created by Facebook, many of which heavily altered the way that people do programming in the relevant domains. Without knowing what exactly you mean by “inventing” in software, I think you’d have a hard time arguing that they’re done none.
Many of the large tech companies have similar contributions, depending on what sort of work they’re doing. It’s not even just large tech companies—a number of much smaller companies I’ve worked for have some level of open source contributions, which often are representative of “invention”, and arguably a lot of the actual products that companies create could be described as “invention” as well.
Without a further explanation what you’d consider an “invention” vs not, it’s hard to say whether or not there’s any “there” there with your original point.
All (most?) invention is engineering, but a lot of engineering is not invention.
Boeing employs many airplane engineers, but they don’t really invent new planes. Facebook employs many software engineers but isn’t inventing much in software. Both are doing product development engineering—which is fine and something the world certainly needs a lot of, but it’s not the same thing.
I think anyone who wanted to be an inventor would train as an engineer. So the education/training part of the inventor career path is there. But it falls apart after university.
React, Jest, and GraphQL (among many other projects that I’m less familiar with) were created by Facebook, many of which heavily altered the way that people do programming in the relevant domains. Without knowing what exactly you mean by “inventing” in software, I think you’d have a hard time arguing that they’re done none.
Many of the large tech companies have similar contributions, depending on what sort of work they’re doing. It’s not even just large tech companies—a number of much smaller companies I’ve worked for have some level of open source contributions, which often are representative of “invention”, and arguably a lot of the actual products that companies create could be described as “invention” as well.
Without a further explanation what you’d consider an “invention” vs not, it’s hard to say whether or not there’s any “there” there with your original point.
Fair enough, I might consider React/GraphQL inventions. (Jest doesn’t seem that fundamentally new?)
But how much of Facebook’s engineering effort went to inventing React/GraphQL? 1% Surely less than 10%.