Science & Tech Quote by Jamie Zawinski

The line lands like a shrug with teeth: a refusal to let "software engineering" launder the messiness out of making software. Zawinski is poking at the industry's perennial desire to sound like civil engineering - orderly, standardized, predictable - when most real-world programming feels closer to improvisation under constraints, with half the constraints discovered mid-solo.

The "might be science" clause is the sly setup. He concedes the prestige of science and the legitimacy of engineering as disciplined practice, then instantly disowns the identity. It's not false modesty; it's a boundary. In hacker culture, "hacker" signals curiosity, speed, and opportunistic problem-solving, plus a willingness to violate formal process if it blocks progress. "Engineer" reads as institutionally approved, method-driven, accountable to specifications rather than to reality as encountered at 3 a.m. The joke is that software keeps begging for the certainties of bridges while behaving like weather.

Context matters: Zawinski comes out of late-80s/90s hacker ecosystems (Emacs, Netscape/Mozilla) where shipping, tinkering, and reverse-engineering were virtues, and where "software engineering" often meant management rituals stapled onto creative work. The subtext is a critique of credentialism and process theater: calling it engineering doesn't make it safe, reproducible, or ethically well-governed. It just makes it easier to sell.

There's also a quiet provocation in the profession tag. A "Scientist" choosing "hacker" is a reminder that science, at its productive edge, is also hacking: probing systems, breaking assumptions, learning by doing. The distinction isn't between rigorous and sloppy; it's between lived practice and the story organizations tell about it.